The archive.

What can surviving coins tell us about monetary policy when records of laws and governmental motives are almost absent? In this brief review of Arthur R. Burns’s Money and Monetary Policy in Early Times, Gottfried Haberler praises the economic interpretation of numismatic evidence while keeping its limits in view. His distinctive interest is in how familiar monetary problems emerged within ancient institutions: small Greek states faced pressures toward monetary union and constraints on depreciation, while Roman rulers pursued extensive fiscal debasement. The review offers a compact encounter with Haberler’s economic reading of ancient money—and with the difficulty of inferring policy from material remains rather than explicit testimony.

Do inflation, tariffs, and cartels indict capitalism—or the policies imposed upon it? In this short 1928 review of Eduard Heimann, Ludwig von Mises disputes the move from identifying economic harms to assigning responsibility for them. He turns Heimann’s own concessions about governments, worker-supported parties, and academic economists against the claim that entrepreneurs bear the chief blame for inflation. For Mises, the disorders Heimann condemns arise from interventionism, not capitalism. A parallel dispute concerns whether a morally approved end can justify class struggle when Gospel injunctions prohibit its means. The review offers a compact encounter between Heimann’s religious socialism and Mises’s liberal economic criticism, sharpening the distinction between condemning an outcome and explaining its causes.

A catalogue of economic disturbances is not yet an explanation of crisis. This distinction drives Gottfried Haberler’s review of Walter Heinrich’s attempt to ground crisis theory in Othmar Spann’s universalism. Haberler grants Heinrich’s diligence but questions what his hierarchy of institutions and disturbances actually explains: listing tariffs, banking errors, war, and changing consumption patterns does not establish how a boom turns into a crisis. His objection is not simply to unfamiliar terminology or broad definitions, but to their failure to yield corresponding analytical gains. Sharply polemical, the review offers a concrete test of theoretical synthesis: does a new framework identify causal relations, or merely rearrange familiar textbook knowledge?

Can a price index become less informative by including more prices? In this 1928 article, Gottfried Haberler examines Carl Snyder’s composite of consumer prices, wages, rents, securities, and other assets, distinguishing statistical breadth from economic meaning. His central contention is that an index must answer a specified question: measuring purchasing power is not the same task as adjusting debts or diagnosing a business cycle. Including wages, for example, can make rising prosperity appear as a rising price level even when consumption prices remain unchanged. Haberler’s critique shows how seemingly technical choices conceal judgments about whose income or claims should be preserved—and why averaging prices can erase the relationships that matter to producers. He nevertheless identifies a possible use for Snyder’s index in estimating monetary circulation.

The general price level is not a given, self-evident fact, but a theoretical abstraction.

A tennis player’s racket interrupting a ball in flight gives Strigl his governing image: economic theory can explain motion between externally given changes in the data, but not the intervention itself. This inquiry into the applicability of economic theory maps the border between economic law and everything that alters its material — needs, technology, law, organization, nature, expectation, and social psychology. Strigl’s central taxonomy divides exogenous data changes, which theory must accept as altered facts, from the narrower endogenous ones that arise within the economic process through saving and the intertemporal ranking of wants. Where an exogenous shift breaks the chain, theory meets a Bruchstelle it cannot bridge; it can only register that something has changed. From this boundary work he projects a future Datentheorie to discipline the application of economic law.

Es ist nun ganz unbezweifelbar, daß außer diesen exogenen Datenänderungen auch noch endogene Datenänderungen möglich sind, das sind solche, welche aus dem wirtschaftlichen Geschehen selbst und kraft der Gesetzlichkeit der Wirtschaft folgen.

English translation: “It is now quite beyond doubt that, apart from these exogenous changes in the data, endogenous changes in the data are also possible—namely, those which follow from the economic process itself and by virtue of the lawful regularity of the economy.”

An economic forecast may change the very conduct it seeks to predict: entrepreneurs who heed a warning can invalidate it. In this 1928 essay, Oskar Morgenstern makes that difficulty central to his assessment of business-cycle research institutes. He distinguishes their valuable work of collecting information and investigating practical problems from their more ambitious claims to prediction and theoretical discovery. Statistical equipment cannot decide what deserves measurement, he argues, nor can institutional prestige substitute for an economist’s judgement. His perspective is neither a rejection of organized research nor a celebration of its resources: funding and publicity can enlarge inquiry while steering scholars away from their own questions. The essay offers a precise account of why better economic information need not mean better forecasts—and why research capacity should not be confused with intellectual authority.

