3,015 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Financing a longer production process is not the same as having the resources to sustain it. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1935 joint review of Richard von Strigl’s Kapital und Produktion and Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen. Machlup finds striking agreement in their treatment of capital as a fund maintaining productive factors until consumers’ goods become available, but tests their propositions rather than merely endorsing them. His criticism of Strigl turns on a concrete temporal problem: an unchanged quantity consumed over a longer period means less consumption per unit of time. In Eucken, he values the connection between production time, wages, and productivity. The review shows how shared capital-theoretical premises can illuminate these relationships without establishing agreement on credit expansion or economic fluctuations.
Depreciation can measure a loss in asset value or guide provision for replacement—but these are not the same task. In this review of R. F. Fowler’s book, Fritz Machlup shows why their separation matters for capital theory and business finance. He welcomes Fowler’s attention to the timing of investment and replacement, while questioning his terminology and identifying neglected changes in complementary costs. Machlup’s distinctive emphasis falls on capital’s time-structure: producing more durable equipment differs from making each piece last longer. The review offers a compact way to see how apparently technical accounting choices bear on investment requirements, dividends, and the contrast between an expanding firm and one maintaining a steady replacement cycle.
To make more durable goods is one thing, to make goods more durable is another.
A currency can return to gold without recovering the trust once attached to it. That distinction drives Mises’s 1935 review of the third edition of T. E. Gregory’s The Gold Standard and its Future. Praising Gregory’s monetary analysis, Mises questions whether restored gold parities could revive international lending while governments remain willing to depreciate currencies in pursuit of domestic objectives. Protectionism, nominal-wage commitments, and policies favouring debtors enter his account as obstacles to credible monetary restraint. This short review offers a precise way to distinguish a formal monetary rule from the political willingness to honour it—and shows why Mises regards the latter, rather than the technical act of stabilization, as the decisive problem.
The label “Manchester School” obscures the social concerns of the Manchester Statistical Society, Hayek argues in this 1935 review of T. S. Ashton’s centenary history. Investigations into mortality, railway labourers’ conditions and public health supply his concrete counterweight to that familiar image: here were researchers making the problems of industrial towns visible with scant resources. Hayek also reads Ashton as a theoretical economist alert to neglected predecessors. He singles out William Langton’s and T. H. Williams’s discussions of banking and trade cycles, asking whether their work helped shape Jevons’s thinking about cycles and capital. This brief review offers both a corrective to an intellectual stereotype and a carefully conditional lead for tracing the transmission of economic ideas.
Monetary nationalism promised escape: independent paper currencies, variable parities, and wide gold points that would seal a national economy off from foreign shocks. That promise, Hayek argues in this contribution to The Economist's debate over a future international order, is a delusion — real international adjustment cannot be evaded, only redirected, and discretionary depreciation breeds fresh conflict. Yet gold too is defective, since shifts in the demand for gold can inflict grave disturbances. His resolution treats fixed parity as a coordinating rule rather than mere attachment to metal, and proposes regulating gold-exchange reserves — central banks' realizable claims on other currencies — with a body such as the Bank for International Settlements varying the permitted ratio to offset gold's swings while leaving national reserves intact.
If an international standard is wanted, the gold standard, in spite of its undeniable defects, is the only practical choice.
Was the Depression an exceptional disruption, or did ordinary business cycles continue beneath it? In this brief, author-prepared summary, Schumpeter distinguishes the downturn’s cyclical shape from its catastrophic severity. He proposes three overlapping cycles rather than a single wave, interpreting the descent to August 1932 and the ensuing recovery through their coinciding depressive phases. Yet he assigns the catastrophe’s intensity to outside disturbances, including what he regards as mistaken efforts to stabilize “prosperity plateaus.” The distinctive interest is this boundary between cyclical explanation and policy judgement: Schumpeter sketches how theory, historical evidence, and statistics might identify an underlying movement without claiming that it alone explains the disaster.
A unified unemployment policy need not mean a single remedy. In this 1935 paper, Karl Pribram asks which forms of joblessness can be insured, which demand public relief, and which call for investment to restart production. His distinctive combination of confidence in capitalist recovery and support for loan-financed public works turns on the purposes of expenditure: projects intended to revive basic industries should not be judged simply by how many people they employ directly. He likewise separates calculable unemployment risks from the unpredictable scale of cyclical losses. Readers encounter a concrete argument about institutional responsibility—why employers and workers should pool some risks, why taxpayers should bear others, and why stimulating recovery differs from meeting immediate hardship.
