The archive.

A faster aircraft or a larger economy does not automatically confer strategic power. In this published address to a naval aviation meeting, Oskar Morgenstern challenges technical forecasts that overlook qualitative change and military calculations that neglect political purpose. His perspective as an economist and game theorist gives the critique its edge: conflict involves an opponent who conceals, bluffs, and deliberately frustrates plans, not merely conditions to be optimized. Ballistic-missile submarines make the distinction concrete—destroying their bases cannot neutralize weapons already at sea. His proposal to measure national power rather than aggregate growth similarly questions what impressive numbers actually establish. The address offers a pointed encounter between technical confidence and strategic uncertainty, including Morgenstern’s contentious Cold War argument for nuclear capabilities in limited war.

We have to make decisions not against nature, but against a consciously interfering adversary.

A symmetric game need not have a fully symmetric solution. In this brief research abstract, Oskar Morgenstern reports incomplete joint work with the late John von Neumann on games whose minimal winning coalitions contain all but one player. He isolates solutions that treat every player symmetrically except one, then examines the set of payoffs available to that exceptional player. Two announced, optimal bounds constrain both the lowest attainable payoff and the gaps between attainable payoffs. The abstract offers a compact example of how symmetry can restrict an asymmetry without eliminating it; the proofs are reserved for a separately announced RAND paper.

Between early 1954 and early 1957 American commercial exports leapt from $11 billion to $21 billion, then fell to $15 billion by 1959, touching off alarm over the balance of payments. This occasional paper brings eight decades of evidence to bear on whether that drop was an ordinary cyclical movement or signaled a deeper loss of competitive power. Mintz declines to forecast or prescribe, using the historical record to place the 1957-59 decline among earlier contractions and judge it unexceptional once the preceding boom is weighed. Measuring exports against world imports, the imports of the world outside the United States, as her gauge of foreign demand, she argues that shifts in foreign demand govern export swings more powerfully than the domestic cycle, while exports came to track U.S. business cycles more closely after 1921 than before.

Most economists share Mitchell’s view—confirmed by our study—that foreign demand is the most important factor in export fluctuations.

Love and friendship become more valuable through freedom, yet economic goods seem to require availability for someone’s purposes. Such awkward cases give these post-1871 annotations their interest: Menger tests the boundaries of concepts rather than simply restating his published theory. Emil Kauder’s 1961 transcription preserves handwritten additions to the Grundsätze, not a new edition of the complete book. Proposed revisions, critical notes and reading excerpts show Menger asking how needs, scarcity and command over resources explain value where labour or production costs do not suffice. His attention to subsistence during production and to debts surviving a fall in prices brings time and monetary disruption into that inquiry. Readers can follow the friction between explanatory principles and resistant examples, while distinguishing Menger’s developing positions from the competing views he records.

Salaried employment can expand while individual jobs become narrower and opportunities for promotion diminish. This contradiction drives Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on employees’ place in industrial society. He distinguishes the growing importance of planning, research, and administration from the authority or qualifications of those who perform them: expertise need not confer command, and numerical growth need not bring higher status. Writing with a trade-union perspective, Bayer asks what could replace inherited prestige and hopes of individual advancement as a basis for collective identity. His answer links meaningful participation in workplace organization to solidarity with manual workers. The article offers a concrete way to examine the gap between an occupation’s economic importance and its members’ power—and Bayer’s case for closing it through collective action rather than status rivalry.

A firm can secure its own future by shifting uncertainty onto its suppliers—but has it thereby made the economy more stable? This distinction anchors Hans Bayer’s 1961 article on the organized market economy. Looking beyond company size and legal form to the structures of managerial decision-making, Bayer asks when long-term planning, diversification, and financial reserves can sustain employment and investment through downturns. He treats profit partly as a margin of safety, without assuming that corporate security serves the public interest. Smaller, personally directed firms enter this account as flexible specialists whose independence may depend on shared research and purchasing. The article offers a conditional account of stabilization through enterprise organization, while retaining competition as a necessary check on rigidity and concentrated power.

