4,249 works (including 483 books, 3,406 articles and 357 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
Economic variables may move together, but how can that dependence enter a stochastic model rather than appear only as a correlation after estimation? Gerhard Tintner and R. Narayanan answer by allowing events to change several variables simultaneously: shared increments become the source of covariance. Their compact article connects this mathematical construction to post-war United States gross national product and private consumer expenditures, culminating in a joint uncertainty ellipse for a 1965 forecast. The distinctive payoff is a concrete link between assumptions about shared events and the shape of forecast uncertainty. Readers can also examine the limits of that link: the constant-parameter application permits only upward increments, while the supplied observations include declines. The model offers a tractable account of interdependent trends, not a causal explanation of output and consumption.
No concept in economic theory, Mahr observes, has been defined in more diverse ways than capital—and much theoretical confusion follows from treating heterogeneous objects and markets as one. He holds real capital and money capital to be two aspects of a single phenomenon, and separates capital in the national-economic sense from private wealth that merely yields income: consumer loans, resold securities, and land purchases may enrich an owner without adding to social productive capacity. The fiction of a single market and a single interest rate dissolves into a short-term money market and a long-term investment market that communicate only imperfectly, their rate differences sustained by liquidity, cycle, and institutional constraint. Interest, finally, is neither a reward for saving nor a mere liquidity premium but an investment premium that restrains hoarding and keeps funds flowing to productive capital.
Der Zins ist weder eine Prämie für das Sparen, noch wird er als Illiquiditätsprämie ausreichend charakterisiert. Er ist vielmehr als Investitionsprämie zu bezeichnen.
English translation: “Interest is neither a premium for saving, nor is it adequately characterized as a liquidity premium. Rather, it is to be designated as an investment premium.”
Rising orders, wages, and profits looked like recovery in 1967; Sennholz hears in them the opening report of a coming collapse. The boom, he argues, is manufactured by expansionary Federal Reserve credit and deficit finance, above all the 'even keel' policy that pins interest rates down while the Treasury borrows heavily—which forces the central bank to create the very money that suppression requires. A proposed tax surcharge, in his view, would only feed further Great Society spending. He dwells on the victims: widows, pensioners, savers, and bondholders who meet inflation as lost purchasing power rather than prosperity, since prices never rise evenly. Artificially cheap credit breeds malinvestment, and the boom carries its own bust within it. Only the federal government, he concludes, can inflate and depreciate the currency—so only it bears the blame.
The inflation that generates the boom is a hidden tax on all money holdings.
Why did merchants and statesmen in American seaport cities turn against the banks that ostensibly served commercial growth? In this conference commentary on Professor Dorfman’s paper, Murray N. Rothbard challenges the dismissal of early hard-money advocates as backward-looking agrarians. He presents their opposition to bank-credit expansion as a reasoned account of inflation, redistribution, and financial crisis, sharpened by the Panic of 1819. His distinctive move is to connect these urban monetary critics with Jeffersonian objections to government-supported growth: the dividing line, he argues, was not simply country against city, but productive activity against political privilege. This short intervention offers a concrete way to reconsider both the intellectual sophistication of banking’s opponents and the sources of early American urban prosperity.
Ten executives gather around the table of a fictional XYZ Corporation, and each proposes a different use for the same surplus — plant expansion, higher dividends, basic research, university gifts, worker bonuses, price cuts — while insisting that his preferred policy serves the company and the national interest alike. From this staged meeting Machlup builds a satirical assault on the doctrine of corporate social responsibility, showing that once profit maximization under competition gives way to an open-ended mandate to serve society, almost any managerial preference can be dressed as public duty. His remedy is competition, which narrows discretion and forces attention back to product and efficiency. The comedy also skewers behavioral theories of the firm, where a surplus of equally plausible motives makes any single corporate decision impossible to predict.
Perhaps they illustrate the enormous difficulties of “behavioral theories”: ten participants in corporate decision making propose ten different courses of action, and there is no warrant for any generalization as to what they are likely to decide after the coffee break.
The oldest claim in the field holds that a booming home market starves exports by raising prices and absorbing goods; an expansionist rival credits growth and scale with strengthening them. Across quarterly data from 1879 to 1961, decomposed into finished manufactures, semimanufactures, crude materials, and foods, Mintz adjudicates between them. The traditional theory, she finds, holds for export quantities but not for values: domestic expansion lifted export prices even as it depressed quantities, so the two effects offset. Fluctuations in world imports, her measure of foreign demand, explain most export movement, while finished manufactures stand apart as the class largely deaf to the domestic cycle. Repressing home demand, she concludes, would not have been a promising route to larger export proceeds.
