The archive.

A productive service is never simply a thing but a quantity applied over an interval, and from that observation Machlup builds a patient dismantling of loose talk about the marginal product. Labour-hours, acre-seasons, machine-days: each unit depends on divisibility, and highly qualified labour may be hired by the minute at one extreme or by five-year contract at the other. 'Efficiency units' tempt the theorist into circularity, since a theory meant to explain factor prices cannot first define factor quantities by those prices. What matters for a firm's hiring, he argues, is neither extra bushels nor their value at an unchanged price, but an expected, dated, discounted money net product framed by a definite competitive situation — marginal productivity rendered conditional rather than emptied of meaning.

This third dimension is, then, the time interval between the application of any productive service, say a labor-hour, and the enjoyment of its product.

Clarity and ease of consultation are Helene Lieser’s criteria in this brief 1937 review of the first volume of Otto Wittschieben’s introduction to Austrian financial law. She recommends a guide intended for students also to practitioners without specialist tax expertise. Her notice draws attention to the volume’s institutional scope: budgets, financial administration and public debt precede the systematic treatment of tax legislation reserved for volume two. It offers a compact assessment of whom the book serves and why its organization matters.

Does industrial monopoly follow inevitably from efficient production, or from legal arrangements and deliberate attempts to control prices? In this 1937 review of Arthur Robert Burns’s The Decline of Competition, Frank Albert Fetter tests the claim of inevitability against Burns’s own evidence. His crucial distinction is between a large, efficient plant and a firm that acquires many plants to gain market power: financial concentration need not improve production. Fetter values Burns’s account of industrial practices but challenges the move from documenting monopoly to accepting it as unavoidable. His criticism sharpens when Burns proposes state control: why should officials deemed unable to preserve competition prove capable of administering concentrated industry? The review connects precise questions of industrial organization with the competence and accountability of economic government.

Democracy must defend the freedoms that its opponents can use to dismantle it—but when does self-defense become domination? In this 1937 essay, Emil Lederer treats public opinion not simply as newspaper commentary or electoral preference, but as something formed through families, schools, associations, and everyday participation. His challenge to the marketplace of ideas is concrete: unequal funding, deliberate falsehoods, and emotional manipulation can make formally free competition anything but fair. Education and disclosure therefore matter alongside legal safeguards. Yet Lederer also confronts the danger that leaders empowered to protect liberty may become its suppressors. The essay offers a demanding account of democratic citizenship while leaving readers with an unresolved practical question: how to resist movements bent on abolishing freedom without corrupting the institutions defending it.

Citizens are not born, they are made.

Does capital mean a company’s assets, its shareholders’ wealth, or the cost of goods used in production? In this 1937 article, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter argues that economics has handed accounting a vocabulary unable to keep these distinctions clear. His alternative treats capital as the present monetary value of investors’ rights to future income, not as a collection of physical objects. This makes ownership and valuation inseparable: corporations own assets, while shareholders own capital; enterprises earn profits, while individuals receive income. Fetter’s respect for accountants’ practical difficulties sharpens his challenge to historical cost. Readers can discover why apparently verbal disagreements affect the interpretation of balance sheets—and why recording past expenditure cannot, in his view, settle the question of present worth.

Accurate evidence can still yield a distorted picture: this is Emil Lederer’s objection to Freda Utley’s account of Japan in his 1937 review of Japan’s Feet of Clay. Accepting her documentation of poverty and exploitation, he questions what it explains. Rice yields become a test of misleading international comparison; proposals for agrarian reform expose the difference between redistributing income and increasing production. His more contentious argument concerns the hold of imperial myth and tradition, which he believes Utley underestimates. The review offers a compact encounter with Lederer’s insistence that economic constraints and cultural allegiance must both enter social explanation—and with his conditional alternative to conquest: peaceful industrial development linked to China and Siberia.

Documenting military supremacy is not the same as explaining it. In this 1937 review of Kenneth W. Colegrove’s Militarism in Japan, Emil Lederer welcomes evidence drawn from Japanese sources but questions an account centred on powerful personalities. Could individual statesmen genuinely restrain an army that dominated budgets and foreign policy? And did expansion into China express military ambition alone, or pressures that even a pacifist government would face? Lederer’s distinctive contribution is to shift attention from elite manoeuvring to social groups and economic conditions, without pretending to resolve the questions Colegrove leaves open. This brief review offers a pointed example of how documentary evidence can establish who holds power while leaving its social foundations unexplained.

Appeals to self-evident principles can turn disputes over social-scientific method into contests of rival certainties. In this review of Rudolf Carnap’s Logische Syntax der Sprache, Felix Kaufmann examines an alternative: replacing claims to privileged philosophical insight with explicit rules for constructing and analysing scientific language. Writing with sociology, economics, and historical inquiry in view, he concentrates on the book’s philosophical consequences rather than its technical logical investigations. His account clarifies how Carnap distinguishes empirical questions from questions about concepts and theories, and why tolerance toward different logical systems requires clearly stated rules. Kaufmann’s endorsement remains qualified: he does not fully accept Carnap’s position, but regards it as a productive basis for debate. The review offers a concise encounter with that tension between methodological clarification and philosophy’s reduction to syntax.

What makes a statutory text usable without commentary? In this brief 1937 review, Helene Lieser credits the Beck edition of the Stock Corporation Act with providing practical alternatives: an official explanatory statement, a subject index, and skillfully placed cross-references. Her compact judgement distinguishes editorial assistance from legal commentary, showing what she values in a reference edition without offering a substantive assessment of the law itself.

How must a legally prescribed “workplace community” be adapted to commercial credit cooperatives? Helene Lieser’s brief 1937 review identifies this as the subject of E. H. Meyer’s study and commends his account as clear and interesting. The notice records her favorable assessment of a specific encounter between labour law and cooperative organization, without detailing Meyer’s proposals or offering an independent argument.

How can a nonspecialist find a way through German foreign-exchange law? In this brief 1937 review of Kurt Urbanek’s Die Devisengesetzgebung, Helene Lieser singles out the practical value of grouping and numbering difficult legal material. Her praise concerns a compact, inexpensive guide to legislation and its implementation, not the merits of exchange controls themselves. The notice offers a precise glimpse of her criteria for useful legal exposition: affordability, economy and navigability.

Helene Lieser’s brief review of Robert Lisnik’s Das neue Depot-Gesetz judges the guide by its usefulness to readers facing a change in German securities-custody law. She singles out the introduction’s clear account of the new provisions, alongside annotations and a subject index. The review offers a compact example of her practical reviewing criteria: clarity about legislative change and ease of reference, rather than an assessment of the law’s merits.