3,187 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Business-cycle theories may be easier to distinguish than the theorists who hold them. In this brief 1929 review of Alvin Harvey Hansen’s Business-Cycle Theory, Gottfried Haberler endorses Hansen’s refusal to draw a rigid boundary between monetary and non-monetary explanations, yet questions the usefulness of a classification in which the same authors repeatedly reappear. His pointed objection to the placement of harvest theories makes the difficulty concrete: does locating cyclical effects within capitalism adequately distinguish their causes? Haberler’s discriminating appraisal separates orderly presentation from substantive insight, reserving his praise for Hansen’s detailed analysis, especially his criticism of Foster and Catchings. The review offers a compact example of Haberler judging competing explanations without forcing their proponents into exclusive camps.
Does an elastic banking system necessarily generate business cycles? In this 1929 review of Friedrich A. Hayek’s Geldtheorie und Konjunkturtheorie, Wilhelm Röpke welcomes a monetary explanation that looks beyond the general price level to credit creation and interest rates, but stops short of endorsing its exclusive claims. Writing as a monetary theorist himself, he asks whether changes in real accumulation can also disturb equilibrium and challenges Hayek’s reliance on automatic market adjustment, particularly in agriculture. His response offers a compact encounter with monetary theory under internal scrutiny: agreement on the importance of commercial-bank credit leaves open both the necessity of recurring fluctuations and the scope for policies to moderate them.
Does calling an economy “dynamic” help explain interest, or merely shift the terms of the problem? In this review of Gerhard Heinze’s comparison of Cassel, Schumpeter, and Böhm-Bawerk, Hayek singles out unstable concepts as a weakness in rival explanations. He endorses Heinze’s pointed observation that entrepreneurial creativity is itself a datum, just as the valuations of agents in a static economy are. Yet his approval is discriminating: neglecting Wicksell weakens the discussion of bank and real interest, while other omissions leave important alternatives unexamined. This brief review shows why Hayek judged Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation stronger than Cassel’s and Schumpeter’s without treating it as immune to criticism: logical consistency and closeness to economic facts matter more than claims to theoretical novelty.
Higher wages for some workers cannot simply compensate for unemployment among others: this distinction anchors Hayek’s appreciation of Richard Strigl’s analysis of collective bargaining. In this short 1929 review, presented in English translation, Hayek praises applied economics that refines theoretical assumptions rather than merely popularising them. Strigl’s experience observing wage negotiations supplies concrete institutional differences and frictions that abstract models can miss. Hayek’s approval is discriminating: he challenges an argument that production can absorb artificially increased wages when its success depends on later capital accumulation. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards of economic explanation—attentive to bargaining power and customary profits, yet insistent that an adjustment argument account for the conditions that make adjustment possible.
National spirit, for Schumpeter, is real only as a historically shifting pattern of dispositions lodged in social strata—never a single essence or moral trait, and altered whenever the relative weight of classes shifts. Refusing both the romanticized Volksgeist and its reduction to statistics, he reads Germany since unification through class morphology, replacing the one social pyramid with coexisting agrarian and industrial hierarchies. Urbanization is irreversible; the peasantry, having secured its essential aims, now stabilizes rather than threatens the order; the nobility, bred for service rather than independent leadership, cannot lead, and neither can the ever-mobile industrialist—so present-day Germany, he concludes, has no leading class at all. Workers grow into the strongest power yet seek a socially secured petty-bourgeois existence, while the swelling ranks of salaried employees and officials promise a future stamped by bureaucracy.
Der Bauer hat gesiegt. Innerhalb der ländlichen Sphäre hat er im Wesen, was er wollte. Aus dem revolutionärsten ist er zum konservativsten Element unseres Volkes geworden.
English translation: “The peasant has triumphed. Within the rural sphere he has, in essence, what he wanted. From the most revolutionary he has become the most conservative element of our people.”
Can bank credit support increased production without making enterprises dependent on continued expansion? In this 1929 critical essay on D. H. Robertson’s Banking Policy and the Price Level, Gottfried Haberler tests Cambridge monetary theory against the movement of capital and labour between industries. His objection is concrete: keeping wheat prices steady after agricultural productivity improves may hold resources in farming when adjustment requires their transfer elsewhere. Admiring Robertson’s analytical distinctions while challenging his policy conclusions, Haberler asks what simplified barter models leave out when applied to a monetary economy. Saving, production time, and especially interest become tests of whether credit-financed investment can endure. The essay makes visible a tension between stabilizing prices and sustaining a productive structure once credit expansion ends.
