3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
What makes a banking directory useful to a foreign reader? In this brief 1927 review of the third annual issue (1925/26) of the Annuario delle Banche e Banchieri d’Italia, Helene Lieser assesses practical accessibility rather than merely the ambition to list every Italian bank. Her comparison with the Kompaß places its institutional and financial data within a familiar reference format. She singles out overseas branch listings and banking tax and fee schedules as valuable supplements, especially for foreigners. The notice offers a concise view of the information Lieser valued for locating banks and conducting business across borders.
What makes an economic dictionary useful beyond supplying equivalent words? In this brief 1927 review of the English–German first part of Hereward T. Price’s Economic Dictionary, Helene Lieser especially welcomes its bibliographical references. Her approval, explicitly based on spot checks, leaves room for pointed correction: she proposes missing entries such as “compulsory liquidation” and questions the German renderings of “political arithmetic” and “bucket shops.” These concrete examples show where a promising reference work still requires scrutiny—and how Lieser distinguishes a questionable translation from a probable printing error.
Could America remain the world’s banker while financing the development of its own land and productive resources? In this brief 1927 review, Helene Lieser welcomes Max E. Bodmer’s statistical survey and foregrounds its argument that American savings would be needed at home. Her approving account connects this prospective limit on foreign lending with the tensions of a creditor economy maintaining protective tariffs and immigration restrictions. The review offers a concise encounter with an expectation that American domestic development would constrain international finance—and that Europe would therefore need to regain financial independence rather than rely indefinitely on American credit.
Freedom of river navigation did not gain the same acceptance as freedom of the seas. In this brief 1927 review of Richard Hennig’s Freie Ströme, Helene Lieser focuses on a legal uncertainty: what did the Versailles treaty mean by “internationalization”? She presents war and the peace treaties as reversing earlier gains in navigational freedom, and reports Hennig’s conclusion that a satisfactory definition would require further international agreements. Her closing judgement adds a political constraint: such agreements were desirable but unlikely under the prevailing balance of power. The review offers a compact encounter with the gap between a promise of international regulation and the conditions needed to make its meaning clear.
Banks can create purchasing power—but can they thereby create the resources needed for investment? In this 1927 review of Albert Hahn’s theory of bank credit, Gottfried Haberler accepts deposit creation while contesting the conclusions Hahn draws from it. His critique turns on two concrete distinctions: an individual bank must reckon with settlement demands from other banks, and money available to entrepreneurs is not the same as resources available to sustain production. Yet Haberler does not reject every productive role for credit expansion; he allows that it may help overcome obstacles to otherwise profitable innovations. The review offers a precise encounter between monetary innovation and economic constraint, showing why recognition of bank-created money need not entail belief that credit can replace saving.
By the 1880s American economics had broken from English classical laissez-faire, and this survey—Fetter's contribution to a German comparative handbook, read here in that German translation—maps what grew in its place. He tells how German-trained scholars like Ely and Clark founded the American Economic Association, how Simon Patten's emphasis on consumption and psychology prepared the ground, and why Austrian marginal utility found unusually fertile soil in a country already reading Jevons and J. B. Clark. Fetter defends the 'psychological school' as a shift of interest from the outer physical world to human wants and valuations, blames the mistranslation of Nutzen as 'utility' for false charges of Benthamite hedonism, and answers Veblen and the institutionalists of The Trend of Economics before laying out ten trends he expects American theory to pursue.
Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.
English translation: “The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.”
Every restriction of contractual freedom imposed in favor of workers: that, at its most general, is what Lederer and Marschak mean by Arbeiterschutz, which they place at the juridical core of social policy under industrial capitalism. Worker protection is not paternal charity but a legal limit on the formally free contract, making the employment relation itself an object of public intervention. Their longest analysis concerns working time, the classic breach in liberal contract freedom, from bans on child and women's labor through Sunday rest to the postwar eight-hour day and the Washington Convention. Truck prohibitions, minimum-wage boards, factory inspection, and occupational-disease law extend the account, until enforcement passes to unions, works councils, and labor courts as much as to statute. A closing section carries it into the ILO founded under Part XIII of Versailles.
