The archive.

Should a stock of identical goods be valued by adding the different utilities its units secure, or by multiplying their number by marginal utility? In this first installment of his study, Hans Mayer reopens the dispute between Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser without accepting that either formula must hold universally. His distinctive move is to separate a valuation rule’s applicability from the soundness of its proof: defective reasoning need not invalidate an observed practice. Mayer shows why uniform market prices cannot establish equal subjective valuations and why calculations that assume consumption all at once may misrepresent economic planning. The positive derivation remains for a later installment; here readers discover how the timing of consumption changes the terms of an apparently mathematical dispute.

Rising profits can conceal shrinking wealth. In this brief English-language review of Julius Wolf’s 1920 study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland foregrounds the unequal losses behind Germany’s currency depreciation: wages trail prices, salaries lag further, and bondholders’ nominal incomes remain unchanged. His largely expository account connects these contrasts to Wolf’s diagnosis of a government unable to align expenditure with revenue. The central tension is between apparent industrial prosperity and the continuing monetary expansion that undermines purchasing power and unsettles trade. Read as a contemporary assessment rather than a retrospective explanation, the review shows how Wolf’s forecast of further depreciation rested on political constraints on spending cuts, not simply on the quantity of banknotes.

A profitable bank of issue need not be a secure one. This distinction drives Robert Zuckerkandl’s 1899 encyclopedia article on the Austrian Nationalbank and its Austro-Hungarian successor, covering 1816–1898. He shows how lucrative treasury dealings left notes payable on demand backed by government debts that could not readily be turned into cash—and why decades of successful redemption could conceal that vulnerability. His institutional perspective also exposes tensions within reform: reserve restrictions could impede emergency lending, while political equality between Austria and Hungary complicated unified management. The account culminates in preparations for gold currency and proposed charter changes still awaiting enactment. Readers can discover how monetary stability depended not simply on metallic reserves, but on the arrangements governing state borrowing, public reporting, crisis lending and shared control.

Full employment conjured from uncovered credit repeats, on Kerschagl's reading, John Law's old error: trying to replace scarce capital with purchasing power. This 1953 essay argues that printing money before consumable goods exist does not abolish scarcity but forces present consumers to finance future production through lower real consumption or higher prices—there are, he warns, no miracle cures. Keynes is placed within that line of reformers, and Dobretsberger's scheme to finance hydropower by note issue serves as the test case: domestically buildable, perhaps, but the new purchasing power would arrive long before the electricity. Against the illusion Kerschagl sets a real-factor remedy of deliberate austerity—new capital formed only through saving and work, weak accumulation traced to three inflations, and employment secured not by protected inefficiency but by rising productivity across all sectors.

Erhöhte Arbeitsleistung je Arbeiter zerstört nicht Arbeitsplätze, sondern schafft neue.

English translation: “Increased output per worker does not destroy jobs; it creates new ones.”

People compete, cooperate, and act on unequal knowledge; atoms do not. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s first-edition preface to Morton Davis’s book on game theory, dated February 1972 and presented here in its 2005 version. Morgenstern argues that social inquiry needs mathematical concepts fitted to purposeful interaction, rather than borrowed from physics. Yet his demand for precision leads not to a dismissal of nontechnical writing but to a defence of it: accessible explanation succeeds when grounded in detailed theoretical knowledge. His endorsement of Davis thus offers a compact account of what rigorous popular exposition should accomplish—and why, in Morgenstern’s view, explaining emotionally charged social problems need not entail passing value judgments.

Never before, Meyer observes, had Austrian taxation asked how much a man possessed altogether rather than taxing each source, land, buildings, trade, salary, rent, in isolation. Written as a practical Wegweiser to the 1896 personal income-tax reform, this second booklet walks the taxpayer through the new law: the progressive scale rising from roughly 0.6 to nearly 5 percent, the exemption of subsistence income below 600 florins, the combined taxation of a household's income, and the deductions allowed for debt interest, illness, and dependents. Meyer defends the reform's institutional novelty, assessment by commissions half-elected by the taxpayers themselves, and insists throughout that consumption and expenditure serve only as a basis for estimating income, never as the object of tax. Rentiers, long escaping the net, now become taxpayers.

Der Haushalt ist keine Abzugspost vom Einkommen, sondern eine Verwendung des Einkommens.

English translation: “The household is not a deduction from income, but a use of income.”

A state can define a monetary unit, but can it explain what that unit will buy? In this review of Kurt Singer’s Das Geld als Zeichen, Emil Lederer presses the gap between money’s legal validity and its purchasing power. He credits Singer’s insights into credit creation and economic fluctuations while questioning whether central-bank management can secure stability without a fuller account of the economy. The same demand for concrete explanation shapes his criticism of Singer’s cultural history: medieval debasement and postwar currency collapse require analysis of fiscal pressures and exchange relationships, not merely the invocation of an epoch’s spirit. The review offers a pointed distinction between recognizing that money is historically conditioned and explaining how particular economic conditions sustain—or undermine—it.