The archive.

Helene Lieser’s brief review of Robert Lisnik’s Das neue Depot-Gesetz judges the guide by its usefulness to readers facing a change in German securities-custody law. She singles out the introduction’s clear account of the new provisions, alongside annotations and a subject index. The review offers a compact example of her practical reviewing criteria: clarity about legislative change and ease of reference, rather than an assessment of the law’s merits.

Who should bear the cost of insecurity when neither workers nor individual employers can control its causes? Writing in 1937 for members of the United States Social Security Board, Karl Pribram examines the emerging American programme against European insurance institutions rooted in mutual provision. His comparison makes technical choices—pension reserves, employer unemployment accounts, and state boundaries—legible as allocations of economic responsibility. He questions whether rewarding individual firms for stable employment can address fluctuations in demand, and whether financial self-sufficiency necessarily serves the economy that sustains contributions. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish insurance as an actuarial technique from social protection as a collective commitment, at a moment when the American system’s institutional choices were still taking shape.

A statistical pattern can fit the business cycle without explaining what causes it. In this 1937 abstract prepared for three lectures he was unable to deliver, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that distinction the basis of a compact research agenda. He urges quantitative researchers to look behind aggregate series at the industrial processes through which disturbances spread: an economy-wide fluctuation need not originate in an economy-wide cause, nor must a cyclical response have a cyclical trigger. His separation of observed facts, formal mechanisms, and causal theories offers a precise way to ask what statistical confirmation actually establishes. Readers encounter not a completed empirical investigation, but a pointed account of the evidence an explanation of the cycle would require.

More employment need not mean economic recovery: this distinction drives Emil Lederer’s 1937 analysis of National Socialist economic doctrine. He argues that rearmament required wages and consumption to remain constrained, since rising prosperity would make military expansion more expensive. His distinctive approach tests the regime’s appeals to national will against the continuing requirements of production, credit, and exchange. Private enterprise survives, but its decisions are subordinated to state purposes; autarchy promises independence while disregarding comparative costs. By separating economic mobilization from individual welfare, Lederer shows how spending and controls can redirect resources toward power without abolishing economic limits. The article offers a concrete way to examine what employment figures conceal when a government determines both the purposes of production and the sacrifices demanded of its population.

Can removing mathematical notation make price theory harder to understand? In this short review of E. H. Phelps Brown’s The Framework of the Pricing System, Hayek praises the book’s coherent exposition while questioning its approach to beginners. His objection is not to mathematical economics but to presenting functional dependencies without the tools that make them intelligible. Calculus might better prepare some students; diagrams could clarify substitution and prevent confusion with older utility concepts. The review offers a focused encounter with Hayek as a reader and teacher of economic theory, distinguishing agreement with an argument from confidence in how it is taught.

Does steel production make monopoly inevitable, or do pricing rules help create the concentration they are invoked to justify? In this 1937 review essay, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the defense of basing-point pricing advanced in The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry. He distinguishes large producing plants from corporations controlling many plants, and investors’ hopes of recovering costs from rights to protected returns. His case for mill-base pricing rests not on perfect competition but on weakening discrimination and centralized price control. Especially pointed is his treatment of investment losses: established firms’ objections to reform leave unheard the businesses already displaced or prevented from forming. The essay offers a concrete way to examine the passage from explaining industrial concentration to defending it as necessary.

Clearly it is not overhead costs but monopoly that permits fixing prices to realize overhead costs.

A rise in production or employment can signal recovery—or conceal growing economic imbalance. In this 1937 article, Karl Pribram shows why business-cycle statistics cannot settle such questions without assumptions about the system they measure. His distinctive concern is the meeting point of economic theory and statistical practice: monetary and structural explanations assign different meanings to the same movements, while national data may obscure forces operating across the world economy. Rather than choosing a winning theory, Pribram makes their underlying commitments explicit. Readers can discover why selecting an indicator is already an act of interpretation, and why treating a nation as a self-contained economic unit requires justification rather than merely convenient data.

Scientific objectivity does not absolve scholars of responsibility for the questions they choose. In this 1937 address, Emil Lederer defends rigorous analysis while challenging the ideal of intellectual detachment: freedom’s moral worth may resist scientific proof, but inquiry cannot proceed without freedom to choose hypotheses. Speaking for the Graduate Faculty and honoring Thomas Mann, he links this methodological necessity to the defense of personal liberty against dictatorship. His account of authoritarian appeal turns on the burden of freedom—the desire to escape decisions and responsibilities by submitting to compulsory conformity. The address offers a precise distinction between fidelity to evidence and indifference to the conditions that make evidence-based inquiry possible.

But trust in mere analysis caused the intellectual to forget that every question he asks involves a decision.

A common mechanism of contraction need not imply a common cause—or a uniform remedy. That distinction anchors Gottfried Haberler’s 1937 review of R. F. Harrod’s The Trade Cycle. Haberler admires Harrod’s account of investment and consumption reinforcing one another, yet questions whether it explains why expansion must end. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he examines workers temporarily holding their wages: does calling these balances “saving” clarify how investment is financed, or merely rename the receipt of income? Readers encounter a critic willing to accept a particular explanation of the downturn while resisting its elevation into a universal diagnosis. The resulting disagreement over public works turns on what caused the crisis, not simply how contraction spreads.

The process of contraction may be in the main features always the same, but the cause by which it is initiated need not be and probably is not always the same.

A state can outlast its members and persist through periods of inactivity—but what makes it the same social whole? In this 1937 review essay, Alfred Schütz examines Tomoo Otaka’s attempt to understand social associations as ideal formations with historical actuality. Schütz takes the problem seriously while questioning whether Otaka’s appeal to shared membership already assumes the association it is meant to explain. His defence of Weber’s interpretive sociology and criticism of Otaka’s selective use of Husserl bring the inquiry back to actors’ meanings and the processes through which collective objects become identifiable. The essay offers a precise encounter between competing accounts of social reality: recognizing an association’s enduring identity is one task; explaining how that identity arises through social action is another.

A long-term security need not represent a long-term commitment. This distinction anchors Gertrud Lovasy’s 1937 article on international capital movements in 1927–1936. New foreign lending had collapsed, yet European purchases of American securities continued to grow: was capital financing investment abroad, or merely seeking temporary shelter? Lovasy combines evidence from major creditor countries with an account of how currency uncertainty, exchange controls, and trade restrictions disrupt investment and transfer. She argues that some apparently durable inflows may instead be readily reversible flight funds. Her careful separation of financial instruments from investors’ purposes gives readers a concrete way to question what capital-flow statistics actually measure—and why renewed market activity need not signal renewed confidence in foreign investment.

Can a party guarantee work and subsistence while retaining private capital and wage labour—and expecting national loyalty to reconcile employers and workers? In this 1938 English translation, Karel Engliš tests the Sudete German Party’s economic programme against the institutions its promises would require. His distinctive approach classifies economic orders by their purposes and rules of allocation, rather than ownership alone. That framework gives practical force to his objections: agricultural protection can damage export-dependent industry, while removing machinery from farms cannot create employment without costs. Engliš also asks who falls within the promised community of care. His critique connects unresolved economic conflicts with ethnic exclusion and party discipline, while exploring how democratic taxation and public spending might accommodate minority needs without breaking the unity of the state.