3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Before Prices and Production made him famous in London, Hayek laid the foundations of his business-cycle theory in this 1929 monograph, here reissued with Kurt Leube's bibliography. Empirical research and statistics, he insists, can raise problems but never generate the causal laws of economics; only theory grounded in price, production, and interest can explain the cycle. Non-monetary accounts, whether technical, psychological, or built on disproportionality, fail because they smuggle in elastic credit while denying it any explanatory role. The engine is the Wicksell-Mises divergence between the money rate and the natural rate of interest: bank credit pushes lending below the equilibrium rate, lengthening the higher stages of production beyond what voluntary saving can sustain, until the boom's distorted capital structure collapses into crisis.
Solange wir uns des Mittels des Bankkredites bedienen, um die Entwicklung zu fördern, werden wir auch die Konjunkturschwankungen mit in Kauf nehmen müssen, die durch ihn verursacht werden.
English translation: “As long as we make use of bank credit as a means of promoting economic development, we shall also have to accept the cyclical fluctuations that it causes.”
The doctrine that thrift starves its own market—money saved being purchasing power withheld from consumers—found aggressive new champions in the American writers W. T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, popularized through the Pollak Foundation and its prize contests. Hayek dismantles their supposed paradox of saving by restoring the capital theory they lack. Saving does not simply pile output beside old output; it changes methods, withdrawing resources from immediate consumption toward intermediate and capital goods and lengthening the production process. Under a constant money stream, falling consumer-goods prices signal higher productivity, not underconsumption. Testing the claim across fixed capital, circulating capital and vertically integrated firms, he warns that the remedy Foster and Catchings urge—injecting new money through consumers or public works—would shorten production and destroy the very capital that saving forms.
Das einzige, was vor allem anderen nötig ist, um eine dauernde Aufwärtsbewegung der Wirtschaft zu sichern, ist genug Geld in den Händen der Verbraucher
English translation: “The one thing above all others required to secure a lasting upward movement of the economy is enough money in the hands of consumers.”
Why did German farms struggle to remain solvent while the country imported substantial quantities of food? In this 1929 article, Emil Lederer challenges the expectation that tariffs or an approaching world shortage would restore agricultural prosperity. His distinctive move is to connect overseas competition with domestic organization: imported grain offers qualities buyers want, expensive debt burdens estates, and widening retail margins leave producers with little of consumers’ expenditure. These connections explain why higher food prices need not mean healthier farms. Lederer argues for publicly coordinated reform, including changes in production, distribution, and estate size. Readers can discover how agricultural recovery, in his account, depends not merely on protecting producers but on creating markets, respecting consumer demand, and avoiding wage cuts that transfer the crisis to rural workers.
The Far East, and Japan above all, appears here as the site where a world-historical rupture becomes visible: the collision of a closed, tradition-saturated civilization with the expansive forces of European industrial capitalism. Refusing both romantic Asia-enthusiasm and European condescension, Lederer and his co-author Emy Lederer-Seidler reconstruct Japanese life from within, from Shinto and ancestor cult to Tokugawa aesthetics, the forty thousand characters that discipline a childhood, and samurai loyalty transferred to the emperor at Meiji. Modern imported capitalism, they contend, corrodes precisely these bonds, detaching a new industrial proletariat from family, myth, and national-religious community. The later chapters turn economic: cultivable land scarcity, tenant rents of half the harvest, feudal capitalism concentrated in Mitsui and Mitsubishi, and armament spending hidden in opaque budgets. The crisis they diagnose is not mere Europeanization but the emergence of an Asian capitalism.
Niemand existiert außerhalb der Gruppe.
English translation: “No one exists outside the group.”
Does paying reparations abroad impose a burden beyond raising the money at home? In this 1929 article, presented in English translation, Jacques Rueff challenges Keynes’s distinction between Germany’s budgetary capacity and its capacity to transfer payments. His crucial move is to separate falling money wages from falling real wages: if prices adjust proportionally, he argues, external adjustment need not add to the sacrifice already imposed by taxation. French trade balances after the withdrawal of Allied credits supply his concrete test of whether commerce responds to financial obligations. The interest lies in the hinge between theory and evidence: how much flexibility can an economy exhibit, and under what fiscal and monetary conditions? Rueff’s answer makes a technical dispute over reparations a sharply defined argument for decentralized adjustment.
An entrepreneur's economic function may be indispensable, Schumpeter tells a 1929 Munich industrial association, and still win him neither affection nor prestige. Dividing his inquiry into the economics, sociology, and psychology of the entrepreneur, he first separates entrepreneur from capitalist and profit from capital rent, locating the real role in carrying new technical and commercial combinations into practice—being the bearer of economic progress. Then he asks why so useful a figure remains so disliked. His answer runs from Aristotle's contempt for commerce through mercantilism to modern resentment: the entrepreneur labors invisibly amid office routine, credit negotiations, and wage conflict, showing the public only the unpleasant surfaces of his work. Unpopularity, moreover, is reciprocal, bred by a bourgeoisie that sought titles and protection rather than public standing—hence his closing plea that entrepreneurs become social functionaries who justify private gain as public service.