Am unmittelbarsten und elementarsten zeigte sich die verheerende Einwirkung des Industriesystems und der Einführung von Maschinen auf Kinder und Frauen.
English translation: “The devastating impact of the industrial system and of the introduction of machinery showed itself most immediately and most elementally upon children and women.”
Idle factories, unemployed workers, expensive capital: why should Germany need more investment when so much productive capacity stands unused? In this 1927 newspaper article, Emil Lederer questions whether recovery requires new equipment or better use of what already exists. His distinctive concern is the gap between a profitable investment for one enterprise and its consequences for the economy: new machinery can destroy still-serviceable capital, while productivity gains that do not lower prices can shrink employment and purchasing power. Rather than opposing technical progress, he asks whether its pace can be excessive. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish capital scarcity from inadequate demand—and makes the limits of available evidence central to deciding between further modernization and recovery through existing facilities.
A ship’s drinking-water supply poses a precise problem for value theory: if stores and remaining needs decline together, does the marginal utility of a tonne remain unchanged? Wilhelm Vleugels uses this example to scrutinize Friedrich Wieser’s rules for valuing stocks, distinguishing successful household planning from an adequate calculation of total value. His objection turns on what a withdrawal would actually cost: halfway through a voyage, surrendering a tonne sacrifices different satisfactions than it would at departure. Against the prospect of reconciling Wieser with Böhm-Bawerk, Vleugels shows why the unit measured and the period of consumption matter. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish equal daily benefits from the changing value of a fixed quantity removed from a dwindling supply.
Austria’s postwar transformation was, Schumpeter argues, less a revolution than a breakdown: political destruction proved permanent, social disruption temporary. This distinction anchors his 1927 review of C. A. Macartney’s The Social Revolution in Austria. His sympathy for the vanished Habsburg order coexists with pointed appreciation of Socialist achievements, especially the financial success of Vienna’s municipal government, which he thinks Macartney undervalues. Personal acquaintance informs his defence of Count Stürgkh against the book’s portrayal, while demands for fuller evidence qualify his praise of its treatment of socialised enterprises. The brief review offers a revealing tension between Schumpeter’s historical loyalties and his assessment of Socialist administration—and a concrete example of why the label “revolution” can obscure what actually changed.
An economist can build a system independently without founding a new school. That distinction guides Schumpeter’s review of the fourth edition of Gustav Cassel’s textbook, first published in 1927 and presented here in its 1954 reprint. Admiring Cassel’s clarity, Schumpeter nevertheless challenges his claim to replace value theory with scarcity and monetary calculation: scarcity, he argues, still presupposes wants and valuations. His criticism also tests the practical cost of theoretical elegance. A framework organized around competitive equilibrium cannot adequately address monopoly and restricted competition merely by claiming wider scope. Readers encounter Schumpeter as a discriminating critic of analytical tools—defending useful approximations, recognizing Cassel’s contribution to interest theory, and asking when simplification clarifies economic problems and when it conceals them.
Everyone says prices have risen or money has lost purchasing power, yet no single formula makes such statements exactly measurable — the obstacle, Haberler contends, is not missing data but the vagueness of the concept being measured. Steering between naive faith in index arithmetic and total skepticism, the book first works through the whole apparatus of index theory — arithmetic, harmonic and geometric means, Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher's "ideal" formula, the circular and reversal tests — to show that formal criteria alone can never fix economic meaning. Only indices traceable to the money cost of one definite bundle of goods are intelligible. Grounding the argument in subjective value and methodological individualism, he concludes that a price level exists only relative to a person or group: there is no objective, supra-personal purchasing power of money to be found.
Das volkswirtschaftliche Preisniveau — ein statistischer Zufall.
English translation: “The economy-wide price level — a statistical accident.”