2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A central bank can hold ample reserves yet undermine monetary stability by refusing to redeem its notes. In this six-page discussion contribution from 1925, Ludwig von Mises makes that distinction central to his replies on European monetary reconstruction. His perspective combines a defence of theory’s practical power—including the destructive power of mistaken doctrines—with insistence on unconditional redemption at parity. Austria supplies a revealing test: rising prices and expanding note circulation, he argues, need not prove renewed inflation when world-market adjustment and returning demand for domestic money explain them. This brief intervention shows Mises testing monetary principles against disputed evidence, distinguishing the appearance of stability from its institutional conditions, and the quantity of notes from the public’s willingness to hold them.
A public that has learned to watch exchange rates may frustrate inflationary finance even when governments have learned nothing. In this second contribution to a recorded discussion in 1925, Mises locates the restraint on renewed note printing in the population’s rapid response to depreciation, not in official wisdom. His reply to Spitzmüller raises a different question: does an economist’s prominence make him responsible for policies he opposed? Mises distinguishes his writings and lectures from the powers exercised by ministers and central-bank governors, naming the 1922 stabilization as the sole adopted Austrian monetary measure consistent with his recommendations. This brief, pointed exchange shows both his account of changed public behaviour after inflation and his resistance to being credited with authority he denied possessing.
An equation can look like a law of cause and effect while stating only an identity — and that, in this early critique, is the charge laid against Schumpeter's monetary formula E = MU = Σpm. Haberler shows that its right-hand side merely restates money income as the sum of prices times quantities consumed, while its left-hand side reduces velocity to the number of purchases each coin intermediates; the whole is a tautology, not an explanation. From this he presses on to the larger quarry, the "objective exchange value of money," which he dissolves into ordinary price relations and denies any existence as a measurable social magnitude. Against Wieser and Anderson he insists that value theory needs only two concepts, subjective value and price, anticipating what he would later call the microfoundation of macroeconomics.
The problem of the value of money is a sham problem!
Higher farm incomes need not mean a wealthier society. In this 1925 contribution responding to Professor Laur, Joseph A. Schumpeter sets aside specifically Swiss conditions to examine what agricultural income can—and cannot—tell policymakers. A protective tariff may increase farmers’ receipts without increasing output, while drawing labour and capital away from more valuable uses. Schumpeter’s distinctive move is to separate the stimulus that higher prices give producers from any judgment of public benefit: consumers’ losses and alternative uses of resources do not disappear when a sector’s accounts improve. Yet his criticism leaves room for temporary assistance to preserve viable investments or overcome business hesitation. This compact article offers a concrete way to distinguish monetary gains, productive expansion and economic welfare without treating either protection or intensification as an end in itself.
Stripping the hypertrophy of zeros from a ruined currency, the statute of 20 December 1924 fixed 10,000 depreciated kronen as a single new Schilling. Kerschagl's annotated edition gathers the law, its motives report, his own section-by-section commentary and a sheaf of finance-ministry and National Bank circulars around it. He is at pains to stress what the reform is not: no revaluation, no depreciation—existing notes, deposits and claims keep their worth in a purely arithmetical shift of four decimal places. What it does accomplish is to fix the Schilling's gold value in law, defining the currency's upper limit while the National Bank's exchange policy guards the lower. The volume documents new gold coins, groschen, the long redemption periods protecting old-krone holders, and the daily mechanics of converting a nation's accounts.
Der Vorgang des Ueberganges zur Schillingrechnung ist eine reine Rechenoperation.
English translation: “The process of transition to Schilling accounting is a purely arithmetical operation.”
Behind the wartime slogan of 'Mitteleuropa' lay a technical problem of customs schedules, and it is that problem Gratz and Schüller reconstruct: the secret German–Austro-Hungarian negotiations, from 1915 to their burial in the collapse of October 1918, to fuse the two empires into a single closed economic area. Part of the Carnegie Endowment's economic history of the war, the study tracks the bargaining over preferential tariffs, the last Austro-Hungarian Ausgleich, and the Salzburg framework of gradually reduced Zwischenzölle, then widens into the peace settlements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest—Ukrainian grain, Romanian oil, the Danube question, the Polish tangle. Throughout, grand design is forced through protectionist compromise: economic union imagined as a bloc to rival the world's larger markets, yet checked at every turn by incompatible agrarian and industrial interests.
Meine Monarchie braucht unbedingt an ihren Grenzen ein freundlich gesinntes Rumänien.
English translation: “My Monarchy absolutely needs a friendly-minded Romania on its borders.”
