The archive.

How much theoretical abstraction helps explain the practical problems of a firm—and where does it obscure them? Walter Fröhlich brings this question to his review of Erich Gutenberg’s production volume in its second edition and sales volume in its first. He values Gutenberg’s sustained application of economics to management and marketing, yet identifies consequential ambiguities: variable input proportions are not clearly separated from returns to scale, and short-run constraints from long-run possibilities. His distinctive judgement rests on choosing the right comparison—not specialist price theory, but management textbooks and Joel Dean’s more empirical Managerial Economics. This compact review offers a concrete test of theoretical ambition: abundant diagrams and business examples can extend analysis without supplying either conceptual precision or empirical evidence.

Does a growing literature on business cycles necessarily mean better understanding? In this brief 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl defends the nearly unchanged republication of Arthur Spiethoff’s early-1920s study while acknowledging its distance from contemporary model-based economics. His pointed judgment is that subsequent research, for all its volume, has added comparatively little to Spiethoff’s treatment of the central problems. Yet his defence is not simply retrospective: he singles out the statistical tables as evidence of what historical inquiry can contribute to economic theory. The review offers a compact statement of Kerschagl’s standards for intellectual progress—analytical reach and useful evidence rather than novelty or quantity.

Can economic planning preserve the market mechanism, and can unions of sovereign states reconcile welfare with defence? These are the possibilities Richard Kerschagl finds worth examining in his brief 1956 review of Meade’s Probleme nationaler und internationaler Wirtschaftsordnung. His interest is qualified by a sharp suspicion: what Meade calls liberal-socialist thinking, Kerschagl argues, begins with liberal theory but ends in socialist practice. Yet this objection does not prevent him from valuing the discussion of economic union or welcoming the German translation. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who tests Meade’s proposals both against their political implications and against continental scholarship he believes Meade has neglected.

An additional billion schillings may create employment—but where does the billion come from? In this short 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl welcomes Josef Steindl’s empirical study, published by the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, while drawing a firm boundary around its conclusions. Estimates of employment gains, he argues, cannot settle the question of inflation without distinguishing money creation, credit finance and investment backed by real capital. His warning about financing hydropower through banknote issuance gives the objection a concrete edge. The review offers a compact encounter between appreciation of statistical modelling and suspicion of Keynesian assumptions: Kerschagl accepts the study’s findings as valuable, but disputes their sufficiency as an economic assessment.

Industrialization may foster economic self-sufficiency, yet surplus production can renew the need for international exchange. In this brief review of Sven Helander’s Das Autarkieproblem in der Weltwirtschaft, Richard Kerschagl draws out that tension while questioning a predominantly economic account of it. He values Helander’s extensive evidence on autarkic formations as groundwork for future theoretical models, but sees the prospect of overproduction as a reason to consider slower, better-coordinated development. His sharpest reservation concerns political choice: relations between autarky and the world economy also turn on the alternative of “butter or guns.” The review offers a compact distinction between what an empirical survey can establish and what requires an account of political priorities.

Explaining why business cycles fluctuate is not the same as making their course calculable. Richard Kerschagl’s 1956 review of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Die Konjunkturschwankungen sharpens this distinction: he welcomes social psychology as a means of understanding irregular economic movements, but argues that it leaves calculation largely general and symbolic. His qualified appreciation also challenges Jöhr’s weighting of monetary factors and asks whether a nearly 700-page synthesis delivers proportionate theoretical gains. This brief review offers a concrete methodological dispute rather than a rejection of psychological explanation: how should economists judge an approach that clarifies the direction of tendencies while weakening their capacity to calculate particular processes?

Higher national income does not by itself show that government spending has improved welfare. In this 1956 discussion contribution, Walter Fröhlich asks what fiscal totals conceal: guarantees and tax exemptions that shape activity without direct expenditure, differences between public provision and support for private initiative, and changes in society’s structure. Defense spending sharpens the problem, raising output while favoring large industry and creating further demands for infrastructure and services. Fröhlich brings institutional choices and explicit social priorities into an analysis too easily confined to aggregates and multipliers. His remarks offer a compact way to distinguish fuller use of resources from structural growth—and both from a defensible claim of social improvement.

