The archive.

Greater coverage need not make a dictionary less portable. In this brief 1930 review of the German–English second volume of Hereward T. Price’s Volkswirtschaftliches Wörterbuch, Helene Lieser praises its expanded contents and organization while stressing its handy format. Her particular concern is business travel: a substantial reference tool must remain easy to carry. The notice offers a compact glimpse of her practical criteria for judging an economic dictionary, rather than an assessment of individual translations.

Trust may explain why people accept money, but does it explain how much money will buy? In this 1930 review of H. Oswalt’s Grundzüge der Geldtheorie, Fritz Machlup praises a monetary primer that keeps these questions distinct. His admiration for Oswalt’s teaching is tempered by a precise objection: calling a commodity’s price its “objective exchange value” does not establish that value is a measurable quantity. The review becomes especially pointed when it turns to banking. Machlup endorses the distinction between creating money for lending and treating every extension of credit as money creation—a distinction that, he argues, prevents banks from shifting responsibility for additional purchasing power onto the economy at large. This brief appraisal shows what Machlup demands of accessible theory: clarity without conceptual shortcuts.

Can economic policy be assessed without endorsing its political goals? In this 1930 review of Martha Stephanie Braun’s Theory of State Economic Policy, Fritz Machlup praises her shift from cataloguing government measures to explaining their effects on demand, supply, and prices. His central distinction is precise: economists can test whether an intervention serves a stated end without deciding whether that end is desirable. The stakes become concrete in his endorsement of Braun’s contested arguments that unemployment benefits and public employment schemes can sustain the conditions they seek to remedy. This short review shows how Machlup’s methodological demand for causal explanation informs substantive policy judgments—and why, for him, good intentions cannot establish an intervention’s success.

Finding an office is not the same as finding an official. In this brief review of the Österreichischer Amtskalender for 1930, Helene Lieser calls the directory indispensable for administrative and economic work, but proposes a practical improvement: an alphabetical list of officials alongside the systematic arrangement. Her small intervention draws attention to the difference between organizing information by institutional structure and making it accessible to someone searching by name.

Comparative advantage, not absolute superiority, is what makes trade pay — a country gains by exporting where its disadvantage is least and importing where it is greatest, even against a rival more efficient at everything. This essay rebuilds that classical theorem on firmer ground, replacing Ricardo's labour theory of value with opportunity cost: the real cost of more of one good is the quantity of another forgone along a substitution curve. Haberler then extends the argument from two goods to many, ranking commodities along a shifting export-import margin set by wages, exchange rates and the balance of payments. He turns the framework against the case for retaliatory tariffs and against protectionist appeals to immobile capital, arguing that idle plant and written-down assets are private losses, not proof of national waste.

Unilateral free trade is thus—tactical considerations aside—thoroughly desirable and preferable to a generalized tariff regimen.

Reserved from the first part were money, capital, and interest; the second volume takes them up. Engländer opens with money 'without intrinsic value,' deriving the total sum of prices from quantity, true cash reserves, market frequency, and velocity, and rejecting any appeal to the marginal utility of fiat money. He then argues that a purely cashless economy of book transfers is theoretically possible, and that bank book-credit does not itself create capital but frees idle reserves. The capital theory works upward from a single-stage economy of capitalists and workers to multi-stage and free-stage production, bounding the interest rate between the highest 'provision number' and the lowest 'sacrifice number' while denying that the productivity of roundabout methods explains interest at all. Cycles, he concludes, are not the inevitable fate of capitalism if saving is properly timed.

Nehmen wir nun noch den Fall eines Barerlages bei einer Bank, und zwar zu bloßen Verwahrungszwecken, so ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, daß die Bank diese bei ihr erlegten Gelder weiterverleiht.

English translation: “If we now consider further the case of a cash deposit at a bank, and indeed one made merely for safekeeping purposes, the possibility arises that the bank lends out these funds deposited with it.”

How does a country saddled with reparations actually hand real resources across its borders, and must its export prices fall to do so? That question, sharpened by Germany's post-Versailles burden, sets Haberler against Bertil Ohlin in these two essays, translated from the 1930 article and its 1931 rejoinder. Endorsing the Thornton-Mill view that price movements are almost always needed to force the required export surplus, he nonetheless refuses the standard conclusion that the terms of trade must turn against the payer, showing that they can conceivably improve. Against Keynes's transfer pessimism he judges a demand elasticity of one or less for German exports highly improbable, given Germany's competitive industries and small share of world markets, while carefully separating the international transfer problem from the domestic fiscal task of raising the sums.

One could say, therefore, that Keynes was right in theory but his opponents in practice.

