3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
How does a country saddled with reparations actually hand real resources across its borders, and must its export prices fall to do so? That question, sharpened by Germany's post-Versailles burden, sets Haberler against Bertil Ohlin in these two essays, translated from the 1930 article and its 1931 rejoinder. Endorsing the Thornton-Mill view that price movements are almost always needed to force the required export surplus, he nonetheless refuses the standard conclusion that the terms of trade must turn against the payer, showing that they can conceivably improve. Against Keynes's transfer pessimism he judges a demand elasticity of one or less for German exports highly improbable, given Germany's competitive industries and small share of world markets, while carefully separating the international transfer problem from the domestic fiscal task of raising the sums.
One could say, therefore, that Keynes was right in theory but his opponents in practice.
Self-determination and imperial collapse multiplied Europe's sovereign states after 1918, even as trade, production, and population bound them ever more tightly together — a contradiction Rappard makes the engine of his survey of postwar cooperation. He tracks the continent's lurch from three republics to thirteen, the rise of dictatorships he links to agrarian social structure, and the slow shift from coercion to negotiation marked by the Dawes Plan, Locarno, and Germany's admission to Geneva. He measures demography, coal, cereals, and tariffs with League statistics, and judges the machinery of peace — the Kellogg Pact, arbitration treaties, the Permanent Court — with a sympathetic skepticism, faulting a renunciation of war that lacks definitions and sanctions. The unresolved question, he writes, is whether brute force or international justice will finally govern a Europe too interdependent to stand apart.
The execution of the peace treaties is a secondary, an almost accidental, and essentially a transient function of the League.
Robert Deumer's prize-winning blueprint for a state monopoly of credit takes nationalization as settled and worries only over its institutional design; Mises attacks the premise instead. Behind the plan lies the belief that private banks finance merely profitable rather than nationally necessary industries, a contrast he dissolves by converting the question of credit allocation into one of consumer sovereignty, since profit expresses the demand of consumers, not the whim of bankers. A nationalized bank, he argues, could never be run commercially: commercial management is inseparable from private ownership, profit-and-loss responsibility, and monetary calculation, so bureaucracy would follow not from bad officials but from the absence of any profitability test. Freed from redemption, such a bank would inflate on political command. Credit nationalization thus approaches full socialization, a late relic of an exhausted statism.
Man kann einen Staatsbetrieb niemals „kommerzialisieren“, auch wenn man noch so viele Äußerlichkeiten der privaten Unternehmung auf ihn überträgt.
English translation: “One can never "commercialize" a state enterprise, no matter how many external features of private enterprise one transfers to it.”
Vienna's adult-education colleges — the Volksheim, the Volksbildungsverein, and the Urania — grew, Braun argues, out of a nineteenth-century liberal faith in knowledge as emancipation, then bent to modern demands for organized, practical, specialized learning. Confining her study to Vienna, where the evidence allowed, she distinguishes the genuine Volkshochschule from vocational schools and party schools, and defends its integrity against the Marxist claim that objective teaching in the social sciences is impossible: choose lecturers by competence, not worldview, or the college becomes a party school. The essay's sharpest thread follows women into the lecture hall — dominant in foreign languages, advancing in physics, medicine, law, and economics as the university opened to them. That they met so little resistance in this poorly paid, honorary work, she concludes, exposes how often talk of female inferiority merely masks competition for wages.
Daß man dem Vordringen der Frauen in dieser sehr verantwortungsvollen und hochqualifizierten Tätigkeit so wenig Widerstand entgegensetzt, ist wiederum ein Beweis mehr dafür, daß die Schlagworte von weiblicher Inferiorität oft nur durch den Brotneid angeregt werden.
English translation: “That so little resistance is being offered to the advance of women into this highly responsible and highly qualified activity is once again further proof that the slogans about female inferiority are often prompted merely by professional envy.”
Rather than rehearse the familiar arguments for reforming the finances of Reich, Länder, and municipalities, this 1930 essay takes the opposite path and estimates what German fiscal inaction would cost. Schumpeter grants the depression is real and severe, but denies that rationalization, concentration, or foreign-capital shortages explain it; their common defect is blindness to how taxation and public spending shape recovery itself. Capitalism renews itself through profits that finance expansion and technical change, and divert those gains into politically driven consumption, and every upswing peters out before its work is done. Failed reform, on this reading, is no mere budgetary mishap but a hinge of historical causation: it drains the surplus recovery needs, deepens the slump, and pushes a strained society toward socialization or authoritarian reaction, each pleasure short-lived against Germany's industrial reality.
Denn jeder Aufschwung nährt sich zum Teil aus seinen eigenen Gewinnen und muß versanden, ehe er getan hat, was er sollte, wenn diese Gewinne ihrer Bestimmung entzogen und fortgesteuert werden.
English translation: “For every upswing feeds in part on its own profits and must peter out before it has accomplished what it should, if these profits are diverted from their purpose and taxed away.”
When does an accounting identity become an economic explanation? In this 1931 rejoinder to Keynes’s reply to his criticism of the Treatise on Money, Hayek argues that describing entrepreneurial losses as an excess of saving over investment does not explain what caused them—or why further bank lending would cure them. His objections turn on concrete difficulties: production costs and sales receipts occur at different times, capital values change, and saving can replace losses rather than finance additional production. Against Keynes’s treatment, Hayek places interest rates within a theory of capital and the changing proportions of consumption- and investment-goods output. This compact, combative intervention makes visible a precise methodological disagreement: what monetary equations can establish, and what requires an account of production and adjustment through time.