In fact, export growth is neither favorable nor unfavorable per se.
Receiving Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, Franz Joseph described himself as the last monarch of the old school—the self-image from which this lecture works outward. Engel-Janosi studies the emperor not as a picturesque survivor but as a political actor governing through counsel, habit, defeat, and constitutional constraint. His early confidence that lost provinces might be won back gave way, over the reign, to renunciation: Lombardy, Venetia, and German leadership were gone, and the alliance with the Prussia that had humiliated Austria in 1866 was embraced as cold state reason rather than affection. Personal in responsibility yet impersonal in manner, scrupulously constitutional despite his distaste for parliaments and bound by the Ausgleich, this Franz Joseph accepted war in 1914 from a pessimistic sense of duty rather than any appetite for it.
„Die Lombardei werden wir ja wieder erobern“, sagte der Monarch, vom Schlachtfeld von Solferino zurückkehrend.
English translation: “We shall reconquer Lombardy after all," said the monarch as he returned from the battlefield of Solferino.”
History is bound to factual correctness, yet it reaches again and again for symbolic and mythic forms when it tries to express a deeper truth. That tension organizes this compact essay, which runs from Jacob Burckhardt—the summit of historicism, for whom historical consciousness separates the cultivated from the barbarian—to Nietzsche's demand that history serve life rather than claim sovereign autonomy. Along the way Engel-Janosi finds myth already at work: Herodotus keeping his distance from the marvels he transmits, Machiavelli stylizing Cesare Borgia and Castruccio Castracani into the political savior-hero who acts as his mission demands. Through Vico, Romanticism, and Bachofen he traces myth's rehabilitation, closing with Arnold Toynbee, the modern historian who no longer merely studies myth but becomes its maker, reaching for an eternal ideal history behind particular ones.
Leopold von Ranke hat einmal Politik und Religion als die beiden Hauptthemen der Geschichte genannt. Sind sie nicht auch die beiden Felder, die der Mythos vorzugsweise besponnen hat?
English translation: “Leopold von Ranke once named politics and religion as the two chief themes of history. Are they not also the two fields around which myth has preferentially spun its web?”
Notorious in his own century as a satirist who declared private vices public benefits, Bernard Mandeville is recovered here, in the German translation of Hayek's 1966 British Academy lecture, not as an economist but as a profound psychologist of human nature. The scandalous paradox of The Fable of the Bees, Hayek argues, is the lesser insight; the greater is that complex social order arises from actions that pursue private aims while intending none of the larger outcomes they produce. Mandeville thus becomes an early theorist of spontaneously grown institutions, law, morality, language, money, markets, against the seventeenth-century rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes. The essay traces a line of descent from Mandeville through Hume and Adam Smith to Ferguson's formula about results of human action but not human design, and onward to Darwin.
Ich befürchte, die meisten Zeitgenossen von Bernard Mandeville würden sich im Grabe umdrehen, wüßten sie, daß er der Britischen Akademie inzwischen als »master mind« gilt.
English translation: “I fear that most of Bernard Mandeville's contemporaries would turn in their graves if they knew that he is now regarded by the British Academy as a "master mind".”
Mach’s influence on Hayek took an unexpected form: his attack on metaphysics helped Hayek question the foundations of Mach’s own psychology. In this brief symposium contribution, presented in English translation, Hayek recalls his student years in Vienna before the formation of the Vienna Circle. Mach offered a resource for clarifying what counted as scientific explanation, without requiring allegiance to positivism or to its socialist advocates. The sharpest example is Hayek’s rejection of “simple and pure sensations” as the elements of perception—a criticism that helped set him on the path toward The Sensory Order. This personal testimony lets readers distinguish intellectual influence from doctrinal agreement, while tracing a concrete connection between Hayek’s early psychological interests and his later methodological concerns.
Supermarket boycotts misidentify their villain: the housewives picketing chain stores before the 1966 elections blame merchants for prices that government, not retailers, produced. Only Washington can legally run the printing presses that depreciate the currency, Sennholz argues, yet the Johnson administration exploits a semantic shift—redefining inflation as mere price increase—so that businessmen absorb the blame officials have earned. He turns the charge back on the picketers, many of whom champion the very spending programs that breed the deficits behind rising prices, and traces the cost of a can of tomatoes through farm supports, crop restriction, subsidized exports, embedded taxation, and union work rules. Chain supermarkets, he counters, are low-margin, fiercely competitive institutions; the boycott is coercion by a minority against the majority's own preference.
They themselves are infected with the very bacillus that is breeding the inflation.