4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
The book that Hulsmann's introduction calls the great untranslated work of interwar Austrian economics appears here in its first English edition, rendering the 1934 Kapital und Produktion for readers of capital-based macroeconomics. Strigl builds an entire theory of production on the higher yield of roundabout methods and the wage-fund idea: capital is not an independent force but a way of using labor and land across time, sustained by a fund of subsistence goods. He distinguishes free capital, intermediate products, and fixed capital, and traces how credit expansion — money capital created beyond real saving — lowers interest below equilibrium, lengthens production past what the subsistence fund can support, and immobilizes investment. Two appendices carry the argument into the business cycle, joining Bohm-Bawerk's production theory to Mises's theory of the crisis.
Owning capital equipment can never in itself represent wealth; it only becomes wealth if it can be integrated into the structure of production.
Problems of production must be approached first through the real relations of goods, Strigl argues, and only then through the veil of money — the reverse of the usual procedure. Published in the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie in 1934, this essay reconstructs capital as a wage fund: a stock of subsistence goods that carries workers through the roundabout processes of production, bound into intermediate goods by investment and released again as finished consumer goods. He reconciles the old wage-fund doctrine with marginal-productivity theory through the interest rate, which regulates the length of production, and then turns to money capital as an independent factor. Drawing on the Wicksell-Mises circulation-credit theory, he shows how bank credit finances longer processes without a matching subsistence fund, tearing apart the structure of production until liquidation forces a crisis.
Die unzureichende Freisetzung von Kapital in der Gestalt von Fertigprodukten muß Anlaß zur Krise werden.
English translation: “The insufficient release of capital in the form of finished products must become the occasion of a crisis.”
When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.
Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.
English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”
Mass unemployment can coexist with a shortage of skilled workers. In this 1936 research pamphlet, Richard von Strigl examines that tension in Austria, where interrupted apprenticeships and prolonged inactivity were weakening the workforce needed for recovery. Comparing census counts, insurance records and employment-office registrations, he shows why rising employment need not mean falling recorded unemployment: improved prospects can draw previously unregistered workers into the market. His distinctive concern is not simply how many people lack jobs, but how workers acquire—and lose—the competence that production requires. Recovery, he argues, cannot restore the industrial pattern of 1929 unchanged. The study connects the limits of unemployment statistics with the concrete costs of exclusion: blocked occupational development, lost advancement and diminished prospects for family formation.
Austrian imputation theory and the Anglo-American theory of cost and returns had grown apart; Strigl's 1936 offprint sets out to build a common foundation for both, citing Bohm-Bawerk and Wieser alongside Sraffa, Chamberlin, and Joan Robinson. From the single assumption of indefinitely divisible factors he derives diminishing returns not as a technical necessity but as a consequence of economic selection among possible combinations, then reproduces the Wicksteed proof that marginal products exhaust the total product. The heart of the essay is the Quantenfaktor, the indivisible factor — above all durable fixed capital — whose original outlay is a merely historical cost, irrelevant to its present value, which residual imputation must nonetheless recover if the good is to be reproduced. From here he reaches free competition, monopolistic competition, and the problem of chronic excess capacity.
Es kann sich der Betrieb niemals in jenem Zustand befinden, in welchem eine Ausdehnung der Produktion zu geringeren Stückkosten führt.
English translation: “The firm can never find itself in a state in which an expansion of production would lead to lower unit costs.”
An apprenticeship can teach a trade, but what happens when its graduates cannot find work in it? In this 1937 statistical study of Austria’s younger workforce, Richard von Strigl treats unemployment not only as unused labour but as an interruption in the making of skilled workers. Employment histories, apprenticeship figures, and educational comparisons expose the gap between obtaining a qualification and developing it through sustained practice. A silversmith pushed into prolonged earthwork makes the dilemma concrete: immediate relief can come at the expense of occupational skill. Strigl also challenges the expectation that smaller birth cohorts will automatically ease unemployment. Attentive to the limits of employment-office records, he shows how present exclusion from work can weaken the productive capacities on which recovery would depend.
Meant to arm the reader against vulgar economic slogans and the reflexes of interest-group politics, this 1937 textbook compresses the secured foundations of economics into a single systematic course. Strigl begins from the free-market price as a selective mechanism, builds through diminishing returns, the Malthusian population law and its qualification by capital and technical progress, and marginal productivity as the key to wages and distribution. Capital enters as roundabout production and a subsistence fund, interest as the marginal product of capital-time. The later chapters carry the apparatus into money and the gold standard, the credit-driven boom and its Harvard-barometer crisis, tax shifting, comparative costs and the case against protection, and finally the socialist calculation problem. Throughout he insists that economics studies the consequences of measures and must never prescribe political ends.
Eine Darstellung wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge muß sich gegenüber allen Fragen der Politik neutral verhalten.
English translation: “A presentation of economic relationships must remain neutral with respect to all questions of policy.”
For the fiftieth-anniversary volume of the Revue d'Economie Politique, Strigl described how economics was actually taught in the universities of his own Vienna — here in the French translation prepared for that Paris series. Long a marginal subject lodged within the law faculties and pushed late in the curriculum, economics had, he explains, been reduced for many students to an examination hurdle despite teaching of the first rank in the Austrian School tradition. He works through the old regulations, the 1935 reform that lengthened legal study and introduced early exercises in basic economic concepts, and the little-used Staatswissenschaft doctorate, before turning to the technical schools and the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His closing claim is plain: the worldwide reputation of the Austrian School is itself the best evidence for the quality of that teaching.
Pendant longtemps, l'enseignement économique, rattaché exclusivement aux facultés de droit, n'occupait, dans les programmes d'enseignement juridique, qu'une place peu saillante.
English translation: “For a long time, economic instruction, attached exclusively to the faculties of law, occupied only a minor place in the programs of legal education.”
Rarely taken seriously in Germany and often dismissed for its ties to monetary crisis theory, the Wicksellian process — the claim that an interest rate departing from equilibrium sets off a cumulative movement in prices, investment, and the structure of production — receives here a searching capital-theoretic defense. Writing in 1942 for Kiel's Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv and taking Erik Lindahl's Studies as his occasion, Strigl runs the process through four models and reaches a single stubborn conclusion: new capital requires a restriction of consumption before, during, or after investment, even where productive capacity sits idle. He rejects the old quantity theory's view of money as a mere price multiplier, and faults Lindahl for treating the necessary saving as an automatic by-product of the process rather than its precondition.
Eine spezifische Selektionsfunktion des Kapitalzinses besteht nun in der Begrenzung der Produktionsumwege.
English translation: “A specific selective function of interest on capital consists in limiting the roundaboutness of production.”