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.

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.

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.

Organizing an industry is not the same as organizing production for society’s needs. This distinction drives Emil Lederer’s encyclopedia article, which asks why monopoly and piecemeal regulation can leave workers and machinery idle even as economic coordination increases. Lederer defends the possibility of socialist calculation without reducing production to an engineering problem: prices, consumer choice, and comparisons of efficiency still matter. His concrete proposals for credit allocation and control of basic industries expose a further tension—planning within capitalism may stabilize investment while continuing to serve existing purchasing power rather than unmet needs. Readers can discover here an argument for planning that refuses to equate administrative coordination with social benefit: its purposes and possibilities depend on who holds economic and political power.

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 loose-leaf arrangement, a usable index, a collection of application forms: these are decisive virtues in Helene Lieser’s 1933 review of five publications on German foreign-exchange law. Faced with regulations whose complexity affects traders abroad as well as German officials, merchants and lawyers, she asks how legal guidance can remain current and useful. Her practical judgement distinguishes the value of scholarly commentary on doubtful questions from the everyday benefits of well-organized texts and administrative aids; one index earns praise for having worked in concrete cases. This short review offers a precise glimpse of the tools needed to navigate exchange controls, without arguing for or against the controls themselves.

An expanding reference work records a contracting banking sector: this contrast anchors Helene Lieser’s brief review of the 1933 annual Europäische Banken. Bilanzen und Konzerne. She judges the collection useful—even necessary—for practitioners in crisis conditions, while testing its coverage against Austrian needs. The Credit-Anstalt now appears, but she asks for more Austrian institutions to be included. Her closing observations give this bibliographic assessment its sharper interest: while coverage rises from 184 to 205 banks, Lieser reports shrinking banking activity and growing state influence through support measures and restructurings. The review offers a concise contemporary judgement of what a banking reference work needed to document amid institutional upheaval.

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.