The archive.

Trade unions at the close of the 1920s boom pressed a seductive claim: that higher wages would themselves raise productivity and general welfare—the doctrine this book was written to dismantle. First published in 1930 and reissued in expanded form in 1945, it untangles the many senses buried in the word wage: relative share against absolute goods, nominal against real, the wage rate per unit against total wage income. A higher rate, Amonn warns, need not raise a worker's income at all, since it may cut employment, hours, or output. He works out wage formation under free competition, ties real wages to productivity and capital accumulation, and grants unions a genuine but bounded power to lift wages toward the competitive level while denying they can be pushed permanently above it at capital's expense.

„Lohnsteigerungen“ bilden also eine sehr zweischneidige Waffe im Kampfe der Arbeit mit dem Kapital und den Anteil am Gesamtprodukt. Wenn man sie benutzt, läuft man Gefahr, sich damit ins eigene Fleisch zu schneiden.

English translation: “Wage increases" thus constitute a very double-edged weapon in the struggle of labor with capital over the share in the total product. If one uses them, one runs the risk of cutting into one's own flesh.”

A stable currency need not mean an economy can bear its reparations burden. In this brief conference contribution, published in 1929, Emil Lederer shifts attention from transferring payments abroad to raising the resources at home. His concern is concrete: defending currency parity through credit restriction could undermine the economy whose capacity makes payment possible. Responding to fellow participants, he also questions reliance on foreign loans when borrowing costs rise and lenders’ confidence weakens. The contribution offers a sharp distinction between monetary success and economic viability—and explains why, for Lederer, transfer protection matters chiefly as grounds for revising the reparations plan when domestic damage becomes evident.

National spirit, for Schumpeter, is real only as a historically shifting pattern of dispositions lodged in social strata—never a single essence or moral trait, and altered whenever the relative weight of classes shifts. Refusing both the romanticized Volksgeist and its reduction to statistics, he reads Germany since unification through class morphology, replacing the one social pyramid with coexisting agrarian and industrial hierarchies. Urbanization is irreversible; the peasantry, having secured its essential aims, now stabilizes rather than threatens the order; the nobility, bred for service rather than independent leadership, cannot lead, and neither can the ever-mobile industrialist—so present-day Germany, he concludes, has no leading class at all. Workers grow into the strongest power yet seek a socially secured petty-bourgeois existence, while the swelling ranks of salaried employees and officials promise a future stamped by bureaucracy.

Der Bauer hat gesiegt. Innerhalb der ländlichen Sphäre hat er im Wesen, was er wollte. Aus dem revolutionärsten ist er zum konservativsten Element unseres Volkes geworden.

English translation: “The peasant has triumphed. Within the rural sphere he has, in essence, what he wanted. From the most revolutionary he has become the most conservative element of our people.”

How much deflation would Germany need to turn reparations payments into goods sold abroad? In this brief conference contribution, Albert Hahn argues that the decisive disagreement concerns the scale of adjustment, not simply rival economic theories. He separates the sacrifice involved in raising reparations domestically from the additional costs of transferring their equivalent abroad: a fall in living standards does not, by itself, establish a transfer obstacle. Yet theory cannot tell him how far German exporters must cut prices to overcome foreign resistance to their goods. His cautious confidence rests instead on observed trade flexibility. The contribution offers a compact encounter with an economist who insists on conceptual distinctions while acknowledging the practical uncertainties that limit prediction.

Can bank credit support increased production without making enterprises dependent on continued expansion? In this 1929 critical essay on D. H. Robertson’s Banking Policy and the Price Level, Gottfried Haberler tests Cambridge monetary theory against the movement of capital and labour between industries. His objection is concrete: keeping wheat prices steady after agricultural productivity improves may hold resources in farming when adjustment requires their transfer elsewhere. Admiring Robertson’s analytical distinctions while challenging his policy conclusions, Haberler asks what simplified barter models leave out when applied to a monetary economy. Saving, production time, and especially interest become tests of whether credit-financed investment can endure. The essay makes visible a tension between stabilizing prices and sustaining a productive structure once credit expansion ends.

Out of the wreck of the Habsburg monetary union came a scatter of new currencies, and this survey sets them side by side as they steadied toward the end of the 1920s: Austria's Schilling, Hungary's Pengő, the Czechoslovak crown forged in Rašín's stamping experiment, Poland's twice-stabilised Zloty, the lira, dinar, lei and, after hyperinflation, the German Reichsmark. Kerschagl narrates each path from collapse to reform, then appends the machinery behind them—gold-parity tables computed from fine-gold weights, statutory redemption and reserve rules, and central-bank balance sheets as of March 1929. One principle recurs across the reforms: sound reconstruction meant barring further state credit from the note press. Issued under the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag, it serves as much as a reference apparatus as a history.

