3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
People compete, cooperate, and act on unequal knowledge; atoms do not. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s first-edition preface to Morton Davis’s book on game theory, dated February 1972 and presented here in its 2005 version. Morgenstern argues that social inquiry needs mathematical concepts fitted to purposeful interaction, rather than borrowed from physics. Yet his demand for precision leads not to a dismissal of nontechnical writing but to a defence of it: accessible explanation succeeds when grounded in detailed theoretical knowledge. His endorsement of Davis thus offers a compact account of what rigorous popular exposition should accomplish—and why, in Morgenstern’s view, explaining emotionally charged social problems need not entail passing value judgments.
Never before, Meyer observes, had Austrian taxation asked how much a man possessed altogether rather than taxing each source, land, buildings, trade, salary, rent, in isolation. Written as a practical Wegweiser to the 1896 personal income-tax reform, this second booklet walks the taxpayer through the new law: the progressive scale rising from roughly 0.6 to nearly 5 percent, the exemption of subsistence income below 600 florins, the combined taxation of a household's income, and the deductions allowed for debt interest, illness, and dependents. Meyer defends the reform's institutional novelty, assessment by commissions half-elected by the taxpayers themselves, and insists throughout that consumption and expenditure serve only as a basis for estimating income, never as the object of tax. Rentiers, long escaping the net, now become taxpayers.
Der Haushalt ist keine Abzugspost vom Einkommen, sondern eine Verwendung des Einkommens.
English translation: “The household is not a deduction from income, but a use of income.”
A state can define a monetary unit, but can it explain what that unit will buy? In this review of Kurt Singer’s Das Geld als Zeichen, Emil Lederer presses the gap between money’s legal validity and its purchasing power. He credits Singer’s insights into credit creation and economic fluctuations while questioning whether central-bank management can secure stability without a fuller account of the economy. The same demand for concrete explanation shapes his criticism of Singer’s cultural history: medieval debasement and postwar currency collapse require analysis of fiscal pressures and exchange relationships, not merely the invocation of an epoch’s spirit. The review offers a pointed distinction between recognizing that money is historically conditioned and explaining how particular economic conditions sustain—or undermine—it.