The archive.

An economic barometer can indicate where an economy stands without reliably telling when it will turn. This 1927 article, published anonymously and attributed to Friedrich August von Hayek, tests that distinction by adapting Harvard’s business-cycle indicators to Austria. Missing data demand concrete substitutions: securities-clearing payments stand in for share prices, while twelve wholesale prices form a new index. The resulting patterns offer guidance, but departures from the expected sequence resist mechanical prediction. Combining attention to money, credit, and uneven industrial expansion with statistical measurement, the article shows why seasonal adjustment, trend removal, and correlation still require economic judgment. Its Austrian experiment makes visible both the practical ingenuity involved in constructing a forecasting instrument and the limits imposed by war, structural change, and imperfect evidence.

Once industrial societies no longer answer to a shared universal moral authority, the reformer who shortens hours or insures the sick in one country soon collides with unregulated competition in the next. From that impasse Pribram derives international social policy, examined here through the League's newly created International Labour Organization: its tripartite conferences of governments, employers, and workers, its conventions and recommendations, and the stubborn problem of a minimum standard that burdens each nation differently according to productivity, wages, and capital. The Versailles principle that labour must not be treated merely as a commodity gives the project its ethical charge, while the Washington eight-hour convention exposes its limits. International social policy, he concludes, is less one doctrine than a compromise among incompatible worldviews.

Vor dem Kriege hing die Vorbereitung der Konventionsentwürfe von allen Zufällen politischer Konstellationen ab; heute ist sie in einer dauernden, vom Völkerrechte getragenen Einrichtung verankert, an der nahezu sämtliche Kulturstaaten beteiligt sind.

English translation: “Before the war, the preparation of draft conventions depended on all the accidents of political constellations; today it is anchored in a permanent institution, borne by international law, in which nearly all civilised states take part.”

Bracket race entirely, and the real question sharpens: why do social classes exist at all? Set in an ethnically homogeneous milieu precisely to isolate that problem from the ethnological factors stressed by Gumplowicz, this theoretical essay argues that classes are real social organisms, not the income categories economists invent, recognized by manners, association, and above all connubium, socially accepted intermarriage. Schumpeter makes the family, not the individual, the true unit of class theory, and grounds a class's rise or fall in the social importance of its function and its success in performing it. The long case is the Germanic nobility, rising as warrior-leadership becomes vital and declining through patrimonialization once war ceases to be its living function. Classes endure, he argues, even as their constituent families are ceaselessly replaced.

Jede Klasse gleicht während der Dauer ihres Kollektivlebens oder der Zeit, während welcher ihre Identität angenommen werden kann, einem Hotel oder einem Omnibus, die zwar immer besetzt sind, aber von immer andern Leuten.

English translation: “During the duration of its collective life, or the time during which its identity can be assumed, every class resembles a hotel or an omnibus that is always occupied, but by ever different people.”

A commemorative medal’s inscription—scholar, teacher, citizen—provides the frame for Schumpeter’s brief 1927 review of Seligman’s Essays in Economics. His appreciation identifies concrete achievements behind those roles: recovering neglected British economists such as Rooke and Longfield, and urging reason and an understanding of opposing standpoints during the First World War. The interest lies less in theoretical disagreement than in Schumpeter’s criteria for lasting scholarly value. He credits historical research with enlarging economists’ collective knowledge and judges Seligman’s railway-tariff study still consequential decades after publication. This compact review shows what Schumpeter admired in a fellow economist: specialist inquiry joined to teaching and wide-ranging public concern.

A handwritten card, dated 23 January 1927, carries the thanks of Viktor Mataja — economist, former minister, and retired president of Austria's federal statistical office — to the journalist Ignaz Grünberg, who had reviewed favorably the idea of advertising treated as a science. The tribute is apt. Mataja had habilitated in political economy in 1884, taught at Vienna and Innsbruck, and earned his reputation as a pioneer of the subject with 'Die Reklame' (1910), which held that publicity was a proper object of scholarly and statistical study rather than mere commercial noise. Written from Italian soil, where Grünberg's essay reached him only belatedly, this small autograph binds a founder of advertising theory to the daily life of the Viennese press.

Seit geraumer Zeit von Wien abwesend u. auf italienischem Boden habe ich Ihren Aufsatz ‚Die Reklame als Wissenschaft‘ erst verspätet zu Gesicht bekommen.

English translation: “Having been away from Vienna for some time and on Italian soil, I only belatedly caught sight of your essay 'Advertising as a Science.'”

A single tax, budget, or loan means nothing in isolation: it takes its sense from the whole fiscal policy of which it is a part, and beyond that from the historical order, political purpose, and economic future it helps create. From this anti-formal premise Schumpeter builds a reading of finance as condensed statecraft, treating Colbert's France, Prussian state-building, and Gladstonian liberal finance not as toolkits but as integrated policy worlds whose greatness lay in the fit between fiscal form and social order. He turns the argument polemically against German practice after unification, judging Bismarck politically great but fiscally uncreative and Erzberger's reform driven by party pressure, and warns against reviving liberal slogans whose social basis has vanished. The task, he insists, is to make the fiscal system an engine rather than a leaden weight.

Eine Umsatzsteuer kann in manchen Situationen die weitaus mildeste von allen möglichen Maßregeln sein, in einer anderen eine Ungeheuerlichkeit.

