The archive.

Can banks create the credit needed for investment without creating the savings on which real capital formation depends? In this short 1927 review, Friedrich August von Hayek endorses Heinrich Mannstaedt’s critique of Albert Hahn while adding a pointed distinction of his own: lending can draw deposits away from an individual bank without withdrawing them from the banking system as a whole. Hayek praises Mannstaedt for pursuing Hahn’s theoretical reasoning more consistently rather than merely citing contrary facts. His judgement turns on the gap between credit creation and capital formation: credit may stimulate saving under certain conditions, but cannot replace it. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards of theoretical criticism and his insistence on distinguishing monetary possibilities from their real economic effects.

A theory can cease to suffice without ceasing to deserve understanding. In this short 1927 review of James Bonar’s The Tables Turned, Oskar Morgenstern finds a way to appreciate classical economics without defending its continued supremacy. He praises Bonar’s pairing of a lecture with an imaginary conversation in Elysium, where Adam Smith meets his successors to discuss what The Wealth of Nations can still offer. Morgenstern’s enthusiasm for this literary device accompanies a precise historical judgement: classical achievements must be measured against the problems their authors faced, not merely against present needs. The review offers a compact statement of that distinction—and turns it back upon contemporary economists, whose own questions and answers will also become historical.

Auch die gegenwärtige Generation wird einmal der Vergangenheit angehören, mit den Fragen, die sie beschäftigen, und mit den Antworten, die sie zu geben versucht.

English translation: “The present generation too will one day belong to the past, together with the questions that occupy it and with the answers it attempts to give.”

For Mises, the missing words in Keynes’s title are decisive: laissez-faire belongs with laissez-passer, the free movement of people and goods. This brief 1927 review of Keynes’s Das Ende des Laissez-Faire turns less on the proposed regulation of private ownership through semi-autonomous bodies than on protectionism and migration restrictions. Mises brings those omissions into focus through the predicament of displaced people and would-be emigrants barred from competing for work abroad. His challenge is pointed: can liberalism be blamed for distress produced, in his judgement, by its abandonment? The review offers a compact encounter with Mises’s insistence that property, trade, and human mobility cannot be assessed as separate freedoms.

Why did authoritative explanations of the mark’s depreciation prove, in Hayek’s judgement, so damaging to German currency policy? This short 1927 review of Rüdiger von der Goltz’s comparison of German exchange-rate theories with Goschen’s earlier account locates the failure in economists’ neglect of monetary theory, not simply their unfamiliarity with currency questions. Hayek singles out the balance-of-payments explanation for criticism and honours the few economists who opposed it without securing practical success. His qualified assessment of Goltz—sufficiently careful, but missing important contributions and offering little independent insight—makes the review more than an endorsement. It offers a compact statement of Hayek’s insistence that theoretical errors can carry policy consequences, without presenting an alternative exchange-rate model.

What makes a banking directory useful to a foreign reader? In this brief 1927 review of the third annual issue (1925/26) of the Annuario delle Banche e Banchieri d’Italia, Helene Lieser assesses practical accessibility rather than merely the ambition to list every Italian bank. Her comparison with the Kompaß places its institutional and financial data within a familiar reference format. She singles out overseas branch listings and banking tax and fee schedules as valuable supplements, especially for foreigners. The notice offers a concise view of the information Lieser valued for locating banks and conducting business across borders.

What makes an economic dictionary useful beyond supplying equivalent words? In this brief 1927 review of the English–German first part of Hereward T. Price’s Economic Dictionary, Helene Lieser especially welcomes its bibliographical references. Her approval, explicitly based on spot checks, leaves room for pointed correction: she proposes missing entries such as “compulsory liquidation” and questions the German renderings of “political arithmetic” and “bucket shops.” These concrete examples show where a promising reference work still requires scrutiny—and how Lieser distinguishes a questionable translation from a probable printing error.

