The archive.

Machinery and labour, Ricardo wrote, are in constant competition; from that maxim Hayek builds a tight reconstruction of the 'Ricardo effect,' the proposition that a general shift in wages relative to product prices alters the comparative profitability of methods combining labour and capital in different proportions. Writing in German in 1942, he makes turnover velocity—Umschlagsgeschwindigkeit—his gauge of capital intensity: a price rise adds the same margin at each sale, lifting the internal rate far more on fast-turnover, labour-heavy methods than on slow, machine-heavy ones. Firms redirect current outlay toward direct labour, even generating unemployment among machine-makers amid strong consumer demand. Testing the extreme of perfectly elastic credit and answering Kaldor and Wilson, Hayek insists that cheap money can obscure real scarcity but never abolish it.

Solange ungenützte Reserven von Arbeitern zu unveränderten Preisen zur Verfügung stehen, bedeuten unbegrenzte Geldmittel unbegrenzte Verfügungsmacht über die Produktionsmittel.

English translation: “So long as unused reserves of workers are available at unchanged prices, unlimited monetary means signify unlimited command over the means of production. But these are not the conditions relevant in a state of full employment, which will prevail near the peak of a boom.”

Rarely taken seriously in Germany and often dismissed for its ties to monetary crisis theory, the Wicksellian process — the claim that an interest rate departing from equilibrium sets off a cumulative movement in prices, investment, and the structure of production — receives here a searching capital-theoretic defense. Writing in 1942 for Kiel's Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv and taking Erik Lindahl's Studies as his occasion, Strigl runs the process through four models and reaches a single stubborn conclusion: new capital requires a restriction of consumption before, during, or after investment, even where productive capacity sits idle. He rejects the old quantity theory's view of money as a mere price multiplier, and faults Lindahl for treating the necessary saving as an automatic by-product of the process rather than its precondition.

Eine spezifische Selektionsfunktion des Kapitalzinses besteht nun in der Begrenzung der Produktionsumwege.

English translation: “A specific selective function of interest on capital consists in limiting the roundaboutness of production.”

Anton von Prokesch-Osten carried Vienna's cause first to Berlin and then to the Frankfurt Bundestag, where he faced the young Bismarck across a table neither man respected. Through these missions between 1849 and the Crimean War, Engel-Janosi reconstructs the struggle over whether Germany would become an enlarged Prussia or Prussia be sacrificed to a unified German nation. Schwarzenberg's design—that Vienna become the centre of a Habsburg-led Mitteleuropa—runs up against a Prussian Borussianism strong enough to thwart every Austrian plan while still too weak to build its own. In quarrels over the federal fleet, fortresses, and procedural privilege, a decade emerges when unification was not yet inevitable and Austria's federal alternative was still a living idea—one strategically defeated long before 1866.

Dank der überlegenen Taktik Bismarcks und der Furcht der kleineren Staaten triumphierte Preußen im Bundestag.

English translation: “Thanks to Bismarck's superior tactics and the fear of the smaller states, Prussia triumphed in the Federal Diet.”

An accounting calculation changes its function with the system in which it operates: this is the insight Erich Schiff singles out in his review of Erich Schneider’s introduction to industrial accounting. Schiff approaches the book as an encounter between economic theory and business administration, distinguishing its logical analysis of cost and profit computation from both practical bookkeeping instruction and a broader economics of production. His assessment makes clear why mass production and production to order require different computational frameworks—and why theoretical clarity can come at a pedagogical cost. The book’s avoidance of concrete examples and assumption of bookkeeping knowledge qualify its promise as an “Introduction.” This compact review offers a precise account of what Schneider’s abstraction achieves and what it demands of students.

Can the supply of bank loans be explained like the output of an industrial firm? In this review of Antonio Graziadei’s study, Erich Schiff welcomes the distinction between bank lending and capital supplied by private savers, but questions the equation of banks’ unit costs with the supply price of loans. His objection turns on a concrete feature of banking: deposits that bear no interest still affect how much banks can lend, although they generate no interest expense to enter Graziadei’s cost curve. The review offers a compact encounter between a Marshallian model and the institutional conditions it must explain, showing how Schiff separates a worthwhile research question from a solution whose simplifying assumptions remain unproven.

Written in 1942 for Americans wary of economists whose earlier prosperity forecasts had failed, this plain-language essay defines inflation as an increase in money and money substitutes - deposit currency and bank credit - and traces where its losses fall. Mises shows that every creditor is silently robbed: savings, pensions, insurance claims, and Social Security benefits are all repaid in depreciated dollars, while salaried professionals watch living costs outrun their incomes. He weighs the usual escapes - gold, foreign currency, farmland, stocks - and finds each blocked by law or market. Gravest of all, he argues, are the moral and political effects: inflation destroys thrift, radicalizes the ruined, and breeds support for dictators and quack remedies. Its true cause is not necessity but the government's choice to finance itself by credit expansion rather than honest taxes.

