The archive.

No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.

Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.

English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”

Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.

Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.

English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”

Nineteenth-century England supplies the model: there fiscal reordering, tariff change, and industrial expansion moved as a single process, proof that public finance is never neutral bookkeeping but an invisible tariff running through the economy. From that premise Schumpeter attacks Weimar's stagnation—two years of unemployment and high interest that no ordinary downturn explains—and traces it to a fiscal structure that taxes future productive capacity. His organizing concept is Kapitalbildung: reserves are not hoarding or privilege but the fund from which equipment is renewed and output extended, and progressive income and business taxes fall hardest on the margins where reserves form. A real reform must shift burden toward tobacco and alcohol consumption, as Stolper's plan proposes; even a limited change, well placed, could lower interest rates and unblock recovery. Doing nothing, or replacing private saving with state compulsion, he rejects outright.

Jede Finanzpolitik ist auch Wirtschaftspolitik, bewußte oder unbewußte.

English translation: “Every fiscal policy is also economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

The household, rather than the individual craftsman, anchors Richard Thurnwald’s explanation of craft guilds in this compact encyclopedic entry. He asks how skills guarded by families and concentrated in particular settlements become the basis of corporate organization. His comparative perspective links kinship and technical mastery to political obligations: artisan communities owe collective payments in kind to the state, with their head responsible for delivery. Yet organization need not bring prestige, as his South Arabian examples suggest. Read as a proposed genealogy rather than a continuous institutional history, Zunft offers a way to distinguish occupational specialization, social standing, and corporate authority without assuming that the familiar arrangements of medieval European crafts were guild organization’s original form.

More intensive cultivation need not make a farm more viable. In this report of a 1929 Heidelberg institute excursion to Pomerania, Emil Lederer, Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg, and Svend Riemer examine estates whose technical efforts collide with poor soils, costly transport, depressed prices, and debt. Estate visits and accounts—given particular prominence by the Pommerscher Landbund’s invitation—support a crucial distinction: preserving existing owners is not the same as securing agricultural production. The authors also test proposed remedies against their human costs. Smallholdings may survive through unpaid family labor; estate economies may depend on low wages and restrictive employment arrangements. Readers encounter agricultural rescue as a conflict among profitability, property, and livelihoods, rather than a simple choice between efficient large estates and independent peasant farms.

A leading sugar manufacturer who opposed the sugar cartel: this tension gives Schumpeter’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Rudolf Auspitz its political interest. His theoretical assessment turns on a different distinction—between early neglect and genuine originality. Schumpeter credits the price theory Auspitz developed with Richard Lieben with pioneering geometrical methods and a symmetry between cost and utility, insisting that its appearance before Marshall’s Principles matters to any judgement of its contribution. The entry offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a historian of economics, weighing an industrialist’s liberal convictions alongside mathematical ideas he considered still only partly exploited.

Accused by Emil Lederer of reading his crisis writings superficially, Hayek replies by quoting them back at length—and finds in them the same underconsumptionist error he had charged against Foster and Catchings. Lederer explains general crisis as a gap between output and the purchasing power spent as income; accumulation, on this view, proceeds 'too fast' for consumer markets to realize profits. Hayek names this the Grundirrtum. Crises, he insists, come not when consumption is too small but when the structure of production is drawn into roundabout paths no longer justified by the relative demand for capital and consumer goods. Against Lederer's leaning toward credit-financed consumption and public works, he sets a preventive policy of braking the boom, since once malinvestment is done no curative Wunderkuren can undo it.

Eine solche Disproportionalität kann vielmehr meiner Ansicht nur darin bestehen, daß das Verhältnis des Kapitalgüterangebotes zum Konsumgüterangebot größer ist als das Verhältnis von Kapitalgüternachfrage zur Konsumgüternachfrage.

English translation: “Such a disproportionality can, in my view, consist rather only in the fact that the ratio of the supply of capital goods to the supply of consumer goods is greater than the ratio of the demand for capital goods to the demand for consumer goods.”

To call Böhm-Bawerk a theorist of interest is, in Schumpeter’s judgement, to understate his project. This brief 1930 encyclopedia entry places interest within a wider account of production and distribution, organized around time: the relation between consumption goods already available and those expected from production processes of different lengths. Schumpeter pairs this interpretation with a portrait of the Austrian finance minister, praising his budgetary discipline and legislative achievements despite difficult political circumstances and no personal party affiliation. The result is a compact assessment of both administrator and economist, especially useful for understanding why Schumpeter regarded Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation of interest as one result of a larger analysis rather than its sole purpose.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

Just as the nineteenth century banished infinitesimals from analysis without destroying the calculus, Kaufmann proposes to eliminate the actual infinite, above all Cantor's uncountable, without dismantling classical mathematics. First published in 1930 and reissued here in 1968, this German study locates the root of foundational paradox in a single confusion: the failure to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims about all objects and their existence. Set-theoretic totalities, on his reading, are an ontological surplus smuggled in through misread symbolism, not objects the mind discovers. He preserves the finite core of the diagonal argument while denying that it defines a totality of all decimals, invokes the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem to argue that axiomatic set theory cannot isolate a genuinely uncountable domain, and reads Hilbert's ideal elements and Brouwer's constructivism as each carrying only part of the truth.

Ein „sinnloses Zeichen“ ist eine contradictio in adjecto, denn in der Behauptung, daß visuelle oder akustische Phänomene „Zeichen“ sind, liegt diejenige eingeschlossen, daß man durch sie etwas verstehen, mit ihrer Hilfe fremde Gedanken erfassen kann.

English translation: “A "meaningless sign" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the assertion that visual or acoustic phenomena are "signs" already contains the assertion that through them one can understand something, that with their help one can grasp the thoughts of others.”

Does explaining why firms hold cash make counting how often money changes hands redundant? In this English-language review of M. W. Holtrop’s Dutch monograph, Gottfried Haberler separates the merits of a causal explanation from the rejection of an alternative accounting description. He welcomes Holtrop’s attention to payment schedules, uneven receipts and expenditures, and credit instruments, but disputes his insistence that cash-reserve and movement theories are incompatible. The disagreement becomes concrete when production is divided among several firms: additional transactions can increase the demand for money, with consequences for prices. This brief review offers a precise encounter between monetary theory and business finance, showing why Haberler values an explanation of cash holdings without abandoning velocity as a useful measure of monetary supply.

Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.

Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.

English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”