The archive.

'I am not running a drug store,' Schumpeter told the Economic Club of Detroit in the spring of 1941 — no pills to hand out, only a diagnosis. Wartime defense spending, he warned, could be the catalyst that turned America's excess reserves and government-monopolized gold stock into inflation, no greenbacks required. The deeper argument is constitutional: gold was never essential to money, but like Supreme Courts and constitutions it restrained the freedom of action of government, telling the truth, like a naughty child, about a nation's finances. Planned economies resent exactly that discipline, so gold's old function is gone — though he allows it a narrower postwar life within an Anglo-American convention or bullion standard, if governments will accept limits on their own sovereignty.

Gold has no function, for planned economy has come to stay.

Why did Swiss officers who proposed a stronger federal government in 1830 later fall silent about their initiative? William Emmanuel Rappard follows scattered testimony, newly located correspondence, and a petition reprinted in the Journal de Genève to recover two distinct reform proposals. Their American inspiration lay chiefly in central authority and military coordination, not the representative institutions later favoured by radicals. Rappard suggests that the officers retreated when their programme attracted political opponents while alienating conservative allies; suspicions of French influence further weakened its credibility. This historical investigation offers a concrete distinction between competing uses of the American constitutional example—and shows how letters and hostile newspaper commentary can recover an abandoned project without resolving every uncertainty about its design or disappearance.

How does a thought retain its meaning while its content continually changes? In this essay, supplied in its 1970 republication, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s stream of thought into conversation with Husserl’s phenomenological psychology. His focus is the often-overlooked fringe of experience: the felt relations, expectations, and receding impressions that make a present thought more than an isolated mental event. Schütz shows how James’s descriptions can illuminate Husserl’s accounts of horizons and temporal continuity without making James a phenomenologist or claiming historical influence. The comparison gives readers a concrete approach to a difficult problem: how an object remains identifiable across changing experiences, and how the conclusion of a train of thought can remain available after its intermediate steps have faded.

A convincing account of a crisis need not rest on a convincing theory of economic change. In this review of Thomas Wilson’s Fluctuations in Income and Employment, Ludwig Lachmann praises much of the analysis of American fluctuations while challenging the theoretical synthesis behind it. His objections are concrete: raw-material shortages can interrupt expansion, industrial equipment differs in age and productivity, and expectations cannot simply be treated as given. These concerns sharpen his defence of Austrian cycle theory against what he regards as Wilson’s static assumptions. The review culminates in a question that reaches beyond their disagreement: if investment opportunities are exhausted, what explains the human effort through which new ones arise? Readers encounter a compact example of Lachmann testing economic explanation against changing resources and purposeful action.

A useful statistical textbook need not settle the theoretical problems behind its procedures. In this brief review of the second edition of Mordecai Ezekiel’s Methods of Correlation Analysis, Gerhard Tintner distinguishes genuine practical improvements from questions the discipline itself has yet to resolve. His qualified praise turns especially on the reliability of time-series forecasts: a sketchy treatment of error formulas disappoints him, but he refuses to blame Ezekiel for the absence of generally accepted solutions. Tintner also notes the edition’s reliance on Fisher’s fiducial approach rather than newer theories of estimation and hypothesis testing. The review offers a concise appraisal of what improved statistical instruction can provide—and what remains beyond its reach.

What can economic analysis establish about monopoly, and where must political judgment begin? In this 1942 review of E. A. G. Robinson’s Monopoly, Fritz Machlup admires the handbook’s integration of institutional detail and theory while testing the precision of its claims. He questions the basis for comparing one person’s satisfaction with another’s burden and identifies the constant-marginal-cost assumption needed for Robinson’s claim about demand elasticity and monopoly output. His appreciation is equally discriminating: breaking a monopoly into a few firms need not restore competition, and opportunities for firms to combine complicate equilibrium. The review offers a compact example of sympathetic criticism, showing how accessible applied economics can remain answerable to explicit assumptions and clearly acknowledged value judgments.

