3,422 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A wage increase cannot protect living standards if rising food prices, utility charges and production costs absorb it. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer treats Austria’s third wage–price agreement as a necessary emergency compromise, not a programme for recovery. His distinctive concern is what stabilization buys time to do: coordinate investment with export markets, redirect labour, and distinguish spending that expands productive capacity from spending that merely raises costs. He challenges both the dismissal of planning as hostile to private initiative and the promise that fiscal repair can burden the population without reducing its purchasing power. The article offers a concrete way to examine the agreement’s limits: not simply by asking who pays for reconstruction, but by asking whether economic policy makes those burdens smaller.
Italy’s factories could produce more without providing enough work for its unemployed. This tension drives Hans Bayer’s 1949 article, which moves from Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto to a working-class suburb and judges reconstruction by the livelihoods it promises. His sharpest example is steel: modernization could cut jobs while lowering costs for manufacturers who might then employ more people. Against projected industrial output growth of roughly 50 percent, Bayer sets anticipated employment growth of only 10–15 percent. His social-policy perspective makes visible what production targets conceal: recovery, competitiveness, and employment are distinct achievements. The article offers a concrete account of why industrial expansion seemed indispensable to postwar Italy—and why, in Bayer’s judgement, even successful expansion would leave its central social problem unresolved.
Money has no essence independent of its economic order; it is a creature of a particular economic form, and once that order changes so does money itself. From the wartime and postwar experience of rationing, blocked balances, black markets, and administrative allocation, Kerschagl rereads the classic problems—deposits and credit creation, quantity theory, exchange rates, gold, inflation, currency reform—around a single insight: legal payment power and general purchasing power can come apart. Ration cards, coupons, price controls, and occupational privileges shift access to goods from money toward administrative entitlement, so that identical nominal incomes carry unequal real content. Planning alters money qualitatively, personalizing it until, at the limit of full socialism, it decays into a mere Rechenpfennig. Sound policy, he insists, demands clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.
Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.
English translation: “Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.”
The claim that every line of a consumer's spending is pushed to the same weighted marginal utility—Gossen's second law, and the hinge of the equilibrium systems of Jevons, Walras, and Pareto—is here dismantled as an aprioristic construction unsupported by experience. Following Hans Mayer, Mahr argues that consumption does not adjust in equal infinitesimal steps: as income rises some quantities stay fixed, inferior goods give way to better ones, and new wants awaken, so no common marginal level is ever revealed. Bread and potatoes remain 'overmarginal' for the well-off, their utility above that of money; genuine leveling appears only in the poorest budgets. What survives the critique is narrow—the marginal utility of money—and a warning that elegant equations must not be allowed to remake economic fact. First published in 1949.
Fällt das Gesetz vom Grenznutzenniveau, dann werden auch die n (m—1) Gleichungen — n repräsentiert dabei die Zahl der Individuen und m die Zahl der Waren —, in denen dieses Gesetz zum Ausdruck kommt, hinfällig.
English translation: “If the law of the marginal-utility level falls, then the n(m−1) equations—where n represents the number of individuals and m the number of goods—in which this law is expressed, also become invalid.”
Why does a state that owns enterprises and controls prices still need taxes? Richard Kerschagl’s 1949 article makes this question central to a comparison of American and Soviet public finance. He distinguishes the outward form of a tax from its function within a particular system of ownership and government. American federal, state, and municipal authorities compete over overlapping tax bases; Soviet authorities use taxes to absorb enterprise surpluses, differentiate among ownership sectors, and preserve incentives for skilled work. Kerschagl argues that recognizable fiscal techniques can serve sharply different political and distributive purposes. The comparison gives readers concrete grounds for understanding why progressive income taxes or turnover levies cannot be interpreted apart from price controls, production costs, and the allocation of governmental power.
A computer can solve a system of equations without making its answer economically trustworthy. In this brief 1949 discussion contribution, Oskar Morgenstern responds to Leontief’s input-output analysis by asking what calculation can establish when observational errors remain unknown. His concern reaches beyond misleading decimal precision: the many zero entries in industrial tables may make solutions easier and more stable while reflecting gaps in information rather than actual economic relationships. Supportive of the research programme, he nevertheless distinguishes computational feasibility from empirical warrant. Readers encounter an economist treating numerical stability, data collection, and model assumptions as connected responsibilities—not problems that faster machines can settle on their own.
