The archive.

Admiration for a historian’s craft need not imply agreement with his explanatory framework. In this review of the 1950 reprint of Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, Emil Kauder praises Stephen’s vivid portraits and first-hand evidence while questioning how far utilitarianism can explain classical economics. The tension becomes concrete in the contrast between empirical philosophy and deductive economic theory, and in John Stuart Mill’s movement toward government intervention, peasant proprietorship, and support for labour unions. Kauder’s distinctive concern is the philosophical foundation beneath economic programmes: he argues that pre-utilitarian deism and conservative and socialist criticism also shaped economic thinking. This brief review offers a sharply drawn distinction between the historical richness of Stephen’s account and the limits of its organising perspective.

Writing in tribute to Abraham Wald, Gerhard Tintner asks what mathematical rigor can secure for economics—and where its assumptions limit practical use. This 1952 memorial survey distinguishes the formulation of equilibrium equations from proofs that economically admissible solutions exist. It also shows how cost-of-living comparisons depend on information about preferences that observed prices and purchases alone cannot supply. Tintner’s appreciation is not uncritical: he questions minimax decision rules that treat an indifferent Nature as an adversary, and the feasibility of measuring social losses for policy decisions. The article offers a compact encounter with Wald’s achievements through an economist’s discriminating perspective, revealing both the power of explicit assumptions and the empirical work still needed to make formal results useful.

That devaluing a currency must worsen a country's terms of trade was, in 1952, an assumption widely taken for granted, and this compact theoretical note, reprinted here, sets out to dismantle it. Haberler's thesis is deliberately asymmetrical: in the normal case, where depreciation improves the balance of payments, the terms of trade may move either way and cannot be predicted a priori; only in the perverse case, where the balance of payments worsens, must they deteriorate. Working through demand and supply curves priced in dollars, he shows that a depreciation lowers both export and import prices measured in dollars, so one cannot pair dearer imports with cheaper exports and infer a loss. Against Joan Robinson's presumption that supply elasticities generally exceed demand elasticities, he denies that any broad generalization holds.

We have, then, the result that export and import prices move in the same direction.

Correct economic theory can still miss the revealing question. In this brief 1952 review of Willi Graf’s dissertation on trade between market and centrally controlled economies, Josef Herbert Fürth praises Graf’s command of the literature but probes what his account leaves unexplained. The delay between Soviet political hostility toward Yugoslavia and changes in trade policy, Fürth suggests, could measure how quickly planners revise their arrangements. Communist cost accounting likewise needs explanation within the system it serves, not dismissal as a distortion of market conventions. These concrete objections give the review its interest: Fürth shows how institutional details can unsettle a neat opposition between planning and markets, while retaining a qualified recommendation of Graf’s comprehensive treatment.

What does practically effective economic training lose when specialization separates it from broader theoretical inquiry? In this 1952 study, Richard Kerschagl connects American university organization with the economics and business administration taught within it. Drawing on teaching experience and conversations with economists, he examines how departmental boundaries, case instruction, and well-funded research shape scholarly priorities. His continental European perspective is explicit: admiration for Mises and methodological breadth informs his criticism of theoretical fragmentation, yet he credits American mathematical methods and specialized research with genuine achievements. The comparison offers readers a concrete account of the institutional conditions behind intellectual differences—and a reciprocal prescription: Europeans need stronger mathematical training, while Americans need better access to European scholarship through languages and translation.

A fitted relationship need not be the economic relationship an investigator seeks. In Econometrics, first published in 1952, Gerhard Tintner makes this gap between statistical calculation and economic interpretation a central teaching problem. Prices and quantities are jointly determined, so reversing a simple regression cannot by itself recover supply or demand; smoothing a time series can introduce dependence rather than merely uncover it. Tintner’s emphasis is statistical, but his tests of method remain tied to economic questions and worked applications. Readers can discover why assumptions about structure, measurement and temporal dependence change what an estimate warrants—and why describing past observations is not enough to justify a forecast. This reprint preserves a textbook concerned as much with the limits of quantitative inference as with its procedures.

