The archive.

Why should urban land rent appear even at the shabby edge of the city, on the worst sites, and why should rents climb without pause in a free housing market? Pribram takes up Friedrich von Wieser's dominant theory—urban rent as a differential rent of location, capitalized from the surplus that superior sites command—and finds it unable to explain the tenement block at the periphery or the relentless upward drift of rents. His answer trades spatial comparison for temporal: across the business cycle, rising construction costs pull rents up in the boom but leave them stranded high in the depression, and that asymmetric gap is capitalized as an 'absolute' ground rent. Each cycle locks in a higher level, and the riddle yields only when rent theory is joined to the analysis of the Konjunktur.

Nur aus der Einsicht in die Dynamik des Wirtschaftslebens läßt sich das Rätsel der städtischen Grundrente vollständig begreifen.

English translation: “Only through insight into the dynamics of economic life can the puzzle of urban ground rent be fully understood.”

By 1930 many economists spoke as though the fundamentals were settled, the inherited Marshallian and Paretian apparatus needing only defense and application. Against that complacency Schumpeter mounts a brief but pointed disciplinary intervention: keep the theoretical engine, but let it be altered by the problems it cannot yet solve. Monopoly is the exemplary unsolved case. Everything between pure monopoly and perfect competition, monopolistic competition, bilateral monopoly, economic warfare, remains the neglected middle terrain where real markets actually live, and Zeuthen's book earns his praise for entering it. The decisive contrast is between competitive compulsion, where deviation is punished, and strategic discretion, where actors bargain, threaten, and change the data themselves. Yet Schumpeter refuses the verdict that such markets dissolve into Edgeworthian chaos: specified, reasonable assumptions still yield meaningful results.

A large group of cases emerges, for various reasons not without claim to the epitheton ornans »normal«, which undoubtedly yield »determinateness« of equilibrium.

Helene Lieser’s brief 1930 review of Richard Kerschagl’s Die mitteleuropäischen Währungen und Notenbanken judges the collection by its practical usefulness rather than its monetary arguments. She singles out the reproduction of hard-to-access explanatory memoranda, parliamentary transcripts and committee reports, noting that chronological and subject indexes ease consultation. The notice offers a compact record of what Lieser valued in this reference work: access to institutional documents for users at home and abroad, not a new interpretation of currencies or issuing banks.

A useful commercial handbook need not make business administration the measure of every subject it contains. In this brief 1930 review of the seventh edition of Georg Obst’s Das Buch des Kaufmannes, Helene Lieser praises the work’s breadth and reference value but challenges its disciplinary hierarchy. Why should law, economic history, economics, and other fields gathered in the first volume count as merely auxiliary to business administration? Her reservation offers a precise distinction between welcoming a handbook’s practical usefulness and accepting its editor’s claims for the primacy of one discipline.

International ties, political upheaval and inflation are the features Helene Lieser singles out in this brief, approving review of Hans Puxbaum’s survey of Central European banking. She values its clear presentation and separately commends Oskar Zaglits’s appendix on mortgage credit in the principal successor states of Austria-Hungary and in Germany. The notice offers a compact record of Lieser’s assessment: cross-border connections and monetary disruption, rather than isolated national banking systems, give the survey its focus.

Greater coverage need not make a dictionary less portable. In this brief 1930 review of the German–English second volume of Hereward T. Price’s Volkswirtschaftliches Wörterbuch, Helene Lieser praises its expanded contents and organization while stressing its handy format. Her particular concern is business travel: a substantial reference tool must remain easy to carry. The notice offers a compact glimpse of her practical criteria for judging an economic dictionary, rather than an assessment of individual translations.

