The archive.

Single-cause explanations of mass unemployment are the target here. Unemployment turns chronic, Mahr argues, when shocks to profitability collide with rigid union wages, monopoly pricing, monetary disturbance, and political insecurity, forces that in the Depression's depths coincided all at once. The analytic core is marginal productivity: wages driven above the marginal product of labor raise unit costs, restrict output, and displace workers, an effect that often surfaces only later, when demand falls or fixed capital must be replaced and wages prove unable to fall. Rationalization forced by excessive wages generates no compensating rise in labor demand. From these distinctions follow conditional remedies, credit-financed public works chosen for real social utility, wage cuts matched by price cuts, work-sharing at unchanged hourly rates, while Germany's recovery stays hostage to reparations.

Die Steigerung der Löhne über die Grenzproduktivität hinaus, die Überhöhung der Löhne führt so zur Entstehung von Arbeitslosigkeit.

English translation: “The raising of wages beyond marginal productivity, the excessive level of wages, thus leads to the emergence of unemployment.”

Can aggregate saving, investment, and profits explain a monetary crisis if they conceal what happens within production? In this two-part review of Keynes’s Treatise on Money, Hayek argues that monetary theory needs an account of capital committed through time. Profits near the point of consumption can coexist with losses further back in production; spending that maintains existing capital need not finance additional investment. These distinctions give concrete substance to his objections to Keynes’s definitions and equations. Hayek also credits Keynes’s analysis of deposit hoarding, making the review more than a statement of opposition. Readers can trace how disagreements over measurement become disagreements over depression: for Hayek, sustaining expenditure through credit may postpone the reallocation of resources required by unsustainable investments.

When formalism, intuitionism, and logicism each stake a claim to the foundations of mathematics, the deeper trouble, Kaufmann contends, is one of sense: symbolic forms, abstractions, and abbreviations get mistaken for independent objects. This 1931 essay reworks the received theory of abstraction, recasting it not as the stripping-away of features but as the holding-fixed of an invariant structure while others vary, and turns it against conceptual realism and extensional logic alike. Expressions like properties of properties and functions of functions are legitimate only as translatable abbreviations. Natural number, on this account, is neither a class of equinumerous classes nor a property of collections but an abstraction from the ordered act of counting; Peano's axioms define that structure, and complete induction merely excludes further determinations. Undecidability, where it appears, signals not metaphysical depth but presuppositions that have failed to fix their object.

The central problem in the theory of a science lies in clearly grasping the sense of the relevant propositions.

Weimar's debate over Rationalisierung becomes, in this 1931 study, a theory of capitalist dynamics. Against the compensation doctrine that markets quietly reabsorb workers displaced by machinery, Lederer argues that labor-saving innovation can leave durable structural unemployment whenever its tempo outruns capital formation and the growth of jobs. His engine is the organic composition of production: modern progress means more capital and fewer workers per unit of output. A model of dynamic equilibrium disturbed by innovation in coal mining shows the mechanism — the rationalized mines draw capital from static sectors, produce the same coal with roughly half the labor, and shrink the economy's capacity to place workers, so the wage bill falls further than the social product. Neither anti-machine reaction nor laissez-faire optimism will do; what he urges is social control over the pace and direction of technical change.

Bei einem sehr schnellen Tempo des technischen Fortschritts können dann die Freisetzungswirkungen zu einer strukturellen, d. h. die Depressionsperiode überdauernden Arbeitslosigkeit führen.

English translation: “At a very rapid pace of technical progress, the effects of labor displacement can then lead to structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that outlasts the depression period.”

Delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the slump deepened, this 1931 address refuses the comfort of ideology: the Depression, Somary insists, spared neither capitalist, syndicalised, nor socialised economies alike. He traces the collapse to gold hoarding and a failing gold-exchange standard, to raw-material prices that cratered while finished goods and wages held firm, and to speculation fed by New York's call-money market. Communism, he argues, is the lesser danger; war is the greater, as distress feeds radical nationalism and the Hitler movement. His remedies—wage reductions, the breaking of cartels, state purchases of cheap raw materials, and a Franco-German confidence rebuilt under British leadership—frame his closing warning that the years ahead may earn the historian's name 'Between Two Wars.'

Europe has no lack of capital; what she needs is confidence.

The League of Nations could convene governments, administer mandates, and cultivate habits of consultation—but could it secure peace while states retained ultimate authority? In these lectures of 1931, William E. Rappard brings his experience of League service and training as an economic historian to the gap between constitutional promises and institutional practice. His revealing paradox is that growing governmental interest in Geneva could diminish the independence on which international judgment depended. Health cooperation and mandate supervision show what shared administration could accomplish; disarmament and sanctions expose what governments withheld. For Rappard, however, stronger enforcement alone was insufficient: collective security also needed procedures for peacefully correcting unjust settlements. The book makes concrete the distinction between an organization that facilitates cooperation and one capable of guaranteeing peace.

