2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A publisher asks for a foreword; Emil Sax acknowledges that the request really calls for advocacy. His 1895 preface to Rank’s work on railway tariffs explores how far such advocacy can responsibly go. Sax discloses their connection through the same railway organization while insisting that he took no part in composing the book. His recommendation rests on a specific achievement: constructing a general tariff theory that joins economic principles to administrative practice, extending beyond transport prices to routing and revenue distribution. Yet he leaves the validity of its conclusions to specialist criticism. This short text offers a concrete distinction between securing attention for an independent contribution and certifying its results—and shows how Sax negotiates that distinction under conditions of professional proximity.
Böhm-Bawerk had claimed that even a solitary Robinson, storing grain and shaping tools, would already harbor the core of interest in the swelling value of goods prepared for the future. Sax sets out to refute that positive theory point by point—the temporal gap between need and provision, the alleged systematic underestimation of the future, the productivity of roundabout production—while preserving the marginal-utility theory from which Böhm-Bawerk wrongly thought it followed. His counter-concept is Wertperspektive: future goods carry lower present value because anticipated needs are felt more faintly, a valuation shift that mirrors planned welfare but generates no surplus. Interest, he concludes, is neither natural nor technical but a private-economic exchange gain, rooted in the unequal possession of present goods and absent alike from Robinson's island and a socialist commonwealth.
Die Wirtschaft Robinson’s kennt den uns geläufigen Zinsbegriff nicht.
English translation: “Robinson's economy does not know the concept of interest familiar to us.”
How can taxation be justified economically when the benefits of security, justice, or disease prevention cannot be divided into personal shares? In this 1924 article, Emil Sax revises his earlier account of collective needs to confront that difficulty. He argues that public spending and the distribution of tax burdens must be judged together: who pays determines which private satisfactions are surrendered, and thus how much collective provision is warranted. Against treating taxes as prices for individually measurable benefits, Sax develops an account of collective appraisal and subjectively equivalent contributions. His disputes with Wicksell and Lindahl expose the difficulty of extending value theory beyond market exchange, while his qualified case for progression shows why that extension supplies neither an exact measure of equal burdens nor a universal tax schedule.
When Oskar Engländer's Theorie des Güterverkehrs und der Frachtsätze promised to overturn transport-price theory—and criticized Sax's own Verkehrslehre in passing—Sax answered with these critical studies. He grants that lower freight costs expand a good's market and equalize prices, but denies that Engländer's mathematical formulas, resting on uniform population density and equal purchasing-power strata, can yield anything but a hypothetical sales figure detached from real markets. The heart of the dispute is Werttarifierung, value tariffing: the practice of charging higher-valued goods higher freight, which Sax defends as a genuine application of monopoly-price theory grounded in subjective value and income stratification. Against Engländer he maintains that cost sets the floor beneath every freight rate and belongs in tariff theory from the outset, and he warns that failed abstract deduction can discredit economic theory itself.
Die Rolle der Kosten im Preisbildungsprozeß ist keine ergänzende, sondern eine wesentliche.
English translation: “The role of costs in the price-formation process is not a supplementary one, but an essential one.”
Goods can remain in a warehouse while their ownership changes and their value finances fresh trade—but what legal documents make this possible? In this 1869 offprint, Emil Sax argues that Austria’s warehouse policy neglects the machinery of commodity credit. His concrete test is whether a merchant can sell stored goods while they remain pledged to a lender. Drawing on Belgian practice, he shows how separate, coordinated documents for ownership and security can protect both transactions, whereas Austria’s single receipt risks confusing them. Sax approaches commercial infrastructure through the rights it must sustain, not merely the buildings it requires. His examples reveal why an apparently simpler rule can obstruct credit, expose owners to loss, and undermine confidence in a promising commercial institution.