3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A barber’s basin can become a knight’s helmet—but what allows two people to live together while seeing different objects? In this essay, Alfred Schütz brings William James’s theory of multiple realities to Cervantes’s novel, shifting attention from Don Quixote’s errors to the conditions that sustain his world. Enchantment absorbs contradictory evidence; Sancho’s compromises make a shared life possible. Yet the Duke and Duchess’s staged confirmations expose the difference between genuine understanding and manipulative accommodation. For Schütz, the knight’s eventual disenchantment is not simply reason’s victory: it also destroys the vocation that made his life coherent. Through these encounters, readers can examine how ordinary certainty depends on interpretive commitments and trust—and why apparent agreement need not amount to a shared reality.
From a Vienna childhood under Carl Menger's tutelage to advisory rooms in wartime Washington, these memoirs follow a banker who cast himself as a forecaster of storms—the 'political meteorologist' of the title. Somary recounts learning marginal utility as it dissolved the labor theory of value, befriending Schumpeter and Otto Bauer, and building at the Anglo-Austrian Bank a career that let him attempt an Anglo-German naval détente before 1914. Independence, he insists, was the price and reward of foresight: his warnings against unrestricted submarine warfare, postwar inflation, the Great Depression, and Hitler repeatedly isolated him from opinion and power. The later chapters carry him through Swiss supply missions to the United States, a skeptical view of Keynes at Bretton Woods, and a lifelong reading of his age as the long aftermath of the French Revolution.
Beide Männer scheiterten in ihrem Vaterland. Jeder der beiden hatte nur im Ausland wirklichen Erfolg, und doch hatten sie eines gemeinsam: Außerhalb ihres Heimatlandes fühlten sie sich wie im Exil.
English translation: “Both men failed in their native country. Each of them enjoyed real success only abroad, and yet they had one thing in common: outside their homeland they felt as if in exile.”
Export success can leave domestic timber processors struggling to obtain affordable supplies. In this 1955 article, Hans Bayer examines that tension in Austria, connecting international demand with sawmills’ weak capitalization, delayed customer payments, and forestry’s slow production cycle. He argues that higher prices cannot reliably restore balance: they may instead drive users permanently toward substitute materials, damaging forest owners’ longer-term interests. Neither unrestricted markets nor permanent export restrictions, in his account, can reconcile remunerative forestry prices with domestic supply and export opportunities. His alternative combines negotiation among producers, processors, workers, and consumers with an export levy financing a timber-industry bank, backed by possible state intervention. The article offers a concrete view of how credit provision and negotiated coordination might stabilize a market whose physical supply cannot quickly respond to price.
Government planning and the disintegration of the world economy, Sennholz argues, are two faces of one process: the tariffs, exchange controls, and nationalizations that wreck the international division of labor also spawn the unification schemes meant to repair it. Writing from Mises's orbit with Earhart Foundation support, he marches through the postwar projects, Streit's federal union of democracies, Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europe, the socialist United States of Europe, the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, the European Payments Union, and the Coal and Steel Community, and finds each fatally wedded to the interventionism it cannot survive. Capitalism and socialism, he insists, cannot coexist in one customs-free federation; the ECSC is a supranational monopoly over coal and steel. His alternative is unilateral free trade, sound gold-backed money, and a state confined to protecting life and property.
There is only one reason for an unsatisfactory operation of the market economy: it is government intervention.
What broke postwar Europe into protected national compartments—the free market, or the governments that overrode it? Reviewing Hans F. Sennholz's book of that title, Mises turns the reigning diagnosis on its head. Where pseudo-economists and statesmen blamed capitalism for poverty, unemployment, depression, and international disintegration, he answers that Europe's economic fragmentation is the work of state regulation and protectionism, not of laissez-faire. A government that fixes prices, wages, or output cannot leave foreign competition free to undermine its controls, so isolation follows from planning as a matter of course. Conventions, conferences, and American subsidies, he argues, cannot restore unity while domestic interventionism persists. Europe's survival depends not on new supranational architecture but on removing the national controls that make open exchange impossible.
The economic disintegration of Europe is not an outcome of the unhampered operation of the capitalist system.
Inequality, on Mises's reading, is not a defect for policy to correct but the very mechanism by which consumers steer production—rewarding entrepreneurs who serve them and stripping resources from those who fail. He distinguishes capitalist fortunes, built by supplying the masses with goods once beyond reach, from feudal wealth won by conquest, and argues that confiscating high incomes diverts capital from investment into consumption or state spending. Redistribution, he warns, has no principled stopping point once inequality is branded an evil: progressive taxation becomes a slope toward socialism. Invoking Henry Ford and the fate of the 1895 business structure, he presses the alternative to its edge—consumers or the state, market economy or socialism, with no third solution. The essay opens the collection's broader case against interventionism and the night-watchman state.