For all these millions of people, every further step toward inflation means a further decline in the real value of the claims or credits they have saved up by years of toil and sacrifice.

When a peacetime economy converts to war, military demand piles onto civilian demand, usable productive means shrink, and the money circulation is thrown out of joint—three simultaneous shocks that no ordinary peacetime remedy can absorb. Written in Zurich in 1942 alongside Swiss reports by Böhler and Dütscher, this study refuses the comforting idea that policy should preserve the old circular flow; the whole national economy, Amonn argues, becomes structurally a war economy or it is none. He challenges the dogma that taxes never inflate while loans always do, subordinates the prevention of inflation to the overriding goal of maximum production, and defends rationing, differentiated price control, and savings-based war loans, testing each against Swiss figures for the cost of living, wages, and foreign trade.

Aber man geriete dann von der Scylla der Inflation unvermeidlich in die Charybdis der Deflation.

English translation: “But one would then inevitably pass from the Scylla of inflation into the Charybdis of deflation.”

A prediction of centralized rule can warn against it—or encourage resignation to it. In this 1942 review, reprinted with editorial notes in 1997, Hayek tests James Burnham’s claim that capitalism must give way to a society governed by managers. He credits Burnham’s disturbing portrait while questioning the premises that make its arrival seem inevitable. His scrutiny of Burnham’s wartime forecasts and account of New Deal administrators also challenges the book’s claim to scientific detachment: historical prediction carries political sympathies of its own. This short review offers a pointed distinction between recognizing a possible future and accepting it as unavoidable, showing why Hayek could recommend Burnham’s book yet fear its influence.

However much one may disagree with the asserted inevitability of the developments the author sketches, its possibility and even likelihood cannot be gainsaid.

Concentrated economic power may demand regulation, but can the same principles govern mergers formed in prosperity and cartels formed in depression? In this brief review of Fritz Haussmann’s study, Karl Pribram locates a precise weakness in an ambitious legal and sociological account of big business. He appreciates Haussmann’s international scholarship and attention to the distribution of power, yet argues that treating concentration chiefly as a social phenomenon obscures the different economic conditions that produce its organizational forms. The review offers a compact encounter between two approaches to corporate regulation: one centred on power and social order, the other insisting that policy also reckon with falling prices, shrinking markets, and business fluctuations.

Can an economy remain capitalist when private ownership survives but government dictates how enterprises operate? In this 1942 review of Maxine Y. Sweezy’s The Structure of the Nazi Economy, Ludwig von Mises praises her empirical research while contesting her classification of the system she describes. His criterion is effective control over production, not legal ownership or equality of incomes; on that basis, he calls the Nazi economy socialist. A particularly revealing tension concerns managers: deprived of independent authority, they may nevertheless preserve capital in the hope of recovering their businesses after the war. This brief review offers a concentrated encounter with Mises’s distinction between the outward forms of enterprise and the power to make economic decisions—and with his attempt to explain productive incentives within a system he condemns.

Listening to someone speak, we follow a thought as it unfolds; reflecting on our own experience, we grasp what has already occurred. This temporal contrast anchors Alfred Schütz’s alternative to Scheler’s account of how we understand others. In this essay, republished in 1967, Schütz accepts Scheler’s challenge to theories that infer another mind from bodily signs, but rejects the hypothesis of an originally undifferentiated consciousness. A shared present, he argues, can explain the priority of the “We” without dissolving distinct persons into a common stream of experience. The resulting account separates participation in another’s unfolding activity from certainty about what that person thinks. Readers can discover why ordinary conversation offers a precise philosophical problem: how we inhabit time together while remaining irreducibly different centres of experience.

Between a rise in commodity prices and money wages that lag behind it lies a mechanism Hayek retrieves from Ricardo and sets at the center of capital and cycle theory. When labor grows cheaper relative to selling prices, the methods that pay are not the long, roundabout, machine-intensive ones but the quick-turnover processes that recover and reinvest their outlays fast—so a boom in consumer demand can perversely reduce demand for capital goods as firms work old plant harder, postpone replacement, and shift toward circulating capital. Reworking the wage-price relation through rates of turnover and internal rates of return, Hayek argues against treating the interest rate as the sole determinant of technique, and shows how credit expansion, once incomes and prices rise, pulls resources back toward shorter processes and throws the capital-goods trades into unemployment.