3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Economic forecasts depend on recurring patterns—but what happens when the economy changes, or when policies guided by forecasts disrupt those patterns? In this 1928 article, Karl Pribram examines business-cycle observation through the practical tension between entrepreneurs seeking to anticipate conditions and central banks seeking to alter them. His critique of the Harvard barometer shows why sequences among securities, commodity, and money markets cannot simply be carried forward from past experience. Indicator selection, he argues, already involves theoretical judgements. Switzerland sharpens the problem: domestic statistics require interpretation through the particular foreign markets that influence them. The article offers a concrete account of why more data alone cannot secure better forecasts, and why economic structure and causal explanation matter to statistical comparison.
An introduction can make economic theory usable while leaving its readers unprepared for advanced analysis. That tension shapes Joseph A. Schumpeter’s 1928 German review of L. V. Birck’s The Theory of Marginal Value. Schumpeter prizes the concrete details that textbooks often omit: they show how general propositions bear on tariffs, monopoly and international exchange. He even suggests that imputation theory might have encountered less resistance had its founders introduced it as skilfully as Birck. Yet pedagogical success does not excuse outdated analysis or sacrificed precision. This short review reveals Schumpeter’s demanding distinction between teaching readers to handle economic ideas and equipping them for theoretical research—and his willingness to value the former without mistaking it for the latter.
Turning a politically charged demand into an analytical problem, Schumpeter asks which way causation runs between wage formation and capitalist development—and denies that long-run wage growth can be credited chiefly to unions or labor legislation. Durable increases require a rising social product; American wages stand high precisely where European-style union power is weakest. He shrinks the imagined surplus available for redistribution, showing how taxes, replacement costs, and investment needs limit what can be transferred without damaging production. The theoretical core is dynamic: entrepreneurs introduce new combinations, win temporary profits, then face imitation that lowers prices and lifts real income. Wage-led demand arguments he dismantles case by case—transfers merely reshuffle purchasing power, credit expansion yields inflation—concluding, with deliberate asymmetry, that development raises wages while imposed wage increases usually impede development.
Edgeworth unterscheidet 80 Jahre später in seiner berühmten Abhandlung über denselben Gegenstand 256 Fälle, von denen keiner ganz ebenso zu behandeln ist wie ein anderer.
English translation: “Edgeworth, 80 years later in his famous treatise on the same subject, distinguishes 256 cases, none of which is to be treated in quite the same way as any other.”
Choosing between two goods is not the same as calculating how best to produce them. This distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s 1928 review of recent writings on socialist economic calculation. Against Otto Neurath’s defense of calculation in kind, Mises asks how heterogeneous resources can be brought into a common accounting framework; criticism of capitalist accounting, he insists, does not establish a workable alternative. His strongest endorsement goes to Boris Brutzkus’s analysis of Soviet experience, particularly its challenge to labor-cost accounting in production that also uses capital and natural resources. The review offers a compact encounter with Mises as a critical reader, testing competing proposals against a precise requirement: explaining how a planned economy could compare productive alternatives rather than merely enumerate its resources.
A bank’s appeal to economic freedom becomes, in Emil Lederer’s hands, a test of whose freedom it protects. In this 1928 article, he examines the Darmstädter und Nationalbank’s report for 1927, contrasting its opposition to wage regulation with its acceptance of agricultural assistance and silence about protective tariffs. His critique is economic as well as political: when capital-goods industries already operate at capacity, lower wages cannot simply conjure additional machinery and materials into existence. Readers encounter a concrete challenge to the identification of business profits with productive investment, and an account of regulation that asks not whether economic power is exercised, but whether it rests with public institutions, employers, or cartels.
Would opening access to land abolish capital profit—or would independent producers still need tools, buildings, and subsistence on credit? This is one of Alfred Amonn’s concrete tests of Franz Oppenheimer’s economic system in his two-part critical study of 1928. Amonn insists that the historical injustice of property relations cannot by itself explain how prices and incomes are determined. Defending marginal utility theory against Oppenheimer’s objections, he also challenges the inference from competition to equal incomes and from landownership to the dependence of wage workers. The interest lies in the distance Amonn maintains between sympathy for emancipatory reform and acceptance of its economic premises: his criticism shows precisely where a proposed abolition of privilege still owes an explanation of wages, interest, and rent.
