The archive.

Economists define capital as productive goods, then discuss it as money invested: for Frank Albert Fetter, this shift exposes an unresolved conceptual problem. In this Festschrift essay, first published in 1927 and supplied here in its 1977 reprint, he honors John Bates Clark by pressing beyond Clark’s distinction between concrete capital goods and a fund of value. Fetter connects the inclusion of land within capital to American property conditions and, more tentatively, to the controversy over Henry George’s single tax. His tribute remains critical: Clark’s reform did not fully separate physical production from the valuation of income rights. Readers can discover why seemingly technical definitions determine whether land, machinery, goodwill, and legal claims belong within one account of investment—and why Fetter locates their common basis in valuation rather than material form.

Everyone says prices have risen or money has lost purchasing power, yet no single formula makes such statements exactly measurable — the obstacle, Haberler contends, is not missing data but the vagueness of the concept being measured. Steering between naive faith in index arithmetic and total skepticism, the book first works through the whole apparatus of index theory — arithmetic, harmonic and geometric means, Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher's "ideal" formula, the circular and reversal tests — to show that formal criteria alone can never fix economic meaning. Only indices traceable to the money cost of one definite bundle of goods are intelligible. Grounding the argument in subjective value and methodological individualism, he concludes that a price level exists only relative to a person or group: there is no objective, supra-personal purchasing power of money to be found.

Das volkswirtschaftliche Preisniveau — ein statistischer Zufall.

English translation: “The economy-wide price level — a statistical accident.”

There is no unified state of science in economics, only a disorderly interaction of problems and traditions, and so this survey of German-language economic theory quickly becomes an anti-nationalist argument about method. Schumpeter accepts Marshall's claim that the nineteenth century built qualitative analysis and that the next task is quantitative and institutional; theory, he insists, is an apparatus, not a worldview. He praises the factual richness of Schmoller, Sombart, and Max Weber while diagnosing German economics as lacking a sustaining tradition and squandering energy on epistemology and methodological labels. Writing after the Methodenstreit, inflation, and the international triumph of marginalism, he defends marginal utility not as one competing doctrine but as the single common instrument of contemporary price theory, shared by Walras, Pareto, Marshall, and the Austrians alike.

Mit keinem dieser „ismen“ ist die Theorie auf Gedeih und Verderb verbunden, mit jedem kompatibel — hören wir doch auf, während ringsum die Probleme locken und drängen, diesen Sand zu pflügen und uns damit zu bewerfen!

English translation: “With none of these "isms" is the theory bound for better or worse; with each it is compatible — let us therefore cease, while problems all around are beckoning and pressing, to plow this sand and to pelt one another with it!”

Supporting a new research institute need not mean trusting its forecasts. In this 1927 article, Oskar Morgenstern endorses Hayek’s proposal for an Austrian business-cycle institute while questioning the predictive authority claimed for American research. His concrete examples expose the gap between statistical precision and economic understanding: correlations require knowledge of institutions, composite indices accumulate errors, and Harvard’s forecast differs less radically from an experienced banker’s judgment than its numerical form suggests. Yet Morgenstern’s skepticism is an argument for better research, not its abandonment. Vienna needs stronger statistics and statistical training, he maintains, alongside theoretical direction. The article offers a pointed examination of how to build a scientific institution without promising that it can immediately cure economic distress.

Competitive theory may explain how unemployment disappears without explaining why it persists in an economy dominated by cartels. This tension drives Schumpeter’s 1927 article on German unemployment. Accepting Gustav Cassel’s reasoning about mobile labour and freely adjusting wages, Schumpeter questions its application where employers can profit by restricting output. Industrial concentration, he argues, can also prevent workers displaced by machinery from finding new employment. Yet dismantling large enterprises would sacrifice technical and international advantages he considers substantial. The result is a reluctant case for planning—not necessarily state-run—rather than a rejection of competitive theory. Readers can trace how attention to the conditions of competition leads Schumpeter toward policies that competition itself would supposedly make unnecessary.

A tjurunga is not a soul but a second body, binding an Aranda man to his totem ancestor and arming him with creative power; kugi, in central New Guinea, names an undifferentiated swarm of the dead, of illness, and of the uncanny. Assembled as a reader in the history of religion, this 1927 volume gathers source accounts of Australian, Papuan-Melanesian, and Polynesian-Micronesian belief, arranged so that each idea sits inside its own social and material culture. Thurnwald sets tjurunga songs and kangaroo-increase rites beside the Kai notion of Seelenstoff—soul-substance clinging to shadow, name, and voice—and the Marind-anim Majo cult of coconut fertility. The Polynesian materials turn on mana, against which no one can prevail, and on tapu, which means not holy or defiled but forbidden through sanctity or custom.

Die Welt der „Seelenstoffe“ umgibt den Eingeborenen ringsum mit geheimnisvollen Kräften, so daß er kein Ding, keine Begebenheit, abstrakt betrachten kann.

English translation: “The world of "soul-substances" surrounds the native on all sides with mysterious forces, so that he cannot contemplate any thing or any event in an abstract manner.”