Can land reform improve rural welfare while reducing recorded national income? This possibility anchors Walter Froehlich’s preliminary contribution to the 1961 collection Land Tenure, Industrialization and Social Stability: Experience and Prospects in Asia. He questions comparisons that value market transactions more readily than household production, leisure, or security, then brings that criticism to bear on agricultural reform. His preference for viable family farms is conditional: redistribution alone cannot remedy holdings too small to support maintenance and improvement, nor replace opportunities for nonagricultural employment. The chapter’s distinctive interest lies in this connection between measurement and institutional choice. Readers can discover why an apparently technical judgement about economic progress depends on tenancy arrangements, resource pressures, and the social values that reform is intended to sustain.

What happens to marginal-utility calculation if people pursue ends other than their own well-being? In this 1961 editorial introduction, Emil Kauder finds that unresolved question in Carl Menger’s annotated copy of the Grundsätze, preserved at Hitotsubashi University. He reads its unfinished additions as evidence of a phase of Menger’s thinking not adequately represented by the posthumous 1923 edition. His account brings value-free economic theory into contact with Menger’s concern for the moral conditions of economic agency, without turning tentative reflections into a completed system. Kauder also explains how interleaved pages, pasted sheets and nested marginal notes were made readable. The result offers both a less settled picture of Menger’s economics and a concrete account of the editorial decisions on which that picture depends.

Asked what he had done in the Great War, the British economist Edwin Cannan answered simply that he had raised his voice against the folly around him—and for Mises that reply names the political virtue Germany lacked. Reviewing Volkmar Muthesius's Frankfurt monthly Monatsblätter für freiheitliche Wirtschaftspolitik, he argues that the catastrophes of early-twentieth-century Germany followed from interventionism, inflationism, and fiscal mismanagement met with silence rather than dissent. The magazine matters as a rare postwar voice defending free trade, sound money, and balanced budgets while attacking subsidies, union privilege, and antimonopoly demagogy. Written at the height of the Cold War, the review links West Germany's liberal recovery to American resolve over Berlin and to Goldwater-style fiscal conservatism, presenting an independent free-market periodical in the classic land of socialism as itself a remarkable achievement.

The great catastrophes that befell Germany in the first part of our century were the inevitable effect of its political and economic policies.

How can economic conduct obey regular laws if individuals are free—and what does freedom mean for people constrained by poverty? Emil Kauder finds these tensions in Carl Menger’s annotations and unfinished revisions, preserved in his library at Hitotsubashi University. This research report reads those materials against the published economist’s more settled positions. Kauder reconstructs a liberalism that accommodates social reform without abandoning private production, and an economic theory whose formation involved repeated revisions rather than a single breakthrough. His archival perspective also brings less familiar intellectual debts into view. Attentive to missing documents and incomplete arguments, the report lets readers distinguish Menger’s exploratory thinking from his published conclusions—and see why analytical individualism need not entail an unconditional defence of laissez-faire.

The salaried employee, caught between the working class and management, is the figure through which Bayer traces a wider mutation in economy and society. Three shifts organize the essay: in macroeconomic aims, now converging on dynamic stabilization; in the functions of the enterprise; and in the roles of those who carry it. He coins Blankobedürfnisse, blank general needs whose concrete content advertising and mass production increasingly supply, to explain the swelling tertiary sector and its white-collar ranks. Concentration, objectification, and long-run corporate planning together yield not a return to free competition but an organized market economy, and an institutionalized firm whose enduring tasks bind everyone in it. The old entrepreneur gives way to the manager, whose growing social power makes managerial ethics and countervailing forces urgent against the ever-present danger of Grenzmoral.

Die Entscheidung für die Freiheit aber bedeutet die Aufgabe geistiger Trägheit; sie verlangt Mut und Selbstverantwortung.

English translation: “The decision in favor of freedom, however, means giving up intellectual inertia; it demands courage and self-responsibility.”

Marx's Communist Manifesto lists ten transitional measures for wresting capital from the bourgeoisie, and Sennholz turns them into a scorecard for the United States of 1961. Point by point—land ownership, progressive income and estate taxes, centralized credit, regulated communications and transport, state production, labor obligations, public education—he argues that America has quietly realized much of the program not through outright nationalization but through control that leaves private title merely nominal. The Federal Reserve, in his reading, has already achieved the Manifesto's fifth plank; confiscatory taxation makes government the controlling partner in every enterprise. What separates America from the Iron Curtain, he concludes, is only surviving markets, constitutional restraints, and due process. A 1961 American Opinion polemic fusing Austrian economics with Cold War anti-communism.

As the second item in the communist program, the Manifesto demands “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” In this regard we are probably more communistic than the Russians and Chinese.