Alfred Amonn, Grundfragen der Konjunkturtheorie und Krisenpolitik

Alfred Amonn’s separately authored Festschrift essay examines the conceptual foundations that business-cycle theory must establish before it can guide crisis policy. Its four sections move from the definition of the explanatory problem through competing starting points and policy implications to the relationship between theory and empirical research. The central contention is that neither statistical regularities nor proposals to stimulate recovery suffice without an account of the forces sustaining economic movement. Whether depression corrects itself, persists in equilibrium, or requires intervention depends on theoretical distinctions that policy cannot bypass.

Amonn first distinguishes fluctuations in economic activity generally from the approximately periodic cycles observed since the early nineteenth century. Similar-looking fluctuations may have heterogeneous causes; their appearance alone cannot justify a unified explanation. Periodicity provides a methodological reason to isolate a narrower problem and investigate an internal mechanism, but does not prove that such a mechanism exists. Once plausible external periodic causes have failed empirical scrutiny, theory must construct an idealized economy and ask what could generate recurrent fluctuations within it:

Gibt es in einer vollkommen rationalen und von äußeren und zufälligen Störungen freien Wirtschaft einen Umstand, der mit innerer Notwendigkeit zu solchen periodisch wiederkehrenden Schwankungen führt?

English translation: Is there, in a perfectly rational economy free from external and accidental disturbances, a circumstance that necessarily produces such periodically recurring fluctuations from within?

This formulation makes rationality a device for isolating causes, not a description of actual economies. It also raises the problem governing the second section: where should explanation begin? Starting from full-employment equilibrium privileges Schumpeter’s combination of entrepreneurial activity and bank-credit expansion. Amonn regards this as formally exemplary, while questioning whether its initial equilibrium exists in reality. Logical completeness does not establish empirical adequacy.

An alternative begins with movement already under way. Amonn sketches how rising prices might encourage advance purchases until demand falls, after which falling prices postpone purchases until another reversal occurs. He presents this as a formally satisfactory possibility, not an established explanation. Its importance is to separate cyclical movement from economic development: oscillation around an unchanged level could occur without an upward trend. His discussion of Hayek further unsettles equilibrium’s privileged position. If monetary expansion continually alters production and equilibrium conditions, the economy might move alongside changing equilibria without ever passing through them.

Depression offers another possible starting point, but only if its apparent persistence has theoretical significance. Amonn distinguishes unstable from stable underemployment equilibrium and competitive from monopolistically sustained equilibrium. He finds Keynes’s reasons for stable underemployment unconvincing, while allowing that unstable depression equilibrium may arise under competition and acquire stability through monopolistic influences. These remain questions to investigate rather than premises silently to assume.

The third section makes the policy stakes explicit. If movement contains its own continuing impulse, measures that obstruct adjustment may prolong depression; removing obstacles could nevertheless be accompanied by relief of hardship. An unstable competitive equilibrium might instead justify laissez-faire, whereas stable depression would require a sufficiently powerful intervention. Credit expansion, public investment, and deflation therefore cannot be assessed independently of the mechanism and circumstances involved.

Amonn particularly challenges the mechanical metaphor of an initial impulse that supposedly guarantees continuing recovery. Expanded production can sustain itself only if additional incomes purchase the additional goods in appropriate quantities at prices covering costs. Expenditure on public works does not, merely by creating income, demonstrate that this continuing circuit will close. His criterion is qualitative coordination rather than investment volume:

Nicht auf große Investitionen, sondern auf richtige Investitionen kommt es an.

English translation: What matters is not large investments, but the right investments.

Railways matter in this account because they sharply reduce the cost of services with elastic demand, not simply because construction is extensive. Amonn favors decentralized, incremental expansion, through which producers test demand before committing further resources. His associated argument about profits and expectations is equally specific: high margins alone do not warrant increased output when additional sales are unavailable. Normally, expectations connect production decisions to observed or reasonably foreseeable demand; they are not an independent force determining expansion. Speculative excess late in the boom qualifies this account.

The final section explains why these problems cannot be settled by accumulating statistics. Economic theory draws substantially on reflective knowledge of purposive conduct, generalizes assumptions, and derives consequences whose agreement with external experience must then be examined. Statistical sequences do not themselves disclose causal or functional necessity:

Die Tatsachenkenntnis, die sie uns vermittelt, kann erst durch Theorie zu einer Erkenntnis werden.

English translation: The knowledge of facts that it conveys can become understanding only through theory.

Empirical research remains important, but its interpretation already requires theoretical distinctions. Conversely, explaining particular historical cycles is an application of theory and may require additional, heterogeneous circumstances. Amonn thus distinguishes a pure account of possible endogenous movement from a comprehensive history of actual crises.

The essay’s ultimate relevance lies in this connection between methodological abstraction and practical discrimination:

Ihre Hauptaufgabe ist vielmehr, eine Grundlage zu liefern für eine rationale zweckorientierte Einflußnahme auf das wirtschaftliche Gesamtgeschehen.

English translation: Its main task is rather to provide a foundation for rational, goal-directed intervention in the overall course of economic events.

Theory should distinguish unavoidable features of exchange economy from removable disturbances, thereby identifying where losses of welfare can genuinely be prevented. Amonn supplies a critical research agenda rather than a completed cycle mechanism: establish what keeps movement going before deciding how policy should redirect it.