3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.
Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.
English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”
Higher wage rates need not mean higher earnings for workers as a whole: employment, prices, and bargaining power can pull in different directions. In this 1947 lecture, Alfred Amonn asks what wage policy can accomplish once those differences are taken seriously. He challenges the assumption that competition automatically secures productivity gains for labour, emphasizing workers’ limited ability to wait, move, or obtain information. Yet he also argues that wage increases can cost jobs—a constraint collective bargaining cannot abolish. His distinctive emphasis falls on changing the conditions of wage determination through labour protection, organization, and informed state mediation rather than simply fixing rates. The lecture offers a concrete way to examine whose income a wage measure protects, and whether a nominal gain represents greater purchasing power.
What divides this presentation from Stackelberg's popular textbook is method, not subject matter: modern theory, Amonn insists, must be learned as a mode of reasoning rather than gathered as a heap of results. He builds from supply and demand as functional relations through equilibrium and market price to monopoly, duopoly, and the imperfect competition of Joan Robinson and Chamberlin, grounding demand in marginal utility and supply in subjective cost. He rejects the marginal-productivity theory of factor values as circular, substituting his own principle that product prices must be differentiated by the quantities of factors each good requires, and derives wage, interest, and rent from it. The argument runs on through money and the quantity theory, business cycles, and comparative costs to a welfare doctrine that weighs competition's productive power against the inequality it breeds.
Der Preis keines Gutes ist unabhängig von denen der anderen bestimmt, sondern alle sind zugleich, «simultan» bestimmt.
English translation: “The price of no good is determined independently of the others; rather, all are determined at once, "simultaneously.”
Progressive taxation and family allowances may be defensible without being deductions from justice. In this 1949 Festschrift essay, Alfred Amonn asks what public-finance scholarship can actually establish when rival standards of fairness prescribe opposite tax burdens. He tests ability-to-pay reasoning against incentives to earn, and equal payment for public services against the revenue needs of the state. His distinctive move is to retain familiar tax arrangements while replacing their purported ethical foundations with arguments about collection costs, household stability, and economic consequences. Readers can discover how the same fiscal policy changes meaning when defended as practical necessity rather than moral entitlement—and why, for Amonn, public feelings of injustice still matter even when justice supplies no determinate scientific rule.
The misery of English factory hands, the gluts of 1818 and 1826, and the depopulation of the countryside posed a puzzle Sismondi could not leave to sentiment: why did the liberal market and its machinery breed crises, unemployment, and want? This second volume presents his 1819 Nouveaux Principes as a dynamic and welfare economics set against the static equilibrium of his earlier work—and against Say's law and Ricardo, who conflated income with capital and imagined consumption almost limitless. Amonn follows Sismondi's demand that production stay proportioned to income and effective demand, his critique of Ricardian rent, his defense of small proprietorship, and his call to bind employers to their workers in sickness, age, and unemployment. Throughout, the editor marks the circular-flow insight as Sismondi's real advance while faulting the confusions that blur it.
Die statische Theorie oder Gleichgewichtstheorie stimmt nicht für die tatsächliche Entwicklung der Wirtschaft.
English translation: “The static theory, or equilibrium theory, does not accord with the actual development of the economy.”
Does unified income taxation threaten federalism, or does that objection leave the costs of fragmented taxation unexamined? In this 1950 reply to Theo Keller’s criticism of his Bundesstaatliche Finanzordnung, Alfred Amonn demands concrete grounds for resisting Swiss fiscal reform. His perspective is conditional rather than categorical: a debt sustainable today may constrain tomorrow’s borrowing, while a one-time levy on existing wealth may permit relief from recurring taxes. The article’s interest lies in how Amonn separates these claims from the political labels attached to them. Readers encounter a pointed dispute over what would count as evidence against reform—and where constitutional loyalties require an argument about practical consequences rather than an appeal to attachment.
