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.
Critical brilliance could win intellectual authority without securing affection or academic recognition. In this obituary, Schumpeter portrays Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz as a scholar whose original contributions often took the form of exposing errors in others’ work. His admiration is discriminating: he praises Bortkiewicz’s analysis of Marx’s theoretical framework while questioning whether his critiques of Walras, Pareto, and Böhm-Bawerk reached equally fundamental weaknesses. Statistical achievements, including the law of small numbers and work on income inequality, receive firmer recognition. The resulting portrait offers a concrete account of criticism as scientific creation—and of the distance between a scholar’s abilities, published accomplishments, and institutional standing.
His critical acumen made people fear him, but it hardly contributed to making them love him.
Haberler delivered this lecture with the Depression as backdrop, but treats panics, bank failures and crashes as secondary drama; the real object of explanation is the recurrent rhythm of expansion and contraction in business activity. Money is a necessary condition of the cycle, though not in the crude quantity-theory sense: stable prices in the 1920s, he argues, concealed a "relative inflation" in which credit expansion masked the fall that rising productivity should have produced. The decisive shift is from the level of prices to the vertical structure of production. When bank credit pushes the market rate of interest below the rate warranted by voluntary saving, entrepreneurs lengthen production into more roundabout, capital-intensive projects that consumers have not chosen to fund — a maladjustment that the depression, painfully, corrects. Reflation aimed merely at purchasing power risks reviving the very disproportions that need liquidating.
The fundamental appearance of the business cycle is a wavelike movement of business activity
By 1932 capitalism had, on Lederer's reading, long ceased to be a purely free economy: tariffs, cartels, subsidies, emergency decrees, and bank rescues had already rewritten circulation and investment. The real question was not whether planning should enter an untouched market, but whether the planning everywhere present would stay defensive and irrational or become conscious coordination. Free economy and planned economy, he argues, are opposites only in principle; in practice they interpenetrate. He proposes a planned emergency sector, idle factories and unemployed hands producing necessities distributed outside ordinary sale, and locates the true lever in credit, whose control becomes control over production itself. Planning, he insists, is not nationalization; a socialized firm still bound to the market must obey it. Against Mises he holds that prices, money, and consumer choice survive the plan, leaving economic calculation intact.
Das Problem der „Wirtschaftsrechnung“ in der Planwirtschaft ist also ein Scheinproblem.
English translation: “The problem of "economic calculation" in the planned economy is thus a pseudo-problem.”
Protecting prices can leave production and employment less secure: this is the tension Erich Schiff examines in his 1932 essay on the Depression. Following support schemes for wheat, coffee, rubber, and cotton, he argues that maintained prices encouraged output and accumulating stocks, preparing sharper collapses when support failed. His distinctive concern is not price flexibility as an end in itself, but the difference between stabilizing monetary values and sustaining real economic activity. Cartelized industrial inputs bring the conflict into focus: protecting suppliers’ prices can squeeze downstream firms exposed to competition. Schiff’s qualified case—more receptive to direct production cuts, and explicitly short of a complete explanation of the Depression—offers readers a concrete way to examine who bears the adjustment costs when particular prices are held steady.
A chief may retain his title while becoming a supervised tax collector; a wage earner may marry without drawing on relatives’ livestock. These shifts anchor Richard Thurnwald’s account of social transformation in Tanganyika, based on a ten-month expedition. His 1932 article explores a contradiction in colonial indirect rule: policies intended to preserve existing institutions could undermine them by requiring taxes paid in money. Connecting household obligations with employment and political authority, Thurnwald argues that change travels through relationships administrators cannot readily control. His comparative observations resist a single trajectory of African adaptation, while his judgments about consumption, gender, and education bear the assumptions of his colonial setting. Readers can examine both his analysis of unintended consequences and the limits of the perspective through which he understood them.
Must workers displaced by machinery accept lower money wages before they can find employment again? In this short 1932 intervention, Gottfried Haberler challenges Alvin Hansen’s claim that unemployed workers’ lost purchasing power cancels consumers’ gains from cheaper goods. His distinctive move is to follow money through successive payments: eliminating one stage of expenditure can bring demand to other producers sooner. Haberler argues that, with money quantity and circulation velocity unchanged, reemployment need not require lower equilibrium money wages. The value of this tightly focused dispute lies in the distinctions it forces: technological displacement is not monetary contraction, and an equilibrium result is not a promise of painless adjustment. Haberler explicitly leaves room for losses and frictions as workers move between industries.
