The archive.

What does a business-cycle indicator measure when economists disagree about what counts as equilibrium? In this preliminary conference report, Karl Pribram argues that statistical comparability requires more than consistent measurement: it requires clarity about the theories built into economic terms. “Over-indebtedness,” “overproduction,” and “underconsumption” call for different indices according to the assumptions they express. Rather than demand agreement on a single cycle theory, Pribram examines how rival conceptions of balance shape the selection and interpretation of evidence. His scrutiny also reaches the geographical unit of analysis: national statistical boundaries do not necessarily delimit distinct economic cycles. The report offers a concrete way to recognize theoretical commitments in apparently neutral indicators—and to ask whether the units being measured fit the economic relationships under investigation.

Simplifying payroll, Leo Illy argues, requires more room for calculation—not squeezing more figures into a single line. This practical guide replaces cramped entries and disposable working notes with a sheet for each employee and pay period, preserving the path from earnings through taxes and deductions to payment. Its worked forms make a concrete organizational problem visible: saving space at entry can mean costly reconstruction when employees ask questions or inspectors demand evidence. Illy approaches efficiency through document design, separating skilled calculation from subsequent copying and aggregation while giving employees a detailed statement. Readers can discover how an apparently modest change in paperwork redistributes work around payday and connects administrative economy with the ability to explain and verify a wage.

A seminar’s survival becomes a personal worry in Felix Kaufmann’s farewell song for Mises: Geneva cannot accommodate everyone, and Vienna’s departing scholars leave more than empty chairs behind. Presented in Arlene Oost-Zinner’s 2010 English translation and folk-song arrangement, the four stanzas mingle affectionate tribute with nervous humour. Drumming fingers and a recurring Latin lament sit alongside opposition to import taxes—a pointed reminder that friendship and economic conviction bound this circle together. The song offers a compact, intimate view of scholarly allegiance under the pressure of separation: its speaker honours the teacher’s new appointment while wondering what will become of the shared life he leaves behind.

A tax on written agreements can discourage people from recording their rights at all. This perverse consequence gives a concrete edge to Friedrich von Wieser’s 1906 examination of Austrian fee legislation. Beneath the statutory label of “fees,” he identifies a system dominated by transaction taxes and asks whether its charges correspond to actual capacity to pay. His economic perspective cuts across legal categories: frequent business turnover differs from durable investment, gross property value from genuine enrichment, and nominal liability from the burden ultimately borne by borrowers or sellers. Readers can discover how documentation, holding periods, liquidity, and collection procedures alter a tax’s effects—and why Wieser couples his defence of the law’s basic fiscal principles with demands for simpler rules and relief from unequal burdens.

Though its printed text is nothing but formula, this thank-you card with autograph signature is a compact witness to a political career. It acknowledges congratulations on Gustav Gross's election as president of the Austrian Reichsrat's Abgeordnetenhaus in 1917, but the catalogue record around it opens outward: Gross had sat since 1899 as deputy for the Moravian town of Iglau and ranked among the leading politicians of the German-national camp, a chairman of German protective associations. The card fuses private courtesy with institutional self-presentation, turning a personal exchange into a sign of parliamentary status. Together with its envelope addressed to Oskar Berl, it preserves in miniature the office, associational leadership, and ceremonial language through which late Habsburg politics marked its occasions.

Er war Präsident und Obmann der deutschen Schutzvereine "Südmark" und "Deutscher Schulverein" sowie Vorsitzender des "Deutschen Nationalvereins".

English translation: “He was president and chairman of the German protective associations "Südmark" and "Deutscher Schulverein," as well as chairman of the "Deutscher Nationalverein.”

Banks can multiply financial claims—but can they create the productive resources those claims promise? In this contribution to Viktor Mataja’s edited Lehrbuch der Volkswirtschaftspolitik, Richard Kerschagl makes that distinction the test of monetary and credit policy. He acknowledges deposit-money creation while rejecting the notion that lending can sustain itself independently of capital, confidence, and liquidity. His comparisons of European central banks with the Federal Reserve expose a practical tension: closer supervision can strengthen credit control without removing the risks of expansion. Equally revealing is his distinction between a solvent bank needing temporary cash and an institution suffering irrecoverable losses. Readers encounter a case for selective intervention bounded by concrete financial constraints, and an explanation of why neither inflation nor subsequent deflation can simply restore lost wealth.

