3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A machine is a productive object; its owner’s investment is a monetary valuation. What goes wrong when economics calls both “capital”? In this encyclopedia article, originally published in 1930 and republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter traces that ambiguity through commercial usage and economic theory. His objection is concrete: the usefulness of equipment cannot by itself explain a percentage return on an investment whose value has yet to be explained. Against definitions centred on physical goods, he proposes capital as the market value of individual claims to income, including patents, franchises and other intangible rights. The article offers a compact way to distinguish production from ownership and valuation—and to see why that distinction changes arguments about interest and capitalism.
Can land remain free if its cultivation yields a surplus after all other inputs have been paid? In this 1930 journal comment, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter makes that inconsistency the starting point of his criticism of Albert Benedict Wolfe’s account of rent under increasing returns. His numerical corrections show why returns available on free land must govern the valuation of inputs used elsewhere, and why profitable cultivation turns on additional product exceeding additional cost—not on rising gross yields alone. Fetter’s distinctive position is to defend the marginal logic of Ricardian rent without accepting its restriction to agricultural land. The comment offers a compact encounter with the demands of equilibrium reasoning and with his argument that rent theory’s useful core applies to the services of durable goods more generally.
A wage cut can improve a firm’s accounts without creating a single new buyer. In this 1930 article, Emil Lederer uses that distinction to challenge wage reduction as a cure for unemployment. He asks where the demand for additional production would come from when factories already have unused capacity and employers may retain higher profits as cash rather than invest. His analysis makes distribution inseparable from recovery: falling prices can benefit people whose incomes remain unchanged while workers bear the adjustment. Readers can discover how an apparently straightforward cost-saving measure depends on investment decisions, industrial pricing and foreign markets—and why, for Lederer, political conflict and capital flight can undo its promised employment gains.
Just as the nineteenth century banished infinitesimals from analysis without destroying the calculus, Kaufmann proposes to eliminate the actual infinite, above all Cantor's uncountable, without dismantling classical mathematics. First published in 1930 and reissued here in 1968, this German study locates the root of foundational paradox in a single confusion: the failure to distinguish empirical from non-empirical claims about all objects and their existence. Set-theoretic totalities, on his reading, are an ontological surplus smuggled in through misread symbolism, not objects the mind discovers. He preserves the finite core of the diagonal argument while denying that it defines a totality of all decimals, invokes the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem to argue that axiomatic set theory cannot isolate a genuinely uncountable domain, and reads Hilbert's ideal elements and Brouwer's constructivism as each carrying only part of the truth.
Ein „sinnloses Zeichen“ ist eine contradictio in adjecto, denn in der Behauptung, daß visuelle oder akustische Phänomene „Zeichen“ sind, liegt diejenige eingeschlossen, daß man durch sie etwas verstehen, mit ihrer Hilfe fremde Gedanken erfassen kann.
English translation: “A "meaningless sign" is a contradictio in adjecto, for the assertion that visual or acoustic phenomena are "signs" already contains the assertion that through them one can understand something, that with their help one can grasp the thoughts of others.”
Does explaining why firms hold cash make counting how often money changes hands redundant? In this English-language review of M. W. Holtrop’s Dutch monograph, Gottfried Haberler separates the merits of a causal explanation from the rejection of an alternative accounting description. He welcomes Holtrop’s attention to payment schedules, uneven receipts and expenditures, and credit instruments, but disputes his insistence that cash-reserve and movement theories are incompatible. The disagreement becomes concrete when production is divided among several firms: additional transactions can increase the demand for money, with consequences for prices. This brief review offers a precise encounter between monetary theory and business finance, showing why Haberler values an explanation of cash holdings without abandoning velocity as a useful measure of monetary supply.
Empires fall to armies and diplomacy; this study insists that Austria-Hungary fell to exhaustion—'die Tragödie der Erschöpfung,' the cumulative wasting of food, transport, raw materials, manpower, and finance under a long war and blockade. Also written for the Carnegie Endowment's war history, it treats the Habsburg lands as a single economic organism, self-sufficient in bread as a whole yet fatally uneven between its halves, and follows collapse group by group: grain deficits and famine in Vienna, the depletion of copper and iron, the near-elimination of civilian industry, war finance through the Austro-Hungarian Bank, and the inflation that hollowed out the middle class. The apparent vitality of the war economy, the authors argue, only masked the steady consumption of the country's reserves. The wrenching Stürgkh–Tisza correspondence over wartime food closes the volume as its documentary core.
Es war keine echte, sondern eine fiktive Blüte, dem Fieberzustand zu vergleichen, der auf einem der Auszehrung verfallenen Körper die Wangen rötet.
English translation: “It was no genuine but a fictitious flowering, comparable to the feverish state that flushes the cheeks of a body wasting away in consumption.”
