The archive.

An influential economic thinker can disappear from a discipline’s memory even while his ideas survive in others’ writings. In this 1931 introduction to the German translation of Cantillon’s Essai, Hayek examines that paradox while making a precise case for Cantillon’s achievement: not simply anticipating later doctrines, but explaining how economic processes work. Against critics who found Cantillon lacking in moral philosophy, Hayek treats his separation of causal explanation from ethical prescription as a strength. His account of entrepreneurship as risk-bearing and of new money changing prices successively gives this methodological claim concrete substance. Alongside the theoretical appraisal, Hayek weighs manuscript borrowings, biographical records and uncertain channels of influence, allowing readers to distinguish evidence of transmission from conjecture—and intellectual originality from mere priority.

Foreign borrowing can strengthen a central bank’s reserves while making its currency more vulnerable to sudden withdrawals. This paradox anchors Richard Reisch’s 1931 article, publishing a lecture delivered as president of the Austrian National Bank. Defending Austria’s monetary stabilization, Reisch nevertheless argues that discipline cannot mean keeping reserves untouched during a panic or treating every increase in banknotes as inflation. His distinction between money hoarded in fear and money spent on goods gives concrete substance to that position. Readers encounter a central banker weighing domestic credit needs against exchange-rate defence, and explaining why apparently sound reserve figures may conceal dependence on short-term foreign loans. His case for temporary international lending shows how preserving a national currency could require cooperation beyond national borders.

Can socialism retain its analytical force without resting on a single economic doctrine? In this signed encyclopedia contribution, Emil Lederer locates its distinctive achievement in treating capitalism as a historically formed social order rather than a timeless mechanism of exchange. His exposition of Marx shows how exploitation can arise through formally free contracts, without individual fraud: workers’ dependence follows from their exclusion from ownership of the means of production. Yet Lederer distinguishes this structural analysis from disputed predictions about capitalism’s development, and rejects Luxemburg’s claim that accumulation necessarily requires external markets. Readers can discover why he regards socialist inquiry as compatible with marginal-utility methods, while insisting that economic analysis must account for the property relations and class divisions within which markets operate.

Idle factories seem to make an obvious case for encouraging consumers to spend. In this 1931 article, Friedrich August von Hayek challenges that inference by asking what machinery needs besides customers to sustain production. His answer directs attention to intermediate goods and the resources committed between the beginning of a process and its finished output. A messenger analogy makes the point concrete: longer journeys require more messengers in transit to maintain regular arrivals. Hayek argues that saving supports this temporal organization, while increased consumption can deprive specialized production processes of the resources they require. The article offers a compact theoretical challenge to spending-led recovery, showing why, in Hayek’s account, visible spare capacity is not the same thing as an abundance of usable capital.

Weimar's debate over Rationalisierung becomes, in this 1931 study, a theory of capitalist dynamics. Against the compensation doctrine that markets quietly reabsorb workers displaced by machinery, Lederer argues that labor-saving innovation can leave durable structural unemployment whenever its tempo outruns capital formation and the growth of jobs. His engine is the organic composition of production: modern progress means more capital and fewer workers per unit of output. A model of dynamic equilibrium disturbed by innovation in coal mining shows the mechanism — the rationalized mines draw capital from static sectors, produce the same coal with roughly half the labor, and shrink the economy's capacity to place workers, so the wage bill falls further than the social product. Neither anti-machine reaction nor laissez-faire optimism will do; what he urges is social control over the pace and direction of technical change.

Bei einem sehr schnellen Tempo des technischen Fortschritts können dann die Freisetzungswirkungen zu einer strukturellen, d. h. die Depressionsperiode überdauernden Arbeitslosigkeit führen.

English translation: “At a very rapid pace of technical progress, the effects of labor displacement can then lead to structural unemployment—that is, unemployment that outlasts the depression period.”

Delivered to the Royal Institute of International Affairs as the slump deepened, this 1931 address refuses the comfort of ideology: the Depression, Somary insists, spared neither capitalist, syndicalised, nor socialised economies alike. He traces the collapse to gold hoarding and a failing gold-exchange standard, to raw-material prices that cratered while finished goods and wages held firm, and to speculation fed by New York's call-money market. Communism, he argues, is the lesser danger; war is the greater, as distress feeds radical nationalism and the Hitler movement. His remedies—wage reductions, the breaking of cartels, state purchases of cheap raw materials, and a Franco-German confidence rebuilt under British leadership—frame his closing warning that the years ahead may earn the historian's name 'Between Two Wars.'

