The archive.

Why might urban land rise in value even without any special advantage of location? In this 1939 conference abstract on Europe, Karl Pribram shifts attention from privileged sites to the changing relation between rentals, construction costs, and interest rates. His account of building activity free from governmental interference turns on an asymmetry: rentals could retain their gains through depression while construction costs fell, enlarging the residual return attributed to land. Once capitalized in property prices, that return became a cost for subsequent purchasers. This compact argument offers a precise connection between business fluctuations and land valuation—and explains why Pribram considered “absolute” ground rent potentially more influential for European building activity than the more visible advantages of location.

Why can construction continue as ground rents fall, yet fail to revive when rental returns improve? In this 1939 conference abstract on the United States, Karl Pribram locates a possible answer in mortgage finance. Comparing American building cycles with European experience, he argues that expansive credit can sustain a boom despite declining ground rent, while foreclosed properties held by financial institutions can obstruct recovery long after rental conditions become favorable. His hypothesis challenges the view that American construction cycles arise from forces separate from general business fluctuations. This compact account offers a precise distinction: the forces initiating a cycle may be shared, while mortgage-market institutions alter its duration and amplitude—and weaken ground rent’s power to regulate new building.

Peace among formerly sovereign states, this 1939 essay argues, cannot rest on political or military union alone; it requires a genuine common market, and that market quietly disarms the interventionist state. Once goods, people, and capital move freely across internal borders, no member government can prop up local prices, shelter a monopoly, or sustain a restriction scheme dependent on territorial control—and, Hayek adds, the federation itself cannot easily replace those powers, because a large heterogeneous people will not agree on whose industries deserve protection. Economic planning presupposes a shared scale of values that diversity denies. Socialism becomes the limiting case: incompatible with free movement within, and lacking the common purpose a socialist union would require. Federation thus emerges as both a peace project and a liberal constraint, with Robbins and Streit in view.

The whole armory of marketing boards and other forms of monopolistic organizations of individual industries will cease to be at the disposal of state governments.

Cheap borrowing does not make steel, machinery or time more abundant. In this 1939 article, republished in 1997, Hayek asks whether wartime authorities should hold interest rates down when urgent production needs make capital scarcer. His distinctive emphasis is on investment’s timing: a machine that saves more labour overall may still be a poorer choice if its benefits arrive too late. He treats interest chiefly as a means of allocating capital, rather than rewarding saving, and follows that distinction into practical decisions about replacing worn equipment or diverting maintenance resources to armaments. The article offers a compact way to distinguish financial ease from real productive capacity—and explains why, in Hayek’s view, a misleading interest rate can distort the choices of government planners and private entrepreneurs alike.

Split cleanly in two, the Keynesian multiplier here becomes an instantaneous logical ratio implied by the marginal propensity to consume and a dynamic process by which output actually adjusts over time. The first follows at once from how income-receivers divide any increment between spending and accumulation; but that behaviour alone, Shackle stresses, cannot explain why firms would expand the output of consumption goods. Only assumptions about entrepreneurs' reactions to sales, inventories, and expected income turn the ratio into a theory of production. Where earlier writers assumed intended accumulation and realized saving simply coincide, he foregrounds their possible divergence: an attempt to raise the pace of accumulation runs down consumer-goods stocks unless output follows. The open-economy extension folds an export surplus into the same field as domestic investment, so a rising surplus can set expansion going exactly as investment does.

Hitherto in expressing the multiplier principle authors have assumed *equality*.

An exchange-rate change can increase export volumes while reducing receipts in foreign currency—and import expenditure can rise in one currency while falling in another. In this first installment of The Theory of Foreign Exchanges, Fritz Machlup uses such distinctions to connect currency markets with production, consumption, and competition. His central challenge is to explanations that treat national price levels as independently given determinants of exchange rates. By tracing how exporters win customers from competitors, how new goods become tradable, and how overseas payments redirect domestic spending, he shows why exchange rates can move without prior inflation or deflation. Readers gain a concrete way to distinguish accounting identities from behavioural responses, and genuine changes in trade from the effects of the currency used to measure them.

Why should wartime allies trade as though they were strangers? In this 1939 letter to The Spectator, reprinted in 1997, Friedrich August von Hayek turns Norman Angell’s proposal for Anglo-French federal unity into an immediate economic challenge. Expensive domestic purchases, inferior substitutes and currency restrictions, he argues, weaken the partners’ combined productive capacity. His example of reciprocal luxury trade sharpens the point: suppressing industries poorly suited to military production need not free useful resources for war. This brief intervention shows Hayek testing a political aspiration against practical arrangements, distinguishing unavoidable cross-channel transport difficulties from policy barriers that allies could remove.

