The archive.

Can credit creation increase capital without raising the general price level—and can voluntary saving ever be excessive? In this short review, presented in a 2013 English translation, Hayek praises Wilhelm Röpke’s account of capital formation while pressing these two points of disagreement. Against Röpke’s emphasis on rising prices, he argues that newly created credit directed toward production changes demand for productive goods relative to consumer goods. He also questions whether voluntary accumulation causes crisis-producing overcapitalisation, distinguishing that claim from judgements about sacrificing present consumption for future benefits. For Hayek, calling aggregate saving excessive requires an explicit policy objective, not an allegedly objective comparison of different people’s utilities. The review offers a compact encounter with his way of separating monetary mechanisms from judgements about desirable economic ends.

A leading sugar manufacturer who opposed the sugar cartel: this tension gives Schumpeter’s brief encyclopedia portrait of Rudolf Auspitz its political interest. His theoretical assessment turns on a different distinction—between early neglect and genuine originality. Schumpeter credits the price theory Auspitz developed with Richard Lieben with pioneering geometrical methods and a symmetry between cost and utility, insisting that its appearance before Marshall’s Principles matters to any judgement of its contribution. The entry offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter as a historian of economics, weighing an industrialist’s liberal convictions alongside mathematical ideas he considered still only partly exploited.

Accused by Emil Lederer of reading his crisis writings superficially, Hayek replies by quoting them back at length—and finds in them the same underconsumptionist error he had charged against Foster and Catchings. Lederer explains general crisis as a gap between output and the purchasing power spent as income; accumulation, on this view, proceeds 'too fast' for consumer markets to realize profits. Hayek names this the Grundirrtum. Crises, he insists, come not when consumption is too small but when the structure of production is drawn into roundabout paths no longer justified by the relative demand for capital and consumer goods. Against Lederer's leaning toward credit-financed consumption and public works, he sets a preventive policy of braking the boom, since once malinvestment is done no curative Wunderkuren can undo it.

Eine solche Disproportionalität kann vielmehr meiner Ansicht nur darin bestehen, daß das Verhältnis des Kapitalgüterangebotes zum Konsumgüterangebot größer ist als das Verhältnis von Kapitalgüternachfrage zur Konsumgüternachfrage.

English translation: “Such a disproportionality can, in my view, consist rather only in the fact that the ratio of the supply of capital goods to the supply of consumer goods is greater than the ratio of the demand for capital goods to the demand for consumer goods.”

To call Böhm-Bawerk a theorist of interest is, in Schumpeter’s judgement, to understate his project. This brief 1930 encyclopedia entry places interest within a wider account of production and distribution, organized around time: the relation between consumption goods already available and those expected from production processes of different lengths. Schumpeter pairs this interpretation with a portrait of the Austrian finance minister, praising his budgetary discipline and legislative achievements despite difficult political circumstances and no personal party affiliation. The result is a compact assessment of both administrator and economist, especially useful for understanding why Schumpeter regarded Böhm-Bawerk’s explanation of interest as one result of a larger analysis rather than its sole purpose.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

Just as the nineteenth century banished infinitesimals from analysis without destroying the calculus, Kaufmann proposes to eliminate the actual infinite, above all Cantor's uncountable, without dismantling classical mathematics. First published in 1930 and reissued here in 1968, this German study locates the root of foundational paradox in a single confusion: the failure to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims about all objects and their existence. Set-theoretic totalities, on his reading, are an ontological surplus smuggled in through misread symbolism, not objects the mind discovers. He preserves the finite core of the diagonal argument while denying that it defines a totality of all decimals, invokes the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem to argue that axiomatic set theory cannot isolate a genuinely uncountable domain, and reads Hilbert's ideal elements and Brouwer's constructivism as each carrying only part of the truth.

Ein „sinnloses Zeichen“ ist eine contradictio in adjecto, denn in der Behauptung, daß visuelle oder akustische Phänomene „Zeichen“ sind, liegt diejenige eingeschlossen, daß man durch sie etwas verstehen, mit ihrer Hilfe fremde Gedanken erfassen kann.

