3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
An economist’s published record may be a poor measure of his achievement. In this brief 1935 encyclopedia entry, Schumpeter portrays Allyn Abbott Young as a creative teacher whose ideas largely survive in the work of others, beyond reliable attribution. His assessment nevertheless gives that elusive influence a concrete intellectual shape: Young brought Marshall into conversation with Cournot and Walras and sought ways to join economic theory with statistical evidence. Schumpeter reads the scattered publications not merely as an incomplete record but as traces of sustained theoretical work, finding in the monetary writings components of a comprehensive treatise. The entry offers a compact example of one economist judging another where bibliography alone cannot settle the question of contribution.
When Frank Knight attacked the notion that time plays any distinct role in production, he struck at the core of Bohm-Bawerk's capital theory; this 1935 essay for the Zeitschrift fur Nationalokonomie mounts the defense. Strigl concedes that the older formulations were rigid and sometimes misleading, but reconstructs the essential claim through a vertically integrated autarkic trust and a new concept, Bindungszeit — the time elapsing between a unit of labor and its finished consumer good. Lengthening binding times raises output; shortening them lowers it. Capital multiplied by time thus functions as a genuine factor subject to diminishing returns, so interest can be explained as its marginal product, and every capital good, he argues, must ultimately be traced back to original factors plus these Zinskostenelemente, the cost of time itself.
Daß da ohne Rücksicht auf die Formulierung doch ein richtiger Kern gegeben sein muß, zeigt die schließlich jedem Schulkind bekannte Regel, daß man Zinsen niemals anders als mit der Formel Kapital mal Zeit mal Zinssatz berechnen kann.
English translation: “That there must nevertheless be a correct core here, regardless of the formulation, is shown by the rule known in the end to every schoolchild: that interest can never be calculated except by the formula capital times time times the rate of interest.”
What makes a share handbook useful? In this brief review of the 1936/37 Der Aktienführer, Helene Lieser foregrounds speed, reliability, and breadth of company information. She notes the separation of the former Saling II into bond and equity guides and compares the equity volume’s arrangement with the Austrian Compass. Her favourable but qualified verdict offers a concise view of the practical standards she applies to financial reference publishing, rather than an assessment of individual companies or investment prospects.
What makes a bibliography trustworthy beyond the breadth of its coverage? In this 1936 review of Henry Higgs’s Bibliography of Economics, 1751–1775, Hayek welcomes an undertaking built on Foxwell’s extensive collections, then tests its reliability against particular entries. Harris’s two-part work on money receives misleading records; Raper reappears as “Roper”; a nineteenth-century edition of Prussian archival documents finds its way under 1769. These are not interchangeable complaints: they expose problems of attribution, identification and chronological scope. The brief review offers a concrete encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of scholarly reference tools, showing why admiration for a bibliography’s comprehensiveness need not entail confidence in its details.
A handsome reprint need not be the most useful one for scholars. In this brief 1936 review, Hayek welcomes the republication of W. A. Shaw’s collection of English monetary documents but questions the cost of its sumptuous production. His judgement distinguishes the bimetallic controversy that shaped Shaw’s 1896 selection from the documents’ continuing value—notably Newton’s reports as Master of the Mint, otherwise unavailable in print. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek as a reader of historical economic sources, attentive both to the interests governing their selection and to the practical conditions under which scholars can consult them.
A useful biography can still fail its subject as an economist. In this brief review of D. B. Copland’s two lectures on W. E. Hearn, Hayek welcomes new information about Hearn’s Australian career but finds his economic thought poorly served. Hayek values Hearn’s original observations and lucid expression; he wants them examined in relation to the teaching at Trinity College and their influence on later writers. His objection is pointed: Copland makes Hearn a vehicle for contemporary Australian economists’ views. The review offers a compact glimpse of Hayek’s judgement of Hearn—and of the distinction he draws between recovering a thinker’s contribution and recruiting him for present purposes.
For Gerhard Tintner, reliable confirmation can matter more than striking novelty. His 1936 review of Allen and Bowley’s Family Expenditure praises their use of household budgets to connect demand theory with statistical evidence, while questioning one simplifying assumption: a linear preference scale maintained throughout the investigation. Where that assumption appears to fail, he wants statistical tests, not merely a workable approximation. This brief review offers a concrete view of Tintner’s standards for econometric research: close knowledge of the data, explicit testing of theoretical assumptions, and economic interpretation of numerical results. His praise turns on what the calculations establish about household spending—not on mathematical sophistication alone.
Adopting Western civilization to resist Western imperialism: this paradox anchors Wilhelm Röpke’s interpretation of Turkish reform in his 1936 review of Henry Elisha Allen’s The Turkish Transformation. He values Allen’s attention to religious and spiritual change, while questioning the book’s proportions and handling of evidence. His own intervention challenges the tendency to treat Kemalist Turkey as merely another modern dictatorship. Röpke argues that its nationalism serves internal unity and defensive independence rather than expansion, making modernization a requirement of sovereignty. The review offers a compact encounter with this argument and its tensions: cultural adaptation reaches beyond military technique to law, education, and religion, yet the West being adopted is, in Röpke’s account, filtered through a rationalistic, positivist conception partly mediated by Soviet Russia.
A consumer’s satisfaction may depend not only on how much is consumed, but on whether consumption is increasing or declining. In this 1936 article, Gerhard Tintner asks how that dependence changes the allocation of a fixed income across goods and over time. Familiarity with luxuries and a desire for novelty motivate his mathematical departure from static consumer theory. Using the calculus of variations, he replaces ordinary marginal utility with a valuation corrected for the changing influence of consumption flows. Readers can follow how familiar expenditure rules survive in altered form—and why a budget alone cannot determine a consumption path. Tintner’s explicit distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions also marks the limits of what his equations establish.
A bibliography can gather elusive material yet still make it difficult to find. In this brief 1936 review, Helene Lieser assesses the Cologne University retail institute’s bibliography for 1883–1933 from the standpoint of scholars and practitioners trying to locate relevant literature. She welcomes its inclusion of trade and company publications unavailable through the book trade, but questions the absence of cross-references. Her praise remains qualified: spot checks establish usefulness, not completeness. The review offers a compact example of bibliographic judgment, distinguishing breadth of coverage from ease of consultation and identifying the practical gain at stake—less time spent preparing to research, more time for the research itself.
Accepting Keynes’s account of persistent unemployment need not mean accepting his explanation of it. In this 1936 discussion of the General Theory, Emil Lederer asks whether consumption habits and liquidity preference can explain a depression marked by idle factories and investment prospects so poor that even zero interest offers no remedy. He shifts attention from psychological dispositions to investment risk, technical change, disrupted markets, and the interdependence of production and demand. His comparison with Marx sharpens a further objection: reforms that appear economically rational may encounter organized resistance from capitalists defending power as well as income. The article offers an appreciative but exacting encounter with Keynes, distinguishing the diagnosis of unemployment from the historical causes of collapse and the political conditions of recovery.
But in both cases it is not the liquidity that is preferred but the investment that is refused.
Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.
Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.
English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”