The archive.

Can workers displaced by machinery count on new investment and cheaper goods to restore their employment? In this 1933 journal reply to Mentor Bouniatian, presented in French, Emil Lederer challenges the assumption that technical progress supplies its own remedy for unemployment. His distinctive concern is timing: even if each innovation eventually generates compensating employment, successive waves of displacement may leave unemployment continuous. He distinguishes labour-saving improvements from inventions that open new fields of production, and argues that credit expansion can conceal displacement during a boom only for depression to expose it. The article offers a precise way to question promises of automatic adjustment: which jobs are created, whose spending sustains them, and how long must displaced workers wait?

An early German advocate of Adam Smith, August Ferdinand Lueder also questioned what economic doctrine and official statistics could explain. In this brief encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram draws attention to a connection between Lueder’s departures from Smith and his criticism of statistical knowledge: both stress intellectual and moral forces in social life. Lueder emerges as more than an importer of liberal economics—he emphasized subjective value, opposed slavery and serfdom, and advocated Jewish emancipation. Pribram’s judgement is measured: he finds Lueder’s attacks on government-serving statistics exaggerated, yet credits them with helping curb governmental interference. The entry offers a compact account of liberalism joined to scepticism about the reach and political uses of social measurement.

Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.

If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.

Written in the spring of 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, this short essay confronts a comforting misreading head-on: that National Socialism was a conservative or capitalist reaction. Hayek argues the opposite, that it was a genuinely socialist and collectivist movement, the ripened fruit of an anti-liberal current running through German thought since the Bismarckian era. Its hostility to the Marxist parties, he contends, was national and cultural rather than economic, while its intellectual debts ran to Marxian relativism and anti-rationalism. Tracing how collectivist planning tends toward coercion, the suppression of intellectual freedom, and finally dictatorship, he warns that other Western nations expanding state control over economic life court the same descent. A compact statement of the themes Hayek would enlarge a decade later in The Road to Serfdom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere.

A clear exposition can deserve recommendation even when its policy conclusions do not. In this short review of Xénophon Zolotas’s book on the gold standard, Fritz Machlup praises monetary explanation written for nonspecialists and endorses the argument that restrictions on imports and international payments aggravate rather than cure monetary disturbances. His approval stops at price stabilization. If stable prices do not eliminate business cycles—as Zolotas acknowledges—what, precisely, is the policy meant to achieve? Machlup’s distinctive contribution is not a detailed rebuttal of stabilization instruments but a pointed demand to distinguish an attainable target from the economic results desired. The review shows how he separates educational merit, agreement on monetary adjustment, and dissent over policy objectives.

No sect, no school: the new discipline gathering around Econometrica is, on Schumpeter's telling, not a mathematical faction but the explicit recognition that a large part of economics is already numerical. Prices, unlike many physical magnitudes, need no artificial measuring procedure invented for them; they exist socially as numerical relations, which lets him call economics the most quantitative of all sciences, physics not excluded. Econometrics simply faces the consequences of that fact. He reconstructs the history of the field as an unfinished quantitative tendency running through Petty, Gregory King, Ricardo, Cournot, Thünen, Walras, Marshall, Fisher, and Moore, then diagnoses the present ailment as institutional: theorist, statistician, and fact-collector work past one another. The remedy is cooperation on concrete numerical problems rather than methodological polemic, disinterested work whose practical uses arrive only as by-product.

There is high remedial virtue in quantitative argument and exact proof.

Here in the English translation of Haberler's 1933 Der internationale Handel, the whole of foreign trade is folded into general price theory: exchange rates are prices formed by supply and demand, balances of payments are not autonomous magnitudes, and comparative advantage is rebuilt on opportunity cost rather than the labour theory of value. The treatise runs from the foreign-exchange market and the gold standard through the transfer problem — with extended treatment of German reparations and the Keynes-Ohlin controversy — to a systematic anatomy of commercial policy: tariffs, dumping, cartels, infant-industry claims and quotas. Throughout, protection is judged by its hidden diversion of resources and its costs to consumers and exporters, not by the visible survival of sheltered industries. Haberler reserves his sharpest hostility for quantitative restrictions, which suppress the price mechanism more arbitrarily than any duty.

