The archive.

Public work need not be invented when unemployment strikes; it can be scheduled before the crisis arrives. In this brief 1914 review of E. Bernhard’s book, Eugen Peter Schwiedland presents the case for moving ordinary public contracts into periods of weak business rather than resorting to costly emergency relief works. His emphasis connects workers’ continued earnings and occupational skills with the practical economies available to public purchasers. The revealing qualification is budgetary: prevention requires appropriations that remain available longer and reserves that make expenditure flexible. The review thus offers a compact account of how rules governing public money can enable—or obstruct—the timely use of public demand against unemployment.

Insurance for salaried employees appears here not simply as expanded social protection, but as a distinct policy for the middle classes. In this brief 1914 review, Emil Lederer presents Maurice Bellom’s comparison of German and Austrian insurance legislation as a sign of growing French interest in salaried employees. His emphasis falls on Bellom’s treatment of private-sector employees as a new constituency for middle-class policy, with insurance purposes sharply distinguished from those of workers’ insurance. Without explicitly endorsing that distinction, Lederer records how social classification shapes the case for protection.

Wages shared with kin and loans repaid through service give this brief review its central tension: reciprocity sustains social ties but can also enforce dependence. Reviewing volumes I and III of Richard Thurnwald’s South Sea research, Eugen Peter Schwiedland concentrates on the economic relations described in the ethnographic material. He highlights how common access to land coexists with ownership of plantations and produce, and how chiefly loans can bind a borrower’s children to labour obligations. His selection brings property, credit and political authority into the same frame without treating money as an independent source of power. The review offers a compact encounter with Schwiedland’s economic reading of Thurnwald, especially his attention to the point where mutual obligation becomes coercion.

Public employment offices could serve the very intermediaries whose abuses they were meant to curb. This is the tension Eugen Peter Schwiedland draws from Sigismund Gargas’s study of labour placement in Galicia. In his 1914 review, offices established in only 24 of 80 districts appear not merely understaffed or ineffective, but sometimes leased out or subordinated to private agencies while receiving public subsidies. Schwiedland’s concern is institutional independence: better provision requires provincial administration and the withdrawal of officials’ protection from powerful agents. His qualified appraisal—welcoming the study while faulting its omission of the law’s text and its unclear passages—offers a compact view of how scrutiny of local administration could inform concrete proposals for labour-market reform.

Can a physical increase in output explain a rate of interest without first assuming the valuations it is meant to explain? In this 1914 rejoinder to Harry Gunnison Brown, reproduced in the supplied 1977 edition, Frank Albert Fetter tests that question through a deceptively simple example of trees and fruit. More fruit is a physical fact; a percentage return requires a valuation of the trees against their future yield. Fetter argues that Brown’s productivity theory smuggles this value relationship into its supposed physical explanation. His further test—what happens when one production method displaces another—clarifies why he assigns time-preference, rather than technical productivity, the governing role. This brief exchange offers a precise distinction between explaining productive income and explaining the value of its source.

Enter the value relation disguised as a rate of physical productivity.

A tael is a weight, not a coin: for Hermann Schwarzwald, misunderstanding this distinction leads European observers to misread Chinese money and prescribe unsuitable reforms. His 1914 article examines payments in silver whose value depends on local weight standards and metallic fineness, turning apparent monetary disorder into a challenge to theories that ground money in state authority. Drawing explicitly on Eugen Dühring, Schwarzwald argues that reform should make commercial practice more reliable rather than replace it by decree. His proposal for freely minted, full-weight silver coins gives that position concrete form. The tension is practical as well as theoretical: how can China simplify domestic payments while meeting foreign debts fixed in gold? Readers encounter both the mechanics of silver settlement and a sharply partisan account of the boundary between monetary certification and fiscal exploitation.

