The archive.

A factory can increase output without putting scarce resources to their best use. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1935 concluding essay in Collectivist Economic Planning, where he tests socialist proposals against the practical demands of economic calculation. His objection to mathematical planning is not that equilibrium cannot be described, but that its equations presuppose detailed, continually changing knowledge: even technically identical goods differ economically by location, age, and availability. Proposals retaining competition under state ownership sharpen another question—who allocates capital and bears the consequences of mistakes? The essay shows why Hayek treats calculation as a problem of institutions and responsibility rather than arithmetic alone. It also directs criticism at capitalist monopolies that preserve investors’ capital at consumers’ expense, distinguishing his defence of competition from a defence of existing businesses.

Cheaper credit can scarcely alter a factory’s running costs yet substantially increase the value of equipment it might build. Fritz Machlup’s 1935 article explains this contrast by separating interest as a production expense from interest as the rate used to capitalize expected returns. His numerical examples sharpen the distinction: a fall from 5 to 4 percent produces only a tiny saving on working capital, but a much larger rise in the present value of long-lived equipment. The reader gains a precise account of why debt relief need not expand output, why durable investment can respond strongly to lower rates, and why that response depends on prospective profits. Machlup’s analysis also identifies a limit to interest-rate policy: cheaper finance cannot stimulate investment where unfavorable costs and selling prices leave no future profits to capitalize.

Industrial growth did not necessarily strengthen trade unions, nor did official worker representation guarantee freedom to organize. These distinctions anchor Karl Pribram’s encyclopedic contribution, first published in 1935 and presented here in its 1954 reprint. Comparing the succession states and Balkan countries, chiefly through conditions in 1932, Pribram gives governmental permission to associate greater explanatory weight than workforce size alone. Hungary’s shrinking independent unions despite industrial expansion sharpen the contrast with Czechoslovakia’s mass organizations and comparatively secure associational rights. His institutional perspective also reveals less obvious pressures: land redistribution could turn potential union members into small proprietors, while unemployment insurance could encourage craft organization. The comparison helps readers distinguish membership, legal recognition, and institutional participation from effective union independence.

Why can unemployment persist even when production becomes more efficient or prosperity returns? In this encyclopaedia article, first published in 1935 and reprinted here in 1954, Karl Pribram tests expectations of automatic reemployment against European and American experience. His comparative perspective resists explanations based on wages alone: technological displacement, cartel prices, unstable lending, and blocked investment can prevent workers from finding new occupations. Equally revealing is his attention to measurement: unemployment figures drawn from benefit records depend partly on who is legally entitled to claim. Readers can discover how administrative categories shape economic evidence, and why Pribram distinguishes policies that provide immediate jobs from those capable of reviving investment.

Hidden inside general-equilibrium theory sits a premise its authors rarely state: that agents foresee the future without error. Morgenstern treats this 'vollkommene Voraussicht' not as a harmless simplification but as a logical fault line running through theories of risk, profit, money, and the business cycle. Pressed for its meaning — whose foresight, of which events, over what horizon — the assumption collapses. In a world of interdependent agents each forecast must include others' forecasts of oneself, and the Holmes–Moriarty regress of anticipated reactions and counter-reactions has no natural stopping point. Unlimited foresight, he shows, is simply incompatible with equilibrium, while total ignorance is impossible too. What remains is a research program: expectations as heterogeneous, fallible, socially distributed variables — an early step toward the strategic reasoning of game theory.

Unbeschränkte Voraussicht und wirtschaftliches Gleichgewicht sind also miteinander unverträglich.

English translation: “Unlimited foresight and economic equilibrium are therefore incompatible with each other.”

In financial usage, A. B. C. can mean the Aerated Bread Co., not the alphabet. This small example anchors Helene Lieser’s brief review of W. Collin Brooks’s A concise dictionary of finance: understanding financial language requires access to abbreviations and company nicknames as well as formal terminology. Lieser singles out the dictionary’s usefulness to readers whose language is not English and reports extensive spot checks supporting her judgement of its reliability. Her review offers a compact, concrete account of what she values in a financial reference work: precise explanation, practical linguistic guidance, and information that users can readily find.

An economy can revive without the world economy recovering. This distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s 1935 commentary its conditional optimism: renewed private investment offers evidence of market resilience, but national upswings remain vulnerable to monetary instability and barriers to trade. He attributes America’s acceleration to restored entrepreneurial confidence and a retreat from policy experimentation, while warning that cheap credit and gold inflows could turn recovery into another excessive boom. His international perspective also sharpens a concrete domestic criticism: protecting grain prices can harm other farmers by raising feed costs and reducing consumers’ purchasing power. The essay offers a contemporary liberal diagnosis of recovery in progress, asking how self-sustaining investment can be distinguished from state-supported activity—and why prosperity within national borders is not enough.

Wilhelm Vleugels’s brief encyclopedia portrait connects two sides of Friedrich von Wieser’s thought: the economist who applied marginal utility to production costs and the sociologist who argued that the many are always governed by the few. Vleugels makes their connection—not merely their coexistence—the point of his account, presenting economic relations as inseparable from their social setting. His appreciative perspective becomes especially visible when he calls Wieser’s prediction of dictatorships replacing the postwar democracies “almost prophetic.” This entry offers a compact introduction to Wieser’s movement from value and price to leadership and coercion, while also showing where Vleugels’s exposition turns into retrospective political judgement.

An economist’s published record may be a poor measure of his achievement. In this brief 1935 encyclopedia entry, Schumpeter portrays Allyn Abbott Young as a creative teacher whose ideas largely survive in the work of others, beyond reliable attribution. His assessment nevertheless gives that elusive influence a concrete intellectual shape: Young brought Marshall into conversation with Cournot and Walras and sought ways to join economic theory with statistical evidence. Schumpeter reads the scattered publications not merely as an incomplete record but as traces of sustained theoretical work, finding in the monetary writings components of a comprehensive treatise. The entry offers a compact example of one economist judging another where bibliography alone cannot settle the question of contribution.

When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.

Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.

English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”

What makes a share handbook useful? In this brief review of the 1936/37 Der Aktienführer, Helene Lieser foregrounds speed, reliability, and breadth of company information. She notes the separation of the former Saling II into bond and equity guides and compares the equity volume’s arrangement with the Austrian Compass. Her favourable but qualified verdict offers a concise view of the practical standards she applies to financial reference publishing, rather than an assessment of individual companies or investment prospects.

What makes a bibliography trustworthy beyond the breadth of its coverage? In this 1936 review of Henry Higgs’s Bibliography of Economics, 1751–1775, Hayek welcomes an undertaking built on Foxwell’s extensive collections, then tests its reliability against particular entries. Harris’s two-part work on money receives misleading records; Raper reappears as “Roper”; a nineteenth-century edition of Prussian archival documents finds its way under 1769. These are not interchangeable complaints: they expose problems of attribution, identification and chronological scope. The brief review offers a concrete encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of scholarly reference tools, showing why admiration for a bibliography’s comprehensiveness need not entail confidence in its details.