A practical guide to foreign-exchange controls can clarify the law without replacing its study. That distinction anchors Helene Lieser’s brief 1935 review of Albrecht Buschke’s account of German exchange regulations. She values its independent exposition, rather than reproduction of statutory texts, for practitioners who encounter the system only occasionally. Her measured endorsement offers a precise criterion for judging such handbooks: whether they orient newcomers toward the legal sources they still need to consult. The review assesses the usefulness of an explanation, not the economic merits of the controls themselves.
Knowing where a tax truly lands, this 1935 treatise argues, must precede any judgment of tax policy. Engländer separates two domains of public finance—general tax theory and the theory of tax shifting—and grounds the obligation to pay not in any equivalence between tax and state service but in the value of the organized community itself. Tracing incidence through his own price theory, he reaches a pointed conclusion: a consumption tax does not merely burden consumers but, by curbing their spending elsewhere, drives down other producers' returns until it merges with the workings of direct taxation. From the Bernoulli-Bentham law of sacrifice he derives progressive rates and exemption of the subsistence minimum, then rejects every single-tax scheme in favor of a system that combines direct and indirect taxes to satisfy competing principles at once.
Nicht die Kaufkraft der Einkommen vermindert sich, sondern indem ein besonderes Staatseinkommen aus Steuern auftritt, vermindern sich die anderen Einkommen.
English translation: “It is not the purchasing power of incomes that diminishes; rather, as a distinct state income from taxes arises, the other incomes diminish.”
Cartelization means isolated planning—that judgment anchors this comparative study of European collective monopolies, written at the Brookings Institution as the United States debated its National Recovery Administration. A cartel, for Pribram, is defined not by its legal form but by its price policy: whether it stabilizes prices, allocates markets, and restrains output to convert competitive uncertainty into administrative allocation. Cartels flourish, he argues, not from industrial maturity but from weak, overbuilt, contracting markets, where the home market comes to look like a fixed quantity to be apportioned; the German movement before and after 1914 supplies his central evidence. Their planning is sectional, privileging producer security over consumer interest and market entry—order, but partial and self-interested, and likely to aggravate the very crises it claims to tame.
The real touchstone enabling the observer to arrive at an adequate understanding of the exact nature of cartels is the price policy they pursue on the controlled markets.
By 1935 Austria's authoritarian state had declared itself built 'auf ständischer Grundlage,' and this concise official guide maps what that meant in practice. Bayer walks through the emerging apparatus of corporatism estate by estate—agriculture, the public service, the Gewerkschaftsbund of workers and employees, and the parallel employer federations for industry, trades, commerce, transport, finance, and the free professions. His argument is made through correspondence: each workers' Berufsverband is to face a structurally matching employer body, so that collective bargaining, consultation, and arbitration can be regularized into 'Arbeitsfrieden' and class antagonism replaced by supervised parity. Membership is nominally voluntary, yet agreements bind all; leaders rise from local units even as ministers keep decisive powers of appointment. The result is Austrofascist ideology translated into concrete administrative machinery for absorbing labour and capital into supervised public structures.
Eine der größten Gefahren der berufständischen Ordnung wäre eine Abschließung der Berufstände gegeneinander; dies würde nichts anderes bedeuten, als daß an Stelle des Egoismus des einzelnen der Gruppenegoismus der Berufszweige treten würde.
English translation: “One of the greatest dangers of the occupational-corporative order would be a sealing-off of the occupational estates against one another; this would mean nothing less than that the group egoism of the occupational branches would take the place of the egoism of the individual.”
Out of the collision and layering of ethnically distinct groups—Überschichtung—Thurnwald derives the state, in this fourth volume tracing political form from egalitarian hordes, clans, and sibs up through sacral chieftainship, feudal tribute, caste, and rationalized despotism. Conquest, pastoral migration, and marriage, not kinship alone, generate rule. He rejects Freud's primal father-horde and Rousseau's unregulated state of nature, holds that society climbs no single ladder from simple to complex, and gathers cases from the Marind-anim of southern New Guinea to Norse Greenland and Polynesian sea-aristocracies. States may rise and vanish, he concludes, yet the knowledge won in building them is never wholly lost.
Der Klan ist eine Extremgestaltung, wobei politische, Kult- und Heirats-Organisation zusammenfallen.
English translation: “The clan is an extreme formation, in which political, cultic, and marriage organization coincide.”