The archive.

A landowner could raise money by selling a perpetual claim on landed income without promising ever to repay the capital. That distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s brief encyclopedia entry: the rent charge served purposes similar to borrowing, yet escaped the church’s disapproval of ordinary interest-bearing loans. Fetter approaches this medieval legal instrument through the economics of investment, comparing the exchange of fixed incomes for capital sums to a modern bond market. His account makes clear why the absence of a maturity date mattered—not merely as a contractual detail, but as a basis for distinguishing the transaction’s ethical status. Readers gain a compact explanation of how landowners’ need for funds and burghers’ demand for investments met within religious constraints.

How could scholars and practitioners find their way through the League of Nations’ abundant publications? In this brief 1934 review, Helene Lieser endorses A. C. v. Breycha-Vauthier’s guide on precise, practical grounds: its author’s experience in the League library’s legal and political service, its skilful arrangement, and its detailed subject index. Her notice offers a compact assessment of a bibliographical aid, showing what she valued in making institutional documents usable—not an appraisal of the League’s policies.

What makes a banking directory useful to both practitioners and researchers? In this brief 1934 review of the 1933/1934 Annuario delle Banche e Banchieri d’Italia, Helene Lieser gives concrete grounds for praising Robert Ghislandi’s handbook: broad institutional coverage, searchable indexes, and several years of balance-sheet figures for larger banks. Her attention to the selection of rural credit institutions— included only if they collect bills for third parties—shows that coverage depends on explicit criteria, not merely a long list of entries. The review offers a compact account of the financial and legal information Lieser valued in a reference work, and of its reach beyond Italy to colonial institutions and Italian banks abroad.

Diminished interest need not mean diminished usefulness: this distinction anchors Helene Lieser’s brief 1934 review of Ferdinand Ensch’s account of Luxembourg holding companies. She values the book not simply for collecting tax and fee provisions, but for showing how they apply to companies engaged in control, investment, financing, and patent exploitation. Her concise appraisal offers a concrete glimpse of what she finds useful in a legal-economic guide during the world economic crisis: rules connected to business functions, illustrated by actual examples, and supported by literature and official publications.

A financial dictionary can prove reliable in practice yet miss the mechanism that defines a monetary term. In this short 1934 review of the German–English second volume of K. T. Langguth’s Handwörterbuch des Finanzwesens, Helene Lieser welcomes a useful reference work while identifying precise improvements. Her sharpest example is Schwundgeld: its definition omits the continual loss of value intended to accelerate circulation. Attention to Austrian institutional names and commercial usage gives her corrections a local specificity. The review offers a compact example of practical terminological criticism: Lieser asks for greater precision without mistaking individual defects for general unreliability.

Perfect competition earns its keep here not as a description of any real market but as the benchmark against which every messier case is measured, and messier cases, this 1934 review essay argues, are where most economic life actually sits. Assessing Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition, Schumpeter fixes on marginal revenue as her decisive analytical discovery, the tool that restores symmetry to demand-and-supply reasoning and unifies pricing across competition, monopoly, and the territory between. He credits the book's rigor and teachability while faulting its cost: a resolutely Marshallian, two-variable, partial-equilibrium frame that forgoes indifference curves and Walrasian generality. Imperfect-competition analysis, he warns, overturns welfare and policy verdicts, sometimes into the exact opposite of what they were twenty years before.

For any science or part of a science, the first task always consists in establishing the logical autonomy of its field, or rather the conditions under which there is logical autonomy.

An early German advocate of Adam Smith could also argue for restrictions on free competition. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram presents Georg Sartorius von Walthershausen as both a teacher of Smithian economics and a selective critic of its premises. Sartorius’s rejection of an automatic harmony between private interests and public welfare led him to defend state intervention, especially in foreign trade. Pribram also credits him with separating the study of national wealth from governmental economic policy. The entry offers a precise glimpse of how Smith’s ideas were adapted in German university teaching, while resisting any easy identification of Sartorius’s historical scholarship with the later historical school of economics.

One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.

The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.

Accepting Adam Smith’s economic laws did not necessarily mean accepting economic freedom. In this brief biographical encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram examines Soden’s attempt to reconcile Smith with German cameralism in his nine-volume Die Nationalökonomie. Property, grain trading and guilds expose the limits of that reconciliation: Soden defended existing social institutions when economic liberty threatened them, distinguishing universal economic laws from their administrative application. Pribram’s pointed assessment separates theoretical coherence from intellectual influence. He suggests that the very compromises that troubled orthodox Smithians may have helped stimulate German discussion of Smith—a concrete case of economic ideas gaining a hearing through adaptations that also altered their implications.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

Even a paradise of unlimited goods would leave one resource scarce: the time to enjoy them. In this 1934 article, Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan makes time an economic problem rather than merely a backdrop to choice. His distinctive move is to connect the limits of anticipation and consumption with the unequal speeds at which markets adjust. Knowing the conditions of equilibrium does not tell us whether an economy will reach it: prices, demand and supply may react at different rates, while fresh disturbances interrupt unfinished adjustments. These frictions, he argues, can change the outcome, not just postpone it. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a tendency towards equilibrium from an actual path through time—and to see what static analysis leaves unexplained.

A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.