The archive.

Can a precise account of economic equilibrium explain how an economy changes when expectations fail? In this 1943 review of Mabel F. Timlin’s Keynesian Economics, G. L. S. Shackle makes admiration for her exposition the starting point for a pointed methodological criticism. He asks whether the formal prominence of interest rates reflects their practical influence on investment, and whether perfect-foresight analysis obscures Keynes’s concern with uncertainty. His sharpest reservation concerns aggregation: identical economic relationships may conceal different individual expectations, producing different responses to disappointment. This short review offers a concrete way to distinguish the consistency of an equilibrium model from its power to explain movement through time.

What should a rigorous theory of competitive price explain—and where does clarity leave questions unresolved? In this brief 1943 review of George J. Stigler’s textbook, Ludwig M. Lachmann welcomes an exposition shaped by Frank Knight’s teaching, particularly its consistent treatment of costs as foregone alternatives. His praise makes the reservations revealing: expectations raise a problem of determinateness that Stigler scarcely recognises, while inventories unsettle the rigid distinction between short and long run without prompting a sufficiently developed analysis of time. Lachmann calls these minor defects, not grounds for rejecting the book. The review offers a compact view of his critical priorities: conceptual consistency deserves recognition, but expectations and time demand more than tidy exposition.

Did European labor succumb to inadequate leadership, or to doctrines that left it unable to answer nationalism? In this 1943 review of Adolf Sturmthal’s The Tragedy of European Labor, 1918–1939, Ludwig von Mises shifts the explanation from personalities to economic ideas. He praises Sturmthal’s portraits of labor leaders but argues that Marxism and trade unionism obscured conflicts between workers protected by immigration barriers and those excluded from opportunity. His distinctive concern is the vulnerability of industrial countries dependent on imported food and raw materials: nationalist conquest offered, he argues, a vicious and unworkable answer to problems labor failed to confront. The review makes international mobility and trade central to Mises’s indictment of interwar labor politics—and to his bleak expectations for postwar recovery.

Can a critic of political myths remain captive to one himself? In this 1943 review of Gustav Stolper’s This Age of Fable, Ludwig M. Lachmann applauds an assault on economic and political formulas of both Right and Left, but challenges its picture of security before 1914. For Lachmann, nationalist agitation had already undermined Austria-Hungary and the precarious European balance: national self-determination belongs among the promises requiring scrutiny, not outside them. This brief review brings his conception of historical inquiry into focus—recovering human purposes and plans beneath inherited world-pictures—and shows how that standard turns admiration into a precise objection to Stolper’s historical frame.

How might the institutional discipline of the gold standard survive once gold itself is abandoned as the monetary anchor? Written amid wartime and postwar quarrels over managed currency, this essay separates gold the metal from gold the mechanism, crediting the old standard with three rule-like virtues—an international money without an international authority, automatic and predictable policy, and roughly self-correcting supply—while blaming its slow adjustment to shifts in liquidity demand for recurrent price instability. Hayek then takes up Benjamin and Frank Graham's commodity-reserve plan: money issued against and redeemable in a fixed bundle of storable raw materials, its aggregate price pegged, its components left free. Governed by a buying-and-selling rule rather than administrative discretion, such a currency would accumulate useful inventories in slump and release them in boom, dampening the cycle it once amplified.

The hoarding of money, instead of causing resources to run to waste, would act as if it were an order to keep raw commodities for the hoarder’s account.

Victory, not defeat, is the premise of this 1943 prognosis, which asks not whether capitalism deserves approval but what order can survive the war — defining capitalism by private ownership, private profit and loss, and privately created means of payment, then denying that any social system is ever pure. Total war, Schumpeter argues, builds bureaucracies and vested interests that outlast the emergency, while capitalism's own success corrodes its foundations: large-scale enterprise displaces the owner-manager, routinizes the entrepreneur, and breeds the taxation, labor power, and intellectual hostility that turn against it. He rejects the vanishing-investment-opportunity thesis in favor of this self-undermining account, and forecasts not doctrinaire socialism but an amphibial order — a formally private economy sustained by public expenditure, then Guided Capitalism and State Capitalism — cumbersome, mixed, and less vigorous than capitalism at its height.

But it is capitalism in the oxygen tent—kept alive by artificial devices and paralyzed in all those functions that produced the successes of the past.

