2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How can relief institutions distinguish unwillingness to work from unemployment imposed by circumstance? In this short 1894 review of Constantin Liebich’s Obdachlos, Robert Meyer highlights the book’s use of individual experiences to bring forward criticisms absent from official institutional reports. Shelters, workers’ colonies and religious charities appear not simply as provisions for need, but as arrangements judged by those who encounter them. Meyer reports Liebich’s objections to mechanical classifications of “work-shyness” and charity without lasting recovery, while noting his proposed remedy of agricultural employment and internal colonization without testing its feasibility. His explicit endorsement concerns the narrative’s instructive, sobering effect on comfortably situated readers. The review offers a concise view of how Meyer weighs experiential testimony against administrative accounts of homelessness.
Ending peacetime borrowing requires more than finding new taxes: it raises questions about who bears them and whose interests they disturb. In this brief 1894 review of Georg v. Mayr’s Zur Reichsfinanzreform, Robert Meyer welcomes the demand for durable imperial revenue without endorsing every proposed source. He singles out tobacco taxation for its analysis of tax shifting and agrees that army and navy expenditure belongs within the general budgetary problem, not a separate financing category. Yet his perspective as a member of a state bound to Germany by a customs treaty makes him wary of tariff increases. The review offers a compact example of fiscal judgement that separates sound budgeting principles from the domestic feasibility and international consequences of particular taxes.
Who should bear a transaction tax: those who benefit from legal protection, or buyers whose spending reflects their standard of living? In this brief 1894 review of Wilhelm Hausmann’s Verkehrssteuern, Robert Meyer finds these two justifications uneasily combined. Hausmann proposes taxes on transfers of movable property, hospitality transactions and entertainment admissions, yet supplies no estimate of their yield. Meyer acknowledges the skill of his advocacy while testing whether its arguments fit together. His sharpest objection concerns the claim that purchase taxes pass to buyers: for Meyer, this appeal to consumption conflicts with distributing the burden according to benefits from the legal order. The review offers a compact example of the distinction between accumulating reasons for a tax and giving it a consistent justification.
Can a classification of public revenues weaken the standards by which they are judged? In this 1894 review of Wilhelm Vocke’s introduction to public finance, Robert Meyer challenges the separation of consumption levies and fiscal monopolies from taxation. He acknowledges the historical insight behind Vocke’s distinctions but argues that shared economic effects and demands of fiscal justice require these revenues to be examined together. His objection becomes concrete in Vocke’s contrasting treatment of direct-tax fraud and violations of consumption levies: why punish one severely while treating the other leniently? Combining conceptual criticism with attention to administration and Austrian tax reform, Meyer shows how seemingly technical definitions can affect the scrutiny of public burdens, while distinguishing Vocke’s useful practical judgments from his disputable doctrines.
How much may someone consume from an asset without consuming the asset itself? In this 1895 review of the first volume of Leo von Petrażycki’s theory of income, Robert Meyer shows why that economic question matters to civil-law disputes over usufruct, possession, and the fruits of property. He welcomes Petrażycki’s treatment of income as a rule of conduct rather than merely a category of receipts, while claiming that his own earlier work had advanced substantially the same conception. His praise also stops short of endorsing a separate science of legislative policy. This compact review offers a pointed encounter between legal doctrine and economic reasoning: rules must be judged not only by the cases they resolve, but by the conduct they encourage.
Protecting a debtor does not necessarily protect the weaker party: a wealthy defaulter may be withholding payment from a producer of modest means. This counterexample anchors Robert Meyer’s qualified appreciation of Petrazycki’s second volume of Die Lehre vom Einkommen in his 1897 review. Meyer welcomes an analysis of compensation and interest that asks how legal expectations encourage productive management or reward opportunism. Yet he challenges both the identification of debtors with economic vulnerability and the claim that such inquiry requires a separate discipline of civil policy. His review offers a concrete encounter between jurisprudence and political economy: readers can see how rules governing payment, reimbursement, and contractual remedies alter economic conduct—and why judging their social effects requires attention to who actually gains and loses.
A new income tax makes incomes visible—but whose incomes, and how accurately? In this 1899 article, Austrian finance ministry official Robert Meyer examines the first personal income-tax assessment without confusing administrative success with statistical completeness. Vienna’s commanding share of receipts may reflect where income recipients lived rather than where wealth was produced; high average assessed incomes may signal missing small taxpayers rather than prosperity. Meyer brings an administrator’s knowledge of declarations, commissions, exemptions, and local revenue disputes to these interpretive problems. His qualified defence of the reform offers a concrete lesson in reading fiscal evidence: apparent regional inequalities and changes in recorded income cannot be understood apart from the rules and incentives that made them countable.
A tax that aims at a year's income faces a stubborn obstacle: the income cannot be known until the year has closed, by which time the taxpayer's ability to pay may already have changed. Meyer devotes this contribution to Austrian tax law and income theory to that temporal gap, dissecting the legal devices, prior-year assessment, three-year averaging, estimated current income, that substitute for the impossible simultaneity of income and tax. He is sharpest on the beginning and ending fragments of income, where sources that arise or cease mid-period escape or overpay tax, and he turns his critique against the Prussian source theory, which cannot handle successive income drawn from a single source. A redrafted paragraph 156 closes the argument, and behind it lies a claim about income's double meaning, whole and parts.
Die Identität des Wirtschaftsjahres und des Steuerjahres schwebt uns als kategorischer Imperativ vor.
English translation: “The identity of the economic year and the tax year stands before us as a categorical imperative.”
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.
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.”