2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Neo-Ricardian critiques advancing, neoclassical theory unsettled, Keynesianism itself in crisis: economics in the mid-1970s struck Lachmann as a discipline in turmoil, and his answer is a deliberate act of dissent. In an age of divergence, he argues, a distinctly Austrian voice must be raised before its insights dissolve into the neoclassical synthesis. Hicks having preempted 'neo-Austrian' with a theory resting on static expectations and a single good, Lachmann simply reclaims the plain word Austrian. He grants the neo-Ricardian exposure of circularity in aggregate capital measurement yet faults its retreat to objective cost, and locates the real quarrel elsewhere: not mathematics but knowledge. Where neoclassical theory treats knowledge as a given datum and presumes universal market awareness, Austrian economics studies the market as a process that diffuses, creates, and renders knowledge obsolete.
When factions are already in existence, who can be blamed for being factious?
What makes a statement representative of business opinion rather than merely a statement by businessmen? In this brief, sharply critical review of Alfred L. Thimm’s book, Murray N. Rothbard questions both the evidence for ideological influence and the economic interests concealed by a favorable account of Morgan-group corporatism. He faults Thimm for neglecting cartelization and for treating concentrated financial ownership as a precursor to control by non-owning managers without explaining the contradiction. The review offers a compact encounter with Rothbard’s standards for business history: scholars need not accept revisionist conclusions, but they must engage the research and distinguish professed ideas from institutional influence.
To demand that society be redesigned whole, according to chosen ends, is what Hayek calls constructivism, the modern illusion of Machbarkeit this 1977 lecture sets out to destroy. Social justice, he argues, is an atavism: the moral instincts bred in small hunter-gatherer bands, projected onto the anonymous order of the Großgesellschaft. Prices are not just rewards for what we have done but signals of what we ought to do next, and no one holds a moral claim to a particular market value, since that value emerges from thousands of circumstances no mind can survey. Competition works as a discovery procedure drawing on more knowledge than any planner commands. To enforce a just distribution would demand totalitarian control, cripple productivity, and, he warns with Hölderlin, turn the state made heaven into hell.
Frühere Generationen haben sich noch nicht der Illusion hingegeben, daß sie ihre gesellschaftliche Umwelt völlig nach Wunsch gestalten können.
English translation: “Earlier generations had not yet indulged the illusion that they could shape their social environment entirely according to their wishes.”
Where Hayek would let private banks issue competing paper currencies held to value by reputation alone, Hazlitt draws a firm line. Reviewing Choice in Currency and Denationalization of Money, he embraces the assault on legal-tender monopoly, repeal the tender laws, he agrees, and let citizens contract in gold, Swiss francs, or D-marks so that an inflating state punishes itself as users flee its notes. But American free banking, with its worthless Michigan banknotes and recurrent panics, teaches him to distrust irredeemable private paper and Hayek's vague commodity-basket 'ducat.' Sound private money, he counters, must be gold or silver certificates redeemable on demand, treated like warehouse receipts, with overissue prosecuted as fraud. The result he wants is not denationalized fiat but denationalized custody of a full-reserve metallic standard.
If it continued to inflate, its citizens would forsake its money for other currencies. Inflation would no longer pay.
Ever since serious discussion of the international monetary system began, economists have worried whether the world holds enough reserves, and this exchange pits Haberler against Robert Triffin over whether that worry still makes sense once currencies float. Haberler traces the anxiety through bimetallism, Marshall's symmetallism, commodity-reserve schemes, and Keynes's Clearing Union, arguing that nearly every such proposal presumed fixed or adjustable parities. Under Bretton Woods, defensible but revisable par values made speculation rational and enlarged the appetite for reserves; under generalized floating, the master problem of reserve control simply dissolves. Reserves matter, he insists, only through national choices such as monetary restraint, sterilization, and intervention, so the IMF should practice surveillance rather than act as a world central bank. Triffin's reply presses the opposite case, keeping dollar-centered reserve creation in view.
Under the Bretton Woods system, in contrast, "complete confidence" in the existing rates was no longer possible.
Can a protection agency acquire the authority to suppress its competitors without violating the rights it exists to defend? In this 1977 article, Murray N. Rothbard challenges Robert Nozick’s derivation of the minimal state from voluntary exchanges. His anarcho-capitalist perspective makes the decisive issue not an agency’s size or success, but its claimed right to prohibit independent enforcement. Combining rights theory with subjective-value economics, Rothbard argues that fear of unreliable procedures cannot justify coercive monopoly, and that compulsory protection cannot simply be counted as compensation for lost freedom. The dispute sharpens a distinction easily blurred in debates over government: agreement on legal standards need not imply a single institution entitled to enforce them. Readers encounter a libertarian challenge to state authority conducted on the terrain of individual rights that Nozick himself defends.
