The archive.

Statistical agreement does not necessarily tell us which economic relationship has been measured. In this 1951 review of Lawrence R. Klein’s Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921–1941, G. L. S. Shackle pairs enthusiasm for econometrics with a precise account of its limits. He values its power to expose ambiguities in theory and distinguish consequential relationships from negligible ones, yet shows how a simple consumption–investment model can produce two apparently similar equations with different underlying parameters. His perspective is neither a defence of purely deductive economics nor an unqualified endorsement of empirical modelling: internal coherence is not evidence, but estimation does not guarantee structural knowledge. This short review makes the identification problem accessible while revealing why Shackle found Klein’s methodological candour as valuable as his technical achievement.

Apparently reasonable demands on collective choice can prove incompatible: this is the tension G. L. S. Shackle brings into focus in his review of Kenneth J. Arrow’s Social Choice and Individual Values. He explains why unrestricted individual preferences cannot always yield a consistent social ranking while preserving responsiveness, independence, and freedom from imposed or dictatorial outcomes. His admiration for Arrow’s symbolic methods rests on their necessity to the result, not on mathematical elegance alone. The review offers a compact route into the theorem’s conditional scope—welfare economics without interpersonal comparisons of utility—and the difficult alternatives Shackle sees it leaving open: relinquishing consistency or restricting the diversity of preferences. It also captures his conviction that rigorous proof and intelligible economic prose can reinforce one another.

When does a theory of international development explain trade and lending, rather than merely rename their patterns? In this 1951 review of Charles P. Kindleberger’s The Dollar Shortage, Josef Herbert Fürth welcomes the idea that countries’ external balances reflect different stages of domestic development, but asks how those stages can be identified independently of the balances they supposedly explain. His scrutiny turns on concrete contrasts: Britain’s presumed maturity versus America’s technological strength, and Soviet lending to satellites versus American relations with Latin America. The review offers a compact encounter with the demands of economic explanation: measurable categories, mechanisms linking debtor and creditor development, and attention to institutions. Fürth’s qualified approval shows how a promising hypothesis can generate research without yet constituting a verified theory.

Currency devaluation can look like an administrative adjustment; in Alfred Amonn’s review of Rudolf Kaulla’s Rechtsstaat und Währung, it becomes a test of the state’s obligations to creditors. Amonn presents Kaulla’s compensation theory, which locates monetary value in enforceable claims rather than in gold itself, and draws out its legal stakes: why should governments reduce debts through monetary action when private debtors must first exhaust their capacity to pay? His distinctive emphasis is the link between monetary theory and protection against arbitrary state power. This compact review offers a clear route into the distinction between a stable monetary unit and stable purchasing power—and into Kaulla’s contention that money deserves protection as a legal right, not merely management as an instrument of policy.

Did foreign capital drive gold into the United States in 1934–1939, or did American monetary policy help draw in both? In this review of Arthur I. Bloomfield’s study, Ilse Mintz praises his empirical work while challenging the direction of his causal explanation. The dollar devaluation of 1934 and the higher American gold price, she suggests, deserve more weight than an account centred on fears abroad allows. She also questions his adverse verdict on capital flight: balances accumulated in America later paid for urgently needed European wartime imports. This brief review offers a pointed example of how agreement over evidence can coexist with disagreement over causation—and how the later use of funds can complicate judgments about their arrival.

Choosing a course of action is not like selecting between two objects already on a table. In this article, Alfred Schütz asks how alternatives themselves take shape during deliberation, as both the imagined projects and the person considering them change. His distinctive starting point is that we envisage an act as already accomplished, then work back towards the means of achieving it. Such anticipation depends on present knowledge that the action itself may alter. Bringing phenomenology to ordinary practical reasoning, Schütz shows how biography and interests give possibilities their weight, and how doubt becomes a decision without yielding final certainty. The analysis gives readers a precise way to question social-scientific models that treat actors’ alternatives as fixed and their motives as fully transparent.

