The archive.

Critics had turned the Pigou effect into a crude prescription for curing depressions by driving wages and prices down; Haberler writes to rescue it from that caricature. Properly understood, he argues, it is not policy advice at all but a theorem about the internal consistency of the static Keynesian model. In a world of flexible competitive wages, the Keynes effect normally restores full employment through falling interest rates; the Pigou effect closes the extreme remaining cases — a liquidity trap, interest-insensitive investment — by letting rising real balances lift expenditure. This dismantles the one strict basis for a static competitive underemployment equilibrium and undercuts secular stagnation, even as Haberler concedes to Hansen and Metzler that real depressions demand monetary and fiscal action, not patient deflation.

For these two reasons it would be foolish to rely entirely on price and wage deflation to cure a depression through the Pigou effect.

Monopoly, in this account, is less a market form than an institutional problem: every arrangement by which alternatives are restricted — business combinations and buyer power, union control of labor markets, and above all government policies that shelter favored groups from competition. Machlup credits antitrust with making cartel agreements less secure, yet judges the law of monopolization, the prohibition of trusts and mergers, a dismal failure. His sharpest reversal is that monopoly is often a product of public permission, manufactured through licensing, tariffs, patents, and marketing orders. He carries the same logic into labor, rejecting the purchasing-power theory of wage increases and denying that union monopoly offsets business monopoly — their effects, he argues, are additive rather than compensatory. First published in 1952, it remains his most sustained brief for open entry.

The economic policies of government are far-flung and many-sided. On many fronts, therefore, could government fight for competition and against monopoly if it so desired. It has not seen fit to do so.

A machine’s purchase price is definite; its contribution to future profits is not. In this review essay, Alfred Amonn examines Friedrich and Vera Lutz’s The Theory of Investment of the Firm through the tension between exact investment calculation and workable business practice. Their approach evaluates durable equipment by discounting anticipated returns rather than allocating its cost through depreciation conventions. Amonn traces what this changes in decisions about replacement, financing, and valuation, while asking whether entrepreneurs can realistically perform the calculations the theory requires. Readers can discover why economic life need not coincide with technical service life, and why accounting rules may point toward different decisions from prospective-profit analysis. Amonn’s appreciation of the Lutzes’ analytical discipline remains tempered by questions about practical applicability and its contribution to broader economic theory.

Creating jobs is not the same as building an economy capable of sustaining them. In this 1952 article, Hans Bayer challenges both social policy that repairs market outcomes and Keynesian measures that stimulate demand without sufficiently attending to productive development. His distinctive concern is economic freedom understood as freedom from private concentrations of power, rather than exemption from obligations to the common good. Wage guarantees, redistribution and public expenditure become tests of a sharper distinction: does policy merely cushion insecurity, or change the conditions that produce it? Bayer’s account of social security as “dynamic stabilization” offers a particularly revealing tension: protecting workers need not mean preserving every existing job. Readers can discover why he locates lasting security in deliberately shaped economic development, while stopping short of a detailed planning blueprint.

Showing that monetary expansion can cause inflation is not the same as explaining how to sustain employment. In this brief review of Albert Hunold’s edited volume, Josef Herbert Fürth accepts its contributors’ warnings about inflation and restrictive controls but challenges the sufficiency of their case. Postwar experience, he observes, includes high employment under expansionist policies and idle resources under policies prioritizing monetary stability—though American aid and shortages of real capital complicate the comparison. His distinctive contribution is this refusal to let either side’s principles settle an empirical question. The review offers a compact example of economic criticism that asks not simply whether a policy can fail, but under what conditions it fails and what a workable alternative requires.

Europe’s shortage of dollars is, for Hans Bayer, more than a payments problem: it tests whether a fragmented continent can become an economic partner rather than remain dependent on American predominance. In this 1952 article, he shifts attention from exchange rates and trade barriers to the location of factories, the allocation of investment, and Europe’s capacity to coordinate production. His criticism of Marshall aid is concrete: reconstruction funds could reinforce national divisions when they supported industries poorly placed from a European perspective. Bayer’s distinctive proposal is to begin investment cooperation within the sector serving collective economic purposes. The article offers a pointed account of how internal fragmentation sustains external dependence—and why, in Bayer’s view, European recovery requires more than higher national output.