In hartem Kleinkrieg und kühlem Rechnen Werkzeug der wirtschaftlichen Vernunft zu sein, ist eben keine Aufgabe, die Applaus und politische Anhängerschaft bringt.
English translation: “To be the instrument of economic reason amid hard skirmishing and cool calculation is simply not a task that wins applause and political followers.”
Written as Germany braced for a sweeping Finanzreform, this three-part essay turns a technical fiscal question into a sociology of taxation. The income tax, Schumpeter argues, is the finest instrument liberal fiscal technique ever devised, yet at high progressive rates it transforms the whole economic man and everything he does. His immediate remedy is the Verbrauchseinkommensteuer, a consumption-income tax that exempts saved and invested income to protect capital formation and end the double taxation of savings. The deeper claim is historical: the income tax was the fiscal child of bourgeois liberalism, of private acquisition, competition, and the cheap state, and as cartels, combines, and public enterprise displace that world, and as taxpayers cease to recognize the legislator's aims as their own, the levy becomes a penal correction of income distribution destined to lose its rationale.
Die Einkommensteuer ist unser schönstes und bestes finanzpolitisches Instrument, das Rückgrat unseres – und jedes kultivierten – Steuersystems, aber wir haben ihm zuviel zugemutet und müssen es für die nächste Zeit etwas entlasten.
English translation: “The income tax is our finest and best fiscal instrument, the backbone of our—and of every civilized—tax system; but we have asked too much of it and must for the time being relieve it somewhat.”
Capital can return after a war without restoring the institutions that once coordinated its movement. In this lecture, delivered in 1928 and published in 1929, Felix Somary approaches that discrepancy as both economist and banker, concerned with decisions that cannot wait for historical hindsight. His distinctive focus is the shift from British commercial finance to American securities speculation: optimistic share valuations can give expanding firms exceptionally cheap capital, even as they expose investors to disappointed expectations. Financial recovery, he argues, also leaves foreign property vulnerable to nationalism and weak legal enforcement. The lecture offers a concrete way to distinguish abundant funds from an effective financial order—and to see how the same investment mechanisms can finance industrial experimentation while widening divisions between secure creditor economies and insecure destinations.
Before judging Germany’s foreign borrowing, what debts had actually been incurred, by whom, and on what terms? In this short review, Fritz Machlup praises Kuczynski’s documentation for giving a noisy controversy a factual footing. His distinction is pointed: he values systematic empirical work while distancing it from the “empirical-realist” school of economics. Praise is tempered by unease over public bodies’ substantial share of foreign debt and by the suggestion that official interventions probably worsened borrowing terms. The review offers a compact instance of Machlup’s critical priorities: reliable evidence is necessary for policy argument, but collecting it does not settle whether borrowing abroad is desirable.
Why would investors accept tiny yields on shares while farmers struggled to borrow even at seven or eight percent? In this closing contribution to a scholarly debate, originally published in 1929, Felix Somary insists that the puzzle concerns the allocation of capital, not simply its scarcity. His example is Sofina, whose high share price dwarfed its dividend; the relevant yield, he reminds an interlocutor, must be calculated against market price rather than nominal value. Alongside his defence of a German debt-consolidation loan, Somary advances a tentative social explanation: income has shifted from older rentiers towards younger speculators. The exchanges expose a precise disagreement over what investors seek from securities—and why settling international debts might not resolve the distortions in long-term lending.
Excluding seasonal workers might balance an insurance fund’s accounts—but would it reduce the cost of unemployment? In this 1929 newspaper article, Emil Lederer challenges proposals to restrict German unemployment insurance after a harsh winter exposed its financial weakness. He accepts the need for stronger financing while rejecting the assumption that workers in high-risk occupations can provide for themselves. His calculation of construction workers’ wage premiums tests that assumption concretely: even saving the entire premium would yield only meagre support through months without work. Combining wage arithmetic with a defence of shared economic risk, Lederer shows how apparent economies could transfer costs to welfare offices and other public institutions. His case for higher contributions turns on the difference between repairing insurance and merely moving its obligations elsewhere.
When the Methodenstreit pitted Menger's theoretical economics against the German historical school, the deeper logical question, whether a science of human action is even possible, went unanswered. Mises returns to it here, arguing that sociology, with economics as its most developed branch, yields universally valid laws rather than Max Weber's ideal types. Scarcity, choice, and the economic principle are not habits of the capitalist epoch but conditions of all action; Gresham's law and subjective value theory hold wherever their premises obtain. He faults historians who imagine they work without theory while leaning on outdated folk economics, and rejects the historicist and Marxist claim that economic laws are bound to particular epochs, a device, he argues, for evading criticism of socialist calculation. History, he concludes, begins only where theory leaves off.
Ohne Theorie ist Geschichte nicht zu denken.
English translation: “History is unthinkable without theory.”