The archive.

An investment cannot always be treated as one trial in a repeatable gamble. How, then, can an economist analyse a decision whose consequences may be unique? Shackle locates its motives in present experiences of imagined futures: the gains that excite hope and the losses that command fear. His alternative to numerical probability, “potential surprise,” measures how astonishing an outcome would seem rather than assigning it a share of total likelihood. The resulting model offers a striking account of waiting: an investor may postpone commitment because information is coming, even without knowing what it will say. Readers can examine both the explanatory reach and the psychological demands of a theory in which two compelling possibilities—not an average across all outcomes—govern a venture’s attraction.

How much support does evidence give a scientific theory, apart from the costs of acting on it? Gerhard Tintner approaches this question from econometrics, where choosing between rival economic theories cannot readily be reduced to a calculation of gains and losses. In this 1949 article, he develops Rudolf Carnap’s logical account of confirmation through worked statistical examples. Coin tosses expose a consequential choice: assigning equal weight to patterns of outcomes rather than to individual sequences changes the probabilities used for prediction. Readers can trace how the language used to describe evidence enters the resulting estimates, and why confirming a universal law differs from predicting its next instance. Tintner also marks the framework’s limits: its treatment of categorical attributes does not yet accommodate the continuous variables central to economics and physics.

Can an economy organized around useful work dispense with the supposedly money-bound insights of economics? In this 1949 review of Gustav Wihrheim’s Der betriebswirtschaftliche Kreislauf, Hans Bayer shares the ambition of socially purposeful reconstruction but challenges the framework offered to achieve it. His central distinction is concrete: labor and materials measure productive effort, not whether production satisfies human needs. A national economy likewise cannot be understood simply as an enlarged enterprise. Drawing on Keynes, welfare economics, and competitive socialism, Bayer tests Wihrheim’s planning proposals against questions of purchasing power, investment, and prices. The review offers a constructive disagreement about economic reconstruction: how to make work serve social welfare without mistaking technical coordination for an adequate account of prosperity.

Progressive taxation and family allowances may be defensible without being deductions from justice. In this 1949 Festschrift essay, Alfred Amonn asks what public-finance scholarship can actually establish when rival standards of fairness prescribe opposite tax burdens. He tests ability-to-pay reasoning against incentives to earn, and equal payment for public services against the revenue needs of the state. His distinctive move is to retain familiar tax arrangements while replacing their purported ethical foundations with arguments about collection costs, household stability, and economic consequences. Readers can discover how the same fiscal policy changes meaning when defended as practical necessity rather than moral entitlement—and why, for Amonn, public feelings of injustice still matter even when justice supplies no determinate scientific rule.

A system of equilibrium prices may be internally consistent without explaining how anyone arrives at those prices. This is the tension Leo Illy pursues in this 1949 article, drawing on Hans Mayer’s critique of functional price theory while extending its challenge to Austrian verbal accounts. If demand determines prices, but buyers need prices before they can specify demand, where does explanation begin? Illy directs attention to successive calculations and exchanges rather than simultaneous relations. Concrete examples—shoes, theatre tickets, and cars with different minimum expenditures—also test whether marginal-utility equalization describes actual consumer choices. The article offers less a completed alternative model than a pointed distinction between explaining an economic process and describing its outcome, making clear why temporal sequence matters to Illy’s conception of price theory.

Financing an international payments deficit is not the same as correcting it. This distinction drives Jacques Rueff’s 1949 introductory congress report, which challenges the monetary arrangements of European reconstruction. Drawing on war indemnities, capital movements and his dispute with Keynes over German reparations, Rueff argues that trade can adjust to external obligations—provided inflation does not neutralize the adjustment. His criticism reaches beyond deficit spending: releasing Marshall aid counterpart funds and recycling currency receipts through the IMF can, he contends, replenish the purchasing power that external settlement should absorb. Readers encounter a precise controversy over how assistance works: whether it restores the conditions for monetary convertibility or sustains dependence on further financing. Rueff’s proposal to use Marshall aid to rebuild gold reserves makes that tension concrete.

Ainsi administré, le Fonds monétaire a toutes les apparences d'un système de convertibilité, mais il n'en a aucune des vertus régulatrices.

English translation: “Administered in this way, the Monetary Fund has all the appearances of a system of convertibility, but none of its regulatory virtues.”

