The archive.

A license that shields a small business from competition can also become a debt that makes it harder to survive. This reversal anchors Walter Fröhlich’s 1939 article on Central European experiments in protecting small enterprises, chiefly in Austria. Writing with American fair-trade debates in view, he follows the costs of protection into concrete settings: Vienna taxi licenses, compulsory apprenticeships, and legally fenced-off craft occupations. His argument is that maintained prices invite further entry restrictions, while those restrictions raise fixed costs and obstruct adaptation to changing demand. Readers can discover why higher retail prices need not mean healthier retailers—and how, in Fröhlich’s account, the pursuit of economic security encouraged political expectations that fascist governments’ industrial and military priorities would frustrate.

Why might an entrepreneur postpone an apparently profitable investment—and why might a boom itself create reasons to stop investing? In this 1939 article, G. L. S. Shackle distinguishes the outcomes entrepreneurs envisage from the clearness with which they envisage them. A ship or steel plant commits resources that cannot remain available for a better-informed choice later; waiting can therefore reflect an expectation of improved knowledge rather than simple pessimism. Extending Keynes’s account of equipment valuation, Shackle tentatively argues that rapid investment changes a business enough to make its future less intelligible. Readers can trace how expansion may generate its own pauses, and how subjective uncertainty can affect investment and employment without being reduced to calculable probability.

It is the belief that knowledge, insight, and foresight will improve that causes the so-called apathy.

Remembered by his contemporaries as a banker, abolitionist, and Evangelical of the Clapham circle rather than as an economist, Henry Thornton is here restored by Hayek to the front rank of monetary thought. The introduction to Thornton's Paper Credit of Great Britain reads the 1802 treatise as the point where classical monetary analysis begins, born of the crises of 1793 and 1797 and the Bank Restriction. Hayek credits Thornton with distinguishing internal from external drains, anticipating both liquidity preference and Wicksell's separation of the market and natural rates of interest, and framing the doctrine of forced saving. Against the reduction of everything to over-issue, and against Ricardo's later narrowing, the case is made for a disciplined practical banker who theorized the credit system from within.

“We are all City people and connected with merchants, and nothing but merchants on every side”

Idle factories and available capital pose a puzzle: why does an economy fail to put them back to work? In this 1939 symposium article, Emil Lederer argues that recovery depends not simply on lower wages or prices, but on opportunities for investment that established industries may no longer provide. His distinction between expanding existing production and creating new industries gives technological unemployment a concrete setting: machines can reduce costs without generating enough demand to reemploy displaced workers. Against assurances drawn from nineteenth-century growth, he asks whether the conditions that once made adjustment possible still hold. The economic frontier, he concludes, is not closed—but spontaneous expansion cannot be counted on. Readers can discover why, in his account, deliberate demand creation and a reconsideration of thrift become questions of democratic economic security.

Germany's colonies, stripped away at Versailles and held under mandate, are the immediate provocation of this 1939 study, which recasts their loss as economic strangulation rather than wounded vanity. Yet Thurnwald's ambition is systematic: colonization as a recurring human phenomenon, older than capitalism, whose methods he compares across Portuguese slave-raiding, the Spanish encomienda among the Maya of Yucatán, the Dutch cultivation system in Java, the French Code noir and St. Domingue, and British expansion from Virginia to the Gezira cotton scheme. His own Deutsch-Neu-Guinea supplies the opening case, from Rabaul's plantations to goldfields opened by aircraft. He rejects a purely Marxist reading of empire, frames expansion as a biological and social movement of peoples, and ties its future to National Socialist colonial policy.

Kolonisation gehört zu den großen bewegenden und Geschichte schaffenden Kräften der menschlichen Gemeinschaften aller Völker und Zeiten.

English translation: “Colonization belongs among the great moving and history-making forces of human communities in all peoples and ages.”

A wage cut can lower a firm’s costs while shrinking the market for its products. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s 1939 article, presented here in French translation, on whether wages cause economic crises and whether reducing them hastens recovery. Lederer challenges both capital-shortage and underconsumption theories by asking when cheaper production actually prompts new investment—and when it merely redistributes purchasing power. His distinctive move is to connect the business cycle with differences among occupations and industries: construction costs, skilled workers’ earnings, and housing affordability matter in ways an average wage index conceals. His case for targeted subsidies rather than general wage cuts offers a concrete way to examine how policy might lower investment costs without reducing workers’ incomes.