Schumpeter offers a deliberately tentative diagnosis of the world slump, reprinted from the American Economic Review in 1931, and refuses every single-factor story, stock speculation, wages, tariffs, reparations, or monetary policy alike. His method is causal layering. First he separates outside shocks from disturbances capitalism generates itself: even without wars or bad harvests, changes in methods of production create the maladjustments that produce recession, so the crisis is at once cyclical and historical, the interference of long waves, Juglar cycles, and shorter forty-month movements. Then he ranks the aggravating factors, agrarian overcultivation, gold-standard deflation, reparations, capital flight, rigid wages, resistant long-term interest rates. Wages did not cause the depression, he grants, but intensify it once present; cheap credit alone cannot revive firms with no appetite to borrow. Diagnosis is possible; the patients will not take the cure.

It is easier to dampen prosperity by a high rate of interest than to alleviate depression by a low one.

Interest rates, in a normal depression, fall and prepare the recovery; in the crisis after September 1929 they fell fast and then rose again, leaving the world economy stranded short of any natural upturn. From this paradox Strigl works toward an uncompromising verdict on the demands of the day — cheaper money and a halt to falling prices, urged by Keynes in England and defended by Cassel against the specter of gold scarcity. Both amount to the same thing, and both are inflation: new money never enters evenly, but favors particular sectors first, distorting relative prices and calling forth production that no real supply of goods can sustain. Such stimulus destroys capital by misdirecting it, and any monetary attempt to obstruct the crisis's necessary liquidation is, for him, already inflation before the currency visibly collapses.

Billiges Geld bedeutet mehr Geld, bedeutet höhere Preise.

English translation: “Cheap money means more money, means higher prices.”

Full shop-windows and idle furnaces at the same moment: the Depression, this 1931 lecture argues, is a crisis of abundance without purchasing power, not a shortage of goods, gold, or effort. Lederer catalogues its causes — cyclical overinvestment financed by credit outrunning real saving, world markets glutted by mechanized grain, rubber, coal, and copper, a swollen German labor supply after conscription's end, and labor-saving rationalization that no longer absorbs workers as the railways once did — then diagnoses why the usual liquidation fails. Cartels and trusts fix prices and quantities, dump losses onto competitive sectors, and block the price falls that would reallocate capital; wage-cutting proves largely a dead end. His verdict is that capitalist automatism has failed, leaving a fixed economy without a plan that only conscious social direction and economic self-government can set right.

Die kapitalistische Wirtschaft ist reich an kostspieligen Paradoxien.

English translation: “The capitalist economy is rich in costly paradoxes.”

That mass unemployment is proof of excessive wages, and that cutting wages will clear the labor market, was the reigning Depression orthodoxy Lederer set out to demolish in this 1931 lecture. He grants that a ruthless wage fall might absorb idle workers for a moment, then shows why the concession dissolves: shrinking consumption, technical unemployment that no compensation doctrine repairs, the combine harvester displacing labor faster than cheaper grain can reabsorb it. Against Cassel and Clark he insists the labor market cannot be read in isolation. In the German winter of 1930/31, with cartels holding prices rigid and plants idled by quota, wage cuts could only deepen deflation while strengthening the National Socialists whose rise frightened capital abroad. Unemployment, he concludes, is structural and institutional, not a mere error in the price of labor.

Eine Lohnsenkung vermehrt aber noch nicht den Absatz, sondern verschiebt nur die Kaufkraft vom Arbeiter auf den Unternehmer.

English translation: “A wage reduction, however, does not yet increase sales; it merely shifts purchasing power from the worker to the entrepreneur.”

An account of equilibrium prices is not yet an explanation of how prices form. This distinction anchors Wilhelm Vleugels’s 1931 defence of subjective value theory. He grants that economists can describe price interdependence without invoking value, but argues that explaining price movements requires the valuations of people buying, selling, and choosing. His distinctive strategy is to examine whether declared opponents actually abandon those valuations: Cassel’s scarcity principle and Gottl’s alternative vocabulary, he contends, retain what they appear to reject. The essay offers a concrete test for theoretical disagreement—does a new terminology change the explanation, or merely rename its working concepts? Readers can discover both the explanatory role Vleugels assigns to subjective value and his reasons for denying that numerical examples require the measurement of feelings.

Territorial partition could not neatly separate peoples who lived alongside one another. This is the premise of Ludwig von Mises’s brief 1932 review of Rudolph Sieghart’s account of the Habsburg Empire’s final decades. Mises reads the former official’s history as evidence for both the rationale and the defeat of a reform project: transforming the monarchy into a kind of East European League of Nations. His endorsement contains a pointed distinction: Sieghart explains, against his own intentions, why the policy failed. The review offers a compact statement of Mises’s judgement that nationalism had defeated a plausible framework for cooperation without resolving the region’s political and economic conflicts.