The archive.

Can measures that accelerate mobilization today weaken the capacity to fight an unforeseen war tomorrow? In these statements at the 1951 Conference on the Economics of Mobilization, Hayek treats market adaptability as a military resource. His concern is not only that controls misallocate production, but that they create dependencies and habits of authority that outlast the emergency. European rent regulation supplies a concrete example; business leaders’ attraction to directing whole industries complicates any easy opposition between business and government. The article offers a focused encounter with Hayek’s argument that wartime efficiency requires room for relative prices to change—including prices to fall—and for entrepreneurs to discover economies that planners cannot anticipate. Preparedness, on this account, must be judged by its capacity for readjustment, not merely its immediate output.

How should economic advisers respond when events contradict their forecasts? In this 1952 review of two United Nations Economic Commission for Europe surveys, Josef Herbert Fürth distinguishes impressive statistical reporting from less convincing policy advice. American inflation subsided and exports rose where the surveys had predicted an inflationary gap and declining exports; West German performance challenged their preference for coordinated controls. Fürth argues that these errors reflect an undervaluation of credit restraint and market-price adjustment. Yet he acknowledges the advantages of hindsight and refuses to make market policy a dogma. The review offers a concrete encounter with the difficulty of testing economic prescriptions: whether disappointing predictions prompt a revision of underlying assumptions or merely a new explanation of the results.

Admiration for a historian’s craft need not imply agreement with his explanatory framework. In this review of the 1950 reprint of Leslie Stephen’s The English Utilitarians, Emil Kauder praises Stephen’s vivid portraits and first-hand evidence while questioning how far utilitarianism can explain classical economics. The tension becomes concrete in the contrast between empirical philosophy and deductive economic theory, and in John Stuart Mill’s movement toward government intervention, peasant proprietorship, and support for labour unions. Kauder’s distinctive concern is the philosophical foundation beneath economic programmes: he argues that pre-utilitarian deism and conservative and socialist criticism also shaped economic thinking. This brief review offers a sharply drawn distinction between the historical richness of Stephen’s account and the limits of its organising perspective.

Writing in tribute to Abraham Wald, Gerhard Tintner asks what mathematical rigor can secure for economics—and where its assumptions limit practical use. This 1952 memorial survey distinguishes the formulation of equilibrium equations from proofs that economically admissible solutions exist. It also shows how cost-of-living comparisons depend on information about preferences that observed prices and purchases alone cannot supply. Tintner’s appreciation is not uncritical: he questions minimax decision rules that treat an indifferent Nature as an adversary, and the feasibility of measuring social losses for policy decisions. The article offers a compact encounter with Wald’s achievements through an economist’s discriminating perspective, revealing both the power of explicit assumptions and the empirical work still needed to make formal results useful.

That devaluing a currency must worsen a country's terms of trade was, in 1952, an assumption widely taken for granted, and this compact theoretical note, reprinted here, sets out to dismantle it. Haberler's thesis is deliberately asymmetrical: in the normal case, where depreciation improves the balance of payments, the terms of trade may move either way and cannot be predicted a priori; only in the perverse case, where the balance of payments worsens, must they deteriorate. Working through demand and supply curves priced in dollars, he shows that a depreciation lowers both export and import prices measured in dollars, so one cannot pair dearer imports with cheaper exports and infer a loss. Against Joan Robinson's presumption that supply elasticities generally exceed demand elasticities, he denies that any broad generalization holds.

We have, then, the result that export and import prices move in the same direction.

Democracy can endanger liberty—but does that make monarchy a safer alternative? In this review of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s Liberty or Equality, Friedrich August von Hayek welcomes a Catholic monarchist’s challenge to democratic assumptions while resisting his conclusions. Hayek’s decisive question is whether threats to freedom arise from democratic institutions or from governmental aims, especially expanding control of economic life, that could prove equally destructive under autocracy. His measured disagreement shows how one can value an opponent’s historical learning without accepting his political prescription. The review also weighs religious explanations of Europe’s uneven experience with parliamentary government against the different democratic traditions those societies inherited. Its compact argument distinguishes peaceful political change from the protection of personal liberty, refusing to assume that either guarantees the other.

