3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A generation of development economists held that primary-product exporters face an inexorable secular decline in their terms of trade, and thus a standing case for protection and industrialization. Haberler subjects that thesis to sustained scrutiny and finds it wanting: the historical evidence is thin, neglects quality improvements, new manufactured goods, and freight costs, and confuses a fall in commodity prices with a fall in welfare. Distinguishing commodity from single factorial terms of trade, he shows that cheaper exports need not mean loss where export productivity has risen, and he treats the cyclical instability of raw-material prices as real but exaggerated by the freak experience of the 1930s. His remedy is not buffer stocks and commodity agreements but financial discipline—reserves accumulated in booms and drawn down in slumps.
It is well known that the hypothesis under consideration is based entirely on the annual index of the United Kingdom's commodity terms of trade.
Planning becomes meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: growth against present consumption, employment against future surplus, equality against efficiency. Rosenstein-Rodan reads India's Five Year Plans less as a statistical exercise than as a theory of democratic development under scarcity, in which a poor society must decide how much the present generation may be asked to forgo for the sake of the future. He treats unemployment and the rural-urban divide as central inequalities rather than side effects, defends general education as social overhead capital whose returns are delayed but transformative, and argues that industrial concentration, often unavoidable where capital and markets are thin, must be restrained by taxation and public investment rather than by price controls. A socialist pattern, on his account, cannot mean redistribution alone, nor can development mean growth alone.
A series of choices between eating ('somewhat' or 'much') less today for the sake of eating ('somewhat' or 'much') more tomorrow has to be made.
National-income statistics fold government spending into "national product" as if a dollar taxed and spent were a dollar of output that consumers had chosen—and that sleight of hand is Rothbard's target. Market productivity, he argues, is validated only by voluntary purchase under scarcity; a million unwanted buggies are not "product" in the sense that chosen automobiles are. Government, funded by coercive confiscation and measured merely by its expenditures, cannot be run like a business and feeds parasitically on the private economy. He proposes subtracting state outlays from national product rather than adding them, answers Galbraith's complaint that public wants are starved by noting that the failing schools and streets cited already lie under government control, and rejects external-benefit defenses of public provision.
But in the public sector, the government's "productivity" is measured—mirabile dictu—by how much it spends!
Into a market order that has abolished legal caste, Marx's class-conflict doctrine smuggles the antagonisms of a vanished status society—and exposing that sleight of hand is Mises's aim in this 1961 essay. Caste conflict is intelligible, he grants: one estate's privilege is another's burden. But where citizens stand equal before the law, membership in a 'class' is a fluctuating market outcome, revised continually by consumer choice rather than fixed by inherited rank. Mises then turns textual critic, noting that Marx never defined 'class' and left the chapter bearing that title in Das Kapital unfinished—less an accident of death, he suggests, than a sign the doctrine had collapsed. The ideology doctrine, which dismisses critics by their social origins, he shows to condemn the bourgeois-born Marx by its own rule.
The essential dogma of the Marxian philosophy, the class conflict doctrine which he and his friend Engels had propagated for many decades, was unmasked as a flop.
The iron law of wages—pay must sink to bare subsistence because higher wages breed population growth and lower ones starve the labor supply—carries, in Mises's 1961 reading, Marx's entire indictment of capitalism on its back. Borrowed from earlier writers and already refuted when Marx adopted it, this premise is what makes exploitation theory work: if workers can never gain above subsistence, then reform, unions, and minimum-wage laws are futile and immiseration must deepen until revolution. Ordinary observation overturns it, Mises replies, since capitalism's mark is mass production for the masses, and wage earners spend their surplus on culture and comfort rather than mere reproduction. He drives the contradiction home—Marx cannot hold both that wages already sit at the physiological minimum and that the proletariat grows steadily poorer.
The pith of Marx's economic teachings is his "law" of wages. This alleged law that is at the bottom of his entire criticism of the capitalistic system is, of course, not of Marxian make.
Galbraith's Affluent Society argued that many modern wants are not our own but are manufactured by the very production that satisfies them, so private consumption lacks urgency and resources should flow toward government-supplied services. The inference is a plain non sequitur, Hayek replies in this 1961 essay, and with it the book's whole argument collapses. His counter-move separates the origin of a want from its worth: nearly all civilized desire is culturally acquired, and to dismiss learned wants as trivial is to dismiss the whole cultural achievement of man, music, literature, cultivated taste and all. Producers and advertisers may shape the environment in which preferences form, he concedes, but shaping is not determining. Behind Galbraith's sociology he detects an old socialist strategy in new dress: having failed to deliver abundance, it now declares that abundance does not matter.
To say that a desire is not important because it is not innate is to say that the whole cultural achievement of man is not important.
