The archive.

Higher national income does not by itself show that government spending has improved welfare. In this 1956 discussion contribution, Walter Fröhlich asks what fiscal totals conceal: guarantees and tax exemptions that shape activity without direct expenditure, differences between public provision and support for private initiative, and changes in society’s structure. Defense spending sharpens the problem, raising output while favoring large industry and creating further demands for infrastructure and services. Fröhlich brings institutional choices and explicit social priorities into an analysis too easily confined to aggregates and multipliers. His remarks offer a compact way to distinguish fuller use of resources from structural growth—and both from a defensible claim of social improvement.

Expenditures alone are not always a good measure of governmental activity.

An automated mail-order business can increase productivity while leaving its employees with little more to do than read five-digit numbers. This tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1956 article: technical sophistication does not necessarily enrich work or spread prosperity. Distinguishing feedback-based automation from assembly-line mechanization, Bayer follows its consequences beyond factories into inventory control and bookkeeping, where integration can displace routine clerical work and concentrate economic power. His perspective links technical change to the arrangements governing its use—working hours, investment, and access to technical education. For Austria, even slow domestic adoption offers no insulation from automated foreign competitors. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what machinery makes possible from what economic and social choices make beneficial.

A firm can save labour without an economy finding new work for those displaced. This gap anchors Hans Bayer’s 1956 article, the concluding contribution to his three-part discussion of automation. He challenges the supposed automatic passage from lower production costs to lower prices, increased demand, and renewed employment: automation may strengthen the concentrations of power that obstruct that very sequence. His alternative retains markets but makes coordination, income distribution, and shorter working hours decisive to technical progress. What distinguishes the article is its movement from economic mechanisms to human purposes. Leisure requires education, not merely time off; institutional reform requires, in Bayer’s view, a religiously grounded rejection of power and profit as ultimate ends. Automation becomes a test of what economic life is for, rather than simply how much it can produce.

Technischer Fortschritt der Automation und sozialer Fortschritt fallen keineswegs zusammen.

English translation: “The technical progress of automation and social progress by no means coincide.”

Platinum’s expanding industrial uses did not necessarily make it a secure store of wealth. In this 1956 survey, Richard Kerschagl examines the tension between growing demand from petroleum refining, chemicals and electrical engineering and the threat of sudden releases from accumulated stocks. His economic perspective separates annual mining output from metal available for sale, and platinum’s specific technical uses from those of increasingly abundant palladium. Concentrated production in Canada and South Africa, uncertain Soviet supplies and divided trading markets complicate any simple equation between scarcity and price. Readers can discover why Kerschagl regarded platinum’s medium-term prospects cautiously favourably while resisting confident short-term forecasts—and how industrial indispensability could coexist with speculative vulnerability.

An economy can expand without changing how it produces or improving output per person. For Alfred Amonn, this distinction exposes a central weakness in dynamic equilibrium theory: explaining growth is not yet explaining development. In this 1956 review essay on Willy Kraus’s Wirtschaftswachstum und Gleichgewicht, Amonn tests models of expansion against the harder questions of technical change, capital deepening, and structural transformation. His criticism also separates equilibrium from two conditions often associated with it—steady growth and full employment. Readers can discover how definitions of saving, investment, and monetary equilibrium shape apparently substantive disagreements, and why Amonn regards the prevention of cumulative disturbances as a more defensible policy aim than a guaranteed programme of uninterrupted growth.

Against a literature on codetermination he concedes is already vast, Bayer justifies one more treatment by insisting the question be examined from the economy rather than from social psychology. He rejects the picture of the economy as a self-regulating mechanism of supply and demand, calling it instead an organism centered on responsible human beings, so that those who shape the economy must share in governing it. From this he derives a staged, subsidiarity-like structure and tests three models: isolated plant-level codetermination, faulted for breeding plant egoism; integrated codetermination on the Montan pattern; and supra-company codetermination reaching across branches and regions. The second industrial revolution of automation and atomic energy only sharpens the tensions, concentrating power in large firms and demanding countervailing labor institutions rather than empty firm-bound partnership rhetoric.

Die Peitsche der Konkurrenz zwingt den einzelnen, die Dynamik der Technik voll in die Wirtschaft zu übernehmen.

English translation: “The whip of competition compels the individual to absorb the dynamism of technology fully into the economy.”