Freedom from state interference can leave people subject to private economic power. This tension drives Hans Bayer’s 1952 article, which measures economic liberty not by the absence of public restrictions but by the real opportunity for self-directed personal development. Drawing on a common-good conception of social order, Bayer challenges neoliberal claims through the concrete problems of corporate concentration, inherited wealth and the separation of share ownership from effective control. His objection is not to economic coordination itself, but to coordination serving particular groups rather than society as a whole. The article offers a pointed way to reconsider the opposition between markets and planning: who already directs economic activity, and whose freedom does that direction secure?

What counts as a “science of history,” and how can its intellectual continuity be recovered after institutional rupture? In this brief book note, Eric Voegelin assesses Fritz Wagner’s sourcebook against the disruption of German academic life under National Socialism. He finds Wagner’s definition insufficiently explicit, yet reads the selections as tracing critical history toward philosophical anthropology, distinct from both uncritical annals and speculative philosophies of history. His endorsement is carefully located: despite limitations in its Greek material, the collection offers American readers a particularly useful guide to German contributions from Ranke onward. The note lets readers see how Voegelin weighs a documentary collection’s conceptual boundaries against its practical capacity to restore scholarly orientation.

A currency can become convertible while the trade it finances remains tightly controlled. In this 1953 discussion contribution responding to Mr. Brown, Josef Herbert Fürth asks what monetary reform accomplishes if governments merely replace exchange restrictions with import barriers. He argues that meaningful convertibility requires changes in production and trade—and acknowledges that these changes will hurt particular industries even when they increase overall prosperity. His perspective joins the political difficulty of adjustment to the practical need for reserves and international cooperation. Readers can discover why he regards the European Payments Union not as an institution made obsolete by convertibility, but as support for its advance: freer currency exchange needs arrangements capable of sustaining freer trade through temporary deficits.

Would cheaper exports necessarily earn America’s trading partners more dollars? In this brief review of Jürg Niehans’s Ausgleichsgesetze der Amerikanischen Zahlungsbilanz, Josef Herbert Fürth examines an answer that depends on how strongly American demand responds to price changes. Niehans argues for selective rather than indiscriminate price reductions, drawing on estimates of import demand largely from 1947–1949. Fürth welcomes the use of price theory and quantitative measurement but finds the statistical base too narrow to establish those estimates—and hence the policy advice—conclusively. The review offers a compact example of economic criticism that distinguishes a useful analytical method from adequately demonstrated results, without dismissing the inquiry because its conclusions remain uncertain.

Joan Robinson appears in Shackle’s 1953 review as both an iconoclast and a pillar of Cambridge orthodoxy. That tension gives his appraisal its focus: intellectual independence need not mean abandoning the traditions that make it possible. He admires Robinson’s insistence on conceptual clarity, yet asks whether her technical ingenuity sometimes makes economics difficult for the wrong reasons. Her treatment of hoarding offers a contrasting model of clarification useful to students, journalists and legislators alike. His reservations extend to political essays whose moral contrasts he finds too stark. This short review lets readers encounter Shackle’s standards of economic argument through a judgement that distinguishes theoretical achievement from the difficulties of exposition and polemic.

Adding time to a market diagram does not necessarily make economic theory more realistic. This is Walter Froehlich’s sharpest objection in his review of Burkhardt Röper’s study of competition and its maldevelopments: buyers and sellers weigh short- and long-run expectations simultaneously, not as neatly successive states. Froehlich balances this methodological criticism against the usefulness of Röper’s survey and his account of monopolies constrained by substitutes and potential entrants. The review offers a compact distinction between describing changes in markets and explaining how economic decisions unfold through time. Its measured conclusion also separates the need for firmer foundations in workable competition from any demand that concrete policy analysis adopt every refinement of welfare theory.