The archive.

Can a country make itself secure by reducing its dependence on foreign trade? In this 1938 essay, reprinted in 1990, Ludwig von Mises argues that preparations for economic self-sufficiency can undermine the military strength they are meant to secure: costly substitutes consume resources and often merely shift dependence to other imported materials. His defense of international specialization also confronts a difficulty that simple appeals to mutual benefit overlook. Immigration barriers, he maintains, create real conflicts between workers admitted to prosperous labor markets and those excluded from them. Linking strategic insecurity to producer privileges and restrictions on migration, Mises shows why arguments for cheaper goods alone cannot restore commercial cooperation when public opinion prizes national independence and protection from competition.

Division of labor and war are incompatible.

A pension system can balance its long-term accounts while worsening the downturn in which workers must pay for it. This tension shapes Karl Pribram’s 1938 examination of old-age benefit reserves. Bringing actuarial reasoning into contact with public budgeting and business-cycle analysis, he asks what reserves actually secure—and who benefits when public subsidies replace them. His scrutiny of the American plan exposes a distributive problem: subsidies covering deficits may support larger pensions more generously than smaller ones. Against this, he proposes equal public supplements alongside earnings-related insurance, and payroll taxes that fall during depression and rise during prosperity. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish financial stability from rigid financing, and public assistance from contributory entitlement.

Saving connects today’s purchases with tomorrow’s possibilities—but what does that connection require of a consumer’s valuations? In this compact mathematical article, Gerhard Tintner extends the equalization of marginal utility per unit of expenditure across consumption dates. Expected interest rates link the marginal utilities of money at different times, rather than entering as a separately imposed psychological discount factor. His distinctive approach allows utility to depend on an entire consumption plan, without assuming independent satisfactions at each date, and carries this logic from discrete choices to continuous consumption streams. Readers can discover how successive budgets become a single discounted constraint, and why ratios of marginal utilities carry the relevant economic content. Tintner also marks the limits of his derivation: equilibrium conditions alone do not guarantee a maximum, and empirical verification remains unfinished.

Reliable predictions about railways and postal services do not require knowledge of every participant’s motives. For Felix Kaufmann, such ordinary cases unsettle the opposition between exact natural science and an irreducibly subjective study of society. In this 1938 article, he argues that both domains depend on interconnected, revisable judgments, while explaining why understanding purposeful conduct requires introspection as well as knowledge of external causes. Methodology offers no philosophical guarantee of truth: its task is to expose assumptions and clarify the rules by which claims are accepted, tested, and withdrawn. His comparison of scientific statements to club members—with admission requirements, ranks, and weighted votes—gives readers a concrete way to distinguish disciplinary boundaries from evidential warrant, and reliable knowledge from claims insulated against correction.

A change in expected interest rates alters not only the value of future income but also the relative cost of consumption at different dates. In this article, Gerhard Tintner extends Hicks and Allen’s demand theory to that intertemporal problem, treating dated commodities as parts of a single consumption plan constrained by a discounted budget. His derivation shows how saving and substitution across dates enter demand’s response to expected incomes, prices, and accumulation rates. The analysis also makes a revealing distinction: demand derived from definite expectations becomes demand expressed through past economic conditions only if the dependence of those expectations on the past is known. Readers can discover both the mathematical structure of this extension of ordinal utility theory and the precise point at which a separate theory of expectations is still needed.

The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.

Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.

English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”

Making money costly to hold might encourage spending—but could it also shrink the money supply? In this brief 1938 review of A. Dahlberg’s When Capital Goes on Strike, G. L. S. Shackle examines a proposal to tax bank balances and depreciate notes. His distinctive interpretation is that the scheme would make liquidity expensive for money holders while making borrowing cheap. Yet attempts to escape the tax through debt repayment or purchases of banks’ securities could reduce the quantity of money. Sympathetic to further investigation, Shackle nevertheless asks whether a steady incentive can withstand a slump’s self-reinforcing momentum. The review offers a compact distinction between changing the rewards for holding money and adjusting policy to an approaching downturn.

Stable prices and expanding employment need not mean rising living standards. In this 1938 article, Emil Lederer asks whose consumption Germany sacrifices to make rearmament possible. His answer shifts attention from borrowing techniques to wages held down during industrial recovery: workers, he argues, supply the real resources behind apparently sound public finance. He tests official welfare statistics against declining product quality, actual shop prices, and food diverted to military use, then explains how military orders absorb output that might otherwise support civilian consumption and investment. The article offers a concrete distinction between financial stability and social cost—and between a system sustained by enforced restraint and the more ambitious total-war program that threatens to exceed its material limits.

A firm’s pricing decision depends partly on what it expects its rivals to do—but those expectations may be vague, inaccessible, or incompatible with equilibrium. In this brief 1939 round-table contribution, Fritz Machlup asks how economic analysts and government investigators can study such markets without assuming away the uncertainty that shapes business decisions. Focusing on the conjunction of product differentiation and fewness of sellers, he proposes using empirical and theoretical case studies together to seek manageable assumptions that preserve some realism. The interest lies in his precise account of a methodological tension: conjectures are difficult evidence, yet indispensable to explanation. Readers encounter a practical argument for what monopolistic competition theory can guide investigators to study—and what it should warn them against concluding.

What distinguishes planning for economic recovery from planning for war? In this brief contribution to the 1939 round-table report Divergencies in the Development of Recovery in Various Countries, Emil Lederer separates policies often grouped under a single label by their purposes and economic settings. He treats wartime controls as a response to inflationary war finance, Russian planning as a planned Industrial Revolution, and totalitarian planning as preparation for war. His contrasting account of capitalist business-cycle policy links monetary measures, price controls, regional planning, and public works to overcoming obstacles to expansion. The contribution offers a compact distinction between planning that mobilizes an economy and planning that seeks to restore its growth.

Full employment is both the achievement and, in Josef Herbert Fürth’s account, the vulnerability of Germany’s economic policy: once unemployment disappears, workers gain the bargaining power to demand higher wages. In this brief 1939 round-table contribution to “Divergencies in the Development of Recovery in Various Countries,” Fürth asks whether democracies can borrow that policy without importing its coercion. Italy’s unsuccessful imitation complicates any simple recipe for recovery, but his central concern is the suppression of wage demands through censorship, the destruction of independent labour organizations, and force. His argument offers a pointed test of policy transfer: not merely whether public spending creates jobs, but whether the controls used to sustain the result can coexist with civil rights.

Rejecting a stationary economy need not mean rejecting equilibrium analysis. In this 1939 review of Moses Abramovitz’s An Approach to a Price Theory for a Changing Economy, Ludwig M. Lachmann draws a sharp distinction between claiming that markets tend towards equilibrium and using equilibrium to test whether entrepreneurs’ plans can fit together. He welcomes Abramovitz’s attention to investment, time and expectations, but argues that abandoning market analysis leaves those plans disconnected. Forward markets supply Lachmann’s alternative: a framework for relating expected prices across dates. This brief, pointed review offers a concrete way to reconsider the supposed opposition between equilibrium and change—and shows why Lachmann finds an implicit equilibrium concept in the very approach that rejects it.