3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
After more than thirty years of trade surpluses, Austria-Hungary's balance turned sharply passive after 1907, sinking to 822.9 million crowns in the red by 1912 — a reversal this newspaper essay sets out to explain. Böhm-Bawerk brushes aside the easy culprits of bad harvests and blocked exports and draws a finer distinction: a passive balance can mark a rich creditor nation paid in goods, or a poor country financing itself through foreign borrowing. The monarchy, he argues, is the latter, and not from productive industrialization but from feeble domestic saving and profligate state, provincial, and municipal spending that drains scarce capital. Reading the trade figures through the wider balance of payments, he insists that goods must ultimately be settled by goods, and that the deficit will dissolve only once lax public budgets are consolidated.
Die Zahlungsbilanz befiehlt, die Handelsbilanz gehorcht, nicht umgekehrt.
English translation: “The balance of payments commands, the trade balance obeys, not the other way around.”
Böhm-Bawerk, asked in 1911 to advise the imperial ministry on economics teaching at the University of Graz, turned an administrative query into a defense of theory itself. Modern economic life, he argues, has grown too broad and too consequential for a single professor: Graz needs two chairs, one cultivating pure theory as the organizing foundation, the other commanding applied fields such as trade policy, banking, money, and agrarian and social policy, with statistics admitted only as a subordinate add-on. The memorandum then becomes a pointed intervention in the afterlife of the Methodenstreit, attacking the retiring Hildebrand's theory-hostile historicism as fanatically one-sided. Among the candidates one stands out above the rest, the young Schumpeter, whose brilliance and productivity, he warns, must not be lost to Austrian scholarship abroad.
Schumpeter ist ein eminent theoretischer Kopf, von glänzender Begabung und enormer Urteilskraft und Produktivität.
English translation: “Schumpeter is an eminently theoretical mind, of brilliant talent and enormous judgment and productivity.”