The archive.

A house and a machine can both be rented: why, then, should economic theory define rent through land alone? In this encyclopedia article, first published in 1934 and reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the inherited division between land rent and returns on other resources. He traces that division to historical usage and the circumstances of English agriculture, then questions the supposedly unique properties of land on which Ricardian theory rests. His alternative turns on the contract: an owner lends the use of a durable thing that must later be returned, rather than advancing money to be repaid. The article offers a concrete way to reconsider what economic categories distinguish—and what they obscure—by separating a resource’s physical origin from the terms governing its use.

A landowner could raise money by selling a perpetual claim on landed income without promising ever to repay the capital. That distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s brief encyclopedia entry: the rent charge served purposes similar to borrowing, yet escaped the church’s disapproval of ordinary interest-bearing loans. Fetter approaches this medieval legal instrument through the economics of investment, comparing the exchange of fixed incomes for capital sums to a modern bond market. His account makes clear why the absence of a maturity date mattered—not merely as a contractual detail, but as a basis for distinguishing the transaction’s ethical status. Readers gain a compact explanation of how landowners’ need for funds and burghers’ demand for investments met within religious constraints.

Greater productive capacity does not necessarily bring greater employment or consumption. In this 1934 review of the Columbia University Commission’s Economic Reconstruction, Emil Lederer welcomes its refusal to assume that recovery will occur automatically, but asks whether its proposals confront the shortage of profitable investment opportunities. His distinctive concern is the difficulty of turning technical efficiency into sustained purchasing power when corporate expansion, rigid prices, and uncertain investment disrupt adjustment. He supports coordinated intervention while finding the report’s institutional remedies vague. The review offers a pointed distinction between diagnosing the need for economic management and specifying machinery capable of achieving it—and shows why abundant savings may coexist with idle resources rather than finance renewed production.

How could scholars and practitioners find their way through the League of Nations’ abundant publications? In this brief 1934 review, Helene Lieser endorses A. C. v. Breycha-Vauthier’s guide on precise, practical grounds: its author’s experience in the League library’s legal and political service, its skilful arrangement, and its detailed subject index. Her notice offers a compact assessment of a bibliographical aid, showing what she valued in making institutional documents usable—not an appraisal of the League’s policies.

What makes a banking directory useful to both practitioners and researchers? In this brief 1934 review of the 1933/1934 Annuario delle Banche e Banchieri d’Italia, Helene Lieser gives concrete grounds for praising Robert Ghislandi’s handbook: broad institutional coverage, searchable indexes, and several years of balance-sheet figures for larger banks. Her attention to the selection of rural credit institutions— included only if they collect bills for third parties—shows that coverage depends on explicit criteria, not merely a long list of entries. The review offers a compact account of the financial and legal information Lieser valued in a reference work, and of its reach beyond Italy to colonial institutions and Italian banks abroad.

Diminished interest need not mean diminished usefulness: this distinction anchors Helene Lieser’s brief 1934 review of Ferdinand Ensch’s account of Luxembourg holding companies. She values the book not simply for collecting tax and fee provisions, but for showing how they apply to companies engaged in control, investment, financing, and patent exploitation. Her concise appraisal offers a concrete glimpse of what she finds useful in a legal-economic guide during the world economic crisis: rules connected to business functions, illustrated by actual examples, and supported by literature and official publications.

A financial dictionary can prove reliable in practice yet miss the mechanism that defines a monetary term. In this short 1934 review of the German–English second volume of K. T. Langguth’s Handwörterbuch des Finanzwesens, Helene Lieser welcomes a useful reference work while identifying precise improvements. Her sharpest example is Schwundgeld: its definition omits the continual loss of value intended to accelerate circulation. Attention to Austrian institutional names and commercial usage gives her corrections a local specificity. The review offers a compact example of practical terminological criticism: Lieser asks for greater precision without mistaking individual defects for general unreliability.

Perfect competition earns its keep here not as a description of any real market but as the benchmark against which every messier case is measured, and messier cases, this 1934 review essay argues, are where most economic life actually sits. Assessing Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition, Schumpeter fixes on marginal revenue as her decisive analytical discovery, the tool that restores symmetry to demand-and-supply reasoning and unifies pricing across competition, monopoly, and the territory between. He credits the book's rigor and teachability while faulting its cost: a resolutely Marshallian, two-variable, partial-equilibrium frame that forgoes indifference curves and Walrasian generality. Imperfect-competition analysis, he warns, overturns welfare and policy verdicts, sometimes into the exact opposite of what they were twenty years before.

For any science or part of a science, the first task always consists in establishing the logical autonomy of its field, or rather the conditions under which there is logical autonomy.

An early German advocate of Adam Smith could also argue for restrictions on free competition. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram presents Georg Sartorius von Walthershausen as both a teacher of Smithian economics and a selective critic of its premises. Sartorius’s rejection of an automatic harmony between private interests and public welfare led him to defend state intervention, especially in foreign trade. Pribram also credits him with separating the study of national wealth from governmental economic policy. The entry offers a precise glimpse of how Smith’s ideas were adapted in German university teaching, while resisting any easy identification of Sartorius’s historical scholarship with the later historical school of economics.

One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.

The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.

A manufacturer of ladies’ coats became a trusted leader of German Social Democracy: Emil Lederer’s compact biographical entry explains why Paul Singer’s bourgeois background helped rather than hindered his appeal. Lederer locates that appeal in Singer’s resemblance, in speech and appearance, to the respectable Berlin citizen, arguing that many skilled workers shared a lower-middle-class outlook. His portrait distinguishes the quiet authority of an organizer from August Bebel’s forceful oratory and uncompromising politics. In this entry, first published in 1934 and republished in 1937, readers encounter a concrete account of socialist leadership grounded less in revolutionary temperament than in practical judgment, willingness to compromise, and voters’ confidence.

Can public intervention enlarge an economy’s output rather than merely redistribute it? In this 1934 article, Emil Lederer challenges the assumption underlying Böhm-Bawerk’s account of economic power: that production operates without unused reserves. Idle equipment, available credit, and unrealized improvements in organization change what policy can accomplish. Lederer shows why falling interest rates may fail to revive investment, why public works can generate savings as well as consume them, and how expectations influence the use of productive resources. His defense of intervention remains conditional: subsidies can misdirect capital, and confidence cannot abolish material constraints. The article offers a precise way to distinguish policies that mobilize dormant capacity from those that merely protect failing enterprises—without treating governmental power as an escape from economic law.