2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Where classical physics can specify its variables with precision, the sciences of complex order cannot, and Hayek builds an entire method around that limit. Accepting Popper's view that theories are deductive systems which forbid events and invite falsification, he rejects the further demand that science must always uncover new laws yielding exact predictions. Prediction, on his account, comes in degrees: to exclude a single outcome, narrow a range, or state a disjunction is still to predict. His central instrument is the explanation of the principle, which begins from familiar mechanisms and asks whether their combined operation could generate an observed pattern, evolution by natural selection being the paradigm. For biology, economics, and institutions, the honest goal is orientation and cultivation, not the control the physics template falsely promises.
The practical value of such knowledge consists indeed largely in that it protects us from striving for incompatible aims.
There is no such thing as 'the' interest rate, only a plurality of rates differing by term, market, risk, and realizability—and from that dismantling Mahr builds his central claim. Interest, he holds, has no determinate effect on how much people save but a decisive effect on the form savings take, and thus on the supply of funds for productive investment. Offered here in the German version of a 1955 Italian essay, the study separates risk premia from a narrowed notion of liquidity and faults Keynes for grounding interest wholly in the striving for liquidity. Since saving depends chiefly on income, the rate matters most by steering wealth toward productive credit or away into cash hoards, land, and durable Sachsparen; net interest, Mahr concludes, could never sink to zero of its own accord.
Aber es geht viel zu weit, die Zinserklärung zur Gänze auf dem Liquiditätsstreben zu basieren, wie dies Keynes tut.
English translation: “But it goes much too far to base the explanation of interest entirely on the striving for liquidity, as Keynes does.”
A barber’s basin can become a knight’s helmet—but what allows two people to live together while seeing different objects? In this essay, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s theory of multiple realities to Cervantes’s novel, shifting attention from Don Quixote’s errors to the conditions that sustain his world. Enchantment absorbs contradictory evidence; Sancho’s compromises make a shared life possible. Yet the Duke and Duchess’s staged confirmations expose the difference between genuine understanding and manipulative accommodation. For Schütz, the knight’s eventual disenchantment is not simply reason’s victory: it also destroys the vocation that made his life coherent. Through these encounters, readers can examine how ordinary certainty depends on interpretive commitments and trust—and why apparent agreement need not amount to a shared reality.
From a Vienna childhood under Carl Menger's tutelage to advisory rooms in wartime Washington, these memoirs follow a banker who cast himself as a forecaster of storms—the 'political meteorologist' of the title. Somary recounts learning marginal utility as it dissolved the labor theory of value, befriending Schumpeter and Otto Bauer, and building at the Anglo-Austrian Bank a career that let him attempt an Anglo-German naval détente before 1914. Independence, he insists, was the price and reward of foresight: his warnings against unrestricted submarine warfare, postwar inflation, the Great Depression, and Hitler repeatedly isolated him from opinion and power. The later chapters carry him through Swiss supply missions to the United States, a skeptical view of Keynes at Bretton Woods, and a lifelong reading of his age as the long aftermath of the French Revolution.
Beide Männer scheiterten in ihrem Vaterland. Jeder der beiden hatte nur im Ausland wirklichen Erfolg, und doch hatten sie eines gemeinsam: Außerhalb ihres Heimatlandes fühlten sie sich wie im Exil.
English translation: “Both men failed in their native country. Each of them enjoyed real success only abroad, and yet they had one thing in common: outside their homeland they felt as if in exile.”
Government planning and the disintegration of the world economy, Sennholz argues, are two faces of one process: the tariffs, exchange controls, and nationalizations that wreck the international division of labor also spawn the unification schemes meant to repair it. Writing from Mises's orbit with Earhart Foundation support, he marches through the postwar projects, Streit's federal union of democracies, Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, the socialist United States of Europe, the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Payments Union, and the Coal and Steel Community, and finds each fatally wedded to the interventionism it cannot survive. Capitalism and socialism, he insists, cannot coexist in one customs-free federation; the ECSC is a supranational monopoly over coal and steel. His alternative is unilateral free trade, sound gold-backed money, and a state confined to protecting life and property.
There is only one reason for an unsatisfactory operation of the market economy: it is government intervention.
What broke postwar Europe into protected national compartments—the free market, or the governments that overrode it? Reviewing Hans F. Sennholz's book of that title, Mises turns the reigning diagnosis on its head. Where pseudo-economists and statesmen blamed capitalism for poverty, unemployment, depression, and international disintegration, he answers that Europe's economic fragmentation is the work of state regulation and protectionism, not of laissez-faire. A government that fixes prices, wages, or output cannot leave foreign competition free to undermine its controls, so isolation follows from planning as a matter of course. Conventions, conferences, and American subsidies, he argues, cannot restore unity while domestic interventionism persists. Europe's survival depends not on new supranational architecture but on removing the national controls that make open exchange impossible.
