The archive.

Economic planning need not mean an economy administered entirely by the state. In this 1948 article, Hans Bayer separates the existence of a plan from the institutions that carry it out, judging both by their capacity to secure the material conditions for personal development. His criticism cuts two ways: competition alone cannot reliably restrain economic power, yet nationalization and bureaucratic control are not ends in themselves. Individuals, private enterprises and cooperatives should retain scope wherever they can serve the plan’s purposes as well as—or better than—state agencies. The article offers a concrete way to examine the tension between collective provision and personal agency: economic institutions must create opportunities for people to cultivate their abilities, without pretending that institutions can do that cultivating for them.

A move in chess reshapes the whole board; so, Shackle insists, does a genuinely crucial economic decision, one that cannot be repeated because it alters the very conditions under which any later choice would occur. Replying here to critics of Expectation in Economics, he defends the distinction between unique, isolated, and crucial trials against those who would treat rival imagined futures as additive terms in a single statistical expectation. Mutually exclusive outcomes, he argues, cannot be summed like fractions drawn from an urn; the chooser confronts an act, a moment, and a set of hypotheses. Against Baumol and Graaff he deploys his focus-value method, the φ-function, and potential surprise, rejecting 'degree of belief' as any general rescue of probabilistic ordering.

Now when an experiment, a question about the future, is unique, isolated, or crucial, it does not make sense to add together its rival hypothetical outcomes or answers.

More productive farms do not necessarily mean more secure farmers—or better-fed consumers. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer draws on a study visit to the United States to examine that tension: machinery saves labour and enlarges operating units, yet abundant harvests can depress farm income while nutritional needs remain unmet. His observations of farmers comparing their accounts with state averages give modernization a practical texture; his Austrian comparisons ask which improvements might travel across very different landholding systems. Bayer argues that technical efficiency cannot substitute for economic coordination. By weighing price supports and production controls against employment and purchasing power, he shows why agricultural prosperity depends on what happens beyond the farm gate, including whether industry can absorb the workers that mechanization releases.

Distinguishing two concepts of probability need not mean separating them. In this brief oral reply to Professor Bartlett, Gerhard Tintner argues that discussions of probability often founder on conceptual confusion rather than genuine disagreement. He connects degree of confirmation with relative frequency: as evidence accumulates, the former must approach the latter. Yet convergence does not settle how to assign measures when evidence is scarce. This two-paragraph contribution isolates the point at which Tintner sees Carnap’s theory as useful—the small sample, where initial assignments still matter—and clarifies why a distinction between concepts can support, rather than obstruct, an account of their relationship.

An accounting identity can be correct and still mislead a student about what causes economic change. This is the tension Fritz Machlup pursues in his 1949 review of the first volume of Erich Schneider’s Introduction to Economic Theory. He welcomes Schneider’s effort to build national-income accounts from the bookkeeping of individual firms, but questions formulations that make taxes and budget deficits appear to determine entrepreneurial income merely by definition. His criticism turns on a precise distinction: quantities recorded after the event do not, by themselves, explain how policy changes affect behaviour. The review offers a compact lesson in reading macroeconomic equations critically, while preserving Schneider’s case for aggregation as a practical necessity rather than a substitute for understanding individual decisions.

British merchants imagined China as a vast market worth opening by force; the Foreign Office doubted that trade could pay for the responsibilities conquest would bring. In this review of Nathan A. Pelcovits’s study, Eric Voegelin accepts that explanation of British restraint but questions what an archival demonstration leaves unevaluated. He asks how competition between Chinese textiles and Western machine goods changed, and distinguishes prudent short-term calculation from the longer reach of industrial ambition. His distinctive suggestion is that the merchants’ program of railways, reform, and industrialization survived under Chinese nationalist leadership, while Britain lacked the strength to carry it out. The review lets readers follow the point at which approval of a documented policy history becomes an argument about the limits of imperial power.

