The archive.

Can social science be objective without discarding what actions mean to the people performing them? In this essay, Schütz argues that subjective meaning belongs to the evidence social scientists must explain. A question and its anticipated answer show why observable sequences alone cannot account for interaction: participants act through expectations about one another’s purposes. Yet understanding them does not require access to their entire inner lives. Schütz connects everyday reliance on typical motives with the investigator’s construction of ideal types—selective model actors whose conduct must remain intelligible to ordinary people. His distinction between intended outcomes and the past experiences behind a project gives readers a precise way to separate purpose from retrospective explanation, while testing where scientific abstraction clarifies social action and where it loses its subject.

Does spending more on research simply buy more inventions? Machlup's answer is a patient no, or rather, much less than proportionately more. Inventive talent is scarce and its supply inelastic; drawing in extra researchers means paying rents to every incumbent and recruiting steadily less able hands, so marginal costs climb fast. Treating invention as an industry with a production function, he traces diminishing returns as more workers crowd a fixed stock of problems and knowledge, and catalogs ten reasons a swelling flow of raw ideas yields a rising share of rejects. The result is his four shrinkages, each thinning the passage from money spent to inventions actually put to work, a sober correction to any faith that funding alone accelerates technical progress.

These shrinkages are independent of one another; but they may add up with a vengeance.

Can Marx remain a valuable critic of industrial society if his economic theory is rejected? In this polemical 1960 article, Richard Kerschagl grants Marx a limited achievement as an economic historian while challenging the explanatory foundations of Capital. His most revealing distinction separates capital’s contribution to production from the capitalist’s entitlement to income: acknowledging the former, he argues, need not justify the latter. From this standpoint, Kerschagl charges Marx with allowing demands about distribution to govern explanations of value and production. Readers encounter a critique informed by marginal-utility reasoning whose insistence on separating scientific explanation from political commitment sits uneasily beside its openly adversarial rhetoric. The article makes that boundary—and the difficulty of maintaining it—the central stake of reassessing Marx.

Mathematical precision does not settle whether a model captures the economic problem it claims to solve. In this review of Samuel Karlin’s two-volume Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming and Economics, Oskar Morgenstern praises lucid proofs and valuable applications while challenging the emphasis on two-person zero-sum games and standard equilibrium models. His objection concerns control: economic participants make decisions under conditions partly determined by other participants, not simply against a fixed background. Readers can discover why he regards n-person, nonzero-sum games as essential to economic analysis—and why his admiration for Karlin’s mathematical achievement coexists with reservations about its modelling choices. His interest in poker as a model of negotiation gives that distinction a concrete, suggestive endpoint.

A social welfare function can make value judgments explicit without resolving what a society should value. Walter Froehlich makes this distinction central to his review of Reimut Jochimsen’s attempt to reorient welfare economics. He locates the book’s originality less in its survey of technical debates than in its search for normative premises concerning personal liberty, social minima, democratic order, and economic adaptability. His response to Jochimsen’s proposed collaboration with philosophers and theologians is cautiously practical: professional biases might counterbalance one another, but cooperation offers no automatic solution. This short review gives readers a sharply defined problem to consider—how economists might move beyond formal consistency toward defensible judgments about public purposes without resorting to improvised philosophy.

Does restraining inflation impede economic growth—or protect its long-term prospects? In this review of Gottfried Bombach’s Festschrift for Erich Schneider, Fritz Machlup tests competing answers against distinctions that policy debate can easily obscure: high prices versus continually rising prices, temporary investment stimulus versus sustained growth, and desirable outcomes versus politically feasible measures. He welcomes the collection’s shared focus on inflation but challenges explanations invoking structural rigidities and arguments that assume stabilization must sacrifice growth. His scrutiny of wage policy is especially concrete: recommending stable wages is not the same as explaining how a democratic government could secure them. The review offers a compact encounter with rival accounts of inflation, sharpened by Machlup’s insistence that mechanisms, time horizons, and policy instruments be specified.

