2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Monetary reform may not deserve first place in European integration, but does that justify postponing it? In this brief 1958 review of Geoffrey Crowther’s Zwei Welten? Oder zwanzig?, Richard Kerschagl welcomes the practical case for abolishing exchange controls in continental Europe and Britain, even while reserving judgement on its theoretical basis. Crowther’s proposal promises limited convertibility rather than an end to the dollar shortage. Kerschagl’s distinctive judgement is that an excessive emphasis on currency reform can still correct its neglect—a compact distinction between endorsing a policy’s priority and recognising the value of pressing it.
What should an account of automation offer beyond technical explanation? In this brief 1958 review, Richard Kerschagl praises the German translation of Georges Hartmann’s book for combining clear concepts with little-known numerical data, reserving particular approval for its treatment of economic and social consequences. His notice offers no examples or detailed critique; its interest lies in the standards of usefulness it articulates and its explicit recognition of French scholarship as a resource for German-speaking readers.
How much can readable monetary journalism achieve when its historical claims do not withstand scholarly scrutiny? In this brief review of Rudolf Mühlfenzl’s Interview mit dem Geld, Richard Kerschagl questions statements about the Lydians and John Law and faults a bibliography restricted to books published in Germany. Yet he distinguishes these weaknesses from the book’s usefulness to lay readers. His qualified endorsement offers a compact example of critical judgement that values accessibility without confusing it with scholarly authority: an entertaining introduction may foster understanding and prompt readers to seek more rigorous work.
Foreign-exchange controls can undermine the balance they are meant to protect: cheap official foreign currency encourages imports while penalizing exporters. In this 1959 article, Richard Kerschagl traces that contradiction through compulsory surrender, rationed allocations, clearing arrangements, and blocked capital transfers. His attention to administrative detail shows how traders adapt to controls through invoice prices and third-country transactions, shifting monetary distortions into trade. Yet his case for realistic exchange rates is not a promise that markets alone will secure stability. Liberalization, he argues, requires credible restraint on inflation and effective coordination of economic policy, with a substantial role for the central bank. The article offers a concrete account of why removing restrictions and establishing durable convertibility are different tasks.
Can Marx remain a valuable critic of industrial society if his economic theory is rejected? In this polemical 1960 article, Richard Kerschagl grants Marx a limited achievement as an economic historian while challenging the explanatory foundations of Capital. His most revealing distinction separates capital’s contribution to production from the capitalist’s entitlement to income: acknowledging the former, he argues, need not justify the latter. From this standpoint, Kerschagl charges Marx with allowing demands about distribution to govern explanations of value and production. Readers encounter a critique informed by marginal-utility reasoning whose insistence on separating scientific explanation from political commitment sits uneasily beside its openly adversarial rhetoric. The article makes that boundary—and the difficulty of maintaining it—the central stake of reassessing Marx.
Cheap housing, guaranteed employment, higher wages: who pays when policy promises to make these benefits affordable? In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares market and command economies by tracing costs that neither institutional system can abolish. His defence of competitive prices and capital maintenance is qualified by recognition of neglected social needs, concentrated economic power, and the political necessity of employment. He also challenges market advocates who demand protection or subsidies for themselves. The article’s distinctive tension lies between social obligations and his insistence that lasting improvements depend on productive performance. Readers can examine how a benefit received as a worker or tenant may return as a burden on the same person as consumer, taxpayer, or saver—and why economic labels alone cannot settle policy choices.
A low-interest development loan may be expensive; a rigorously supervised one may be impossible to repay. In this 1961 article, Richard Kerschagl compares Eastern and Western financing by looking beyond stated credit terms to equipment prices, commodity deliveries, export markets, and political leverage. He argues that Soviet-bloc credits can conceal costs in tied transactions, while Western lenders too often demand hard-currency repayment without securing borrowers’ opportunities to earn it. His distinctive concern is the connection between financial obligations and actual flows of goods. That perspective also unsettles the equation of development with industrialization: agricultural improvements or transport may serve a country better than prestigious factories. Readers gain concrete criteria for judging aid by its effective costs, local suitability, and repayment prospects rather than its advertised generosity.
