The archive.

Perfect competition earns its keep here not as a description of any real market but as the benchmark against which every messier case is measured, and messier cases, this 1934 review essay argues, are where most economic life actually sits. Assessing Joan Robinson's Economics of Imperfect Competition, Schumpeter fixes on marginal revenue as her decisive analytical discovery, the tool that restores symmetry to demand-and-supply reasoning and unifies pricing across competition, monopoly, and the territory between. He credits the book's rigor and teachability while faulting its cost: a resolutely Marshallian, two-variable, partial-equilibrium frame that forgoes indifference curves and Walrasian generality. Imperfect-competition analysis, he warns, overturns welfare and policy verdicts, sometimes into the exact opposite of what they were twenty years before.

For any science or part of a science, the first task always consists in establishing the logical autonomy of its field, or rather the conditions under which there is logical autonomy.

An early German advocate of Adam Smith could also argue for restrictions on free competition. In this compact biographical encyclopedia entry, Karl Pribram presents Georg Sartorius von Walthershausen as both a teacher of Smithian economics and a selective critic of its premises. Sartorius’s rejection of an automatic harmony between private interests and public welfare led him to defend state intervention, especially in foreign trade. Pribram also credits him with separating the study of national wealth from governmental economic policy. The entry offers a precise glimpse of how Smith’s ideas were adapted in German university teaching, while resisting any easy identification of Sartorius’s historical scholarship with the later historical school of economics.

One word has been stretched to cover a family of unlike acts—postponed consumption, idle money holding, capital maintenance, investment, taxation, and the 'forced saving' manufactured by credit creation—and the confusion, Hayek argues, has misled theories of capital, interest, and depression. Borrowing Röpke's classification, the article separates saving in natura from monetary saving, and voluntary individual thrift from corporate, compulsory, and credit-driven kinds, insisting that only one answers to ordinary usage. Against underconsumptionist explanations of slumps, it admits only special cases: hoarding, violent swings in the rate of saving, and credit that simulates saving and provokes malinvestment. Hayek traces the modern machinery—banks, securities, insurance—by which abstention becomes command over resources, and ends on the determinants of saving, from income security to the rate of interest.

The original meaning of the term saving, keeping or preserving something for future use, has gradually been extended to cover a number of different activities more or less directly connected with the original sense of the word.

Accepting Adam Smith’s economic laws did not necessarily mean accepting economic freedom. In this brief biographical encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram examines Soden’s attempt to reconcile Smith with German cameralism in his nine-volume Die Nationalökonomie. Property, grain trading and guilds expose the limits of that reconciliation: Soden defended existing social institutions when economic liberty threatened them, distinguishing universal economic laws from their administrative application. Pribram’s pointed assessment separates theoretical coherence from intellectual influence. He suggests that the very compromises that troubled orthodox Smithians may have helped stimulate German discussion of Smith—a concrete case of economic ideas gaining a hearing through adaptations that also altered their implications.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.

Financing a longer production process is not the same as having the resources to sustain it. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1935 joint review of Richard von Strigl’s Kapital und Produktion and Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen. Machlup finds striking agreement in their treatment of capital as a fund maintaining productive factors until consumers’ goods become available, but tests their propositions rather than merely endorsing them. His criticism of Strigl turns on a concrete temporal problem: an unchanged quantity consumed over a longer period means less consumption per unit of time. In Eucken, he values the connection between production time, wages, and productivity. The review shows how shared capital-theoretical premises can illuminate these relationships without establishing agreement on credit expansion or economic fluctuations.

A currency can return to gold without recovering the trust once attached to it. That distinction drives Mises’s 1935 review of the third edition of T. E. Gregory’s The Gold Standard and its Future. Praising Gregory’s monetary analysis, Mises questions whether restored gold parities could revive international lending while governments remain willing to depreciate currencies in pursuit of domestic objectives. Protectionism, nominal-wage commitments, and policies favouring debtors enter his account as obstacles to credible monetary restraint. This short review offers a precise way to distinguish a formal monetary rule from the political willingness to honour it—and shows why Mises regards the latter, rather than the technical act of stabilization, as the decisive problem.

The label “Manchester School” obscures the social concerns of the Manchester Statistical Society, Hayek argues in this 1935 review of T. S. Ashton’s centenary history. Investigations into mortality, railway labourers’ conditions and public health supply his concrete counterweight to that familiar image: here were researchers making the problems of industrial towns visible with scant resources. Hayek also reads Ashton as a theoretical economist alert to neglected predecessors. He singles out William Langton’s and T. H. Williams’s discussions of banking and trade cycles, asking whether their work helped shape Jevons’s thinking about cycles and capital. This brief review offers both a corrective to an intellectual stereotype and a carefully conditional lead for tracing the transmission of economic ideas.

Monetary nationalism promised escape: independent paper currencies, variable parities, and wide gold points that would seal a national economy off from foreign shocks. That promise, Hayek argues in this contribution to The Economist's debate over a future international order, is a delusion — real international adjustment cannot be evaded, only redirected, and discretionary depreciation breeds fresh conflict. Yet gold too is defective, since shifts in the demand for gold can inflict grave disturbances. His resolution treats fixed parity as a coordinating rule rather than mere attachment to metal, and proposes regulating gold-exchange reserves — central banks' realizable claims on other currencies — with a body such as the Bank for International Settlements varying the permitted ratio to offset gold's swings while leaving national reserves intact.

If an international standard is wanted, the gold standard, in spite of its undeniable defects, is the only practical choice.

Was the Depression an exceptional disruption, or did ordinary business cycles continue beneath it? In this brief, author-prepared summary, Schumpeter distinguishes the downturn’s cyclical shape from its catastrophic severity. He proposes three overlapping cycles rather than a single wave, interpreting the descent to August 1932 and the ensuing recovery through their coinciding depressive phases. Yet he assigns the catastrophe’s intensity to outside disturbances, including what he regards as mistaken efforts to stabilize “prosperity plateaus.” The distinctive interest is this boundary between cyclical explanation and policy judgement: Schumpeter sketches how theory, historical evidence, and statistics might identify an underlying movement without claiming that it alone explains the disaster.

A unified unemployment policy need not mean a single remedy. In this 1935 paper, Karl Pribram asks which forms of joblessness can be insured, which demand public relief, and which call for investment to restart production. His distinctive combination of confidence in capitalist recovery and support for loan-financed public works turns on the purposes of expenditure: projects intended to revive basic industries should not be judged simply by how many people they employ directly. He likewise separates calculable unemployment risks from the unpredictable scale of cyclical losses. Readers encounter a concrete argument about institutional responsibility—why employers and workers should pool some risks, why taxpayers should bear others, and why stimulating recovery differs from meeting immediate hardship.