Could America remain the world’s banker while financing the development of its own land and productive resources? In this brief 1927 review, Helene Lieser welcomes Max E. Bodmer’s statistical survey and foregrounds its argument that American savings would be needed at home. Her approving account connects this prospective limit on foreign lending with the tensions of a creditor economy maintaining protective tariffs and immigration restrictions. The review offers a concise encounter with an expectation that American domestic development would constrain international finance—and that Europe would therefore need to regain financial independence rather than rely indefinitely on American credit.

Freedom of river navigation did not gain the same acceptance as freedom of the seas. In this brief 1927 review of Richard Hennig’s Freie Ströme, Helene Lieser focuses on a legal uncertainty: what did the Versailles treaty mean by “internationalization”? She presents war and the peace treaties as reversing earlier gains in navigational freedom, and reports Hennig’s conclusion that a satisfactory definition would require further international agreements. Her closing judgement adds a political constraint: such agreements were desirable but unlikely under the prevailing balance of power. The review offers a compact encounter with the gap between a promise of international regulation and the conditions needed to make its meaning clear.

Banks can create purchasing power—but can they thereby create the resources needed for investment? In this 1927 review of Albert Hahn’s theory of bank credit, Gottfried Haberler accepts deposit creation while contesting the conclusions Hahn draws from it. His critique turns on two concrete distinctions: an individual bank must reckon with settlement demands from other banks, and money available to entrepreneurs is not the same as resources available to sustain production. Yet Haberler does not reject every productive role for credit expansion; he allows that it may help overcome obstacles to otherwise profitable innovations. The review offers a precise encounter between monetary innovation and economic constraint, showing why recognition of bank-created money need not entail belief that credit can replace saving.

By the 1880s American economics had broken from English classical laissez-faire, and this survey—Fetter's contribution to a German comparative handbook, read here in that German translation—maps what grew in its place. He tells how German-trained scholars like Ely and Clark founded the American Economic Association, how Simon Patten's emphasis on consumption and psychology prepared the ground, and why Austrian marginal utility found unusually fertile soil in a country already reading Jevons and J. B. Clark. Fetter defends the 'psychological school' as a shift of interest from the outer physical world to human wants and valuations, blames the mistranslation of Nutzen as 'utility' for false charges of Benthamite hedonism, and answers Veblen and the institutionalists of The Trend of Economics before laying out ten trends he expects American theory to pursue.

Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.

English translation: “The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.”

Every restriction of contractual freedom imposed in favor of workers: that, at its most general, is what Lederer and Marschak mean by Arbeiterschutz, which they place at the juridical core of social policy under industrial capitalism. Worker protection is not paternal charity but a legal limit on the formally free contract, making the employment relation itself an object of public intervention. Their longest analysis concerns working time, the classic breach in liberal contract freedom, from bans on child and women's labor through Sunday rest to the postwar eight-hour day and the Washington Convention. Truck prohibitions, minimum-wage boards, factory inspection, and occupational-disease law extend the account, until enforcement passes to unions, works councils, and labor courts as much as to statute. A closing section carries it into the ILO founded under Part XIII of Versailles.

Am unmittelbarsten und elementarsten zeigte sich die verheerende Einwirkung des Industriesystems und der Einführung von Maschinen auf Kinder und Frauen.

English translation: “The devastating impact of the industrial system and of the introduction of machinery showed itself most immediately and most elementally upon children and women.”

A ship’s drinking-water supply poses a precise problem for value theory: if stores and remaining needs decline together, does the marginal utility of a tonne remain unchanged? Wilhelm Vleugels uses this example to scrutinize Friedrich Wieser’s rules for valuing stocks, distinguishing successful household planning from an adequate calculation of total value. His objection turns on what a withdrawal would actually cost: halfway through a voyage, surrendering a tonne sacrifices different satisfactions than it would at departure. Against the prospect of reconciling Wieser with Böhm-Bawerk, Vleugels shows why the unit measured and the period of consumption matter. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish equal daily benefits from the changing value of a fixed quantity removed from a dwindling supply.