Europe has no lack of capital; what she needs is confidence.

The League of Nations could convene governments, administer mandates, and cultivate habits of consultation—but could it secure peace while states retained ultimate authority? In these lectures of 1931, William E. Rappard brings his experience of League service and training as an economic historian to the gap between constitutional promises and institutional practice. His revealing paradox is that growing governmental interest in Geneva could diminish the independence on which international judgment depended. Health cooperation and mandate supervision show what shared administration could accomplish; disarmament and sanctions expose what governments withheld. For Rappard, however, stronger enforcement alone was insufficient: collective security also needed procedures for peacefully correcting unjust settlements. The book makes concrete the distinction between an organization that facilitates cooperation and one capable of guaranteeing peace.

Why did a recurrent economic downturn become a world depression? Writing in March 1931, Schumpeter separates the adjustments generated by productive innovation from the pressures that made this contraction exceptionally severe. His distinctive claim is that prosperity itself transforms production in ways that require recession; external shocks cannot alone explain the reversal. Yet overlapping cycles do not account for the catastrophe. Monetary restoration, reparations, agricultural distress and price rigidities enter his diagnosis as aggravating forces, not interchangeable root causes. This short article offers a pointed way to distinguish the origins of a crisis from its amplification—and to understand why, in Schumpeter’s view, cheaper credit may fail to revive borrowing even when high interest rates can readily restrain a boom.

It is easier to dampen prosperity by a high rate of interest than to alleviate depression by a low one.

Why should an economy’s growing productive power bring bankruptcies and unemployment rather than uninterrupted prosperity? In this 1931 article, based on his Tokyo lecture, Joseph A. Schumpeter locates the answer in the boom itself. Pioneering innovations attract imitators; bank-created credit finances a rush of new enterprises before their goods reach the market. When those goods arrive, they displace older producers, while repayment of loans contracts purchasing power. Depression, in his account, is the painful adjustment to changes initiated during prosperity, not simply a monetary malfunction. The article offers a compact route into Schumpeter’s distinctive connection between entrepreneurial achievement and economic instability, while distinguishing the mechanism he seeks to explain from external shocks and statistical patterns that cannot, by themselves, establish causes.

Money makes complex production calculable, but it does not measure what people value. This distinction anchors Ludwig von Mises’s 1931 essay on subjective value theory. He extends economic reasoning beyond commerce to any conscious choice between alternatives, while reserving a narrower role for monetary accounting. Choosing honor over possessions is no less intelligible than seeking profit; neither choice requires the economist to endorse its ends. Yet, Mises argues, coordinating extended production requires prices for productive resources—a requirement that underlies his objection to comprehensive socialism. The essay offers a precise way to distinguish preference, price, and cost: valuations rank alternatives, prices enable calculation, and costs point to satisfactions forgone. It also shows why indispensable market accounts cannot become measurements of human welfare.

Die Geldrechnung ist eben nicht Wertrechnung und schon gar nicht Wertmessung.

English translation: “Monetary calculation is precisely not value calculation, and certainly not value measurement.”

Interest rates, in a normal depression, fall and prepare the recovery; in the crisis after September 1929 they fell fast and then rose again, leaving the world economy stranded short of any natural upturn. From this paradox Strigl works toward an uncompromising verdict on the demands of the day — cheaper money and a halt to falling prices, urged by Keynes in England and defended by Cassel against the specter of gold scarcity. Both amount to the same thing, and both are inflation: new money never enters evenly, but favors particular sectors first, distorting relative prices and calling forth production that no real supply of goods can sustain. Such stimulus destroys capital by misdirecting it, and any monetary attempt to obstruct the crisis's necessary liquidation is, for him, already inflation before the currency visibly collapses.

Billiges Geld bedeutet mehr Geld, bedeutet höhere Preise.

English translation: “Cheap money means more money, means higher prices.”

Calculus can locate a monopolist’s maximum profit—but who establishes the demand and cost functions on which the calculation depends? In this 1931 article, Felix Kaufmann uses that distinction to reconsider what mathematics contributes to economics. His perspective joins the logical analysis of mathematical proof to an insistence on understanding economic motives: neither formal deduction nor price curves alone supply an empirical theory of action. Against both blanket objections to mathematization and overconfident analogies with physics, he asks when simplifying assumptions make inquiry productive and when they merely make calculation possible. Readers gain a precise way to distinguish computational success from economic discovery, and to examine what assumptions about continuity, measurement, and choice permit a model to explain.