The archive.

The slim volume in which Hicks reworked the demand theory of Value and Capital gets a patient, skeptical reading here. Machlup follows Hicks through weak ordering, the derivation of the law of demand, and the awkward Giffen case that requires an inferior good, a small substitution effect, and a large budget share at once. He sorts out the four consumer's surpluses Hicks had once collapsed into one, the First and Second Substitution Theorems, and the reciprocity of cross-effects. His verdict is measured: the revisions change neither policy nor prediction, but they honor Occam's razor by resting demand theory on fewer primitive terms, an important reconstruction, he grants, though difficult and joyless to read.

An important book is sometimes enjoyable to read. Unfortunately this cannot be said about this book.

When do long odds make an outcome seem not merely improbable but impossible? In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle acknowledges a difficulty for his account of decision under uncertainty: even someone facing a unique venture may let probabilities shape judgements of what can happen. He welcomes investigation of Gould’s proposed modification while insisting on a prior question—whether the conflicting evidence from which businesspeople form expectations can be expressed as numerical odds at all. The exchange offers a compact view of Shackle responding to criticism without abandoning his central distinction between probability and possibility, and helps readers separate two sources of uncertainty: the rarity of a decision and the difficulty of interpreting its evidence.

The saver, in Mises's telling here—rendered into English from the 1957 German 'Der Sparer als Wähler'—is no marginal figure begging paternal favor but a structural pillar of capitalism, since to defend savings is to defend property, capital formation, and the rising real wages they finance. Genuine protection of savers, he insists, differs entirely from protectionist privilege: it means securing the legal and monetary order in which accumulated capital can survive. His sharpest move recasts the ordinary wage earner, with his savings account and life-insurance policy, as a creditor—one whom inflation quietly robs. The democratic danger is epistemic: voters mistake inflation for mere rising prices rather than an expansion of money and credit, and so demand the cheap-money policies that erode their own claims. Only patient explanation to the voter, he concludes, offers a way out.

The American "common man," as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic.

Can society claim the rental value of natural sites while protecting ownership of everything people build upon them? In this 1957 essay, republished in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Henry George’s single tax at precisely that boundary. He argues that separating site value from accumulated improvements requires arbitrary assessment, and that landowners perform a service even when they postpone development: they allocate scarce locations across uses and time. His economic objections lead into a moral dispute over whether gains arising from social development justify confiscation. The essay offers a compact encounter between two defenses of property that diverge over land, revealing how Rothbard connects market valuation, entrepreneurial foresight, and original appropriation—and why he regards taxing away land rent as a threat to those connections.

One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.

To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.

Can measures designed to protect tenants and farmers undermine the welfare they promise? In this 1958 review of Alfred Amonn’s Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen, Richard Kerschagl sympathetically examines a market-oriented answer, emphasizing policy disputes relevant to Austria. His treatment of agricultural protection brings the stakes into focus: Amonn’s case for cheaper food and more productive farming entails accepting the closure or absorption of marginal farms. Kerschagl praises the book’s accessible economic reasoning while questioning some of its chosen authorities. The review offers a compact encounter with his evaluative priorities: protection must be judged by its costs to consumers and taxpayers, and individual interventions by their possible cumulative direction—a concern that leads him to endorse Amonn’s warning about collectivism.

Grant an inventor exclusive rights over a new process, and you plant a monopoly in an economy that otherwise prizes competition, the tension Machlup was asked to weigh when the Senate patent subcommittee commissioned this study. He traces the institution from Venice's 1474 law and England's Statute of Monopolies through the free-trade antipatent movement of 1850 to 1873, when the Netherlands actually repealed its patent law, and dissects the four classic defenses: natural property in ideas, monopoly as just reward, monopoly profit as incentive, and disclosure traded for temporary exclusivity. His conclusion is a famous refusal to conclude, that on present knowledge economics can pronounce the system neither a clear gain nor a clear loss to society.

To confuse an important invention with the patent that excludes people from using it is like confusing an important bridge with the tollgates that close it to many who might want to use it.

Can labour explain capital formation without treating saving as its original cause? In this critical essay, Alfred Amonn examines Alexander Kokkalis’s attempt to rebuild economic theory around human productive powers. Kokkalis locates productive advance in invention, organization, and education rather than abstention from consumption; even the maintenance of workers becomes part of production, not merely its endpoint. Amonn takes these connections seriously while testing the distinctions that sustain them: between natural conditions and controllable means, and between directive intellectual labour and executive bodily labour. The essay’s interest lies in this combination of sympathetic reconstruction and conceptual scrutiny. It allows readers to see how redefining labour changes the explanation of capital, income, and wages—and where that explanation depends on contestable premises.

An automated rolling mill can raise output without spreading prosperity. In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer examines that gap through Austria’s uneven adoption of automation, from VÖEST’s industrial installations to the difficulties facing smaller firms short of capital and secure markets. His central distinction is between profitability for an enterprise and welfare for the economy: lower costs need not produce lower prices, and displaced workers need not find new jobs. Bayer treats credit coordination, retraining, shorter working hours, and equal educational opportunities as conditions for sharing technical gains, not incidental remedies. The article offers a concrete encounter with an economist who welcomes industrial modernization while asking how its growing productive power can serve personal development rather than strengthen economic concentration.

What should a social academy offer working adults beyond skills for economic competition? In this 1958 article, Hans Bayer argues that vocational learning must cultivate independent judgment and social responsibility, not merely occupational competence. His distinctive concern is the connection between personal formation and democratic counterpower: unions and cooperatives need educated members, not just capable leaders, if they are to resist concentrated economic power and commercial manipulation. Bayer makes this educational ideal concrete through unequal access to further study, neglected working-class talent, and the possibilities of leisure beyond consumption. The article lets readers examine both the institutional promise of adult education and the demanding ethical conception of Bildung on which Bayer bases it—a conception that refuses to count knowledge or prestigious schooling alone as genuine education.

Beryllium production expanded even as its price fell: this apparent paradox gives Richard Kerschagl’s 1958 survey its economic focus. A metal valued in aircraft, nuclear technology, and copper alloys was acquiring new sources of supply, notably in India and the Belgian Congo. Yet Kerschagl refuses to equate rising reported tonnage with increased extraction alone: better statistical coverage and improved metal recovery complicate the figures. His account distinguishes geographically dispersed mining from concentrated American and British processing, and connects cheaper supplies with a wider range of economically viable uses. Readers can discover both the changing supply geography of a strategic metal and the care required to interpret production statistics whose units, coverage, and relationship to usable metal vary.

The decline of classical liberalism is, in Mises's telling, the one fact that renders modern history intelligible, the return of doctrines that pit class against class, nation against nation, and race against race in place of the market's harmony of rightly understood interests. Originally a reply to a 1957 questionnaire, this compact polemic defines capitalism not as rule by big business but as consumer sovereignty and mass production for the common man, and defends higher output as the moral condition of lower infant mortality and vanishing famine. There is no stable third way, he maintains: each interference with prices, wages, or profits distorts coordination and breeds the next, so reformism slides toward gradual socialization. Sound money, he adds, is the constitutional barrier against escape through inflation.

Interventionism cannot be considered a lasting system of society's economic organization. It is a method of realizing socialism by installment.