Computational progress does not settle the question of how reliable economic estimates are. In this brief discussion, Gerhard Tintner welcomes work by Nerlove, Suits and Koizuma on neglected supply functions and praises Ladd’s demonstration of the value of large-scale digital computers. Yet his approval carries a reservation: viewed against Morgenstern’s concern with the accuracy of economic observations, might Ladd’s model allow too little observational error? Tintner’s compact intervention offers a concrete distinction between advances in technique and adequacy of empirical assumptions, while pointing to cost functions and multicollinearity as subjects still needing attention.

Against the post-Keynesian notion of an 'equilibrium income' defined by the equality of saving and investment, Mahr insists that a growing economy has no fixed point of rest, only balanced growth—the harmonious movement of its aggregate magnitudes. Attacking Samuelson's tabular model, he argues that investment merely matched by current saving reproduces income rather than enlarging it; expansion requires investment to outrun saving, the excess financed by monetary and credit expansion. The multiplier is reinterpreted as a temporal process bound to the income velocity of money, and saving is assigned a stabilizing office, absorbing purchasing power while long-gestation projects—power stations, housing, factories—create incomes before goods. First published in 1956, the essay ends where the social market economy begins: value-stable monetary policy, backed when needed by fiscal policy and measures against monopoly power.

Es gehört geradezu zu den Voraussetzungen eines störungsfreien Wachstumsprozesses, daß die Investitionen höher sind als die Ersparungen, wobei das Mehr an Investitionen durch Erweiterung des Zahlungsmittelumlaufs finanziert wird.

English translation: “It belongs, indeed, among the prerequisites of an undisturbed growth process that investments be higher than savings, the excess of investments being financed through an expansion of the circulation of means of payment.”

Can more wine always compensate for less bread? In this 1956 rejoinder to Bäsmann, Alexander Mahr defends Hans Mayer’s criticism of indifference-curve theory by pressing a concrete question: whether its assumptions describe the needs and choices of individual consumers. Statistical averages, he argues, cannot answer objections about indivisible goods, nor can debates over utility measurement establish the empirical validity of substitution. Mahr adds his own contention that consumers seek a preferred proportion of goods rather than move among indefinitely many equally satisfactory combinations. The interest of this short polemic lies in the distinction it draws between mathematical precision and descriptive accuracy—and in Mahr’s willingness to leave room for a more restricted concept of substitution while rejecting its unrestricted application.

Can economic planning secure rapid development without sacrificing the freedoms it promises to serve? In this 1956 article, Hans Bayer compares China and India through official documents and conversations gathered during a study journey. His sharpest distinction concerns institutions that look alike but serve different purposes: Chinese mixed enterprises prepare the way for nationalization, while India’s private and cooperative sectors are intended to endure. Sympathetic to India’s decentralized order, Bayer nevertheless questions whether a state with limited revenues can turn national objectives into effective commitments. He sees possible convergence in Chinese decentralization and Indian public-sector expansion. Read as a contemporary assessment rather than a verdict on subsequent development, the article makes concrete the tension between preserving local initiative and commanding the resources needed for collective investment.

South Africa mined gold; the United States held it. This contrast anchors Richard Kerschagl’s examination of gold production, reserves, and monetary systems in 1950–1955. He argues that accumulated stocks, international credit, and economic strength mattered far more to monetary power than changes in mining output. His statistical comparisons distinguish newly extracted gold from existing reserves, and reported transfers from evidence of production—a particularly consequential distinction in his assessment of uncertain Soviet figures. Marshall aid and the growth of dollar holdings outside the United States bring the central tension into focus: gold remained a monetary foundation, yet access to that foundation increasingly depended on the American financial centre. The essay offers a concrete account of how gold’s continuing importance could coexist with growing dependence on the dollar.

Can a system of equilibrium equations explain how prices arise, or only describe their relations once established? This tension gives Alexander Mahr’s memorial essay on Hans Mayer its theoretical focus. Writing as a sympathetic colleague within the Austrian tradition, Mahr presents Mayer as a renovator of its foundations: an economist concerned with how ranked wants, scarce multipurpose means, and recurring needs become market demands and prices. His account distinguishes Mayer’s objections to equilibrium theory from a rejection of mathematics, while also correcting one of Mayer’s arguments about factor remuneration. Alongside the portrait of a demanding teacher whose influence exceeded his publications, readers encounter a precise dispute about what economic explanation must accomplish—and why subjective valuation cannot simply be read off from numerical market relations.