The archive.

Currency depreciation can increase exports and reduce imports yet still worsen the balance of payments. In this 1949 article, Gottfried Haberler explains why physical trade responses do not settle the monetary question: prices, supply elasticities, and the currency in which the balance is measured also matter. His distinctive approach traces foreign-exchange demand and supply back through trade schedules to domestic production and consumption, showing how stable commodity markets can coexist with an unstable currency market. Readers can discover both the limits of familiar elasticity rules and the difference between an adjustment that works in principle and one that requires impractically large exchange-rate movements. Haberler also separates weak trade responses from inflationary expenditure shifts that can undo depreciation’s initial gains.

Before asking how interest-rates are determined, Shackle insists on a prior matter — what interest actually is, and what realities it manifests. His answer breaks with time-preference theory, which presumes agents already know their future, and pushes Keynes's liquidity-preference further by refusing to tame the unknown with probability. Wealth, held for 'possessor-satisfaction' as much as future consumption, may take the form of banknotes, bonds, or equipment; a man who trades banknotes for a bond swaps a known for an unknown quantity of money, and pure interest is the premium for surrendering that certainty. From gain- and loss-epitomes and uncertainty indifference curves the argument builds toward an aggregate model in which saving equals investment by identity, and finally to the British cheap-money drive of 1945–47, where reversing gilt-edged prices betray interest as a manifestation of uncertainty rather than credit standing or thrift.

The rate of interest is, of all prices, the one most inseparably bound up by the logic of its very nature with expectation and uncertainty.

A firm cannot choose its best course without considering what its rivals may do; a union bargains with an employer whose intentions it cannot fully know. In this 1949 Scientific American article, Oskar Morgenstern presents such interdependence as a mathematical problem that isolated individual maximization cannot capture. His account makes the apparent paradox of rational randomization concrete: unpredictability can protect a player from an opponent. Coalitions introduce a different difficulty, since cooperation creates gains without uniquely determining their distribution. Moving between strategic examples and economic disputes, Morgenstern shows why a solution need not be a single best outcome—and why formal privileges may depend on the bargaining arrangements that sustain them. His ambitions for game theory remain checked by the difficulty of calculating even simplified games.

No single person has control of all the variables, but only of a few.

"There are no ivory towers to house economists": the essay opens by denying the economist any refuge from public conflict, since every policy, however 'practical,' rests on some underlying theory. Written in 1949 as a retrospective apologia for his life's work and the just-published Human Action, Mises marshals his central doctrines in miniature—that inflation and credit expansion redistribute wealth rather than create it, that interest is a category of action itself, that a socialist commonwealth cannot calculate once market prices for the factors of production vanish, and that interventionism is no durable compromise but a slide toward comprehensive controls. Economics, he argues, admits no breaking up into isolated branches, because money, prices, interest, and production condition one another. Mistaken theory, for him, is a causal force in civilization's decline.

There is no middle way. Control is indivisible.

Small businesses can prosper while losing their independence: this tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1949 article on American corporate giants. Bayer locates their power not merely in efficient production but in financial resources that sustain advertising, research, service networks, and expansion into other industries. An automobile manufacturer’s ability to enter locomotive production makes the mechanism concrete: accumulated capital can challenge specialist producers far beyond its original market. Against assurances that the survival of small firms proves competition remains healthy, Bayer asks who controls the conditions under which those firms survive. His argument offers a way to distinguish business growth from economic autonomy—and explains why he regards regulation as capable of restraining corporate abuses, but not of restoring an earlier competitive order.

When does efficient coordination become an abuse of economic power? In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer examines American antitrust policy without assuming that either large enterprises or unrestricted competition are inherently desirable. His concrete test is basing-point pricing: buyers can be charged freight calculated from a designated production centre, regardless of where their goods actually originate. Such arrangements expose the difficulty of distinguishing useful coordination from practices that suppress competition—and of proving collusion from identical prices. Bayer argues that law should target the abuse of concentration rather than combinations themselves. His consideration of public supervision and cooperative self-help lets readers explore what protecting consumers might require when breaking up firms is neither practicable nor economically sound.

