The archive.

A gifted biographer can restore an economist’s reputation—and distort the distribution of intellectual credit. In this 1933 review of Keynes’s Essays in Biography, Schumpeter admires the intimacy and literary skill of the portraits while questioning the judgments they sustain. Keynes’s rehabilitation of Malthus, he argues, risks projecting contemporary objections to saving onto different historical conditions; his compelling account of Marshall leaves Edgeworth’s theoretical achievements comparatively obscure. Schumpeter writes as a fellow economist alert both to analytical invention and to the means by which it becomes memorable. The review offers a compact encounter between two ways of judging economic achievement, showing how personal allegiance, present concerns, and narrative power can shape the history of a discipline.

Factories can produce more while profitable opportunities to invest disappear. This tension drives Emil Lederer’s 1933 article on the obstacles to economic recovery. Against the expectation that depression clears away inefficient firms and prepares renewed growth, he argues that idle machinery, fixed costs and debt can make contraction destructive rather than corrective. His distinctive focus is on technical progress that saves labour and capital without necessarily creating new demand: greater productive capacity need not bring employment or profitable expansion. Public works and debt reduction therefore matter, but neither offers a painless cure. Readers can trace why Lederer questions saving and cheap credit as sufficient remedies—and why the gap between material abundance and private profitability leads him to consider the possibilities of a planned economy.

A factory bought cheaply can yield a profit while its depreciation allowances fail to cover eventual replacement. This divergence between a purchaser’s success and the maintenance of productive capacity anchors Martha Stephanie Braun’s Kapitalaufzehrung. Engaging with Erich Schiff’s research, Braun asks what balance sheets actually reveal about capital lost during a depression. She distinguishes write-downs that merely reflect lower replacement costs from losses that threaten physical renewal. Her accounting analysis also informs a contested policy position: she argues that price supports, rigid wages and taxes, and renewed inflation obstruct adjustment or create fresh imbalances. The article offers a concrete way to examine why monetary wealth, private profitability, and the preservation of productive resources cannot be treated as interchangeable measures.

The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.

Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.

English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”

If the usefulness of each good depends on how other goods are used, how can anyone discover the best allocation? In this article, Rosenstein-Rodan treats complementarity not as a special relation between paired goods but as a general problem of economic planning. His decisive distinction is between describing an equilibrium and explaining how a person arrives at a plan. Reading mathematical utility theory alongside Austrian accounts of valuation, he argues that marginal utilities can be results of planning before they become guides to adjustment. The practical payoff is an account of abbreviated calculation: experience allows people to revise selected uses without reconsidering everything. Yet coordinated improvements that look disadvantageous one change at a time remain a revealing difficulty for this explanation.

Constitutional supremacy need not mean political command. In this signed encyclopedia contribution, supplied in its 1937 republication, William Emmanuel Rappard examines why Switzerland’s Federal Assembly exercises less independence than its extensive powers suggest. His explanation turns on the contrast between a continuously reelected, experienced executive and legislators whose parliamentary duties remain part-time. Popular referendums, he argues, both check government more effectively and reinforce parliamentary deference. The account also makes federalism concrete: equal representation for cantons sits alongside representation by population, while disputes over whether to count foreign residents expose competing regional interests. This compact institutional portrait offers a precise distinction between the authority a constitution assigns and the influence that tenure, expertise, and direct popular intervention allow.

The success of the referendum in Switzerland is both a cause and a consequence of this extreme parliamentary docility.

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.

Henry Dunning Macleod’s ambition to rebuild economics threatened to obscure the banking insights he actually achieved. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, republished in 1937, Hayek separates those insights from the larger system he judges inadequately worked out. He credits Macleod’s account of Bank of England policy, early grasp of discount policy, and detailed explanation of bank credit creation, while questioning his treatment of credit and capital. The distinction is pointed: theoretical vagueness did not, in Hayek’s judgement, lead Macleod to unsound monetary prescriptions. Alongside the failed bank, fraud conviction, and frustrated academic ambitions, readers encounter a discriminating assessment of what deserves preservation in an economist’s work even when his claims to have refounded the discipline do not.

Demand and supply explain prices—but what explains their effects on individual valuations? In this compact encyclopedia entry, Franz Xaver Weiss places that question at the centre of Carl Menger’s contribution to economics. His portrait connects marginal utility with an effort to understand individual conduct, while presenting Menger’s defence of theory as compatible with, rather than a substitute for, historical research. Weiss also identifies a practical obstacle to Menger’s reception: his principal books went out of print, leaving successors to transmit much of his thought. Republished here in its 1937 version, the entry offers a concise account of what Weiss regarded as Menger’s distinctive explanatory approach and why readers often encounter it through other economists.

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.

Giving employers, workers and other economic interests seats at a common table does not tell them how to settle their differences. In this signed encyclopedia entry, originally published in 1933 and republished in 1937, Emil Lederer examines that difficulty through national economic councils, with particular attention to Germany’s Weimar experiment. Occupational representation promised an alternative to territorial politics, yet class divisions repeatedly outweighed occupational affiliations, and councils largely settled into advisory roles. Lederer distinguishes the useful collection of technical knowledge from the authority to make binding decisions. His comparative perspective makes the entry valuable for understanding why better representation of interests need not produce agreement—and why, in his account, economic coordination remains a matter of political judgment rather than institutional design alone.