The archive.

Can credit creation increase capital without raising the general price level—and can voluntary saving ever be excessive? In this short review, presented in a 2013 English translation, Hayek praises Wilhelm Röpke’s account of capital formation while pressing these two points of disagreement. Against Röpke’s emphasis on rising prices, he argues that newly created credit directed toward production changes demand for productive goods relative to consumer goods. He also questions whether voluntary accumulation causes crisis-producing overcapitalisation, distinguishing that claim from judgements about sacrificing present consumption for future benefits. For Hayek, calling aggregate saving excessive requires an explicit policy objective, not an allegedly objective comparison of different people’s utilities. The review offers a compact encounter with his way of separating monetary mechanisms from judgements about desirable economic ends.

Practical judgment, rather than original political doctrine, anchors William Emmanuel Rappard’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Gustave Ador. A long career in Genevan politics gives way to wartime responsibilities: organizing the Red Cross agency that traced missing soldiers and connected prisoners with their families, then entering Switzerland’s federal government amid a controversy over neutrality. Rappard highlights Ador’s role in negotiating Swiss membership in the League of Nations while preserving military neutrality. The entry offers a compact account of how humanitarian service and international participation intersected in one statesman’s career, ending with a measured assessment of honesty, fearlessness and tact as his principal strengths.

High yields need not mean prosperous farmers. In this signed encyclopedia subsection, republished in 1937, Emil Lederer examines how Chinese agriculture’s intensive use of scarce land coexists with rural deprivation. Rice transplantation, repeated cropping and the return of urban waste to the soil demonstrate agricultural skill, yet demand exhausting labour with rudimentary tools. His perspective joins cultivation to institutions: irrigation requires administrative coordination, while poor transport limits markets and tenancy reduces household returns. The crucial distinction is between productivity per acre and income per family. Lederer sees winter industrial employment as more promising than further intensification, but argues that population growth and divided inheritance would absorb economic gains without birth control. This compact account lets readers examine both that demographic claim and the concrete agricultural practices on which his diagnosis rests.

Intensive cultivation can sustain a dense population without giving cultivators economic independence. This tension anchors Emil Lederer’s signed encyclopedia contribution on Japanese agriculture, originally published in 1930 and republished here in 1937. Comparing Japan with China and European feudalism, Lederer argues that Tokugawa institutions supported stable production while extracting a large share of the peasants’ yield. The end of political overlordship, he observes, replaced that dependence with estate tenancy rather than independent ownership. His distinctive focus is on the collision between scarce cultivable land and expanding expectations: literate villagers, connected to cities and modern industry, seek incomes that greater agricultural effort alone cannot secure. This compact account makes rent and ownership—not merely farming technique—central to understanding the pressures on Japan’s rural economy.

Why do otherwise dissimilar cultures share particular customs? In this brief biographical encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Richard Thurnwald presents Richard Andrée through his comparisons of such practices as the evil eye, mourning mutilations and personal naming across geographically distant peoples. Thurnwald distinguishes Andrée’s attention to recurring traits from his explanation of them: independent origins grounded in the supposed sameness of the human mind and uniformity of cultural progress. By noting Andrée’s misgivings and placing his conclusions before the development of diffusionist theory, Thurnwald offers a compact account of the tension between observing cultural parallels and explaining how they arose.

A leading sugar manufacturer who opposed the sugar cartel: this tension gives Schumpeter’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Rudolf Auspitz its political interest. His theoretical assessment turns on a different distinction—between early neglect and genuine originality. Schumpeter credits the price theory Auspitz developed with Richard Lieben with pioneering geometrical methods and a symmetry between cost and utility, insisting that its appearance before Marshall’s Principles matters to any judgement of its contribution. The entry offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a historian of economics, weighing an industrialist’s liberal convictions alongside mathematical ideas he considered still only partly exploited.

