The archive.

Perfect competition earns its keep here not as a description of any real market but as the benchmark against which every messier case is measured, and messier cases, this 1934 review essay argues, are where most economic life actually sits. Assessing Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition, Schumpeter fixes on marginal revenue as her decisive analytical discovery, the tool that restores symmetry to demand-and-supply reasoning and unifies pricing across competition, monopoly, and the territory between. He credits the book's rigor and teachability while faulting its cost: a resolutely Marshallian, two-variable, partial-equilibrium frame that forgoes indifference curves and Walrasian generality. Imperfect-competition analysis, he warns, overturns welfare and policy verdicts, sometimes into the exact opposite of what they were twenty years before.

For any science or part of a science, the first task always consists in establishing the logical autonomy of its field, or rather the conditions under which there is logical autonomy.

An early German advocate of Adam Smith could also argue for restrictions on free competition. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram presents Georg Sartorius von Walthershausen as both a teacher of Smithian economics and a selective critic of its premises. Sartorius’s rejection of an automatic harmony between private interests and public welfare led him to defend state intervention, especially in foreign trade. Pribram also credits him with separating the study of national wealth from governmental economic policy. The entry offers a precise glimpse of how Smith’s ideas were adapted in German university teaching, while resisting any easy identification of Sartorius’s historical scholarship with the later historical school of economics.

One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.

The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.

A manufacturer of ladies’ coats became a trusted leader of German Social Democracy: Emil Lederer’s compact biographical entry explains why Paul Singer’s bourgeois background helped rather than hindered his appeal. Lederer locates that appeal in Singer’s resemblance, in speech and appearance, to the respectable Berlin citizen, arguing that many skilled workers shared a lower-middle-class outlook. His portrait distinguishes the quiet authority of an organizer from August Bebel’s forceful oratory and uncompromising politics. In this entry, first published in 1934 and republished in 1937, readers encounter a concrete account of socialist leadership grounded less in revolutionary temperament than in practical judgment, willingness to compromise, and voters’ confidence.

Can public intervention enlarge an economy’s output rather than merely redistribute it? In this 1934 article, Emil Lederer challenges the assumption underlying Böhm-Bawerk’s account of economic power: that production operates without unused reserves. Idle equipment, available credit, and unrealized improvements in organization change what policy can accomplish. Lederer shows why falling interest rates may fail to revive investment, why public works can generate savings as well as consume them, and how expectations influence the use of productive resources. His defense of intervention remains conditional: subsidies can misdirect capital, and confidence cannot abolish material constraints. The article offers a precise way to distinguish policies that mobilize dormant capacity from those that merely protect failing enterprises—without treating governmental power as an escape from economic law.

Accepting Adam Smith’s economic laws did not necessarily mean accepting economic freedom. In this brief biographical encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram examines Soden’s attempt to reconcile Smith with German cameralism in his nine-volume Die Nationalökonomie. Property, grain trading and guilds expose the limits of that reconciliation: Soden defended existing social institutions when economic liberty threatened them, distinguishing universal economic laws from their administrative application. Pribram’s pointed assessment separates theoretical coherence from intellectual influence. He suggests that the very compromises that troubled orthodox Smithians may have helped stimulate German discussion of Smith—a concrete case of economic ideas gaining a hearing through adaptations that also altered their implications.

Machines can increase output without securing employment or prosperity. In this encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Emil Lederer asks why technical capacity and social outcomes diverge. His answer turns on the institutions governing investment, wages, markets, and political power rather than on machinery alone. He gives particular weight to displaced workers: lower production costs do not automatically create the capital, demand, or opportunities needed to employ them again. The same resistance to technological determinism informs his contrast between electrification supporting small producers in western Europe and collectivization in Soviet Russia. Readers encounter a precise distinction between what technology makes possible and what an economic order can realize—a distinction that also sharpens Lederer’s criticism of schemes to replace economic valuation with measures of mechanical power.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

Even a paradise of unlimited goods would leave one resource scarce: the time to enjoy them. In this 1934 article, Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan makes time an economic problem rather than merely a backdrop to choice. His distinctive move is to connect the limits of anticipation and consumption with the unequal speeds at which markets adjust. Knowing the conditions of equilibrium does not tell us whether an economy will reach it: prices, demand and supply may react at different rates, while fresh disturbances interrupt unfinished adjustments. These frictions, he argues, can change the outcome, not just postpone it. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a tendency towards equilibrium from an actual path through time—and to see what static analysis leaves unexplained.

A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.

Financing a longer production process is not the same as having the resources to sustain it. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1935 joint review of Richard von Strigl’s Kapital und Produktion and Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen. Machlup finds striking agreement in their treatment of capital as a fund maintaining productive factors until consumers’ goods become available, but tests their propositions rather than merely endorsing them. His criticism of Strigl turns on a concrete temporal problem: an unchanged quantity consumed over a longer period means less consumption per unit of time. In Eucken, he values the connection between production time, wages, and productivity. The review shows how shared capital-theoretical premises can illuminate these relationships without establishing agreement on credit expansion or economic fluctuations.

Depreciation can measure a loss in asset value or guide provision for replacement—but these are not the same task. In this review of R. F. Fowler’s book, Fritz Machlup shows why their separation matters for capital theory and business finance. He welcomes Fowler’s attention to the timing of investment and replacement, while questioning his terminology and identifying neglected changes in complementary costs. Machlup’s distinctive emphasis falls on capital’s time-structure: producing more durable equipment differs from making each piece last longer. The review offers a compact way to see how apparently technical accounting choices bear on investment requirements, dividends, and the contrast between an expanding firm and one maintaining a steady replacement cycle.

To make more durable goods is one thing, to make goods more durable is another.