Buying Kant out of snobbery, paying extra to support a disabled veteran, or choosing a nearby shop for convenience: are these exceptions to economic explanation, or ordinary instances of valuation? In this essay, presented in its 1933 German republication, Ludwig von Mises argues that price theory must explain actual choices without first approving their motives. His distinctive target is not subjective value theory’s opponents but inconsistencies in its founders, Menger and Böhm-Bawerk, whose substantive achievements he defends. Mistaken beliefs, generosity, and national loyalty enter exchange through buyers’ preferences, not as departures from economic law. The essay makes precise why explaining a purchase differs from judging its purpose—and why monetary gain alone cannot define the conduct economics seeks to understand.

A theory can be logically coherent and still fail to explain economic life. In this 1928 article, Oskar Engländer turns that distinction against Böhm-Bawerk’s criticism of Marx. He argues that equalized profit rates need not contradict Marx’s account of surplus value: differences in production time can modify prices without overturning the model’s explanation of how output is divided between workers and capitalists. Yet this defense exposes a different vulnerability. Competition may equalize wages, Engländer contends, but cannot establish that they equal the cost of reproducing labor. His reconstruction offers a precise way to distinguish objections to Marx’s reasoning from objections to his premises—and to see why rejecting one criticism need not mean accepting the theory.

Can a theory explain how value is assigned to productive factors without yet providing a workable way to measure it? This tension sharpens Schumpeter’s 1928 review of Carl Landauer’s book on functional distribution. He welcomes Landauer’s argument that such attribution is conceptually possible even without money, but presses a practical objection: a utility measure may itself change because of the changes it is meant to measure. His praise is equally specific. Landauer’s distinction between economic and extra-economic power advances, Schumpeter judges, beyond his own treatment. The review offers a compact encounter with Schumpeter’s standards of theoretical progress: clear distinctions and teachable reasoning count as scientific achievements, yet conceptual possibility must not be mistaken for an operational method.

A theory can fail without making its author historically negligible. In this brief 1928 review of Rodbertus-Jagetzow’s letters to Schumacher, Schumpeter judges Rodbertus’s land-rent theory both false and unfruitful—two distinct charges—yet explains why he attracted followers. A landed proprietor who combined socialist and conservative commitments, Rodbertus could command allegiances unavailable to thinkers identified with any one of those positions alone. Schumpeter consequently finds broader interest in R. Michels’s introduction than in the letters themselves: it reconstructs the milieu, personality and alliances through which Rodbertus exerted influence. The review offers a compact example of Schumpeter distinguishing theoretical achievement from historical significance, without allowing appreciation of the latter to soften criticism of the former.

All economic activity unfolds through time, and static theory, by treating every exchange as if prices formed at a single instant, suppresses a central function of prices: coordinating production and consumption across dates. Extending rather than abandoning equilibrium analysis, Hayek argues that even a stationary economy needs different prices for technically identical goods available at different moments, exactly as it accepts different prices for goods in different places. From this he derives a sharp critique of price-level stabilization: when productivity rises, equilibrium requires prices to fall, and any currency—gold or deliberately managed—that resists this movement falsifies the intertemporal signals allocating resources between present and future, with effects analogous to inflation. Monetary disturbance is thus not mere change in the value of money but disruption of the whole intertemporal price structure through which dated plans are coordinated.

Alles Wirtschaften erstreckt sich in der Zeit.

English translation: “All economic activity extends through time.”

Can a programme celebrate competition while placing industry under public supervision? In this 1928 critical article on Britain’s Industrial Future, Martha Stephanie Braun tests the British Liberals’ proposals against the economic discipline they profess to preserve. Her defence of competition is not a defence of small firms against large ones: private combinations may remain exposed to rival suppliers and imports, while legally protected monopolies escape those pressures. She asks why competent administration of universities or waterworks should imply competence in competitive manufacturing, and warns that cooperation between employers and workers can come at consumers’ expense. The article offers a pointed distinction between industrial coordination that remains answerable to markets and administrative arrangements that weaken that accountability, while acknowledging the programme’s pursuit of industrial peace.