The archive.

Higher farm incomes need not mean a wealthier society. In this 1925 contribution responding to Professor Laur, Joseph A. Schumpeter sets aside specifically Swiss conditions to examine what agricultural income can—and cannot—tell policymakers. A protective tariff may increase farmers’ receipts without increasing output, while drawing labour and capital away from more valuable uses. Schumpeter’s distinctive move is to separate the stimulus that higher prices give producers from any judgment of public benefit: consumers’ losses and alternative uses of resources do not disappear when a sector’s accounts improve. Yet his criticism leaves room for temporary assistance to preserve viable investments or overcome business hesitation. This compact article offers a concrete way to distinguish monetary gains, productive expansion and economic welfare without treating either protection or intensification as an end in itself.

Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.

Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.

English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”

Can production costs explain prices if those costs already depend on other prices? This circularity anchors Alfred Amonn’s critical survey of pure economic theory, first published as an essay in 1925 and republished here in 2015. Against both fragmented classical explanations and psychological derivations from utility, Amonn argues that prices must be understood as a mutually dependent system linking consumer goods, productive resources, and money. He finds Cassel’s simultaneous-equation approach promising without mistaking a set of equations for proof of a determinate solution. The essay offers a precise way to distinguish naming a price determinant from explaining its operation—and to see why wages, interest, and rent cannot be detached from the general problem of price formation.

The liquidation of the Stinnes conglomerate gives Emil Lederer a concrete test of entrepreneurial greatness: did its enormous acquisitions create a coherent productive organisation, or merely accumulate assets under favourable inflationary conditions? In this 1925 newspaper article, he distinguishes industrial concentration from rational coordination, challenging both the cult of Hugo Stinnes and the belief that sheer corporate scale represents historical progress. Stabilisation, he argues, exposed weaknesses that celebrity and abundant credit had concealed. His economic criticism becomes a demand for social accounting: before industrialists invoke capital formation to justify low wages, they must explain what became of fortunes built, in his account, through workers’ deprivation and the destruction of small rentiers’ savings. The article connects managerial competence to responsibility for the resources entrusted to it.

Should monetary recovery restore gold parity or stabilize domestic purchasing power—and how much practical guidance did postwar economists offer for either course? Richard Kerschagl’s 1925 literature review reconnects German-speaking readers with foreign scholarship, giving priority to untranslated works. He identifies Anglo-American proposals for managing credit and prices as a significant policy development, yet questions whether their advocates explain adequately how such management would work. His comparisons distinguish agreement on stabilization from agreement about deflation’s costs or feasibility. Equally revealing is his separation of theoretical merit from documentary value: an unreliable explanation may accompany indispensable evidence. The review offers both a critical map of competing monetary remedies and an account of why historical studies and international statistics mattered to their assessment.

Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.

Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.

English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”

A currency can remain a gold currency without ever putting gold into everyday hands—this is the paradox Machlup sets out to define rather than to sell. Separating the monetary standard from the physical medium of payment, he argues that gold need not circulate as coin if it is concentrated as a reserve behind a system held at parity through the Umtauschprinzip, the rule of convertibility between domestic and foreign money at a fixed rate. Tracing the idea to Ricardo's neglected 1816 ingot plan, appended here, and testing it against India, the South American conversion offices, and Austria-Hungary's own krone, he shows the arrangement economizes scarce gold while preserving discipline. The system is not self-enforcing: its sole danger, he insists, lies in inflationary measures.

Goldkernwährung bedeutet Goldkonzentration.

English translation: “The gold-core standard means the concentration of gold.”

When does rescuing a failing bank serve the public rather than its owners? In this 1925 article, based on a Budapest lecture, Richard Reisch answers as president of the Austrian National Bank: the privilege of issuing money entails responsibilities beyond shareholder returns, but rescue must never endanger the currency. His defence of Austrian bank and stock-exchange interventions brings that tension into focus. Their immediate objectives were not ultimately achieved, yet he argues that they limited damage elsewhere—an outcome whose value cannot be measured against an observable alternative. Readers encounter a central banker explaining why even a culpably managed institution may warrant support, while insisting that finite reserves and sound monetary backing set limits to intervention.

Can dictatorship prepare a people for freedom, or does its promise of transition merely excuse permanent coercion? In this 1925 article, Friedrich von Wieser locates the answer not simply in constitutional rules or military force, but in the relationship between exceptional leaders and their followers. He treats democratic self-government as an acquired capacity for organized political leadership. That perspective informs his sympathetic, expressly provisional assessment of Mussolini and Primo de Rivera, while Bolshevism tests whether enforced equality can coexist with independent initiative. The article exposes a tension in Wieser’s reasoning: his hope that a vigorous nation will dismiss a dictator once his task is done depends on distinguishing genuine popular authorization from acquiescence under coercion.

Beneath the noisy quarrels over method, Schumpeter contends, the real work of economics advances quietly, and no one exemplifies that subterranean progress better than F. Y. Edgeworth, a master of exact analysis who founded no school. Formally a review of Edgeworth's collected papers, this 1925 essay becomes an assessment of the discipline's whole achievement. Schumpeter reads mathematics not as decoration but as the natural language of interdependent quantities, and insists that Edgeworth and Marshall, for all their classical rhetoric, stand on ground cleared by Walras, Jevons, and Menger. Taxation, where a levy disturbs equilibrium and its incidence shifts through the entire organism, and monopoly, where discrimination can sometimes beat competition, show why modern theory must analyze classes of cases rather than issue universal maxims of free trade or laissez-faire.

Fast unbekümmert um methodische Moden geht sozusagen subkutan die positive Arbeit der Wissenschaft ihren Weg.

English translation: “Almost unconcerned with methodological fashions, the positive work of science proceeds, so to speak, subcutaneously along its way.”

Method and subject matter mutually determine one another: define the economy as a system of means for ends, as causal regularity, or as functional relation, and you have already chosen a different object. That thesis governs this study of how pure economics can be scientific, appearing here in its third edition of 1948—delayed, its preface records, by the author's arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from his teaching post. Kerschagl compresses the history of method from the Physiocrats through the classics, the historical school's cry of “back to reality,” and Menger's restoration of exact theory, then turns to its problems: what reality a science can claim, exactness without mathematical calculation, necessity replaced by probability and conditional validity. Methodological monism, he concludes, is a logical utopia; causal and teleological analysis both belong to a science of purposeful economic life.

Wirklichkeit ist ihrem Wesen nach das Wesentliche und nicht das Vollständige.

English translation: “Reality is, in its essence, the essential, not the complete.”

When does scholarly caution become a failure of public responsibility? In this first report, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary confronts economists’ delayed opposition to German inflation. His criticism joins a defence of monetary theory to a concrete account of what depreciation concealed: firms could accumulate materials while uncertainty prevented long-term investment. Apparent enrichment, he argues, could coexist with the destruction of productive opportunities. Stabilization, meanwhile, remained vulnerable to reparations arrangements that might undermine central-bank restraint. The report offers a pointed encounter between economic diagnosis and professional obligation: Somary demands further empirical research but refuses to make complete evidence a prerequisite for warning against destructive policy.