3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Rising output, falling prices, and uneven prosperity coexist in Schumpeter’s account of the American twenties. In this 1946 article, he interprets that combination through the delayed effects of earlier technological transformations, insisting that national totals obscure the contrasting fortunes of industries and regions. His central distinction separates the pressures that made depression likely from the financial conditions that turned contraction into catastrophe: speculative gains sustaining consumption, a fragmented banking system, and reckless mortgage lending. Readers can discover how a historical diagnosis changes when industrial adjustment and financial fragility are treated as distinct mechanisms—and why, for Schumpeter, agreement about causes need not settle disputes over policy.
Time series never tell the whole tale and must be supplemented by a detailed historical account of what actually happened in the economic organism.
When civilizations seem to repeat one another’s histories, what makes the resemblance an explanation rather than an analogy? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article tests cyclical interpretations of history against this question, placing Vico—not Spengler—at its conceptual centre. For Kauder, Vico’s distinction between an ideal historical structure and its particular realizations offers a firmer foundation than appeals to civilizational souls or destiny. He values Toynbee’s comparative evidence while questioning whether accumulated parallels can establish historical necessity. Writing in the aftermath of war, he also challenges confidence that human cruelty serves a benevolent providential plan. The article makes visible the philosophical commitments behind accounts of civilizational rise and decline: what acts in history, what recurs, and whether recurrence carries any moral meaning.
Agreement with Hayek’s economics need not entail agreement with his explanation of political change. In this 1946 review of The Road to Serfdom, Joseph A. Schumpeter praises Hayek’s defense of personal liberty while questioning the social foundations of his liberalism. Could an economically workable capitalist reform program win support from voters asked to accept insecurity and delayed rewards? More fundamentally, Schumpeter argues that capitalism itself has empowered constituencies whose demands challenge liberal principles. The departure from individualism is thus not simply a victory of mistaken ideas: it reflects a change in whose preferences carry political weight. This brief review offers a pointed distinction between defending liberty, designing economic policy, and explaining the forces that determine either’s political prospects.
Cheap money has a long pedigree of enemies of interest behind it, Bolshevik, Nazi, and easy-money reformers alike who picture creditors as idle rich and debtors as toiling poor. Mises overturns the picture: in a modern financial society the bondholders, savers, and insurance and social-security claimants harmed by depressed interest and depreciated currency are ordinary people. From the distinction between commodity credit, drawn from real savings, and circulation credit, conjured by banks as fiat money, he builds the familiar sequence, artificially lowered rates, false calculation, malinvestment, boom, and then either runaway inflation toward a 1923-style collapse or panic and mass unemployment. The crisis, he stresses, springs not from ending expansion but from the misdirection cheap money already produced. Interest expresses time preference and cannot be legislated away.
The artificial boom is not prosperity, but the deceptive appearance of good business.
The United Nations promised sovereign equality while granting its strongest members privileges unavailable to the rest. In this 1946 published address, William Emmanuel Rappard examines that contradiction from Geneva: a former centre of international organization, in a neutral country excluded from the new wartime coalition. He distinguishes the practical necessity of unequal influence from the more troubling exemption of great powers from obligations binding smaller states. Yet his criticism does not lead to rejection. American participation, he argues, is indispensable, and the UN’s conduct may exceed the standards of its Charter. The address offers a sharply situated account of what smaller states surrender—and what protection they can realistically expect—when a military alliance becomes an institution for peace.
Citizens must judge claims whose technical foundations they cannot fully master. Alfred Schutz’s essay locates this difficulty between specialized expertise and the practical recipes that ordinarily let people get on with their lives. His distinctive question is not simply how much we know, but how we decide what deserves attention—and what happens when other people’s purposes make unfamiliar matters consequential for us. The expert, the everyday actor, and the would-be informed citizen are attitudes one person can adopt in different domains, not separate social classes. By examining both the perspectives of informants and the authority conferred by group approval, Schutz gives readers a precise distinction between knowledge received from others and knowledge warranted merely by social acceptance. His account makes informed judgment a task of scrutinizing relevance as well as evidence.
Trieste could change sovereigns without recovering the trade that sustained it. Writing in December 1946, Richard Schüller examines the disputed port through its railways, shipping companies, tariffs, and links to the Danube rather than through national claims alone. His experience as an Austrian economic official gives the article a practical institutional focus, alongside an acknowledged attachment to Austrian administration. An exclusively Austrian free zone that failed through delays and added costs offers a pointed example of the limits of nationally bounded solutions. Schüller argues that international status likewise cannot guarantee prosperity without cooperation across borders. The article lets readers distinguish the struggle to possess Trieste from the harder task of making its commercial networks function amid Italian–Yugoslav antagonism and Soviet–Western rivalry.
To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.
Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.
English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”
Can satire sharpen a history of political ideas without compromising its fairness? In this 1947 review of Alexander Gray’s The Socialist Tradition. Moses to Lenin, Hayek argues that irreverence toward socialism’s founders need not undermine serious scholarship. He praises Gray’s accessible exposition while testing its historical boundaries and noting gaps in its use of recent research. His endorsement becomes most pointed over Marx: Hayek approves Gray’s irony about the difficulty sympathetic interpreters have in agreeing on what Marx meant, particularly concerning value. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader—attentive to historical evidence, openly unsympathetic to intellectual reverence, and unwilling to assume that Lenin supplies a settled endpoint to socialism’s development.
A concise introduction can teach statistical reasoning well yet leave students poorly equipped to continue their studies. In this brief review of S. T. Bok’s textbook for medical students, Gerhard Tintner praises its Fisherian perspective, medical and biological examples, and emphasis on methodology rather than mathematical proofs. His reservations are concrete: nomographs seem less accurate than tables, replacing χ² with G² needlessly obstructs access to English-language literature, and the absence of references leaves no route to further reading. The review offers a compact account of Tintner’s standards for statistical teaching: clarity and brevity matter, but so do computational accuracy, shared notation, and guidance beyond the introductory text.
Democratic consent cannot simply be assumed—but can discussion establish the values on which a free society depends? In this 1947 review of Frank H. Knight’s Freedom and Reform, Ludwig M. Lachmann admires Knight’s resistance to easy answers while probing the gap between cooperative truth-seeking and political debate. His sharpest disagreement concerns methodological individualism: against Knight’s demand that it account for society’s formation of individuals, Lachmann argues that scientific analysis isolates conceptual elements rather than explaining concrete social life in its entirety. The review offers a compact encounter between two defenders of freedom who disagree about its philosophical and analytical foundations. Readers can discover why securing agreement, validating values, and explaining purposeful action are distinct problems—and why conflating them weakens the case for a free society.
A statistical method can succeed on artificial data without earning authority over economic observations. That distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s review of M. G. Kendall’s study of oscillatory time-series. Kendall’s experiments favour correlogram analysis, but Morgenstern asks whether the result follows from building the test series around the very mechanism that method assumes. His objection is concrete: the empirical Beveridge series have not been shown to share that mechanism, and economic processes may change over the span of a long record. Appreciative of Kendall’s computational labour, yet alert to emerging high-speed machines, Morgenstern argues for larger experiments with varied assumptions rather than a premature ranking of methods. This compact review shows how a seemingly technical comparison turns on what counts as evidence about the process producing the data.