2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Neither instant copying nor a permanent monopoly serves an economy: some delay rewards the innovator who bore the sunk costs, but prompt competitive imitation is what turns one firm's advance into a general rise in productivity. From that premise Machlup builds a spare model of quasi-rents discounted over an expected imitation lag, and uses it to doubt that patents earn their keep. Long fixed terms, he argues, are a blunt instrument, too generous for cheap innovations, too weak for costly ones, and undercut anyway by circum-invention, substitutes, and discounting. The strongest case for a patent system, he suggests, is that it fosters a socially useful illusion of protection; the true optimum lag lies far closer to an innovator's natural head start than to sixteen years of statutory delay. The essay honors Fredrik Zeuthen.
To buy innovation by paying with unnecessarily long delays of imitation is a poor bargain for society to make.
The sprawling ambition here is a synthesis: to show that economics cannot be severed from philosophy, sociology, history, and value, and to read the modern economy through recurring tensions rather than static equilibrium. Bayer sorts a vast empirical field, from consumer sovereignty undone by advertising through class stratification, social security, nationalization in Austria and Britain, European integration, and the rival plans of China, India, and Russia, into four fundamental tensions: absolute versus relative values, production versus consumption, money versus goods, and individual versus totality. The immoderation he ascribes to so-called capitalism follows, he argues, from absolutizing what are merely relative values. His remedy is Wirtschaftsgestaltung, economic design built from below through firms, cooperatives, municipal economy, and codetermination, with only residual tasks reserved for the top.
Der Mensch ist mittelbar und unmittelbar Gestalter und Ziel der Wirtschaft.
English translation: “Man is, both indirectly and directly, the shaper and the goal of the economy.”
Across every front of postwar economic policy—money, cartels, rents, agriculture, public finance—Amonn diagnoses the same disorder: isolated, "pointillist" interventions that each summon the next until a market order slides toward central planning. Invoking Eucken's interdependence of orders, he shows how cheap money invites credit expansion, inflation, and then price controls. He reads the 1957 Law Against Restraints of Competition as a prohibition so laced with exceptions that it becomes abuse-control by another name, defends rent decontrol against entrenched tenant privilege, attacks cost-covering agricultural prices, and rejects Keynesian deficit finance and redistributive taxation alike. His guiding maxim, aligned with Erhard's "prosperity for all," is in dubio pro libertate—when in doubt, decide for freedom.
Will man den einkommenschwachen Schichten, die es nötig haben, helfen, so kann dies — und soll dies — durch sozialpolitische Maßnahmen geschehen, wie es bis anhin als Regel gegolten hat. Das ist etwas wesentlich anderes als die Umverteilung der Einkommen.
English translation: “If one wishes to help the low-income strata who are in need, this can — and should — be done through social-policy measures, as has hitherto been the rule. That is something essentially different from the redistribution of incomes.”
How could monetary expansion remain an implausible explanation of the mark’s depreciation to economists witnessing it? In this 1959 essay, Mises locates the roots of Germany’s 1923 currency catastrophe in an intellectual culture that made ethical intentions, national loyalty, and confidence in state authority tests of economic truth. His distinctive evidence is a surviving 1914 memorandum of objections raised against Böhm-Bawerk and himself: interest theory became a defence of unearned income, while monetary institutions were judged by their usefulness for war. Explicit about the limits of his recollections and missing notes, Mises offers a participant’s account of how rival explanations were excluded from debate. The essay’s particular interest lies in this connection between scholarly judgement and policy: arguments could lose a hearing not because they had been refuted, but because their presumed purposes were condemned.
Die Ideen, die die Politik der Völker leiten, fallen nicht vom Himmel.
English translation: “The ideas which guide the policies of nations do not fall from heaven.”
Every political conflict of the age, Mises insists, is at bottom economic, which makes economic theory a civic necessity rather than a specialist's luxury. This short review-essay uses the new complete English translation of Bohm-Bawerk's Capital and Interest to redefine the general reader as a citizen whose political judgment depends on theoretical literacy: whoever debates inflation, unions, taxation, or socialism without grasping economic fundamentals merely parrots what he has picked up from others no better informed. Mises supplies a reading order, beginning with the second volume on saving, capital, value, and price, then the critical history of interest theories in the first, and singles out the refutation of Marx's labor theory of value as the politically decisive chapter. Abstract theory, he argues, is the West's sharpest weapon against Soviet destructionism.
There is no doubt that Böhm-Bawerk's book is the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory.
When household budgets grow, does consumption expand in quantity, shift towards dearer varieties, or move into different goods altogether? Gerhard Tintner examines these alternatives through Austria’s 1954/55 urban consumption survey, distinguishing expenditure responses from changes in quantities and average prices paid. His estimates show why a simple contrast between necessities and luxuries is insufficient: rent protection and social insurance can weaken the connection between spending and household resources, while a food’s classification as “inferior” may depend on the social group examined. The report’s distinctive interest lies in its scrutiny of what such estimates warrant. Statistical uncertainty qualifies apparent differences, and forecasts depend on assumptions linking comparisons between households to changes over time. Readers can discover both concrete patterns of Austrian consumption and the limits of using household budgets to anticipate demand.
