3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Does equating a worker’s wage with the value of marginal output explain that wage—or merely restate a relation between values still needing explanation? Alfred Amonn’s methodological article challenges marginal-productivity theory on precisely this ground. He seeks a unified explanation of wages, interest, and rent through consumer demand, production requirements, and the distinct supply conditions of labour, capital, and land. His approach separates questions often run together: why an income category exists, what determines its magnitude, and whether it must take the form of a market payment. Rent on owner-cultivated land and saving without interest sharpen these distinctions. The result is an explanatory programme, not a finished model, that asks readers to distinguish an equilibrium condition from an account of the forces producing it.
Can an editor disclaim responsibility for a translation published under his name? In this brief reply to Kerschagl, Alfred Amonn insists that dividing the labour does not divide accountability. He contrasts Kerschagl’s defence with the editors’ own declaration of joint work on the German translation of Walras’s Theory of Money. His objections to expressions about metallic parity and stabilization sharpen a second distinction: grammatical correctness and intelligibility are not merely matters of stylistic taste. This is not an exposition of Walras’s monetary theory, but a pointed dispute over the standards required to transmit it. Readers can follow how Amonn tests claims of scholarly collaboration against the wording and public presentation of the resulting work.
Ranking satisfactions is not the same as measuring them. This distinction drives Alfred Amonn’s critique of the first volume of Robert Liefmann’s Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, which promises to rebuild economics on psychological foundations. Amonn tests that promise against definitions of utility and cost and numerical examples of choice: can subjective feelings legitimately be added, subtracted, or expressed as ratios? His defence of marginal-utility theory is qualified by a willingness to challenge its practitioners when they use the same questionable arithmetic. He also develops a concrete alternative to treating cost as pain: cost is the benefit forgone when resources are used elsewhere. The review offers a focused encounter with the limits of numerical representations of preference—and with the distinction between a genuinely new explanation and a change of theoretical vocabulary.
Can a monetary theory justify reform if its central terms keep changing meaning? In this polemical review of Robert Liefmann’s Geld und Gold, Alfred Amonn tests claims of theoretical novelty against the discipline of consistent definition. He traces shifts between money as a tangible medium of exchange and money as an abstract accounting unit, arguing that these changes obscure rather than explain economic relations. The stakes become concrete in Liefmann’s proposal to dispose of the Reichsbank’s gold reserves. Without insisting that sound money must rest on gold, Amonn defends reserves as a resource for international purchases and postwar reconstruction. The review offers a pointed encounter between conceptual criticism and monetary policy: what must an economist establish before recommending that a country surrender such a resource?