The archive.

Gold seemed the one balance-of-payments figure a statistician could trust: physically definite, internationally traded, central to gold-standard theory. Applying a single reciprocal test — country A's reported gold exports to B should match B's reported imports from A — Morgenstern finds the trust misplaced. For the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, and Canada in 1900, 1907, 1928, and 1935, the paired ratios refuse to cluster near unity and sometimes turn absurd, worst of all in the classical gold-standard years. Earmarking, transit trade, misclassification of gold and silver, and traveler-carried coin all corrupt the record, and no scientific ground exists for preferring one nation's figures over another's. If the best-looking data are this poor, he warns, a sound theory cannot rest on them — and trade statistics are likely worse still.

There is no reason why, say, an American economist or a man from Mars should prefer one set of these statistics over the others.

How can ethnology compare cultures across continents without flattening them into evolutionary stages or freezing them into isolated culture areas? Composed in 1945 and published a decade later, this methodological essay answers by way of source criticism: ethnographic “facts” are produced through uneven encounters between observers who differ in patience, language, and purpose, and cannot be treated as interchangeable units. Thurnwald credits the culture-circle theory of Gräbner, Ankermann, and Schmidt with recognizing diffusion, yet rejects its rigid Kulturkreis schemata; he embraces Malinowski’s functionalism for attending to living institutions, then faults it for excluding history. Insisting that no single continent suffices for developmental history, he treats subsistence — hunting, hoe agriculture, pastoralism, seafaring — as the engine of hierarchy and assimilation, and makes cultural history a form of human self-knowledge.

Wir dürfen uns diese Vorgänge nicht statisch vorstellen, sondern im ganzen dynamischen Ablauf.

English translation: “We must not conceive these processes statically, but in their entire dynamic course.”

A currency may buy goods without giving its holder freedom to choose what to buy. This distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1955 article on convertibility and economic organization. Ration cards provide his concrete test: when purchasing requires a personal entitlement as well as money, equal nominal incomes no longer confer equal command over goods. Kerschagl argues that monetary rules cannot function independently of the institutions governing production, credit, and trade. Yet his criticism of intervention does not become a blanket rejection of transitional arrangements: multilateral clearing, including the European Payments Union, can help advance convertibility. The article offers a way to distinguish restrictions that diminish money’s general usefulness from arrangements that may widen it, making convertibility a question of economic freedom and institutional compatibility rather than exchange technique alone.

Building more homes does not necessarily put families into dwellings they need and can afford. In this 1955 review essay, Alfred Amonn examines eight reports from West Germany’s housing advisory council with Swiss policy firmly in view. He finds a compelling distinction between financing construction and helping households pay rent: protecting all existing tenants through frozen rents can discourage mobility and maintenance while leaving overcrowded families without relief. His support for cost-covering rents therefore goes together with targeted assistance, not the withdrawal of social protection. Particularly revealing is his attention to indirect effects—smaller new dwellings may free larger homes for families, while cheaper credit can complicate funded welfare provision. The essay offers a concrete examination of why housing finance, household needs, and social assistance must be considered together.

Do economic theories resolve their authors’ psychological conflicts, or answer problems imposed by their methods of reasoning? In this 1956 review of Walter A. Weisskopf’s The Psychology of Economics, Karl Pribram tests the limits of a psychoanalytic history of economic thought. He accepts that ethical tensions can illuminate doctrine, but challenges the inference that Smith’s labor theory of value chiefly glorifies work: inherited scientific procedures offer another explanation. Ricardo, in turn, appears as a logician concerned with consistent premises rather than a moralist reconciling labor with property. More receptive to Weisskopf’s treatment of Marshall, Pribram avoids a blanket rejection of psychological interpretation. This brief review offers a concrete test of competing explanations for economic ideas: unconscious motives, historical inheritance, and the internal demands of analysis.

