The archive.

Bureaucracy is a symptom, not the underlying evil: this distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s 1945 review of Ludwig von Mises’s book. Fetter locates its real target in the transfer of decisions about prices and production from private enterprise to government. His distinctive contribution is to connect that argument to an older dispute over price theory, presenting Austrian subjective valuation as a basis for consumer sovereignty and political liberalism. Yet his endorsement has limits: he questions whether Mises sufficiently distinguishes bureaucratic administration from the system it serves, and whether capitalism deserves so much credit for scientific and cultural progress. This brief review shows where a sympathetic defender of free enterprise qualifies Mises’s claims—and why Fetter does not read the book as a demand for unrestricted laissez-faire.

Can policies that sustain spending also preserve the incentives to produce? In this 1945 review of six Oxford studies on full employment, Ludwig M. Lachmann praises the theoretical contributions of Balogh and Kalecki while testing their policy proposals against profitability, international trade, and political bargaining. His sharpest objection concerns plans to hold prices steady while wages rise: redistributing income may strengthen demand, he argues, yet undermine supply if profits disappear. He also examines the tension between independent national employment policies and an integrated world economy. The review offers a compact encounter with Lachmann’s critical method: appreciation of analytical ingenuity coupled with concrete questions about tax exemptions, producers’ incomes, and the political interests concealed by appeals to “social priorities.”

For in the absence of profit no amount of "effective demand" will call forth effective supply.

Even Soviet orders and “Hero” titles came with substantial financial benefits. In this brief 1945 review of Abram Bergson’s The Structure of Soviet Wages, Friedrich August von Hayek singles out the tension between egalitarian policy and reliance on monetary rewards. He praises Bergson’s empirical care while acknowledging the limits of the available data and of quartile ratios as measures of inequality. His particular interest is Bergson’s comparison of Soviet industrial earnings in 1928 with American earnings in 1904, which found closely similar inequality. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a reader of economic evidence: attentive to incentives, but also to the qualifications that distinguish a measured comparison from a sweeping verdict on Soviet wages.

Criticism of perfect competition is not yet a programme for economic policy. That distinction drives Ludwig Lachmann’s brief 1945 review of the first volume of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Theoretische Grundlagen der Wirtschaftspolitik. Jöhr identifies monopoly, frictions, weakened profit motivation and power as obstacles to the theoretical market model; Lachmann asks what would protect economic freedom and competition under those conditions. His objection is precise: rejecting laissez faire leaves the constructive task unresolved. Yet his verdict is not simply dismissive. He welcomes Jöhr’s movement from advocacy of a corporative economy towards appreciation of competitive markets. The review offers a compact example of Lachmann separating recognition of a market’s imperfections from an account of how policy should address them.

India in 1940, England in 1830–48, and Germany in 1865–70 form one of the historical “equations” Gerhard Tintner examines in this brief review of Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s book. Tintner clarifies that the title promises no mathematical economics: Sarkar instead compares countries at supposedly equivalent stages of economic development. The review’s interest lies in Tintner’s discriminating judgement of that approach. He credits Sarkar with perceptive observations and wide multilingual reading, while qualifying the depth of his scholarship and finding his treatment of post-war problems unilluminating and journalistic. This compact assessment separates the appeal of comparative economic history from the book’s less convincing promise of guidance for reconstruction.

Calling the economy a machine does not, for Gerhard Tintner, make economics an exact science. In this brief, sharply dismissive review of Jerome Levy’s book, he questions the unconventional terminology and assumed linear relationships behind Levy’s model. He also asks what social philosophy supports its prescriptions for “just” wages and profits, finding little explicit justification. The interest lies in the grounds of Tintner’s rejection: mathematical form and appeals to justice are not substitutes for defensible economic concepts and stated policy principles. His closing astonishment that the book found a publisher during a paper shortage gives the methodological objections a distinctly caustic edge.