Can a comprehensive account of international trade explain much if its basic concepts are unstable? In this 1931 review of Franz Eulenburg’s Aussenhandel und Aussenhandelspolitik, Gottfried Haberler tests a broad historical and policy survey against exacting theoretical standards. His distinction between selling cheaply abroad and charging different prices at home and abroad makes the stakes concrete: an account of dumping can fail at the level of definition. He likewise objects to tariff analysis that precedes an adequate explanation of comparative costs. While acknowledging useful historical material, Haberler argues that facts require a coherent explanatory framework. This brief, sharply critical review shows what he demands of trade scholarship—and why, for him, theoretical order is more than a matter of presentation.
From his editorial desk in Zehlendorf on 15 June 1931, Thurnwald answers Dr. Ernst Harms with the courteous firmness of a journal editor holding a line. Writing for the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, he reports that the contributions to the symposium, already excessively swollen, have been definitively closed, and that Harms's submitted review of Halfdan Bryn's book falls short of the scientific standards the journal is obliged to impose. One door he leaves ajar: a manuscript on the theory of an experimental Völkerpsychologie may be considered once he can examine it in hand, and Harms is directed to the publisher C. L. Hirschfeld about his lecture on folk character and cultural progress. A brief document, it catches the gatekeeping labor behind an interwar scientific periodical.
Government statistics as fiscal bookkeeping or as an inquiry into social life: this distinction anchors Karl Pribram’s compact biographical entry on the Austrian statistician Karl Czoernig. Pribram’s portrait emphasizes practical changes in how knowledge was collected and shared. When cooperation through official channels proved impracticable, Czoernig sent questionnaires directly to more than 7,000 industrial enterprises in 1844; as parliamentary representation widened, he supplemented bulky statistical source books with small annuals. These details give concrete substance to Pribram’s assessment of a reformer who expanded both the scope and accessibility of state statistics. The entry offers a concise account of how administrative coordination, direct inquiry, and public dissemination could become parts of a single statistical programme.
Capital is not a pile of tools, buildings, or accumulated goods but a form of reckoning, so runs the central chapter of this 1931 lecture volume on Kapital und Kapitalzins. Refusing to begin from a definition, Schumpeter lets the phenomenon emerge from the economic process itself, reconstructing the stationary circular flow in which labor and nature enter as productive services and consumption goods emerge as the social product, all financed from prior receipts. Capital here is an accounting form corresponding to money income, distinct from produced means of production. Development changes everything: entrepreneurs carry out new combinations before the goods exist, and bank credit, the distinctively capitalist device, creates the purchasing power that commands labor and materials. From this follow the Konjunkturzyklus of clustered innovation, the self-deflation of productive credit, and interest as an agio on present money born of entrepreneurial profit.
Wir beginnen deshalb nicht mit einer Definition des Kapitals, vielmehr soll sich das Phänomen aus unserer Darlegung von selbst ergeben.
English translation: “We therefore do not begin with a definition of capital; rather, the phenomenon shall emerge of itself from our exposition.”
Is capitalism trapped in a permanent crisis, or merely in the depression phase of a normal business cycle? Schumpeter answers at once for the cycle, then devotes the essay to the qualification that makes the difference. What should have been short and mild turned catastrophic because political lesions, war legacies, protection, fiscal distortion, and deflationary therapy, pressed continuously on the economic organism. Cycles themselves arise when innovations bunch: railways or new raw-material methods become feasible, spread in swarms, expand credit, and then collide with the old, so that depression is a groping toward new equilibrium rather than simple collapse. Politically unfettered, he insists, the capitalist mechanism would scarcely produce symptoms of such severity, and the system as such needs no planning to function, while deflation policy, his chief example, manufactures the very bankruptcies and unemployment it claims to cure.
Das kapitalistische System als solches bedarf keiner Regelung oder Planung innerhalb oder außerhalb der Depression, um zu funktionieren, Erfolge zu erzielen und Zusammenbrüche zu vermeiden.
English translation: “The capitalist system as such requires no regulation or planning, whether within or outside of a depression, in order to function, achieve successes, and avoid breakdowns.”
The opening volume of a five-part survey of human society sets itself against sociology's habit of generalizing from a narrow European sample, and against the Kulturkreis theorists who treated cultural goods as museum objects passed mechanically between peoples. Thurnwald's method is the representative Lebensbild: concrete communities—Polar Eskimo, Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Copper Eskimo, Maori—shown whole, so that institutions appear functioning inside real cultural systems rather than sorted into ideal types. Foragers are ranged by habitat across ice, steppe, forest, and water, then plant-cultivators and herders. Running through everything is a distinction he presses hard: the irreversible accumulation of technique and knowledge against the reversible, pendulum-like swings between mother-right and father-right. Institutions such as blood revenge or asylum, he warns, cut across so-called culture circles and cannot be identified mechanically with them.
Die Feldbauer sind bei den Expansionen keine „Imperialisten“, sondern eher Gründer neuer Tochtervölker und Niederlassungen, sie sind „Kolonisatoren“, aber keine „Eroberer“.
English translation: “In their expansions, agriculturalists are not "imperialists" but rather founders of new daughter peoples and settlements; they are "colonizers," but not "conquerors.”