3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Where formal precision should have brought clarity, the debate over the elasticity of substitution had instead grown unintelligible, its related but distinct ideas forced under one name. Machlup's clarification separates Robinson's and Hicks's appendix concept—a partial-equilibrium measure of technical substitution—from Hicks's main-text concern with factor shares in the National Dividend. His commonsense rests on substitution within increase: when a factor grows more abundant the economy does not discard the other, but industries rearrange combinations as the community absorbs the larger supply. Distribution theory, he argues, needs an elasticity of total substitution fusing producers' technical substitution with consumers' choice among commodities—and every such elasticity rises with the time allowed for adjustment, since fixed capital yields only slowly.
THE discussion of the “elasticity of substitution” is conspicuous for its unintelligibility.
More consumption need not mean greater prosperity: it may be financed by resources that will no longer support future income. In this 1935 article, Fritz Machlup applies Austrian capital theory to Austria’s economic decline, asking how rising living standards could coexist with severe losses in corporate capital value. His concrete mechanisms include inflationary inventory gains mistaken for profits, depreciation allowances inadequate to replace machinery, and banks sustaining dividends at loss-making firms. He argues that taxation, wage pressures, and social charges also contributed, while acknowledging that their separate effects cannot be precisely measured. The distinction between falling market valuations and physical depletion gives the article its analytical tension. Readers can trace how apparently healthy accounts and continued production may conceal an erosion of the capacity to produce.
Few concepts are invoked so often and interrogated so rarely, Hayek observes, as a 'constant amount of capital'—and once change is admitted, it dissolves. Maintaining capital, the essay shows, cannot mean preserving identical goods or an unchanged money valuation; it is a derivative rule for avoiding unintended encroachment on future income. Sparring with Pigou over physical-loss and index-number criteria, Hayek holds that foreseeable obsolescence must be amortized like ordinary wear, that windfall profits are not freely consumable income, and that no expectation-free standard of 'net' saving or investment survives in a changing world. Foresight thus moves to the centre of capital theory, and the warning carries into monetary policy: in a boom, rising asset valuations mistaken for income invite the quiet consumption of capital itself.
It is not likely that in the whole field of economics there are many more concepts which are at the same time so generally used and so little analysed as that of a “constant amount of capital.”
A factory can increase output without putting scarce resources to their best use. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1935 concluding essay in Collectivist Economic Planning, where he tests socialist proposals against the practical demands of economic calculation. His objection to mathematical planning is not that equilibrium cannot be described, but that its equations presuppose detailed, continually changing knowledge: even technically identical goods differ economically by location, age, and availability. Proposals retaining competition under state ownership sharpen another question—who allocates capital and bears the consequences of mistakes? The essay shows why Hayek treats calculation as a problem of institutions and responsibility rather than arithmetic alone. It also directs criticism at capitalist monopolies that preserve investors’ capital at consumers’ expense, distinguishing his defence of competition from a defence of existing businesses.
Idle factories, unemployed workers, and available capital do not necessarily add up to recovery. In this 1935 article, Emil Lederer asks what can reconnect them when profitable investment opportunities have disappeared. His key distinction is between innovations that create new wants and industries and improvements that merely reduce the labor needed for existing production. A bicycle industry can enlarge the circuit of purchasing and employment; cheaper production alone may simply displace workers. Through concrete examples involving railroads, imports, and public works, Lederer shows why increased efficiency, unsatisfied needs, and additional spending have different consequences depending on the resources they activate. The article offers a precise way to distinguish expansion from redistribution—and to question the assumption that displaced labor will automatically find new employment.
Cheaper credit can scarcely alter a factory’s running costs yet substantially increase the value of equipment it might build. Fritz Machlup’s 1935 article explains this contrast by separating interest as a production expense from interest as the rate used to capitalize expected returns. His numerical examples sharpen the distinction: a fall from 5 to 4 percent produces only a tiny saving on working capital, but a much larger rise in the present value of long-lived equipment. The reader gains a precise account of why debt relief need not expand output, why durable investment can respond strongly to lower rates, and why that response depends on prospective profits. Machlup’s analysis also identifies a limit to interest-rate policy: cheaper finance cannot stimulate investment where unfavorable costs and selling prices leave no future profits to capitalize.
