The archive.

Beneath the visible quarrels of schools, systems, and policy creeds runs more logical continuity than economists usually grant, and this essay reads the history of theory as sedimentary rather than revolutionary: Ricardo clarifies Smith, while Jevons, Walras, and Menger carry classical work forward rather than discarding it, like geological layers conditioning the ones above them. The occasion is Taussig's Wages and Capital, which Schumpeter credits with finally disposing of the wages-fund doctrine and, alongside Böhm-Bawerk, supplying a theory of capital as a time-structured process that marginal utility and marginal productivity alone could never reach. Along the way he names the Ricardian Vice — presenting simplified models to the public as policy certainties — as the standing temptation the theorist must resist.

There is more logic in the history of those tools of analysis which we have come to call economic theory than either its friends or its foes admit.

Understanding an action is not the same as establishing that one’s interpretation is correct. In this article, Felix Kaufmann makes that distinction central to a social science that neither imitates physics wholesale nor claims exemption from empirical testing. His example of a naval distress signal shows how deciphering words, recognizing a request, explaining an emergency, and inferring the sender’s knowledge require different evidence. Drawing on Weber and Schütz, he replaces sweeping disputes over scientific method with precise questions about what investigators assume and how their claims can be checked. Readers can discover why uncertainty need not mean vagueness, and why practical interests may shape the choice of a research problem without deciding what counts as an adequate answer.

An unfavorable but respectful tribute is how this 1936 review casts its verdict on Keynes's General Theory, granting the book's public impact while charging it with reviving the Ricardian habit of smuggling situated policy into theory disguised as universal law — on every page, Schumpeter writes, the ghost of that policy looks over the analyst's shoulder. His technical objections are sharp: the aggregate demand and supply schedules illegitimately stretch the Marshallian cross to social aggregates; treating employment as an index of output assumes invariant production functions and so assumes away the continuous revolution in production methods that defines capitalism; the propensity to consume enters as a deus ex machina, and liquidity preference names rather than explains. The whole closes with a satirical bow to the spending of Louis XV.

Economics will never have nor merit any authority until that unholy alliance is dissolved.

An exhaustive account of Soviet institutions can still leave the decisive economic question unanswered: how does a plan establish which uses of scarce resources are most worthwhile? In this 1936 review, reprinted with editorial notes in 1997, Hayek praises Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s investigative achievement while challenging their confidence in a deliberately constructed, “scientific” civilization. His objection is not that Soviet workers lack incentives; he credits competitive wages and piecework with real successes. Rather, he asks what replaces the coordinating function of profits and prices. Bookkeeping, he argues, cannot test efficiency when its figures fail to reflect relative scarcity. This compact review makes visible the distinction between mobilizing resources and allocating them effectively—and the limits Hayek finds in treating social organization as an engineering problem.

Social insurance may protect against individual misfortune, but what happens when economic contraction makes unemployment a mass condition? In this contribution to the 1936 National Conference of Social Work proceedings, Karl Pribram challenges the stability assumed by social legislation without dismissing its protective purpose. He locates recurrent crises in monetary and credit imbalances, distinguishing these from the trade barriers and international debt difficulties that, he argues, deepened the Depression. His practical concern is how protection should change with economic conditions: shorter hours, public works, and wage adjustments cannot be judged independently of industry and timing. The essay offers a pointed encounter between business-cycle analysis and social policy, showing why preventing economic breakdown and relieving its uneven consequences require distinct but coordinated measures.

Orderly tables do not necessarily make national economies comparable. In this short 1936 review of the Statistisches Reichsamt’s handbook, Helene Lieser weighs the usefulness of statistics for 80 countries against differences in definitions and collection methods. She highlights the handbook’s own warning against mechanical comparisons: common layouts and metric units help, but cannot remove those differences. Her endorsement rests less on new findings than on access—bringing scattered, sometimes hard-to-obtain sources within reach of practitioners and non-statisticians. The review offers a compact distinction between making economic information usable and making it genuinely comparable.

