The archive.

If the “least important need” is simply the one a person sacrifices, does saying so explain the choice? In this reply to Bernardelli, Felix Kaufmann makes that problem of circularity a test for claims of necessary truth in economics. He argues that definitions can secure certainty only by leaving open whether actual behaviour conforms to them. His treatment of marginal utility distinguishes rational valuation as a definition, its applicability to conduct as an empirical assumption, and diminishing utility through satiation as a claim grounded in experience. The point is not to discard these concepts, but to establish what they can explain. This compact methodological dispute shows how an apparently unassailable economic principle can acquire explanatory content precisely by becoming open to refutation.

How can practitioners find their way through four major laws, five implementing regulations and hundreds of administrative circulars? In this brief 1937 review of Alfred Etscheit, Alexander Etscheit and Otto Böhmer’s Handbuch des Devisenrechts, Helene Lieser judges the handbook by its usefulness in navigating German foreign-exchange law. She singles out its organization by factual situations, supported by an introduction that directs readers to the relevant provisions. Her concern is practical access rather than the merits of exchange controls: even practitioners abroad, she observes, benefit from these coordinated finding aids. The review offers a compact example of legal criticism attentive to how readers actually consult a reference work.

In two sentences, Helene Lieser’s 1937 review places a colonial source collection’s political purpose beside a brief favourable appraisal. She quotes Ernst Gerhard Jacob’s declared aim of equipping speakers, youth leaders and political instructors to demand the restoration of German colonial possessions, then notes its wealth of interesting material. The revealing contrast is between that mobilizing rhetoric, which casts colonial loss as an affront to national honour, and Lieser’s narrowly informational judgement. This short notice lets readers examine that juxtaposition without mistaking it for a developed argument about colonial policy or a critical assessment of Jacob’s sources.

Strip away its empirical content, and equilibrium theory is merely a "Pure Logic of Choice" — true by definition, silent about the world. In this 1937 presidential address Hayek asks what must be assumed about the knowledge of separate minds before such analysis can say anything causal. Equilibrium, he argues, means the compatibility of individual plans through time, and "correct foresight" is not a premise added from outside but the very thing equilibrium describes. The familiar appeal to a perfect market merely disguises omniscience as market form. What economics neglects is the division of knowledge — as fundamental as the division of labor — and the learning by which dispersed, situated fragments come into alignment. The essay marks Hayek's turn toward his mature account of markets as coordinators of knowledge no single mind could hold.

The situation seems here to be that before we can explain why people commit mistakes, we must first explain why they should ever be right.

Meant to arm the reader against vulgar economic slogans and the reflexes of interest-group politics, this 1937 textbook compresses the secured foundations of economics into a single systematic course. Strigl begins from the free-market price as a selective mechanism, builds through diminishing returns, the Malthusian population law and its qualification by capital and technical progress, and marginal productivity as the key to wages and distribution. Capital enters as roundabout production and a subsistence fund, interest as the marginal product of capital-time. The later chapters carry the apparatus into money and the gold standard, the credit-driven boom and its Harvard-barometer crisis, tax shifting, comparative costs and the case against protection, and finally the socialist calculation problem. Throughout he insists that economics studies the consequences of measures and must never prescribe political ends.

Eine Darstellung wirtschaftlicher Zusammenhänge muß sich gegenüber allen Fragen der Politik neutral verhalten.

English translation: “A presentation of economic relationships must remain neutral with respect to all questions of policy.”

What makes a legal compilation useful? In this brief 1937 review of Erich Bohley and Hermann Krutsch’s Das Sparkassenrecht in Bayern, Helene Lieser values the consolidation of scattered legal sources rather than a novel interpretation. She singles out its inclusion of previously unpublished implementation decisions alongside Reich and state provisions, and notes its treatment of national banking legislation’s effects on savings banks. Her concise verdict identifies the practical basis for her praise: making Bavarian savings-bank law accessible as a coherent overview.

What makes a legal handbook useful to laypeople as well as lawyers? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser commends Franz Bachmayer’s guide to the judicial invalidation of documents under Austrian law for combining statutory provisions and highest-court decisions with an intelligible account of procedure. Her concise assessment identifies a practical standard for legal exposition: authoritative material must be accompanied by a clear explanation of how proceedings unfold.

Neither wealth in itself nor a lever that could hoist an economy out of distress from the monetary side alone, money and credit are for Bayer indispensable but strictly serving institutions. Cast as twenty-two questions for workers' education, this booklet moves from the emergence of money out of barter and the division of labour, through coinage, banknotes, and cashless giro payments, to banking, the credit market, the stock exchange, and the note bank's discount policy. Its governing norm is neutrality: currency serves best when it merely facilitates the course of the economy. From that standard Bayer dismisses the fashionable reform schemes of the day—index currency, and above all Silvio Gesell's depreciating 'Freigeld'—and reads the 1932 Wörgl experiment not as proof of shrinkage-money theory but as an unusual method of collecting municipal taxes, its losses falling on small traders.

Das Geld als Zahlungsmittel ist aber ebensowenig Kapital wie der elektrische Leitungsdraht elektrische Kraft ist.

English translation: “Money as a means of payment is no more capital than the electrical conducting wire is electrical power.”

Does recovery mean restoring purchasing power or correcting investments made during the boom? In this 1937 article, Karl Pribram traces conflicting answers to different conceptions of economic equilibrium. His distinctive move is to connect the assumptions of business-cycle theory with both practical remedies and the statistics used to judge them. Reflation and liquidation emerge not simply as rival policies, but as responses to different diagnoses of what has gone wrong. Exchange controls, compulsory cartels, and bilateral clearing sharpen his concern: balancing one market may unsettle another. Readers can discover how apparently technical definitions shape policy choices—and why statistical indicators require an explicit account of the economic system they measure. The article shares a conceptual framework with Pribram’s related “The Notion of Economic System,” while separately developing the implications for recovery policy.

An apparent glut of gold may be a problem of distribution rather than worldwide supply. In this brief 1937 letter to The Times, republished here in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek brings preliminary London School of Economics research to bear on that distinction. He measures both accumulated monetary gold and annual production against the central-bank liabilities and paper currency they support, rather than treating rising quantities as self-explanatory. His figures temper alarm about global abundance while showing why concentration in Britain and the United States could produce a different impression. The letter offers a compact example of Hayek’s empirical caution: the observed increase is not necessarily alarming, but further production growth could make maintaining the gold price and preventing dangerous credit inflation difficult.

What makes a difficult banking law usable, especially for a foreign reader? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser praises Hans Pröhl’s commentary for combining clear explanation with the documents needed to interpret the statute, including reporting guidelines and agreements on maximum deposit interest rates. Her assessment offers a precise distinction: she commends the commentary’s practical aids to understanding, not the law’s economic purposes or effects.

The more capital goods an economy produces, the lower the return on further investment must fall — so runs the static inference this sharp intervention in trade-cycle theory sets out to break. The confusion, Hayek locates in the ambiguity of "capital": aggregate value versus the concrete form and arrangement of capital goods. Investment comes in complementary chains, and once specific fixed capital is sunk, its owners accept prices barely above operating cost, transferring the expected interest to later stages — so that completing a project begun under a 4 percent expectation stays worthwhile even at rates that would have blocked it. A hydroelectric plant may turn unprofitable yet still generate demand for motors. Past investment can thus raise, not lower, the demand for funds, with credit expansion the chief practical trigger.

The success of current investment will depend upon this expectation being fulfilled.