When observed variables contain measurement error, strong correlations alone cannot establish how many independent relationships underlie them. Gerhard Tintner’s 1945 note links that question to a second: how should those relationships be estimated once their number is determined? His distinctive move is to make one generalized eigenvalue problem serve both purposes, using an independently estimated disturbance covariance matrix to separate systematic dependence from noise. The emphasis is structural estimation rather than prediction: the aim is to recover coefficients of underlying relations, not simply improve a forecast. Readers can follow how error-weighted least squares leads back to the roots used in rank testing—and see why the resulting unity depends on assumptions about disturbance estimation and large samples.

Why does one price movement leave expectations unchanged while another forces people to rethink the future? In this article, Ludwig Lachmann distinguishes measuring the responsiveness of expectations from explaining it. Against accounts based on fixed psychological sensitivity or a single expected price, he examines the range of outcomes people consider plausible. A movement near its boundary may encourage expectations of reversal; a movement beyond it may undermine the very assumptions on which a forecast rests. His distinctive claim is that expectations arise through interpretation: people diagnose the forces at work before predicting their effects. The article shows why identical numerical changes can carry different economic meanings—and why a narrow range of expectations can both stabilise a market and make its eventual disruption more abrupt.

The formation of expectations is always incidental to the diagnosis of the situation in which we find ourselves; no prognosis without diagnosis.

How could the Allies prevent renewed German aggression without making foreign domination the rallying point for another nationalism? In this 1945 essay, reprinted in 2013, Hayek proposes progressively autonomous German states, compulsory free trade, and intellectual reconstruction led by independent scholars rather than Allied propagandists. His distinctive concern is that a settlement must survive after the victors cease enforcing it. Yet his proposals expose a tension between liberal ends and coercive means: he endorses severe retribution and externally imposed economic rules while rejecting an imposed political creed. Linking regional independence and commercial interdependence to the recovery of truthful historical inquiry, the essay lets readers examine both the practical architecture and the uneasy limits of Hayek’s postwar liberalism.

An Allied decision could separate Austria from Germany—but what would make that independence last? In this April 1945 article, reprinted here as an addendum, Friedrich August von Hayek argues that sovereignty needs an economic foundation. He interprets the earlier appeal of Anschluss chiefly as a calculation by a poor country seeking its neighbour’s prosperity, rather than as nationalist sentiment. His striking alternative is an autonomous, internationally protected Vienna: a free-trade district whose commercial revival need not restore its former political dominance. Read alongside his warning that punitive reparations could drive Austria back towards Germany, this proposal exposes a concrete tension in postwar reconstruction: how to secure political separation without imposing economic isolation.

A small revision in expectations can provoke a large shift from money into speculative assets. In this 1945 article, G. L. S. Shackle asks how that disproportion arises when investors confront imagined possibilities rather than a certain forecast. His distinctive vocabulary—“potential surprise,” “focus gain,” and “focus loss”—connects the outcomes that capture an investor’s attention with the gains and losses that investor is willing to contemplate. Geometrical models show how purchases can raise prices and seemingly confirm the optimism that prompted them. Development land provides a revealing test: each owner may plausibly anticipate a profitable sale even when all those hopes cannot be fulfilled together. The article offers a precise way to examine how individually credible possibilities can sustain collectively incompatible valuations, while exposing the assumptions behind its own account of portfolio choice.

Six and a half centuries of Swiss survival amount, in Rappard's reading, to one sustained experiment in mutual defense—and thus to a rehearsal of the problem the League of Nations and the United Nations inherited: how sovereign units, unequal in wealth and divided by creed, can shield one another without a common command. Prepared in English at Lionel Curtis's urging as an abridgment of his French Cinq siècles de sécurité collective, the book separates the law of the Swiss alliances—from the 1291 pact of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden through the Covenant of Stans and the Defensional of Wyl—from the messier facts of Morat, the Musso War, and the Catholic secession of 1680. Federalism, he concludes, reconciles unity with diversity, and stands as the alternative to anarchy.

It might delight the patriot to believe, but it would discredit the historian to assert, that the present Swiss federal state was born of the love of the Swiss cantons for each other.