2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Mahr rejects the classical specie-flow orthodoxy: gold movements are too small and mistimed to explain how international claims and liabilities rebalance. Writing from interwar Vienna in 1927, amid reparations, hyperinflation, and violent currency swings, he fuses Angell's credit-volume theory with Wieser's account of the balance of payments as the sum of individual payment balances, deriving external equilibrium from the interdependence of debtors, creditors, and domestic-only actors. Inflation is the great disruptor, swelling nominal purchasing power that spills into foreign goods and securities; against Cassel and Keynes he denies that purchasing-power parity governs the exchanges, insisting the causation often runs the other way. Speculation, he argues from the Austrian crown and the wartime mark, is no mere forecast but itself a cause—capable of igniting fresh inflation.
Andererseits ist die Erkenntnis, daß die fortgesetzte Inanspruchnahme der Notenpresse zur Deckung eines staatlichen Defizits unweigerlich zur Kurswertsenkung führt, heutzutage wohl schon Gemeingut der ganzen Welt.
English translation: “On the other hand, the insight that the continued resort to the printing press to cover a state deficit inevitably leads to a fall in the exchange rate is today probably common knowledge throughout the world.”
No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.
Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.
English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”
Single-cause explanations of mass unemployment are the target here. Unemployment turns chronic, Mahr argues, when shocks to profitability collide with rigid union wages, monopoly pricing, monetary disturbance, and political insecurity, forces that in the Depression's depths coincided all at once. The analytic core is marginal productivity: wages driven above the marginal product of labor raise unit costs, restrict output, and displace workers, an effect that often surfaces only later, when demand falls or fixed capital must be replaced and wages prove unable to fall. Rationalization forced by excessive wages generates no compensating rise in labor demand. From these distinctions follow conditional remedies, credit-financed public works chosen for real social utility, wage cuts matched by price cuts, work-sharing at unchanged hourly rates, while Germany's recovery stays hostage to reparations.
Die Steigerung der Löhne über die Grenzproduktivität hinaus, die Überhöhung der Löhne führt so zur Entstehung von Arbeitslosigkeit.
English translation: “The raising of wages beyond marginal productivity, the excessive level of wages, thus leads to the emergence of unemployment.”
A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.
Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.
English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”
Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.
If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.
Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.
Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.
English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”
Could the money already spent on the dole be reorganized so that the unemployed produce necessities for one another? That is the wager of this 1937 monograph, which treats postwar joblessness as structural rather than cyclical and finds ordinary relief a guarantee of idleness and emergency public works too costly to generalize. Mahr first dismantles rival schemes: Lederer's disguised socialization of idle plant and the substitute-currency plans of Graham and of Eaton, Cheadle, and Ewing, which would leak into the money economy and dump discounted goods on ordinary producers. His own Hilfswerk rests on binding advance orders, payment in restricted vouchers redeemable only within the scheme, and the inclusion of farm surpluses and part-time settlement, so that a disciplined emergency economy sustains the excluded without inflation or market displacement.
Wäre die ganze Produktion auf Vorausbestellungen aufgebaut, gäbe es natürlich auch keine Absatzkrisen, weil eben dann nur die Waren erzeugt würden, welche schon im Vorhinein ihre Abnehmer gefunden haben.
English translation: “If the whole of production were built on advance orders, there would of course be no sales crises either, because then only those goods would be produced which had already found their buyers in advance.”
Scarcity is the premise from which everything else unfolds, economic life understood as the disposition of limited goods toward the fullest possible satisfaction of needs. This comprehensive Viennese treatise, here in its substantially expanded second edition, moves from needs, goods, and marginal utility through a full theory of prices, competition, monopoly, oligopoly, bilateral monopoly, and the imputation of factor values from consumer demand, into money, credit, national income, and the business cycle. Mahr rejects the static claim that investment merely follows prior saving; in a growing economy, he argues, investment must exceed saving, the excess financed by monetary expansion. Against Hayek's neutral money he defends stabilizing a wholesale-price index; on foreign trade he is liberal but strategic, weighing reciprocity and defensive tariffs. Throughout, causal explanation takes priority over moral verdict, though moral judgment is never dismissed.
Keinesfalls erspart die ethische Bewertung eines wirtschaftlichen Vorganges die Mühe seiner kausalen Erklärung.