European commerce in China could expand even as European political privileges disappeared: this is the tension Emil Lederer explores in his 1927 article. Rather than treating Chinese modernization as a foreign achievement, he foregrounds domestic savings, banks, industrial enterprises, and the intermediaries on whom foreign merchants depended. The boycott of British goods beginning in May 1925 makes the stakes concrete: established commercial networks could not guarantee access to politically mobilized buyers. His comparison of British and Japanese investments also distinguishes ordinary economic participation from lending and industrial expansion pursued for strategic ends. Readers can discover why Lederer regarded accommodation to Chinese sovereignty—not the defence of concessions—as a practical condition for sustaining European trade and investment.

Because modern bank credit creates purchasing power rather than merely transferring existing savings, it needs an external restraint, and gold, for all its flaws, supplies one. Written after Britain's 1925 return to gold, the essay concedes every fashionable objection: gold circulation is a superfluous luxury, money need not be materially backed, and gold discoveries can trigger arbitrary price revolutions. Against Keynes, who would free credit policy from exchange parity to fight unemployment and stabilize prices, Schumpeter argues that discretion alone is not safer. His theory of credit as forced saving, with entrepreneurs outbidding old users of labor and machinery and then repaying as new goods appear, explains cyclical price movements without reducing the cycle to money, as he thinks Hawtrey wrongly does. Gold is defensible because it works automatically yet still permits development.

Und wirklich, die Goldwährung wirkt wie eine Bremse an der Maschine des Kredits, indem sie bei freier Einlöslichkeit der Kreditinstrumente der Kreditausdehnung dort eine Grenze setzt — sonst aber nie —, wo die Parität zwischen Goldgeldeinheit und Kreditgeldeinheit in Gefahr kommt.

English translation: “And indeed, the gold standard acts like a brake on the machinery of credit, in that—given free redeemability of the credit instruments—it sets a limit to credit expansion there, but never otherwise, where the parity between the gold-money unit and the credit-money unit comes into danger.”

Industrial capitalism gathers workers under shared technical and disciplinary conditions, so that, Lederer and Marschak argue, their conduct can never be explained by the isolated choices of classical market theory. Workers react not as individuals but as a class, and the labor market itself is transformed once unions and employers' associations bargain as collective subjects. Collective agreements move to the center of the analysis: they translate antagonism into general rules, and autonomous bargaining typically precedes the law that later codifies it. From this the study follows the whole institutional apparatus, from strikes and lockouts, conciliation, and yellow unions to works councils, labor exchanges, and the reach toward economic self-government. First drafted in 1913 and expanded by Marschak through the 1920s, it binds the workplace formation of class to the larger problem of governing a modern economy.

Der „Arbeitsmarkt“ ist jetzt nicht mehr unter dem Bilde einer Auktion oder eines Bazars aufzufassen, mit individuellen Käufern und Verkäufern, sondern die Gesamtheit von Arbeitern und Unternehmern ist es, welche zu je einem Subjekt zusammenwächst.

English translation: “The "labor market" is now no longer to be conceived on the model of an auction or a bazaar, with individual buyers and sellers; rather, it is the totality of workers and of entrepreneurs which coalesces into a single subject on each side.”

A stable exchange rate did not necessarily mean a restored gold currency. In this 1927 article, Richard Kerschagl examines European monetary recovery by separating legal gold definitions, reserve accumulation, exchange controls, and actual redemption practices. Switzerland’s proximity to gold parity without gold redemption and Poland’s renewed depreciation after reform expose the limits of declaring stabilization complete. Austria and Germany supply his most sustained examples of reconstruction through successive institutional changes rather than a single legislative act. Cautiously optimistic, Kerschagl nevertheless presents recovery as uneven and reversible. His comparisons let readers distinguish the practical arrangements concealed beneath the language of a “return to gold,” while his closing comparison of European and American reserves places national reforms within an increasingly unequal international monetary order.

An economic barometer can indicate where an economy stands without reliably telling when it will turn. This 1927 article, published anonymously and attributed to Friedrich August von Hayek, tests that distinction by adapting Harvard’s business-cycle indicators to Austria. Missing data demand concrete substitutions: securities-clearing payments stand in for share prices, while twelve wholesale prices form a new index. The resulting patterns offer guidance, but departures from the expected sequence resist mechanical prediction. Combining attention to money, credit, and uneven industrial expansion with statistical measurement, the article shows why seasonal adjustment, trend removal, and correlation still require economic judgment. Its Austrian experiment makes visible both the practical ingenuity involved in constructing a forecasting instrument and the limits imposed by war, structural change, and imperfect evidence.

The monarchy had collapsed, but its bank still issued notes, maintained branches, and owed obligations across new national borders. Richard Kerschagl’s 1927 article follows the Austro-Hungarian Bank from the war’s end to the opening of liquidation in 1920, asking whether political separation had to entail monetary disintegration. Writing from acknowledged professional proximity, he presents the bank’s administrative network as a resource for recovery that successor governments needed even as they displaced its authority. Negotiations over regional offices, the stamping of banknotes, and seizures of branches make the conflict between national sovereignty and contractual continuity concrete. His institutional defence also exposes a practical dilemma: restricting note issuance might check inflation, yet threaten immediate social disorder. Readers encounter monetary fragmentation through the operations and obligations of the institution being dismantled.