The archive.

Does equating a worker’s wage with the value of marginal output explain that wage—or merely restate a relation between values still needing explanation? Alfred Amonn’s methodological article challenges marginal-productivity theory on precisely this ground. He seeks a unified explanation of wages, interest, and rent through consumer demand, production requirements, and the distinct supply conditions of labour, capital, and land. His approach separates questions often run together: why an income category exists, what determines its magnitude, and whether it must take the form of a market payment. Rent on owner-cultivated land and saving without interest sharpen these distinctions. The result is an explanatory programme, not a finished model, that asks readers to distinguish an equilibrium condition from an account of the forces producing it.

A workshop can pass between generations; a salary lasts only as long as employment. Emil Lederer makes this difference in temporal horizon central to his account of modern economic dependence. In this essay, first published in 1918/19 and reprinted here in 1979, insecurity concerns not only how much people earn, but how far into the future they can organize their lives and sustain attachments. His comparison of proprietors, civil servants, salaried employees, and workers gives the psychology of modern life a specific economic foundation. Insurance sharpens the distinction: a pension can extend an income without restoring control over productive resources. The essay poses a demanding question for social reform: can greater security or collective ownership also give individuals a durable connection to the material foundations of their lives?

German trade unions emerged from the revolution of 1918 with more members, legal recognition, and greater influence—but no settled answer to what their new power should achieve. In this critical survey, Emil Lederer examines the tension between bargaining within capitalism and preparing to transform production. He tests institutional gains against their economic substance: inflation eroded wage increases and strike funds, while employer–union cooperation could secure recognition without altering private ownership. Works councils sharpened a further conflict, representing entire workforces rather than the members of voluntary unions. Lederer’s distinctive concern is how these organizational arrangements shaped competing ideas of socialism and class struggle. His analysis shows why stronger labor institutions could simultaneously stabilize existing economic relations and generate demands to overturn them.

What should future merchants learn that bookkeeping alone cannot teach? Siegmund Feilbogen makes the place of economics in Austrian commercial schools a question of judgment as well as occupational competence. Economics, he argues, connects individual transactions with collective life—but teaching it requires a different order from expounding it as a science. Familiar commodities, industries and institutions should prepare pupils for abstractions rather than merely illustrate definitions learned in advance. Drawing on Herbartian pedagogy, Feilbogen joins this practical method to an ethical ambition: merchants should understand other classes and recognize interests beyond private gain. His use of a student presentation on Austrian trade with China also exposes a tension within that ambition, as education for wider social understanding becomes preparation for national commercial expansion.

War can impoverish an economy while enriching its owners. In this 1918/19 article, Emil Lederer examines that tension principally through Germany’s wartime experience, distinguishing depleted productive resources from growing monetary claims on future output. Agricultural receipts can rise as harvests shrink; industrial reserves can conceal equipment consumed without replacement; higher wages need not secure workers a lasting share in recovery. Reading prices, company accounts, and wage statistics against material shortages, Lederer asks who will command reconstruction—not merely how production will resume. His analysis also challenges the equation of extensive state regulation with an end to capitalism: rationing still leaves access dependent on money. The result is a concrete account of how wartime gains can become durable economic power even when the productive basis of wealth has deteriorated.

Advertising joins business technique to psychological influence: this is Schwiedland’s starting point in his brief English-language review of the third enlarged edition of Victor Mataja’s Die Reklame. Noting advertising’s expanding political uses, he commends Mataja’s scientific approach and impartial assessment of its forms and effects. The interest lies in what Schwiedland singles out for approval: an inquiry that considers advertising’s educational and enlightening potential alongside its economic results. This compact endorsement shows the criteria by which he welcomes advertising as a subject of systematic study, without offering specific findings or a developed critique.

What counts as progress in economic theory when rival schools address the same problems? Reviewing the published volumes of the international Festschrift for Friedrich von Wieser, Martha Stephanie Braun judges contributions by their explanatory precision rather than their school allegiance. Her commitment to marginal analysis does not prevent her from valuing its opponents. The sharpest tests concern credit and collective choice: she challenges explanations of recurrent business cycles that neglect credit institutions and rejects loose analogies between individual and collective valuation. Her praise for international trade and public-finance research shows where she finds theory clarifying practical problems. This review offers a discriminating account of theoretical disagreement, with its verdict explicitly provisional pending the collection’s volume on prices and money.

What connects buying a loaf of bread with founding a steel trust? In this journal article, Erich Voegelin treats both as investments that reshape the temporal pattern of human satisfaction. His target is economic theory that isolates goods and needs from the historically given situation in which people choose, consume, and provide for the future. Time, he argues, is not an empty container for economic events: it arises within the changing rhythms of enjoyment, satiety, and renewed need. This perspective makes familiar problems of value, capital, and interest look different—not least the assumption that a physically identical good remains economically identical at different dates. Readers can discover how a concrete account of consumption becomes a challenge to static valuation and to the restriction of economic initiative to entrepreneurs.

If the “least important need” is simply the one a person sacrifices, does saying so explain the choice? In this reply to Bernardelli, Felix Kaufmann makes that problem of circularity a test for claims of necessary truth in economics. He argues that definitions can secure certainty only by leaving open whether actual behaviour conforms to them. His treatment of marginal utility distinguishes rational valuation as a definition, its applicability to conduct as an empirical assumption, and diminishing utility through satiation as a claim grounded in experience. The point is not to discard these concepts, but to establish what they can explain. This compact methodological dispute shows how an apparently unassailable economic principle can acquire explanatory content precisely by becoming open to refutation.

Can investigating the business cycle bring it to an end? Felix Kaufmann makes that absurd prospect the closing joke of this satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. His speaker distrusts scientific abstraction, demands that science feed a nation, and calls on the state to halt value-neutral inquiry. These complaints become comic through their excess: the critic of scientific methods cannot explain why engines run, while a renowned institute’s board leaves one man doing all the work. The song offers a compact encounter with methodological controversy turned into performance, where anxiety about science’s limitations gives way to fear of its improbable power.

A numerical estimate can look precise before the economic relationship it measures has even been identified. In this 1953 journal article, Gerhard Tintner explains why econometrics needs more than statistical technique: theory must specify relationships that the available observations can distinguish. Demand for meat and the dynamics of corn markets give concrete form to problems of identification, omitted influences, and uncertainty. Tintner writes as a practitioner who sees numerical estimation as useful but insists on exposing its assumptions. His discussion of taxes and subsidies brings that discipline to policy: econometrics may estimate the consequences of alternative measures, but cannot choose their ethical or political ends. Readers can discover why a calculable result is not necessarily an economically warranted one.

An explanation of interest under perfect foresight need not explain interest under uncertainty. This distinction drives G. L. S. Shackle’s review of Allais’s Économie et Intérêt. After presenting Allais’s reasons why interest remains positive, Shackle questions whether money and liquidity-preference merely obscure deeper forces of thrift and productivity. Might causation also run the other way, with monetary interest rates shaping capital accumulation, income and ultimately time-preference? His objection gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what a model shows to be possible from what it establishes about economic life. Yet the review is no dismissal: Shackle balances his impatience with perfect foresight against admiration for Allais’s analytical precision and the breadth of his investigation.

The fact that a gas-fire can make a room warm does not imply that a warm room must contain a gas-fire.