3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Divide economic life into two orders of fact, the repeated equilibrium of statics and the innovation of dynamics, and the central phenomena of capitalism fall into place. Reading Schumpeter's early system, Amonn shows that a purely static economy, where production and exchange merely reproduce themselves, forecloses every specifically capitalist income, interest, capital, and credit alike, since under full competition prices reduce to wages and rent. Everything else requires the entrepreneur, who breaks the routine by introducing a new combination and buys inputs at old prices while the transformed product commands a higher valuation. Profit is that temporary gap; interest is a share split from it; and crisis erupts when too many uncoordinated innovations obstruct one another's readjustment, collapsing the whole value-and-price system.
Gewinne können in der statischen Wirtschaft nicht entstehen.
English translation: “Profits cannot arise in a static economy.”
Domestic crisis symptoms and tighter credit surfaced across Austria-Hungary before either the world slump or the Balkan War could account for them. Taking Böhm-Bawerk's diagnosis of the passive trade balance as his starting point—the monarchy consumes too much and produces too little—Mises turns to the internal causes: a swollen public administration and loss-making state railways, backward tariff-protected agriculture, hostility to large-scale enterprise, and above all the Borgsystem of long goods-credit chains binding consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and producers into uncollectible receivables. He reads the insolvencies of 1912-13 as the overdue liquidation of that credit structure rather than its cause, and holds that only the radical removal of policy-made obstacles to production, together with expanded exports, can right the monarchy's balance of payments.
Die großen öffentlichen Unternehmungen sind der wundeste Punkt des öffentlichen Haushaltes in Österreich.
English translation: “The great public enterprises are the sorest point of the public finances in Austria.”
Could a depression arise even if entrepreneurs made no mistakes? In this 1914 article, Joseph A. Schumpeter locates the source of recurrent fluctuations in successful innovation itself. Bank credit enables pioneers to redirect resources; their success lowers barriers for followers, producing a cluster of new enterprises rather than a steady stream. The resulting changes in costs, prices, and markets can overturn business plans that were sound when made. Schumpeter thus distinguishes the economy’s adjustment to innovation from panics, fraud, and speculative excess, which may intensify a downturn without explaining it. His account offers a precise tension to explore: the same developments that expand productive possibilities can unsettle established livelihoods, while falling prices may benefit consumers even as businesses experience depression.
Delivered to the Lower Austrian Trade Association in February 1914, this lecture reports back from the fourteenth session of the International Statistical Institute, whose forty-nine printed reports Meyer sifts for what economic statistics had achieved. He dwells on the hardest problems of comparability: rival methods for estimating national income and national wealth, weighed through Kiaer's tax-list approach and Fellner's contested Austro-Hungarian valuations; Neymarck's running census of the world's negotiable securities; the semiology of index numbers and whether diverse indicators may be fused into one; and the vexed measurement of unemployment. Throughout, Meyer treats the Institute not as a popular congress but as a cooperative body harmonizing national data for the use of governments, and he insists that technical care in statistics serves the larger understanding of economic regularity.
La paix du monde, paix internationale entre les peuples et les gouvernements, la paix intérieure entre les hommes s'imposent pour maintenir l'échafaudage actuel de papiers de crédit et d'affaires qui existe.
English translation: “World peace—international peace between peoples and governments, and internal peace among men—is indispensable to maintain the existing scaffolding of credit paper and business affairs.”
Economics became a science, on Schumpeter's telling, only when it moved beyond isolated practical disputes to grasp the national economy as an interconnected circular flow, the breakthrough he credits to Quesnay and the tableau economique. This survey, written for the 1914 Grundriss der Sozialoekonomik, traces the discipline from two roots, a philosophical natural-law tradition and a practical-policy literature, through physiocracy and the classical system of Smith, Ricardo, and Mill, into the Methodenstreit between Menger's defense of theory and Schmoller's historical school, and finally to the marginal utility revolution of Menger, Jevons, and Walras. He judges every school by whether it obstructs or enriches analysis, and argues that beneath the noisy polemics of method lies an organic continuity, one hundred fifty years of cumulative work whose unity later observers will more easily perceive.
Wirklich bedeutende Gegensätze gibt es innerhalb dieser Preistheorie nicht mehr.
English translation: “Within this theory of price there are no longer any really significant oppositions.”
