4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
John Bates Clark had claimed that wages, interest, and rent alike could be settled by a single marginal-productivity principle, the product neatly exhausted by its factors. Strigl’s compact intervention in Austrian distribution theory dismantles that equation as an unproven technical hypothesis rather than a law of value, then rebuilds interest on other ground. Reserving marginal-productivity pricing for the “primary” factors of labor and land, and following Böhm-Bawerk in treating capital as the wage-and-rent fund that finances time-consuming roundabout production, he shows that once workers and landowners are paid what added units would yield elsewhere, a surplus must remain. Competition cannot erase it where it appears in every capitalist enterprise; it becomes a residual rent attributable to the fund that makes waiting possible — and this residual, Strigl argues, is capital interest itself.
Trotzdem bleibt die statische Kapitalzinstheorie von grundlegender Bedeutung, da ihr Gesetz den Ruhepunkt definiert, dem auch die dynamische Wirtschaft jederzeit zustrebt, wobei nur immer neue Störungen die völlige Ausgleichung hindern.
English translation: “Nevertheless the static theory of capital interest remains of fundamental significance, since its law defines the resting point toward which the dynamic economy at all times strives, while only ever-new disturbances prevent complete equalization.”
Before economics can state a single law, Strigl argues, it must decide what “economy” actually means — and ordinary language, saturated with technical, legal, ethical, and social associations, cannot supply the answer. This methodological prolegomenon grounds theoretical economics in pure “economic categories,” the necessary forms in which any economic fact must be grasped, beginning from Gottl’s Lebensnot, the bare condition that goods fall short of wants. The variable “data” of an economy — needs, techniques, milieu, social organization — are not external givens but concretizations of those categories, realized through what Strigl calls the Organisation der Wirtschaft. Against the historical school’s relativism and against Amonn’s attempt to define economics through social exchange, he insists that Crusoe’s isolated household, communist planning, and the market alike remain objects of one law-science.
Die theoretische Nationalökonomie ist keine Sozialwissenschaft, sondern enthält Aussagen über Begriffe, welche soziale und auch nichtsoziale Erscheinungen erfassen können.
English translation: “Theoretical economics is not a social science; rather, it contains propositions about concepts that can encompass social as well as non-social phenomena.”
Demand becomes a precise economic concept, in this compact encyclopedia entry for the Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, only once money mediates exchange and separates the buyer’s side from the seller’s. Strigl’s decisive move is to distinguish mere desire from kaufkräftige Nachfrage — demand backed by the ability and willingness to pay — and to show that price is the device that selects which wants become effective. Because wants outrun the scarce stock, the ranking of demand turns not on urgency of need alone but on wealth and the subjective valuation of money, so price theory explains allocation, not moral desert. He follows the argument to legal maximum prices, where a ceiling below the market-clearing level produces excess demand rationed by queues or cards, and to the Grenzkäufer whose bid guides production itself.
Nur ein Teil der Nachfrage kann jeweils mit dem begrenzten Gütervorrate befriedigt werden.
English translation: “Only a portion of demand can, in any given case, be satisfied out of the limited stock of goods.”
A higher wage can improve workers’ lives, displace workers from employment, or prompt changes that make the increase sustainable. Richard von Strigl’s Angewandte Lohntheorie examines what distinguishes these outcomes, treating social policy as a problem of economic adjustment rather than a choice between intervention and laissez-faire. His analysis gives collective bargaining a qualified but substantive role: unions may capture profits sustained by restricted competition or accelerate wage increases when earnings lag behind business recovery. Social insurance, meanwhile, can benefit workers even when they ultimately bear its costs, by replacing expensive private responses to illness and unemployment. The book offers a way to distinguish immediate gains from durable improvements while insisting that economic theory can clarify consequences, not decide the ethical purposes policy should serve.
How much of production’s yield can be consumed without diminishing the means of producing again? In this concise encyclopedia entry, Richard von Strigl distinguishes gross output from net return, then asks why a productive factor receives an economically attributable share at all. His example of land sharpens the distinction: land may contribute physically to production yet receive no imputed return while it remains abundant; scarcity changes its economic status without changing the productive process. Strigl’s perspective joins the maintenance of productive resources to the problem of valuation, showing why physical productivity alone cannot explain income—and why demonstrating capital’s contribution does not yet explain interest. The entry offers a compact way to distinguish what production delivers, what can sustainably be consumed, and what economic calculation attributes to particular inputs.
A tennis player’s racket interrupting a ball in flight gives Strigl his governing image: economic theory can explain motion between externally given changes in the data, but not the intervention itself. This inquiry into the applicability of economic theory maps the border between economic law and everything that alters its material — needs, technology, law, organization, nature, expectation, and social psychology. Strigl’s central taxonomy divides exogenous data changes, which theory must accept as altered facts, from the narrower endogenous ones that arise within the economic process through saving and the intertemporal ranking of wants. Where an exogenous shift breaks the chain, theory meets a Bruchstelle it cannot bridge; it can only register that something has changed. From this boundary work he projects a future Datentheorie to discipline the application of economic law.
