The archive.

Returning to the terrain of his London lectures on Prices and Production, Hayek recasts production as a flow through time, a stream in which resources are allocated not only horizontally among goods but longitudinally among stages serving different future dates. Competitive relative prices supply the signals that keep this changing capital structure coordinated, work that no central planner, lacking the dispersed local knowledge, could perform. Against Keynes he insists that demand for commodities is not demand for labour, and that macroeconomics obscures the relative-price adjustments governing capital, wages, and intermediate goods. Disequilibrium, he argues, is not a flaw but the very thing that keeps the stream moving; price fixing, monopolistic wage-setting, and the craving for security only dam it. The remedy lies not in demand management but in better legal and monetary rules.

Genaugenommen kann eigentlich ein Strom niemals im Gleichgewicht sein, denn gerade das Ungleichgewicht hält ihn in Fluß und bestimmt seine Richtung.

English translation: “Strictly speaking, a stream can never really be in equilibrium, for it is precisely the disequilibrium that keeps it flowing and determines its direction.”

Cooperation among strangers depends on knowledge that no participant possesses in full. In this published lecture, Hayek asks how such an order can function—and why the solidarity appropriate to a small community might undermine it. His answer joins competitive prices to inherited restraints: property, consensual exchange, and promise-keeping allow people with different purposes to coordinate without agreeing on a common end. The sharpest tension concerns rewards. Hayek argues that market incomes guide productive choices even when they fail familiar tests of merit or justice, making distribution inseparable from future production. Readers can examine how his account of dispersed knowledge becomes an argument about morality and institutional scale, and where that explanation turns into his polemical claim that socialism rests on factual error rather than merely different values.

Planning fails, on the usual telling, because information is expensive to gather. Kirzner's target here is exactly that comfortable assumption. Hayek's knowledge problem, he argues, cannot be folded into standard welfare economics as a matter of higher search costs, because the ignorance that matters most is ignorance the planner does not know he suffers. Beginning from the Robbinsian model of the individual optimizing over given ends and means, he shows that a preliminary search plan cannot rescue it: search itself presupposes knowing what is missing and where to look. Scaled up to a central authority governing dispersed, locally held knowledge, the difficulty becomes crippling, and no allocation calculus can absorb unknown ignorance. What markets possess and planners cannot replicate is entrepreneurial alertness to the profit opportunities that disequilibrium prices throw off. The argument reaches industrial policy and piecemeal intervention alike.

The unknown ignorance that is the heart of the knowledge problem created by the dispersal of information defies its being able to be squeezed into the Procrustean bed of the allocation plan.

The alternatives among which a person chooses are creations of his own thought, not a menu the world hands down — and from that premise Shackle builds this compact statement of subjectivist economics, written to introduce Alexander Shand's survey of the tradition from Plato to Hayek. Choice becomes creative rather than calculative, its consequences unknowable in advance, so that the future is not merely unknown but partly made. Non-determinism and the unpredictability of history-to-come follow, along with a political corollary: central coercion cannot render human affairs predictable, only extinguish the dispersed invention that renews economic life. Markets earn their place by disseminating knowledge after events occur, never by abolishing uncertainty.

Subjectivism credits the individual with the power of the alchemist who can throw into his crucible whatever his fancy has invented but knows not what will emerge.

Expensive to create, verify, and teach yet nearly free to reuse, knowledge resists efficient pricing—a tension that runs through this survey of information economics and human capital. Writing deliberately without a line of algebra, Machlup guides the reader through markets riddled with asymmetric information, from Akerlof's lemons to adverse selection and moral hazard, through public goods and the free-rider problem, and back to the Mises-Hayek socialist calculation debate and the dispersed knowledge that no central board can gather. He accepts a weak rational expectations while rejecting the strong version as granting agents superhuman powers, and narrows human capital to investments built into persons alone, distinct from tools and disembodied knowledge. The third volume of the Knowledge project, published after his death, completes it.

I have set for myself the task of writing without a single line of algebra, even where this constraint should make it impossible to give a proper presentation of an author’s ideas.

