The archive.

Gerhard Tintner’s 1950 review of Jan Tinbergen’s The Dynamics of Business Cycles asks what specialized econometric research can offer economists without advanced mathematical training. His answer rests on Tinbergen’s combination of accessible exposition, statistical investigation, and experience in Dutch economic planning. Reviewing the translation adapted for American readers by J. J. Polak, Tintner values a Keynesian-influenced approach that nevertheless considers other theoretical systems. His particular attention to hog and coffee markets gives the review a concrete agricultural emphasis: aggregate fluctuations matter alongside cycles in individual commodities. This short, favorable assessment shows why Tintner regarded Tinbergen’s synthesis as useful for teaching and policy discussion, without offering a detailed critique of its models or prescriptions.

Defending free enterprise once meant, for many European economists, opposing patents. Fritz Machlup and Edith Penrose recover this nineteenth-century dispute to ask what can justify granting exclusive rights over knowledge others might independently discover. Their 1950 article combines the history of abolitionist campaigns—including the Netherlands’ abolition of patents in 1869—with a careful separation of claims too often treated as interchangeable: property, fair reward, incentives, and disclosure. Rewarding inventors, they show, does not by itself establish patents as the right instrument; stimulating invention does not prove that protection is necessary or worth its social costs. By distinguishing the political victory of patent advocates from the unresolved economic debate, the article gives readers concrete grounds for questioning what exclusive rights accomplish—and at whose expense.

A country’s need for imports is not the same as its demand for dollars—and foreign aid does not, by itself, prove a foreign-exchange market deficit. In this 1950 article, Fritz Machlup makes these distinctions central to his diagnosis of the postwar dollar shortage. He separates effective demand at a given exchange rate from planners’ desired imports and accountants’ records of past financing. His criticism of the IMF’s treatment of relief and reconstruction aid gives the analysis a concrete edge: assistance may pay for purchases that would never otherwise have occurred. Readers can discover why apparently similar deficits call for different responses, and why the case for productive foreign assistance must be distinguished from the case for exchange-rate adjustment.

Two rival redrawings of the φ-surface, one by J. Mars and one by H. G. Johnson, prompt this comparison, though the stakes are conceptual rather than merely graphical. Shackle defends a deliberate division of labour: the φ-surface locates the standardized focus-values of a venture, while a separate indifference-map registers the chooser's temperament toward possible gain and loss. Mars's version, by making φ algebraically summable across gains and losses, would let the surface rank ventures on its own and render that map redundant, dissolving the independent representation of an individual's attitude to uncertainty. Through profiles, translated lines, and 'crank-handle' constructions Shackle exposes the cost, and defends his 'subliminal' region, where tiny gains under extreme potential surprise command no attention. Johnson's wooden three-dimensional model he treats more warmly, as suggestive but not decisive.

By abandoning, or drastically circumscribing the role of, the gambler indifference-map, Mr Mars loses an essential ‘degree of freedom’ which my system possesses.

Workers bear the consequences of business failure—but does that give them a claim to help direct the enterprise? In this two-installment article, Hans Bayer examines American union–management cooperation as something more demanding than wage bargaining or joint efforts to raise productivity. The General Motors dispute makes financial disclosure a test of managerial openness; the disappearance of wartime committees exposes the fragility of participation granted for temporary purposes. Bayer argues that lasting cooperation requires strong unions, not their weakening. Yet he also asks whose interests cooperation serves: agreement between employers and workers may protect jobs while imposing costs on consumers. His distinctive concern is the connection between authority inside the firm and economic security beyond it, showing why workplace participation cannot substitute for institutions capable of addressing unemployment and technological displacement.

Behind the United States’ reputation for laissez-faire, Hans Bayer finds a growing apparatus of economic coordination. His 1950 article asks how dispersed federal institutions can pursue employment, production, and purchasing power without replacing decentralized economic activity with comprehensive state command. Drawing on Washington discussions and government reports, he examines the Council of Economic Advisers’ practical influence and shows how agricultural credit, public investment, and financial regulation can serve shared objectives. The distinction is between anticipating economic instability and repairing its damage after the fact. Bayer does not present coordination as complete: administrative fragmentation and business opposition remain obstacles. His account offers a concrete view of how public responsibility for economic stability can expand through existing institutions rather than through a single centralized planning authority.

