2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A tax textbook can supply facts without teaching readers how to judge them. That distinction drives Walter Froehlich’s 1954 review of William H. Anderson’s Taxation and the American Economy. Froehlich tests the book’s interdisciplinary ambitions against concrete explanatory tasks: distinguishing taxable income from economic profit when discussing who bears a tax, and reconciling court decisions rather than merely placing them side by side. His praise for Anderson’s diagram-assisted account of estate-tax avoidance sharpens the criticism: accessibility need not sacrifice precision. This short review offers a pointed standard for introductory writing in law and economics—whether it gives nonspecialists the conceptual connections needed to reason beyond the information provided.
The same visible movement might belong to a war dance or a ceremonial reception: observation alone cannot establish what an action means. In this methodological essay, republished here in 1967, Alfred Schütz asks how social science can achieve objectivity when its subject matter is already interpreted by the people it studies. His answer preserves scientific rigor without treating actors’ meanings as dispensable or interpretation as private intuition. Scientific concepts, he argues, reconstruct the everyday types and expectations through which people understand one another. The essay offers a precise way to assess theoretical models: their simplified actors need not reproduce whole persons, but their attributed motives and actions must remain intelligible in everyday terms. Readers can discover why abstraction and fidelity to subjective meaning need not be competing demands.
Whether the non-communist economies would return to multilateral liberal trade or settle into a managed world of controls, quotas, and currency blocs was, in 1954, the question convertibility decided. Haberler first clears the definitional ground, separating full from partial convertibility, resident from nonresident rights, and current from capital transactions, because governments can proclaim liberalization while preserving discrimination through licensing and blocked balances. His normative claim is that convertibility is the monetary form of free trade, letting countries specialize by comparative efficiency instead of matching imports to exports bilaterally. The failed 1947 sterling experiment serves as his warning: it collapsed not because convertibility is unworkable but because inflation and an overvalued pound made it so. Rejecting gold-standard deflation, he favors monetary discipline joined to freely floating rates over the speculation-prone Bretton Woods peg.
It cannot be repeated too often that any form of open or repressed inflation is incompatible with convertibility and stable exchange rates.
No purely factual history is possible in any politically relevant sense, Hayek maintains, because citizens judge their institutions through inherited stories about what those institutions have done. Introducing a wider inquiry into capitalism and industrialization, he takes aim at one such story: the legend that the Industrial Revolution impoverished and degraded the working classes. Drawing on Clapham and on concessions later made by the Hammonds, he argues that real wages and living standards generally rose, and that capital accumulation let a vastly larger proletarian population survive at all. Visible urban misery, Corn Law-era Tory propaganda against manufacturers, and socialist historicism from Marx to Sombart and the Webbs together fixed the darker picture as common sense. Hardship, he counters, more often flowed from monopoly, state action, and precapitalist restrictions than from the competitive order itself.
Political opinion and views about historical events ever have been and always must be closely connected.
Twenty-odd centuries of economic reasoning, from Aristotle and the scholastic doctors through Smith, Ricardo, Walras, and Keynes, pass under review in this vast and unfinished history, assembled from Schumpeter's disordered manuscript by his widow Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter. Its governing distinction separates economic analysis, the evolving box of scientific tools, from the surrounding economic thought and political creed. Tracing the filiation of ideas, Schumpeter insists that competent analysis rests on three techniques, history, statistics, and theory, and that every theorist first works from a pre-analytic 'vision' colored by ideology. He crowns Walrasian general equilibrium the summit of theoretical economics, weighs the scholastics' neglected contributions against the British classical tradition he distrusts, and reconceives capital, from the standpoint of analysis, as a set of restrictions.
practically and analytically, a credit theory of money is possibly preferable to a monetary theory of credit.
Bread and wine, bread and butter, coffee and milk: for Mahr these are never interchangeable along a smooth curve but combine in one determinate best proportion, which income and prices may put out of reach. On that observation rests his assault, first advanced in 1954, on the indifference-curve analysis then spreading from Anglo-American economics through Pareto and Hicks. Taking up Hans Mayer's objections—the fictive 'experiment,' infinite divisibility, unlimited substitutability—he denies that a field of equally valued bundles exists at all, and replaces indifference curves with curves of preferred combinations shifting with income and saturation. Extending the argument to the marginal-utility level, he separates broad need-classes from particular goods and locates the one clear margin in the marginal utility of money rather than in any equalization across commodities.
In Wahrheit gibt es regelmäßig nur ein optimales Kombinationsverhältnis zweier Konsumgüter.
English translation: “In truth, there is regularly only one optimal combination ratio of two consumer goods.”