A traffic signal regulates an intersection two ways: by being perfectly timed already, or by being faulty in a manner that feeds back and corrects itself — and that analogy carries the argument here. Economists, Kirzner charges, have flattened Hayek's insight into a single claim, that equilibrium prices efficiently summarize dispersed knowledge, as in the textbook tin example. The deeper, more Austrian truth concerns disequilibrium prices: the wrong prices, the missed trades, the disappointment and regret of a tea market where beneficial exchanges go unmade. Such prices coordinate not by telling the truth but by exposing error, alerting entrepreneurs to arbitrage and profit. Faulting even Thomas Sowell's Knowledge and Decisions for the usual emphasis, Kirzner concludes that the market's deepest service is not to broadcast what is already known but to generate the conditions under which the unknown is progressively uncovered — which is why price controls do such damage.

What Hayek's 'Austrian' insights permit us to see is that the social function served by market prices is captured far more significantly by the concept of discovery than by that of communication.

Separate money creation from saving, real resources from accounting totals, causal theory from statistical coincidence: the same analytic move recurs through the ten refutations Rothbard assembles in this compact 1984 brief against the language of macroeconomic management. Deficits, he argues, are inflationary only when financed through the banking system; falling prices are the mark of dynamic growth, not catastrophe; wage rates track productivity, not tariff walls. He punctures the Phillips curve as an ideological fallback and the Laffer curve for making state revenue the measure of policy, asking why maximizing government receipts should be anyone's aim at all. The only sound cure for deficits, he concludes, is the one no politician will name: cut the federal budget.

People are contrary cusses whose behavior, thank goodness, cannot be forecast precisely in advance.

What if the Federal Reserve’s early record is measured against bankers’ interests rather than its public promises of stability? In this essay, Rothbard interprets central banking as a means of coordinating credit expansion that competition and demands for redemption would otherwise constrain. His distinctive approach connects monetary mechanisms with banking alliances, political negotiations, and the influence of Benjamin Strong at the New York Fed. The argument becomes especially concrete in his account of Federal Reserve support for bankers’ acceptances and for Britain’s return to gold at sterling’s prewar parity. Readers can examine how reserve provision, securities purchases, and international cooperation worked—and assess Rothbard’s contention that the resulting instability arose from protected credit expansion, not merely from failures to manage it effectively.

Open the issue of money to private enterprise, and let the public, not the state, decide which currencies it will hold: this is the proposal Hayek develops here, extending the argument of The Denationalization of Money. A government monopoly on issue, he contends, has blocked the kind of evolutionary experimentation long seen in law, language, and morals, leaving society ignorant of what the best money would even be. Competing private issuers, disciplined by the threat of depreciation and lost custom, would supply currencies of stable purchasing power, perhaps a unit he calls the Solid, redeemable against a weighted basket of widely traded raw materials. He argues that Gresham's law binds only under fixed exchange rates, doubts the gold standard can be restored, and urges that money be removed from political control and returned to the market's self-steering order.

It is really extraordinary that, as long as the discussion on money has been going on, everyone has accepted the right of government to provide us with money on an exclusive basis.

Assembled as the world economy emerged from the severest recession of the postwar period, this edited symposium gathers Haberler as framer and contributor alongside Michael Bruno, Robert Mundell, and others to debate what made the early-1980s slump so deep and how recovery might proceed. Haberler supplies the anti-catastrophic baseline: this was disinflation after the runaway 1970s, not a second Great Depression, since deposit insurance and central-bank activism made a wholesale monetary collapse unthinkable. Bruno presses the oil shocks and real-wage resistance; Mundell and other reformers warn of an unstable dollar and the absence of professional consensus. Against calls for coordinated intervention and fixed rates, Haberler defends floating as an imperfect but durable second-best in a world of divergent national policies.

The world economy is sinking, yet the profession is unable to reach any consensus on what should be done.

Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.

The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.

As old as government itself, the hidden economy springs, in this 1984 pamphlet, from human nature choosing among the alternatives that taxation and regulation leave open. Sennholz's first move is to separate the underground producer from the criminal underworld: the latter preys on persons and property, the former supplies wanted goods and services outside official permission, reporting, or taxation. Minimum wages, overtime mandates, building codes, licensing, union privileges, taxi medallions, and Social Security earnings limits all price willing workers out of lawful jobs, so informal work becomes a labor market for people whom law has excluded, students, retirees, moonlighting teachers, gypsy cabs, barter networks, undocumented field hands. Even the unemployment rate, he shows, dissolves once hidden workers misreport themselves idle. The verdict is libertarian: the underground is no anomaly but the shadow cast by intervention itself.

There is no doubt that the underground economy is essentially an employment phenomenon. Where government causes disemployment the underground offers ample opportunities for employment. It offers jobs to the officially unemployable.