Can a logical measure of confirmation genuinely learn from experience if its starting weights are chosen for simplicity? In this brief written reply to a journal discussion, Gerhard Tintner defends Carnap’s inductive logic on precisely that ground. He contrasts a weighting procedure that leaves confirmation untouched by previous observations with a predictive rule whose results approach observed relative frequencies as samples grow. His defence remains qualified: the language must satisfy demanding conditions, the notion of a simple predicate presents difficulties, and application to continuous variables awaits further theory. The reply offers a compact view of how Tintner tests a formal construction against empirical learning without concealing its unfinished foundations.

Can European countries open their markets to one another without surrendering control of their external trade policies? In this 1949 article, Richard Schüller argues for a free-trade area rather than a customs union, drawing on his experience negotiating Austro-Hungarian commercial arrangements to expose the political demands of a common tariff. His alternative preserves national independence, but offers no escape from monetary reform: duty-free trade means little while individual imports still require licenses. Concrete examples—including American aid that obstructs sales of Italian tractors and Polish coal—show how measures intended to relieve scarcity can impede European exchange. The article distinguishes what trade agreements can accomplish from what depends on stable currencies, adjusted exchange rates, and governments’ willingness to relinquish controls.

Neither these schemes nor the usual tariff agreements have any meaning so long as each individual import transaction depends on the granting of a license.

Numerical probability divides a fixed unit of belief among rival hypotheses; that additive structure, Shackle contends, is exactly what makes it useless for describing genuine uncertainty, where several incompatible outcomes may each be perfectly possible with nothing known against them. The remedy proposed is potential surprise, a non-additive measure of disbelief that lets rival hypotheses coexist without competing for a common total. Dividing experiments into 'divisible' series, where frequency ratios can render an aggregate outcome knowable in advance, and unique 'non-divisible' acts, where such ratios are meaningless, he weighs an integrative decision rule, drawn via Ralph Turvey from Ingvar Svennilson, against his own focus-values solution and rejects the former as psychologically artificial. Expectation, he concludes, is an act of creative imagination, not rational calculation on incomplete data.

For a non-divisible, unique experiment it is plain that no frequency-ratio can have any meaning or relevance.

These are not the famous treatise but dense student notes from a 1949 Institute of World Affairs lecture, circulated by Arthur Smithies as the fullest exposition he knew of Schumpeter's late thought. Against Trotsky's claim that imperialism is capitalism's last stage, Schumpeter advances laborism: a society, exemplified by Britain, where labor's interests become the state's governing purpose. Higher wages, shorter hours, subsidies, and cheap money redirect the fiscal state away from capital renewal and defense toward present labor consumption. His feudal analogy is deliberately provocative, since modern redistribution does not abolish the class use of the state but inverts it. A laborist Britain, he predicts, cannot sustain great-power burdens and grows dependent on America, while a dictatorial Russia mobilizes for power politics Britain cannot match.

The working class has replaced Mme. du Barry, and we have the inverse of the feudal system.

Can Kant’s account of scientific knowledge survive the physics that overturned his assumptions about space? In this essay, Felix Kaufmann examines Cassirer’s answer: preserve the inquiry into the conditions of objective experience while relinquishing Kant’s commitment to Euclidean geometry. Scientific objects emerge through relations and laws, not as ready-made things merely copied by observation. Kaufmann tests this perspective against relativity, quantum indeterminacy, and mathematical concept formation, asking what allows changing theories to remain comparable. His sympathy is qualified: Cassirer illuminates the organization of knowledge, but Dewey offers a stronger account of how claims are tested. The resulting tension gives readers a precise way to distinguish a philosophy of scientific objectivity from an account of the procedures that warrant scientific belief.

Generating models that oscillate is not the same as explaining actual business cycles. In his contribution to this 1949 collective discussion, Gottfried Haberler asks how researchers can choose among proliferating theories without dismissing what they already know. His criticism cuts both ways: ambitious econometric techniques may promise more than they deliver, but failed research programmes can still leave useful evidence and methods. Against the search for one encompassing explanation, he proposes testing narrower causal claims through historical as well as statistical evidence. Readers can discover a concrete alternative to both theoretical overconfidence and theory-free measurement: inquiry centred on income, employment, and the limited propositions that economists can reasonably share.

However, the more models we have, the less we seem to know of the real business cycle.