Le niveau des salaires est une abstraction, de même que le niveau général des prix.

English translation: “The wage level is an abstraction, just as the general price level is.”

What mathematics should economists learn, and how should it be taught? In this 1939 review of R. G. D. Allen’s Mathematical Analysis for Economists, Gerhard Tintner values economic applications over the physical examples customary in calculus textbooks. Constrained optimization is his telling case: a technique central to economics receives the sustained attention economists need. His praise also draws a useful distinction between teaching mathematical tools through consumer choice, monopoly, and production, and presenting a continuous economic theory. Yet the book’s predominantly static approach leaves dynamic problems underrepresented. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for graduate training: mathematical instruction should prepare economists to follow current research, while its omissions should guide their supplementary study.

Hayek’s objection to Keynes’s wartime financing proposal begins with agreement: compulsory savings could restrain civilian spending more fairly and efficiently than inflation. In this short 1939 article, republished here in 1997, the dispute turns instead on what happens when those savings become repayable. Keynes envisages releasing deposits during a postwar slump; Hayek asks whether Parliament could withstand demands for repayment when increased spending would be dangerous. The article offers a concrete encounter between economic design and political pressure, rather than a rehearsal of their wider theoretical disagreements. Hayek’s tentative alternative—converting savers’ government claims into interests in industrial capital—sharpens the central question: how can a workable wartime policy avoid creating an unstable peacetime obligation?

Profit maximization need not settle a price when a sole buyer faces a sole seller. In this theoretical note, Gerhard Tintner makes that difficulty concrete through a steel producer purchasing iron ore from a monopolist supplier. His distinctive question is when buyer control, seller control, and joint profit maximization yield the same outcome. The conditions for their agreement prove exceptional: ordinarily, static analysis establishes a bargaining range rather than a unique input price. By tracing how price-setting authority changes the result, readers can distinguish the constraints imposed by demand and production costs from the distribution of gains between the parties. Tintner’s extension to union–employer wage bargaining sharpens the stakes: on his account, bargaining power, shaped especially by political forces, determines what profit-maximizing equations leave unresolved.

Discarding observations can make a statistical test more defensible. In this 1939 mathematical note, Gerhard Tintner confronts a difficulty in time-series analysis: successive differencing may remove a smooth trend, but it also creates correlations even when the original errors are independent. His response is to select differences built from disjoint observations, allowing their variances to be compared using familiar significance tests. He applies the same selection principle to lagged products in deriving a serial-covariance distribution. The note offers a precise encounter with the trade-off between retaining information and securing a tractable sampling distribution. Readers can see how the observations chosen determine which tests become available—and why the assumptions of normality, independence and a sufficiently smooth trend matter.

What makes consumer-credit exercises useful in teaching financial mathematics? In this brief review, Gerhard Tintner assesses Charles H. Mergendahl and Le Baron R. Foster’s pamphlet as a supplement to high-school and college textbooks. He distinguishes an adequate introduction to credit concepts and calculations from the exercises themselves, which he finds thoughtfully designed, interesting and stimulating. The review offers a concise curricular judgement: its interest lies in Tintner’s emphasis on the quality of practice problems, rather than merely their number or subject matter.

The multiplier, in Keynes and Kahn, arrives as a timeless ratio linking investment to income; Machlup's 1939 intervention insists it can only be understood as a dated process. Public wages become shop receipts, which become factory receipts, which only later become incomes to be spent again — and between the rounds lie inventories, pay dates, and spending habits. He builds an 'income propagation period,' tentatively about three months, to measure how long expenditure takes to become income anew, and shows that a higher propensity to consume yields a larger eventual multiple but a longer road to it, so a government minding the coming fiscal year may collect only a fraction. Leakages, he adds, need not mean hoarding; saved funds may repay debt or buy securities, deferring rather than destroying the next round of spending.

For a discussion of time lags, transition phases, and other intertemporal relationships, Keynesian terminology is not well suited.