To pry loose the American loans the Central Powers desperately needed, Schwarzwald proposes an unlikely lever: silver. His confidential memorandum, printed in Vienna two months into the war, tells the statesmen of Berlin and Vienna that Britain's command of the sea lanes and of finance gives the Entente a durable edge, and that only organized interest, not appeals to neutrality, will move the United States. A permanent pledge of free silver coinage would enrich American mining and banking groups while loosening London's grip. The coins, marked by metric weight, would circulate beside the untouched gold mark and crown at market value, a parallel currency he sharply severs from the discredited fixed ratios of bimetallism and defends, with precedents from Hamburg to China, as older and more honest money.
Das Mittel dazu ist die dauernde Freigabe unbeschränkten monetären Gebrauchs des Silbers.
English translation: “The means to that end is the permanent authorization of the unrestricted monetary use of silver.”
Employer welfare can offer material benefits while leaving workers’ rights uncertain. In this short 1914 review of the Hansabund’s survey of voluntary welfare provision, Emil Lederer asks what expenditure figures and lists of facilities actually prove. Against the survey’s celebration of employer generosity, he sets firms’ own descriptions of welfare as a profitable investment or a reward for loyalty. His criticism is concrete: spending totals need comparison with wages, capital and production costs, while accounts of benefits must explain workers’ legal standing. The review offers a compact lesson in evaluating social provision—not simply by how much employers spend, but by the rights and dependencies their institutions create.
A stable exchange rate can conceal a struggle over who controls monetary wealth. In this 1914 review of Keynes’s Indian Currency and Finance, Hermann Schwarzwald asks whose interests are served when Indian reserves finance the London money market while Indians face higher borrowing costs. He acknowledges Keynes’s account of monetary administration but disputes the security and legitimacy of a currency dependent on British officials’ willingness to redeem it. His distinctive counterargument joins criticism of colonial financial power to a strict metallism: precious metals constitute independently valuable property, whereas credit should rest on consent. His defense of Indian gold saving makes that connection especially concrete. The review offers a pointed encounter between administrative efficiency and monetary independence, while exposing the assumptions about property that underpin Schwarzwald’s challenge to Keynes.
Swiss industry existed long before the factory: urban merchants coordinated work performed in rural households. William E. Rappard takes this dispersed economy as the starting point for explaining how mechanization changed both labour and the case for its legal protection. His 1914 study connects industrial techniques, household poverty and political institutions without reducing reform to humanitarian conviction alone. Child labour brings these relationships into focus: larger, more complex spinning machines could make young children less useful to employers, while declining destitution made their earnings less necessary to families. Following the emergence of factory workers as a distinct social group, readers can examine how industrial growth created new vulnerabilities—and helped establish the conditions under which unrestricted economic freedom could be challenged.
A survey can capture a movement’s main tendencies yet leave its social meaning unexplained. In this brief 1914 review of Leo Müffelmann’s Die moderne Mittelstandsbewegung, Emil Lederer credits the book’s descriptive account but questions its separation of the Mittelstand movement from economic development and class structure. His objection is directed especially at writing for a broad public: accessibility, he argues, requires explaining connections rather than treating a subject in isolation. The review offers a compact statement of that critical standard, identifying—but not itself explaining—the movement’s changing significance within state social policy.
A defense can reach the right conclusion for the wrong reason. In this brief 1914 reply to Mezey, Böhm-Bawerk corrects a sympathetic account of why sellers’ subjective valuations may cease to determine the momentary market price. A price ceiling near zero cannot simply be ignored: if binding, it would force prices down. His explanation instead turns on who remains outside the exchange. When every seller finds a buyer, no excluded seller exists to supply that upper limit; buyers’ valuations can then become decisive under the conditions he specifies. The afterword offers a compact lesson in applying a general price theory: a constraint that does not exist is different from one that exists but does not bind.
What might China lose by acquiring a supposedly modern currency? In this 1914 article, Hermann Schwarzwald argues that silver valued by weight and fineness offers protections that a national coinage and central issuing bank could undermine. His defence of metallic money, informed by Eugen Dühring, turns apparent monetary disorder into a question of who controls value: those who weigh and verify silver, or governments and banks that enforce nominal denominations. British India supplies his warning about exchange stability purchased at the cost of financial dependence. Yet he advocates standardization, not the preservation of every local custom. The article exposes the political choices within technical proposals for currency reform, while making clear how Schwarzwald’s opposition to foreign financial control rests on his distrust of credit-based money.