For nearly three millennia silver was the money metal of antiquity and the Middle Ages, beside which gold played a modest part; this volume in the series Die metallischen Rohstoffe follows its descent from coinage into the smelter. Kerschagl moves from the chalcophile geology of galena and the Comstock Lode through amalgamation, cupellation, and cyanide leaching to the monetary drama: shifting gold-silver ratios, the Latin Monetary Union's retreat from true bimetallism, and the doomed remonetization schemes of the interwar years. He argues that no one can fix an objective silver price, that most output now comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining, and that only twentieth-century industrial demand, not monetary nostalgia, at last stabilized the metal.
Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.
English translation: “Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.”
Knowledge is no ornament and its diffusion no work for court jesters, Kerschagl insists — it is as materially vital as the erection of industrial plants. That conviction anchors this treatment of development aid, written just after its author took the presidency of the Austrian UNESCO Commission, which ranges across population theory from Malthus to Nurkse's circular causation, the psychology of entitlement and colonial guilt, and the institutional scaffolding of trade unions, honest bureaucracy, and stable currency. Identifying mass poverty and illiteracy as the true marks of a development area, it ranks agriculture before heavy industry, holds up the Marshall Plan as a model that cannot be transplanted into pre-industrial economies, and presses throughout the principle of Hilfe für Selbsthilfe against both beggar ideology and condescending charity.
Das Verhältnis zwischen Helfenden und Hilfe Empfangenden kann nicht das von Gönnern und Bettelnden sein, sondern nur das echter Partnerschaft.
English translation: “The relationship between those giving aid and those receiving it cannot be that of patrons and beggars, but only that of genuine partnership.”
To ask why taxes exist, this textbook contends, is really to ask why the state exists — every tax system is at bottom a theory of the state. Kerschagl's teaching text moves from the history of the tax state through Adam Smith's four canons, tax justice, universality, and the interdependence of prices, wages, and shifting that dissolves the tidy line between direct and indirect taxes, to a claim central to the welfare age: even the fully socialized Soviet economy cannot replace taxation with enterprise profit, leaning instead on a turnover tax that works as a consumption tax. A long comparative part then dissects the fiscal constitutions of the United States, the USSR, Italy, France, both Germanys, Benelux, Scandinavia, England, and Austria, exposing how divergent tax systems threaten EEC and EFTA integration.
Der Wohlfahrtsstaat des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist eben ein riesiger Ausgleichsmechanismus, durch den etwa die Hälfte aller originären Einkommen einem Prozeß der Neuverteilung unterzogen wird.
English translation: “The welfare state of the twentieth century is nothing other than a gigantic equalization mechanism, through which roughly half of all originary incomes is subjected to a process of redistribution.”
Every standard objection to development aid gets its hearing here first — that recipient states expropriate foreign property, drift toward socialism, squander funds through corruption, and repay generosity with nationalist ingratitude — before Kerschagl answers them one by one. Aid can check communist expansion as the Marshall Plan once did, even if friends cannot be bought; a new humanitas demands it; and corruption is met not by withholding help but by devising controls that spare the delicate matter of sovereignty. He contrasts Western dollar loans, repayable in hard currency, with Eastern credits settled in goods, calls for a coordinating umbrella over the IFC, IDA, and Export-Import Bank, and argues — invoking Nehru's claim that knowledge matters as much as bread — that material aid is worthless without education.
Diese Hilfe müsse aber so rasch wie möglich geleistet werden; denn es sei besser, einen Brand in seinen Anfängen zu löschen als bereits niedergebrannte Ruinen nutzlos unter Einsatz einer wirtschaftlichen oder politischen Feuerwehr zu retten.
English translation: “But this aid, it is said, must be rendered as quickly as possible; for it is better to extinguish a fire at its beginnings than uselessly to try to salvage already burned-out ruins by deploying an economic or political fire brigade.”
Could a failed businessman and writer serving successive political masters nevertheless be a consistent reformer? Richard Kerschagl’s 1965 article defends Daniel Defoe by separating commercial fortunes and political employment from enduring commitments, especially religious toleration. Its strongest evidence lies in concrete institutional proposals: bankruptcy laws that preserve a debtor’s ability to repay, contributory pensions, and education open to women. Kerschagl reads these projects sympathetically as anticipations of later reforms, while attending to the financial and political obstacles to their adoption. The result shifts attention from the familiar novelist to a pamphleteer concerned with how institutions might reduce suffering—and gives readers grounds to reconsider whether apparent utopianism belongs to a proposal itself or to the circumstances in which it first appears.