2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can central-bank support foster an unsustainable boom without conspicuously cheap credit or rapid monetary expansion? In this 1994 article, Roger W. Garrison compares the interwar cycle with the boom and contraction of the 1980s–1990s, shifting attention from investment timing to risk bearing. His Austrian perspective locates the later distortion in the interaction of federal borrowing, potential debt monetization, banking regulation, and deposit insurance. These arrangements, he argues, encouraged investments riskier than savers would knowingly finance while insulating Treasury creditors from default. The comparison offers a concrete way to examine what monetary aggregates can miss: guarantees that alter incentives before any rescue occurs, and investment patterns whose unwinding may be prolonged even when the measured recession remains shallow.
Saving produces genuine growth; credit expansion produces boom and bust, Garrison compresses the Austrian theory of the business cycle into that contrast. When artificial credit pushes the bank rate below the natural rate of interest, he argues, the result is not merely too much investment but malinvestment: capital committed to the wrong stages of an economy's intertemporal production structure, later exposed and unwound in the downturn. Drawing the line from Menger, Boehm-Bawerk, Wicksell, Mises, and Hayek back to the British Currency School, the summary sets capital-based macroeconomics against the Keynesian aggregates that see only investment in the lump, and against demand management as a cure. Its policy conclusion is spare: prevent the distortion at its monetary source through hard money and decentralized banking.
Changes within the capital structure may be significant even when the change in net investment is not.
Does capital accumulation simply enlarge production, or does it reorganize the time between investment and consumption? In this review of Klaus Hennings’s study of Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Roger W. Garrison makes that distinction the basis of a pointed disagreement. He welcomes Hennings’s critical reconstruction but argues that its emphasis on formal limitations overlooks Böhm-Bawerk’s account of entrepreneurs redirecting resources among stages of production. The concentric-ring diagram becomes a way to examine structural change, not merely a static arrangement of capital goods. Readers can discover why Garrison sees this analysis as approaching the later Austrian distinction between saving-supported growth and credit-induced instability, while carefully distinguishing that development from Böhm-Bawerk’s own reluctance to venture into monetary theory.
Calling entrepreneurs short-sighted leaves a crucial comparison unresolved: are political decisionmakers better able to plan ahead? This question anchors Roger W. Garrison’s review of the ecological capital modelling developed by Malte Faber, John Proops, and Stefan Speck with Frank Jöst. Garrison distinguishes models that track production through time from Austrian explanations rooted in participants’ subjective purposes. He credits the authors’ methodological self-awareness but challenges the move from continually revised entrepreneurial plans to environmental accounting rules intended to correct market outcomes. His review exposes the institutional assumption beneath that move: governmental foresight must be demonstrated, not presumed. The result is a compact examination of what formal models of capital and pollution can—and cannot—establish about the case for intervention.
Relative to what other decisionmakers are the entrepreneurs supposedly myopic?