The archive.

Germany’s imperial inheritance tax of 1906 taxed each beneficiary’s share rather than the estate as a whole, making kinship as important as wealth in determining liability. In this short note, Frank Albert Fetter explains how exemptions for close family transfers coexist with progressive rates reaching 25 percent. His attention to a safeguard limiting abrupt tax increases at bracket boundaries shows why the rate table alone cannot describe the burden. Fetter combines precise fiscal exposition with a wry awareness of the statute’s interlocking qualifications. His closing remarks report fears that a popularly elected Reichstag might use the tax against saving and property, while noting the states’ retained taxing powers. The result is a compact account of how family distinctions, progression, and divided authority shape a revenue measure.

Can a distinction between stocks and flows explain capital and income, or does it conceal the role of valuation? In this 1907 review of Irving Fisher’s book, republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter praises Fisher’s mathematical treatment of capitalization while arguing that its strongest results have outgrown its original definitions. Durable goods are not stored quantities of their future services; their capital value depends on expected incomes. Fetter makes this conceptual dispute tangible through deferred annuities, capital appreciation, and taxation, asking whether income means earnings available to save or spend, or only consumption actually enjoyed. His qualified endorsement offers a way to examine how apparently simple accounting terms can shift meaning—and how those shifts alter economic arguments.

When John Bates Clark defended a "true capital" — a permanent fund persisting intact while its concrete goods are used up and replaced — he handed his critic a target too tempting to refuse. Across four tightly argued questions, Böhm-Bawerk answers that capital and capital goods are identical at every instant, so no second material entity remains to do the work Clark assigns to his abstraction. He presses the difference between noticing that a net return exists and explaining why, rejects Clark's attempt to confine distribution theory to present production, and denies that capital "synchronizes" labor and its fruits: today's coat was made by past shepherds and weavers, not by workers now beginning another. Throughout, he demands that capital theory keep heterogeneous goods, time-structured production, and honest imputation distinct from mere verbal continuity.

What the labor of the instant secures is not a present provision of completed commodities, but the continuance of provision at some time in the future.

One half of a Tyrolean farm passed through sixteen owners between 1600 and 1738—a striking complication of the image of settled peasant property. In this 1907 article, Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen explores the Verfachbücher, registers preserving legal documents, through the fortunes of a predominantly peasant lineage. Sales, remarriages, inheritances and long-lived debts reveal how holdings changed hands and wealth accumulated or dispersed. His distinctive concern is what such records permit historians to count—and what they do not. A sale price may conceal assumed debts; a child’s disappearance may indicate migration rather than death. The article offers both concrete evidence of rural mobility and a disciplined account of why family histories, however richly documented, cannot yet stand as population statistics.

Georg von Mayr's renewed defense of a separate moral statistics provokes this sharp rebuttal on the boundaries of a science. Inama-Sternegg does not deny that suicide, divorce, illegitimacy, or prostitution can be studied statistically; he denies that moral categories may organize the discipline itself, forcing heterogeneous facts into a scheme fixed by prior valuation. Notions of the normal and the typical, he argues, obscure the structure of social masses, and the inner motives behind a crime or a suicide cannot be reconstructed as reliable mass data. In place of a moral-statistical chapter he proposes a social statistics of fundamental institutions — marriage and family above all — so that divorce or adultery keeps the legal and confessional context that alone makes its meaning intelligible.

Zunächst sind Symptome nur Hypothesen, nicht Tatsachen.

English translation: “To begin with, symptoms are only hypotheses, not facts.”

A single word—Bedürfnis—had, on Cuhel's diagnosis, thrown the foundations of value theory into confusion, bundling together at least eight distinct concepts under one popular name. Written on the borderland of economics and psychology, this 1907 treatise pries them apart, distinguishing welfare-, use-, and disposal-needs and making the 'use-desire' the first fundamental concept of economic science. Cuhel rejects the hedonism of Bentham and Gossen, argues that the desire-intensity he calls Egenz can be compared but never truly measured—anticipating the later turn to ordinal utility—and reworks Gossen's law of diminishing enjoyment into precise statements about marginal use-egenz. Along the way he criticizes Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Menger, and Sax, and treats the discounting of future needs not as a direct effect of time but as a matter of practical probability.

