3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Can a currency economize on gold without escaping the discipline of monetary adjustment? In this 1925 review of Fritz Machlup’s Die Goldkernwährung, Hayek distinguishes the practical appeal of minimizing gold circulation from claims that such arrangements permit greater independence in discount policy. He praises Machlup’s explanation of how gold outflows defend a currency’s external value through monetary contraction, rather than merely by financing a payments deficit. Yet he doubts that gold-core currency constitutes a fundamentally distinct monetary mechanism or makes adjustment substantially less painful. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s critical priorities: the mechanism behind reserve movements matters more than the monetary system’s label, and a useful route from inconvertible paper back to gold need not be a release from gold’s constraints.
An accessible introduction is not necessarily a basis for scholarly debate. In this brief review, Hayek assesses the German translation of Fisher’s own abridged account of dollar stabilization—not the merits of the monetary plan itself. He regrets the decision to translate a popularized extract rather than the complete work: German specialists, he argues, need material for critical examination, not advocacy for adoption. Yet he warmly acknowledges the translation’s usefulness to students. The review offers a compact example of Hayek distinguishing a publication’s pedagogical value from its adequacy for scientific discussion.
Can marginal utility explain economic choices if its calculation already presupposes that goods have been allocated? In this 1925 review of Parts I and II of Leo Schönfeld’s Grenznutzen und Wirtschaftsrechnung, Hayek tests an attempt to resolve that circularity by starting from total utility. His sharpest objection concerns interdependence: several reallocations made together may improve the whole even when each change, taken separately, would make matters worse. Defining the best allocation is therefore not the same as explaining how decisions can reach it. Sympathetic to Schönfeld’s theoretical ambition but cautious about an unfinished project, Hayek distinguishes useful conceptual advances from unresolved foundations. The review offers a focused encounter with his demand that subjective value theory explain choices rather than merely describe their completed results.
The cost of drinking extends beyond the price of liquor in Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief 1925 review of Robert Wilbrandt’s temperance booklet. Schwiedland foregrounds Wilbrandt’s economic case: expenditure on alcohol, burdens on police and hospitals, agricultural land diverted to its production, and labour lost through diminished productivity. Against the reported wartime fall in consumption, renewed drinking appears as a drain on Germany’s strained resources. The review offers a compact account of how temperance advocacy could frame abstinence as a question of national productive capacity rather than private conduct, while conveying Wilbrandt’s claims and hopes for German youth without independently testing his estimates.
Wartime and postwar monetary chaos, Schumpeter argues, was unavoidable adaptation to real shocks, not proof that old bank policy had failed. What Keynes's reform program really proposes is neither abandoning gold nor stabilizing prices but transforming the central bank into an instrument for consciously steering the whole economy, with discount policy, open-market operations, reserve rules, and selective credit turned from guardians of parity into levers of employment, industry, and distribution. Against Hawtrey and Keynes he grants that credit moves the price cycle yet denies the Konjunkturzyklus is a monetary disease: prosperity is when entrepreneurs force new combinations on the economy, depression the painful reabsorption. Take away price fluctuation and you disable capitalist development. He defends the gold standard not as a fetish but as impersonal constraint against discretionary planning.
Das ist nicht mehr »management« des Geldwesens, das ist »management« der gesamten Volkswirtschaft, ohne daß man irgendwo eine Grenze ziehen könnte.
English translation: “This is no longer 'management' of the monetary system; it is 'management' of the entire national economy, without any point at which one could draw a boundary.”
A movement can declare war on Marxism while remaining as anticapitalist as the doctrine it fights: this is the paradox Mises anatomizes in republican Germany and German-Austria. Scientific anti-Marxism, he argues, attacks Marxist politics while keeping Marxist categories intact, above all class conflict, resentment against capitalism, and contempt for theoretical economics. Tracing how the Historical School and Kathedersozialismus absorbed Marxian ideas even while claiming to refute them, he sets a utilitarian sociology of the division of labor against every struggle theory, whether of class, race, or nation, faulting them for explaining conflict but never association. Werner Sombart serves as the exemplary critic still caught inside the doctrine he renounces. Only science, not nationalist ressentiment, can overcome Marxism. First published 1925.
