The archive.

High tax rates need not mean high tax burdens: opportunities to defer gains or escape taxation can matter more than the published rate. In this 1952 review of Henry C. Simons’s Federal Tax Reform, Walter Fröhlich examines the gap between fiscal principles and enforceable revenue laws. He endorses Simons’s case for comprehensive personal income taxation, emphasizing how selective realization of gains and losses favors some taxpayers over high-income wage earners. Yet he questions whether corporate taxation could be abolished without sacrificing necessary revenue. The review offers a compact encounter with Fröhlich’s combination of ethical commitment and technical scrutiny: fairness requires attention not only to rates, but also to accounting periods, income averaging, and the distinction between postponing a tax and avoiding it altogether.

Around 1700 the world's economies resembled one another far more than they would a century later; by the nineteenth century Western Europe had opened a vast productive gap over much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That gap, Mises contends in this lecture, sprang not from secret inventions or hoarded technique—engineers, manuals, and machines were available—but from institutions and expectations that made saving, accumulation, and long-term investment worthwhile. Nineteenth-century capital export, distinct from older colonial extraction, financed railways, mines, and ports where opportunity existed but local capital was scarce, rewarding investor and recipient alike. Against Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism he insists capital flowed to serve consumers, not to conquer. His sharpest warning falls on confiscation, debt repudiation, and exchange control, which empty ownership of value without abolishing title—and, he cautions, may once more make war over raw materials thinkable.

Capitalism is not things; it is a mentality.

Econometrics needs economics, mathematics, and statistics—but how should universities bring them together? In this 1952 report for UNESCO, Gerhard Tintner examines teaching arrangements across responding institutions in eight countries, finding that course titles alone cannot establish what students actually learn. His perspective combines an advocate’s concern for coherent quantitative training with a surveyor’s caution about incomplete evidence. Research institutes that unite teaching and investigation offer one promising model; specialized mathematics courses for economists expose the competing demands on students’ time. The questionnaire and institutional responses give readers concrete access to the courses, prerequisites, and research requirements behind Tintner’s comparisons. The report makes visible a practical tension: extending econometric education requires institutional coordination, while assessing its reach requires sharper definitions than this deliberately preliminary enquiry could provide.

Routinely misread as an excessive worker demand, profit-sharing in fact more often originates with employers, and Bayer refuses to judge it by tidy lists of pros and cons. Ranging across American, British, French, German, Austrian, and Soviet practice, he tests the Scanlon Plan, the Rucker Plan, the Duisburger Kupferhütte's division of results, and the statutory worker shares of Chile and Peru, then submits them all to economic theory. His sharpest distinction separates genuine entrepreneurial profit from monopoly rent: many schemes, he warns, merely redistribute rent, burdening society twice through restricted output and lost taxes. Real profit-sharing, tied to a base wage at least equal to the industry average, can smooth income during upswings and lift macroeconomic productivity, but only where trust, strong unions, and a policy of economic coordination already prevail.

So führen uns die Probleme der Gewinnbeteiligung hinein in die Gesamtzusammenhänge der Wirtschaft.

English translation: “Thus the problems of profit-sharing lead us into the overall interconnections of the economy.”

An economist who objects that an argument is “too abstract” or lacks statistical verification is already discussing methodology, whether or not he welcomes the subject. In these brief chairman’s remarks, Fritz Machlup exposes the mismatch between economists’ professed indifference to methodology and the standards they routinely invoke. His distinction is precise: researchers cannot avoid using a method, but they can avoid explicitly discussing it—though their everyday criticisms often betray them. Opening with the comic spectacle of practical-minded economists gathered to discuss metaphysics, Machlup makes a compact case for bringing assumptions about knowledge into the open, without prescribing a particular method.

When does a more realistic economic model become a less useful one? In this contribution to a published methodological discussion, Fritz Machlup challenges the demand that a single theory capture every aspect of economic conduct. Responding chiefly to Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Boulding, he defends mathematics without granting it exclusive authority, and simplified models without mistaking them for complete descriptions. His treatment of the firm makes the stakes concrete: a model suited to price determination need not explain investment or managerial power, while even a firm’s survival depends on how the firm is defined. Readers encounter a precise distinction between realism and relevance—and an argument for combining disciplinary knowledge when a particular problem requires it, rather than constructing an all-purpose synthesis.

The addition of "admittedly realistic" variables into analytical models can be defended only if they significantly modify the results.

