The archive.

How much present consumption can justifiably be sacrificed to build future productive capacity? This question anchors Hans Bayer’s 1957 article on Chinese economic planning, electronically republished in 2007. Bayer examines arrangements that complicate a simple opposition between state control and markets: local initiative under central authority, and mixed enterprises retaining former shareholders while transferring control. His broadly affirmative assessment relies heavily on official Chinese statistics and policy reports, making it a contemporary interpretation rather than an independent audit of achievements. Distinctively, he connects investment and ownership reform with the “Bandung spirit” of Asian-African solidarity. Readers can discover how Bayer understood industrialization as both a practical problem of allocating resources and a political response to poverty and foreign domination.

The slim volume in which Hicks reworked the demand theory of Value and Capital gets a patient, skeptical reading here. Machlup follows Hicks through weak ordering, the derivation of the law of demand, and the awkward Giffen case that requires an inferior good, a small substitution effect, and a large budget share at once. He sorts out the four consumer's surpluses Hicks had once collapsed into one, the First and Second Substitution Theorems, and the reciprocity of cross-effects. His verdict is measured: the revisions change neither policy nor prediction, but they honor Occam's razor by resting demand theory on fewer primitive terms, an important reconstruction, he grants, though difficult and joyless to read.

An important book is sometimes enjoyable to read. Unfortunately this cannot be said about this book.

When do long odds make an outcome seem not merely improbable but impossible? In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle acknowledges a difficulty for his account of decision under uncertainty: even someone facing a unique venture may let probabilities shape judgements of what can happen. He welcomes investigation of Gould’s proposed modification while insisting on a prior question—whether the conflicting evidence from which businesspeople form expectations can be expressed as numerical odds at all. The exchange offers a compact view of Shackle responding to criticism without abandoning his central distinction between probability and possibility, and helps readers separate two sources of uncertainty: the rarity of a decision and the difficulty of interpreting its evidence.

The saver, in Mises's telling here—rendered into English from the 1957 German 'Der Sparer als Wähler'—is no marginal figure begging paternal favor but a structural pillar of capitalism, since to defend savings is to defend property, capital formation, and the rising real wages they finance. Genuine protection of savers, he insists, differs entirely from protectionist privilege: it means securing the legal and monetary order in which accumulated capital can survive. His sharpest move recasts the ordinary wage earner, with his savings account and life-insurance policy, as a creditor—one whom inflation quietly robs. The democratic danger is epistemic: voters mistake inflation for mere rising prices rather than an expansion of money and credit, and so demand the cheap-money policies that erode their own claims. Only patient explanation to the voter, he concludes, offers a way out.

The American "common man," as a saver and especially as an owner of life insurance policies, is a creditor to a much greater degree than was the average German of the Weimar Republic.

Can society claim the rental value of natural sites while protecting ownership of everything people build upon them? In this 1957 essay, republished in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Henry George’s single tax at precisely that boundary. He argues that separating site value from accumulated improvements requires arbitrary assessment, and that landowners perform a service even when they postpone development: they allocate scarce locations across uses and time. His economic objections lead into a moral dispute over whether gains arising from social development justify confiscation. The essay offers a compact encounter between two defenses of property that diverge over land, revealing how Rothbard connects market valuation, entrepreneurial foresight, and original appropriation—and why he regards taxing away land rent as a threat to those connections.

One adjective, Hayek contends, has done more to muddle political thought than any other. 'Social'—as in 'social market economy' or 'social Rechtsstaat'—lends moral prestige while quietly voiding the words it modifies of definite meaning, until almost nothing in life is not 'social' in some sense and the term becomes, for all practical purposes, empty. Presented here in a revised English translation of his 1957 German essay, the argument recovers an older sense of society as spontaneous order—language, custom, law, evolved without central design—and sets it against the modern demand that individuals and governments pursue concrete collective aims they cannot fully know. That demand, he warns, corrodes the inherited rules of conduct on which it rests, and much that parades as social proves, in the deeper sense, thoroughly anti-social.

To be “social” is not the same as being good or “righteous in the eyes of the Lord”.

