4,366 works (including 487 books, 3,476 articles and 400 historical documents), 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable.
A world price need not be a single quotation, nor a world market a single trading centre. In this published excerpt from his 1905 seminar report, Schumpeter investigates international price formation through the institutions that connect wheat, cotton, coffee, and wool markets: credit, transport, exchanges, auctions, and colonial production. His concrete examples unsettle easy measures of economic independence. Austria-Hungary’s wheat prices can be constrained by the mere possibility of imports; continental traders can bypass London while becoming more closely connected to overseas producers. Comparing these markets reveals why shared price movements coexist with differences in quality, speculative pressure, and bargaining power. Schumpeter’s central distinction is between declining British intermediation and declining international integration: the former, he argues, can be evidence of the latter’s advance.
A price index can change even when prices do not—if the mixture of goods it measures has changed. In this seminar paper published in 1905, Joseph Alois Schumpeter treats such difficulties as questions about what economic measurement can legitimately claim. His guiding distinction is between describing price movements and explaining their causes: an aggregate cannot, by itself, identify monetary influences. No index is best for every purpose. Counting both raw materials and finished products can multiply particular price influences; holding weights fixed can preserve comparability while losing touch with consumption. Readers encounter the economic choices embedded in apparently technical formulas, and the tension between measuring purchasing power consistently and representing an economy whose goods, qualities, and quantities keep changing.
Economic theory must begin not from an abstract calculator but from the acting person, whose bodily, instinctual, and affective constitution shapes conduct in advance. Dedicated to the psychiatrist August Forel, this essay builds a layered anthropology, reflex, instinct, character, habit, suggestion, and traces economic behaviour to instinctual complexes of nutrition, protection, possession, power, and vanity that differ sharply in urgency. Schwiedland's sharpest tool is a distinction economics had blurred: Begier, desire, generates its own activity and seeks heightened pleasure, while Bedürfnis, need, is provoked by deprivation and drives toward its removal. The essence of economy, he insists, lies not in consuming but in procuring goods for future satisfaction. Culture is the refinement of striving; luxury is ambiguous, capable of both waste and invention; and economic reform, he concludes, must include the education of wants.
Die soziale Therapie besteht ja zum besten Teil in einer Beeinflussung des inneren Menschen.
English translation: “Social therapy consists for the most part in influencing the inner man.”
Modern competition, Ettinger contends, throws up the very associations meant to restrain it. Cartels are neither an invention of academic economists nor a creature of legislation, but practical answers to ruinous price wars, overproduction, and unstable relations among firms. With a foreword by Carl Menger, this legal-economic study refuses both a naive faith in laissez-faire and the reflex of treating every combination as criminal conspiracy. If private associations already regulate prices, output, and risk across whole branches, the state cannot pose as a neutral onlooker; it must decide how such power is supervised and where stabilizing coordination shades into private domination. Ettinger works through cartel forms as stages in an industry's self-organization — from loose price agreements, vulnerable to evasion, toward integrated cooperatives that turn rivalry into collective calculation — and supplies model statutes for the promoters and lawyers who would build them.
Dem Kartellprobleme kann und darf der Staat nicht länger als stiller Beobachter gegenüberstehen.
English translation: “The state can and must no longer stand before the cartel problem as a silent observer.”
Railways, steamships and telegraphs had transformed the practical meaning of distance—but had economics adequately understood the change? In this 1905 article, reproducing a congress lecture, Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg argues that transport is not merely a servant of commerce: it reshapes the conditions of production, competition and political organization. His distinctive approach brings economic theory into contact with geography, engineering and law without pretending that these disciplines share a single method. Low freight rates can outweigh a producer’s skill; railway networks can enlarge markets while concentrating power and prompting regulation. Readers encounter an argument for making spatial relations central to social explanation, coupled with a caution: science has largely followed transport’s development rather than predicted or directed it.
Holding people responsible for their livelihoods presupposes conditions that individual effort cannot supply. In this 1905 rectoral address, Eugen Philippovich von Philippsberg makes that tension the basis of a qualified defence of mutual assistance. Economic freedom releases people from personal subordination, he argues, while exposing them to impersonal markets they cannot control. Insurance, unions, education, and public safeguards can therefore enable responsibility rather than replace it. His distinctions are concrete: boiler inspection protects against risks individuals cannot assess, whereas subsidies and protective tariffs may shield producers from consequences they should bear. Yet unemployment tests his continued insistence on self-support. The address offers a demanding way to examine social provision: does an institution strengthen people’s capacity to act, or merely transfer their obligations elsewhere?
A tariff reduction need not mean the destruction of a domestic industry. In this 1905 review of Richard Schüller’s Schutzzoll und Freihandel, Carl Menger examines the differences among firms that make reciprocal trade concessions possible. Producers with unequal costs can coexist, while even the strongest enterprises face limits to profitable expansion. On Schüller’s account, carefully measured concessions may therefore contract less competitive production without eliminating an entire branch of industry. Menger’s qualified appreciation centres on the connection between these production conditions and practical treaty negotiation. His review offers a concrete alternative to treating protection and free trade as all-or-nothing choices: assessing which producers bear the losses, where export opportunities arise, and under what conditions both negotiating countries can benefit.
