The archive.

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.”

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.”

Can more wine always compensate for less bread? In this 1956 rejoinder to Bäsmann, Alexander Mahr defends Hans Mayer’s criticism of indifference-curve theory by pressing a concrete question: whether its assumptions describe the needs and choices of individual consumers. Statistical averages, he argues, cannot answer objections about indivisible goods, nor can debates over utility measurement establish the empirical validity of substitution. Mahr adds his own contention that consumers seek a preferred proportion of goods rather than move among indefinitely many equally satisfactory combinations. The interest of this short polemic lies in the distinction it draws between mathematical precision and descriptive accuracy—and in Mahr’s willingness to leave room for a more restricted concept of substitution while rejecting its unrestricted application.

Can a system of equilibrium equations explain how prices arise, or only describe their relations once established? This tension gives Alexander Mahr’s memorial essay on Hans Mayer its theoretical focus. Writing as a sympathetic colleague within the Austrian tradition, Mahr presents Mayer as a renovator of its foundations: an economist concerned with how ranked wants, scarce multipurpose means, and recurring needs become market demands and prices. His account distinguishes Mayer’s objections to equilibrium theory from a rejection of mathematics, while also correcting one of Mayer’s arguments about factor remuneration. Alongside the portrait of a demanding teacher whose influence exceeded his publications, readers encounter a precise dispute about what economic explanation must accomplish—and why subjective valuation cannot simply be read off from numerical market relations.

How could the Zeitschrift für Nationalökonomie preserve its founding aims while rebuilding international scholarly exchange after wartime disruption? In this brief 1956 editorial notice, Alexander Mahr addresses that practical question as the journal’s new editor following Hans Mayer’s death. The appointments of Gottfried Haberler and Oskar Morgenstern connect earlier affiliations with hopes for closer contact with Anglo-American economics; plans to reprint unavailable articles and index earlier volumes give continuity a concrete editorial form. Rather than an appraisal of Mayer’s thought, the notice offers a compact record of how Mahr proposed to carry the journal forward through renewed collaboration and access to its past.

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.”

For Alexander Mahr, Alfred Amonn exemplified an economics in which conceptual precision served practical judgment rather than becoming an end in itself. This obituary brings that standard into focus through Amonn’s Austrian intellectual formation, his teaching in Bern, and his recovery of Sismondi’s analysis of crises and market dynamics. Mahr’s portrait turns on a productive tension: he praises theoretical explanation while rejecting models he considers too unrealistic to guide policy. His account of Amonn’s influence on younger Swiss economists gives this distinction an institutional setting, where theory had to establish its place against historically oriented teaching. Readers encounter both a compact scholarly remembrance and Mahr’s own criteria for useful economics: causal understanding, critical independence, and attention to the consequences of policy.

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.