Self-determination and imperial collapse multiplied Europe's sovereign states after 1918, even as trade, production, and population bound them ever more tightly together — a contradiction Rappard makes the engine of his survey of postwar cooperation. He tracks the continent's lurch from three republics to thirteen, the rise of dictatorships he links to agrarian social structure, and the slow shift from coercion to negotiation marked by the Dawes Plan, Locarno, and Germany's admission to Geneva. He measures demography, coal, cereals, and tariffs with League statistics, and judges the machinery of peace — the Kellogg Pact, arbitration treaties, the Permanent Court — with a sympathetic skepticism, faulting a renunciation of war that lacks definitions and sanctions. The unresolved question, he writes, is whether brute force or international justice will finally govern a Europe too interdependent to stand apart.

The execution of the peace treaties is a secondary, an almost accidental, and essentially a transient function of the League.

Robert Deumer's prize-winning blueprint for a state monopoly of credit takes nationalization as settled and worries only over its institutional design; Mises attacks the premise instead. Behind the plan lies the belief that private banks finance merely profitable rather than nationally necessary industries, a contrast he dissolves by converting the question of credit allocation into one of consumer sovereignty, since profit expresses the demand of consumers, not the whim of bankers. A nationalized bank, he argues, could never be run commercially: commercial management is inseparable from private ownership, profit-and-loss responsibility, and monetary calculation, so bureaucracy would follow not from bad officials but from the absence of any profitability test. Freed from redemption, such a bank would inflate on political command. Credit nationalization thus approaches full socialization, a late relic of an exhausted statism.

Man kann einen Staatsbetrieb niemals „kommerzialisieren“, auch wenn man noch so viele Äußerlichkeiten der privaten Unternehmung auf ihn überträgt.

English translation: “One can never "commercialize" a state enterprise, no matter how many external features of private enterprise one transfers to it.”

Vienna's adult-education colleges — the Volksheim, the Volksbildungsverein, and the Urania — grew, Braun argues, out of a nineteenth-century liberal faith in knowledge as emancipation, then bent to modern demands for organized, practical, specialized learning. Confining her study to Vienna, where the evidence allowed, she distinguishes the genuine Volkshochschule from vocational schools and party schools, and defends its integrity against the Marxist claim that objective teaching in the social sciences is impossible: choose lecturers by competence, not worldview, or the college becomes a party school. The essay's sharpest thread follows women into the lecture hall — dominant in foreign languages, advancing in physics, medicine, law, and economics as the university opened to them. That they met so little resistance in this poorly paid, honorary work, she concludes, exposes how often talk of female inferiority merely masks competition for wages.

Daß man dem Vordringen der Frauen in dieser sehr verantwortungsvollen und hochqualifizierten Tätigkeit so wenig Widerstand entgegensetzt, ist wiederum ein Beweis mehr dafür, daß die Schlagworte von weiblicher Inferiorität oft nur durch den Brotneid angeregt werden.

English translation: “That so little resistance is being offered to the advance of women into this highly responsible and highly qualified activity is once again further proof that the slogans about female inferiority are often prompted merely by professional envy.”

Rather than rehearse the familiar arguments for reforming the finances of Reich, Länder, and municipalities, this 1930 essay takes the opposite path and estimates what German fiscal inaction would cost. Schumpeter grants the depression is real and severe, but denies that rationalization, concentration, or foreign-capital shortages explain it; their common defect is blindness to how taxation and public spending shape recovery itself. Capitalism renews itself through profits that finance expansion and technical change, and divert those gains into politically driven consumption, and every upswing peters out before its work is done. Failed reform, on this reading, is no mere budgetary mishap but a hinge of historical causation: it drains the surplus recovery needs, deepens the slump, and pushes a strained society toward socialization or authoritarian reaction, each pleasure short-lived against Germany's industrial reality.

Denn jeder Aufschwung nährt sich zum Teil aus seinen eigenen Gewinnen und muß versanden, ehe er getan hat, was er sollte, wenn diese Gewinne ihrer Bestimmung entzogen und fortgesteuert werden.

English translation: “For every upswing feeds in part on its own profits and must peter out before it has accomplished what it should, if these profits are diverted from their purpose and taxed away.”

Can a comprehensive account of international trade explain much if its basic concepts are unstable? In this 1931 review of Franz Eulenburg’s Aussenhandel und Aussenhandelspolitik, Gottfried Haberler tests a broad historical and policy survey against exacting theoretical standards. His distinction between selling cheaply abroad and charging different prices at home and abroad makes the stakes concrete: an account of dumping can fail at the level of definition. He likewise objects to tariff analysis that precedes an adequate explanation of comparative costs. While acknowledging useful historical material, Haberler argues that facts require a coherent explanatory framework. This brief, sharply critical review shows what he demands of trade scholarship—and why, for him, theoretical order is more than a matter of presentation.