Hayek reads Margaret Cole’s commemorative collection through a pointed tension: how did the Webbs’ Fabian gradualism lead to admiration for Soviet communism? In this short 1950 review, he highlights their associates’ testimony that the Soviet allegiance continued, rather than overturned, their earlier political philosophy—including a reported preference for Lenin’s abandonment of workers’ control. He also challenges the collection’s biographical balance, arguing that Beatrice’s prominence obscures Sidney’s intellectual originality and political influence. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek as a critical reader of socialist biography: appreciative of firsthand testimony, alert to its omissions, and intent on distinguishing recollections of a partnership from an explanation of how its governing beliefs were formed.

Do British industrial employment and labor supply respond to real wages, or separately to money wages and prices? In this brief conference-paper abstract, Gerhard Tintner reports estimates for 1920–1938, distinguishing employers’ wholesale-price measure from workers’ cost of living. His demand estimates suggest that the wage–price ratio matters, but the estimated elasticity changes from −0.4 to −0.7 when a time trend is included. On supply, he is more guarded: the negative elasticities are interesting, yet dependence on wages and prices remains uncertain. The abstract offers a compact encounter with an empirical tension—how much an econometric estimate can establish when its magnitude depends on specification and the underlying relationship itself is doubtful.

A useful textbook can still teach distinctions that obscure the processes it seeks to explain. In this 1950 review of the third edition of Elmer Clark Bratt’s Business Cycles and Forecasting, Joseph A. Schumpeter combines a strong teaching recommendation with scrutiny of statistical and conceptual habits. He questions trend fitting, the separation of short cycles from longer movements, and the neglect of individual industries in accounts of economy-wide fluctuations. His concern is causal: do the categories clarify mechanisms, or merely organize observations? Especially revealing is his distinction between factors external to a formal model and those external to business activity. This compact review shows how Schumpeter’s welcome for complementary cycle theories coexists with exacting demands on the assumptions used to classify and explain economic change.

Why should interchangeable factors guarantee determinate values? In this brief conference abstract, Oskar Morgenstern challenges that familiar economic assumption through game theory. He treats the extra value created by combining factors not as an awkward exception, but as something the characteristic function of an n-person game can describe. His sharper challenge concerns substitution: he points to games involving six players or factors in which substitutability does not permit values to be assigned. The examples are announced rather than demonstrated here, but the distinction is clear: interchangeability need not secure the determinate equilibrium economists seek. This compact statement shows why Morgenstern redirects attention toward the different, more complex game-theoretic notion of a “solution.”

A military program can demand more tanks and ships yet undermine itself by diverting steel from the railroads needed to move them. This concrete tension anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s 1950 article on economic computation: requirements cannot be assessed separately when industries compete for resources and depend on one another’s output. He argues for mathematical analysis while confronting its limits—delayed statistics, information lost through aggregation, and an economy coordinated by decentralized decisions rather than commands. An interindustry calculation traces how an order for chemicals and munitions generates still larger demands elsewhere. The reader discovers both what computation can expose beyond administrative intuition and why proving a program feasible does not establish that it is the best available choice.

Written in the aftermath of a catastrophe its author dates to 1932–1945, this closing synthesis measures humanity's ascent against its recurring descent into madness. Thurnwald traces self-domestication from foragers through plant cultivators and pastoralists to the Metal Age and the archaic state, giving Überschichtung—the superimposition of specialized groups, herders over cultivators—pride of place as the engine of caste, serfdom, and slavery. Institutions of kinship, economy, law, and religion are read through cases from Maori communal redistribution and Buin shell money to the Sumerian temple economy, while universal religions appear as reforms against aristocratic cults. The verdict is somber: technical command of external nature has far outrun any comparable command of social life, whose domestication remains grievously unfinished.

Die Menschen haben die Natur in nicht unerheblichem Ausmaß zu meistern verstanden, doch nur wenig ihr Zusammenleben.

English translation: “Human beings have managed to master nature to no small extent, but their common life only very little.”