The archive.

The complete economist, on Shackle's mischievous accounting, would need mathematics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, prose, and practical finance all at once—an impossible portrait meant to show that no single technique defines the field. Theory, he argues, is the disciplined imaginative construction of recurrent structures; it grows rigorous not by turning algebraic but by drawing out implications and testing them against rival forms. Keynes stands as proof, since abler mathematicians produced no revolution of their own. From this breadth follows an educational program: recruit able rather than residual students, delay premature specialization, and keep mathematics the servant of economic problems. An economist, on this view, is formed by breadth disciplined into judgment—the capacity to quantify without forgetting the people economics is finally about.

Economics emphatically is about chaps.

Even a fully developed economic theory, Morgenstern contends, would leave many policy problems unsolvable — because policy adds demands theory never faces: aims stated quantitatively, timing, tolerated side-effects, feasible computation, and, decisively, a list of admissible means. A problem impossible under one set of permitted operations may become trivial under another, as squaring the circle, Columbus's egg, and the Gordian knot each illustrate. Unemployment could be 'solved' by conscription, work camps, or forced relocation; ruling those out changes the problem itself. Invoking Gödel as a reminder that decidability runs deep, he separates the theoretical solution from the policy solution and warns that civilization, by narrowing the morally acceptable instruments of action, tends to make its economic problems harder even as economic knowledge advances.

The statement that a problem has no solution for a given set of means is exactly equivalent to stating that a contradiction prevails.

Adam Smith did not lay the foundation stone of political economy but its keystone: with this revision Mises opens his 1953 introduction to a selection from The Wealth of Nations, recasting Smith less as a solitary inventor than as the synthesizer who gave the liberal tradition durable architecture and impeccable literary form. Smith's importance, he argues, is civilizational—his laissez-faire principles dismantled mercantilism and secured even the less industrious a standard of living above the well-to-do of earlier days, all under the discipline of consumer sovereignty. Against socialist caricatures of Smith as an apologist for greed, Mises enlists Buckle and Bagehot. Yet the essay ends in warning: read Smith for the origins of freedom, never as a substitute for studying modern economics, any more than reading Euclid replaces mathematics.

Its publication date—1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence—marks the dawn of freedom both political and economic.

Private ownership does not guarantee economic freedom, Hans Bayer argues, when concentrated power restricts production and leaves workers bearing the costs of failed investment. This 1953 article asks how deliberate economic coordination might instead protect individual development within social security. Bayer’s answer is neither unrestricted competition nor comprehensive nationalization, but a mixed arrangement of private firms, public enterprises, and democratic cooperatives. His distinctive concern is how their investment decisions can be coordinated around anticipated demand and collective welfare without hardening into bureaucracy. Examples from British coal production and Benelux investment cooperation give practical substance to the argument. Readers can examine a conception of freedom that requires protection from private domination while explicitly subordinating individual opportunities to the interests of the community.

For Hans Bayer, economic freedom in postwar Austria requires more than lifting state restrictions: it depends on repairing the institutions that constrain production and sustain monopoly power. This 1953 article treats the economy as a patient whose repeated wage–price settlements have relieved symptoms without addressing their causes. Fragmented farms, poorly coordinated industrial exports, and rigid cartel pricing underpin his argument that inflationary danger follows structural weakness, rather than explaining it. Against the Kamitz programme, Bayer proposes coordinated investment and a public-interest sector of cooperatives and municipal and state enterprises. His distinctive tension lies in making collective economic organization a condition of individual freedom. The article shows concretely how that claim translates into choices about credit, productivity, and the purposes of enterprise.

The claim organizing this survey is that international trade theory is no autonomous doctrine but general price, production, monetary, and welfare theory applied to a world of nations, currencies, and immobile factors. Tracing the line from Hume's price-specie-flow mechanism and Ricardo's comparative costs through Mill and Marshall's reciprocal demand, Haberler shows how opportunity cost and general equilibrium rescued comparative advantage from the wreck of the labour theory of value. He weighs Heckscher-Ohlin factor-price equalization, the Stolper-Samuelson theorem, and Leontief's paradox, always separating sharp theorems from empirically reliable ones, and carries the same caution into terms-of-trade measurement, the foreign-trade multiplier, and purchasing-power parity. The classical free-trade case survives as a powerful benchmark — never an unconditional theorem.