Es ist nun ganz unbezweifelbar, daß außer diesen exogenen Datenänderungen auch noch endogene Datenänderungen möglich sind, das sind solche, welche aus dem wirtschaftlichen Geschehen selbst und kraft der Gesetzlichkeit der Wirtschaft folgen.
English translation: “It is now quite beyond doubt that, apart from these exogenous changes in the data, endogenous changes in the data are also possible—namely, those which follow from the economic process itself and by virtue of the lawful regularity of the economy.”
Division of labour requires goods to move between producers—but must they move through exchange? In this 1928 encyclopedia article, Richard von Strigl distinguishes the general demands of economic allocation from the particular institutions of a market society. Exchangeability, he argues, is not inherent in goods: it depends on transferable ownership and rules governing transactions. His account also sharpens the claim that both parties gain from trade, separating expected advantage from actual success, and unfavourable market terms from legally compelled sale. These distinctions give readers a precise way to examine what voluntary exchange does—and does not—imply. Strigl’s broader concern is the reach of economic theory: markets connect individual choices through interdependent prices, but the principles of economizing cannot be confined to market relations.
The rift between theory and practice runs deeper in economics than in almost any other field, and this essay sets out to bridge rather than deny it. Theory, Strigl argues, discovers causal relations but cannot choose political ends; classical liberalism only seemed to unite the two because it quietly adopted an end of its own — national wealth, the wealth of nations — which cannot by itself settle questions of distribution, welfare, or national power. When policy abandons theory altogether, it does not escape theory but falls into “vulgar economics,” a patchwork of exploitation claims and slogans that blames merchants for high prices and treats faster money circulation as a cure. Rebuilt on marginal analysis and a theory of the economy’s data, pure theory earns its service role: not dictating aims, but showing what follows from chosen means.
Man sieht hier deutlich, wie der liberale Freihandelsgedanke den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ganz allein in den Vordergrund rückt.
English translation: “One sees clearly here how the liberal free-trade idea places economic success alone in the foreground.”
Who legally pays a tax tells you almost nothing about who ultimately bears it — this is the wedge Strigl drives through the theory of tax shifting. Building a deliberately simplified static economy of circular flow, where entrepreneurs buy factors and sell at cost price without profit or loss, he shows that a levy on labor or land alters demand, supply, output, and prices whether the buyer or the seller formally remits it, so that incidence turns on the elasticity of supply and demand rather than on legal form. An income tax generally cannot be shifted, since the purchasing power it removes reappears as state demand; a tax on entrepreneurial profit is the archetype of the non-shiftable tax, yet by starving capital formation and blunting competition it harms the very factor owners and consumers it seems to spare.
Man kann leicht sehen, daß der Unternehmer nicht einfach den Betrag der Steuer auf den Preis des Produktes aufschlagen kann.
English translation: “It is easy to see that the entrepreneur cannot simply add the amount of the tax onto the price of the product.”
Interest rates, in a normal depression, fall and prepare the recovery; in the crisis after September 1929 they fell fast and then rose again, leaving the world economy stranded short of any natural upturn. From this paradox Strigl works toward an uncompromising verdict on the demands of the day — cheaper money and a halt to falling prices, urged by Keynes in England and defended by Cassel against the specter of gold scarcity. Both amount to the same thing, and both are inflation: new money never enters evenly, but favors particular sectors first, distorting relative prices and calling forth production that no real supply of goods can sustain. Such stimulus destroys capital by misdirecting it, and any monetary attempt to obstruct the crisis's necessary liquidation is, for him, already inflation before the currency visibly collapses.
Billiges Geld bedeutet mehr Geld, bedeutet höhere Preise.
English translation: “Cheap money means more money, means higher prices.”
Statutes, reserve rules, and central-bank independence all fail, Strigl warns, against the one authority that can suspend them — the state itself. Written amid the crisis after 1929, as several central banks drifted back toward expansionary “accommodating” policy, this essay asks whether a currency can be secured against political manipulation rather than mere mismanagement. Its conceptual pivot is a reversal of Gresham’s law: where people are free to denominate contracts, wages, and credit in a sounder foreign currency, good money drives out bad, and depreciating money survives only through ignorance, habit, or coercion. Strigl’s remedy is not a new currency scheme but a legal one — treaties binding states never to prohibit a partner’s currency, creating an automatic and sensitive index of monetary health. A state that cannot outlaw the foreign money cannot inflate.
Der Geist der Zeit ist inflationistisch und manche Völker werden für ihre Heilung von währungspolitischen Irrtümern jetzt wieder schweres Lehrgeld zahlen müssen.
English translation: “The spirit of the age is inflationist, and some peoples will now once again have to pay dearly to be cured of their monetary-policy errors.”
Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.
Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.
English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”