Could the Federal Reserve curb stock-market speculation while encouraging credit to agriculture and industry? In this 1930 article, Oskar Morgenstern examines the institutional conflict behind that ambition, rather than attempting a general explanation of the crash. He distinguishes the New York Reserve Bank’s repeated requests for higher discount rates from the Washington Board’s resistance, which he attributes to political calculation. His central concern is the gap between statutory design and working authority: a formally decentralized system had developed around New York’s financial leadership. Readers can discover how apparently inconsistent policy emerged from competing centres of power—and assess Morgenstern’s case for giving experienced bankers greater independence from government.
Where Sombart sees economics deformed by borrowed natural-scientific method, Schams sees the diagnosis aimed at the wrong target. Prompted by Die drei Nationalökonomien and its carving of the discipline into judging, ordering, and understanding economics, this essay charges that Sombart expels physical "laws" only to smuggle the old wage-fund, rent, monopoly-price, and supply-and-demand laws back in under the stamp of Sinngesetze, without ever showing why the earlier economics was cognitively empty. Exactness, Schams counters, is not measurement or quantity but the fit between a mode of concept-formation and its problem; the true fault lies in importing physical structures — equilibrium, statics and dynamics, material constants — into a domain that has none. Allied with Sombart against scientism, he defends instead a mathematical, relationist theory grounded in meaning and purged of natural-science residue.
Die Mathematik wirkt keine Wunder.
English translation: “Mathematics works no miracles.”
When several productive resources yield a good only by working together, what determines the value of each? Wilhelm Vleugels argues that Böhm-Bawerk and Wieser offer complementary answers rather than rival solutions. One explains the valuations behind decisions to acquire, surrender or replace a resource; the other describes the mutual determination of values and prices in equilibrium. The distinction becomes concrete when an indispensable input is lost: the output that disappears need not equal the utility sacrificed if substitutes are available. Following this problem from individual choice into market exchange, Vleugels shows how causal explanation and simultaneous equations can serve different tasks within one theory. He also marks their limits: explaining returns does not justify ownership, and allocation through purchasing power must not be confused with the satisfaction of collective needs.
Why should urban land rent appear even at the shabby edge of the city, on the worst sites, and why should rents climb without pause in a free housing market? Pribram takes up Friedrich von Wieser's dominant theory—urban rent as a differential rent of location, capitalized from the surplus that superior sites command—and finds it unable to explain the tenement block at the periphery or the relentless upward drift of rents. His answer trades spatial comparison for temporal: across the business cycle, rising construction costs pull rents up in the boom but leave them stranded high in the depression, and that asymmetric gap is capitalized as an 'absolute' ground rent. Each cycle locks in a higher level, and the riddle yields only when rent theory is joined to the analysis of the Konjunktur.
Nur aus der Einsicht in die Dynamik des Wirtschaftslebens läßt sich das Rätsel der städtischen Grundrente vollständig begreifen.
English translation: “Only through insight into the dynamics of economic life can the puzzle of urban ground rent be fully understood.”
What makes an observed fluctuation a business cycle rather than a movement caused by war, growth, or industrial innovation? In this 1930 review of Wesley C. Mitchell’s Business Cycles: The Problem and Its Setting, Joseph A. Schumpeter turns admiration for empirical research into a pointed argument about its analytical foundations. Statistics and business annals, he contends, cannot identify their own objects: cycle durations, price indices, and fitted trends acquire economic meaning only through explicit theoretical distinctions. His disagreement with Mitchell is not a rejection of observation but a demand for reciprocal work between measurement and theory. The review offers a concrete way to examine how apparently neutral decisions about counting, averaging, and classification shape what economists can explain.
Such difference in outlook as remains between us can be summarized by saying the theory of the cycle is not the last but the first step on the road to our goal.
By 1930 many economists spoke as though the fundamentals were settled, the inherited Marshallian and Paretian apparatus needing only defense and application. Against that complacency Schumpeter mounts a brief but pointed disciplinary intervention: keep the theoretical engine, but let it be altered by the problems it cannot yet solve. Monopoly is the exemplary unsolved case. Everything between pure monopoly and perfect competition, monopolistic competition, bilateral monopoly, economic warfare, remains the neglected middle terrain where real markets actually live, and Zeuthen's book earns his praise for entering it. The decisive contrast is between competitive compulsion, where deviation is punished, and strategic discretion, where actors bargain, threaten, and change the data themselves. Yet Schumpeter refuses the verdict that such markets dissolve into Edgeworthian chaos: specified, reasonable assumptions still yield meaningful results.
A large group of cases emerges, for various reasons not without claim to the epitheton ornans »normal«, which undoubtedly yield »determinateness« of equilibrium.