It is the increase and not the reduction of duties which is the real economic burden!

Why might economists oppose reforms whose humanitarian aims they share? In this 1933 inaugural lecture at the London School of Economics, Hayek locates the tension in the difference between intentions and consequences—and in the delayed influence of economic ideas on public opinion. His account of the Historical School argues that objections to intervention were often forgotten rather than refuted. Yet his defence of theory is not an unconditional defence of laissez-faire: economists must also identify useful government action. A concrete example gives the argument its force. Whether to retain old machinery or replace it depends not simply on technical efficiency, but on the competing uses of capital and other resources. The lecture shows how Hayek connects apparently wasteful individual decisions with coordination across an economy, while separating agreement about social purposes from agreement about policy.

What Hayek defends under the name 'neutral money' is a tool of theoretical analysis, not a norm for central banks—a distinction he presses against Koopmans and Egle. The concept names an imagined case in which a money economy would leave relative prices to the 'real' determinants of barter-equilibrium theory, a counterfactual for detecting when money becomes an independent force. Its starting point is that money breaks the identity of supply and demand that barter enforces in every market: hoarding, dishoarding, newly created and destroyed money each inject demand without supply, or the reverse. From this follows the benchmark of a constant money stream. Yet sticky prices, long-term money contracts and downward wage rigidity create frictions, so practical policy may need a compromise—perhaps stabilizing an index of original-factor prices—which must not be confused with neutrality itself.

Der Begriff neutrales Geld war bestimmt, als Instrument der theoretischen Analyse zu dienen und sollte keineswegs in erster Linie eine währungspolitische Norm bilden.

English translation: “The concept of neutral money was designed to serve as an instrument of theoretical analysis and by no means was intended primarily to constitute a norm for monetary policy.”

Marxism stands or falls with its theory of value—and by that measure, this 1933 polemic sets out to demolish it. Presenting Marx largely in his own words before turning to a factual but uncompromising critique, Kerschagl reverses the Marxian causal order: labor does not create value; labor is undertaken because a purposively valued good is sought. Socially necessary labor time becomes a fiction unable to compare heterogeneous work or accommodate scarcity and demand, while the money chapter convicts Marx of a crude metallism blind to credit and purchasing power. The book's sharpest thrust is the calculation argument—by admitting only one factor of production, Marxism destroys the very measures a planned economy would need to know which processes waste labor and capital. Class struggle, he concludes, dissolves nation, law, and religion into organized antagonism.

Geldschöpfung, Angebot und Nachfrage, Marktprobleme existieren für Marx überhaupt nicht.

English translation: “Money creation, supply and demand, market problems simply do not exist for Marx.”

How can economists learn modern statistical methods when their mathematical preparation falls short? In this 1933 review of Wilhelm Winkler’s Grundriß der Statistik, I. Theoretische Statistik, Joseph A. Schumpeter assesses the compromises an intermediate textbook must make. He values worked examples as a means of independent study where university teaching is inadequate, but does not confuse accessibility with full understanding. His sharpest pedagogical objection concerns the placement of abstract foundations: what comes first logically may become intelligible only after practical work. The review offers a concrete view of Schumpeter’s standards for economic training—statistics alongside theory and economic history—and of his distinction between methods every economist should command and foundational controversies that an introductory course need not resolve.

Defending entrepreneurial initiative need not mean defending the power of capital. In this 1933 study, Eugen Peter Schwiedland distinguishes the creative organizer of production from the financier who controls enterprises through credit and other people’s assets. He judges business success by useful provision and collective welfare, not private earnings alone, while questioning whether bureaucratic management can preserve entrepreneurial judgment and adaptability. The sharpest tension lies in his proposed remedy: criticism of financial domination leads him toward stronger state authority and a sympathetic account of Italian fascist corporatism. Readers can examine how a defense of personal economic responsibility becomes joined to an authoritarian program of coordination—and where Schwiedland places the boundary between productive leadership and irresponsible power.