3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Should Austria, before doing anything else, throttle credit still further? Schumpeter's answer, delivered to a June 1922 audience and printed with a sharp editorial rebuttal, is essentially no. He separates normal cyclical tightness and deliberate deflation from Austria's inflationary predicament, where the true disease is state spending for consumption. Restricting credit without restraining expenditure, he warns, would merely shackle production while leaving the fiscal cause untouched; the hope that scarcity would force hoarders to surrender foreign exchange ignores the producer's other exit - simply to stop producing. A liquid money market becomes, paradoxically, a brake on capital destruction. The newspaper's reply presses back: what matters is not the quantity of credit but its use, and forcing uneconomic firms to close is painful but necessary liquidation. The exchange captures a live debate between liquidity and discipline.
Allein es nützt nichts, eine Krise, die kommen muß, hinauszuschieben.
English translation: “But there is no use in postponing a crisis that is bound to come.”
That a bank of issue crowns currency stabilization rather than beginning it has always belonged to the ABC of financial policy the world over - and it is against this maxim that Schumpeter weighs Austria's decision to found a central bank in 1922. His verdict is conditional. The announcement has already steadied exchange rates and securities markets, but psychological effect cannot substitute for structural cure: Austria cannot be set right by formulas and slogans. Every office, revenue source, and state enterprise must be reformed separately, or the bank becomes another engine of inflation, its note reserve financing a depreciation worse than the present. So long as the government cannot commit to a definite crown rate, any success can only be temporary. Chances exist, and so do dangers demanding a moral energy Austria has rarely possessed in abundance.
Natürlich ist das ein kühner Schritt, dessen Rechtfertigung nur im Erfolg liegen kann.
English translation: “Naturally this is a bold step, whose justification can lie only in success.”
A government can balance its books while its currency continues to fall. In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer explains why that possibility matters for Germany’s external obligations: collecting taxes does not automatically provide the foreign means of payment needed to meet them. He distinguishes fiscal balance from the balance of the national economy, showing how taxation that forces asset sales can transfer productive property abroad without relieving exchange-rate pressure. His argument turns on the difference between resources drawn from genuine savings and payments financed by selling accumulated wealth. Without dismissing budgetary discipline, Lederer challenges its sufficiency as a remedy and makes international credit and confidence central to the problem. The article offers a concrete way to understand why sound public accounts and currency stability need not coincide.
Identical resources and identical rankings of needs need not produce identical valuations: everything depends on how long the resources must last. In this 1922 installment of his investigation, Hans Mayer presses marginal-utility theory to account for recurring needs and the time required to replenish supplies. His concern is not to reject marginal valuation, but to establish conditions that its usual derivations leave unspecified. Economizing, on his account, means allocating common means among competing ends—a distinction that leads him to classify the enterprise’s pursuit of monetary income as technical activity, while locating its economic foundations in households. Readers can discover why a period of provision matters to value theory, and why market prices cannot independently explain the valuations from which they are supposedly derived. The promised derivation of the valuation law remains for a subsequent article.
Against theories that lodge value in labor, cost, or the object itself, this short monograph — later folded into Schwiedland's Volkswirtschaftslehre — grounds value in a subjective consciousness of dependence on useful and scarce goods. Utility, he argues, names an objective suitability, whereas value is the felt dependence of the economizing subject; hence his correction of both 'objective value' language and the Austrian preference for 'Grenznutzen.' Price, by contrast, is external, negotiated, social — an actual counter-performance received in exchange, one requiring not equal values but divergent valuations, so that barter enriches both sides. Translating usefulness and scarcity into supply and demand, Schwiedland tracks seller competition in abundance, buyer competition in shortage, hoarding, panic selling, cartels, and monetary policy, yet ends in methodological modesty: no single theory can capture every real price.
Wert ist ein Gefühl, Preis eine tatsächliche Gegenleistung: die Menge von Gütern, die man beim Austausch für andere empfängt.
English translation: “Value is a feeling, price an actual counter-performance: the quantity of goods one receives in exchange for others.”