Crusade, Reformation, Revolution: Europe's three great movements of ideas, Somary contends in this 1952 political testament, each produced results opposite to their creators' aims, and each ultimately swelled the power of the state. He denies that peoples are truly sovereign, watches modern war put a uniform on thought, food, and death alike, and charts the replacement of the measured Rechtsstaat by the boundless Machtstaat. State monopoly over money creation, he argues—abetted by Knapp's nominalism—hands governments an instrument of silent expropriation, while Jacobin primacy of politics and the doctrine of national self-determination corrode law and liberty. Against Bolshevism, which he judges to rest on power and nothing else, he sets Switzerland's organic democracy, and codifies his pessimism in twenty 'social laws of inverse proportion' explaining how tyranny thrives beneath the forms of popular sovereignty.

Je stärker die Gewalt konzentriert ist, desto geringer ist die Verantwortung.

English translation: “The more strongly power is concentrated, the smaller is responsibility.”

Faster calculation does not make an economic model true. In this 1952 article, Oskar Morgenstern asks what electronic computers can genuinely add to econometrics when observations are unreliable and the equations themselves may misrepresent economic life. His distinctive proposal is to treat computation not merely as the execution of established theory, but as a form of experiment: models can be tested against later production figures, temporal relationships explored across many series, and strategic choices calculated for competing firms. He couples this exploratory ambition with exacting demands for meaningful solutions and attention to propagated error. The result offers a concrete encounter with the promise—and limits—of computational economics before larger calculations could be mistaken for better knowledge.

Welche Gleichungen die Wirklichkeit tatsächlich löst, kann heute niemand angeben.

English translation: “No one today can specify which equations reality actually solves.”

Value theory, Shackle charges, quietly presumes perfect knowledge — that the buyer can see every satisfaction in advance — a fiction exposed by the very existence of information, a good worth having only because its contents are not yet known. The essay accordingly shifts the object of economic choice from satisfactions to actions whose consequences remain hypothetical. Each rival hypothesis carries a face-value, the gain or loss if it proves true, and a second variable measuring its claim on the imagination; numerical probability, he demonstrates through five separate objections, cannot serve as that second variable for unique, non-seriable decisions. His replacement is potential surprise: not a lesser degree of certainty but a positive recognition of some disabling incongruity, a scale on which any number of mutually exclusive hypotheses may all sit at zero.

But the theory of consumer’s behaviour assumes that we always know what we are going to get.

Temporary tariff cuts promise a useful bargain during rearmament: more civilian goods for Americans and more dollar earnings for their allies. Karl Pribram’s 1952 article asks whether that promise survives the constraints of actual trade. Foreign factories also face military demands, scarce materials, and limited investment capital; uncertain access to the American market gives them little reason to expand. Combining attention to import composition with scrutiny of executive authority, Pribram distinguishes the case for lower tariffs from the case for continually adjustable ones. His alternative—selective, negotiated reductions of indefinite duration—makes dependable market access part of Atlantic defense cooperation. The article offers a concrete account of how an apparently flexible emergency measure can undermine the investment and international commitments needed to make it effective.

The conditions that make freedom possible can also become instruments of domination: tools impose new necessities, commerce turns means into ends, and representatives acquire interests distinct from those they govern. In this review essay, republished in 1964, Alfred Schütz examines how Santayana’s Dominations and Powers understands these reversals through humanity’s dependence on nature and social arrangements. He takes Santayana’s philosophical ambition seriously without accepting its biological foundation as an adequate explanation of social meaning. The resulting tension gives the essay its particular interest: Schütz preserves Santayana’s account of embodied, constrained agency while questioning his treatment of economic life and activities beyond subsistence. Readers can discover precisely where recognition of human dependence becomes, in Schütz’s judgement, an unwarranted reduction of human possibilities.

Can a tax intended to reduce inequality instead protect established wealth against new competitors? In this review essay, presented in its 1953 English translation, Friedrich August von Hayek uses Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven Jr.’s examination of progressive taxation to challenge its claims to justice. His distinctive objection concerns the treatment of identical services: annual progression can leave two people with different net rewards for the same work because their earlier earnings differ. He also argues that restricting new fortunes can obstruct upward mobility. Yet his position is not an unconditional demand for flat income-tax rates: he allows progression where it offsets indirect taxes borne by poorer people. The essay makes that distinction central, exposing the tension between redistribution, equal treatment, and political power over a taxpaying minority.