The archive.

Advertising joins business technique to psychological influence: this is Schwiedland’s starting point in his brief English-language review of the third enlarged edition of Victor Mataja’s Die Reklame. Noting advertising’s expanding political uses, he commends Mataja’s scientific approach and impartial assessment of its forms and effects. The interest lies in what Schwiedland singles out for approval: an inquiry that considers advertising’s educational and enlightening potential alongside its economic results. This compact endorsement shows the criteria by which he welcomes advertising as a subject of systematic study, without offering specific findings or a developed critique.

What counts as progress in economic theory when rival schools address the same problems? Reviewing the published volumes of the international Festschrift for Friedrich von Wieser, Martha Stephanie Braun judges contributions by their explanatory precision rather than their school allegiance. Her commitment to marginal analysis does not prevent her from valuing its opponents. The sharpest tests concern credit and collective choice: she challenges explanations of recurrent business cycles that neglect credit institutions and rejects loose analogies between individual and collective valuation. Her praise for international trade and public-finance research shows where she finds theory clarifying practical problems. This review offers a discriminating account of theoretical disagreement, with its verdict explicitly provisional pending the collection’s volume on prices and money.

What connects buying a loaf of bread with founding a steel trust? In this journal article, Erich Voegelin treats both as investments that reshape the temporal pattern of human satisfaction. His target is economic theory that isolates goods and needs from the historically given situation in which people choose, consume, and provide for the future. Time, he argues, is not an empty container for economic events: it arises within the changing rhythms of enjoyment, satiety, and renewed need. This perspective makes familiar problems of value, capital, and interest look different—not least the assumption that a physically identical good remains economically identical at different dates. Readers can discover how a concrete account of consumption becomes a challenge to static valuation and to the restriction of economic initiative to entrepreneurs.

If the “least important need” is simply the one a person sacrifices, does saying so explain the choice? In this reply to Bernardelli, Felix Kaufmann makes that problem of circularity a test for claims of necessary truth in economics. He argues that definitions can secure certainty only by leaving open whether actual behaviour conforms to them. His treatment of marginal utility distinguishes rational valuation as a definition, its applicability to conduct as an empirical assumption, and diminishing utility through satiation as a claim grounded in experience. The point is not to discard these concepts, but to establish what they can explain. This compact methodological dispute shows how an apparently unassailable economic principle can acquire explanatory content precisely by becoming open to refutation.

Can investigating the business cycle bring it to an end? Felix Kaufmann makes that absurd prospect the closing joke of this satirical song, presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation. His speaker distrusts scientific abstraction, demands that science feed a nation, and calls on the state to halt value-neutral inquiry. These complaints become comic through their excess: the critic of scientific methods cannot explain why engines run, while a renowned institute’s board leaves one man doing all the work. The song offers a compact encounter with methodological controversy turned into performance, where anxiety about science’s limitations gives way to fear of its improbable power.

An explanation of interest under perfect foresight need not explain interest under uncertainty. This distinction drives G. L. S. Shackle’s review of Allais’s Économie et Intérêt. After presenting Allais’s reasons why interest remains positive, Shackle questions whether money and liquidity-preference merely obscure deeper forces of thrift and productivity. Might causation also run the other way, with monetary interest rates shaping capital accumulation, income and ultimately time-preference? His objection gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what a model shows to be possible from what it establishes about economic life. Yet the review is no dismissal: Shackle balances his impatience with perfect foresight against admiration for Allais’s analytical precision and the breadth of his investigation.

The fact that a gas-fire can make a room warm does not imply that a warm room must contain a gas-fire.

A circle without its center becomes an affectionate joke about intellectual fellowship in Felix Kaufmann’s three-stanza song. Radii wander with nowhere to go, while π laments a wound measured to the thousandth decimal place. The mathematical conceit lets the Mises circle express attachment to its absent center without abandoning its taste for precision—or taking its own grief entirely seriously. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation with the musical score, this small work offers a glimpse of shared scholarly language turned into sociable wit: calculation supplies the terms of sorrow, and the hoped-for return promises collective jubilation.

Austria loosened its foreign-exchange controls partly by ceasing to enforce regulations that remained formally in place. In this 1938 article, Oskar Morgenstern examines that practical retreat from measures introduced after the Credit-Anstalt crisis. His distinctive move is to treat exchange controls as price ceilings: an artificially cheap official rate, he argues, rewarded favored importers, penalized exporters, and aggravated the shortage it was meant to cure. The central tension is between defending a declared currency value and acknowledging the value at which people actually trade. Morgenstern also shows how independent economists helped make that discrepancy publicly intelligible, while recognizing that confidence and administrative experience shaped the pace of reform. Readers can discover how monetary liberalization worked through negotiated exceptions—and why surviving trade restrictions qualified its success.

Who decides which differences between people should count? In this essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz approaches equality through the classifications that organize everyday social life. His central distinction is between belonging to a group as its members understand it and being assigned to a category by outsiders. Racial legislation, segregation, and minority protection show how imposed classifications can make one characteristic govern a person’s entire social standing. Schütz also exposes a tension within equal opportunity: formal eligibility does not ensure that an opportunity is accessible or compatible with someone’s other commitments. The essay offers a precise way to examine why equal treatment can leave domination intact—and why preserving a group’s distinctive life may require more than removing discriminatory barriers.

Typifying consists in passing by what makes the individual unique and irreplaceable.

What does a business-cycle indicator measure when economists disagree about what counts as equilibrium? In this preliminary conference report, Karl Pribram argues that statistical comparability requires more than consistent measurement: it requires clarity about the theories built into economic terms. “Over-indebtedness,” “overproduction,” and “underconsumption” call for different indices according to the assumptions they express. Rather than demand agreement on a single cycle theory, Pribram examines how rival conceptions of balance shape the selection and interpretation of evidence. His scrutiny also reaches the geographical unit of analysis: national statistical boundaries do not necessarily delimit distinct economic cycles. The report offers a concrete way to recognize theoretical commitments in apparently neutral indicators—and to ask whether the units being measured fit the economic relationships under investigation.

Simplifying payroll, Leo Illy argues, requires more room for calculation—not squeezing more figures into a single line. This practical guide replaces cramped entries and disposable working notes with a sheet for each employee and pay period, preserving the path from earnings through taxes and deductions to payment. Its worked forms make a concrete organizational problem visible: saving space at entry can mean costly reconstruction when employees ask questions or inspectors demand evidence. Illy approaches efficiency through document design, separating skilled calculation from subsequent copying and aggregation while giving employees a detailed statement. Readers can discover how an apparently modest change in paperwork redistributes work around payday and connects administrative economy with the ability to explain and verify a wage.

Should Cantillon be read for his place in economics’ ancestry, or for what his reasoning can still teach? In this 1932 review of Henry Higgs’s edition and English translation of the Essai, Hayek firmly favours the latter. His praise for making the work accessible accompanies a precise textual objection: neither the printed French nor the reconstructed English is straightforwardly the original, and the edition does not adequately distinguish its English sources. The review brings Hayek’s theoretical commitments into contact with the practical demands of scholarship. Readers can discover why he regards historical priority and conjectures about influence as less compelling than direct engagement with Cantillon’s analysis—and why access to that analysis still requires editorial transparency.