Trade theory has been weakened, this Nobel Symposium survey argues, by a set of artificial oppositions: Ricardo against Heckscher-Ohlin, theory against empirics, factor proportions against technology. Read properly, Haberler insists, the tradition running from Ricardo through Mill and Marshall to Ohlin and Samuelson is continuous and plural, for Ricardo belongs not to the labour theory of value but to opportunity cost within a general price system. He faults the textbook shrinking of Heckscher-Ohlin into a two-factor capital-labour model, restores natural resources and their heterogeneity to theoretical importance, and reads the modern literature on skills, R&D, technological gaps, and product cycles as, in his phrase, pure Schumpeter. What emerges is not a single predictive law but a disciplined mosaic of overlapping models, with general equilibrium preserved as an indispensable ideal type.
No sophisticated theory is required to explain why Kuwait exports oil, Bolivia tin, Brazil coffee and Portugal wine.
By the time the IMF's Interim Committee met at Kingston in 1976, floating exchange rates were already the reality; Jamaica and the Manila assembly merely legalized and disciplined them while easing the Fund away from gold-centered convertibility toward surveillance of national policy. Haberler reads the collapse of Bretton Woods not as a descent into disorder but as the predictable end of an adjustable peg undone by inflation differentials and one-way speculative bets. Against Manila's critics he denies that floating causes inflation - it merely exposes domestic monetary excess sooner - and he sharply distinguishes legitimate smoothing of disorderly markets from "dirty floating," the split rates and multiple-currency schemes that mimic controls. Skeptical of reference rates and target zones, and of pressure on Germany and Japan to inflate away their surpluses, he defends managed but disciplined floating.
The conclusion is that widespread floating is here to stay.
What exactly counts as money? Rothbard's answer refuses the Chicago school's habit of choosing a monetary aggregate because it correlates with national income—statistical fit, he argues, evades the prior question of what money is. Returning to Mises's definition of money as the generally accepted medium of exchange, he counts demand deposits and other claims the public treats as redeemable at par in standard money, while excluding stocks, bonds, and real estate that are merely liquid and must first be sold. The functional test yields his aggregate Ma: cash plus fixed-rate redeemable claims. A second measure, Mb, isolates newly created bank money entering business credit—the channel that, in Austrian cycle theory, distorts the structure of production toward higher-order capital goods, distinct from deficit finance or consumer lending.
Furthermore, the approach overlooks the fact that statistical correlation cannot establish causal connections; this can only be done by a genuine theory that works with definable and defined concepts.
The instruments to stop inflation exist; the will does not, and that gap is Hayek's diagnosis in this 1978 lecture. Central banks command the base of the credit pyramid, but democratic commitments to full employment, coupled with unions that push money wages above market-clearing levels, make expansion the path of least resistance. Drawing on Mises, Hume, and Cantillon, he shows that new money enters at particular points and spreads as a price gradient rather than a uniform rise, misleading entrepreneurs and corrupting accounting so that spurious profits are taxed as though real. Because the stimulus works only by surprise, inflation must accelerate to keep its effect, and stop-go policy grows ever more unstable. Durable stability, he concludes, requires restoring flexible wage determination before any international reform can hold.
My main aim tonight is to bring out clearly why we must stop inflation if we are to preserve a viable society of free men.
No genuine reform of the international monetary system emerged from the 1976 Jamaica Agreement — so Machlup argues in this sharp commentary answering Dr. Slighton’s defense, which, read carefully, concedes nearly every charge the prosecution had made. The agreement supplies neither an adequate adjustment mechanism nor an orderly means of controlling international liquidity, and liquidity and adjustment, he insists, hang together: reserve-rich countries postpone correction while intervening ones inflate their money supplies. Against the claim that flexible rates impose their own discipline, he notes that internationally, borrowed reserves can enlarge the effective reserve base. He sketches three routes — rules on intervention, a gold-for-SDR substitution account, a Witteveen-style cap — and dismisses “politically impossible” as a temporary condition of education, recalling that dollar devaluation was once unspeakable.
Nothing of what I have said is well thought out: I have spoken impromptu. But I think we must have the courage of saying foolish things because, eventually, out of foolish things, wise things may be distilled.
Economists devoted to efficiency, Kirzner observes, keep building theories in which genuine error cannot happen. This chapter—its title nodding to Hayek's 1937 essay on economics and knowledge—asks why, and why market theory cannot manage without it. He clears away the false admissions: Mises's poor marksman is not irrational but merely unskilled; Croce's "economic error" smuggles in value judgments; Stigler's economics of information turns ignorance into rational economizing; Leibenstein's X-inefficiency dissolves into a taste for leisure. The genuine article is different—not lacking information, but failing to notice what lies before one's very nose, the cheaper identical good passed by. Alertness cannot be a resource one chooses to acquire, since choosing it already presupposes it. On this hinge Kirzner rebuilds Jevons's Law of Indifference as the systematic discovery and correction of real error.
Scope for entrepreneurship, we have discovered, is present whenever error occurs.