Defending free trade, Haberler argues, requires admitting that tariffs can sometimes confer benefits—even on a country as a whole. In this 1932 review of the committee report chaired by Sir William Beveridge, he praises a method that concedes theoretical possibilities while testing how plausible their conditions are in practice. His concern is both analytical and persuasive: absolute claims leave free traders vulnerable to objections they have failed to answer. Britain’s departure from gold gives that distinction a concrete setting, removing, in his assessment, the basis for Keynes’s proposal to use tariffs instead of devaluation or wage reductions. This short review shows why Haberler regarded qualification not as a retreat from free trade but as a condition of its credible defense.
Between the causal explanation of what exists and the normative account of what ought to be, Engliš carves out a third, autonomous form of reason: teleology, the logic of whatever is willed. On that foundation the second volume of his teleological system, given here in the German of the 1932 Czech original, constructs the state economy as a purposive order governed not by any individual's satisfaction but by an objective 'human and national ideal.' Needs, utility, cost and yield reappear as formal categories, and from them he derives a theory of taxation in which burdens fall first on the highest incomes, producing a steep progression that levels from above, checked only by the need to preserve productive incentive. A sustained critique of Hans Ritschl's rival doctrine closes the book, faulting it for lacking any central ordering purpose.
Proportionalität oder Progressivität sind keine Steuergrundsätze, sondern bestimmte Konstruktionen von Steuersätzen, die sich erst aus den Steuergrundsätzen ergeben müssen.
English translation: “Proportionality or progressivity are not principles of taxation, but particular constructions of tax rates, which must first be derived from the principles of taxation.”
How could rapidly rising prices lead monetary authorities to issue still more money? In this 1932 review of Frank D. Graham’s study of German hyperinflation, Ludwig von Mises locates the answer in doctrines that blinded officials to the consequences of their own policies. He praises Graham’s historical account while arguing that the catastrophe confirmed established monetary theory. His sharpest examples concern everyday calculation: apparently high interest rates encouraged borrowing when debts depreciated faster, and profits recorded in marks concealed losses of real value. As households learned to exchange wages immediately for goods, inflation also ceased to serve the government’s financial purposes. The review connects errors in economic thought with banking practices, misleading accounts, and the public’s changing willingness to hold money.
A loan may fall due in three months while the capital it finances remains committed to production for years. In this 1932 paper, Fritz Machlup examines that mismatch from the standpoint of the productive system rather than the individual creditor. Selling a claim can restore one investor’s cash without freeing any underlying capital; even an advance against inventories can release a borrower’s own funds for machinery. These examples sharpen his challenge to the doctrine of self-liquidating credit. Machlup argues that routine repayment depends on replacement savers sustaining commitments that withdrawing creditors leave behind. The paper offers a concrete way to distinguish contractual maturity from economic duration—and to understand why individually liquid claims need not permit collective withdrawal without a contraction of production.
When one people takes over the tools, rites, and ideas of another, what is adopted rarely keeps its old function. Acculturation, Thurnwald argues here, is a dynamic socio-psychological process rather than a mechanical transfer, driven by individual learning, imitation, and leadership, and passing through distinct phases: initial suspicion, eager imitation, the fear of losing one's identity, and eventual recovery or self-assertion. He distinguishes selective, rejective, eliminative, and transformative responses, drawing on New Guinea, Africa, Japan's reopening, Europe, and Indigenous North America, and stresses that what passes between peoples depends on the receiving culture's own traditions. Wars, migrations, and political upheavals, he concludes, are only the visible climaxes of these deeper and slower adaptations in the life of cultures.
The acquisition of any civilizatory accomplishment is not limited to the act of acceptance like the moving of an object from one case in a museum to another.
No stable middle ground exists between a free economy and a fully controlled one — that is the verdict Vleugels reaches after examining the neglected theory of officially bound prices. Following Mises, he separates Ordnungstaxen, which merely track competitive prices and disturb little, from echte Taxen, genuine controls set below them, and shows how the latter set off a chain reaction. A maximum price below the market cuts supply, diverts goods elsewhere, and forces controls onto substitutes, then onto factors of production and wages, until — invoking Wieser's notion of production relatedness — the whole price structure must be bound together. Neither an enduring order nor a gentle bridge to socialism, genuine price-fixing emerges here as a primitive interventionist measure that harms the very people it means to protect.
Ebensowenig wie ein ausgebautes Taxsystem als Endzustand der Volkswirtschaft denkbar wäre, ebensowenig kommt es praktisch auch als Anfangszustand zur Überleitung in eine sozialistische Wirtschaft in Frage.
English translation: “Just as a fully developed system of price fixings is inconceivable as the terminal state of an economy, so too is it practically out of the question as an initial state for the transition into a socialist economy.”