How much mathematics should an introduction to economic modelling teach, and which tools can it afford to leave out? In this 1958 review of E. F. Beach’s Economic Models—An Exposition, Gerhard Tintner judges accessibility against technical coverage. He values Beach’s use of economic examples to make mathematical and statistical methods intelligible to readers with substantial economic knowledge but limited mathematical training. Yet he finds the explanations compressed and challenges the omission of matrices, determinants, input-output models and linear programming: these, he argues, are no harder than topics already included. This brief assessment offers a concrete view of Tintner’s pedagogical priorities, showing why an example-rich introduction can succeed while still leaving readers without useful analytical tools.

How much can a small sample tell agricultural administrators before a full census is available? In this brief 1958 review of Heinrich Strecker’s Moderne Methoden in der Agrarstatistik, Gerhard Tintner singles out a striking result: a sample covering 2% of West German agricultural enterprises produced preliminary census figures, nine-tenths of whose deviations from complete enumeration were below 10%. Tintner’s interest lies in the practical performance of statistical methods, rather than a separate examination of their theory. His favorable assessment connects this example with ongoing surveys of farm labor and agricultural production, while noting Strecker’s command of international research. The review offers a compact account of the concrete evidence on which Tintner based his confidence in agricultural sampling.

When does a statistical distribution become an economically interpretable model? In this concise 1958 review of J. Aitchison and J. A. C. Brown’s The Lognormal Distribution, Gerhard Tintner singles out the connections between income dispersion, inequality measures, and consumer demand. He values the authors’ use of Lorenz diagrams to relate lognormal variance to income concentration, and finds particular novelty in their derivation of Engel curves linking purchases to income. His assessment shows what an econometrician looks for beyond statistical fit: meaningful parameters and a model that can accommodate aggregation, prices, and household composition. Strong praise for the monograph’s methods and multilingual bibliography is tempered by a specific historical correction—the omission of H. T. Davis’s earlier work on income distribution.

Calling an economic assumption a fiction does not settle whether it helps or distorts explanation. This distinction drives Karl Pribram’s 1958 review of Paul K. Crosser’s Economic Fictions, an attack on subjectivist economics in the name of Smith and Ricardo. Pribram counters that the classical economists themselves used fictitious standards, including units of labor costs: the relevant question is what such constructions do, not merely whether they depart from observation. His defense remains conditional, leaving open whether particular fictions produce erroneous interpretations. In a few pages, the review exposes a dispute between reasoning through constructed representations and grounding economics in supposedly stable essences—and shows why criticism of abstraction requires more than identifying its unreality.

Can measures designed to protect tenants and farmers undermine the welfare they promise? In this 1958 review of Alfred Amonn’s Wirtschaftspolitik auf Irrwegen, Richard Kerschagl sympathetically examines a market-oriented answer, emphasizing policy disputes relevant to Austria. His treatment of agricultural protection brings the stakes into focus: Amonn’s case for cheaper food and more productive farming entails accepting the closure or absorption of marginal farms. Kerschagl praises the book’s accessible economic reasoning while questioning some of its chosen authorities. The review offers a compact encounter with his evaluative priorities: protection must be judged by its costs to consumers and taxpayers, and individual interventions by their possible cumulative direction—a concern that leads him to endorse Amonn’s warning about collectivism.

Grant an inventor exclusive rights over a new process, and you plant a monopoly in an economy that otherwise prizes competition, the tension Machlup was asked to weigh when the Senate patent subcommittee commissioned this study. He traces the institution from Venice's 1474 law and England's Statute of Monopolies through the free-trade antipatent movement of 1850 to 1873, when the Netherlands actually repealed its patent law, and dissects the four classic defenses: natural property in ideas, monopoly as just reward, monopoly profit as incentive, and disclosure traded for temporary exclusivity. His conclusion is a famous refusal to conclude, that on present knowledge economics can pronounce the system neither a clear gain nor a clear loss to society.

To confuse an important invention with the patent that excludes people from using it is like confusing an important bridge with the tollgates that close it to many who might want to use it.