2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Postwar trade policy broke with the economic nationalism of the interwar years, and reciprocity became its governing principle—the ground on which Mahr, in 1955, builds a case that mutual liberalization, broad enough and paced with care, can raise national income without the feared wave of unemployment. He concedes the transition problem, that sheltered industries contract before resources migrate to exporting ones, but judges it commonly overstated. His decisive addition to foreign-trade multiplier analysis is the acceleration principle: expanding export industries call forth machinery, steel, and construction, a fresh investment demand that outweighs the replacement demand lost in shrinking sectors. Where prior protection ran very high, he allows devaluation over deflation; his caution is reversed against excessive speed, which would overstrain investment-goods capacity. The horizon is OEEC integration, with inner and outer circles of participation.
Therefore the removal of trade barriers, if carried out not too slowly and faint-heartedly, will bestow prosperity upon the industries which produce investment goods.
Against the post-Keynesian notion of an 'equilibrium income' defined by the equality of saving and investment, Mahr insists that a growing economy has no fixed point of rest, only balanced growth—the harmonious movement of its aggregate magnitudes. Attacking Samuelson's tabular model, he argues that investment merely matched by current saving reproduces income rather than enlarging it; expansion requires investment to outrun saving, the excess financed by monetary and credit expansion. The multiplier is reinterpreted as a temporal process bound to the income velocity of money, and saving is assigned a stabilizing office, absorbing purchasing power while long-gestation projects—power stations, housing, factories—create incomes before goods. First published in 1956, the essay ends where the social market economy begins: value-stable monetary policy, backed when needed by fiscal policy and measures against monopoly power.
Es gehört geradezu zu den Voraussetzungen eines störungsfreien Wachstumsprozesses, daß die Investitionen höher sind als die Ersparungen, wobei das Mehr an Investitionen durch Erweiterung des Zahlungsmittelumlaufs finanziert wird.
English translation: “It belongs, indeed, among the prerequisites of an undisturbed growth process that investments be higher than savings, the excess of investments being financed through an expansion of the circulation of means of payment.”
Why does a country's current account normally settle back toward balance when money is neither inflated nor deflated? Mahr's answer, from 1957, discards purchasing-power parity—too blind to non-traded goods, tariffs, freight, and capital movements—and grounds external equilibrium in the budgets of individual households and firms, which cannot forever spend without income or receive without spending. From this micro-foundation, refined out of Wieser by shifting the emphasis from claims to actual receipts and expenditures, he traces how a passive balance depresses income and so curbs imports (the income effect), while falling prices and wages, where they are permitted, speed correction (the price effect). Where monopolies and rigid wages block the price effect, adjustment falls instead on output and unemployment; flexible exchange rates, he warns, breed uncertainty and protectionism.
Die Tendenz zum Gleichgewicht in der Zahlungsbilanz ist die Folge einer analogen Tendenz, die innerhalb der Budgets der Einzelwirtschaften wirksam ist.
English translation: “The tendency toward equilibrium in the balance of payments is the consequence of an analogous tendency operating within the budgets of individual economic units.”
Business cycles and foreign trade feed on one another, and Mahr maps their interaction across six combinations of domestic and foreign boom and slump: a home upswing leaks abroad through imports, a downturn is cushioned by exports and cheaper foreign goods. From this he weighs the modern, Keynesian case for protection—full employment defended against multiplier leakage—only to warn that in depression protectionism spreads faster than at any other time, tipping into beggar-my-neighbour escalation. His distinctive contribution, written in 1957, is the 'Defensivzoll,' a defensive tariff justified strictly up to the point where it offsets, rather than compounds, the productivity loss inflicted by foreign barriers. List's infant-industry argument is confined to agrarian latecomers; the standing ideal remains reciprocal free trade, and OEEC liberalization, through the accelerator, is read as broadly expansionary.
Vor allem aber wirkt der Protektionismus zu keiner anderen Zeit so ansteckend wie in der Depression.
English translation: “Above all, however, protectionism is at no other time so contagious as during a depression.”
The suspicion that sound economic conduct must collide with ethical obligation rests, Mahr argues, on a false definition of economy. Against the caricature of homo oeconomicus as pure profit-seeker, he recovers the subjectivist conception: economizing is not a realm of money or goods but the ordering of scarce means toward chosen ends, whatever their moral content. Altruistic, religious, cultural, and political aims become economic the moment they compete for scarce resources; a seller who favors a friend satisfies two needs at once, and unwirtschaftlich conduct means only the irrational use of means, never the refusal to maximize gain. The closing pages defend a qualified Wertfreiheit against Max Weber's shadow: economists may render moral judgments, but derivation and proof must stay free of them.
Es handelt sich eben nur um das Disponieren über die knappen Mittel zwecks maximaler Zielerreichung.
