The archive.

A devalued currency may pull the exchange market back toward balance or drive it further from it, and telling the two cases apart is the whole problem here. Haberler builds a static two-country skeleton, deriving the demand and supply of foreign currency from underlying import and export schedules and defining stability by how a deficit responds to a falling exchange rate. A negatively inclined supply curve of foreign exchange, he shows, can make depreciation worsen the very deficit it was meant to cure. Recasting the Marshall-Lerner condition as a special case of a broader exchange-market stability rule, he insists that currency-market curves must never be confused with the commodity curves beneath them, and resists the 'elasticity pessimism' of postwar dollar-scarcity debates.

But the free price mechanism could not achieve that result; it would drive the exchange rate in the wrong direction.

Before asking how interest-rates are determined, Shackle insists on a prior matter — what interest actually is, and what realities it manifests. His answer breaks with time-preference theory, which presumes agents already know their future, and pushes Keynes's liquidity-preference further by refusing to tame the unknown with probability. Wealth, held for 'possessor-satisfaction' as much as future consumption, may take the form of banknotes, bonds, or equipment; a man who trades banknotes for a bond swaps a known for an unknown quantity of money, and pure interest is the premium for surrendering that certainty. From gain- and loss-epitomes and uncertainty indifference curves the argument builds toward an aggregate model in which saving equals investment by identity, and finally to the British cheap-money drive of 1945–47, where reversing gilt-edged prices betray interest as a manifestation of uncertainty rather than credit standing or thrift.

The rate of interest is, of all prices, the one most inseparably bound up by the logic of its very nature with expectation and uncertainty.

"There are no ivory towers to house economists": the essay opens by denying the economist any refuge from public conflict, since every policy, however 'practical,' rests on some underlying theory. Written in 1949 as a retrospective apologia for his life's work and the just-published Human Action, Mises marshals his central doctrines in miniature—that inflation and credit expansion redistribute wealth rather than create it, that interest is a category of action itself, that a socialist commonwealth cannot calculate once market prices for the factors of production vanish, and that interventionism is no durable compromise but a slide toward comprehensive controls. Economics, he argues, admits no breaking up into isolated branches, because money, prices, interest, and production condition one another. Mistaken theory, for him, is a causal force in civilization's decline.

There is no middle way. Control is indivisible.

Small businesses can prosper while losing their independence: this tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1949 article on American corporate giants. Bayer locates their power not merely in efficient production but in financial resources that sustain advertising, research, service networks, and expansion into other industries. An automobile manufacturer’s ability to enter locomotive production makes the mechanism concrete: accumulated capital can challenge specialist producers far beyond its original market. Against assurances that the survival of small firms proves competition remains healthy, Bayer asks who controls the conditions under which those firms survive. His argument offers a way to distinguish business growth from economic autonomy—and explains why he regards regulation as capable of restraining corporate abuses, but not of restoring an earlier competitive order.

When does efficient coordination become an abuse of economic power? In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer examines American antitrust policy without assuming that either large enterprises or unrestricted competition are inherently desirable. His concrete test is basing-point pricing: buyers can be charged freight calculated from a designated production centre, regardless of where their goods actually originate. Such arrangements expose the difficulty of distinguishing useful coordination from practices that suppress competition—and of proving collusion from identical prices. Bayer argues that law should target the abuse of concentration rather than combinations themselves. His consideration of public supervision and cooperative self-help lets readers explore what protecting consumers might require when breaking up firms is neither practicable nor economically sound.

Hayek reads Margaret Cole’s commemorative collection through a pointed tension: how did the Webbs’ Fabian gradualism lead to admiration for Soviet communism? In this short 1950 review, he highlights their associates’ testimony that the Soviet allegiance continued, rather than overturned, their earlier political philosophy—including a reported preference for Lenin’s abandonment of workers’ control. He also challenges the collection’s biographical balance, arguing that Beatrice’s prominence obscures Sidney’s intellectual originality and political influence. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of socialist biography: appreciative of firsthand testimony, alert to its omissions, and intent on distinguishing recollections of a partnership from an explanation of how its governing beliefs were formed.

