The archive.

The Rio Agreement on Special Drawing Rights succeeded, on Machlup's reading, precisely because it refused to call a spade a spade: by avoiding contested words — credit, loan, reserve, repayment — it let France read SDRs as a repayable credit facility while Britain and America read them as new reserve assets. Reconstructing the negotiations among the IMF and the Group of Ten, he explains SDRs as a closed giro system among monetary authorities, money created by allocation rather than lending, whose acceptability rests on mutual willingness rather than collateral. He endorses the design while insisting on its limits: added liquidity works only indirectly, easing the pressure that pushes governments toward import restrictions and deflation, and it leaves the dollar overhang, gold speculation, and rigid exchange rates unresolved.

Money needs takers, not backers; the takers accept it, not because of any backing, but only because they count on others accepting it from them.

A financier without an academic appointment, Karl Schlesinger helped shape economic arguments whose influence outstripped his small published output. In this concise encyclopedia entry, Oskar Morgenstern connects that discrepancy to specific intellectual contributions: Schlesinger’s account of why cash balances have utility in their own right, and his reformulation of production equations that helped stimulate Abraham Wald’s equilibrium research. Morgenstern’s portrait brings mathematical reasoning into contact with banking experience and the informal discussions of Vienna’s economists. Readers can discover both the substance of an underrecognized monetary theorist’s ideas and the channels—conversation, collaboration, and practical financial judgment—through which Morgenstern argues they mattered.

When Treasury Secretary Henry Fowler laid out his 1968 tax-reform agenda—exempt the poor, tax high incomes shielded by preferences, revisit estate and gift duties, curb tourists' spending abroad—Sennholz read compassion as compulsion. His counter-move is to redefine "the rich" not as idle hoarders but as businessmen and investors whose saving builds the factories and stores that employ the poor; to tax their capital, he argues, is to consume the very fund on which rising wages depend. He defends municipal-bond exemption as a constitutional shield for state borrowing, treats a proposed seventy-seven-percent estate levy as either demagoguery or socialism, and reads the curb on foreign travel as a police measure. Invoking Marshall's warning that the power to tax is the power to destroy, he joins economic, constitutional, and civil-libertarian objections to Great Society redistribution.

Taxing Peter to pay Paul has become a respectable way of life with countless pressure groups and their vociferous spokesmen in Congress.

Political thought stumbles because everyday language fuses what must be kept apart: grown orders with designed organizations, law with command, popular opinion with unlimited collective will. Presented here in translation of Hayek's 1967 essay, the lecture threads seven paired distinctions to clear the confusion, cosmos and taxis, nomos and thesis, articulated and non-articulated rules, opinion and will, nomocracy and teleocracy, catallaxy and economy, demarchy and democracy. A cosmos serves no single purpose and can marshal knowledge dispersed beyond any mind; a taxis is imposed toward chosen ends. Because a spontaneous order allocates nothing, social justice can have meaning only inside an organization. From these terms Hayek rebuilds liberal constitutionalism, proposing demarchy, popular authority over universal rules but not over particular outcomes, as the cure for factional, unlimited majority power.

The insight that not all order that results from the interplay of human actions is the result of design is indeed the beginning of social theory.

Reform is easy to want in rhetoric and costly to endure in fact—and that gap, Sennholz argues, is why electoral hope so reliably disappoints. Saving the dollar from inflation, he insists, cannot be a mere central-bank adjustment; it is a political willingness to let earlier errors be liquidated. Halting credit expansion would expose years of malinvestment, raise interest rates, depress stocks and bonds, and bring recession—the price of a sound currency. Drawing on Gustave Le Bon, he frames monetary reform as a moral problem before a technical one: laws only express popular ideas, and the public that cheers reform balks at its consequences. Because stabilization also strips unions of the inflationary cover for rigid wages, genuine reform would mean abolishing the National Labor Relations Board and restoring a market in labor—something he doubts any administration would endure.

Monetary stabilization means price stabilization, which is a fatal enemy of labor unions.

Scarcity sets the members of a species at odds, yet human beings escape that antagonism through the division of labor and peaceful exchange, so that the market becomes the standard form of interhuman relations. Against both anarchism and socialism, this 1968 essay argues that the market cannot defend itself and therefore needs the state—'a grim apparatus of coercion'—to restrain those who break the peace. But no middle sphere exists: talk of a friendly 'public sector' cannot fuse the two opposed principles of voluntary agreement and command. Planning does not merely administer production differently; it transfers the individual's power of choice to a central authority, demanding obedience from cradle to coffin. Mises ends categorically—the market economy is the only order tending toward the cheapest provisioning of consumers.