The economic disintegration of Europe is not an outcome of the unhampered operation of the capitalist system.
Inequality, on Mises's reading, is not a defect for policy to correct but the very mechanism by which consumers steer production—rewarding entrepreneurs who serve them and stripping resources from those who fail. He distinguishes capitalist fortunes, built by supplying the masses with goods once beyond reach, from feudal wealth won by conquest, and argues that confiscating high incomes diverts capital from investment into consumption or state spending. Redistribution, he warns, has no principled stopping point once inequality is branded an evil: progressive taxation becomes a slope toward socialism. Invoking Henry Ford and the fate of the 1895 business structure, he presses the alternative to its edge—consumers or the state, market economy or socialism, with no third solution. The essay opens the collection's broader case against interventionism and the night-watchman state.
Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress.
Postwar trade policy broke with the economic nationalism of the interwar years, and reciprocity became its governing principle—the ground on which Mahr, in 1955, builds a case that mutual liberalization, broad enough and paced with care, can raise national income without the feared wave of unemployment. He concedes the transition problem, that sheltered industries contract before resources migrate to exporting ones, but judges it commonly overstated. His decisive addition to foreign-trade multiplier analysis is the acceleration principle: expanding export industries call forth machinery, steel, and construction, a fresh investment demand that outweighs the replacement demand lost in shrinking sectors. Where prior protection ran very high, he allows devaluation over deflation; his caution is reversed against excessive speed, which would overstrain investment-goods capacity. The horizon is OEEC integration, with inner and outer circles of participation.
Therefore the removal of trade barriers, if carried out not too slowly and faint-heartedly, will bestow prosperity upon the industries which produce investment goods.
Can devaluation cure a trade deficit? The mid-century answer split into two camps, and this 1955 article refuses to let either win outright. Against Sidney Alexander's claim that his 'income-absorption' approach supersedes the older elasticities method, Machlup grants the weaknesses of relative-price reasoning — supply and demand curves for foreign exchange shift once devaluation changes costs and incomes — but shows that the accounting identity Y ≡ A + B, however clarifying, is no causal theory. Alexander's gravest omission is resource reallocation: devaluation can raise real income by moving resources into more valuable uses, an effect no marginal propensity to absorb can capture. Reasoning from identities, Machlup warns, tempts the analyst into implicit theorizing. Neither set of tools can be spared; both relative prices and aggregate spending are needed.
The trade balance is negative when the nation absorbs more than its income.
We encounter people directly, but how do we encounter a friendship, an institution, or society itself? In this essay, reprinted in 1967, Alfred Schütz examines how tangible things make present what lies beyond immediate experience. His phenomenological approach distinguishes reminders, indications, and signs from symbols that connect everyday life with such different provinces of meaning as religion, art, and science. The central tension is reciprocal: individuals inherit socially established meanings, yet symbols also enable them to apprehend the collectivities to which they belong. By separating these kinds of reference, Schütz gives readers a precise way to ask how shared meanings support communication without erasing differences of perspective—and why the same representation can sustain belonging for one group while provoking disagreement in another.
Between apriorism and a crude empiricism that would test every assumption in isolation, Machlup marks out a middle path for what 'verification' can mean in economics. He lowers the stakes deliberately: verification is not access to final truth but a disciplined comparison between what a theory implies and what inquiry discloses. His pivotal distinction separates particular historical propositions, checkable directly, from general hypotheses that yield conclusions only when joined to auxiliary assumptions about conditions and change. Fundamental postulates such as rational action need no independent sense-verification; they make conduct intelligible and are judged by the fruitfulness of the systems they support. Steering past both Misesian apriorism and Hutchison-style ultra-empiricism, and drawing on physics, Einstein, and Braithwaite, he holds that economics stays empirically disciplined while a hypothesis, at most, survives as not disconfirmed.
The hypothesis is confirmed if reasonable correspondence is found between the deduced and the observed, or more correctly, if no irreconcilable contradiction is found between the deduced and the observed.
That the United States had become the world's most prosperous nation was, by 1955, a fact no one contested; what puzzled Mises was why so many treated that abundance as a crime to be redistributed rather than an achievement to be explained. Reviewing William E. Rappard's study, he accepts its four causes—mass production, applied science, the passion for productivity, competition—but drives them toward a single Austrian conclusion: American wealth was not extracted from poorer nations but built at home through capital accumulation. Better tools, plants, and mines raise the marginal productivity of labor, and technical know-how is worthless where saving is discouraged and property insecure. Against Marx, Keynes, and the anti-saving doctrines of the New Economics, he makes the secret plain—prosperity is accumulated, never seized.
America is prosperous because its people wanted prosperity and resorted to policies fitted to the purpose.