3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Keynes made an unforgettable impression even on those who could never accept his monetary theories, and Hayek, friend since their 1928 meeting and sparring partner after his 1931 move to London, begins here in that key of admiration. But recollection turns to reckoning. Recalling his laborious review of the Treatise on Money, only for Keynes to change his mind, Hayek explains why he never mounted a comparable assault on the General Theory, and locates his true objection not in any detail but in the whole macroeconomic approach. The Keynesian Revolution's lasting effect, he contends, was to elevate measurable aggregates over the relative prices and capital structures through which an economy actually coordinates, encouraging a sophisticated inflationism by assuming resources everywhere lie unused. He predicts the episode will one day appear a temporary aberration.
But the assumption that all goods and factors are available in excess makes the whole price system redundant, undetermined and unintelligible.
Shackle opposes reason to imagination and probability to poetry, without discarding knowledge: business policy, he argues, is an originative art conducted under radical uncertainty, not the solving of a well-posed problem. He builds a scale of openness from dice and cards, which yield a complete list of outcomes, through horse-racing to new enterprise, which has no card of runners and no book of rules. Decision is commitment to a future that does not yet exist, and therefore choice among imagined possibilities rather than known facts. Where probability demands an exhaustive list of contingencies, he substitutes judgments of possibility, surprise, and ascendancy, with focus-gain and focus-loss standing for an enterprise in deliberation. Success, he concludes, needs not only the axial mind that reasons toward a solution but the radial imagination that sees outward into an expanding field of possible histories.
My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.
Production technology alone does not determine how an economy holds together or how fast it can expand. In this 1966 research report, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson extend von Neumann’s growth model to distinguish the effects of private and public consumption and saving. Their example of wheat, entertainment and diamonds makes a precise point: consumer demand can connect sectors that production requirements leave separate. The extension also breaks the original model’s equality between expansion and interest factors. Using matrix games and numerical examples, the authors distinguish proving that equilibrium exists from explaining which equilibrium will prevail. Readers can discover how preferences and government allocations reshape a formal growth economy—and why identical technological and preference data may still leave its outcome undetermined.
What presents itself as a review of Hicks's Capital and Growth becomes a sustained challenge to equilibrium growth theory itself. Lachmann admires Hicks as a broker between the Marshallian, Paretian, Wicksellian, and Keynesian traditions, and welcomes his refusal of homogeneous capital, yet he presses one question the models cannot answer: can an economy actually traverse from one growth path to another? During any such transition the capital stock must be reshaped while relative prices, technology, expectations, and wealth distribution all shift, so the price system required for the new equilibrium can never be known in advance. Malinvestment, mentioned only once in Hicks's book, is for Lachmann a normal feature of a world where capital goods embody past plans and expectations diverge, revisable and causally powerful.
In this way he has become a prominent mediator between different strands of thought, a broker of ideas whose influence has been far greater than is often realised today.
A public quarrel among Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Walter Heller over tight money and recession opens this 1966 essay, which Sennholz quickly recasts as a deeper confusion over what inflation even is. Properly, he insists, inflation means the expansion of money and credit; rising prices are only its delayed effect, and by narrowing the word to prices officials shift blame from the central bank to business and labor. Marshaling figures on Federal Reserve credit, Treasury currency, and bank deposits from 1960 to 1966, he builds an Austrian diagnosis: cheap manufactured money signals savings that do not exist, luring investment that later collapses. The 'zigzag course' of 1966 shows a Fed trapped between lowering prices and lowering rates. The ration book, he warns, waits at the end of the road.
The Federal Reserve Banks fathered the Great Society boom through vast injections of money and credit.
Behind the Bretton Woods debates over how much gold and foreign exchange a country ought to hold lies a prior question Machlup insists economists have dodged: whether monetary authorities can be said to need reserves at all. Distinguishing need from desire and demand, he defines a need by the consequences of its absence — devaluation, deflation, exchange controls — and turns that test against the familiar ratios of reserves to imports, money supply, or past deficits, which he finds describe convention rather than requirement. Data from fourteen industrial countries between 1949 and 1965 show variation no single formula explains. His wife's-wardrobe analogy reframes the matter: what a growing world economy needs is not a particular stock but annual additions to reserves, enough to keep governments from lurching toward restriction.