English translation: “Under no circumstances does the ethical evaluation of an economic process spare us the effort of its causal explanation.”
The claim that every line of a consumer's spending is pushed to the same weighted marginal utility—Gossen's second law, and the hinge of the equilibrium systems of Jevons, Walras, and Pareto—is here dismantled as an aprioristic construction unsupported by experience. Following Hans Mayer, Mahr argues that consumption does not adjust in equal infinitesimal steps: as income rises some quantities stay fixed, inferior goods give way to better ones, and new wants awaken, so no common marginal level is ever revealed. Bread and potatoes remain 'overmarginal' for the well-off, their utility above that of money; genuine leveling appears only in the poorest budgets. What survives the critique is narrow—the marginal utility of money—and a warning that elegant equations must not be allowed to remake economic fact. First published in 1949.
Fällt das Gesetz vom Grenznutzenniveau, dann werden auch die n (m—1) Gleichungen — n repräsentiert dabei die Zahl der Individuen und m die Zahl der Waren —, in denen dieses Gesetz zum Ausdruck kommt, hinfällig.
English translation: “If the law of the marginal-utility level falls, then the n(m−1) equations—where n represents the number of individuals and m the number of goods—in which this law is expressed, also become invalid.”
Monopoly prices fall less sharply in a depression than competitive prices — a regularity Alexander Mahr had observed in 1932 and here places on a fuller analytical footing. Starting from the elasticity of demand as the decisive determinant of the monopoly price, he shows that under inelastic or unit-elastic demand a cost reduction is largely pocketed as profit rather than passed to buyers, so that monopoly price adjustment is systematically less elastic than competitive adjustment. Real monopolists, he argues, are nonetheless hemmed in by substitutes, latent competitors, tariffs, and the threat of state intervention. The stakes are macroeconomic: by defending prices through cuts to output and employment, monopoly and cartel pricing convert cyclical contractions into cumulative ones, and Mahr rejects the claim that cartels stabilize the Konjunkturzyklus.
Bei unelastischer Nachfrage oder wenn die Nachfrageelastizität gleich eins ist, wird also der Monopolpreis trotz Änderung der Kosten ganz überwiegend unverändert bleiben, während der Konkurrenzpreis sich durchaus der Kostenänderung anpassen würde.
English translation: “With inelastic demand, or when the elasticity of demand equals one, the monopoly price will therefore, despite a change in costs, remain overwhelmingly unchanged, whereas the competitive price would fully adjust to the change in costs.”
Bread and wine, bread and butter, coffee and milk: for Mahr these are never interchangeable along a smooth curve but combine in one determinate best proportion, which income and prices may put out of reach. On that observation rests his assault, first advanced in 1954, on the indifference-curve analysis then spreading from Anglo-American economics through Pareto and Hicks. Taking up Hans Mayer's objections—the fictive 'experiment,' infinite divisibility, unlimited substitutability—he denies that a field of equally valued bundles exists at all, and replaces indifference curves with curves of preferred combinations shifting with income and saturation. Extending the argument to the marginal-utility level, he separates broad need-classes from particular goods and locates the one clear margin in the marginal utility of money rather than in any equalization across commodities.
In Wahrheit gibt es regelmäßig nur ein optimales Kombinationsverhältnis zweier Konsumgüter.
English translation: “In truth, there is regularly only one optimal combination ratio of two consumer goods.”
There is no such thing as 'the' interest rate, only a plurality of rates differing by term, market, risk, and realizability—and from that dismantling Mahr builds his central claim. Interest, he holds, has no determinate effect on how much people save but a decisive effect on the form savings take, and thus on the supply of funds for productive investment. Offered here in the German version of a 1955 Italian essay, the study separates risk premia from a narrowed notion of liquidity and faults Keynes for grounding interest wholly in the striving for liquidity. Since saving depends chiefly on income, the rate matters most by steering wealth toward productive credit or away into cash hoards, land, and durable Sachsparen; net interest, Mahr concludes, could never sink to zero of its own accord.
Aber es geht viel zu weit, die Zinserklärung zur Gänze auf dem Liquiditätsstreben zu basieren, wie dies Keynes tut.
English translation: “But it goes much too far to base the explanation of interest entirely on the striving for liquidity, as Keynes does.”