Does unified income taxation threaten federalism, or does that objection leave the costs of fragmented taxation unexamined? In this 1950 reply to Theo Keller’s criticism of his Bundesstaatliche Finanzordnung, Alfred Amonn demands concrete grounds for resisting Swiss fiscal reform. His perspective is conditional rather than categorical: a debt sustainable today may constrain tomorrow’s borrowing, while a one-time levy on existing wealth may permit relief from recurring taxes. The article’s interest lies in how Amonn separates these claims from the political labels attached to them. Readers encounter a pointed dispute over what would count as evidence against reform—and where constitutional loyalties require an argument about practical consequences rather than an appeal to attachment.

Statistical agreement does not necessarily tell us which economic relationship has been measured. In this 1951 review of Lawrence R. Klein’s Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921–1941, G. L. S. Shackle pairs enthusiasm for econometrics with a precise account of its limits. He values its power to expose ambiguities in theory and distinguish consequential relationships from negligible ones, yet shows how a simple consumption–investment model can produce two apparently similar equations with different underlying parameters. His perspective is neither a defence of purely deductive economics nor an unqualified endorsement of empirical modelling: internal coherence is not evidence, but estimation does not guarantee structural knowledge. This short review makes the identification problem accessible while revealing why Shackle found Klein’s methodological candour as valuable as his technical achievement.

When does a theory of international development explain trade and lending, rather than merely rename their patterns? In this 1951 review of Charles P. Kindleberger’s The Dollar Shortage, Josef Herbert Fürth welcomes the idea that countries’ external balances reflect different stages of domestic development, but asks how those stages can be identified independently of the balances they supposedly explain. His scrutiny turns on concrete contrasts: Britain’s presumed maturity versus America’s technological strength, and Soviet lending to satellites versus American relations with Latin America. The review offers a compact encounter with the demands of economic explanation: measurable categories, mechanisms linking debtor and creditor development, and attention to institutions. Fürth’s qualified approval shows how a promising hypothesis can generate research without yet constituting a verified theory.

Did foreign capital drive gold into the United States in 1934–1939, or did American monetary policy help draw in both? In this review of Arthur I. Bloomfield’s study, Ilse Mintz praises his empirical work while challenging the direction of his causal explanation. The dollar devaluation of 1934 and the higher American gold price, she suggests, deserve more weight than an account centred on fears abroad allows. She also questions his adverse verdict on capital flight: balances accumulated in America later paid for urgently needed European wartime imports. This brief review offers a pointed example of how agreement over evidence can coexist with disagreement over causation—and how the later use of funds can complicate judgments about their arrival.

Choosing a course of action is not like selecting between two objects already on a table. In this article, Alfred Schütz asks how alternatives themselves take shape during deliberation, as both the imagined projects and the person considering them change. His distinctive starting point is that we envisage an act as already accomplished, then work back towards the means of achieving it. Such anticipation depends on present knowledge that the action itself may alter. Bringing phenomenology to ordinary practical reasoning, Schütz shows how biography and interests give possibilities their weight, and how doubt becomes a decision without yielding final certainty. The analysis gives readers a precise way to question social-scientific models that treat actors’ alternatives as fixed and their motives as fully transparent.

Only the foreign, Richard Thurnwald insists, first opens a path to knowledge of ourselves — and from that premise unfolds a vast comparative anthropology of the human mind, tracing its awakening, growth, and errancy from the earliest Naturvölker through the archaic civilizations of Egypt, Peru, and Babylon. Against the older evolutionism that ranked cultures on a single ladder toward European reason, Thurnwald reconstructs a paleopsychology of participation, in which surrounding reality is lived personally rather than confronted as impersonal object. He works through Mittelpunktgefühl, mana, totemism, projection, sacrifice, and the slow emergence of high gods, arguing that error is no accident but built into the very symbolic powers — naming, analogy, projection — that make understanding possible. Rationalization of life, he warns, will never be complete.

Die Welt ist für sie ein erweitertes Selbst.

English translation: “For them the world is an extended self.”