The archive.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Building more homes does not necessarily put families into dwellings they need and can afford. In this 1955 review essay, Alfred Amonn examines eight reports from West Germany’s housing advisory council with Swiss policy firmly in view. He finds a compelling distinction between financing construction and helping households pay rent: protecting all existing tenants through frozen rents can discourage mobility and maintenance while leaving overcrowded families without relief. His support for cost-covering rents therefore goes together with targeted assistance, not the withdrawal of social protection. Particularly revealing is his attention to indirect effects—smaller new dwellings may free larger homes for families, while cheaper credit can complicate funded welfare provision. The essay offers a concrete examination of why housing finance, household needs, and social assistance must be considered together.

An economy can expand without changing how it produces or improving output per person. For Alfred Amonn, this distinction exposes a central weakness in dynamic equilibrium theory: explaining growth is not yet explaining development. In this 1956 review essay on Willy Kraus’s Wirtschaftswachstum und Gleichgewicht, Amonn tests models of expansion against the harder questions of technical change, capital deepening, and structural transformation. His criticism also separates equilibrium from two conditions often associated with it—steady growth and full employment. Readers can discover how definitions of saving, investment, and monetary equilibrium shape apparently substantive disagreements, and why Amonn regards the prevention of cumulative disturbances as a more defensible policy aim than a guaranteed programme of uninterrupted growth.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.

Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.

English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”

Can an economy gain from foreign trade without changing its domestic institutions? In this review-essay on Ernst Heuss’s Wirtschaftssysteme und internationaler Handel, Alfred Amonn examines trade policy through the economic arrangements it sustains. His sympathetic exposition brings out the stakes of Heuss’s approach: exchange controls may undermine market coordination, while tariffs may protect not simply producers but a particular distribution of income. The tension becomes especially concrete when a centrally planned economy bargains as a single buyer and seller against dispersed market participants. By following Amonn’s presentation, readers can distinguish restrictions that Heuss regards as necessary to preserve an economic system from measures that may instead transform it—a different test from asking whether a policy merely increases trade.