Can interest be explained as payment for waiting if land and goods already held by consumers are excluded from the account? In this 1905 review, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter tests Gustav Cassel and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk against the demand for a consistent conception of capital. He finds Böhm-Bawerk’s combination of psychological and productivity explanations insufficient, while arguing that Cassel’s account of waiting stops short of its own implications. Yet Fetter separates these theoretical objections from his appreciation of Cassel’s analysis of falling interest rates and their effects on economic incentives. This compact review lets readers see how a dispute over the definition of capital changes what an interest theory can explain—and why an incomplete theory may still yield a valuable argument.
Neither doctrinaire free trade nor blanket protection survives Schüller's scrutiny, which rests a rational tariff policy on a fact both camps overlook: within a single country the same good is produced at widely unequal costs, in layers reaching from the most favorable conditions to the marginal ones that fix the price. From this — and from the marginal-utility line that runs through Menger, Wieser, and Zuckerkandl — he derives when imports enrich a nation and when they merely displace home production and depress wages and rents. He weighs foreign 'superiority' against real export capacity, defends measured grain tariffs against Brentano's objections, takes apart Germany's and Russia's excessive duties, and treats commercial treaties as the arena where an import harmful in isolation may be admitted for compensating export concessions. The work carries a dedication to Carl Menger.
Der größte Irrtum jedoch besteht darin, daß die Exportfähigkeit als gleichbedeutend mit der Überlegenheit aufgefaßt wird, während es für die Exportfähigkeit ebenso sehr auf die in der Regel ganz übersehenen Konsumverhältnisse als auf die Produktion ankommt.
English translation: “The greatest error, however, consists in the fact that export capacity is regarded as synonymous with superiority, whereas export capacity depends just as much on consumption conditions—which are usually entirely overlooked—as on production.”
A tax cut intended for tenants can end up raising the price of building land. This possibility anchors Robert Meyer’s critique of Friedrich von Wieser’s proposal to divide the house-rental tax into a tenant-borne charge and a tax on urban land rent. Meyer supports relief for cheaper housing but disputes the claim that these burdens can be measured separately—or that relief can reach tenants alone. His distinctive emphasis is on how expectations, purchasing power, and property transactions alter the distribution of taxes: even peripheral building sites already carry a price for anticipated urban growth. The essay shows why an accounting distinction between land and buildings cannot settle who pays, and why predictable concessions for new construction may serve tenants better than a theoretically precise but administratively uncertain division.
A generation earlier, Europe's cities had buried more of their inhabitants than were born in them, surviving only by immigration; now, Inama-Sternegg observes, they grow from their own surplus of births. This essay from the Österreichische Rundschau warns against reading that reversal as simple urban flourishing. The vanished 'Lebensdefizit' rests less on sanitation, water, and food inspection than on the altered age-structure of a population fed by vigorous young rural migrants — so the city's vitality is borrowed, and the deeper reproductive strength of the people still rests on the land. The second half turns the lens around: rural factories, commuter suburbs and annexations, and spa and resort towns carry urban economy and habits outward, weaving town and country into a single circulatory system in which each feeds the other.
So bewirken schließlich alle Kräfte, welche das städtische Leben entwickelt, eine Nivellierung des Gegensatzes von Stadt und Land, indem sie dem Lande höhere Lebensformen zuführen, sich selbst aber von den überschüssigen Säften des flachen Landes nähren.
English translation: “Thus, in the end, all the forces which urban life develops bring about a leveling of the opposition between town and country, in that they bring higher forms of life to the countryside, while nourishing themselves from the surplus vital sap of the flat land.”
Every street, sewer, and tramline a city lays out of public funds quietly enriches the private owners of the land beside it — and that unearned increment, Inama-Sternegg argues, is why the growing city must claim a public competence over its soil analogous to the state's own. Dedicated to Adolf Wagner, the study presents urban land policy as at once the central municipal social question and an old problem in new form. He works through its instruments in turn: annexation of urbanized suburbs, expropriation and 'Zonenenteignung' reaching into the adjacent hinterland, deliberate municipal purchase of land and housing, and private-law devices — repurchase rights, the revived Erbbaurecht, tenancy reform. Rejecting the land-reformers' call for outright communalization, and drawing medieval parallels from Burgrecht to the taxing of the 'tote Hand,' he keeps municipal power firmly under the rule of law.
Ein so erweitertes Expropriationsrecht ist also eine notwendige Voraussetzung für die Durchführung eines jeden weiter ausgreifenden Planes einer Straßenregulierung und Bebauung unter den Gesichtspunkten moderner Hygiene, Verkehrs- und Sozialpolitik.
English translation: “Such an expanded right of expropriation is therefore a necessary precondition for carrying out any more far-reaching plan of street regulation and development under the aspects of modern hygiene, transport, and social policy.”