Neither List’s protectionism nor free trade supplied Carl von Hock with a ready-made customs policy: he sought duties calibrated to production costs and the prospects of particular Austrian industries in world competition. This practical middle ground anchors Friedrich von Wieser’s brief dictionary portrait of the financial writer and Austrian official. Wieser’s emphasis falls on the conjunction of scholarship, administrative skill and integrity, crediting Hock with improving the conduct of officials under his direction. A further detail complicates the portrait: Hock’s strong Catholic convictions did not stop him supporting state control of elementary education. The entry offers a compact account of how economic inquiry and political independence could inform the work of a senior administrator.

A factory may lower its costs while a cartel raises its customers’ prices: industrial efficiency and public benefit are not the same achievement. In this contribution to Viktor Mataja’s edited Lehrbuch der Volkswirtschaftspolitik, Eugen Peter Schwiedland asks how governments can foster industrial capacity without mistaking business interests for national necessities. His perspective combines respect for entrepreneurial judgment with scrutiny of concentrated economic power. Mass production brings cheaper goods, but also dependence on expanding markets; joint-stock finance mobilizes savings, yet allows small controlling stakes to command vast assets. Against Europe’s postwar fragmentation and growing overseas competition, Schwiedland favours informed supervision rather than blanket prohibitions. The chapter offers concrete ways to distinguish productive coordination from restrictions on competition—and to understand why neither entrepreneurial freedom nor state intervention guarantees public welfare.

Can an editor disclaim responsibility for a translation published under his name? In this brief reply to Kerschagl, Alfred Amonn insists that dividing the labour does not divide accountability. He contrasts Kerschagl’s defence with the editors’ own declaration of joint work on the German translation of Walras’s Theory of Money. His objections to expressions about metallic parity and stabilization sharpen a second distinction: grammatical correctness and intelligibility are not merely matters of stylistic taste. This is not an exposition of Walras’s monetary theory, but a pointed dispute over the standards required to transmit it. Readers can follow how Amonn tests claims of scholarly collaboration against the wording and public presentation of the resulting work.

Written from New York in November 1961 to thank Alfred Müller-Armack for birthday wishes, this short letter turns quickly to a correction Mises wanted on record: he had been misunderstood as rejecting all political compromise. Theory and program, he insists, must be built consistently and without contradiction, yet the politician who cannot move the majority to adopt them must settle for whatever the given circumstances make attainable. The concession costs him nothing doctrinally—he restates his standing verdict that middle-of-the-road interventionism, in every variety, necessarily ends in full socialism. Writing as a European rather than American liberal, he closes by praising Müller-Armack and Ludwig Erhard for the postwar German recovery, a liberal achievement he can admire without endorsing its every interventionist remnant.

In der praktischen Politik kann man nur selten das Vollkommene erreichen. Man muss sich in der Regel damit begnügen, das kleinere Übel zu wählen.

English translation: “In practical politics one can only rarely attain the perfect. As a rule one must be content to choose the lesser evil.”

Equal legal capacity offers little to a worker who lacks the means to acquire property: this is the problem Friedrich von Wieser foregrounds in his dictionary portrait of Anton Menger. Wieser credits the jurist with exposing how the draft German Civil Code misunderstood the circumstances of the propertyless, even where reform need not challenge private ownership. Wage contracts and family law become concrete tests of whose circumstances legal rules accommodate. Yet admiration has a boundary: Wieser praises Menger’s knowledge of socialist literature while finding his economic theory inadequate. This brief entry lets readers examine that distinction between legal insight and economic explanation, and encounter a socialist criticism of law that could work within existing property institutions as well as challenge their foundations.

Market reporting, rather than withdrawal from practical affairs, supplies the origin of abstract value theory in Friedrich von Wieser’s dictionary portrait of Carl Menger. Wieser traces Menger’s attention to human needs to pricing practices that prevailing economics failed to explain, then connects his discoveries to his defence of theory against the German historical school. This is also a founder’s account of how intellectual credit should be divided: Wieser defends Menger’s independence from Gossen while assigning much of the theory’s subsequent development to Böhm-Bawerk and himself. The brief entry offers both a concrete account of the relation between market observation and subjective value and a participant’s revealing distinction between founding a school and extending its work.