The archive.

Land, labour, and equipment produce goods together—but how can each input acquire a separate value? In this encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer examines the problem of economic imputation, distinguishing it from both physical causation and claims about just remuneration. His criticism of Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, and marginal productivity theory turns on a concrete difficulty: values calculated for an already settled production arrangement may presuppose the allocation they should explain. Mayer instead locates valuation within the formation of the production plan, asking what satisfaction would be lost if an input were withdrawn and its complements reassigned. Readers can discover why such hypothetical losses do not automatically yield mutually consistent factor values, and how Mayer proposes to connect them to entrepreneurial bids, production costs, and incomes.

A system of simultaneous equations can establish that prices, quantities, and marginal utilities are mutually compatible; it cannot show how any determinate price came to be. That distinction, between genetic-causal theories, which explain how prices arise, and functional theories, which merely describe correspondences once equilibrium is presupposed, drives this methodological reckoning with mathematical economics. Marching through Cournot's demand function, Jevons's and Walras's equilibrium equations, Pareto's indifference curves, and Cassel's scarcity model, Mayer argues that each mistakes a description of finished relations for an account of their formation, and that Pareto's curves rest on the mere fiction of an experiment. Writing from interwar Vienna in the long shadow of the Methodenstreit, he does not spurn formalization but demands a return to causal inquiry into subjective valuation and its temporal sequence.

Das Problem hat sich damit geändert und nicht nur die Betrachtungsweise.

English translation: “The problem itself has thereby changed, and not merely the point of view.”

Statistical patterns can describe a business cycle without explaining why it occurs. In this short contribution to the 1933 Spiethoff Festschrift, Hans Mayer presses that distinction while questioning what a general theory of crises could actually establish. His test case is the inability to sell goods at prices that cover costs: can its recurrence be derived from the basic conditions of an exchange economy? Mayer’s distinctive move is to turn the demand for rigorous causal explanation back upon the assumption of rational entrepreneurial conduct. Profit-seeking alone determines neither foresight nor responses to cheap credit and technical change. The essay lets readers examine a precise methodological tension: economic dynamics requires more than historical description, yet its general premises may leave the decisive entrepreneurial choices unexplained.

A commemorative commission poses a scholarly problem: how can a history sponsored by Austria’s chambers of commerce establish their importance without assuming it? In his 1949 preface to Hundert Jahre österreichischer Wirtschaftsentwicklung 1848–1948, editor Hans Mayer insists that their prominence follows from research, while explicitly championing their role in reconciling economic freedom with social obligations. His account of the project brings documentary inquiry into contact with administrative experience: legislation, chamber proceedings and political speeches are to disclose motives behind economic change, not merely record events. This short preface offers a focused view of Mayer’s conception of useful economic history—and of the tension between his commitment to scholarly independence and his confidence in the institution commissioning the work.

How can economic agents calculate with subjective values if those values cannot be measured? In this 1953 essay contributed to the Festschrift for Alfred Amonn, Hans Mayer proposes that the missing element is time. A stock allocated across recurring needs differs from one consumed in a single episode: repeated satisfactions of equal importance may, he argues, permit calculation without a numerical measure of utility. Writing from Menger’s account of value, Mayer challenges indifference analysis for overlooking finite quantities, distinct needs, and limits to substitution. His constructive proposal lets readers examine precisely where ranking might become arithmetic—and how shared production inputs might connect otherwise unlike goods. The interest lies in this attempted bridge between ordinal valuation and practical planning, rather than in a claim to have made subjective experience measurable.

Should a stock of identical goods be valued by adding the different utilities its units secure, or by multiplying their number by marginal utility? In this first installment of his study, Hans Mayer reopens the dispute between Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser without accepting that either formula must hold universally. His distinctive move is to separate a valuation rule’s applicability from the soundness of its proof: defective reasoning need not invalidate an observed practice. Mayer shows why uniform market prices cannot establish equal subjective valuations and why calculations that assume consumption all at once may misrepresent economic planning. The positive derivation remains for a later installment; here readers discover how the timing of consumption changes the terms of an apparently mathematical dispute.