The archive.

A tax reform can promise lower rents yet leave unanswered how properties will be assessed and how much revenue the state will surrender. In these interventions as chairman of the building-tax inquiry on 8 December 1903, Robert Meyer presses experts on precisely those gaps. He distinguishes statistics measuring different things, asks why occasional valuations for mortgages should prove the feasibility of assessing countless buildings, and separates tax remission from a ceiling that forfeits future revenue growth. His perspective is that of an administrator testing proposals against evidence, workload, and fiscal consequences—not that of an author presenting a complete reform programme. These brief exchanges show how apparently technical distinctions can change the case for a policy, especially when advocates move too quickly from individual examples to a general tax system.

When can a representative house justify the valuation of other houses? In these brief interventions at the building-tax reform hearing of 9 December 1903, published in 1904, Robert Meyer moves from chairing expert testimony to questioning the practical reach of valuation by building types. He grants that Styrian investigations offer useful orientation, but doubts whether they can spare assessors fresh investigations of individual properties. Drawing on administrative attempts to classify urban houses, he identifies the difficulty: known returns and land values do not establish how many other buildings a selected example represents. The document offers a precise encounter between statistical comparison and tax administration, showing why an informative survey may still fall short of a usable valuation register.

A tax can alter prices not only through the payments it imposes, but through the exchanges it prevents. Robert Meyer’s 1905 review of Leo Petritsch’s study of tax shifting singles out this change of perspective: a land transfer may cease to be worthwhile when the tax exceeds the difference between buyer’s and seller’s valuations. Meyer welcomes Petritsch’s account of the wider price effects of such blocked transactions, yet stops short of endorsing his sweeping rejection of taxes on transactions in movable property. This brief review draws a useful distinction between an explanatory advance and the policy conclusions claimed for it. Its critical edge also turns inward: Meyer openly acknowledges his personal stake when protesting Petritsch’s omission of his own research.

A tax cut intended for tenants can end up raising the price of building land. This possibility anchors Robert Meyer’s critique of Friedrich von Wieser’s proposal to divide the house-rental tax into a tenant-borne charge and a tax on urban land rent. Meyer supports relief for cheaper housing but disputes the claim that these burdens can be measured separately—or that relief can reach tenants alone. His distinctive emphasis is on how expectations, purchasing power, and property transactions alter the distribution of taxes: even peripheral building sites already carry a price for anticipated urban growth. The essay shows why an accounting distinction between land and buildings cannot settle who pays, and why predictable concessions for new construction may serve tenants better than a theoretically precise but administratively uncertain division.

A counting machine can register answers only after someone has decided how to classify them. In this published lecture, Robert Meyer examines the Austrian census through the labor behind its tables: coding occupations and birthplaces, preparing more than 28 million punched cards, and planning which combinations to count. His administrative and technical perspective exposes a tension between mechanical speed and the human work it requires. A card’s 240 fields and the machine’s 77 counters impose concrete limits on what can be recorded and compared. Readers discover how publication plans, equipment, and budgets shape statistical knowledge—and why Meyer argues that saving money by leaving analysis unfinished can waste the much larger expenditure on collecting the facts.

Tax relief for buildings need not mean cheaper housing: it may simply increase the value of existing property. This distinction anchors Robert Meyer’s 1912 analysis of Austria’s three housing laws of 28 December 1911. Writing as a participant in legislative drafting and the finance minister responsible for the narrower reform, Meyer explains why incentives for new construction proved more attainable—and, in his judgement, better targeted—than general property-tax reductions. His fiscal calculations test the apparent generosity of tax holidays, while his discussion of public mortgage guarantees identifies a concrete obstacle facing nonprofit builders: financing the gap beyond a first mortgage. The article offers an insider’s qualified defence of selective legislation, showing how housing objectives, public revenues, and parliamentary compromise shaped both its possibilities and its limits.

Delivered to the Lower Austrian Trade Association in February 1914, this lecture reports back from the fourteenth session of the International Statistical Institute, whose forty-nine printed reports Meyer sifts for what economic statistics had achieved. He dwells on the hardest problems of comparability: rival methods for estimating national income and national wealth, weighed through Kiaer's tax-list approach and Fellner's contested Austro-Hungarian valuations; Neymarck's running census of the world's negotiable securities; the semiology of index numbers and whether diverse indicators may be fused into one; and the vexed measurement of unemployment. Throughout, Meyer treats the Institute not as a popular congress but as a cooperative body harmonizing national data for the use of governments, and he insists that technical care in statistics serves the larger understanding of economic regularity.

La paix du monde, paix internationale entre les peuples et les gouvernements, la paix intérieure entre les hommes s'imposent pour maintenir l'échafaudage actuel de papiers de crédit et d'affaires qui existe.

English translation: “World peace—international peace between peoples and governments, and internal peace among men—is indispensable to maintain the existing scaffolding of credit paper and business affairs.”

Never before, Meyer observes, had Austrian taxation asked how much a man possessed altogether rather than taxing each source, land, buildings, trade, salary, rent, in isolation. Written as a practical Wegweiser to the 1896 personal income-tax reform, this second booklet walks the taxpayer through the new law: the progressive scale rising from roughly 0.6 to nearly 5 percent, the exemption of subsistence income below 600 florins, the combined taxation of a household's income, and the deductions allowed for debt interest, illness, and dependents. Meyer defends the reform's institutional novelty, assessment by commissions half-elected by the taxpayers themselves, and insists throughout that consumption and expenditure serve only as a basis for estimating income, never as the object of tax. Rentiers, long escaping the net, now become taxpayers.

Der Haushalt ist keine Abzugspost vom Einkommen, sondern eine Verwendung des Einkommens.

English translation: “The household is not a deduction from income, but a use of income.”