The archive.

An unemployment total may count people registered at employment exchanges, receiving benefits, or covered by insurance: the same label can conceal different populations. In this article, Karl Pribram uses such difficulties to ask what makes labour statistics a distinct field. His answer locates its identity not in exclusive ownership of facts, but in questions about workers’ conditions and their improvement. That reforming purpose raises a methodological tension: social policy can set the questions, but must not dictate the findings. Pribram shows why international comparison requires scrutiny of administrative categories, why economic and labour statistics legitimately overlap, and why an average wage cannot establish an adequate wage. The result is a concrete account of how measurement can serve social purposes without pretending to supply its own standards of justice.

Defining an economic equilibrium does not explain what brings it about. In this second reply to Franz Oppenheimer’s reconstruction of objective value theory, Alfred Amonn tests that distinction against occupational choice: a worker may be capable of better-paid work yet prefer an easier job, so lower earnings do not establish inferior ability. His criticism targets the passage from convenient assumptions to purported explanations. Most sharply, he argues that taking the relative values of different kinds of skilled labor as given leaves a general theory of value assuming what it should explain. The exchange offers a concrete way to examine the limits of economic abstraction: when does a definition clarify a causal problem, and when does it merely conceal an unanswered question?

Vienna’s commercial privileges could protect a market without producing merchants willing—or able—to expand beyond it. In this archival article, Friedrich Engel-Janosi examines the city’s loss of commercial reach from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century, with evidence extending into a later, partial recovery. He connects warfare, currency debasement, and foreign competitors’ superior credit networks with a more difficult question: did merchants increasingly prefer secure household wealth to an enduring enterprise? Tax assessments and wills suggest an investment ideal centred on property and independence, while Alexius Funk’s ledgers disclose overdue payments and debts settled in goods. Read together, these records allow readers to weigh Engel-Janosi’s interpretation of diminished commercial ambition against the insecurity that made caution reasonable.

Careful documentation does not yet amount to explanation: this distinction guides Helene Lieser’s brief 1927 review of two studies of Swiss banking. She credits Albert Linder’s historical dissertation with extensive research and Hans Drechsle’s statistical account with clear, interesting data, while finding both theoretically underdeveloped. Her comparison of Swiss and Austrian banking gives the criticism concrete substance. Industrialization and railway construction helped shape institutions that combined deposit banking with commercial and industrial credit and securities issuance. The review offers a compact view of these institutional connections—and of Lieser’s insistence that banking scholarship do more than assemble historical facts or present figures.

How could a bank identify the sender of a telegram from its telegraphic address? That practical problem gives a revealing detail in Helene Lieser’s brief review of Pick’s International Banking Directory 1927/28. She singles out an alphabetical appendix that links telegraph addresses to banks’ names and locations, alongside some 50,000 entries for banks and bankers in Europe and New York. Her recommendation rests on completeness and ease of retrieval. This short notice offers a concrete glimpse of the reference tools used to locate banking contacts and decipher incoming communications.

A history of an exchange is not necessarily a history of its buildings. In this brief 1927 review, Helene Lieser credits the attractive presentation of Rudolf Granichstaedten-Czerva’s illustrated booklet while noting that it describes Vienna’s trading premises rather than offering economic history. Her judgement becomes concrete in corrections concerning ownership of the former exchange building, current trading hours, and an illustration’s source. The review’s interest lies in this precise distinction between a well-presented account of places and a history of the activity they housed.

Sound research does not necessarily warrant a book: that distinction gives Hayek’s brief 1927 review of Andreas Révai its edge. Révai explains fluctuations in the French franc through Ricardo–Cassel purchasing-power parity theory, and Hayek commends his choice of statistical evidence, command of foreign-language scholarship, and usefulness for university teaching. Yet he leaves open whether such studies, however suitable as dissertations, justify separate publication. The review offers a compact example of Hayek’s critical standards: approval of an economic explanation and its empirical support remains distinct from a judgement of its significance as a publishing contribution.

Mises opens this brief review by contrasting two kinds of socialist historiography: scholarship absorbed in personal trivia and scholarship that clarifies economic ideas. Rodbertus’s letters to Schumacher, edited by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann, earn his approval for their attention to agricultural credit, rent, and the social question. His praise is not an endorsement of Rodbertus’s doctrines; it concerns what the correspondence and its supporting documents make intelligible. Even without Schumacher’s replies, Mises finds evidence illuminating both Rodbertus’s thought and Germany’s early imperial years. The review offers a compact instance of Mises judging historical scholarship by its explanatory value rather than dismissing it for its subject’s politics.

A wealth of economic statistics does not, for Morgenstern, amount to a reliable means of prediction. His 1927 review of Hardy and Cox’s Forecasting Business Conditions praises its guide to American forecasting services while challenging its promise to make businessmen independent forecasters. Production figures, freight data, and price indices offer information; they do not tell users which indicators to trust or explain the processes behind them. Morgenstern’s distinctive concern is the pressure commercial demand places on unsettled science: impatience with theory cannot establish predictive competence. Nor does his criticism imply that he possesses a better forecasting method. This short review makes a precise distinction between a handbook’s documentary usefulness and the authority of the practical techniques it recommends.

American banks expanded abroad while New York and California barred foreign banks from opening branches at home. This asymmetry gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1927 review of Clyde William Phelps’s The Foreign Expansion of American Banks its critical edge. Rather than rest with war and growing trade as explanations, Morgenstern stresses the legal permissions and acceptance market that made overseas expansion possible. He also asks how long unequal access could persist: in his judgement, European dependence on New York capital restrained retaliation, but could not be assumed permanent. His qualified appreciation of Phelps’s history offers a compact view of the institutional conditions behind banking expansion—and of the difference between international financial reach and willingness to admit foreign competitors.

A wage law may work as designed without securing the social peace it promises. This distinction frames Oskar Morgenstern’s 1927 review of E. M. Burns’s Wages and the State: the efficiency of regulatory machinery and the suitability of its aims require separate scrutiny. He values Burns’s comparative evidence, especially from Australia and New Zealand, as a necessary basis for that inquiry. Yet his praise also draws attention to unresolved standards: what makes a wage “fair,” which family’s needs count, and what can an industry afford? This short review shows Morgenstern joining empirical demands to conceptual criticism, while endorsing Burns’s turn from wage-setting rules toward the underlying causes of low pay.

Advice on shelving and folder labels becomes the decisive exhibit in Hayek’s sharp 1927 review of Erich Schäfer’s Die Wirtschaftsbeobachtung. Schäfer draws on experience in the German porcelain industry’s economic archive; Hayek objects not to practical instruction itself, but to its presentation as a theoretically grounded contribution to economic observation. He contrasts the book’s epistemological ambitions with elementary administrative advice, quoting a passage on archive furniture to make the mismatch tangible. This brief review shows Hayek judging scholarship by the connection between its theoretical claims and its practical substance—and lets readers assess how far his concrete example warrants his sweeping dismissal.