English translation: “What is involved is simply the disposition of scarce means with a view to maximal attainment of ends.”
Affluence has not made people happier: that unsettling premise drives this 1964 study of modern industrial society. Full employment, rising productivity, and mass consumption are genuine achievements, yet Mahr sees them breeding new pathologies, a wage-price spiral as governments bound to full employment accommodate every union demand, consumer egoism and status display in Veblen's sense, monotonous work, empty leisure, falling birth rates, and swelling cities. The social market economy of Müller-Armack and Erhard is defended as the best available order, but framework alone cannot suffice. His remedy is twofold: decentralized industry paired with garden-home settlements that restore meaningful activity outside the factory, and a moral renewal led by a nonpartisan elite schooled in Christian ethics and noble simplicity against the artificially inflated needs of prosperity.
Demzufolge sind die Regierungen einzugreifen gezwungen, wenn in irgendwelchen Bereichen der Volkswirtschaft ein Rückgang der Beschäftigung einsetzt.
English translation: “Governments are consequently compelled to intervene whenever a decline in employment sets in in any sector of the economy.”
Entrepreneurs must advance wages and materials long before sales proceeds return, and when banks restrict credit, hoard cash, and slow velocity, consumers' purchasing power falls short of producers' costs—so money income and real market product drift apart. Correcting that drift is the task Mahr sets monetary policy in this 1964 study, defending stable purchasing power against 'neutral,' cost-oriented money that would merely finance the creeping inflation of monopoly wages and prices. His central move is to show that technological profit under stable money is non-inflationary, since it springs from falling costs rather than redistribution. Linking the multiplier to circuit velocity through the 'allocation period,' and rereading the New Deal's deficits as real but self-defeating, he shifts the modern danger from deflationary collapse to creeping inflation driven by pressure-group politics.
A policy of stable money creates profits of a non-inflationary character, if we define inflation as an increase of monetary national income beyond real net market product.
Consumers never merely weigh today's helping of a good against tomorrow's; they confront recurring subsistence needs, postponable wishes, durable purchases, future-only aims, and precautionary reserves. On that typological insight Mahr rebuilds the theory of intertemporal choice, which he judges to have sought one general law where none exists. Present restraint, he shows, is undertaken not to enjoy the same want more intensely later but to fund a different project altogether—dissolving Böhm-Bawerk's doctrine of systematically undervalued future goods; where earlier satisfaction is genuinely preferred, the cause is stronger anticipatory pleasure, not faulty foresight. Interest therefore cannot rest on a universal discounting of the future, and long-term rationality can be judged only by the tendencies discernible when the decision was made, never by its later outcome.
Die Regel ist, daß Einschränkungen an der gegenwärtigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung nur vorgenommen werden, um in der Zukunft neue, anders geartete Bedürfnisse befriedigen zu können.
English translation: “The rule is that restrictions on present want-satisfaction are undertaken only in order to be able to satisfy new, differently constituted wants in the future.”
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
No concept in economic theory, Mahr observes, has been defined in more diverse ways than capital—and much theoretical confusion follows from treating heterogeneous objects and markets as one. He holds real capital and money capital to be two aspects of a single phenomenon, and separates capital in the national-economic sense from private wealth that merely yields income: consumer loans, resold securities, and land purchases may enrich an owner without adding to social productive capacity. The fiction of a single market and a single interest rate dissolves into a short-term money market and a long-term investment market that communicate only imperfectly, their rate differences sustained by liquidity, cycle, and institutional constraint. Interest, finally, is neither a reward for saving nor a mere liquidity premium but an investment premium that restrains hoarding and keeps funds flowing to productive capital.
Der Zins ist weder eine Prämie für das Sparen, noch wird er als Illiquiditätsprämie ausreichend charakterisiert. Er ist vielmehr als Investitionsprämie zu bezeichnen.
English translation: “Interest is neither a premium for saving, nor is it adequately characterized as a liquidity premium. Rather, it is to be designated as an investment premium.”
Multiplier theory, as Keynes bequeathed it, sums an endless sequence of income effects without ever fixing the accounting period national income actually requires—and for Mahr the neglect of the time factor is its cardinal defect. Since income is reckoned by the year, the multiplier too must be annual: he redefines it as the coefficient linking a rise in circulating money to the rise in monetary national income, and identifies it with the marginal velocity of circulation, the number of income-forming turnovers a newly issued unit performs within the year. Hoarding, on this account, is not an external leakage but a lowering of that average velocity. The Keynesian investment multiplier and the export multiplier become mere special cases of a broader principle: supplying a growing economy with means of payment. Marked here as previously unpublished.
Der entscheidende Mangel der herrschenden Multiplikatortheorie liegt in der Vernachlässigung des Zeitfaktors.
English translation: “The decisive defect of the prevailing multiplier theory lies in the neglect of the time factor.”