Accused by Emil Lederer of reading his crisis writings superficially, Hayek replies by quoting them back at length—and finds in them the same underconsumptionist error he had charged against Foster and Catchings. Lederer explains general crisis as a gap between output and the purchasing power spent as income; accumulation, on this view, proceeds 'too fast' for consumer markets to realize profits. Hayek names this the Grundirrtum. Crises, he insists, come not when consumption is too small but when the structure of production is drawn into roundabout paths no longer justified by the relative demand for capital and consumer goods. Against Lederer's leaning toward credit-financed consumption and public works, he sets a preventive policy of braking the boom, since once malinvestment is done no curative Wunderkuren can undo it.

Eine solche Disproportionalität kann vielmehr meiner Ansicht nur darin bestehen, daß das Verhältnis des Kapitalgüterangebotes zum Konsumgüterangebot größer ist als das Verhältnis von Kapitalgüternachfrage zur Konsumgüternachfrage.

English translation: “Such a disproportionality can, in my view, consist rather only in the fact that the ratio of the supply of capital goods to the supply of consumer goods is greater than the ratio of the demand for capital goods to the demand for consumer goods.”

How does an injury become an obligation binding an entire family—and why does compensation sometimes fail to end the killing? In this concise encyclopedia entry, Richard Thurnwald treats blood vengeance as an organized relation between kin groups, shaped by unequal power rather than merely by personal anger. His New Britain example follows retaliation through innocent families until it reaches an influential offender who could not be attacked directly. Alongside such escalation, he identifies restraints: proportional retaliation, exceptions for unintended injury, and settlements through payment or humiliation. These comparisons expose the tension between feud’s internal rules and its capacity to perpetuate violence. Thurnwald’s categorical claim that only strong political authority can displace private vengeance gives readers a pointed historical argument about the boundary between compensation and public punishment.

To call Böhm-Bawerk a theorist of interest is, in Schumpeter’s judgement, to understate his project. This brief 1930 encyclopedia entry places interest within a wider account of production and distribution, organized around time: the relation between consumption goods already available and those expected from production processes of different lengths. Schumpeter pairs this interpretation with a portrait of the Austrian finance minister, praising his budgetary discipline and legislative achievements despite difficult political circumstances and no personal party affiliation. The result is a compact assessment of both administrator and economist, especially useful for understanding why Schumpeter regarded Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation of interest as one result of a larger analysis rather than its sole purpose.

An economist’s defence of a tradition can help undo it. In this brief biographical encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Frank Albert Fetter assesses John Elliot Cairnes as both an influential public writer and an uncertain guardian of classical economics. Cairnes sought to defend Ricardo and Mill against Jevons; Fetter argues that his amendments instead weakened the doctrines he meant to preserve. The sharpest contrast concerns method: Cairnes advocated abstract deduction, yet Fetter finds his strongest work in historical explanation and empirical studies, including The Slave Power and essays on Australian gold. The entry offers a compact, pointed distinction between Cairnes’ contemporary authority and the theoretical achievements Fetter was prepared to credit.

A machine is a productive object; its owner’s investment is a monetary valuation. What goes wrong when economics calls both “capital”? In this encyclopedia article, originally published in 1930 and republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter traces that ambiguity through commercial usage and economic theory. His objection is concrete: the usefulness of equipment cannot by itself explain a percentage return on an investment whose value has yet to be explained. Against definitions centred on physical goods, he proposes capital as the market value of individual claims to income, including patents, franchises and other intangible rights. The article offers a compact way to distinguish production from ownership and valuation—and to see why that distinction changes arguments about interest and capitalism.

Can land remain free if its cultivation yields a surplus after all other inputs have been paid? In this 1930 journal comment, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter makes that inconsistency the starting point of his criticism of Albert Benedict Wolfe’s account of rent under increasing returns. His numerical corrections show why returns available on free land must govern the valuation of inputs used elsewhere, and why profitable cultivation turns on additional product exceeding additional cost—not on rising gross yields alone. Fetter’s distinctive position is to defend the marginal logic of Ricardian rent without accepting its restriction to agricultural land. The comment offers a compact encounter with the demands of equilibrium reasoning and with his argument that rent theory’s useful core applies to the services of durable goods more generally.