Out of the wreck of the Habsburg monetary union came a scatter of new currencies, and this survey sets them side by side as they steadied toward the end of the 1920s: Austria's Schilling, Hungary's Pengő, the Czechoslovak crown forged in Rašín's stamping experiment, Poland's twice-stabilised Zloty, the lira, dinar, lei and, after hyperinflation, the German Reichsmark. Kerschagl narrates each path from collapse to reform, then appends the machinery behind them—gold-parity tables computed from fine-gold weights, statutory redemption and reserve rules, and central-bank balance sheets as of March 1929. One principle recurs across the reforms: sound reconstruction meant barring further state credit from the note press. Issued under the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag, it serves as much as a reference apparatus as a history.
Die wichtigste Bestimmung war die, daß jede weitere direkte oder indirekte Kreditgewährung an den Staat unzulässig sei.
English translation: “The most important provision was that any further direct or indirect extension of credit to the state was inadmissible.”
Cooperatives need not replace capitalism to deserve serious study. In this brief 1929 review of Ernst Grünfeld’s handbook volume, Ludwig von Mises distinguishes failed hopes of economic transformation from cooperatives’ durable role as enterprises. His sharpest criticism concerns what an economic account can miss: cooperatives also serve political, religious, cultural, and national commitments. Grünfeld acknowledges these forces in his historical discussions, Mises observes, but leaves them out of his sociology. The review offers a compact example of Mises insisting that organizational purposes cannot be reduced to immediate economic tasks—while warmly endorsing a book whose treatment he finds incomplete.
Stable prices and unchanged lending rates need not mean that investment is aligned with saving. This is the central challenge Fritz Machlup develops in his 1929 review of F. A. Hayek’s identically titled book. He explains why improved profit opportunities can set credit expansion in motion without banks first cutting rates, and why bankers who merely accommodate demand may collectively finance investment beyond available savings. His perspective is sympathetic but not deferential: while praising Hayek’s account of monetary causation, he disputes the concession that changes in voluntary saving alone can explain the characteristic passage from boom to crisis. The review offers a concrete way to distinguish what initiates an expansion from what allows it to become unsustainable—and monetary explanation from moral blame directed at bankers.
Before Prices and Production made him famous in London, Hayek laid the foundations of his business-cycle theory in this 1929 monograph, here reissued with Kurt Leube's bibliography. Empirical research and statistics, he insists, can raise problems but never generate the causal laws of economics; only theory grounded in price, production, and interest can explain the cycle. Non-monetary accounts, whether technical, psychological, or built on disproportionality, fail because they smuggle in elastic credit while denying it any explanatory role. The engine is the Wicksell-Mises divergence between the money rate and the natural rate of interest: bank credit pushes lending below the equilibrium rate, lengthening the higher stages of production beyond what voluntary saving can sustain, until the boom's distorted capital structure collapses into crisis.
Solange wir uns des Mittels des Bankkredites bedienen, um die Entwicklung zu fördern, werden wir auch die Konjunkturschwankungen mit in Kauf nehmen müssen, die durch ihn verursacht werden.
English translation: “As long as we make use of bank credit as a means of promoting economic development, we shall also have to accept the cyclical fluctuations that it causes.”
The doctrine that thrift starves its own market—money saved being purchasing power withheld from consumers—found aggressive new champions in the American writers W. T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, popularized through the Pollak Foundation and its prize contests. Hayek dismantles their supposed paradox of saving by restoring the capital theory they lack. Saving does not simply pile output beside old output; it changes methods, withdrawing resources from immediate consumption toward intermediate and capital goods and lengthening the production process. Under a constant money stream, falling consumer-goods prices signal higher productivity, not underconsumption. Testing the claim across fixed capital, circulating capital and vertically integrated firms, he warns that the remedy Foster and Catchings urge—injecting new money through consumers or public works—would shorten production and destroy the very capital that saving forms.
Das einzige, was vor allem anderen nötig ist, um eine dauernde Aufwärtsbewegung der Wirtschaft zu sichern, ist genug Geld in den Händen der Verbraucher
English translation: “The one thing above all others required to secure a lasting upward movement of the economy is enough money in the hands of consumers.”
The Far East, and Japan above all, appears here as the site where a world-historical rupture becomes visible: the collision of a closed, tradition-saturated civilization with the expansive forces of European industrial capitalism. Refusing both romantic Asia-enthusiasm and European condescension, Lederer and his co-author Emy Lederer-Seidler reconstruct Japanese life from within, from Shinto and ancestor cult to Tokugawa aesthetics, the forty thousand characters that discipline a childhood, and samurai loyalty transferred to the emperor at Meiji. Modern imported capitalism, they contend, corrodes precisely these bonds, detaching a new industrial proletariat from family, myth, and national-religious community. The later chapters turn economic: cultivable land scarcity, tenant rents of half the harvest, feudal capitalism concentrated in Mitsui and Mitsubishi, and armament spending hidden in opaque budgets. The crisis they diagnose is not mere Europeanization but the emergence of an Asian capitalism.
Niemand existiert außerhalb der Gruppe.
English translation: “No one exists outside the group.”