The archive.

Writing in tribute to Abraham Wald, Gerhard Tintner asks what mathematical rigor can secure for economics—and where its assumptions limit practical use. This 1952 memorial survey distinguishes the formulation of equilibrium equations from proofs that economically admissible solutions exist. It also shows how cost-of-living comparisons depend on information about preferences that observed prices and purchases alone cannot supply. Tintner’s appreciation is not uncritical: he questions minimax decision rules that treat an indifferent Nature as an adversary, and the feasibility of measuring social losses for policy decisions. The article offers a compact encounter with Wald’s achievements through an economist’s discriminating perspective, revealing both the power of explicit assumptions and the empirical work still needed to make formal results useful.

That devaluing a currency must worsen a country's terms of trade was, in 1952, an assumption widely taken for granted, and this compact theoretical note, reprinted here, sets out to dismantle it. Haberler's thesis is deliberately asymmetrical: in the normal case, where depreciation improves the balance of payments, the terms of trade may move either way and cannot be predicted a priori; only in the perverse case, where the balance of payments worsens, must they deteriorate. Working through demand and supply curves priced in dollars, he shows that a depreciation lowers both export and import prices measured in dollars, so one cannot pair dearer imports with cheaper exports and infer a loss. Against Joan Robinson's presumption that supply elasticities generally exceed demand elasticities, he denies that any broad generalization holds.

We have, then, the result that export and import prices move in the same direction.

What does practically effective economic training lose when specialization separates it from broader theoretical inquiry? In this 1952 study, Richard Kerschagl connects American university organization with the economics and business administration taught within it. Drawing on teaching experience and conversations with economists, he examines how departmental boundaries, case instruction, and well-funded research shape scholarly priorities. His continental European perspective is explicit: admiration for Mises and methodological breadth informs his criticism of theoretical fragmentation, yet he credits American mathematical methods and specialized research with genuine achievements. The comparison offers readers a concrete account of the institutional conditions behind intellectual differences—and a reciprocal prescription: Europeans need stronger mathematical training, while Americans need better access to European scholarship through languages and translation.

A fitted relationship need not be the economic relationship an investigator seeks. In Econometrics, first published in 1952, Gerhard Tintner makes this gap between statistical calculation and economic interpretation a central teaching problem. Prices and quantities are jointly determined, so reversing a simple regression cannot by itself recover supply or demand; smoothing a time series can introduce dependence rather than merely uncover it. Tintner’s emphasis is statistical, but his tests of method remain tied to economic questions and worked applications. Readers can discover why assumptions about structure, measurement and temporal dependence change what an estimate warrants—and why describing past observations is not enough to justify a forecast. This reprint preserves a textbook concerned as much with the limits of quantitative inference as with its procedures.

Around 1700 the world's economies resembled one another far more than they would a century later; by the nineteenth century Western Europe had opened a vast productive gap over much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That gap, Mises contends in this lecture, sprang not from secret inventions or hoarded technique—engineers, manuals, and machines were available—but from institutions and expectations that made saving, accumulation, and long-term investment worthwhile. Nineteenth-century capital export, distinct from older colonial extraction, financed railways, mines, and ports where opportunity existed but local capital was scarce, rewarding investor and recipient alike. Against Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism he insists capital flowed to serve consumers, not to conquer. His sharpest warning falls on confiscation, debt repudiation, and exchange control, which empty ownership of value without abolishing title—and, he cautions, may once more make war over raw materials thinkable.

Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.

Routinely misread as an excessive worker demand, profit-sharing in fact more often originates with employers, and Bayer refuses to judge it by tidy lists of pros and cons. Ranging across American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Soviet practice, he tests the Scanlon Plan, the Rucker Plan, the Duisburger Kupferhütte's division of results, and the statutory worker shares of Chile and Peru, then submits them all to economic theory. His sharpest distinction separates genuine entrepreneurial profit from monopoly rent: many schemes, he warns, merely redistribute rent, burdening society twice through restricted output and lost taxes. Real profit-sharing, tied to a base wage at least equal to the industry average, can smooth income during upswings and lift macroeconomic productivity, but only where trust, strong unions, and a policy of economic coordination already prevail.

So führen uns die Probleme der Gewinnbeteiligung hinein in die Gesamtzusammenhänge der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Thus the problems of profit-sharing lead us into the overall interconnections of the economy.”

Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.

Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.

English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”

Value theory, Shackle charges, quietly presumes perfect knowledge — that the buyer can see every satisfaction in advance — a fiction exposed by the very existence of information, a good worth having only because its contents are not yet known. The essay accordingly shifts the object of economic choice from satisfactions to actions whose consequences remain hypothetical. Each rival hypothesis carries a face-value, the gain or loss if it proves true, and a second variable measuring its claim on the imagination; numerical probability, he demonstrates through five separate objections, cannot serve as that second variable for unique, non-seriable decisions. His replacement is potential surprise: not a lesser degree of certainty but a positive recognition of some disabling incongruity, a scale on which any number of mutually exclusive hypotheses may all sit at zero.

But the theory of consumer’s behaviour assumes that we always know what we are going to get.

Temporary tariff cuts promise a useful bargain during rearmament: more civilian goods for Americans and more dollar earnings for their allies. Karl Pribram’s 1952 article asks whether that promise survives the constraints of actual trade. Foreign factories also face military demands, scarce materials, and limited investment capital; uncertain access to the American market gives them little reason to expand. Combining attention to import composition with scrutiny of executive authority, Pribram distinguishes the case for lower tariffs from the case for continually adjustable ones. His alternative—selective, negotiated reductions of indefinite duration—makes dependable market access part of Atlantic defense cooperation. The article offers a concrete account of how an apparently flexible emergency measure can undermine the investment and international commitments needed to make it effective.

The conditions that make freedom possible can also become instruments of domination: tools impose new necessities, commerce turns means into ends, and representatives acquire interests distinct from those they govern. In this review essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines how Santayana’s Dominations and Powers understands these reversals through humanity’s dependence on nature and social arrangements. He takes Santayana’s philosophical ambition seriously without accepting its biological foundation as an adequate explanation of social meaning. The resulting tension gives the essay its particular interest: Schütz preserves Santayana’s account of embodied, constrained agency while questioning his treatment of economic life and activities beyond subsistence. Readers can discover precisely where recognition of human dependence becomes, in Schütz’s judgement, an unwarranted reduction of human possibilities.

When the prestige of physics and biology tempts social thinkers to borrow their methods wholesale, the result, Hayek argues, is not science but scientism: a prejudiced approach that decides how to study society before examining it. This volume gathers his studies on that abuse of reason, first defending a subjectivist, compositive method in which institutions such as money, law, and markets exist only as the beliefs and purposes of those who use them, and collective terms like 'society' name patterns of individual conduct rather than agents. It then narrates the counter-revolution historically, from the École Polytechnique and Saint-Simon's engineers through Comtean sociology and its convergence with Hegel, tracing how impatience with evolved orders turned science into a model for social command. The through-line is epistemic: planning fails because dispersed knowledge exceeds any single directing mind.

So far as human actions are concerned the things are what the acting people think they are.

For the seller who feels himself one among very many, rivals are colleagues rather than threats—and it is this state of mind, not the sheer count of firms, on which Machlup rebuilds the theory of selling. He coins pliopoly for the pressure of potential newcomers, setting it beside polypoly, oligopoly, and monopoly, and defines a true monopolist by the triple absence of all three. Against businessmen who claim they price by average or full cost, he reinterprets such rules as competitive responses to expected demand elasticity, treating cartel ethics and break-even charts as evidence rather than refutation. The analysis ranges across perfect and imperfect polypoly, artificial scarcity and monopoly rents, and the kinked demand curve, always parting the economist's objective calculus from the trader's rough feel for the market.

The concept of the industry is nothing but an expedient device for ruling out negligible or too uncertain interdependence.