The archive.

Representation does not necessarily amount to self-government. In this short review of Hellmuth Freytag’s study, Helene Lieser makes that distinction concrete: Czechoslovakia’s agricultural councils lacked the chambers of commerce’s power to levy assessments, and many of their members were appointed. Her account of institutions inherited from Austria and proposals for their reform highlights the practical conditions of institutional autonomy rather than merely their legal labels. It also identifies a competing demand: how could bodies representing occupations accommodate separate national-minority interests? The review offers a compact view of the fiscal, representative, and national questions involved in organizing economic self-government.

For readers abroad, German exchange-control legislation raised practical questions about payments and debt obligations. In this brief 1935 review of W. Flad’s statutory text edition, Helene Lieser singles out the supplementary provisions on the transfer moratorium, the German clearing office, and foreign debt securities. Her concern is usability rather than the economic merits of exchange controls: she values the subject index as a guide through difficult material. The notice offers a compact view of which legal texts she considered useful to foreign users navigating these restrictions.

A screw-fastened binding becomes a criterion of usefulness in Helene Lieser’s brief 1935 review of Wehr and Kozák’s commentary on Czechoslovak foreign-exchange regulations, in F. Adler’s German adaptation. With two supplements already issued, Lieser values a handbook that can keep pace with changing law without requiring replacement. Her judgement is practical: headings and an index help readers locate legislation and National Bank directives, while commentary helps foreign users understand them. The review offers a compact example of legal reference criticism attentive to both the physical means of updating a book and the reader’s difficulty in navigating unfamiliar regulations.

What makes a Swiss financial calendar useful to a foreign specialist? In this brief 1935 review of Karl Strasser’s compilation, Helene Lieser looks beyond securities prices to the practical rules and agreements governing transactions. Her favourable assessment encompasses exchange practices, stamp duties and brokerage rates, but gives particular attention to a table of foreign-exchange clearing agreements and P. Jaberg’s explanation of German credit agreements in relation to Swiss–German clearing arrangements. The review offers a compact glimpse of what Lieser valued in a financial reference work: accessible market data accompanied by guidance on the institutional conditions of cross-border business.

For decades socialism was argued as a question of justice, distribution, and whether citizens would supply the needed virtue—never as a question of whether central direction could actually work. Recovering the distinction between the economic problem, allocating scarce means among rival ends, and the merely technical problem of achieving one given end, Hayek shows that even wholly loyal officials would still confront the need to compare competing uses of resources, a comparison capitalism performs through prices no single mind computes. He traces the long eclipse of this insight through the historical school's suspicion of abstraction and Marxism's faith in historical inevitability, then through marginal utility theory to Mises's decisive claim: without money prices for the means of production, a planning authority has no rational way to calculate at all.

THERE is reason to believe that we are at last entering an era of reasoned discussion of what has long uncritically been assumed to be a reconstruction of society on rational lines.

Long treated as a moral demand or a rational blueprint for society, socialism must instead be judged, Hayek insists in this German-language essay, by whether it can actually coordinate scarce means among competing ends. The distinction he presses is between technical and economic problems: a technician optimizes toward a given end, but a society must weigh forgone alternatives, and only money prices for intermediate goods, capital, and factors of production make such comparison possible. Tracing the debate from Gossen, Pierson, and Barone to its decisive formulation by Mises in 1920, he shows why marginal utility theory made the calculation problem unavoidable, and why historicism and Marxian anti-utopianism had long concealed it. The burden of proof, he concludes, falls squarely on socialism's advocates.

In einer reinen Verkehrswirtschaft denkt niemand über irgendwelche wirtschaftlichen Probleme nach, außer über seine eigenen.

English translation: “In a pure exchange economy, nobody reflects on any economic problems other than his own.”