Set aside wars, politics, and social conflict: the real question is whether capitalism harbors an economic tendency toward its own breakdown. Schumpeter's answer is narrow and paradoxical—the system of business conditions is unstable because innovation ceaselessly disrupts equilibrium, yet the capitalist order is not economically self-destructive. Defining capitalism by private initiative, market production, and above all credit, he first defends static equilibrium theory, then locates the disruptive force not in mere growth of population or savings but in innovation: the discontinuous shift of resources into uses hitherto untried. From this follow entrepreneurial profit, credit creation, and endogenous business cycles that cluster into boom and depression. Trustified capitalism, absorbing risk and routinizing research, tames that very instability—so capitalism's eventual transformation, he insists, will be sociological, not a law of economic collapse.
And we may phrase the result we reach in our terminology by saying that there is, though instability of the System, no economic instability of the Order.
Owning a business does not, for Schumpeter, make someone an entrepreneur; nor does managing it efficiently. In this 1928 encyclopedia article, he locates entrepreneurship in the practical implementation of new economic possibilities—redirecting resources while overcoming habit, uncertainty, and resistance from creditors, workers, or customers. His distinction makes room for salaried directors and promoters as well as owner-managers, separating entrepreneurial leadership from property, invention, and routine administration. Readers can discover why profit seeking alone cannot explain this activity, and why its institutional setting matters. The article’s closing tension sharpens the account: as innovation becomes customary and specialist expertise makes decisions more calculable, economic development may diminish the need for the exceptional personal leadership that helped set it in motion.
Excessive foreign borrowing can burden taxpayers without making repayment a threat to currency stability. That distinction drives Fritz Machlup’s 1928 intervention in the dispute between Hjalmar Schacht and his critics. Machlup shares their concern about Germany’s debts but challenges the assumption that a country’s difficulty raising payments proves an independent inability to transfer them abroad. He traces how setting aside repayment funds reduces domestic purchasing power, changing imports, exports, and the availability of foreign exchange—provided new credit does not undo that withdrawal. His argument connects municipal budgets with the monetary mechanics of reparations under the Dawes Plan. It offers readers a precise way to distinguish fiscal hardship from transfer obstacles, while exposing the policy assumptions on which his account of adjustment depends.
The unglamorous problem of covering the Reich deficit becomes the occasion for a theory of who ultimately bears a general turnover tax. A moderate increase, Schumpeter argues, is administratively the easiest of all measures and discriminates less against saving than income or inheritance taxes—no tax being an ideal in any case. The conceptual center is incidence: he dismisses the sterile dispute over whether the levy is direct or indirect, since legal form never fixes economic burden. The Umsatzsteuer's very generality blocks escape into untaxed branches, yet full shifting to consumers would demand a rising price level that Reichsbank policy forbids. Because a tax on value turnover differs from one per physical unit, it favors decreasing-cost and burdens increasing-cost industries, with a nod to Marshall—its incidence diffuse, structurally mediated, and precisely thereby tolerable.
Wenn wir einen paradox klingenden Satz riskieren dürfen – die Allgemeinheit dieser »Verbrauchssteuer« beraubt sie ihres Charakters als Verbrauchssteuer.
English translation: “If we may venture a paradoxical-sounding proposition — the very generality of this »consumption tax« robs it of its character as a consumption tax.”
The rift between theory and practice runs deeper in economics than in almost any other field, and this essay sets out to bridge rather than deny it. Theory, Strigl argues, discovers causal relations but cannot choose political ends; classical liberalism only seemed to unite the two because it quietly adopted an end of its own — national wealth, the wealth of nations — which cannot by itself settle questions of distribution, welfare, or national power. When policy abandons theory altogether, it does not escape theory but falls into “vulgar economics,” a patchwork of exploitation claims and slogans that blames merchants for high prices and treats faster money circulation as a cure. Rebuilt on marginal analysis and a theory of the economy’s data, pure theory earns its service role: not dictating aims, but showing what follows from chosen means.
Man sieht hier deutlich, wie der liberale Freihandelsgedanke den wirtschaftlichen Erfolg ganz allein in den Vordergrund rückt.
English translation: “One sees clearly here how the liberal free-trade idea places economic success alone in the foreground.”
Modern culture, for all its machinery, has not freed anyone from material dependence, and that unfreedom, Schwiedland contends, now shapes character, morality, and world politics alike. His survey of the West's crisis runs from the psychic toll of rationalization and big-city life, through capitalism, individualism, and imperialism, to a social question that has outgrown classes and nations to set whole continents against one another. Europe, exhausted by war and stripped of prestige, confronts three non-European powers, the United States, Russia, and Japan, while its former colonies industrialize and awaken to national self-determination. Against economic feudalism by cartel and trust, he urges European integration, Riedl's collective trade treaties, and the League of Nations, insisting that peace must be built by deliberate effort, not awaited.
Willst du Kriege vermieden sehen, so organisiere den Frieden.
English translation: “If you wish to see wars avoided, then organize peace.”