Does a growing literature on business cycles necessarily mean better understanding? In this brief 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl defends the nearly unchanged republication of Arthur Spiethoff’s early-1920s study while acknowledging its distance from contemporary model-based economics. His pointed judgment is that subsequent research, for all its volume, has added comparatively little to Spiethoff’s treatment of the central problems. Yet his defence is not simply retrospective: he singles out the statistical tables as evidence of what historical inquiry can contribute to economic theory. The review offers a compact statement of Kerschagl’s standards for intellectual progress—analytical reach and useful evidence rather than novelty or quantity.

Can economic planning preserve the market mechanism, and can unions of sovereign states reconcile welfare with defence? These are the possibilities Richard Kerschagl finds worth examining in his brief 1956 review of Meade’s Probleme nationaler und internationaler Wirtschaftsordnung. His interest is qualified by a sharp suspicion: what Meade calls liberal-socialist thinking, Kerschagl argues, begins with liberal theory but ends in socialist practice. Yet this objection does not prevent him from valuing the discussion of economic union or welcoming the German translation. The review offers a compact encounter with a critic who tests Meade’s proposals both against their political implications and against continental scholarship he believes Meade has neglected.

An additional billion schillings may create employment—but where does the billion come from? In this short 1956 review, Richard Kerschagl welcomes Josef Steindl’s empirical study, published by the Austrian Institute of Economic Research, while drawing a firm boundary around its conclusions. Estimates of employment gains, he argues, cannot settle the question of inflation without distinguishing money creation, credit finance and investment backed by real capital. His warning about financing hydropower through banknote issuance gives the objection a concrete edge. The review offers a compact encounter between appreciation of statistical modelling and suspicion of Keynesian assumptions: Kerschagl accepts the study’s findings as valuable, but disputes their sufficiency as an economic assessment.

Industrialization may foster economic self-sufficiency, yet surplus production can renew the need for international exchange. In this brief review of Sven Helander’s Das Autarkieproblem in der Weltwirtschaft, Richard Kerschagl draws out that tension while questioning a predominantly economic account of it. He values Helander’s extensive evidence on autarkic formations as groundwork for future theoretical models, but sees the prospect of overproduction as a reason to consider slower, better-coordinated development. His sharpest reservation concerns political choice: relations between autarky and the world economy also turn on the alternative of “butter or guns.” The review offers a compact distinction between what an empirical survey can establish and what requires an account of political priorities.

Explaining why business cycles fluctuate is not the same as making their course calculable. Richard Kerschagl’s 1956 review of Walter Adolf Jöhr’s Die Konjunkturschwankungen sharpens this distinction: he welcomes social psychology as a means of understanding irregular economic movements, but argues that it leaves calculation largely general and symbolic. His qualified appreciation also challenges Jöhr’s weighting of monetary factors and asks whether a nearly 700-page synthesis delivers proportionate theoretical gains. This brief review offers a concrete methodological dispute rather than a rejection of psychological explanation: how should economists judge an approach that clarifies the direction of tendencies while weakening their capacity to calculate particular processes?

Platinum’s expanding industrial uses did not necessarily make it a secure store of wealth. In this 1956 survey, Richard Kerschagl examines the tension between growing demand from petroleum refining, chemicals and electrical engineering and the threat of sudden releases from accumulated stocks. His economic perspective separates annual mining output from metal available for sale, and platinum’s specific technical uses from those of increasingly abundant palladium. Concentrated production in Canada and South Africa, uncertain Soviet supplies and divided trading markets complicate any simple equation between scarcity and price. Readers can discover why Kerschagl regarded platinum’s medium-term prospects cautiously favourably while resisting confident short-term forecasts—and how industrial indispensability could coexist with speculative vulnerability.

An economy can expand without changing how it produces or improving output per person. For Alfred Amonn, this distinction exposes a central weakness in dynamic equilibrium theory: explaining growth is not yet explaining development. In this 1956 review essay on Willy Kraus’s Wirtschaftswachstum und Gleichgewicht, Amonn tests models of expansion against the harder questions of technical change, capital deepening, and structural transformation. His criticism also separates equilibrium from two conditions often associated with it—steady growth and full employment. Readers can discover how definitions of saving, investment, and monetary equilibrium shape apparently substantive disagreements, and why Amonn regards the prevention of cumulative disturbances as a more defensible policy aim than a guaranteed programme of uninterrupted growth.