Add as many mail-coaches as you please, you will never get a railroad by so doing — with that image the essay marks the fault line between growth and innovation that organizes its argument. Reprinted from the Review of Economic Statistics, it brackets the exogenous shocks — wars, weather, gold discoveries — that make every fluctuation historically unique, in order to ask whether capitalism generates an endogenous wave-form of its own. It does, Schumpeter contends: purely economic cycles arise from the clustered insertion and absorption of innovations, financed by credit creation, yielding four phases of prosperity, recession, depression, and revival. From this follows the three-cycle schema of Kondratieff, Juglar, and Kitchin waves, and a sustained warning against monetary and trend-fitting explanations that mistake symptom for mechanism.

If there be a purely economic cycle at all, it can only come from the way in which new things are, in the institutional conditions of capitalist society, inserted into the economic process and absorbed by it.

Where formal precision should have brought clarity, the debate over the elasticity of substitution had instead grown unintelligible, its related but distinct ideas forced under one name. Machlup's clarification separates Robinson's and Hicks's appendix concept—a partial-equilibrium measure of technical substitution—from Hicks's main-text concern with factor shares in the National Dividend. His commonsense rests on substitution within increase: when a factor grows more abundant the economy does not discard the other, but industries rearrange combinations as the community absorbs the larger supply. Distribution theory, he argues, needs an elasticity of total substitution fusing producers' technical substitution with consumers' choice among commodities—and every such elasticity rises with the time allowed for adjustment, since fixed capital yields only slowly.

THE discussion of the “elasticity of substitution” is conspicuous for its unintelligibility.

More consumption need not mean greater prosperity: it may be financed by resources that will no longer support future income. In this 1935 article, Fritz Machlup applies Austrian capital theory to Austria’s economic decline, asking how rising living standards could coexist with severe losses in corporate capital value. His concrete mechanisms include inflationary inventory gains mistaken for profits, depreciation allowances inadequate to replace machinery, and banks sustaining dividends at loss-making firms. He argues that taxation, wage pressures, and social charges also contributed, while acknowledging that their separate effects cannot be precisely measured. The distinction between falling market valuations and physical depletion gives the article its analytical tension. Readers can trace how apparently healthy accounts and continued production may conceal an erosion of the capacity to produce.

Few concepts are invoked so often and interrogated so rarely, Hayek observes, as a 'constant amount of capital'—and once change is admitted, it dissolves. Maintaining capital, the essay shows, cannot mean preserving identical goods or an unchanged money valuation; it is a derivative rule for avoiding unintended encroachment on future income. Sparring with Pigou over physical-loss and index-number criteria, Hayek holds that foreseeable obsolescence must be amortized like ordinary wear, that windfall profits are not freely consumable income, and that no expectation-free standard of 'net' saving or investment survives in a changing world. Foresight thus moves to the centre of capital theory, and the warning carries into monetary policy: in a boom, rising asset valuations mistaken for income invite the quiet consumption of capital itself.

It is not likely that in the whole field of economics there are many more concepts which are at the same time so generally used and so little analysed as that of a “constant amount of capital.”

A factory can increase output without putting scarce resources to their best use. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1935 concluding essay in Collectivist Economic Planning, where he tests socialist proposals against the practical demands of economic calculation. His objection to mathematical planning is not that equilibrium cannot be described, but that its equations presuppose detailed, continually changing knowledge: even technically identical goods differ economically by location, age, and availability. Proposals retaining competition under state ownership sharpen another question—who allocates capital and bears the consequences of mistakes? The essay shows why Hayek treats calculation as a problem of institutions and responsibility rather than arithmetic alone. It also directs criticism at capitalist monopolies that preserve investors’ capital at consumers’ expense, distinguishing his defence of competition from a defence of existing businesses.

Idle factories, unemployed workers, and available capital do not necessarily add up to recovery. In this 1935 article, Emil Lederer asks what can reconnect them when profitable investment opportunities have disappeared. His key distinction is between innovations that create new wants and industries and improvements that merely reduce the labor needed for existing production. A bicycle industry can enlarge the circuit of purchasing and employment; cheaper production alone may simply displace workers. Through concrete examples involving railroads, imports, and public works, Lederer shows why increased efficiency, unsatisfied needs, and additional spending have different consequences depending on the resources they activate. The article offers a precise way to distinguish expansion from redistribution—and to question the assumption that displaced labor will automatically find new employment.