The archive.

Mises opens this brief review by contrasting two kinds of socialist historiography: scholarship absorbed in personal trivia and scholarship that clarifies economic ideas. Rodbertus’s letters to Schumacher, edited by Robert Michels and Ernst Ackermann, earn his approval for their attention to agricultural credit, rent, and the social question. His praise is not an endorsement of Rodbertus’s doctrines; it concerns what the correspondence and its supporting documents make intelligible. Even without Schumacher’s replies, Mises finds evidence illuminating both Rodbertus’s thought and Germany’s early imperial years. The review offers a compact instance of Mises judging historical scholarship by its explanatory value rather than dismissing it for its subject’s politics.

A wealth of economic statistics does not, for Morgenstern, amount to a reliable means of prediction. His 1927 review of Hardy and Cox’s Forecasting Business Conditions praises its guide to American forecasting services while challenging its promise to make businessmen independent forecasters. Production figures, freight data, and price indices offer information; they do not tell users which indicators to trust or explain the processes behind them. Morgenstern’s distinctive concern is the pressure commercial demand places on unsettled science: impatience with theory cannot establish predictive competence. Nor does his criticism imply that he possesses a better forecasting method. This short review makes a precise distinction between a handbook’s documentary usefulness and the authority of the practical techniques it recommends.

American banks expanded abroad while New York and California barred foreign banks from opening branches at home. This asymmetry gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1927 review of Clyde William Phelps’s The Foreign Expansion of American Banks its critical edge. Rather than rest with war and growing trade as explanations, Morgenstern stresses the legal permissions and acceptance market that made overseas expansion possible. He also asks how long unequal access could persist: in his judgement, European dependence on New York capital restrained retaliation, but could not be assumed permanent. His qualified appreciation of Phelps’s history offers a compact view of the institutional conditions behind banking expansion—and of the difference between international financial reach and willingness to admit foreign competitors.

A wage law may work as designed without securing the social peace it promises. This distinction frames Oskar Morgenstern’s 1927 review of E. M. Burns’s Wages and the State: the efficiency of regulatory machinery and the suitability of its aims require separate scrutiny. He values Burns’s comparative evidence, especially from Australia and New Zealand, as a necessary basis for that inquiry. Yet his praise also draws attention to unresolved standards: what makes a wage “fair,” which family’s needs count, and what can an industry afford? This short review shows Morgenstern joining empirical demands to conceptual criticism, while endorsing Burns’s turn from wage-setting rules toward the underlying causes of low pay.

Advice on shelving and folder labels becomes the decisive exhibit in Hayek’s sharp 1927 review of Erich Schäfer’s Die Wirtschaftsbeobachtung. Schäfer draws on experience in the German porcelain industry’s economic archive; Hayek objects not to practical instruction itself, but to its presentation as a theoretically grounded contribution to economic observation. He contrasts the book’s epistemological ambitions with elementary administrative advice, quoting a passage on archive furniture to make the mismatch tangible. This brief review shows Hayek judging scholarship by the connection between its theoretical claims and its practical substance—and lets readers assess how far his concrete example warrants his sweeping dismissal.

Can banks create the credit needed for investment without creating the savings on which real capital formation depends? In this short 1927 review, Friedrich August von Hayek endorses Heinrich Mannstaedt’s critique of Albert Hahn while adding a pointed distinction of his own: lending can draw deposits away from an individual bank without withdrawing them from the banking system as a whole. Hayek praises Mannstaedt for pursuing Hahn’s theoretical reasoning more consistently rather than merely citing contrary facts. His judgement turns on the gap between credit creation and capital formation: credit may stimulate saving under certain conditions, but cannot replace it. The review offers a compact encounter with Hayek’s standards of theoretical criticism and his insistence on distinguishing monetary possibilities from their real economic effects.

A theory can cease to suffice without ceasing to deserve understanding. In this short 1927 review of James Bonar’s The Tables Turned, Oskar Morgenstern finds a way to appreciate classical economics without defending its continued supremacy. He praises Bonar’s pairing of a lecture with an imaginary conversation in Elysium, where Adam Smith meets his successors to discuss what The Wealth of Nations can still offer. Morgenstern’s enthusiasm for this literary device accompanies a precise historical judgement: classical achievements must be measured against the problems their authors faced, not merely against present needs. The review offers a compact statement of that distinction—and turns it back upon contemporary economists, whose own questions and answers will also become historical.

Auch die gegenwärtige Generation wird einmal der Vergangenheit angehören, mit den Fragen, die sie beschäftigen, und mit den Antworten, die sie zu geben versucht.

English translation: “The present generation too will one day belong to the past, together with the questions that occupy it and with the answers it attempts to give.”

For Mises, the missing words in Keynes’s title are decisive: laissez-faire belongs with laissez-passer, the free movement of people and goods. This brief 1927 review of Keynes’s Das Ende des Laissez-Faire turns less on the proposed regulation of private ownership through semi-autonomous bodies than on protectionism and migration restrictions. Mises brings those omissions into focus through the predicament of displaced people and would-be emigrants barred from competing for work abroad. His challenge is pointed: can liberalism be blamed for distress produced, in his judgement, by its abandonment? The review offers a compact encounter with Mises’s insistence that property, trade, and human mobility cannot be assessed as separate freedoms.

Why did authoritative explanations of the mark’s depreciation prove, in Hayek’s judgement, so damaging to German currency policy? This short 1927 review of Rüdiger von der Goltz’s comparison of German exchange-rate theories with Goschen’s earlier account locates the failure in economists’ neglect of monetary theory, not simply their unfamiliarity with currency questions. Hayek singles out the balance-of-payments explanation for criticism and honours the few economists who opposed it without securing practical success. His qualified assessment of Goltz—sufficiently careful, but missing important contributions and offering little independent insight—makes the review more than an endorsement. It offers a compact statement of Hayek’s insistence that theoretical errors can carry policy consequences, without presenting an alternative exchange-rate model.

What makes a banking directory useful to a foreign reader? In this brief 1927 review of the third annual issue (1925/26) of the Annuario delle Banche e Banchieri d’Italia, Helene Lieser assesses practical accessibility rather than merely the ambition to list every Italian bank. Her comparison with the Kompaß places its institutional and financial data within a familiar reference format. She singles out overseas branch listings and banking tax and fee schedules as valuable supplements, especially for foreigners. The notice offers a concise view of the information Lieser valued for locating banks and conducting business across borders.

What makes an economic dictionary useful beyond supplying equivalent words? In this brief 1927 review of the English–German first part of Hereward T. Price’s Economic Dictionary, Helene Lieser especially welcomes its bibliographical references. Her approval, explicitly based on spot checks, leaves room for pointed correction: she proposes missing entries such as “compulsory liquidation” and questions the German renderings of “political arithmetic” and “bucket shops.” These concrete examples show where a promising reference work still requires scrutiny—and how Lieser distinguishes a questionable translation from a probable printing error.

Could America remain the world’s banker while financing the development of its own land and productive resources? In this brief 1927 review, Helene Lieser welcomes Max E. Bodmer’s statistical survey and foregrounds its argument that American savings would be needed at home. Her approving account connects this prospective limit on foreign lending with the tensions of a creditor economy maintaining protective tariffs and immigration restrictions. The review offers a concise encounter with an expectation that American domestic development would constrain international finance—and that Europe would therefore need to regain financial independence rather than rely indefinitely on American credit.