A useful textbook can still teach distinctions that obscure the processes it seeks to explain. In this 1950 review of the third edition of Elmer Clark Bratt’s Business Cycles and Forecasting, Joseph A. Schumpeter combines a strong teaching recommendation with scrutiny of statistical and conceptual habits. He questions trend fitting, the separation of short cycles from longer movements, and the neglect of individual industries in accounts of economy-wide fluctuations. His concern is causal: do the categories clarify mechanisms, or merely organize observations? Especially revealing is his distinction between factors external to a formal model and those external to business activity. This compact review shows how Schumpeter’s welcome for complementary cycle theories coexists with exacting demands on the assumptions used to classify and explain economic change.

Why should interchangeable factors guarantee determinate values? In this brief conference abstract, Oskar Morgenstern challenges that familiar economic assumption through game theory. He treats the extra value created by combining factors not as an awkward exception, but as something the characteristic function of an n-person game can describe. His sharper challenge concerns substitution: he points to games involving six players or factors in which substitutability does not permit values to be assigned. The examples are announced rather than demonstrated here, but the distinction is clear: interchangeability need not secure the determinate equilibrium economists seek. This compact statement shows why Morgenstern redirects attention toward the different, more complex game-theoretic notion of a “solution.”

Written in the aftermath of a catastrophe its author dates to 1932–1945, this closing synthesis measures humanity's ascent against its recurring descent into madness. Thurnwald traces self-domestication from foragers through plant cultivators and pastoralists to the Metal Age and the archaic state, giving Überschichtung—the superimposition of specialized groups, herders over cultivators—pride of place as the engine of caste, serfdom, and slavery. Institutions of kinship, economy, law, and religion are read through cases from Maori communal redistribution and Buin shell money to the Sumerian temple economy, while universal religions appear as reforms against aristocratic cults. The verdict is somber: technical command of external nature has far outrun any comparable command of social life, whose domestication remains grievously unfinished.

Die Menschen haben die Natur in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß zu meistern verstanden, doch nur wenig ihr Zusammenleben.

English translation: “Human beings have managed to master nature to no small extent, but their common life only very little.”

Economics had long borrowed its self-image from mechanics, treating prices and quantities as passive magnitudes tending toward equilibrium. Against that inheritance, this programmatic essay introduces the theory of games that Morgenstern developed with John von Neumann, insisting the mathematics is essential rather than decorative. Isolated maximization may suffice for a Robinson Crusoe, or for the limiting cases of monopoly and pure competition; it fails wherever each agent's best move depends on what rivals conceal, threaten, or choose. Two-person zero-sum games yield saddle points and mixed strategies, making bluff and secrecy formal elements of rational conduct; games of three or more introduce coalitions, compensations, and solution sets rather than single equilibria — the natural language of cartels, unions, and bilateral monopoly. Rationality itself, he argues, cannot be defined before the strategic situation has been analyzed.

Jeder einzelne strebt nach seinem maximalen Vorteil, und die Interessen aller oder der meisten stehen miteinander in Widerspruch.

English translation: “Each individual strives for his maximum advantage, and the interests of all, or of most, stand in conflict with one another.”

A coherent individual plan does not guarantee a coherent social outcome. In this encyclopaedia entry, first published in 1950 and reprinted with editorial annotations in 2022, Friedrich August von Hayek locates economics’ distinctive task in explaining how separately formed plans interact—and produce consequences nobody intended. His history of economic thought gives particular weight to marginal utility, which made individual valuations central to explanations of prices and allocation. Yet his account of spontaneous coordination also includes unemployment and wasted resources: explanation is not endorsement. Readers can discover why Hayek distinguishes the logic of a single choice from the causal analysis of social processes, and why he denies that economic science alone can establish the desirability of a policy such as free trade.

Economics is a science, a social science, and an analytical social science—Lachmann's 1950 inaugural lecture unfolds each claim in turn. As science it seeks systematic, value-free generalizations about observable phenomena, leaving judgments of the good to philosophy; as social science it studies not a special material object called man but phenomena—prices, output, employment—intelligible only as consequences of human choice under scarcity. Borrowing Robbins's ends-and-scarce-means framework, Lachmann insists economics is not psychology: it analyzes the logical implications of choices once made, not the motives behind them. Its method is compositive, tracing complex phenomena back to the plans that compose them, so that even failure becomes intelligible only by reconstructing the plans that failed. The lecture also polices history, warning against pseudo-explanations that personify 'Capitalism' or 'Industrialization,' and denying that any single invariant 'Trade Cycle' exists.

The Logic of Action is essentially a Logic of Success.