There exist only rudiments of truly dynamic analysis in the field of non-monetary trade theory.

A tax textbook can supply facts without teaching readers how to judge them. That distinction drives Walter Froehlich’s 1954 review of William H. Anderson’s Taxation and the American Economy. Froehlich tests the book’s interdisciplinary ambitions against concrete explanatory tasks: distinguishing taxable income from economic profit when discussing who bears a tax, and reconciling court decisions rather than merely placing them side by side. His praise for Anderson’s diagram-assisted account of estate-tax avoidance sharpens the criticism: accessibility need not sacrifice precision. This short review offers a pointed standard for introductory writing in law and economics—whether it gives nonspecialists the conceptual connections needed to reason beyond the information provided.

Christian charity cannot compensate for an unjust economic order—but the Gospel cannot substitute for economic expertise. This tension guides Hans Bayer’s review essay as he weighs Christian social teaching against competitive markets, monopoly, and centralized coercion. Engaging Catholic and Protestant thinkers, Bayer argues that moral renewal and institutional reform must proceed together: an economy should secure the material conditions for personal development, not merely obey the price mechanism. His distinctive move is to seek common ground with democratic socialism while separating its humane aspirations from materialism and totalitarian collectivism. The essay offers a concrete encounter with Christian arguments for structural economic change, including the difficult question of how religious commitments can guide institutions without prescribing their technical design.

The same visible movement might belong to a war dance or a ceremonial reception: observation alone cannot establish what an action means. In this methodological essay, republished here in 1967, Alfred Schütz asks how social science can achieve objectivity when its subject matter is already interpreted by the people it studies. His answer preserves scientific rigor without treating actors’ meanings as dispensable or interpretation as private intuition. Scientific concepts, he argues, reconstruct the everyday types and expectations through which people understand one another. The essay offers a precise way to assess theoretical models: their simplified actors need not reproduce whole persons, but their attributed motives and actions must remain intelligible in everyday terms. Readers can discover why abstraction and fidelity to subjective meaning need not be competing demands.

Whether the non-communist economies would return to multilateral liberal trade or settle into a managed world of controls, quotas, and currency blocs was, in 1954, the question convertibility decided. Haberler first clears the definitional ground, separating full from partial convertibility, resident from nonresident rights, and current from capital transactions, because governments can proclaim liberalization while preserving discrimination through licensing and blocked balances. His normative claim is that convertibility is the monetary form of free trade, letting countries specialize by comparative efficiency instead of matching imports to exports bilaterally. The failed 1947 sterling experiment serves as his warning: it collapsed not because convertibility is unworkable but because inflation and an overvalued pound made it so. Rejecting gold-standard deflation, he favors monetary discipline joined to freely floating rates over the speculation-prone Bretton Woods peg.

It cannot be repeated too often that any form of open or repressed inflation is incompatible with convertibility and stable exchange rates.

Can consumer cooperatives grow powerful enough to challenge cartels without weakening their own democratic life? In this 1954 article, Hans Bayer answers critics who equate cooperative scale with bureaucracy and economic regimentation. His defense turns on what economic power is used for: the Swedish Luma light-bulb factory, he recounts, welcomed a cartel’s threatened price cuts because cheaper bulbs would serve consumers even if competitors supplied them. Yet growth brings obligations, not automatic justification. Investment must be balanced against immediate savings, and member education and decentralized oversight must keep pace with organizational complexity. Bayer offers a concrete account of the tension between competitive strength and self-government, arguing that freedom for economically weaker consumers may require large institutions rather than small ones.

No purely factual history is possible in any politically relevant sense, Hayek maintains, because citizens judge their institutions through inherited stories about what those institutions have done. Introducing a wider inquiry into capitalism and industrialization, he takes aim at one such story: the legend that the Industrial Revolution impoverished and degraded the working classes. Drawing on Clapham and on concessions later made by the Hammonds, he argues that real wages and living standards generally rose, and that capital accumulation let a vastly larger proletarian population survive at all. Visible urban misery, Corn Law-era Tory propaganda against manufacturers, and socialist historicism from Marx to Sombart and the Webbs together fixed the darker picture as common sense. Hardship, he counters, more often flowed from monopoly, state action, and precapitalist restrictions than from the competitive order itself.

Political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected.