2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
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.
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.”
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.