Can monetary expansion cause inflation without doing so every time? In this 1943 article, Alfred Amonn defends quantity theory by separating a conditional causal claim from the evidence needed to explain an actual rise in prices. His distinctive emphasis falls on how money enters expenditure: commercial credit, government spending, and saving do not have identical effects, nor must additional purchasing power raise consumer prices rather than asset prices. Amonn treats the exchange equation as a constraint, not a self-sufficient causal explanation. His closing thought experiment—whether a fully employed economy could replace taxation with newly printed money without raising prices—makes the dispute concrete. The article offers a way to distinguish monetary mechanisms from automatic predictions, while showing why institutions and the destination of spending matter.

'Forced saving' had wandered through monetary theory, cycle theory, war finance, socialism, rationing, and corporate boardrooms, collecting incompatible meanings along the way — and this 1943 survey sets out to disentangle them. At its core lies a monetary idea: when bank credit or newly active money finances investment, capital formation can exceed what people meant to save, forced on the community, in Machlup's phrase, through monetary witchcraft. But the real consequences vary wildly, from no added investment under immobility to genuine consumption sacrifice at full employment. Drawing on Robertson's careful separation of money 'lacking' from real deprivation, and on Mises, Schumpeter, and Keynes, he ends with a thirty-four-item taxonomy of synonyms and homonyms, deliberately retiring the ambiguous phrase itself. A term that connotes so many meanings, he concludes, has lost its usefulness.

Saving refers merely to money amounts; lacking, on the other hand, refers to “real” quantities.

First published in 1943 and reissued here, this technical study rebuilds foreign-trade theory around the money-income multiplier, discarding the instantaneous multiplier of textbook exposition for a period-by-period sequence in which time itself becomes a variable. Machlup traces how an autonomous export sets off successive rounds of income and induced imports, then layers in induced saving, foreign repercussions across two and three countries, and the capital account, all through numerical model tables and elementary algebra. Foreign trade, he shows, plays a double role—both multiplicand and determinant of the multiplier—so that imports lagging behind exports are what let income rise at all. He closes by refusing the neo-mercantilist temptation, since the multiplier offers no honest warrant for tariffs and quotas once price effects, retaliation, and the gains from international division of labor are admitted.

Only the lag of imports behind exports makes it possible that money income rises as a consequence of the exports.

Economists dismiss pre-eighteenth-century thought as pre-scientific; historians lack the tools to spot economic theory buried in older texts. Against that double neglect, Schumpeter praises Father Dempsey's study of interest and usury for reading late-scholastic theology from within while judging it by modern standards. The Jesuits Molina, Lessius, and de Lugo, he argues, worked in a world already full of money markets, speculation, and negotiable paper, and their empirical method did not differ in logical character from ours. The essay's conceptual center is a sharp separation: economic analysis is valid or invalid autonomously, whatever moral use its results are later put to. From this Schumpeter defends both the scientific seriousness of scholastic inquiry and his warning that modern clergy pronouncing on money and banking must first master the technical economics involved.

Interest holds so central a position in the capitalist organism that it intrudes in practically every economic consideration or valuation.

A quota is not a tariff by another name, even when both cut imports to the same level: where a duty preserves market allocation, price contact between countries, and revenue for the treasury, a quantitative control rigidly fixes quantities, breeds monopoly and quota rents, and shifts power from legislatures to administrators. Written in 1943 with an eye to the postwar settlement, this study traces how licensing born of wartime scarcity hardened, through the sterling crisis and the gold bloc's defensive measures, into a standing tool of protection, retaliation, and bilateral bargaining that fragmented 1930s trade. Haberler roots the persistence of controls in monetary instability and political insecurity, and sets the Atlantic Charter's promise of equal access against the drift toward autarky, warning that a tightly controlled trade system cannot long coexist with a free domestic economy.

From being isolated measures to limit the importation of a few specific commodities, they came to be consciously used in many countries as a general instrument of protection.

A textbook can make a discipline intelligible while concealing how much remains to be questioned. This tension animates Hayek’s 1943 review of Kenneth E. Boulding’s Economic Analysis. Hayek welcomes its coherent presentation of modern theory, especially its advanced marginal analysis and effective diagrams, but objects sharply to its near absence of references to original research and the history of doctrines. His praise and criticism rest on the same educational conviction: students need systematic exposition, yet must not mistake it for the limits of economics. His concrete proposal—to replace chapter questions in an English edition with historical and bibliographical guidance—makes this brief review a pointed account of what university teaching should enable: informed inquiry beyond the textbook.