There is no conciliation between constraint and spontaneity.

What one person can do against the drift toward socialism is the easy question; the harder one is what defenders of liberty must do together. Hazlitt reframes the problem strategically: interventionism survives not through bad arguments alone but through entrenched institutions—agencies, beneficiaries, pressure groups, and paid experts, some 2,133 federal bureaus by the Hoover Commission's 1954 count—each defending its own program with specialized authority. His remedy is a division of intellectual labor: general principles cannot substitute for detailed mastery of farm policy, labor law, monetary policy, and taxation. He distrusts business as a reliable ally, invokes Bastiat on the state as the fiction by which everyone lives at everyone else's expense, and settles on honest money as the single front where every libertarian can concentrate.

The war must be fought on a thousand fronts, and the true libertarians are grossly outnumbered on practically all these fronts.

Robbins refuses the grand definitions: development, for these expanded 1966 Chichele Lectures, means neither national grandeur nor moral progress but change in real income per head and the productive capacity behind it. He traces how that question passed through economic thought—posed energetically by mercantilist pamphleteers yet rarely theorized, made central by the Physiocrats though wrongly confined to agriculture, given classical structure by Smith's division of labour and capital accumulation. The causal conditions of growth follow: population, saving, the growth of usable knowledge, monetary institutions, and a Smithian natural liberty that is legal order rather than anarchy. The marginal revolution, he argues, narrowed economics toward allocation, while Marshall and Schumpeter kept a developmental imagination alive. A final lecture weighs whether growth should be desired, setting it beside liberty, education, and amenity.

Why do socialist economies, for all their proclaimed internationalism, trade so little and so cautiously? Haberler's answer, offered as candid speculations of a theorist, is that comparative cost identifies gains from trade but never realizes them; someone must go looking. Marginal analysis and shadow pricing can aid socialist calculation, yet they cannot supply the entrepreneurial discovery that foreign markets demand: unfamiliar demand, currency risk, contractual hazard, the real possibility of loss. Private merchants chase profit across borders; plan-bound managers, rewarded for fulfilment and punished for failure, stay inward-looking and nationalistic. The predicted result is trade aversion and undertrading, volumes far below the comparative-cost optimum, together with bilateralism, barter, and imports confined to unavoidable necessities. It is comparative advantage recast from a static doctrine into an institutional argument.

Nationalism has proved to be an extremely hardy plant.

Smoothing an economic series can create dependence where none existed; removing its trend can conceal a change that still needs explaining. These difficulties give Gerhard Tintner’s 1968 encyclopedia article its methodological edge. He examines time-series techniques from the economist’s predicament: observations are interdependent, measurements imperfect, and available records often too short to support the large-sample results on which inference relies. Rather than treating trend, cycle, and random disturbance as independent components, Tintner favours stochastic models capable of generating them together. His survey helps readers distinguish a convenient statistical transformation from a defensible account of the process behind the data—and understand why a close historical fit need not warrant a forecast.

Whether taxation serves privileged rulers or citizens jointly providing public services is the central distinction in Oskar Morgenstern’s compact portrait of Antonio De Viti de Marco. This encyclopedia entry connects the economist’s fiscal reasoning with his practical commitments: opposition to protectionism, advocacy for agricultural southern Italy, and refusal to swear the fascist loyalty oath. Morgenstern shows how De Viti’s distinction between monopolistic and cooperative states changes the interpretation of taxes and public expenditure: a tax can lower citizens’ costs when collective provision is cheaper than private purchase. He also notes a revealing tension between De Viti’s use of marginal utility and his preference for proportional taxation. The result is a concise introduction to an economist whose abstract analysis remained closely engaged with political institutions and choices.

What changes when mathematics treats other people’s choices not as fixed conditions but as part of the problem? In this biographical encyclopedia entry, Oskar Morgenstern places John von Neumann’s contributions to social science within his wider mathematical career. Writing as his collaborator on Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, Morgenstern explains why strategic rationality can require randomized choices, and why economic equilibrium demands more than matching equations to unknowns. These examples sharpen the portrait’s central tension: empirical problems can stimulate mathematics, yet economics cannot simply borrow the structures of physics. The entry offers a compact account of how von Neumann helped reshape economic questions themselves, rather than merely supplying new techniques for answering them.