Wohlgemerkt: nicht der Sozialismus wird angegriffen, sondern der Marxismus, und dem marxistischen Sozialismus wird zum Vorwurf gemacht, daß er gar nicht der richtige, der wahre, der allein anzustrebende Sozialismus sei.
English translation: “Note well: it is not socialism that is attacked, but Marxism, and Marxist socialism is reproached for not being the correct, the true, the only socialism worth striving for.”
A central bank can hold ample reserves yet undermine monetary stability by refusing to redeem its notes. In this six-page discussion contribution from 1925, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction central to his replies on European monetary reconstruction. His perspective combines a defence of theory’s practical power—including the destructive power of mistaken doctrines—with insistence on unconditional redemption at parity. Austria supplies a revealing test: rising prices and expanding note circulation, he argues, need not prove renewed inflation when world-market adjustment and returning demand for domestic money explain them. This brief intervention shows Mises testing monetary principles against disputed evidence, distinguishing the appearance of stability from its institutional conditions, and the quantity of notes from the public’s willingness to hold them.
A public that has learned to watch exchange rates may frustrate inflationary finance even when governments have learned nothing. In this second contribution to a recorded discussion in 1925, Mises locates the restraint on renewed note printing in the population’s rapid response to depreciation, not in official wisdom. His reply to Spitzmüller raises a different question: does an economist’s prominence make him responsible for policies he opposed? Mises distinguishes his writings and lectures from the powers exercised by ministers and central-bank governors, naming the 1922 stabilization as the sole adopted Austrian monetary measure consistent with his recommendations. This brief, pointed exchange shows both his account of changed public behaviour after inflation and his resistance to being credited with authority he denied possessing.
An equation can look like a law of cause and effect while stating only an identity — and that, in this early critique, is the charge laid against Schumpeter's monetary formula E = MU = Σpm. Haberler shows that its right-hand side merely restates money income as the sum of prices times quantities consumed, while its left-hand side reduces velocity to the number of purchases each coin intermediates; the whole is a tautology, not an explanation. From this he presses on to the larger quarry, the "objective exchange value of money," which he dissolves into ordinary price relations and denies any existence as a measurable social magnitude. Against Wieser and Anderson he insists that value theory needs only two concepts, subjective value and price, anticipating what he would later call the microfoundation of macroeconomics.
The problem of the value of money is a sham problem!
Higher farm incomes need not mean a wealthier society. In this 1925 contribution responding to Professor Laur, Joseph A. Schumpeter sets aside specifically Swiss conditions to examine what agricultural income can—and cannot—tell policymakers. A protective tariff may increase farmers’ receipts without increasing output, while drawing labour and capital away from more valuable uses. Schumpeter’s distinctive move is to separate the stimulus that higher prices give producers from any judgment of public benefit: consumers’ losses and alternative uses of resources do not disappear when a sector’s accounts improve. Yet his criticism leaves room for temporary assistance to preserve viable investments or overcome business hesitation. This compact article offers a concrete way to distinguish monetary gains, productive expansion and economic welfare without treating either protection or intensification as an end in itself.
Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.
Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.
English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”
The liquidation of the Stinnes conglomerate gives Emil Lederer a concrete test of entrepreneurial greatness: did its enormous acquisitions create a coherent productive organisation, or merely accumulate assets under favourable inflationary conditions? In this 1925 newspaper article, he distinguishes industrial concentration from rational coordination, challenging both the cult of Hugo Stinnes and the belief that sheer corporate scale represents historical progress. Stabilisation, he argues, exposed weaknesses that celebrity and abundant credit had concealed. His economic criticism becomes a demand for social accounting: before industrialists invoke capital formation to justify low wages, they must explain what became of fortunes built, in his account, through workers’ deprivation and the destruction of small rentiers’ savings. The article connects managerial competence to responsibility for the resources entrusted to it.