Currency devaluation can look like an administrative adjustment; in Alfred Amonn’s review of Rudolf Kaulla’s Rechtsstaat und Währung, it becomes a test of the state’s obligations to creditors. Amonn presents Kaulla’s compensation theory, which locates monetary value in enforceable claims rather than in gold itself, and draws out its legal stakes: why should governments reduce debts through monetary action when private debtors must first exhaust their capacity to pay? His distinctive emphasis is the link between monetary theory and protection against arbitrary state power. This compact review offers a clear route into the distinction between a stable monetary unit and stable purchasing power—and into Kaulla’s contention that money deserves protection as a legal right, not merely management as an instrument of policy.
A machine’s purchase price is definite; its contribution to future profits is not. In this review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Friedrich and Vera Lutz’s The Theory of Investment of the Firm through the tension between exact investment calculation and workable business practice. Their approach evaluates durable equipment by discounting anticipated returns rather than allocating its cost through depreciation conventions. Amonn traces what this changes in decisions about replacement, financing, and valuation, while asking whether entrepreneurs can realistically perform the calculations the theory requires. Readers can discover why economic life need not coincide with technical service life, and why accounting rules may point toward different decisions from prospective-profit analysis. Amonn’s appreciation of the Lutzes’ analytical discipline remains tempered by questions about practical applicability and its contribution to broader economic theory.
Can interest persist in an economy where innovation has ceased—and can it disappear even where capital remains productive? Alfred Amonn’s 1953 article challenges the assumptions behind both questions by distinguishing physical capital goods from present command over them. Against Keynes’s exclusively monetary explanation, he argues that scarce access to goods underlies interest, while money and liquidity preference help determine its rate. His extended example of fishermen acquiring boats and nets makes the distinction concrete: replacement costs, entrepreneurial profit and pure interest need not rise or vanish together. Readers can discover why productivity alone does not explain a positive return, why stationary conditions need not eliminate it, and how monetary and real explanations can be combined without treating either as sufficient.
When the textbooks of Hansen and Schneider reduced the quantity theory of money to the crude claim that prices simply track the money stock, Amonn set out to show they were attacking a straw man no serious theorist had ever held. Tracing the doctrine from Bodin and Hume through Mill and Fisher, he recasts it not as a mechanistic identity but as the application of ordinary supply-and-demand value theory to the special case of money, whose demand and supply enter as simple quantities rather than price-quantity functions. He defends Fisher's equation of exchange against the charge of empty tautology, distinguishes the money actually offered on the market from the total stock, and closes by likening the quantity-theory law to the law of free fall: never perfectly realized, yet valid when other factors are accounted for.
Man wird selbst in der ältesten geldtheoretischen Literatur vergeblich nach einer derart primitiven Fassung der Quantitätstheorie suchen.
English translation: “Even in the oldest monetary-theoretical literature one will search in vain for so primitive a formulation of the quantity theory.”
No final classification of taxes is possible, Amonn concedes at the outset, because real tax systems are the residue of historically uneven practice. What follows is a concise study aid to the special theory of taxation, tracing each levy—land, building, trade, capital-rent, labour, income, wealth, inheritance, consumption, and turnover taxes—through its object, assessment base, and above all its Überwälzung, the shifting and incidence that determine who truly bears the burden. He distinguishes objective yield taxes from the subjective income tax geared to ability to pay, judges the old yield taxes fit as principal taxes only in economically backward countries, and extends the analysis to public credit, the structure and conversion of state debt, and the fiscal equalization between a federation and its member states.
Eine Zwangsanleihe vereinigt die Nachteile sowohl einer Anleihe wie einer Steuer, ohne die Vorteile einer Anleihe bzw. die Vorteile einer Steuer zu bieten.
English translation: “A forced loan combines the disadvantages of both a loan and a tax without offering the advantages of either a loan or a tax.”
A large, rent-controlled apartment can cost less than a smaller new one: for Alfred Amonn, this disparity helps explain why housing shortages persist even when construction resumes. His 1953 article on Swiss housing argues that frozen rents discourage shrinking households from moving, protecting established tenants while leaving newcomers to bear higher costs. Yet he separates rent reform from the removal of security of tenure: insufficient vacancies still justify protection against termination. This distinction gives his case for market restoration its particular shape—gradual rent increases, continued supervision, and assistance directed towards need rather than possession of a controlled tenancy. Readers can examine a concrete tension between protecting current occupants and making fuller use of scarce housing, without treating all emergency safeguards as equally necessary or equally obsolete.