A comprehensive account of trade controls is not necessarily an account of trade planning. This distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s brief 1940 review of Heinrich Heuser’s Control of International Trade. Haberler values the book’s otherwise hard-to-find material on import quotas, exchange controls, and bilateral clearing and payment agreements, while noting its omission of the broader planning questions raised by the Russian and German systems. His judgement gives teachers of international trade a concrete assessment of the book’s usefulness, tempered by criticism of its editing and organization. The review offers a compact example of how Haberler separates descriptive coverage, theoretical analysis, and practical usability in assessing economic scholarship.

Written as Keynesian ascendancy pushed Austrian cycle theory to the margins, this reconstruction insists that its critics had mistaken its character: the theory is not a static contrast between saving and credit but a dynamic account of how investment reshapes the interdependence of industries over time. Its hinge is irreversibility—investment transforms fluid resources into specific, complementary capital that mistaken expectations can no longer unwind. Lachmann gives the theory a sectoral anatomy of consumers' goods, equipment, raw-material, and 'dynamic key' industries, and joins the Lundberg effect to the Ricardo effect to show how falling real wages during a boom divert entrepreneurs from long-period deepening toward speculation. Candid about limits, he finds the nineteenth-century railway booms fit the model but concedes that the 1929 crisis, with its stable prices and rising raw-material stocks, does not.

Once "free Capital" has been converted into buildings and machinery, any failure of events to conform to expectations will upset everything.

What began as a 4,000-word review for Economica, commissioned by Hayek, had swollen into a 20,000-word analysis—"a monster," Schütz calls it—of Talcott Parsons's The Structure of Social Action. This 1940 letter opens the celebrated transatlantic exchange between the émigré phenomenologist and the Harvard theorist of social action. Schütz reports reading Parsons's unpublished second manuscript three times, reserves his sharpest comments for an oral meeting he proposes in New York or Cambridge, and presses gently on their differences over the foundations of a theory of action. He encloses his essay "Phenomenology and the Social Sciences" from Farber's Husserl memorial volume and mentions his forthcoming paper on William James, folding a personal letter into a document at the crossroads of phenomenology and American sociology.

Ich verdanke Ihren Theorien auch dort unendlich viel Gewinn und Anregung, wo ich von ihnen abweiche.

English translation: “I owe your theories an infinite amount of profit and stimulation, even where I depart from them.”

Do the so-called primitive peoples truly lack logical and causal thought? Thurnwald, drawing on first-contact encounters in New Guinea, the Solomons, and Africa and citing Jung on the limits of the psyche, answers no. Hunting, planting, house-building, and trapping all proceed by sound causal reasoning; magic enters only where causal relations turn opaque, as when a Buin man's festering arm is traced to coconuts stolen from a tabooed palm and healed through payment, rite, and appeal to the demon Orómrui. He reads headhunting, name magic, tjurunga stones, omens, and totemism as internally coherent theories of where life-force resides, and holds that all knowing is interpretation, modern minds included. Primitive thought, diffuse and unexact, survives in the fatigued and the neurotic today.

Doch beurteilen wir die Gedanken und Riten nur zu oft von unserem Standpunkt am Schreibtisch und im geheizten Zimmer mit hochgezogenen Augenbrauen und überlegenem Lächeln.

English translation: “Yet all too often we judge these ideas and rites from our vantage point at the desk in a heated room, with raised eyebrows and a superior smile.”

Modern dictatorship is not rule by a clique, a bureaucracy, or a defensive capitalist class; it arises, Lederer argues, when a society loses the classes, parties, associations, and publics through which individuals become politically articulate. What remains is an amorphous mass, available for emotional mobilization, crystallized around a leader and held together by propaganda that mimics argument while severing it from truth. Tracing d'Annunzio at Fiume, Italian Fascism, and the SA's conquest of the German street, he presents fascism as the destruction of society itself rather than its capture. His warning against the classless society defends not hierarchy but stratification, the plural conflict on which freedom depends. Written in American exile and read here in Angela Kornberger's German rendering of the 1940 English original, State of the Masses, it stands among the first emigre theories of totalitarianism.

Der totalitäre Staat ist der Staat der Massen.

English translation: “The totalitarian state is the state of the masses.”