Social upheaval does not necessarily produce new art—and those who gain power may retain the tastes of the groups they displace. This mismatch anchors Emil Lederer’s inquiry into how art belongs to its time without merely reflecting it. His 1922 essay places metropolitan capitalism’s fragmented encounters alongside Expressionism’s search for elemental forms, while insisting that social explanation must also reckon with the internal development of artistic vision. Genius, in his account, gives form to questions an age has not yet learned to ask. Readers can discover why artistic innovation, political transformation, and public recognition move at different speeds—and how sociology can illuminate those differences without claiming the authority to judge artistic value.
Higher interest rates may restrain inflation—but what if they also destroy the production needed for recovery? In this 1922 review of Gustav Cassel’s Das Geldproblem der Welt, Emil Lederer tests monetary remedies against the material and social conditions of postwar reconstruction. He accepts Cassel’s insistence that credit cannot substitute for real resources, yet questions policies whose success depends on unemployment forcing down wages. Unemployment relief, political resistance, and obligations to those without work are not external complications: they help determine whether stabilization can succeed. Lederer’s alternative emphasis on restoring production is itself qualified by the problem of finding markets. The review offers a concrete encounter between monetary discipline and reconstruction, showing why neither balanced budgets nor increased output alone can secure economic recovery.
The entrepreneurs capable of rebuilding industry may also acquire the power to bend national policy to private ends. This tension gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Herbert von Beckerath’s book its focus. In presenting Beckerath’s account, Schwiedland explains why postwar shortages and mismatched resources favoured integrated industrial combines rather than cartels of separate firms. He then presses the question of leadership: can roughly two dozen powerful figures supply the judgement these vast organizations require, accommodate workers, and ease international antagonisms? His explicit insistence that economic problems are also ethical questions sharpens the review’s interest. Readers encounter an argument for entrepreneurial coordination whose confidence in practical competence stops short of confidence in the responsible exercise of power.
Can geography explain both the formation of nations and the growth of world wealth? In this brief 1923 review of O. D. von Engeln’s Inheriting the Earth, Eugen Peter Schwiedland finds stimulating material without being persuaded that it forms a unified account of economic development. He reports Engeln’s claim that shared surroundings, rather than race, language or religion, create nations, but reserves his strongest appreciation for the factual discussion of resources and exchange between temperate and tropical regions. The review’s interest lies in this selective judgement: Schwiedland questions the book’s coherence while welcoming the knowledge and prospects offered by its treatment of tropical cultivation, migration and settlement colonies.
Can an autarkic economic union spanning several nations escape the nationalist motives behind trade barriers? In this short 1923 review of Waldemar Mitscherlich’s Der Nationalismus Westeuropas, Ludwig von Mises questions that proposed compromise between free trade and national self-sufficiency. He credits Mitscherlich’s historical account with fresh insights but argues that nationalism cannot be adequately understood without examining protectionist economics. His criticism rests alongside a pointed distinction: belonging to a nation is not the same as subscribing to a nationalist party’s programme. The review offers a compact encounter with Mises’s insistence on separating linguistic nationality from political allegiance—and on testing schemes for economic union against the motives that would sustain their restrictions on trade.
Ranking wants by urgency is not the same as measuring satisfaction—and measuring one person’s satisfaction would not establish that it can be added to another’s. This distinction drives Hayek’s 1923 review of L. V. Birck’s The Theory of Marginal Value. Hayek questions the foundations of Birck’s claim that equal incomes maximize aggregate utility, while praising his detailed analysis of price formation and his engagement with Wieser’s theory of imputation. The review offers a compact view of Hayek’s standards of theoretical criticism: analytical finesse cannot compensate for unsupported premises, especially in a textbook. His reservations about mathematical notation sharpen the point: treating economic relations as an equilibrium problem does not, he argues, require an exposition burdened with mathematical apparatus.
Opposition to Marxism does not necessarily imply a defence of liberalism: this distinction frames Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s affirmative 1923 review of Mises’s Die Gemeinwirtschaft. Writing in English, Schwiedland places the book against German nationalist alternatives that reject liberalism alongside Marxism. He foregrounds Mises’s shift from the unequal distribution of wealth to the conditions of its production: could socialism increase output, and could it calculate rationally without market prices? His account also presents consumer choice, rather than control of the workplace, as the basis of economic self-determination. This short review offers a concrete instance of Mises’s early reception, showing which arguments a sympathetic contemporary selected and why he regarded a liberal defence of capitalism as a distinctive intervention.