Inequality of wealth and incomes is the cause of the masses’ well-being, not the cause of anybody’s distress.
Postwar trade policy broke with the economic nationalism of the interwar years, and reciprocity became its governing principle—the ground on which Mahr, in 1955, builds a case that mutual liberalization, broad enough and paced with care, can raise national income without the feared wave of unemployment. He concedes the transition problem, that sheltered industries contract before resources migrate to exporting ones, but judges it commonly overstated. His decisive addition to foreign-trade multiplier analysis is the acceleration principle: expanding export industries call forth machinery, steel, and construction, a fresh investment demand that outweighs the replacement demand lost in shrinking sectors. Where prior protection ran very high, he allows devaluation over deflation; his caution is reversed against excessive speed, which would overstrain investment-goods capacity. The horizon is OEEC integration, with inner and outer circles of participation.
Therefore the removal of trade barriers, if carried out not too slowly and faint-heartedly, will bestow prosperity upon the industries which produce investment goods.
How much of Keynes’s system survives when its analytical tools are rebuilt? In this 1955 article, Emil Kauder examines revisions from within Keynes-influenced economics rather than announcing its defeat. His examples give reconstruction a concrete meaning: consumption depends on accustomed living standards and social comparison, while spending intended to support employment can generate cyclical disturbances or encounter productive bottlenecks. Kauder asks what these refinements gain in explanatory power—and what they lose in universal applicability and predictive confidence. His distinctive assessment separates changing techniques from enduring commitments: the possibility of equilibrium without full employment and the preservation of a market economy through public stabilization. Readers can discover why criticism of particular Keynesian mechanisms need not amount to rejection of Keynes’s central problem.
An optimal cropping plan calculated from average yields leaves a farmer’s exposure to poor outcomes unresolved. M. M. Babbar, Gerhard Tintner, and Earl O. Heady address that gap by attaching probability estimates to a linear-programming solution for an Iowa farm. Their example turns on seasonal labor bottlenecks: corn and flax offer the best return under mean input coefficients, but historical yield variation changes the range of possible production and revenue. The article shows how lower profit bounds might help distinguish equally profitable plans, while making its restrictive assumptions explicit—small, normally distributed coefficient errors and, in the numerical application, fixed prices. Readers can examine a concrete attempt to connect resource optimization with downside risk, rather than treating a calculated optimum as a sufficient basis for decision.
A model chosen for its economic usefulness may still yield misleading measures of statistical precision. In this brief discussion of three agricultural-marketing papers, Gerhard Tintner welcomes modern econometric methods while warning that trying several models before selecting one introduces biases that affect reported standard errors. He also suggests that restrictive linearity assumptions may help explain modest forecasting results. His perspective is constructive rather than merely corrective: he connects agricultural decision models with economic and statistical theory, and values methods that make the choice among alternative technologies part of production analysis. The contribution offers a compact distinction between fitting data, forecasting reliably, and representing the decisions producers actually face.
Can devaluation cure a trade deficit? The mid-century answer split into two camps, and this 1955 article refuses to let either win outright. Against Sidney Alexander's claim that his 'income-absorption' approach supersedes the older elasticities method, Machlup grants the weaknesses of relative-price reasoning — supply and demand curves for foreign exchange shift once devaluation changes costs and incomes — but shows that the accounting identity Y ≡ A + B, however clarifying, is no causal theory. Alexander's gravest omission is resource reallocation: devaluation can raise real income by moving resources into more valuable uses, an effect no marginal propensity to absorb can capture. Reasoning from identities, Machlup warns, tempts the analyst into implicit theorizing. Neither set of tools can be spared; both relative prices and aggregate spending are needed.
The trade balance is negative when the nation absorbs more than its income.
Can international institutions secure cooperation when national economies are organized to obstruct it? In this 1955 review of the revised second edition of Wilhelm Röpke’s Internationale Ordnung – heute, Alfred Amonn endorses an answer that shifts attention from treaties and agencies to domestic economic and moral foundations. Competitive markets, convertible money, and limits on governmental economic power become, in his account of Röpke, conditions of international order rather than merely national policy choices. Exchange controls and persistent foreign-exchange shortages provide concrete tests of that position. Amonn’s unusually emphatic approval makes the review revealing in its own right: readers can examine how a diagnosis of monetary disorder becomes an argument against national planning, and where exposition turns into advocacy for Röpke’s liberal programme.