Industrial growth did not necessarily strengthen trade unions, nor did official worker representation guarantee freedom to organize. These distinctions anchor Karl Pribram’s encyclopedic contribution, first published in 1935 and presented here in its 1954 reprint. Comparing the succession states and Balkan countries, chiefly through conditions in 1932, Pribram gives governmental permission to associate greater explanatory weight than workforce size alone. Hungary’s shrinking independent unions despite industrial expansion sharpen the contrast with Czechoslovakia’s mass organizations and comparatively secure associational rights. His institutional perspective also reveals less obvious pressures: land redistribution could turn potential union members into small proprietors, while unemployment insurance could encourage craft organization. The comparison helps readers distinguish membership, legal recognition, and institutional participation from effective union independence.
Why can unemployment persist even when production becomes more efficient or prosperity returns? In this encyclopaedia article, first published in 1935 and reprinted here in 1954, Karl Pribram tests expectations of automatic reemployment against European and American experience. His comparative perspective resists explanations based on wages alone: technological displacement, cartel prices, unstable lending, and blocked investment can prevent workers from finding new occupations. Equally revealing is his attention to measurement: unemployment figures drawn from benefit records depend partly on who is legally entitled to claim. Readers can discover how administrative categories shape economic evidence, and why Pribram distinguishes policies that provide immediate jobs from those capable of reviving investment.
Hidden inside general-equilibrium theory sits a premise its authors rarely state: that agents foresee the future without error. Morgenstern treats this 'vollkommene Voraussicht' not as a harmless simplification but as a logical fault line running through theories of risk, profit, money, and the business cycle. Pressed for its meaning — whose foresight, of which events, over what horizon — the assumption collapses. In a world of interdependent agents each forecast must include others' forecasts of oneself, and the Holmes–Moriarty regress of anticipated reactions and counter-reactions has no natural stopping point. Unlimited foresight, he shows, is simply incompatible with equilibrium, while total ignorance is impossible too. What remains is a research program: expectations as heterogeneous, fallible, socially distributed variables — an early step toward the strategic reasoning of game theory.
Unbeschränkte Voraussicht und wirtschaftliches Gleichgewicht sind also miteinander unverträglich.
English translation: “Unlimited foresight and economic equilibrium are therefore incompatible with each other.”
In financial usage, A. B. C. can mean the Aerated Bread Co., not the alphabet. This small example anchors Helene Lieser’s brief review of W. Collin Brooks’s A concise dictionary of finance: understanding financial language requires access to abbreviations and company nicknames as well as formal terminology. Lieser singles out the dictionary’s usefulness to readers whose language is not English and reports extensive spot checks supporting her judgement of its reliability. Her review offers a compact, concrete account of what she values in a financial reference work: precise explanation, practical linguistic guidance, and information that users can readily find.
An economy can revive without the world economy recovering. This distinction gives Wilhelm Röpke’s 1935 commentary its conditional optimism: renewed private investment offers evidence of market resilience, but national upswings remain vulnerable to monetary instability and barriers to trade. He attributes America’s acceleration to restored entrepreneurial confidence and a retreat from policy experimentation, while warning that cheap credit and gold inflows could turn recovery into another excessive boom. His international perspective also sharpens a concrete domestic criticism: protecting grain prices can harm other farmers by raising feed costs and reducing consumers’ purchasing power. The essay offers a contemporary liberal diagnosis of recovery in progress, asking how self-sustaining investment can be distinguished from state-supported activity—and why prosperity within national borders is not enough.
Wilhelm Vleugels’s brief encyclopedia portrait connects two sides of Friedrich von Wieser’s thought: the economist who applied marginal utility to production costs and the sociologist who argued that the many are always governed by the few. Vleugels makes their connection—not merely their coexistence—the point of his account, presenting economic relations as inseparable from their social setting. His appreciative perspective becomes especially visible when he calls Wieser’s prediction of dictatorships replacing the postwar democracies “almost prophetic.” This entry offers a compact introduction to Wieser’s movement from value and price to leadership and coercion, while also showing where Vleugels’s exposition turns into retrospective political judgement.