A single correlation or average lag can conceal different relationships between short-term fluctuations and long-term movements. In this 1961 Princeton research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern asks what economists could discover by separating those temporal scales rather than imposing familiar business-cycle classifications. Drawing on communication engineering, he advocates spectral analysis as a way to detect rhythms within aggregate data and examine how series interact at different frequencies. His example of New York money-market rates makes the stakes concrete: longer-term components can show greater lags than shorter-term ones. Yet finer measurement is not economic explanation. Morgenstern’s proposal turns on a demanding tension: longer records improve frequency analysis, but also span institutional and technological changes that may undermine its assumptions. Readers encounter a research program in which statistical discovery challenges theory without claiming to replace it.

A faster aircraft or a larger economy does not automatically confer strategic power. In this published address to a naval aviation meeting, Oskar Morgenstern challenges technical forecasts that overlook qualitative change and military calculations that neglect political purpose. His perspective as an economist and game theorist gives the critique its edge: conflict involves an opponent who conceals, bluffs, and deliberately frustrates plans, not merely conditions to be optimized. Ballistic-missile submarines make the distinction concrete—destroying their bases cannot neutralize weapons already at sea. His proposal to measure national power rather than aggregate growth similarly questions what impressive numbers actually establish. The address offers a pointed encounter between technical confidence and strategic uncertainty, including Morgenstern’s contentious Cold War argument for nuclear capabilities in limited war.

We have to make decisions not against nature, but against a consciously interfering adversary.

Between early 1954 and early 1957 American commercial exports leapt from $11 billion to $21 billion, then fell to $15 billion by 1959, touching off alarm over the balance of payments. This occasional paper brings eight decades of evidence to bear on whether that drop was an ordinary cyclical movement or signaled a deeper loss of competitive power. Mintz declines to forecast or prescribe, using the historical record to place the 1957-59 decline among earlier contractions and judge it unexceptional once the preceding boom is weighed. Measuring exports against world imports, the imports of the world outside the United States, as her gauge of foreign demand, she argues that shifts in foreign demand govern export swings more powerfully than the domestic cycle, while exports came to track U.S. business cycles more closely after 1921 than before.

Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.

Love and friendship become more valuable through freedom, yet economic goods seem to require availability for someone’s purposes. Such awkward cases give these post-1871 annotations their interest: Menger tests the boundaries of concepts rather than simply restating his published theory. Emil Kauder’s 1961 transcription preserves handwritten additions to the Grundsätze, not a new edition of the complete book. Proposed revisions, critical notes and reading excerpts show Menger asking how needs, scarcity and command over resources explain value where labour or production costs do not suffice. His attention to subsistence during production and to debts surviving a fall in prices brings time and monetary disruption into that inquiry. Readers can follow the friction between explanatory principles and resistant examples, while distinguishing Menger’s developing positions from the competing views he records.

Salaried employment can expand while individual jobs become narrower and opportunities for promotion diminish. This contradiction drives Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on employees’ place in industrial society. He distinguishes the growing importance of planning, research, and administration from the authority or qualifications of those who perform them: expertise need not confer command, and numerical growth need not bring higher status. Writing with a trade-union perspective, Bayer asks what could replace inherited prestige and hopes of individual advancement as a basis for collective identity. His answer links meaningful participation in workplace organization to solidarity with manual workers. The article offers a concrete way to examine the gap between an occupation’s economic importance and its members’ power—and Bayer’s case for closing it through collective action rather than status rivalry.

A firm can secure its own future by shifting uncertainty onto its suppliers—but has it thereby made the economy more stable? This distinction anchors Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on the organized market economy. Looking beyond company size and legal form to the structures of managerial decision-making, Bayer asks when long-term planning, diversification, and financial reserves can sustain employment and investment through downturns. He treats profit partly as a margin of safety, without assuming that corporate security serves the public interest. Smaller, personally directed firms enter this account as flexible specialists whose independence may depend on shared research and purchasing. The article offers a conditional account of stabilization through enterprise organization, while retaining competition as a necessary check on rigidity and concentrated power.