What can economic measurement establish—and what must remain beyond its authority? In this 1949 French article, Gerhard Tintner places econometrics between mathematical deduction and statistical description: theory makes assumptions explicit, while observations test their consequences. His distinctive concern is how to identify economically meaningful relationships in data that do not come from controlled experiments. An estimate of agricultural demand shows what numerical analysis can reveal; a discussion of tariffs shows why estimating consequences cannot decide which social goals to pursue. Readers encounter a defence of econometrics that also marks its limits, distinguishing the testing of individual coefficients from the still unresolved task of judging competing economic theories as wholes.

Toutes les lois économiques sont conditionnelles.

English translation: “All economic laws are conditional.”

Monopoly prices fall less sharply in a depression than competitive prices — a regularity Alexander Mahr had observed in 1932 and here places on a fuller analytical footing. Starting from the elasticity of demand as the decisive determinant of the monopoly price, he shows that under inelastic or unit-elastic demand a cost reduction is largely pocketed as profit rather than passed to buyers, so that monopoly price adjustment is systematically less elastic than competitive adjustment. Real monopolists, he argues, are nonetheless hemmed in by substitutes, latent competitors, tariffs, and the threat of state intervention. The stakes are macroeconomic: by defending prices through cuts to output and employment, monopoly and cartel pricing convert cyclical contractions into cumulative ones, and Mahr rejects the claim that cartels stabilize the Konjunkturzyklus.

Bei unelastischer Nachfrage oder wenn die Nachfrageelastizität gleich eins ist, wird also der Monopolpreis trotz Änderung der Kosten ganz überwiegend unverändert bleiben, während der Konkurrenzpreis sich durchaus der Kostenänderung anpassen würde.

English translation: “With inelastic demand, or when the elasticity of demand equals one, the monopoly price will therefore, despite a change in costs, remain overwhelmingly unchanged, whereas the competitive price would fully adjust to the change in costs.”

Buying machinery does not guarantee cheaper farming when fields remain scattered and equipment stands idle. This practical objection anchors Hans Bayer’s 1949 critique of Austria’s four-year agricultural programme, prompted by the Marshall Plan. Accepting the need for planning, Bayer asks whether recovery should restore prewar production or redirect it towards economically viable branches. He tests investment promises against farm costs, land consolidation, cooperative marketing, and the wider economy’s need for affordable food. His distinctive insistence is that agricultural labour belongs inside this calculation: wages and housing are not secondary concerns to be addressed after output rises. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish expenditure from productive reform—and to see why production targets cannot be judged apart from the conditions of those who work the land.

A familiar face can conceal a gap in the historical record. In this 1949 letter to the Times Literary Supplement, republished here with editorial notes, F. A. Hayek asks readers to help locate two early portraits of John Stuart Mill, whose appearance was chiefly known through images of his old age. Preparing the Mill–Harriet Taylor correspondence for publication, Hayek follows a medaillon through published reproductions, Caroline Fox’s recollections, and an unpublished letter by John Sterling. His concern is concrete: the originals may have passed through a sale without being recognised. This brief appeal offers a glimpse of Hayek at work as a historical researcher, distinguishing a surviving image from a traceable object and seeking evidence that could restore a younger Mill to view.

A Chinese sentry, Kwong Hui, weighs loyalty against treachery in a choice he can make only once — and for whom, as Shackle drily observes, a severed head is rather final. From Keith West's parable Shackle draws his standing objection to orthodox decision theory: frequency-ratio probability describes a series of repeatable trials, but says nothing about the single occasion whose outcome absorbs a person's whole future. Such crucial experiments may destroy the very conditions under which they were run, so they cannot be rerun. In their place he offers not calculation but imaginative appraisal, where rival hypotheses are ranked by their power to stir hope or fear and by their degree of potential surprise, and choice settles on a representative focus-gain and focus-loss. It is a founding statement of the Knight–Keynes–Shackle line dividing calculable risk from genuine uncertainty.

For a non-divisible non-seriable experiment the concept of frequency-ratios is wholly irrelevant.

How does bias enter a science whose tools, time series, value theory, marginal productivity analysis, are in principle neutral? Schumpeter locates it not in open advocacy, which may be perfectly honest, but in the pre-scientific act of vision: the moment before proof when the investigator perceives which phenomena connect and matter. Models and statistics can be tested and refuted; vision cannot, and so it becomes the true gateway of ideological bias. He tries the thesis on three economists: Smith, whose natural-law slogans did little harm because his analysis stayed sober; Marx, who discovered ideology yet let his creed of class struggle and increasing misery sterilize his analysis; and Keynes, whose stagnationist vision gained technical armor and then dissolved into professional controversy. Ideology, he concludes, both retards science and supplies the vision without which it might never advance.

And so—though we proceed slowly because of our ideologies, we might not proceed at all without them.