How can economists measure the gains from technical progress when innovation changes the capital they are measuring? In this 1942 review of Spurgeon Bell’s Productivity, Wages, and National Income, Ludwig Lachmann welcomes evidence on American productivity and income distribution while challenging the accounting used to interpret it. He singles out Bell’s finding that, after 1933, productivity gains accrued to wage earners rather than consumers and profit recipients. His sharper objection concerns comparisons of capital across periods marked by idle capacity, asset write-downs, and machinery replaced before it wears out. This compact review shows why, for Lachmann, empirical detail and theoretical criticism belong together: a study can document technological change yet conceal its effects through the measures it employs.

What makes a catalogue useful to a historian of economics: the breadth of its holdings or the precision of its entries? In this short 1942 review, Hayek judges Harvard’s Kress Library catalogue by its practical service to scholarship rather than its ambition or lavishness. He praises reliable descriptions of 7,279 titles, concise annotations drawn from Foxwell’s notes, and explicit acknowledgment of disputed authorship in anonymous publications. His comparison with Higgs’s bibliography distinguishes the scope of a library collection from that of a broader bibliographical undertaking. A closing objection to capitalization adds a lightly humorous qualification. The review offers a concrete glimpse of Hayek as a reader attentive to the editorial details on which historical research depends.

Expert testimony about inventions is not necessarily evidence of patents’ economic benefits. In this sharply critical review of George E. Folk’s Patents and Industrial Progress, Fritz Machlup asks what a defense of patent protection must establish beyond the convictions of engineers, businesspeople, and patent lawyers. He faults Folk’s extensive reproduction of favorable testimony for failing to explain effects on unemployment or living standards, and challenges a reassurance about competition in glass-container manufacturing. Yet Machlup leaves the merits of the patent system open: his objection is to advocacy presented as analysis, not to the policy defended. This short review offers a concrete test of where professional authority ends and economic reasoning must begin.

What I am opposed to is propaganda in the disguise of analysis. The book perhaps contains legal arguments, but it contains no economic analysis.

More observations do not necessarily mean more information: this difficulty gives Gerhard Tintner’s review of Harold T. Davis’s The Analysis of Economic Time Series a focus beyond its assessment of a statistical handbook. Tintner asks what mathematicians miss when economic statistics remains outside their field of attention. He distinguishes lucid exposition from genuine methodological innovation, praising Davis’s work on serial correlation while treating forecasting and business-cycle explanation as unresolved problems. Particularly revealing is his account of how dependence among observations can undermine a naïve count of degrees of freedom. The review offers a concise encounter with Tintner’s standards of judgement: mathematical ingenuity matters, but so do the limits of inference and the connection between statistical technique and economic interpretation.

A market can have many sellers without being open to more. In Part I of Competition, Pliopoly and Profit, Fritz Machlup makes this distinction the starting point for examining whether profitable opportunities actually attract newcomers. His term “pliopoly” shifts attention from existing firms’ conduct to entry over time—and to the uncertainty, investment requirements and indivisible plants that can obstruct it. Crucially, the profits at stake are not simply those recorded in business accounts: ownership arrangements can disguise resource earnings as profits, while opportunity costs reveal what entry might eliminate. This first installment offers readers a precise way to distinguish persistent economic profit from scarcity rents, and to understand why rapid entry can coexist with slow withdrawal by loss-making firms.

When a household buys a car on monthly instalments, does that credit drive the business cycle or merely ride it? This National Bureau study, completed as Regulation W brought consumer credit under wartime control, argues firmly for the second view. Haberler defines instalment credit narrowly — scheduled repayment, finance charge, short maturity, a negotiable instrument — and shifts attention from the stock of debt outstanding to the flow of net credit change, the excess of new lending over repayments, which he takes as its direct contribution to effective demand. Durable-goods purchases, especially automobiles, make that flow cyclically volatile and, through the acceleration principle formalized in Samuelson's appendix, magnify swings in output. Yet credit follows income rather than leading it; between the oversaving arguments of Keynes and Hansen and the Austrian warnings of Hayek and Mises, Haberler places credit as amplifier, not motor.

The dog wags the tail and not the tail the dog.