Often accuracy is identified with detail; for example, the giving of figures with many decimal points when the real inaccuracy has already been permitted to enter into a much rougher figure.
Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.
I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.
Six recent English books, by Baster, Franks, Harrod, Jewkes, Meade, and Robbins, give Schumpeter his occasion to ask whether economists have drawn a serious analytic harvest from Britain's postwar experiment in state management. His first move is to prise apart three questions habitually merged under planning: socialism, meaning central control of production; laborism, meaning labor's political ascendancy within a still-private economy; and the sheer readjustment of exports, saving, and solvency after the war. Nationalizing coal or transport, he insists, proves neither socialism nor its absence; the telling fact is that the wage rate has become a political datum, protected as a matter of course while profits and rents are compressed. Britain's dollar shortage he reads as the outward face of domestic maladjustment, conceding that under laborite constraints direct controls may be forced expedients rather than doctrinal choices.
Nevertheless, there is point in keeping these three topics distinct, if only in order to show how they interact to produce the English problem.
Addressed directly to the champions of economic dirigisme, this open letter concedes their ends—higher living standards, human dignity, protection of wage-earners—and attacks only their means. Rueff's wager is that a price held away from its market-clearing level must produce either disorder or coercion: queues, shortages, black markets, rationing, and finally an economic police. Free prices, he counters, are the condition of a society of free persons, and price control is not egalitarian but malthusian, since it organizes scarcity instead of redistributing wealth. The volume pairs the Épître with Le Dilemme français, which frames postwar France's choice starkly: a plan enforced with the coercion of Vichy or Hitler's Germany, or liberated prices disciplined by a balanced budget and honest social intervention.
Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.
English translation: “As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.”
An investment cannot always be treated as one trial in a repeatable gamble. How, then, can an economist analyse a decision whose consequences may be unique? Shackle locates its motives in present experiences of imagined futures: the gains that excite hope and the losses that command fear. His alternative to numerical probability, “potential surprise,” measures how astonishing an outcome would seem rather than assigning it a share of total likelihood. The resulting model offers a striking account of waiting: an investor may postpone commitment because information is coming, even without knowing what it will say. Readers can examine both the explanatory reach and the psychological demands of a theory in which two compelling possibilities—not an average across all outcomes—govern a venture’s attraction.
Can an economy organized around useful work dispense with the supposedly money-bound insights of economics? In this 1949 review of Gustav Wihrheim’s Der betriebswirtschaftliche Kreislauf, Hans Bayer shares the ambition of socially purposeful reconstruction but challenges the framework offered to achieve it. His central distinction is concrete: labor and materials measure productive effort, not whether production satisfies human needs. A national economy likewise cannot be understood simply as an enlarged enterprise. Drawing on Keynes, welfare economics, and competitive socialism, Bayer tests Wihrheim’s planning proposals against questions of purchasing power, investment, and prices. The review offers a constructive disagreement about economic reconstruction: how to make work serve social welfare without mistaking technical coordination for an adequate account of prosperity.
Monopoly prices fall less sharply in a depression than competitive prices — a regularity Alexander Mahr had observed in 1932 and here places on a fuller analytical footing. Starting from the elasticity of demand as the decisive determinant of the monopoly price, he shows that under inelastic or unit-elastic demand a cost reduction is largely pocketed as profit rather than passed to buyers, so that monopoly price adjustment is systematically less elastic than competitive adjustment. Real monopolists, he argues, are nonetheless hemmed in by substitutes, latent competitors, tariffs, and the threat of state intervention. The stakes are macroeconomic: by defending prices through cuts to output and employment, monopoly and cartel pricing convert cyclical contractions into cumulative ones, and Mahr rejects the claim that cartels stabilize the Konjunkturzyklus.
Bei unelastischer Nachfrage oder wenn die Nachfrageelastizität gleich eins ist, wird also der Monopolpreis trotz Änderung der Kosten ganz überwiegend unverändert bleiben, während der Konkurrenzpreis sich durchaus der Kostenänderung anpassen würde.
English translation: “With inelastic demand, or when the elasticity of demand equals one, the monopoly price will therefore, despite a change in costs, remain overwhelmingly unchanged, whereas the competitive price would fully adjust to the change in costs.”