A currency can remain a gold currency without ever putting gold into everyday hands—this is the paradox Machlup sets out to define rather than to sell. Separating the monetary standard from the physical medium of payment, he argues that gold need not circulate as coin if it is concentrated as a reserve behind a system held at parity through the Umtauschprinzip, the rule of convertibility between domestic and foreign money at a fixed rate. Tracing the idea to Ricardo's neglected 1816 ingot plan, appended here, and testing it against India, the South American conversion offices, and Austria-Hungary's own krone, he shows the arrangement economizes scarce gold while preserving discipline. The system is not self-enforcing: its sole danger, he insists, lies in inflationary measures.
Goldkernwährung bedeutet Goldkonzentration.
English translation: “The gold-core standard means the concentration of gold.”
Beneath the noisy quarrels over method, Schumpeter contends, the real work of economics advances quietly, and no one exemplifies that subterranean progress better than F. Y. Edgeworth, a master of exact analysis who founded no school. Formally a review of Edgeworth's collected papers, this 1925 essay becomes an assessment of the discipline's whole achievement. Schumpeter reads mathematics not as decoration but as the natural language of interdependent quantities, and insists that Edgeworth and Marshall, for all their classical rhetoric, stand on ground cleared by Walras, Jevons, and Menger. Taxation, where a levy disturbs equilibrium and its incidence shifts through the entire organism, and monopoly, where discrimination can sometimes beat competition, show why modern theory must analyze classes of cases rather than issue universal maxims of free trade or laissez-faire.
Fast unbekümmert um methodische Moden geht sozusagen subkutan die positive Arbeit der Wissenschaft ihren Weg.
English translation: “Almost unconcerned with methodological fashions, the positive work of science proceeds, so to speak, subcutaneously along its way.”
Method and subject matter mutually determine one another: define the economy as a system of means for ends, as causal regularity, or as functional relation, and you have already chosen a different object. That thesis governs this study of how pure economics can be scientific, appearing here in its third edition of 1948—delayed, its preface records, by the author's arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from his teaching post. Kerschagl compresses the history of method from the Physiocrats through the classics, the historical school's cry of “back to reality,” and Menger's restoration of exact theory, then turns to its problems: what reality a science can claim, exactness without mathematical calculation, necessity replaced by probability and conditional validity. Methodological monism, he concludes, is a logical utopia; causal and teleological analysis both belong to a science of purposeful economic life.
Wirklichkeit ist ihrem Wesen nach das Wesentliche und nicht das Vollständige.
English translation: “Reality is, in its essence, the essential, not the complete.”
When does scholarly caution become a failure of public responsibility? In this first report, published in 1925 and republished here in 2022, Felix Somary confronts economists’ delayed opposition to German inflation. His criticism joins a defence of monetary theory to a concrete account of what depreciation concealed: firms could accumulate materials while uncertainty prevented long-term investment. Apparent enrichment, he argues, could coexist with the destruction of productive opportunities. Stabilization, meanwhile, remained vulnerable to reparations arrangements that might undermine central-bank restraint. The report offers a pointed encounter between economic diagnosis and professional obligation: Somary demands further empirical research but refuses to make complete evidence a prerequisite for warning against destructive policy.
Two men are inseparable in this 1925 portrait: the founder of exact interest theory and the disciplined servant of a vanishing Habsburg state. Böhm-Bawerk, Schumpeter argues, extended Menger's marginal utility through imputation into a full theory of capital whose decisive innovation was to make time internal to equilibrium, with present goods valued above future goods, longer roundabout production yielding more than proportional output, and interest emerging as an agio rather than a legal or social accident. Schumpeter ranks the Positive Theorie des Kapitales beside Marx's system in ambition but free of its political passion. The essay's second half follows the same intelligence into the 1896 direct-tax reform and the finance ministry under Koerber, where Böhm-Bawerk defended budget discipline against parliament and the army, resigning when military claims could no longer be contained.
Die Angelpunkte einer jeden Theorie des Wirtschaftsablaufes sind die Wert- und die Zinslehre.
English translation: “The pivotal points of any theory of the economic process are the theory of value and the theory of interest.”
Inflation redistributes wealth not only through rising prices but through unequal speeds of recognition and response. In this 1925 review of Julius Bunzel’s edited volume on Austrian monetary depreciation and stabilization, Martha Stephanie Braun draws a common argument from contributions she finds insufficiently integrated. Her focus is concrete: workers lose purchasing power between wage payments, tax revenues shrink between assessment and collection, and declining commodity quality conceals losses in living standards. She praises agreement across the contributors’ political differences while questioning their causal ordering and gaps in statistical evidence. The review offers a compact account of how monetary instability changes calculation and expectations—and a caution against treating it as the sole explanation for cultural developments whose origins precede the war.