Diesen Vorgang kann man somit nicht Messen nennen; für ihn dürfte die Benennung Skalieren eher passen.

English translation: “This procedure, then, cannot be called measuring; the term scaling would be more appropriate for it.”

Does a gain cease to be income if its owner saves rather than spends it? In this conference discussion, originally published in 1908 and reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter challenges Irving Fisher’s definition by separating monetary acquisition from the enjoyment wealth eventually affords. His concrete test is ordinary business practice: wages, interest, rent, and increases in capital value need not await consumption to count as income. Fetter accepts the relevance of psychic satisfaction but disputes its use as the exclusive measure of income. The disagreement also bears on taxation of gains from land speculation. This compact intervention shows why accrual, saving, expenditure, and enjoyment must be distinguished before an apparently verbal dispute can be settled.

We are discussing a question of terminology but not a question “merely” of terminology.

How did German economics come to treat industrial poverty and social reform as problems within its own remit? In this 1908 Festschrift contribution, Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg traces an indirect route: socialist criticism challenged the established order, but legal philosophy and historical and ethical inquiry helped economists reconsider their discipline’s boundaries. His account centres on the tension between property as a condition of personal independence and property as a source of social obligation. Associations, cooperatives and public intervention emerge as competing responses, not components of a single reform doctrine. Readers can discover how economics acquired a broader concern with human development without, in Philippovich’s view, surrendering its insights into scarcity—and why accepting the need for social policy did not settle who should act or how.

Paying rent with a share of the harvest could mean precarious annual dependence—or inheritable rights in vines, trees, and improvements. Hermann von Schullern zu Schrattenhofen makes this disparity central to his report on Kolonat in Görz and Gradisca, Istria, Dalmatia, and Tirol, drawing on a ministry-commissioned journey in spring 1908. Rather than treating share-tenancy as a single institution, he examines how contracts distribute security, costs, and incentives to cultivate. Phylloxera could end agreements tied to the lifetime of vines; landlords’ claims to particular crops could obstruct diversification. His comparisons support locally differentiated reforms rather than uniform abolition. Interviews, contracts, and official responses allow readers to explore the concrete arrangements behind apparently identical tenancy labels—and why ownership alone need not settle questions of agricultural productivity.

A state that had suppressed workers’ associations now proposed to guarantee their representation inside the workplace. Eugen Peter Schwiedland examines this contradiction in his 1908 essay on compulsory workers’ committees in Austria. His account of Emil Steinbach’s proposals shows how institutions intended to foster loyalty to employers could also give workers a recognized voice in disciplinary grievances, welfare administration, and workplace rules. Defending statutory representation against reliance on employers’ goodwill, Schwiedland nevertheless takes seriously the danger of managerial control and workers’ historically grounded distrust. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish representation from paternalism: compulsory establishment matters only if committees have substantive functions. Its legislative controversies expose why both employers and organized workers could resist the same institution for opposing reasons.

How could equilibrium justify both state intervention and economic freedom? In this 1908 study, Karl Pribram locates a shared mechanical conception beneath the apparent opposition between mercantilism and liberal economics. What changed, he argues, was chiefly the unit of analysis: national stocks of money and goods gave way to individual exchanges, prices, and competing interests. Connecting economic reasoning with natural science, natural law, and commercial rivalry, Pribram asks how balance became an expectation before it was established by observation. His treatment of Adam Smith brings the stakes into focus: spontaneous harmony depends on assumptions about mobility, economic similarity, and bargaining power. Readers can discover how a seemingly neutral analytical idea carries different political prescriptions—and how much those prescriptions leave assumed.

A building project can have many independent contractors yet remain under concentrated financial control. In this 1908 article, Emil Lederer examines that tension in Austrian construction, especially Vienna’s speculative housebuilding, with Germany as a comparison. His revealing example is the landowner who sells to a developer without capital while retaining a senior mortgage: those supplying labour and materials create value but may be last in line for payment. Distinguishing illegal fraud from legally protected advantage, Lederer asks why fragmented production persists and whom it serves. Trade licensing and limited mechanization matter, but so do credit arrangements that separate economic command from liability. The article offers a concrete way to understand how property rights and financing shape not only business organization, but workmanship, payment security, and the costs borne by tenants.