Composed in the immediate wake of Böhm-Bawerk's death, this commemorative essay converts personal reverence into a claim about intellectual scale: that the Austrian finance minister and theorist was not merely a capital theorist but a founder of exact economic analysis. Schumpeter reads the major works, from Rechte und Verhältnisse through the Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien and the Positive Theorie des Kapitals to the Marx critique, as a single architecture built from Menger toward a general theory of the economic process. At its center stands capital as roundabout production and the agio theory of interest, grounded in the higher valuation of present over future goods for three reasons: differing provision, the perspectival underestimation of future wants, and the productivity of longer production. Interest, he insists, is a purely economic category that would persist even in a socialist commonwealth.

Sein Werk gehört nicht einer Generation oder einem Volk, sondern der Menschheit.

English translation: “His work belongs not to a single generation or a single people, but to humanity.”

Can an economics defined by money prices explain valuation—or judge the social worth of private wealth? In this 1914 review of Herbert Joseph Davenport’s The Economics of Enterprise, Frank Albert Fetter welcomes a value-based account of capital but disputes the limits Davenport places on economic inquiry. His sharpest tests are concrete: debts do not themselves create lendable resources, and doubling physical output does not explain interest if prices must also adjust. Writing from the psychological approach to value, Fetter asks what monetary transactions presuppose about choices and future returns. His disagreement also reaches property: he accepts that private gain can diverge from public welfare without accepting Davenport’s sweeping condemnation. The review shows how shared theoretical premises can lead to conflicting explanations of interest and standards of social criticism.

Can systematic observation replace economic theory, or does it need theory to explain what it records? In this 1914 review of François Simiand’s La méthode positive en science économique, republished here in 1952, Joseph A. Schumpeter challenges what he sees as the conversion of a fruitful empirical approach into an exclusive scientific programme. His defence of abstraction turns on concrete distinctions: investment choices depend on risk as well as return, and modelling utility-maximizing behaviour need not mean recommending it. Yet he grants empirical sociology tasks that theory cannot perform, including investigating market organization and competition’s historical extent. The review offers a pointed account of how observation can correct and specify economic models without replacing analytical explanation—and how defending theory can coexist with acknowledging its limits.

Greater need does not necessarily give a worker greater power to demand higher pay: family responsibilities may instead make leaving a poorly paid job harder. This tension anchors Richard Schüller’s account of workers’ demands as conditions for accepting employment, rather than wishes or a fixed subsistence minimum. He examines how savings, information, mobility and union support turn preferences into effective bargaining power. His distinctive claim is that the poorest workers do not automatically set wage levels: employers must also meet the demands of workers whose services they cannot replace. Readers can discover why partial unionization may matter, why dangerous work need not command a premium, and why labour supply depends on the terms offered. Schüller’s racial and national stereotypes also expose limits in his comparative analysis.

An economist’s neutrality does not make economic actors morally indifferent. In this two-part study, Oskar Engländer asks how explanations built on self-interest can accommodate duty, solidarity, and restraint without abandoning their starting point. His answer turns on compatibility: mutually advantageous exchange need not conflict with moral convictions, though particular prices, wages, and bargaining conditions may do so. Drawing on Franz Brentano’s account of objective ethical knowledge, Engländer also challenges the passage from explaining an income to justifying its recipient’s entitlement. Readers encounter a defence of ethical reasoning that nevertheless refuses to derive economic policy from moral principles alone: judging distribution or intervention requires knowledge of incentives, consequences, and feasible alternatives. The resulting tension is precise—economics needs evaluative standards, while ethics cannot settle economic questions without economic investigation.

Why did mass unemployment accompany the withdrawal of workers for military service? In this 1914 article, Emil Lederer examines the apparent paradox through Germany’s disrupted supply chains, lost export markets and curtailed civilian spending. His perspective joins economic interdependence to close scrutiny of the institutions attempting relief: employment exchanges could redistribute workers but not create demand, while unions faced mounting claims as contributions dwindled. Reading union and employer statistics critically, he also exposes how aggregate figures obscure short-time work and women’s search for earnings. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish labour scarcity from the availability of paid work—and to understand why remedies designed for ordinary downturns could fail under wartime conditions.