The archive.

When does mathematical abstraction clarify economic choice, and when does it change the object being explained? In this 1911 review of Schumpeter’s Das Wesen und der Hauptinhalt der theoretischen Nationalökonomie, Hans Mayer tests equilibrium theory against concrete difficulties: possessions valued without any desire to acquire more, needs that end abruptly, and goods whose usefulness disappears when divided. Defending Austrian marginal-utility theory while acknowledging its unfinished work, he challenges the identification of subjective value with demand price and the requirement that equilibrium equalize marginal utilities. His objection is not to quantitative analysis itself, but to assumptions that cannot be relaxed without losing the proposed explanation. The review offers a precise encounter between two conceptions of theoretical economics: functional interdependence and explanation grounded in needs, valuations, and choices.

Identical resources and identical rankings of needs need not produce identical valuations: everything depends on how long the resources must last. In this 1922 installment of his investigation, Hans Mayer presses marginal-utility theory to account for recurring needs and the time required to replenish supplies. His concern is not to reject marginal valuation, but to establish conditions that its usual derivations leave unspecified. Economizing, on his account, means allocating common means among competing ends—a distinction that leads him to classify the enterprise’s pursuit of monetary income as technical activity, while locating its economic foundations in households. Readers can discover why a period of provision matters to value theory, and why market prices cannot independently explain the valuations from which they are supposedly derived. The promised derivation of the valuation law remains for a subsequent article.

Satisfying a need is not necessarily consuming a good: this distinction anchors Hans Mayer’s 1923 encyclopedia entry on consumption. By defining consumption as the depletion of goods in immediate use, Mayer explains why even an economy with unchanged needs must continually produce replacements—and why present enjoyment can erode future productive capacity. His account brings household choice into contact with the material limits of production, while refusing to treat market demand as a transparent measure of human need. Wealthier households can command resources for less urgent wants while poorer households lack necessities. Readers can discover how this precise definition changes the interpretation of expenditure, overconsumption, and consumption statistics: neither money spent nor goods purchased straightforwardly measures how well a population’s needs are met.

A strong desire need not deserve priority: reflection may favour a quieter need with more lasting consequences. This tension shapes Hans Mayer’s 1924 encyclopedia entry, Bedürfnis, which asks how needs ground economic valuation without reducing choice to immediate impulses. Working within marginal-utility theory, Mayer makes anticipated welfare—not raw desire intensity—the basis of reflective allocation. His qualifications are concrete: housing cannot be divided into arbitrarily small increments, and provision for familiar future needs need not undervalue them simply because they are not yet felt. Readers can discover how a theory often presented through smooth scales of satisfaction accommodates indivisible goods, foresight, and competing judgments about well-being, including satisfactions derived from altruism and ethical commitments.

A monopolist can restrict supply, but cannot independently dictate both price and sales. This distinction anchors Hans Mayer’s 1925 encyclopedia contribution, “II. Der Monopolpreis,” which asks when monopoly pricing admits a definite economic explanation—and when it does not. Mayer shows why maximizing profit need not mean charging the highest price or always withholding goods: demand, purchasing power, production costs, and substitutes constrain the seller’s choices. His account becomes especially revealing at the boundaries of monopoly, where potential competitors can restrain a sole supplier, public-service obligations displace profit maximization, and two monopolists must bargain over their shared surplus. Readers can discover a carefully differentiated account of market power that separates control over supply from freedom to set prices, and calculable outcomes from those dependent on institutions and negotiation.

Can production be rationally coordinated without market prices? In this 1925 encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer treats that question as a problem of scarce resources, competing wants and practical knowledge—not simply of ownership. He argues that accumulated experience and marginal valuations can guide collective production, while distinguishing calculability from the capacities of those directing it. His account also draws a sharp line between contributing labour and controlling a production plan: who counts as the producer depends on legal rights and power, not technical participation alone. Read together, these distinctions illuminate what Mayer considers common to market and collective economies, and what their institutions change: the means of calculation, the authority to allocate resources, and the wants that production actually serves.

Sunlight, knowledge, labour, and machinery all help make production possible; why count only some as economic factors? In this encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer defends the classification into nature, labour, and capital by distinguishing causal necessity from dependence on scarce productive means. His treatment of capital makes the distinction concrete: although machines are made with labour and natural resources, replacing them takes time, so present output depends on the existing stock. Equally important is his separation of productive contribution from entitlement to income: property rights and institutions require their own explanation. The entry offers a compact way to examine what factor theory can explain about valuation—and why it cannot, by itself, explain who receives the proceeds of production.

A tax assessed on one person may ultimately be paid by another through higher prices or lower wages. In this 1926 conference address, preserved as an unrevised stenogram, Hans Mayer asks how abstract agreement about tax shifting can yield dependable guidance for legislation. His distinctive approach joins price theory to taxpayer motivation and the precise design of assessment: a levy on pure monopoly profit, he argues, has different consequences from one on gross receipts, while an inheritance tax may provoke less resistance than a tax on accustomed income. These distinctions underpin his challenge to the presumed fairness of a uniform general income tax. The address shows why identifying the statutory taxpayer is only the beginning of judging a tax’s distributional effects—and why the definition of the tax base matters to fiscal justice.

A tax’s legal name does not tell us who ultimately bears it. In these closing remarks from a 1926 conference discussion, Hans Mayer shows why even a question as apparently precise as whether land tax can be shifted requires distinctions between recipients of differential rent and marginal producers. His defence of deduction is also a statement of its limits: theory may identify how burdens move, but cannot alone measure how much falls on each participant. Mayer proposes comparing price changes with consumption and sales data, including across countries. This brief intervention offers a concrete view of the gap between legislative intention and economic incidence—and of the evidence needed to move beyond a simple verdict that a tax either is or is not shifted.

How can a theory grounded in individual needs explain production costs, income distribution, and the power relations of society? In this 1927 memorial essay, Hans Mayer presents Friedrich Wieser’s career as a sustained attempt to connect these problems. His tribute is also a partisan account of Austrian economics: Mayer credits Wieser with deriving costs from the utility of products and explaining how their value is allocated among cooperating productive resources. He argues that these relationships persist across capitalist and socialist institutions, while law and power shape their concrete operation. The essay offers readers both an accessible account of this theoretical ambition and Mayer’s explicit standard for judging it: theory must connect phenomena and explain reality, not merely construct an internally consistent system.

An ineffective medicine can count as an economic good, while a property right need not add anything to society’s stock of goods. Hans Mayer’s 1927 encyclopedia entry explains these apparently contrary judgments by locating economic goods not in material substance but in relations among needs, beliefs, scarcity, and control. Working within Menger’s framework, Mayer asks what makes something available as a means to human ends—and what economists mistakenly count twice. His treatment of labor and personal services separates economic classification from ethical endorsement; his account of rights distinguishes command over wealth from additional wealth. The entry offers a precise way to examine why usefulness alone does not establish economic value, and why a marketable advantage need not constitute a separate good.

Does income exist before it is distributed? In this 1928 encyclopedia entry, Hans Mayer challenges the picture of a national product waiting to be divided among social classes. Individual incomes, he argues, arise through prices; national income is their aggregate, not their source. His Austrian perspective gives the historical discussion a pointed purpose: to show how a vocabulary inherited from feudal allocation and physiocratic class theory can misdirect the explanation of an exchange economy. Readers can discover why treating classes as income-receiving agents reverses the explanatory order, and why explaining earnings is not the same as justifying them. Mayer’s distinction leaves room for law, institutions, and social power without making moral entitlement a substitute for an account of income formation.