The archive.

No single psychological impulse, neither abstinence nor Böhm-Bawerk's alleged underestimation of future needs, can carry the weight of interest. Working at the crossroads of Austrian capital theory, marginal productivity, and monetary economics, Mahr rebuilds the theory around the productivity of roundabout production, distinguishing horizontal expansion, which repeats existing methods, from vertical expansion, which lengthens production through new stages. Whether longer methods pay depends on technology, market size, and above all wages. He then abandons the fiction of one capital market and one rate: money markets, bond markets, and stock markets communicate imperfectly, their rates parting over the cycle. Modifying Wicksell, he locates the trigger of booms not in a single natural rate but in a discount rate held below the normal money-market level. The result fuses Böhm-Bawerkian roundaboutness with institutional and monetary realism.

Die Kenntnis der Gesetze des Produktionsertrages ist eine unentbehrliche Voraussetzung der Zinstheorie wie überhaupt jeder Einkommenstheorie.

English translation: “Knowledge of the laws of the yield of production is an indispensable prerequisite of the theory of interest, as indeed of any theory of income.”

A binding obligation need not be a contract. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald makes that distinction the basis of a comparative inquiry into what secures agreements: ritual acts, prescribed words, political authority, or dependence on another’s resources. Against Mauss and Davy, he rejects customary gift obligations as a universal origin of contract. His cattle-leasing examples give the problem a concrete edge: an arrangement for subsistence can also sustain political subordination, blurring the boundary between private agreement and public authority. The article offers readers a way to examine consent alongside rank, kinship, and enforcement, while its ethnographic comparisons expose tensions within Thurnwald’s own proposed progression from binding acts through verbal formulas to consensual agreement.

What distinguishes regular administration from the exercise of authority? In this brief 1929 encyclopedia entry, Richard Thurnwald sets a precise threshold: an archaic state must have developed an officialdom with assigned functions that constitutes a distinct social stratum. The entry offers a compact definition rather than an extended argument, making specialization and social differentiation—not merely rule—the criteria for administration, before directing readers to “Staat” for fuller treatment.

Marriage prohibitions and sexual conduct do not necessarily coincide: this distinction opens Richard Thurnwald’s brief encyclopedia article, Verwandtenheirat (1929). He tentatively connects restrictions on marriage between relatives with alliances among communities, rather than explaining them by blood relationship alone. Maternal or paternal right and neighboring customs further shape the permitted unions. The entry offers a compact glimpse of his comparative approach to kinship: marriage rules emerge through relations both within communities and between them, while their existence does not establish how people actually behave.

Somary, lecturing at Heidelberg in the war's long aftermath, argues that 1918 recast not merely currencies and trade routes but the very axes of economic politics: state construction, market scale, and world-power position now cut across the old party labels. Liberalism and socialism, once international programs, have both curdled into national interest parties. From this his German survey moves through spaces rather than doctrines, a Britain sunk from ingenious solver to land of unsolved problems, a United States crossing from colonial periphery to world power as the Federal Reserve and New York displace London, a Europe fragmented by tariff walls into a caricature of itself. His boldest proposal is a Franco-German economic union marrying French capital to German labor; his sharpest observation, that the great capitalist organizer and the socialist planner converge in their appetite for monopoly and stabilization.

Das Europa von heute ist eine Karikatur dessen, was es sein sollte.

English translation: “The Europe of today is a caricature of what it ought to be.”

Nineteenth-century England supplies the model: there fiscal reordering, tariff change, and industrial expansion moved as a single process, proof that public finance is never neutral bookkeeping but an invisible tariff running through the economy. From that premise Schumpeter attacks Weimar's stagnation—two years of unemployment and high interest that no ordinary downturn explains—and traces it to a fiscal structure that taxes future productive capacity. His organizing concept is Kapitalbildung: reserves are not hoarding or privilege but the fund from which equipment is renewed and output extended, and progressive income and business taxes fall hardest on the margins where reserves form. A real reform must shift burden toward tobacco and alcohol consumption, as Stolper's plan proposes; even a limited change, well placed, could lower interest rates and unblock recovery. Doing nothing, or replacing private saving with state compulsion, he rejects outright.

Jede Finanzpolitik ist auch Wirtschaftspolitik, bewußte oder unbewußte.

English translation: “Every fiscal policy is also economic policy, whether consciously or unconsciously.”

