The archive.

Austria's spring 1933 gold-clause and foreign-exchange ordinances did not revalue every gold debt at a stroke; they built a classified transition from nominal schilling parity to regulated value payment. Writing as the paper schilling broke openly from gold—127.49 paper schillings for 100 gold schillings on 28 March—Kerschagl turns a vague “gold clause” controversy into a sequence of legal tests: whether an obligation is effective or merely a value clause, whether it sounds in foreign valuta or gold schillings, what kind of debt it is, and whether its Stichtag has arrived. His reading of the Goldschuldenerleichterungsverordnung shows the pattern plainly—revalued mortgage capital paired with longer maturities and reduced interest, temporal redistribution rather than repudiation. Throughout, he insists that technical wording is distributive power.

Also mithin: bei Hypothekentilgung: gleiche Raten, aber mehr Raten, bei Pfandbriefen: aufgewertetes, aber später zu leistendes Kapital.

English translation: “Thus, in short: for the amortization of mortgages, equal installments, but more of them; for mortgage bonds, revalued capital, but payable at a later date.”

Medicine can name and treat the body's diseases; the science of society, by contrast, has barely learned to diagnose the disorders of collective life. Rejecting cheap analogies from biology and mechanics and the abstractions of German philosophical sociology, Thurnwald makes personality the "atom" of social analysis, with character understood as a dynamic product of biological potential and environmental fate. From this unit he builds family, male associations, leadership, and the problem of fitting the right man to the right place through automatic or planned social sifting. American Prohibition serves as his cautionary case of law enacted without regard to social psychology, breeding illegal trade and corruption; race questions in Hawaii and Fiji become social-psychological problems, and Germany, he argues, needs social inventions to match its technical ones.

Wir werden vielfach irregeführt von dem Gedanken, daß Verordnungen, Gesetze, Vorschriften ausreichen, das Gesellungsleben zu regulieren.

English translation: “We are frequently misled by the notion that ordinances, laws, and prescriptions suffice to regulate communal life.”

A plot of fifteen hundred to three thousand square meters, enough for vegetables, potatoes, fruit, poultry, rabbits, perhaps a goat, anchors this Depression-era proposal for Vienna. The wager is that industry, even in recovery, will not again employ everyone eight hours a day, so the unemployed need a supplementary livelihood rooted in the soil rather than merely healthier housing. Mahr designs the whole settlement economy: land secured by lease or hereditary building right rather than costly purchase, construction cheapened through voluntary labor service, serial building, and local materials, even an industrial labor service in which future settlers make their own bricks and window frames against credited wage claims. Financed by domestic loans at roughly fifteen hundred Schilling per holding, Stadtrandsiedlung leaves a lasting productive asset where ordinary public works leave none.

Aus diesen Gründen erscheint die Behauptung durchaus gerechtfertigt, daß die Förderung der Stadtrandsiedlung gegenwärtig unter den Zielen der staatlichen Wirtschaftspolitik an erster Stelle stehen sollte.

English translation: “For these reasons, the assertion appears entirely justified that the promotion of suburban settlement should presently stand in first place among the aims of state economic policy.”

Read as an economic program rather than a devotional text, Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo anno becomes, in Bayer's hands, a diagnosis of the Depression. He begins from the paradox of apparent overproduction: goods stand abundant while unemployment destroys the income that would buy them, each production cut breeding fresh joblessness. Against this he defines the economy's rational goal as durable maximum value—rising output adapted to need, income tied to contribution, distribution as even as possible—and finds it confirmed in the encyclical. His remedy is neither socialist planning, which lacks price formation and calculation, nor unrestrained competition, which decays into destructive underbidding and then monopoly. Bayer locates the world crisis above all in monopoly pricing by finance-controlled cartels and in the 'Fehlrationalisierung' of misdirected investment, prescribing a flexible corporative order to hold competition within bounds.

Es ist also weder die freie Konkurrenz noch die mit ihr in ursächlichem Zusammenhang stehende Monopolgestaltung in der Lage, aus sich heraus eine Heilung der Volkswirtschaft herbeizuführen.

English translation: “Thus neither free competition nor the monopoly formation causally bound up with it is able, of itself, to bring about a healing of the national economy.”

Mandeville and Adam Smith showed that a market can turn private self-interest into social coordination; Strigl's 1933 offprint, printed for the Association of Austrian Banks and Bankers, denies that this licenses the state to grant favors to particular firms and trades. He tests the interventionist slogan that every branch of national labor has a claim to protection and finds it hollow: imports do not make employment vanish but merely shift it while raising costs, wages, and consumer prices, and rescuing loss-making firms diverts scarce capital from productive uses. Such policy he names anti-selectionist, since it freezes existing arrangements against necessary structural change, and he traces a self-reinforcing spiral in which crisis breeds intervention and intervention deepens crisis. Every measure, he insists, must face one objective test: whether it serves the whole or only a favored few.