English translation: “A "meaningless sign" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the assertion that visual or acoustic phenomena are "signs" already contains the assertion that through them one can understand something, that with their help one can grasp the thoughts of others.”

Does explaining why firms hold cash make counting how often money changes hands redundant? In this English-language review of M. W. Holtrop’s Dutch monograph, Gottfried Haberler separates the merits of a causal explanation from the rejection of an alternative accounting description. He welcomes Holtrop’s attention to payment schedules, uneven receipts and expenditures, and credit instruments, but disputes his insistence that cash-reserve and movement theories are incompatible. The disagreement becomes concrete when production is divided among several firms: additional transactions can increase the demand for money, with consequences for prices. This brief review offers a precise encounter between monetary theory and business finance, showing why Haberler values an explanation of cash holdings without abandoning velocity as a useful measure of monetary supply.

Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.

Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.

English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”

Could the Federal Reserve curb stock-market speculation while encouraging credit to agriculture and industry? In this 1930 article, Oskar Morgenstern examines the institutional conflict behind that ambition, rather than attempting a general explanation of the crash. He distinguishes the New York Reserve Bank’s repeated requests for higher discount rates from the Washington Board’s resistance, which he attributes to political calculation. His central concern is the gap between statutory design and working authority: a formally decentralized system had developed around New York’s financial leadership. Readers can discover how apparently inconsistent policy emerged from competing centres of power—and assess Morgenstern’s case for giving experienced bankers greater independence from government.

Where Sombart sees economics deformed by borrowed natural-scientific method, Schams sees the diagnosis aimed at the wrong target. Prompted by Die drei Nationalökonomien and its carving of the discipline into judging, ordering, and understanding economics, this essay charges that Sombart expels physical "laws" only to smuggle the old wage-fund, rent, monopoly-price, and supply-and-demand laws back in under the stamp of Sinngesetze, without ever showing why the earlier economics was cognitively empty. Exactness, Schams counters, is not measurement or quantity but the fit between a mode of concept-formation and its problem; the true fault lies in importing physical structures — equilibrium, statics and dynamics, material constants — into a domain that has none. Allied with Sombart against scientism, he defends instead a mathematical, relationist theory grounded in meaning and purged of natural-science residue.

Die Mathematik wirkt keine Wunder.

English translation: “Mathematics works no miracles.”

When several productive resources yield a good only by working together, what determines the value of each? Wilhelm Vleugels argues that Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser offer complementary answers rather than rival solutions. One explains the valuations behind decisions to acquire, surrender or replace a resource; the other describes the mutual determination of values and prices in equilibrium. The distinction becomes concrete when an indispensable input is lost: the output that disappears need not equal the utility sacrificed if substitutes are available. Following this problem from individual choice into market exchange, Vleugels shows how causal explanation and simultaneous equations can serve different tasks within one theory. He also marks their limits: explaining returns does not justify ownership, and allocation through purchasing power must not be confused with the satisfaction of collective needs.

Why should urban land rent appear even at the shabby edge of the city, on the worst sites, and why should rents climb without pause in a free housing market? Pribram takes up Friedrich von Wieser's dominant theory—urban rent as a differential rent of location, capitalized from the surplus that superior sites command—and finds it unable to explain the tenement block at the periphery or the relentless upward drift of rents. His answer trades spatial comparison for temporal: across the business cycle, rising construction costs pull rents up in the boom but leave them stranded high in the depression, and that asymmetric gap is capitalized as an 'absolute' ground rent. Each cycle locks in a higher level, and the riddle yields only when rent theory is joined to the analysis of the Konjunktur.

Nur aus der Einsicht in die Dynamik des Wirtschaftslebens läßt sich das Rätsel der städtischen Grundrente vollständig begreifen.

English translation: “Only through insight into the dynamics of economic life can the puzzle of urban ground rent be fully understood.”