2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Orthodox theory said a fall in interest-rates should quicken investment by raising the present value of future returns; businessmen questioned by the Oxford Economists' Research Group flatly denied noticing any such effect. Rather than discard the doctrine, Shackle narrows it. A future receipt must be discounted twice, once for deferment through the pure interest rate and once for doubt, and the two work very differently: interest bites hardest on distant, secure returns, which is why housing and other long-lived, dependable assets remain rate-sensitive. But where invention, fashion, and obsolescence truncate an asset's useful life, a swelling 'marginal rate of risk' absorbs the far future before the pure rate can act, leaving valuations almost unmoved by a one-point change. Entrepreneurs, attending to shifting orders and markets, simply never register interest as the cause of their decisions.
It was until recent years an accepted doctrine that changes of interest-rates powerfully influence the pace at which enterprisers, all taken together, extend or improve their equipment.
Written weeks after Keynes's death, this memoir refuses to separate the theory from the man who made it: a Cambridge and Eton mind, mathematically gifted yet impatient with technique that did not bear on public action. Schumpeter reads the whole career as the slow forging of a single vision, first glimpsed in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that laissez-faire capitalism had ended in 1914 and that thrift no longer served accumulation. The General Theory supplies that vision its machinery, reducing the economy to three schedules: the consumption function, the marginal efficiency of capital, and liquidity preference. Admiring the elegance yet insisting on the narrowness, Schumpeter accepts Hicks's verdict that this is the economics of depression, and grants Keynes a genuine school rivaling the Physiocrats and Marxists.
It does not make us Keynesians, it makes us better economists.
Empirical critics of the 1940s claimed that interviews and questionnaires had caught firms behaving in ways marginal analysis could not explain; the reply here is that they had misunderstood the theory they meant to refute. Economic theory, Machlup argues, is essentially a theory of adjustment to change, and its variables are the entrepreneur's own expected costs and revenues, not the observer's accounting magnitudes — a driver overtaking a truck responds to speed and distance without computing them. Reports of 'full-cost' pricing dissolve on inspection: average cost may smooth fluctuations over time, discipline a cartel, or hint at rivals' demand elasticity without contradicting marginalism. He is hardest on Richard Lester's wage-employment surveys, whose 'importance' ratings confuse frequency with marginal effect. The theory has not been disproved, he insists, though better empirical work, grounded in theory, is badly needed.
The business man does what he does on the basis of what he thinks, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.
Anti-Prussian sentiment ran high in the monarchy of 1870, yet at the Crown Council of 18 July—Franz Joseph, Andrássy, Beust, Kuhn, and Potocki around the table—Austria-Hungary chose neutrality with only preparatory armament. Engel-Janosi reads that choice not as simple weakness but as the sum of converging constraints. Potocki's federalist ministry, which would have granted the crownlands almost the status of American federal states, had deepened rather than resolved the monarchy's internal paralysis, while the Eastern Question tied any western war to Russia's designs on Constantinople and to unrest in Serbia, Romania, and Egypt. Drawing on ministerial protocols and American diplomatic reports, the essay presents neutrality not as grand design but as the only policy the Dual Monarchy's divided structure could sustain.
Prokesch hatte recht: es war, als seien die Segel eines Schiffes so gesetzt, daß sie gegeneinander wirkten.
English translation: “Prokesch was right: it was as though the sails of a ship had been set so as to work against one another.”
Take a single stretch of history and use it to test what economic analysis can and cannot do: that is Schumpeter's method here, applied to the American 1920s and the collapse that followed. He rejects both the reduction of the decade to monetary quantities and the treatment of it as self-contained, reading its prosperity instead as the American surface of a longer industrial transformation, automobiles, electrical utilities, corporate finance, whose effects were expansive and depressive at once. Prosperity was real but spotty, concealing falling farm and profit tendencies beneath rising output. On the crash he distinguishes why depression was likely from why it turned catastrophic, laying the disaster to speculation in 1927-29, a fragmented banking system prone to epidemics, and a mortgage crisis that turned price declines into panic.
Time series never tell the whole tale and must be supplemented by a detailed historical account of what actually happened in the economic organism.
When civilizations seem to repeat one another’s histories, what makes the resemblance an explanation rather than an analogy? Emil Kauder’s 1946 article tests cyclical interpretations of history against this question, placing Vico—not Spengler—at its conceptual centre. For Kauder, Vico’s distinction between an ideal historical structure and its particular realizations offers a firmer foundation than appeals to civilizational souls or destiny. He values Toynbee’s comparative evidence while questioning whether accumulated parallels can establish historical necessity. Writing in the aftermath of war, he also challenges confidence that human cruelty serves a benevolent providential plan. The article makes visible the philosophical commitments behind accounts of civilizational rise and decline: what acts in history, what recurs, and whether recurrence carries any moral meaning.
