2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Keynes defines the multiplier as the reciprocal of one minus the marginal propensity to consume — and in that definition, this methodological critique argues, the celebrated result is already smuggled in. To infer a large multiplier from a high propensity to consume explains nothing, Haberler contends, unless that propensity has been established independently; otherwise the argument merely renames the unknown magnitude it claims to illuminate. He separates the formal aggregate propensity, which is just the algebra of the multiplier, from the psychological propensity describing how people actually spend, and shows that leakages, time lags, monetary velocity and displaced investment stand between them. The same defect, he adds, runs through Keynes's Treatise, where saving and investment are defined into equality and then made to explain one another. Identities can clarify accounts while misleading theory when mistaken for mechanisms.
By assuming something about the marginal propensity to consume he assumes something about the multiplier, but this is no more an explanation of the multiplier that pauvreté is an explanation of poverty.
Beneath the visible quarrels of schools, systems, and policy creeds runs more logical continuity than economists usually grant, and this essay reads the history of theory as sedimentary rather than revolutionary: Ricardo clarifies Smith, while Jevons, Walras, and Menger carry classical work forward rather than discarding it, like geological layers conditioning the ones above them. The occasion is Taussig's Wages and Capital, which Schumpeter credits with finally disposing of the wages-fund doctrine and, alongside Böhm-Bawerk, supplying a theory of capital as a time-structured process that marginal utility and marginal productivity alone could never reach. Along the way he names the Ricardian Vice — presenting simplified models to the public as policy certainties — as the standing temptation the theorist must resist.
There is more logic in the history of those tools of analysis which we have come to call economic theory than either its friends or its foes admit.
An unfavorable but respectful tribute is how this 1936 review casts its verdict on Keynes's General Theory, granting the book's public impact while charging it with reviving the Ricardian habit of smuggling situated policy into theory disguised as universal law — on every page, Schumpeter writes, the ghost of that policy looks over the analyst's shoulder. His technical objections are sharp: the aggregate demand and supply schedules illegitimately stretch the Marshallian cross to social aggregates; treating employment as an index of output assumes invariant production functions and so assumes away the continuous revolution in production methods that defines capitalism; the propensity to consume enters as a deus ex machina, and liquidity preference names rather than explains. The whole closes with a satirical bow to the spending of Louis XV.
Economics will never have nor merit any authority until that unholy alliance is dissolved.
Social insurance may protect against individual misfortune, but what happens when economic contraction makes unemployment a mass condition? In this contribution to the 1936 National Conference of Social Work proceedings, Karl Pribram challenges the stability assumed by social legislation without dismissing its protective purpose. He locates recurrent crises in monetary and credit imbalances, distinguishing these from the trade barriers and international debt difficulties that, he argues, deepened the Depression. His practical concern is how protection should change with economic conditions: shorter hours, public works, and wage adjustments cannot be judged independently of industry and timing. The essay offers a pointed encounter between business-cycle analysis and social policy, showing why preventing economic breakdown and relieving its uneven consequences require distinct but coordinated measures.
"Overcapacity" is less an industrial fact, this 1936 lecture contends, than a political dogma — the belief that competition either adopts new techniques too slowly or squanders capital by scrapping serviceable machines. Hayek dissolves the charge by separating technical from economic capacity: a machine may still run yet be worth nothing, because new capital does not duplicate the old but economizes on labor and materials, freeing them for use elsewhere. Old plant should survive only while the new method's total cost exceeds its bare operating cost. From this he attacks "capital preservation" as a false end, whether protecting railways against motor traffic or shielding state assets, and ridicules forced standardization for letting an authority decide what consumers ought to like. Idle plant, he adds, may signal a scarcity of capital, not a surplus.
Die Normierungsfanatiker begeben sich da auf ein außerordentlich gefährliches Feld, und ich wenigstens kann mich nicht für die Idee begeistern, daß jemand anderer für mich entscheiden soll, was mir gefallen oder schmecken soll und was nicht.
English translation: “The fanatics of standardization are venturing here onto extraordinarily dangerous ground, and I, at least, cannot warm to the idea that someone else should decide for me what I ought to like or find tasty and what not.”
Bank-created fiduciary media, notes and current accounts unbacked by gold, expand credit, push interest rates below their natural level, and lure entrepreneurs into ventures that look profitable only under distorted conditions. Setting out the Austrian monetary theory of the trade cycle, Mises traces its lineage to the English Currency School while faulting that school for missing current accounts as engines of expansion and for confining its gaze to national rather than international credit. He separates genuine capital accumulation from the artificial boom, explains why sustained expansion must give way to either crisis or currency collapse, and reads depression as the necessary liquidation of malinvestment. Renewed pump-priming only postpones and deepens the reckoning. Wicksell, Boehm-Bawerk, Wieser, Hayek, Machlup, and Robbins stand behind the argument.
