3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Defending free trade, Haberler argues, requires admitting that tariffs can sometimes confer benefits—even on a country as a whole. In this 1932 review of the committee report chaired by Sir William Beveridge, he praises a method that concedes theoretical possibilities while testing how plausible their conditions are in practice. His concern is both analytical and persuasive: absolute claims leave free traders vulnerable to objections they have failed to answer. Britain’s departure from gold gives that distinction a concrete setting, removing, in his assessment, the basis for Keynes’s proposal to use tariffs instead of devaluation or wage reductions. This short review shows why Haberler regarded qualification not as a retreat from free trade but as a condition of its credible defense.
Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.
Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.
English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”
Taking up Karl Knies's proposal to rank means of exchange as a third class beside consumer and producer goods, Mises, read here in the English translation of the 1932 original, builds a subjective theory of money's value. Its worth, he argues, springs from demanded monetary services, not from any intrinsic material use, and analysis must start from the individual's cash balance rather than aggregates like velocity or the equation of exchange. He rescues the quantity theory's core while discarding its mechanical version: new money enters through particular hands and redistributes wealth before prices adjust, never proportionally or all at once. A sharp line separates money proper, fully backed certificates, and unbacked fiduciary media, the last being what truly moves prices and interest. Perfectly stable money, he concludes, is a wish to escape the temporal nature of capitalism itself.
Only with the use of money is it possible to compare the marginal utility of goods in all alternative employments.
When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.
The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”
The Great War left Europe's monetary circulation almost wholly in the hands of central banks, which now furnish money rather than merely regulating it — the departure point for Reisch's practical observations, built on Menger, Mises, and Wieser. He reconsiders the banknote itself: once cash payments were suspended, its promise of redemption became a fiction, so the modern Schilling note is better read as a certificate of value whose parity the bank must defend. A discount rate held below the natural rate, he warns, drives production into overlong roundabout processes that end in liquidation and crisis; a wholly cashless economy, against Hahn, remains a fantasy; and the central bank stands as a primus inter pares disciplining the giro-money creation of private banks.
Es ist daher gewiß richtig, wenn die Federal Reserve-Banken die ihnen überreichlich zufließenden Goldmengen in weitem Maße „unausgenützt“ in ihren Kellern einsperren und nicht als Grundlage weiterer Kreditexpansion verwenden.
English translation: “It is therefore certainly correct that the Federal Reserve Banks largely lock away "unused" in their vaults the excessively abundant gold flowing to them, and do not use it as a basis for further credit expansion.”
The gold standard did not fail of its own defects; it was disabled, and then blamed for failing. First published in 1932 and reissued here with two supplements because the same misunderstandings still shaped policy, Hayek's report pins the interwar monetary collapse on central banks, above all the Bank of England, that refused to let gold outflows force the domestic credit contraction and wage adjustment the system demanded. Britain's 1925 return to prewar parity left costs too high; cheap money and appeals for central-bank cooperation masked the weakness rather than curing it. Behind the crisis lies his attack on price-level stabilization: propping up prices that ought to fall with rising productivity is inflation by another name, breeding the misdirected production that made 1929 unavoidable.
All this means that there has not been too little but too much cooperation between central banks, and that not the gold standard, but efforts aimed at making the gold standard inoperative are the causes of the present monetary troubles.
No explanation of the world crisis can dispense with the business cycle, and none can make do with it alone: from that double warning Schumpeter narrows a broad diagnosis to Germany's emergency policy of cutting prices and incomes together. Were every price, income, and value to fall at the same instant and in equal proportion, nothing real would change, but because book values, debts, inventories, and expectations cannot adjust uniformly, administrative deflation breeds the paralysis it claims to cure, driving unemployment toward seven million. Its one rational function is temporary, a strategic thrust to strengthen the mark and shift the reparations argument, to be dropped the moment it succeeds or clearly fails. The essay closes on fiscal causality, arguing through counterfactual that disciplined spending since 1924 could have spared Germany, since here public finance is destiny.
Für Deutschland sind die Finanzen Schicksal, rationelle Wirtschaft Lebensfrage.
English translation: “For Germany, finance is destiny, and rational economic management is a matter of life and death.”
The one hopeful element in Franco-German relations, Schumpeter argues in this 1932 view written for Lloyds Bank Monthly Review, is the economic factor, yet economics alone cannot overcome a political psychology shaped by victory, defeat, and the memory of war. Reparations are the crucial mixed case: economically damaging, since Germany cannot pay while creditor nations bar the exports that would earn the foreign exchange, but politically indispensable to a France that reads them as right and security, so that no ministry can revise them without courting political death. Against nationalist rhetoric he insists the two economies are complementary rather than antagonistic; agriculture divides them little, and disputes in porcelain, nitrogen, potash, coal, and automobiles are negotiable through committees and cartel-like compromise. French capital cannot substitute for confidence; loans that merely paper over political maladjustment only postpone the crisis.
No party or ministry can afford to neglect them unless it is prepared to encounter political death.
Can a banking law be clearly explained without inspiring confidence in its effectiveness? In this short 1933 review, Helene Lieser separates the two questions. Comparing editions of Czechoslovakia’s 1932 banking law prepared by Ant. Jeřábek and Oswald Doernfest, she treats the substantial revision of earlier legislation as grounds for skepticism, not reassurance. Yet she credits both editors with making a difficult statute intelligible: Jeřábek through cross-references and documentary materials, Doernfest through commentary incorporating parliamentary sources. The review offers a compact example of critical discrimination—approval of the tools for understanding regulation need not imply approval of the regulation itself.
What makes an international banking reference useful during a banking crisis? In this brief 1933 review of the 1932 survey Europäische Banken, Helene Lieser weighs the value of annually updated information against coverage limited to a few representative banks per country. Her praise centres on explanation rather than balance sheets alone: how the world crisis and currency depreciation damage credit institutions, and how rescue efforts differ across countries. From the Austrian Credit-Anstalt’s reorganisation to Swedish banks’ reckoning with the Kreuger crash, her examples identify what she finds instructive in the survey—a comparative account of banking distress and attempted repair, despite its restricted institutional coverage.
Financial translation requires more than formal equivalents: jargon and differences between British and American usage can determine a dictionary’s practical value. These are Helene Lieser’s particular concerns in her brief 1933 review of the English–German first volume of K. Th. Langguth’s Handwörterbuch des Finanzwesens. She grounds her strong recommendation in spot checks made during practical use, praising coverage useful to exporters as well as bankers. The review offers a compact statement of her criteria for a financial reference work: reliability tested in use, attention to regional terminology, and inclusion of expressions that more conventional dictionaries miss.