Trust may explain why people accept money, but does it explain how much money will buy? In this 1930 review of H. Oswalt’s Grundzüge der Geldtheorie, Fritz Machlup praises a monetary primer that keeps these questions distinct. His admiration for Oswalt’s teaching is tempered by a precise objection: calling a commodity’s price its “objective exchange value” does not establish that value is a measurable quantity. The review becomes especially pointed when it turns to banking. Machlup endorses the distinction between creating money for lending and treating every extension of credit as money creation—a distinction that, he argues, prevents banks from shifting responsibility for additional purchasing power onto the economy at large. This brief appraisal shows what Machlup demands of accessible theory: clarity without conceptual shortcuts.

Can economic policy be assessed without endorsing its political goals? In this 1930 review of Martha Stephanie Braun’s Theory of State Economic Policy, Fritz Machlup praises her shift from cataloguing government measures to explaining their effects on demand, supply, and prices. His central distinction is precise: economists can test whether an intervention serves a stated end without deciding whether that end is desirable. The stakes become concrete in his endorsement of Braun’s contested arguments that unemployment benefits and public employment schemes can sustain the conditions they seek to remedy. This short review shows how Machlup’s methodological demand for causal explanation informs substantive policy judgments—and why, for him, good intentions cannot establish an intervention’s success.

Finding an office is not the same as finding an official. In this brief review of the Österreichischer Amtskalender for 1930, Helene Lieser calls the directory indispensable for administrative and economic work, but proposes a practical improvement: an alphabetical list of officials alongside the systematic arrangement. Her small intervention draws attention to the difference between organizing information by institutional structure and making it accessible to someone searching by name.

A determinate shade of colour and a natural number supply the sharpest point of disagreement in Felix Kaufmann’s review of Wilhelm Burkamp’s Begriff und Beziehung. Kaufmann treats both as eidetic singularities, logically distinct from concrete individuals—a distinction he believes Burkamp underestimates. This precise objection accompanies strong approval of Burkamp’s critique of class logic. Against the background of set-theoretic paradoxes, the review shows Kaufmann weighing a philosopher’s response to problems often left to mathematical specialists. Its interest lies in that discriminating judgement: readers encounter both his criterion for assessing an account of individuality and Burkamp’s proposal that logic differs from mathematics through its task of determining the unknown from the known, rather than through formal structure alone.

Comparative advantage, not absolute superiority, is what makes trade pay — a country gains by exporting where its disadvantage is least and importing where it is greatest, even against a rival more efficient at everything. This essay rebuilds that classical theorem on firmer ground, replacing Ricardo's labour theory of value with opportunity cost: the real cost of more of one good is the quantity of another forgone along a substitution curve. Haberler then extends the argument from two goods to many, ranking commodities along a shifting export-import margin set by wages, exchange rates and the balance of payments. He turns the framework against the case for retaliatory tariffs and against protectionist appeals to immobile capital, arguing that idle plant and written-down assets are private losses, not proof of national waste.

Unilateral free trade is thus—tactical considerations aside—thoroughly desirable and preferable to a generalized tariff regimen.

Reserved from the first part were money, capital, and interest; the second volume takes them up. Engländer opens with money 'without intrinsic value,' deriving the total sum of prices from quantity, true cash reserves, market frequency, and velocity, and rejecting any appeal to the marginal utility of fiat money. He then argues that a purely cashless economy of book transfers is theoretically possible, and that bank book-credit does not itself create capital but frees idle reserves. The capital theory works upward from a single-stage economy of capitalists and workers to multi-stage and free-stage production, bounding the interest rate between the highest 'provision number' and the lowest 'sacrifice number' while denying that the productivity of roundabout methods explains interest at all. Cycles, he concludes, are not the inevitable fate of capitalism if saving is properly timed.

Nehmen wir nun noch den Fall eines Barerlages bei einer Bank, und zwar zu bloßen Verwahrungszwecken, so ergibt sich die Möglichkeit, daß die Bank diese bei ihr erlegten Gelder weiterverleiht.

English translation: “If we now consider further the case of a cash deposit at a bank, and indeed one made merely for safekeeping purposes, the possibility arises that the bank lends out these funds deposited with it.”