It is not the task of the banks to remedy the consequences of the scarcity of capital or the effects of wrong economic policy by extension of credit.
Why hold money rather than invest it until payment falls due? For Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan, this question exposes a difficulty in separating monetary theory from the theory of prices: uncertainty shapes both the desire for cash and the valuation of other goods. This 1936 article brings cash-balance analysis and Wicksellian capital theory into conversation, arguing that money cannot simply be added to a system of relative prices already determined without it. Its distinctive move is to scrutinize the supposed barter economy against which monetary effects are measured, asking what people there would use to preserve value against unforeseen needs. Readers can discover why monetary neutrality depends on how it is defined, and why revisable expectations make liquidity, credit, and commodity demand parts of the same problem.
Imperial conquest can advance even as imperial authority enters a crisis. In this 1936 article, Richard C. Thurnwald locates that contradiction partly in colonial education: schools train subordinates but also equip intellectuals to demand independence. His East African analysis follows less conspicuous transformations, as taxation, wages, missions, and administrative appointments reshape chiefly authority, kinship obligations, and social prestige. Political sovereignty, he argues, would not by itself undo dependence on distant markets or resolve conflicts over cultural inheritance. The article’s distinctive tension lies in its conjunction of support for African cultural autonomy with paternalistic judgments about African readiness for independence. Its concrete institutional observations allow readers to examine both the reach of colonial restructuring and the limits of Thurnwald’s attempt to treat imperialism as a process of cultural contact.
Written for American students in the Governments of Modern Europe series, this account treats Switzerland as a mirror in which the United States might study its own federal habits. Rappard traces the confederation from the 1291 forest-canton alliance through the Sonderbund War to the Constitution of 1848, which consciously borrowed American bicameralism even as Switzerland exported the initiative and referendum back across the Atlantic. He anatomizes the collegial seven-member Federal Council, the supremacy of the legislature, the tenacity of cantonal and communal loyalty, and the slow drift toward etatisme. Neutrality, guaranteed since 1815, he defends as a necessity rather than a virtue, and Switzerland's guarded entry into the League of Nations emerges as the cautious conduct of a small state reluctant to surrender its ultimate safeguard.
For Switzerland, to resort to a more modern metaphor, neutrality is the parachute which she will not abandon until international flying becomes safer.
Frank Knight had reduced capital to a self-perpetuating fund — permanent, self-maintaining, its replacement a mere matter of technology. Against that "mythology" Hayek defends the Austrian insight that capital is no substance behind things but a structure of heterogeneous, perishable goods whose replacement must be economically explained. He concedes that Böhm-Bawerk's single "average period of production" oversimplifies, yet insists Knight's alternative is worse, since it cannot explain how limited capital restricts the choice among known methods. More capitalistic production means investing some factor for longer; a given stock of capital goods offers not one subsistence fund but many possible time-shaped income streams. What matters are prospective returns, not original factors — and the doctrine collapses only under the fiction of perfect foresight.
The theory looks forward, not back.
An abundant wheat crop lowers prices; dearer labour and cheaper capital spur labour-saving inventions; endangered banks receive central-bank credit — three statements that look logically alike yet do not, Machlup insists, carry equal economic validity. Writing in 1936 amid the quarrels over Lionel Robbins's definition of economics and Ralph Souter's revolt against disciplinary 'regimentation,' he ranks propositions by the anonymity and generality of the conduct they presuppose, a vocabulary he borrows from Alfred Schütz. The payoff is practical. In international transfer theory, a low-generality institutional assumption about central-bank credit gets smuggled into a causal chain as though it were a market law, and the argument collapses. Methodology earns its keep, he concludes, precisely because failing to mark the order of one's statements has serious practical consequences.
The type of the competitive seller is not so likely to disappear from the economic stage as the type of the benevolent central bank manager.
Economic and political liberalism, Mises insists, are of one stock and cannot be divided: strip away market freedom and parliamentary democracy and civil liberty go with it. This short Geneva essay presents the private-property market economy as a form of economic democracy, one in which consumers direct production through their daily purchases while political majorities increasingly vote against that very order. Drawing on William Rappard's study of Switzerland, where democratic expansion marched in step with growing state intervention, he frames the age's central choice starkly, between liberal-democratic freedom and an etatism that, left to its logic, tends toward dictatorship. Interventionism, statism, socialism, and the planned economy figure here not as moderate alternatives but as solvents of the constitutional order itself.
Jeder Groschen stellt einen Stimmzettel dar.
English translation: “Every penny represents a ballot.”