High tax rates need not mean high tax burdens: opportunities to defer gains or escape taxation can matter more than the published rate. In this 1952 review of Henry C. Simons’s Federal Tax Reform, Walter Fröhlich examines the gap between fiscal principles and enforceable revenue laws. He endorses Simons’s case for comprehensive personal income taxation, emphasizing how selective realization of gains and losses favors some taxpayers over high-income wage earners. Yet he questions whether corporate taxation could be abolished without sacrificing necessary revenue. The review offers a compact encounter with Fröhlich’s combination of ethical commitment and technical scrutiny: fairness requires attention not only to rates, but also to accounting periods, income averaging, and the distinction between postponing a tax and avoiding it altogether.

Around 1700 the world's economies resembled one another far more than they would a century later; by the nineteenth century Western Europe had opened a vast productive gap over much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That gap, Mises contends in this lecture, sprang not from secret inventions or hoarded technique—engineers, manuals, and machines were available—but from institutions and expectations that made saving, accumulation, and long-term investment worthwhile. Nineteenth-century capital export, distinct from older colonial extraction, financed railways, mines, and ports where opportunity existed but local capital was scarce, rewarding investor and recipient alike. Against Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism he insists capital flowed to serve consumers, not to conquer. His sharpest warning falls on confiscation, debt repudiation, and exchange control, which empty ownership of value without abolishing title—and, he cautions, may once more make war over raw materials thinkable.

Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.

Routinely misread as an excessive worker demand, profit-sharing in fact more often originates with employers, and Bayer refuses to judge it by tidy lists of pros and cons. Ranging across American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Soviet practice, he tests the Scanlon Plan, the Rucker Plan, the Duisburger Kupferhütte's division of results, and the statutory worker shares of Chile and Peru, then submits them all to economic theory. His sharpest distinction separates genuine entrepreneurial profit from monopoly rent: many schemes, he warns, merely redistribute rent, burdening society twice through restricted output and lost taxes. Real profit-sharing, tied to a base wage at least equal to the industry average, can smooth income during upswings and lift macroeconomic productivity, but only where trust, strong unions, and a policy of economic coordination already prevail.

So führen uns die Probleme der Gewinnbeteiligung hinein in die Gesamtzusammenhänge der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Thus the problems of profit-sharing lead us into the overall interconnections of the economy.”

When does a more realistic economic model become a less useful one? In this contribution to a published methodological discussion, Fritz Machlup challenges the demand that a single theory capture every aspect of economic conduct. Responding chiefly to Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Boulding, he defends mathematics without granting it exclusive authority, and simplified models without mistaking them for complete descriptions. His treatment of the firm makes the stakes concrete: a model suited to price determination need not explain investment or managerial power, while even a firm’s survival depends on how the firm is defined. Readers encounter a precise distinction between realism and relevance—and an argument for combining disciplinary knowledge when a particular problem requires it, rather than constructing an all-purpose synthesis.

The addition of "admittedly realistic" variables into analytical models can be defended only if they significantly modify the results.

Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.

Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.

English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”

Value theory, Shackle charges, quietly presumes perfect knowledge — that the buyer can see every satisfaction in advance — a fiction exposed by the very existence of information, a good worth having only because its contents are not yet known. The essay accordingly shifts the object of economic choice from satisfactions to actions whose consequences remain hypothetical. Each rival hypothesis carries a face-value, the gain or loss if it proves true, and a second variable measuring its claim on the imagination; numerical probability, he demonstrates through five separate objections, cannot serve as that second variable for unique, non-seriable decisions. His replacement is potential surprise: not a lesser degree of certainty but a positive recognition of some disabling incongruity, a scale on which any number of mutually exclusive hypotheses may all sit at zero.

But the theory of consumer’s behaviour assumes that we always know what we are going to get.