Markets without centralized states, wealth accumulated for obligatory generosity, and shared food alongside individually owned tools unsettle familiar divisions between economic systems. In this 1929 encyclopedia article, Richard Thurnwald asks how subsistence, exchange and work become intelligible through the social relations that organize them. Drawing on ethnography, Oceanian observations and ancient history, he resists both a compulsory sequence of economic stages and the assumption of universal acquisitive self-interest. Festival markets on the lower Augusta River and the circulation of Kula valuables give concrete substance to his distinctions between profit, prestige and obligation. His hierarchical terminology and broad cultural generalizations require critical scrutiny, but his comparisons offer a precise question to pursue: when does control over goods become authority over people?

The household, rather than the individual craftsman, anchors Richard Thurnwald’s explanation of craft guilds in this compact encyclopedic entry. He asks how skills guarded by families and concentrated in particular settlements become the basis of corporate organization. His comparative perspective links kinship and technical mastery to political obligations: artisan communities owe collective payments in kind to the state, with their head responsible for delivery. Yet organization need not bring prestige, as his South Arabian examples suggest. Read as a proposed genealogy rather than a continuous institutional history, Zunft offers a way to distinguish occupational specialization, social standing, and corporate authority without assuming that the familiar arrangements of medieval European crafts were guild organization’s original form.

More intensive cultivation need not make a farm more viable. In this report of a 1929 Heidelberg institute excursion to Pomerania, Emil Lederer, Käthe Bauer-Mengelberg, and Svend Riemer examine estates whose technical efforts collide with poor soils, costly transport, depressed prices, and debt. Estate visits and accounts—given particular prominence by the Pommerscher Landbund’s invitation—support a crucial distinction: preserving existing owners is not the same as securing agricultural production. The authors also test proposed remedies against their human costs. Smallholdings may survive through unpaid family labor; estate economies may depend on low wages and restrictive employment arrangements. Readers encounter agricultural rescue as a conflict among profitability, property, and livelihoods, rather than a simple choice between efficient large estates and independent peasant farms.

A leading sugar manufacturer who opposed the sugar cartel: this tension gives Schumpeter’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Rudolf Auspitz its political interest. His theoretical assessment turns on a different distinction—between early neglect and genuine originality. Schumpeter credits the price theory Auspitz developed with Richard Lieben with pioneering geometrical methods and a symmetry between cost and utility, insisting that its appearance before Marshall’s Principles matters to any judgement of its contribution. The entry offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a historian of economics, weighing an industrialist’s liberal convictions alongside mathematical ideas he considered still only partly exploited.

Accused by Emil Lederer of reading his crisis writings superficially, Hayek replies by quoting them back at length—and finds in them the same underconsumptionist error he had charged against Foster and Catchings. Lederer explains general crisis as a gap between output and the purchasing power spent as income; accumulation, on this view, proceeds 'too fast' for consumer markets to realize profits. Hayek names this the Grundirrtum. Crises, he insists, come not when consumption is too small but when the structure of production is drawn into roundabout paths no longer justified by the relative demand for capital and consumer goods. Against Lederer's leaning toward credit-financed consumption and public works, he sets a preventive policy of braking the boom, since once malinvestment is done no curative Wunderkuren can undo it.

Eine solche Disproportionalität kann vielmehr meiner Ansicht nur darin bestehen, daß das Verhältnis des Kapitalgüterangebotes zum Konsumgüterangebot größer ist als das Verhältnis von Kapitalgüternachfrage zur Konsumgüternachfrage.

English translation: “Such a disproportionality can, in my view, consist rather only in the fact that the ratio of the supply of capital goods to the supply of consumer goods is greater than the ratio of the demand for capital goods to the demand for consumer goods.”

To call Böhm-Bawerk a theorist of interest is, in Schumpeter’s judgement, to understate his project. This brief 1930 encyclopedia entry places interest within a wider account of production and distribution, organized around time: the relation between consumption goods already available and those expected from production processes of different lengths. Schumpeter pairs this interpretation with a portrait of the Austrian finance minister, praising his budgetary discipline and legislative achievements despite difficult political circumstances and no personal party affiliation. The result is a compact assessment of both administrator and economist, especially useful for understanding why Schumpeter regarded Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation of interest as one result of a larger analysis rather than its sole purpose.