This article will address itself to the question whether it is possible to find any objective criteria for the need of monetary reserves, either for individual countries or for the world at large.
Ricardo's observation that insecurity drives capital to flee abroad sets the theme of this 1966 essay, which tracks how the nineteenth century's world trade in capital goods gave way to twentieth-century hostility toward saving itself. Foreign investment, Mises argues, was never conquest but a transfer of capital to lands unable to generate it; recast by socialist and nationalist doctrine as 'imperialism,' its expropriation gets dressed up as 'liberation,' and voluntary investment predictably vanishes. He then turns on union productivity statistics: output per worker reflects the capital equipment behind the worker, not effort alone, so crediting every gain to labor leaves nothing for the savers who financed the tools. Progressive income, corporate, and inheritance taxes complete the confiscation of 'unearned' returns—and the mechanism of accumulation quietly dies.
Saving, capital accumulation and investment will no longer pay and will come to an end.
Freedom, on this account, depends far less on who holds power than on how far power may reach. Reconstructing classical liberalism as a theory of law-governed order, Hayek separates the English Old Whig tradition of Hume, Smith and Acton from the Continental constructivism he traces to Rousseau and the French Revolution, and insists that liberalism and democracy answer entirely different questions. He renames the market a catallaxy to dispel the fiction that society is one great household with shared ends, grounds liberty in private property and general rules of just conduct, and dismisses 'social' or distributive justice as nonsense in an order where no one distributes. First delivered to the Mont Pelerin Society in 1966, the paper closes on the three great negatives that must govern all coercion: peace, justice and liberty.
Liberalism and democracy, although compatible, are not the same. The first is concerned with the extent of governmental power, the second with who holds this power.
What can sustain a lifelong, costly alienation from the status quo when victory seems distant? Rothbard dismisses the thin answers—liberty as intellectual amusement, or as a route to private profit—and rejects even utilitarian forecasts of abundance as too weak to command sacrifice. The durable ground, he insists, is a passion for justice, and his central move is to distinguish injustice from misfortune: poverty yields only slowly to capital and time, but injustice is an action men inflict on other men and can therefore cease at once. English rule in Ireland, wage and price controls, chattel slavery—each could be ended by will. Invoking Leonard Read's button and William Lloyd Garrison's demand for immediate emancipation, Rothbard casts the true libertarian as a radical abolitionist who states the end without dilution.
In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals.
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
Economic variables may move together, but how can that dependence enter a stochastic model rather than appear only as a correlation after estimation? Gerhard Tintner and R. Narayanan answer by allowing events to change several variables simultaneously: shared increments become the source of covariance. Their compact article connects this mathematical construction to post-war United States gross national product and private consumer expenditures, culminating in a joint uncertainty ellipse for a 1965 forecast. The distinctive payoff is a concrete link between assumptions about shared events and the shape of forecast uncertainty. Readers can also examine the limits of that link: the constant-parameter application permits only upward increments, while the supplied observations include declines. The model offers a tractable account of interdependent trends, not a causal explanation of output and consumption.
No concept in economic theory, Mahr observes, has been defined in more diverse ways than capital—and much theoretical confusion follows from treating heterogeneous objects and markets as one. He holds real capital and money capital to be two aspects of a single phenomenon, and separates capital in the national-economic sense from private wealth that merely yields income: consumer loans, resold securities, and land purchases may enrich an owner without adding to social productive capacity. The fiction of a single market and a single interest rate dissolves into a short-term money market and a long-term investment market that communicate only imperfectly, their rate differences sustained by liquidity, cycle, and institutional constraint. Interest, finally, is neither a reward for saving nor a mere liquidity premium but an investment premium that restrains hoarding and keeps funds flowing to productive capital.
Der Zins ist weder eine Prämie für das Sparen, noch wird er als Illiquiditätsprämie ausreichend charakterisiert. Er ist vielmehr als Investitionsprämie zu bezeichnen.
English translation: “Interest is neither a premium for saving, nor is it adequately characterized as a liquidity premium. Rather, it is to be designated as an investment premium.”