English translation: “A turnover tax may in some situations be by far the mildest of all possible measures, in another a monstrosity.”

Whether fiscal judgment ever becomes binding action depends less on correct doctrine than on political institutions strong enough to enforce it. Schumpeter's diagnosis of German finance locates its troubles not in economic ignorance but in the weakness of executive authority, with a finance minister exposed to the daily Kleinkampf of ministries, parties, and interest groups, whose cumulative small concessions destroy budgetary order. Formal veto rights and procedural safeguards, he argues, cannot rescue a minister who lacks cabinet backing. Widening the lens, he contrasts the British cabinet crystallized around a genuine prime-ministerial chief with a German republic that adopted parliamentary forms without their central organ, leaving ministers as agents of coalition pressure. This is early analysis of democratic state capacity: democracy must build cabinet leadership, disciplined parties, and budget procedure, or responsibility disperses until no one governs finance.

Aber abgesehen davon hat es ja gar keinen Sinn, die Stellung eines Finanzministers in einer schwachen Regierung zu stärken, denn diese kann ja nicht, wie sie will.

English translation: “But apart from that, there is no point at all in strengthening the position of a finance minister in a weak government, for such a government cannot do as it wills.”

How can an economist leave a coherent intellectual legacy without founding a school or writing a systematic treatise? In this 1927 memorial essay, Oskar Morgenstern finds an answer in Edgeworth’s scattered writings, brought together in the three-volume Papers Relating to Political Economy. He identifies a distinctive combination: mathematical inventiveness joined to a reluctance to discard classical results without demonstrably better alternatives. His appraisal is not unqualified; elaborate symbolism could obscure limited problems, and the mathematical treatment of time remained unsettled. Recollections of meetings in Oxford and London give this assessment a personal grounding. Readers encounter both Morgenstern’s case for neglected resources in Edgeworth’s work—especially on taxation—and his conception of economic inquiry as cumulative, exacting, and open to criticism.

Respectful citation can be a form of neglect. In this brief 1927 review of the third edition of Hermann’s Staatswirtschaftliche Untersuchungen, Schumpeter argues that the book’s analytical seriousness has won it esteem without readers: it offers neither political parties a banner nor fashionable debate a slogan. His defence of Hermann also reveals a practical criterion for preserving economic classics. Though he hopes for a critical edition, Schumpeter welcomes this inexpensive reprint of the 1832 text as a usable foundation for student exercises and introductory seminars. The review distinguishes historical homage from active study—and shows why, for Schumpeter, editorial completeness need not take precedence over teaching.

How can a theory grounded in individual needs explain production costs, income distribution, and the power relations of society? In this 1927 memorial essay, Hans Mayer presents Friedrich Wieser’s career as a sustained attempt to connect these problems. His tribute is also a partisan account of Austrian economics: Mayer credits Wieser with deriving costs from the utility of products and explaining how their value is allocated among cooperating productive resources. He argues that these relationships persist across capitalist and socialist institutions, while law and power shape their concrete operation. The essay offers readers both an accessible account of this theoretical ambition and Mayer’s explicit standard for judging it: theory must connect phenomena and explain reality, not merely construct an internally consistent system.

Poincaré calmed French markets and broke the spiral of inflation and capital flight not with new fiscal ideas but with posture, credible restraint, authority, reassurance, where Erzberger's Germany, with measures Schumpeter judges not intrinsically unbearable, spread panic through threatening tone alone. That contrast opens an argument that finance works through expectations and social psychology as much as through statutes. A tax law becomes living law only when it enters everyday legal consciousness; taxation under a capitalist order is inherently intrusive and provokes normal resistance, not criminality. From this Schumpeter attacks anti-capitalist fiscal moralism and the official who acts as investigator, prosecutor, and provisional judge at once, calling for the principles of civil procedure and the surrender of the fisc's privileges. His warning is against technique without spirit: an apparatus of surveillance that consumes the very tax capacity it means to command.

Das Gesetz entsteht auf dem Schreibtisch des Fachmanns und im Parteienkampf des Reichstags, aber das lebendige Recht, das wirklich gilt, in der Praxis des Alltags.

English translation: “The statute arises on the desk of the expert and in the party struggle of the Reichstag, but the living law that actually holds sway arises in the practice of everyday life.”

Double-entry accounting, in the form Pacioli gave it, is for Reisch the enduring foundation of the discipline, even as the surrounding literature otherwise mirrors the broader course of economic development. He contrasts an older writing that explained bookkeeping to jurists and adapted it to new legal forms — joint-stock companies, cooperatives, limited-liability firms — with a newer one bent on modernization through machines, faster reporting, business administration, statistics, and operational control. This brief foreword praises the volume it introduces for surveying such proposed reforms systematically, while cautioning that only the passage of time will separate what proves lasting and useful from the pseudo-reforms of the moment.

So verbindet sich die Buchhaltung mit der Statistik und dient womöglich als Konjunkturenbarometer im kleinen, aus dessen Angaben dann die Konjunkturforschungsinstitute ihre großen Wetterberichte zusammenstellen können.

English translation: “Thus bookkeeping combines with statistics and possibly serves as a business-cycle barometer in miniature, from whose data the business-cycle research institutes can then compile their great weather reports.”