Although Husserl never engaged the concrete problems of the social sciences, his analyses of intersubjectivity, inner time-consciousness, appresentation, and typification supply, on Schütz's account, exactly the tools those sciences lack. The essay first clears away hasty appropriations, Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, and the early Scheler among them, and reads Ortega y Gasset's insistence on the ego's radical solitude as exposing the unresolved circularity in Husserl's constitution of the alter ego. The decisive move is to relocate Husserl's importance from transcendental theory to the natural attitude, the pregiven world taken as self-evident until called into question. Linking Husserl to Weber's problem of meaningful action, Schütz sketches a program, sedimented stocks of knowledge, relevance, reciprocity of perspectives, signs and symbols, and concludes that social science belongs to a constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, not a transcendental one.
Max Weber hat gezeigt, daß alle Phänomene der soziokulturellen Welt in sozialem Handeln gründen und auf soziales Handeln zurückverwiesen werden können.
English translation: “Max Weber has shown that all phenomena of the socio-cultural world are grounded in social action and can be traced back to social action.”
The classical gold standard is often imagined as a self-regulating machine; this dense National Bureau study replaces that image with a practical arrangement of tolerable deviations and institutional adaptation. Comparing monthly interest rates, exchange rates, gold points, arbitrage, and central-bank discount policy across the United States, Britain, France, and Germany for roughly 1870–1914 and 1925–1938, Morgenstern shows that mint par was rarely touched, that gold points depended on shipping costs and market practice, and that money markets displayed a bounded 'solidarity' rather than exact convergence. A new quantitative measure of inter-market 'effort' or stress runs through the analysis. World War I emerges as the great structural break, shattering a prewar coherence the interwar gold-exchange standard never restored — and throughout, he insists that fragile statistics cannot bear more theory than their quality allows.
Economic statistics are—in the overwhelming majority of cases—not scientific observations.
Delivered as three lectures in Cairo against the postwar tide of import substitution, the Singer-Prebisch thesis, and Myrdal's backwash pessimism, these essays defend trade as an engine of development while conceding narrowly bounded exceptions. Haberler refuses to equate development with industrialization, Switzerland and Denmark being advanced without it, and reframes comparative advantage as a dynamic channel supplying capital goods, technical knowledge, foreign investment, and competitive discipline. He denies that classical theory ever promised income convergence, and dismantles the claim that primary exporters face a secular deterioration in their terms of trade, faulting its reliance on British price series, freight costs, and quality bias. Disguised unemployment he treats as low productivity, not a free resource; infant-industry protection he allows only as a costly, temporary investment, preferring education, health, and infrastructure to trade restriction.
The underdeveloped countries are not exempt from the general law of scarcity—they least of all, unfortunately.
On the centenary of On Liberty, the liberal problem is deliberately displaced: from the legal freedom of discussion to the harder matter of readiness to discuss. Mill's defense, Voegelin argues, rests on an anthropology of 'improvement' that treats liberty not as a metaphysical right but as an instrument of social order, and so cannot secure the very goods it protects. To recover what rights cannot supply, the essay turns to Plato's Protagoras, where prolixity of speech becomes the model technique for preventing rational inquiry, and where virtue proves teachable only when rooted in episteme, a knowledge of the order of life rather than a stock of rules. Its refusal, Voegelin insists, is amathia, folly; and modern ideological culture has confined reason to weak but genuine enclaves in a jungle of unreason.
Rationale Diskussion der Ordnung in der Existenz des Menschen und der Gesellschaft ist nur möglich unter der Bedingung des Wissens um transzendente Erfüllung.
English translation: “Rational discussion of the order in the existence of man and society is possible only under the condition of knowledge of transcendent fulfillment.”
Political liberalism, in this encyclopedia article, names something narrower and older than democracy or progress: the Anglo-Dutch and above all Whig tradition of limiting and binding state power. Hayek condenses its classical form into three interlocking principles — freedom of opinion, the rule of law, and private property with its competitive economy — and traces the idea from post-Glorious-Revolution England through its rationalist French mutation, its late and failing German career under Bismarck, to its revival after totalitarianism. The French turn is his pivot: confidence in free social development gives way to confidence in a plan, shifting the question from limiting power to seizing it. His sharpest warning is that political and economic liberalism cannot be prised apart, contra Croce; replace competition with direction and the rule of law is hollowed out even where basic rights remain.
Tatsächlich hängt die Eigentums- und Vertragsfreiheit auf das innigste mit der Herrschaft des Gesetzes zusammen: die eine ist ohne die andere nicht möglich.
English translation: “In fact, freedom of property and contract is most intimately connected with the rule of law: the one is not possible without the other.”
Ownership gives entrepreneurs control over production—but, in Mises’s account, consumers continually put that control to the test. This encyclopedia entry from the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften presents the market as a process in which purchases, profits, and losses redirect productive resources under conditions of uncertainty. Its central tension lies between private command over wealth and dependence on buyers’ choices. Mises sharpens the argument by distinguishing monopoly ownership from the ability to profit by restricting supply, and by explaining entrepreneurial profit as a temporary result of anticipating change rather than a permanent reward for possession. Readers can trace how consumer sovereignty becomes not only his explanation of market coordination but also his standard for defending inequality and criticizing redistribution.