Die wichtigste Bestimmung war die, daß jede weitere direkte oder indirekte Kreditgewährung an den Staat unzulässig sei.

English translation: “The most important provision was that any further direct or indirect extension of credit to the state was inadmissible.”

Should the qualification that prepares a judge also open the door to economic administration? In this 1929 article, represented here by its 1952 reprint, Schumpeter challenges the occupational reach of legal training without simply demanding privileges for economists. Examination rules, he argues, determine what students actually learn: making economics a marginal subject cannot produce usable economic judgment. Yet his case for an independent route into administrative service turns sharply toward his own discipline. Graduates who lack elementary statistical competence give employers good reason to doubt them. The article offers a concrete encounter with Schumpeter as an educational reformer, linking professional access to distinct intellectual skills and insisting that economics earn recognition through what its graduates can do.

Was wir bieten, reicht nicht aus. Unser Volkswirt kann zu wenig.

English translation: “What we offer is insufficient. Our economics graduate can do too little.”

Germany needs its imports—but why assume that other countries have no equally urgent need for German exports? In this brief conference contribution, published in 1929, Emil Lederer challenges the asymmetry behind pessimistic assessments of foreign trade. Drawing on evidence of industrial adaptation, he shifts attention from fixed national constraints to changing demand abroad. Low machinery imports in India and China suggest potential markets, conditional on economic development; machinery itself, he argues, can become more urgently necessary than grain. Without offering a quantified forecast, Lederer shows how assumptions about necessity and demand shape judgements of Germany’s export prospects—and why accelerating industrialization might unsettle those judgements.

Cooperatives need not replace capitalism to deserve serious study. In this brief 1929 review of Ernst Grünfeld’s handbook volume, Ludwig von Mises distinguishes failed hopes of economic transformation from cooperatives’ durable role as enterprises. His sharpest criticism concerns what an economic account can miss: cooperatives also serve political, religious, cultural, and national commitments. Grünfeld acknowledges these forces in his historical discussions, Mises observes, but leaves them out of his sociology. The review offers a compact example of Mises insisting that organizational purposes cannot be reduced to immediate economic tasks—while warmly endorsing a book whose treatment he finds incomplete.

Stable prices and unchanged lending rates need not mean that investment is aligned with saving. This is the central challenge Fritz Machlup develops in his 1929 review of F. A. Hayek’s identically titled book. He explains why improved profit opportunities can set credit expansion in motion without banks first cutting rates, and why bankers who merely accommodate demand may collectively finance investment beyond available savings. His perspective is sympathetic but not deferential: while praising Hayek’s account of monetary causation, he disputes the concession that changes in voluntary saving alone can explain the characteristic passage from boom to crisis. The review offers a concrete way to distinguish what initiates an expansion from what allows it to become unsustainable—and monetary explanation from moral blame directed at bankers.

Before Prices and Production made him famous in London, Hayek laid the foundations of his business-cycle theory in this 1929 monograph, here reissued with Kurt Leube's bibliography. Empirical research and statistics, he insists, can raise problems but never generate the causal laws of economics; only theory grounded in price, production, and interest can explain the cycle. Non-monetary accounts, whether technical, psychological, or built on disproportionality, fail because they smuggle in elastic credit while denying it any explanatory role. The engine is the Wicksell-Mises divergence between the money rate and the natural rate of interest: bank credit pushes lending below the equilibrium rate, lengthening the higher stages of production beyond what voluntary saving can sustain, until the boom's distorted capital structure collapses into crisis.

Solange wir uns des Mittels des Bankkredites bedienen, um die Entwicklung zu fördern, werden wir auch die Konjunkturschwankungen mit in Kauf nehmen müssen, die durch ihn verursacht werden.

English translation: “As long as we make use of bank credit as a means of promoting economic development, we shall also have to accept the cyclical fluctuations that it causes.”

The doctrine that thrift starves its own market—money saved being purchasing power withheld from consumers—found aggressive new champions in the American writers W. T. Foster and Waddill Catchings, popularized through the Pollak Foundation and its prize contests. Hayek dismantles their supposed paradox of saving by restoring the capital theory they lack. Saving does not simply pile output beside old output; it changes methods, withdrawing resources from immediate consumption toward intermediate and capital goods and lengthening the production process. Under a constant money stream, falling consumer-goods prices signal higher productivity, not underconsumption. Testing the claim across fixed capital, circulating capital and vertically integrated firms, he warns that the remedy Foster and Catchings urge—injecting new money through consumers or public works—would shorten production and destroy the very capital that saving forms.

Das einzige, was vor allem anderen nötig ist, um eine dauernde Aufwärtsbewegung der Wirtschaft zu sichern, ist genug Geld in den Händen der Verbraucher

English translation: “The one thing above all others required to secure a lasting upward movement of the economy is enough money in the hands of consumers.”