A functioning market, this revised Cologne lecture insists, demands not an absent state but a deliberately maintained legal framework — general, predictable rules applied equally to all, sharply distinguished from the discretionary administrative commands that corrode economic coordination. Speaking into the German debate over the soziale Marktwirtschaft and alongside Walter Eucken's ordoliberalism, Hayek presses the case in strict rule-of-law terms and dismantles the textbook ideal of 'perfect competition,' which mistakes an imagined final state for the discovery process by which markets actually work. He defends even the distressed, overinvested industry's right to fail against demands for cartels and protection, holding that competition's painful verdicts perform an accounting no administrative body can replace. The decisive task, he concludes, is educating opinion to accept competition consistently rather than licensing exceptions whenever it turns temporarily harmful.
Was wir wollen, ist nicht universelle Konkurrenz, sondern universelle Möglichkeit der Konkurrenz.
English translation: “What we want is not universal competition, but the universal possibility of competition.”
Between 1933 and 1953, economics was reshaped by three visible debates—Keynesian macroeconomics, the theories of imperfect and monopolistic competition, and the new welfare economics of Hicks and Kaldor—but the deeper story, Lachmann contends, is the slow displacement of static equilibrium by problems of time, knowledge, and expectation. Welfare economics he dismisses as ingenious yet politically remote; Keynesian theory as coherent but valid only for extreme situations of depression or wartime inflation, where factors can be treated as homogeneous. Chamberlin, Robinson, and Harrod exposed the unreality of perfect competition yet still classified market forms statically. The constructive alternative is Swedish Process Analysis, which distinguishes the coherence of a single plan from the compatibility of all plans, together with a redefinition of competition not as a market form but as the process by which knowledge spreads and one form turns into another.
In reality, as every newspaper reader knows, politicians pursue power, not welfare.
Strip a system of its outer layers and something eventually gives way, not gradually but all at once. Morgenstern's essay builds a vocabulary for that threshold, introducing compressibility, the selective reduction of an economy or organization that preserves its defining function, against the kernel, the minimal core below which the thing ceases to be what it was. He resists the picture of total connectedness implied by input-output schemes read as if every cell were indispensable, since such a system would collapse at the first loss. Real economies, armies, and bureaucracies instead shed activities, reorganize, and substitute; war, scarcity, and damage reveal cores that abundance ordinarily hides. Part II turns to economic constants, denying that economics has physics-like constants while insisting on firmer physiological and technological bounds, from caloric minimums to reproduction times, beneath the shifting surface of prices.
A system will be said to be totally connected if the destruction of any of its parts destroys the whole system, i. e., deprives it of all of its functions.
Rappard, a Geneva economist who had taught at Harvard, set out to explain a fact many Europeans preferred to explain away: that the United States enjoyed a material abundance no rival approached, and had done so well before two world wars widened the gap. Offered here in the 1955 English translation of his 1954 French study, and prefaced by Henry Hazlitt, the argument marshals figures on national income, population, and production before turning to observers from Adam Smith and Tocqueville to Mill. The wealth, he concludes, springs less from virgin soil than from labor and its productivity—driven by mass production, the marriage of laboratory and workshop, a sheer passion for output, and above all the spirit of competition that European cartels had smothered. Economic superiority, he cautions, implies no superiority of soul.
The United States are today by far the richest nation in the world because they produce by far the most wealth.
Production takes time—but does taking longer make it more productive? In this review of the second edition of Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen, Emil Kauder tests capital theory against technological evidence, drawing on observations of American steelmaking to challenge any simple link between duration and efficiency. He also asks where a production period could actually begin: with the allocation of iron, leather, or a factory building? These concrete difficulties sharpen his objection to Eucken’s measurement procedure. Yet Kauder finds greater promise in Eucken’s treatment of interest, especially where price expectations and interdependent industrial investment loosen the original theoretical framework. The review distinguishes the problems Eucken exposes from the solutions Kauder finds convincing.
That production is time consuming does not necessarily imply that the theory of roundabout production is correct.
American trade policy of the 1950s contained a puzzle Haberler sets out to resolve: Washington condemned imperial preferences and discriminatory tariffs while applauding customs unions, even though a customs union discriminates against outsiders more sharply than a mere preference does. His resolution turns on economic effect rather than the degree of discrimination. A preferential regime keeps separate national tariffs and invites product-by-product bargaining and capture by protected interests; a complete customs union abolishes internal barriers wholesale, adopts a common external tariff, and is far likelier to create trade than to divert it. He judges genuine unions rare, Benelux being the modern instance, and insists Japan's viability depends on worldwide markets rather than an Asian bloc, holding throughout to multilateralism and the most-favoured-nation clause.
If tariff preferences are bad because they imply discrimination, then a customs union should be worse because it implies a higher degree of discrimination.