3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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 happens when a demand for scientific objectivity excludes the expectations that guide human choice? In this sharply critical 1942 review of Joseph Mayer’s Social Science Principles, Hayek argues that Mayer’s proposed reconstruction of economics misunderstands the theories it seeks to replace. His most concrete objections concern utility—the benefit an individual expects at the moment of acting—and opportunity cost—the alternative forgone, not the cost of that alternative. These distinctions give the brief review its interest beyond Hayek’s severe verdict on the book: they show why, for him, explaining economic action requires attention to subjective expectations. Readers encounter a methodological dispute tested against specific concepts, rather than a general opposition between economics and natural science.
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.
A convincing portrait of a possible future is not proof that it must arrive. In this 1942 review of James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, Hayek grants the realism of Burnham’s account of managerial power while challenging its claim to historical inevitability. He finds revealing evidence in Burnham’s portrait of New Deal administrators who both believe they can run society and enjoy doing so; he also questions the supposed detachment of an analysis sympathetic to the emerging order in Germany and Russia. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s distinction between recognizing a danger and accepting its necessity—and with his concern that persuasive predictions can encourage the very developments they describe.
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.
Can stronger incentives to expand output lead to less investment? In this short reply to Nicholas Kaldor, Hayek explains why they can—and why he regards that claim as a development, not a repudiation, of Prices and Production. His defence turns on distinctions easily blurred in arguments about the business cycle: money interest rates versus relative-price incentives, longer production methods versus a larger volume of investment, and rapid delivery of consumer goods versus capital accumulation. Hayek argues that entrepreneurs seeking higher profits may adopt shorter production methods, while monetary accommodation cannot necessarily reconcile investment plans with consumers’ demands. The exchange offers a compact account of what Hayek believed remained constant in his theory as its assumptions changed.
The essential argument is still the same, but the assumptions under which I describe the operation of the mechanism in question are different.
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.
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.”