Agreement with Hayek’s economics need not entail agreement with his explanation of political change. In this 1946 review of The Road to Serfdom, Joseph A. Schumpeter praises Hayek’s defense of personal liberty while questioning the social foundations of his liberalism. Could an economically workable capitalist reform program win support from voters asked to accept insecurity and delayed rewards? More fundamentally, Schumpeter argues that capitalism itself has empowered constituencies whose demands challenge liberal principles. The departure from individualism is thus not simply a victory of mistaken ideas: it reflects a change in whose preferences carry political weight. This brief review offers a pointed distinction between defending liberty, designing economic policy, and explaining the forces that determine either’s political prospects.
Cheap money has a long pedigree of enemies of interest behind it, Bolshevik, Nazi, and easy-money reformers alike who picture creditors as idle rich and debtors as toiling poor. Mises overturns the picture: in a modern financial society the bondholders, savers, and insurance and social-security claimants harmed by depressed interest and depreciated currency are ordinary people. From the distinction between commodity credit, drawn from real savings, and circulation credit, conjured by banks as fiat money, he builds the familiar sequence, artificially lowered rates, false calculation, malinvestment, boom, and then either runaway inflation toward a 1923-style collapse or panic and mass unemployment. The crisis, he stresses, springs not from ending expansion but from the misdirection cheap money already produced. Interest expresses time preference and cannot be legislated away.
The artificial boom is not prosperity, but the deceptive appearance of good business.
To fix a price at all, one must already know how prices form—and confusing value with price, this essay warns, wrecks the attempt from the start. Contributed to the 1946 Bern anthology Konkurrenz und Planwirtschaft, Amonn's piece first pries apart two words ordinary usage runs together: price, the money ratio of a good, and value, its regular exchange ratio against other goods. He distinguishes indirect influence such as tariffs from direct price policy, showing how ceilings breed shortages and rationing while floors breed surpluses and quotas, and grounds the whole in modern functional supply-and-demand theory and elasticity. Economics can test whether measures suit a chosen aim, he concludes, but the aims themselves belong to politics—so direct policy should ordinarily aim at durable competitive equilibrium, best secured by curbing monopoly.
Die Wert- und Preistheorie ist eine unumgängliche Voraussetzung einer rationellen Preispolitik, wie einer rationellen Wirtschaftspolitik überhaupt.
English translation: “The theory of value and price is an indispensable prerequisite of a rational price policy, and indeed of a rational economic policy generally.”
Complementarity and substitution are not, Lachmann argues, symmetrical static relations between factors: complementarity is the coherence of means within a single production plan, while substitution is the response to disruption, error, or revised expectations. A locomotive substitutes for another locomotive yet complements wagons, crews, tracks, and timetables—so which relation holds depends entirely on the plan through which the goods are read. Beginning from the Hicks-Lange-Harrod debate but pulling the question out of demand analysis and into the structure of production, this early essay dissolves the fiction of homogeneous capital without collapsing into mere physical classification. Capital goods are artifacts made for purposes; spare parts, standardization, and reserve capacity are not accidental frictions but devices for preserving a wider pattern of complementarity. Accumulation, working through chain reactions of gain and loss, makes any single rate of profit meaningless.
We have to provide for many minor changes in order to prevent a major one.
Behind the cooperative movement lay a revolutionary dream, to abolish entrepreneurs, capitalists, and the wage system through producers' cooperatives owned in common. That dream, Mises argues in this report commissioned by the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation, failed utterly, and the surviving consumers' and farmers' cooperatives are simply large businesses. Patronage refunds are distributions of profit; undistributed surpluses accumulate capital exactly as any firm's do. What sustains cooperatives, on his account, is not superior efficiency but privilege, the tax exemptions, cheap credit, and legal favors that shelter high-cost operations from a genuine market test. He points to the contradiction between farmers' cooperatives seeking higher prices and consumers' cooperatives claiming to seek lower ones, and concludes that cooperatives can be legitimate in a free society only if they renounce these advantages and win consumers on their own.
Capitalism needs neither propaganda nor apostles. Its achievements speak for themselves. Capitalism delivers the goods.
The social Wunschbild, the anticipatory image of what economy and society ought to become, is treated in this 1947 rectoral address as an active economic factor rather than escapist fantasy. Because all economic processes take shape from the willing of living human beings, Kerschagl argues, economics cannot be a mechanics of things; yesterday's utopia may become today's reality, even as fulfilled ideals cease to press as ideals. He reads mercantilism, physiocracy, classical economics, Marxism, and the Austrian marginalists as mixtures of contradictory wishes, each torn between freedom and binding order—a plurality that turns destructive whenever one doctrine is enforced as total truth. Applied to postwar Austrian policy the thesis is austere: distribution can complement production but never replace it, and social aims must be judged by persuasion and human dignity, not coercion.
Es kann auf die Dauer nur das verteilt werden, was erarbeitet ist, und alle Verteilungssysteme können nur eine wichtige und notwendige Ergänzung der Erzeugung, aber kein Ersatz für diese selbst sein.
English translation: “In the long run only what has been produced by labor can be distributed, and all systems of distribution can only be an important and necessary complement to production, but never a substitute for it.”