Only the foreign, Richard Thurnwald insists, first opens a path to knowledge of ourselves — and from that premise unfolds a vast comparative anthropology of the human mind, tracing its awakening, growth, and errancy from the earliest Naturvölker through the archaic civilizations of Egypt, Peru, and Babylon. Against the older evolutionism that ranked cultures on a single ladder toward European reason, Thurnwald reconstructs a paleopsychology of participation, in which surrounding reality is lived personally rather than confronted as impersonal object. He works through Mittelpunktgefühl, mana, totemism, projection, sacrifice, and the slow emergence of high gods, arguing that error is no accident but built into the very symbolic powers — naming, analogy, projection — that make understanding possible. Rationalization of life, he warns, will never be complete.

Die Welt ist für sie ein erweitertes Selbst.

English translation: “For them the world is an extended self.”

The failures of American foreign lending in the 1920s had been blamed on the depression and the transfer problem of the 1930s, on conditions arising after the loans were made. Ilse Mintz relocates the fault to the moment of issue. Building a default index from the share of each year's foreign-government dollar bonds that later defaulted, she shows that loans floated early in the decade performed far better than those floated late, as lending shifted from sound areas toward Latin America and eastern Europe, and from cautious houses toward reckless ones. Risk premiums, meanwhile, fell just as quality collapsed. The mechanism she names is not dollar scarcity but investor delusion during a speculative expansion, and she ties it to business-cycle theories of over-optimism in Burns, Mitchell, Haberler, and Schumpeter.

The 1920’s were the defaultless era in foreign lending.

A bonus can reward cooperation, but can it create the trust cooperation requires? In this 1951 article, Hans Bayer examines workplace consultation and profit sharing through British institutions and an American Scanlon-plan example. His emphasis falls on what workers can know and influence: access to company information, participation in cost-saving decisions, and the union’s right to inspect accounts. Financial incentives, he argues, depend on these relationships rather than replacing them. Bayer also tests the limits of cooperation: committees can fail, employers can resist, and solidarity within an industry can work against the public interest. The article offers a concrete account of why productivity reform involves not only wages and managerial technique, but also workers’ standing within the enterprise and its obligations beyond the factory.

Der Mensch im Mittelpunkt der Wirtschaft ist Erkenntnis und Forderung zugleich.

English translation: “The human being at the centre of the economy is both an insight and a demand.”

Stable exchange rates may require changing price relationships rather than preserving purchasing-power parity. This reversal anchors Alexander Mahr’s 1951 article on the conditions of international payments equilibrium. Developing—and qualifying—Friedrich von Wieser’s approach, Mahr locates adjustment in the interconnected receipts and expenditures of households and businesses: additional imports reduce domestic orders and incomes, setting off pressures that can eventually restrain imports and encourage exports. The interest lies in what this mechanism costs and where it fails. Reparations, rigid prices, sudden credit withdrawals, and foreign trade barriers expose the distance between an accounting tendency toward balance and an adjustment that can actually occur. Readers encounter an explanation of external equilibrium that makes monetary stability central without mistaking equilibrium for a painless or immediate outcome.

Property law can remain unchanged while ownership becomes a radically different source of social power. This tension anchors Hans Bayer’s 1951 appraisal of Karl Renner as a social scientist rather than chiefly a political figure. Bayer follows Renner’s analysis of the separation between ownership and productive activity, asking how cooperatives, unions, credit and social insurance can alter economic relations without simply abolishing existing legal forms. His distinctive contribution is to connect this account with natural-law principles that subordinate private property to the common good. The article also makes a consequential distinction: socialist possibilities emerging within capitalism are not guarantees of socialism. Readers can discover an account of institutional change in which empirical inquiry and democratic organization matter more than historical inevitability.

What can economic calculation contribute to planning without claiming to predict everything? Reporting on the 1951 European meeting of the International Econometric Society in Leuven, Hans Bayer treats econometrics as a practical bridge between abstract theory and policy decisions. His advocacy is qualified: mathematical elegance matters only when it illuminates economic relationships, and models must acknowledge social constraints and uncertain outcomes. Dutch efforts to reconcile full employment with a reduced payments deficit provide a concrete test of coordinated policy. Bayer’s criticism of treating entrepreneurial risk as a game adds another measure of realism: workers may bear consequences they never chose. The article lets readers examine how quantitative tools can inform deliberate economic planning without displacing substantive judgment or political negotiation.