Correct economic theory can still miss the revealing question. In this brief 1952 review of Willi Graf’s dissertation on trade between market and centrally controlled economies, Josef Herbert Fürth praises Graf’s command of the literature but probes what his account leaves unexplained. The delay between Soviet political hostility toward Yugoslavia and changes in trade policy, Fürth suggests, could measure how quickly planners revise their arrangements. Communist cost accounting likewise needs explanation within the system it serves, not dismissal as a distortion of market conventions. These concrete objections give the review its interest: Fürth shows how institutional details can unsettle a neat opposition between planning and markets, while retaining a qualified recommendation of Graf’s comprehensive treatment.

What does practically effective economic training lose when specialization separates it from broader theoretical inquiry? In this 1952 study, Richard Kerschagl connects American university organization with the economics and business administration taught within it. Drawing on teaching experience and conversations with economists, he examines how departmental boundaries, case instruction, and well-funded research shape scholarly priorities. His continental European perspective is explicit: admiration for Mises and methodological breadth informs his criticism of theoretical fragmentation, yet he credits American mathematical methods and specialized research with genuine achievements. The comparison offers readers a concrete account of the institutional conditions behind intellectual differences—and a reciprocal prescription: Europeans need stronger mathematical training, while Americans need better access to European scholarship through languages and translation.

When observations contain measurement error, how can one determine whether their underlying systematic components obey independent linear relations? In this compact 1952 article, Gerhard Tintner makes the error covariance matrix the link between multicollinearity and weighted regression. For time series with smooth systematic components, he proposes estimating error covariances through successive differences, then assessing observed covariance against that noise structure. The same calculation supports both an estimate of the number of underlying relations and the coefficients needed to express them. Readers can examine a precise connection between error estimation and regression, together with its limits: errors must have constant covariances and no lag correlation, while the significance tests rely on normality and large-sample approximations rather than a known exact distribution.

A fitted relationship need not be the economic relationship an investigator seeks. In Econometrics, first published in 1952, Gerhard Tintner makes this gap between statistical calculation and economic interpretation a central teaching problem. Prices and quantities are jointly determined, so reversing a simple regression cannot by itself recover supply or demand; smoothing a time series can introduce dependence rather than merely uncover it. Tintner’s emphasis is statistical, but his tests of method remain tied to economic questions and worked applications. Readers can discover why assumptions about structure, measurement and temporal dependence change what an estimate warrants—and why describing past observations is not enough to justify a forecast. This reprint preserves a textbook concerned as much with the limits of quantitative inference as with its procedures.

High tax rates need not mean high tax burdens: opportunities to defer gains or escape taxation can matter more than the published rate. In this 1952 review of Henry C. Simons’s Federal Tax Reform, Walter Fröhlich examines the gap between fiscal principles and enforceable revenue laws. He endorses Simons’s case for comprehensive personal income taxation, emphasizing how selective realization of gains and losses favors some taxpayers over high-income wage earners. Yet he questions whether corporate taxation could be abolished without sacrificing necessary revenue. The review offers a compact encounter with Fröhlich’s combination of ethical commitment and technical scrutiny: fairness requires attention not only to rates, but also to accounting periods, income averaging, and the distinction between postponing a tax and avoiding it altogether.

Around 1700 the world's economies resembled one another far more than they would a century later; by the nineteenth century Western Europe had opened a vast productive gap over much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That gap, Mises contends in this lecture, sprang not from secret inventions or hoarded technique—engineers, manuals, and machines were available—but from institutions and expectations that made saving, accumulation, and long-term investment worthwhile. Nineteenth-century capital export, distinct from older colonial extraction, financed railways, mines, and ports where opportunity existed but local capital was scarce, rewarding investor and recipient alike. Against Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism he insists capital flowed to serve consumers, not to conquer. His sharpest warning falls on confiscation, debt repudiation, and exchange control, which empty ownership of value without abolishing title—and, he cautions, may once more make war over raw materials thinkable.

Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.