Eine gefährliche Schraube ohne Ende.

English translation: “A dangerous screw without end.”

Can economics establish laws that hold across different societies without treating human beings like objects in a laboratory? In these methodological essays, presented in the 2003 third English edition, Ludwig von Mises grounds economic knowledge in purposeful choice rather than statistical regularity or psychological motives. His claim that action is rational does not mean that people are wise or selfish: pursuing honor, religious devotion, or political power also involves choosing ends and sacrificing alternatives. Against historicism, he argues that even accounts of unique events presuppose general concepts of exchange, cost, and value. The central tension is between the universality Mises claims for economic theory and the diversity he acknowledges in human purposes. His distinctions clarify what economics can explain—and why, on his account, it can neither prescribe ultimate ends nor predict numerical outcomes.

A gifted biographer can restore an economist’s reputation—and distort the distribution of intellectual credit. In this 1933 review of Keynes’s Essays in Biography, Schumpeter admires the intimacy and literary skill of the portraits while questioning the judgments they sustain. Keynes’s rehabilitation of Malthus, he argues, risks projecting contemporary objections to saving onto different historical conditions; his compelling account of Marshall leaves Edgeworth’s theoretical achievements comparatively obscure. Schumpeter writes as a fellow economist alert both to analytical invention and to the means by which it becomes memorable. The review offers a compact encounter between two ways of judging economic achievement, showing how personal allegiance, present concerns, and narrative power can shape the history of a discipline.

A factory bought cheaply can yield a profit while its depreciation allowances fail to cover eventual replacement. This divergence between a purchaser’s success and the maintenance of productive capacity anchors Martha Stephanie Braun’s Kapitalaufzehrung. Engaging with Erich Schiff’s research, Braun asks what balance sheets actually reveal about capital lost during a depression. She distinguishes write-downs that merely reflect lower replacement costs from losses that threaten physical renewal. Her accounting analysis also informs a contested policy position: she argues that price supports, rigid wages and taxes, and renewed inflation obstruct adjustment or create fresh imbalances. The article offers a concrete way to examine why monetary wealth, private profitability, and the preservation of productive resources cannot be treated as interchangeable measures.

The paired terms Kapitalbildung and Kapitalaufzehrung conceal an ambiguity: in a boom, a society may genuinely accumulate productive wealth or merely bid up the monetary valuation of assets it already holds. Pursuing that distinction drives Schiff's contribution to early empirical business-cycle research, issued through Vienna's Institute for Business Cycle Research with acknowledged help from Hayek, Morgenstern, and Machlup. Working in the Austrian tradition of Böhm-Bawerk, he treats capital not as a stock of things but as a value-form — the capitalized stream of expected returns — so the same plant signifies differently as interest rates and profit expectations shift. Vertical malinvestment in the upswing, over-lengthened roundabout production, and the crisis felt as capital shortage amid idle capacity organize an argument haunted by the fear of secular capital shrinkage.

Die Theorie, die das Wesen des Kapitalwertes als diskontierten oder kapitalisierten Ertrages vielleicht am meisten betont und die belangreichsten Folgerungen daraus ableitet, ist die Kapitaltheorie Fishers.

English translation: “The theory that perhaps most strongly emphasizes the essence of capital value as discounted or capitalized yield, and that draws the most significant conclusions from it, is Fisher's theory of capital.”

An early German advocate of Adam Smith, August Ferdinand Lueder also questioned what economic doctrine and official statistics could explain. In this brief encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram draws attention to a connection between Lueder’s departures from Smith and his criticism of statistical knowledge: both stress intellectual and moral forces in social life. Lueder emerges as more than an importer of liberal economics—he emphasized subjective value, opposed slavery and serfdom, and advocated Jewish emancipation. Pribram’s judgement is measured: he finds Lueder’s attacks on government-serving statistics exaggerated, yet credits them with helping curb governmental interference. The entry offers a compact account of liberalism joined to scepticism about the reach and political uses of social measurement.

Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.

If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.

Written in the spring of 1933, as Hitler consolidated power, this short essay confronts a comforting misreading head-on: that National Socialism was a conservative or capitalist reaction. Hayek argues the opposite, that it was a genuinely socialist and collectivist movement, the ripened fruit of an anti-liberal current running through German thought since the Bismarckian era. Its hostility to the Marxist parties, he contends, was national and cultural rather than economic, while its intellectual debts ran to Marxian relativism and anti-rationalism. Tracing how collectivist planning tends toward coercion, the suppression of intellectual freedom, and finally dictatorship, he warns that other Western nations expanding state control over economic life court the same descent. A compact statement of the themes Hayek would enlarge a decade later in The Road to Serfdom.

The inherent logic of collectivism makes it impossible to confine it to a limited sphere.