The ruin in Shackle’s title is the loss of confidence in an economy that automatically reconciles private interests—not the end of economics. This 1961 article asks what the discipline should teach once unemployment, imperfect competition and inflation have unsettled that reassuring picture. Shackle brings personal experience to the question, recalling how hearing Joan Robinson in Cambridge transformed his understanding of unemployment. He also argues that Keynes and Hayek addressed different conditions: deficient demand and excessive investment under full employment. His perspective combines respect for mathematical tools with resistance to treating people as calculating machines. Readers can discover how a critique of automatic harmony becomes a concrete proposal for economic education, linking resource allocation to employment, monetary authority and the political choices that theory cannot settle alone.
Much recent work in economics has treated man as a computer. Let us also study him as an artist, a poet, a mystic, a dreamer, in some degree, even in his economic activity.
When do mathematical probability models warrant conclusions about economic and social data? Gerhard Tintner’s memorial survey approaches this question through Oskar Anderson’s insistence that statistical procedures answer to the populations and observations they describe. Tintner connects Anderson’s practical experience in agricultural sampling with his demands for explicit probability models and predetermined standards of accuracy. His most sustained discussion concerns the Variate Difference Method: how repeated differencing can separate trends from random variation, and why autocorrelation or short periodic fluctuations can undermine it. As a contributor to this field himself, Tintner offers appreciation tempered by technical objections. Readers can discover both the reasoning behind familiar first-difference techniques and a methodological alternative to prevailing Anglo-American approaches, grounded in Anderson’s Russian and continental statistical inheritance.
A country can accumulate productive assets abroad while losing the liquidity needed to sustain confidence in its currency. This distinction anchors Josef Herbert Fürth’s analysis of the American external deficit in 1958–60. Rather than prescribing indiscriminate austerity, he asks which losses reflect weakened competitiveness, which arise from capital movements, and which signal anxiety about the dollar itself. His remedies expose a policy tension: restoring external balance must not obstruct domestic recovery or sacrifice alliance commitments and development assistance. Readers can discover why a current-account surplus need not establish equilibrium, why restricting foreign expenditure may fail, and why Fürth assigns surplus countries a role in adjustment alongside the United States.
Imbalance so defined is a purely monetary concept: a decline in a country's external liquidity. It does not necessarily imply a decline in the country's "real" wealth, abroad or at home.
Public opinion imagines wages as the prize in a tug-of-war between employers and workers; Mises dismantles that picture by placing the consumer at its center. Entrepreneurs, disciplined by profit and loss, can pay only what buyers will indirectly reimburse, so the market becomes a daily plebiscite in which each purchase helps assign incomes—modest for the welder, lavish for the entertainer. Wages rise, in this 1961 essay, only as capital accumulation lifts the marginal productivity of labor; poverty in underdeveloped nations reflects bad policy and insecure property, not natural scarcity. Force wages above the market-clearing level, and employers curtail production until mass unemployment becomes lasting. Keynesian inflation, Mises adds, is merely a disguised cut in real wages that an 'index conscious' public can no longer be fooled by.
The consumers are sovereign and the businessmen are their servants.
Three books at once—Ludwig von Mises on epistemology, a collection of European economic thought, and Richard von Mises's frequency theory of probability—give Rothbard the occasion to argue that purposive action cannot be studied like the motion of unmotivated physical objects. Mises supplies the positive method: economic laws are built by deducing necessarily true conclusions from apodictic axioms, never 'tested' against historical data. The mathematician Paul Painlevé—no innocent of equations—furnishes the critique of mathematical economics, whose proper domain is continuous, unmotivated magnitudes. And the frequency theory confines probability to homogeneous, repeatable classes, blocking its extension to the unique, motivated choices of acting men. Economics, the essay concludes, must study man as he acts, not as a thing to be measured.
It becomes evident from Richard von Mises’s fundamental work that mathematical probability theory can never be applicable to economics, or to any other study of human action.
The suspicion that sound economic conduct must collide with ethical obligation rests, Mahr argues, on a false definition of economy. Against the caricature of homo oeconomicus as pure profit-seeker, he recovers the subjectivist conception: economizing is not a realm of money or goods but the ordering of scarce means toward chosen ends, whatever their moral content. Altruistic, religious, cultural, and political aims become economic the moment they compete for scarce resources; a seller who favors a friend satisfies two needs at once, and unwirtschaftlich conduct means only the irrational use of means, never the refusal to maximize gain. The closing pages defend a qualified Wertfreiheit against Max Weber's shadow: economists may render moral judgments, but derivation and proof must stay free of them.
Es handelt sich eben nur um das Disponieren über die knappen Mittel zwecks maximaler Zielerreichung.
English translation: “What is involved is simply the disposition of scarce means with a view to maximal attainment of ends.”