The archive.

Borrowing the prestige of physics to study human beings is, for Rothbard, not science but scientism—the uncritical transfer of methods fit for stones to creatures who choose. Reprinted from Scientism and Values, this essay grounds a science of man in the axiom of volition: because people possess consciousness and free will, praxeology, psychology, technology, and ethics are intelligible where mechanistic determinism would render them absurd. Rothbard dismantles two families of false analogy—the mechanical, which reduces persons to servomechanisms, equations, and equilibria, and the organismic, which inflates "society" and "the public" into living wholes with purposes of their own. Against Weberian Wertfreiheit he charges that claimed neutrality often smuggles in majority values, and defends an axiomatic-deductive method over positivist experiment.

Scientism is the profoundly unscientific attempt to transfer uncritically the methodology of the physical sciences to the study of human action.

Can social science be objective without discarding what actions mean to the people performing them? In this essay, Schütz argues that subjective meaning belongs to the evidence social scientists must explain. A question and its anticipated answer show why observable sequences alone cannot account for interaction: participants act through expectations about one another’s purposes. Yet understanding them does not require access to their entire inner lives. Schütz connects everyday reliance on typical motives with the investigator’s construction of ideal types—selective model actors whose conduct must remain intelligible to ordinary people. His distinction between intended outcomes and the past experiences behind a project gives readers a precise way to separate purpose from retrospective explanation, while testing where scientific abstraction clarifies social action and where it loses its subject.

Does spending more on research simply buy more inventions? Machlup's answer is a patient no, or rather, much less than proportionately more. Inventive talent is scarce and its supply inelastic; drawing in extra researchers means paying rents to every incumbent and recruiting steadily less able hands, so marginal costs climb fast. Treating invention as an industry with a production function, he traces diminishing returns as more workers crowd a fixed stock of problems and knowledge, and catalogs ten reasons a swelling flow of raw ideas yields a rising share of rejects. The result is his four shrinkages, each thinning the passage from money spent to inventions actually put to work, a sober correction to any faith that funding alone accelerates technical progress.

These shrinkages are independent of one another; but they may add up with a vengeance.

Can Marx remain a valuable critic of industrial society if his economic theory is rejected? In this polemical 1960 article, Richard Kerschagl grants Marx a limited achievement as an economic historian while challenging the explanatory foundations of Capital. His most revealing distinction separates capital’s contribution to production from the capitalist’s entitlement to income: acknowledging the former, he argues, need not justify the latter. From this standpoint, Kerschagl charges Marx with allowing demands about distribution to govern explanations of value and production. Readers encounter a critique informed by marginal-utility reasoning whose insistence on separating scientific explanation from political commitment sits uneasily beside its openly adversarial rhetoric. The article makes that boundary—and the difficulty of maintaining it—the central stake of reassessing Marx.

A single correlation or average lag can conceal different relationships between short-term fluctuations and long-term movements. In this 1961 Princeton research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern asks what economists could discover by separating those temporal scales rather than imposing familiar business-cycle classifications. Drawing on communication engineering, he advocates spectral analysis as a way to detect rhythms within aggregate data and examine how series interact at different frequencies. His example of New York money-market rates makes the stakes concrete: longer-term components can show greater lags than shorter-term ones. Yet finer measurement is not economic explanation. Morgenstern’s proposal turns on a demanding tension: longer records improve frequency analysis, but also span institutional and technological changes that may undermine its assumptions. Readers encounter a research program in which statistical discovery challenges theory without claiming to replace it.

Between early 1954 and early 1957 American commercial exports leapt from $11 billion to $21 billion, then fell to $15 billion by 1959, touching off alarm over the balance of payments. This occasional paper brings eight decades of evidence to bear on whether that drop was an ordinary cyclical movement or signaled a deeper loss of competitive power. Mintz declines to forecast or prescribe, using the historical record to place the 1957-59 decline among earlier contractions and judge it unexceptional once the preceding boom is weighed. Measuring exports against world imports, the imports of the world outside the United States, as her gauge of foreign demand, she argues that shifts in foreign demand govern export swings more powerfully than the domestic cycle, while exports came to track U.S. business cycles more closely after 1921 than before.

Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.

Love and friendship become more valuable through freedom, yet economic goods seem to require availability for someone’s purposes. Such awkward cases give these post-1871 annotations their interest: Menger tests the boundaries of concepts rather than simply restating his published theory. Emil Kauder’s 1961 transcription preserves handwritten additions to the Grundsätze, not a new edition of the complete book. Proposed revisions, critical notes and reading excerpts show Menger asking how needs, scarcity and command over resources explain value where labour or production costs do not suffice. His attention to subsistence during production and to debts surviving a fall in prices brings time and monetary disruption into that inquiry. Readers can follow the friction between explanatory principles and resistant examples, while distinguishing Menger’s developing positions from the competing views he records.

Salaried employment can expand while individual jobs become narrower and opportunities for promotion diminish. This contradiction drives Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on employees’ place in industrial society. He distinguishes the growing importance of planning, research, and administration from the authority or qualifications of those who perform them: expertise need not confer command, and numerical growth need not bring higher status. Writing with a trade-union perspective, Bayer asks what could replace inherited prestige and hopes of individual advancement as a basis for collective identity. His answer links meaningful participation in workplace organization to solidarity with manual workers. The article offers a concrete way to examine the gap between an occupation’s economic importance and its members’ power—and Bayer’s case for closing it through collective action rather than status rivalry.

A firm can secure its own future by shifting uncertainty onto its suppliers—but has it thereby made the economy more stable? This distinction anchors Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on the organized market economy. Looking beyond company size and legal form to the structures of managerial decision-making, Bayer asks when long-term planning, diversification, and financial reserves can sustain employment and investment through downturns. He treats profit partly as a margin of safety, without assuming that corporate security serves the public interest. Smaller, personally directed firms enter this account as flexible specialists whose independence may depend on shared research and purchasing. The article offers a conditional account of stabilization through enterprise organization, while retaining competition as a necessary check on rigidity and concentrated power.

Can land reform improve rural welfare while reducing recorded national income? This possibility anchors Walter Froehlich’s preliminary contribution to the 1961 collection Land Tenure, Industrialization and Social Stability: Experience and Prospects in Asia. He questions comparisons that value market transactions more readily than household production, leisure, or security, then brings that criticism to bear on agricultural reform. His preference for viable family farms is conditional: redistribution alone cannot remedy holdings too small to support maintenance and improvement, nor replace opportunities for nonagricultural employment. The chapter’s distinctive interest lies in this connection between measurement and institutional choice. Readers can discover why an apparently technical judgement about economic progress depends on tenancy arrangements, resource pressures, and the social values that reform is intended to sustain.

What happens to marginal-utility calculation if people pursue ends other than their own well-being? In this 1961 editorial introduction, Emil Kauder finds that unresolved question in Carl Menger’s annotated copy of the Grundsätze, preserved at Hitotsubashi University. He reads its unfinished additions as evidence of a phase of Menger’s thinking not adequately represented by the posthumous 1923 edition. His account brings value-free economic theory into contact with Menger’s concern for the moral conditions of economic agency, without turning tentative reflections into a completed system. Kauder also explains how interleaved pages, pasted sheets and nested marginal notes were made readable. The result offers both a less settled picture of Menger’s economics and a concrete account of the editorial decisions on which that picture depends.

Asked what he had done in the Great War, the British economist Edwin Cannan answered simply that he had raised his voice against the folly around him—and for Mises that reply names the political virtue Germany lacked. Reviewing Volkmar Muthesius's Frankfurt monthly Monatsblätter für freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, he argues that the catastrophes of early-twentieth-century Germany followed from interventionism, inflationism, and fiscal mismanagement met with silence rather than dissent. The magazine matters as a rare postwar voice defending free trade, sound money, and balanced budgets while attacking subsidies, union privilege, and antimonopoly demagogy. Written at the height of the Cold War, the review links West Germany's liberal recovery to American resolve over Berlin and to Goldwater-style fiscal conservatism, presenting an independent free-market periodical in the classic land of socialism as itself a remarkable achievement.

The great catastrophes that befell Germany in the first part of our century were the inevitable effect of its political and economic policies.