Expenditures alone are not always a good measure of governmental activity.

An automated mail-order business can increase productivity while leaving its employees with little more to do than read five-digit numbers. This tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1956 article: technical sophistication does not necessarily enrich work or spread prosperity. Distinguishing feedback-based automation from assembly-line mechanization, Bayer follows its consequences beyond factories into inventory control and bookkeeping, where integration can displace routine clerical work and concentrate economic power. His perspective links technical change to the arrangements governing its use—working hours, investment, and access to technical education. For Austria, even slow domestic adoption offers no insulation from automated foreign competitors. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what machinery makes possible from what economic and social choices make beneficial.

A firm can save labour without an economy finding new work for those displaced. This gap anchors Hans Bayer’s 1956 article, the concluding contribution to his three-part discussion of automation. He challenges the supposed automatic passage from lower production costs to lower prices, increased demand, and renewed employment: automation may strengthen the concentrations of power that obstruct that very sequence. His alternative retains markets but makes coordination, income distribution, and shorter working hours decisive to technical progress. What distinguishes the article is its movement from economic mechanisms to human purposes. Leisure requires education, not merely time off; institutional reform requires, in Bayer’s view, a religiously grounded rejection of power and profit as ultimate ends. Automation becomes a test of what economic life is for, rather than simply how much it can produce.

Technischer Fortschritt der Automation und sozialer Fortschritt fallen keineswegs zusammen.

English translation: “The technical progress of automation and social progress by no means coincide.”

Platinum’s expanding industrial uses did not necessarily make it a secure store of wealth. In this 1956 survey, Richard Kerschagl examines the tension between growing demand from petroleum refining, chemicals and electrical engineering and the threat of sudden releases from accumulated stocks. His economic perspective separates annual mining output from metal available for sale, and platinum’s specific technical uses from those of increasingly abundant palladium. Concentrated production in Canada and South Africa, uncertain Soviet supplies and divided trading markets complicate any simple equation between scarcity and price. Readers can discover why Kerschagl regarded platinum’s medium-term prospects cautiously favourably while resisting confident short-term forecasts—and how industrial indispensability could coexist with speculative vulnerability.

An economy can expand without changing how it produces or improving output per person. For Alfred Amonn, this distinction exposes a central weakness in dynamic equilibrium theory: explaining growth is not yet explaining development. In this 1956 review essay on Willy Kraus’s Wirtschaftswachstum und Gleichgewicht, Amonn tests models of expansion against the harder questions of technical change, capital deepening, and structural transformation. His criticism also separates equilibrium from two conditions often associated with it—steady growth and full employment. Readers can discover how definitions of saving, investment, and monetary equilibrium shape apparently substantive disagreements, and why Amonn regards the prevention of cumulative disturbances as a more defensible policy aim than a guaranteed programme of uninterrupted growth.

Against a literature on codetermination he concedes is already vast, Bayer justifies one more treatment by insisting the question be examined from the economy rather than from social psychology. He rejects the picture of the economy as a self-regulating mechanism of supply and demand, calling it instead an organism centered on responsible human beings, so that those who shape the economy must share in governing it. From this he derives a staged, subsidiarity-like structure and tests three models: isolated plant-level codetermination, faulted for breeding plant egoism; integrated codetermination on the Montan pattern; and supra-company codetermination reaching across branches and regions. The second industrial revolution of automation and atomic energy only sharpens the tensions, concentrating power in large firms and demanding countervailing labor institutions rather than empty firm-bound partnership rhetoric.

Die Peitsche der Konkurrenz zwingt den einzelnen, die Dynamik der Technik voll in die Wirtschaft zu übernehmen.

English translation: “The whip of competition compels the individual to absorb the dynamism of technology fully into the economy.”