"Overcapacity" is less an industrial fact, this 1936 lecture contends, than a political dogma — the belief that competition either adopts new techniques too slowly or squanders capital by scrapping serviceable machines. Hayek dissolves the charge by separating technical from economic capacity: a machine may still run yet be worth nothing, because new capital does not duplicate the old but economizes on labor and materials, freeing them for use elsewhere. Old plant should survive only while the new method's total cost exceeds its bare operating cost. From this he attacks "capital preservation" as a false end, whether protecting railways against motor traffic or shielding state assets, and ridicules forced standardization for letting an authority decide what consumers ought to like. Idle plant, he adds, may signal a scarcity of capital, not a surplus.

Die Normierungsfanatiker begeben sich da auf ein außerordentlich gefährliches Feld, und ich wenigstens kann mich nicht für die Idee begeistern, daß jemand anderer für mich entscheiden soll, was mir gefallen oder schmecken soll und was nicht.

English translation: “The fanatics of standardization are venturing here onto extraordinarily dangerous ground, and I, at least, cannot warm to the idea that someone else should decide for me what I ought to like or find tasty and what not.”

Bank-created fiduciary media, notes and current accounts unbacked by gold, expand credit, push interest rates below their natural level, and lure entrepreneurs into ventures that look profitable only under distorted conditions. Setting out the Austrian monetary theory of the trade cycle, Mises traces its lineage to the English Currency School while faulting that school for missing current accounts as engines of expansion and for confining its gaze to national rather than international credit. He separates genuine capital accumulation from the artificial boom, explains why sustained expansion must give way to either crisis or currency collapse, and reads depression as the necessary liquidation of malinvestment. Renewed pump-priming only postpones and deepens the reckoning. Wicksell, Boehm-Bawerk, Wieser, Hayek, Machlup, and Robbins stand behind the argument.

It is not the task of the banks to remedy the consequences of the scarcity of capital or the effects of wrong economic policy by extension of credit.

A boom can falter not because investment opportunities disappear, but because construction projects need the same scarce resources at the same time. In this 1936 article, Shackle develops a conditional explanation of that turning point through large, indivisible enterprises whose most expensive construction phases arrive late. Entrepreneurs cannot reliably anticipate one another’s plans; when demand converges, projects nearing completion can outbid those with most expenditure still ahead. His distinctive focus is on the timing and technical sequence of investment, rather than its aggregate volume alone. The analysis shows how scarcity of shared inputs can suspend otherwise promising projects and leave specialised resources unemployed—an instability arising from competition among equipment constructors themselves. Shackle presents this as an additional possible mechanism, not a general theory of every boom’s collapse.

Why hold money rather than invest it until payment falls due? For Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan, this question exposes a difficulty in separating monetary theory from the theory of prices: uncertainty shapes both the desire for cash and the valuation of other goods. This 1936 article brings cash-balance analysis and Wicksellian capital theory into conversation, arguing that money cannot simply be added to a system of relative prices already determined without it. Its distinctive move is to scrutinize the supposed barter economy against which monetary effects are measured, asking what people there would use to preserve value against unforeseen needs. Readers can discover why monetary neutrality depends on how it is defined, and why revisable expectations make liquidity, credit, and commodity demand parts of the same problem.

Imperial conquest can advance even as imperial authority enters a crisis. In this 1936 article, Richard C. Thurnwald locates that contradiction partly in colonial education: schools train subordinates but also equip intellectuals to demand independence. His East African analysis follows less conspicuous transformations, as taxation, wages, missions, and administrative appointments reshape chiefly authority, kinship obligations, and social prestige. Political sovereignty, he argues, would not by itself undo dependence on distant markets or resolve conflicts over cultural inheritance. The article’s distinctive tension lies in its conjunction of support for African cultural autonomy with paternalistic judgments about African readiness for independence. Its concrete institutional observations allow readers to examine both the reach of colonial restructuring and the limits of Thurnwald’s attempt to treat imperialism as a process of cultural contact.

Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.

For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.