The archive.

Why should expanding production end in goods that cannot be sold? In this review of Mentor Bouniatian’s Les crises économiques, Emil Lederer accepts overcapitalization as a promising explanation of recurrent crises but challenges an account confined to production and savings. Credit, he argues, accelerates expansion, while the distribution of income determines whether consumption can keep pace. His distinctive contribution is to connect these mechanisms: profits reinvested in productive capacity may deepen instability when consumers’ purchasing power lags behind. Appreciative of Bouniatian’s clarity and statistical evidence, Lederer nevertheless asks what his theory leaves unexplained—and what monetary and social policy might change. This compact review shows how criticism of a crisis theory becomes an inquiry into the conditions for steadier economic development.

What makes a pocket handbook useful without making it comprehensive? In this brief 1922 review of the third edition of the Wirtschaftliches Arbeitnehmer-Taschenbuch, Volume I, Emil Lederer distinguishes preliminary guidance on currency, finances, and the peace treaty from fuller treatment of works councils and labor law. His recommendation rests on contributors’ expertise, skillful compilation, and what he judges to be objectivity across the contributions. The review offers a concise glimpse of Lederer’s standards for practical public information: accessible breadth, differentiated depth, and brevity suited to readers seeking an initial orientation rather than exhaustive instruction.

Should Austria, before doing anything else, throttle credit still further? Schumpeter's answer, delivered to a June 1922 audience and printed with a sharp editorial rebuttal, is essentially no. He separates normal cyclical tightness and deliberate deflation from Austria's inflationary predicament, where the true disease is state spending for consumption. Restricting credit without restraining expenditure, he warns, would merely shackle production while leaving the fiscal cause untouched; the hope that scarcity would force hoarders to surrender foreign exchange ignores the producer's other exit - simply to stop producing. A liquid money market becomes, paradoxically, a brake on capital destruction. The newspaper's reply presses back: what matters is not the quantity of credit but its use, and forcing uneconomic firms to close is painful but necessary liquidation. The exchange captures a live debate between liquidity and discipline.

Allein es nützt nichts, eine Krise, die kommen muß, hinauszuschieben.

English translation: “But there is no use in postponing a crisis that is bound to come.”

That a bank of issue crowns currency stabilization rather than beginning it has always belonged to the ABC of financial policy the world over - and it is against this maxim that Schumpeter weighs Austria's decision to found a central bank in 1922. His verdict is conditional. The announcement has already steadied exchange rates and securities markets, but psychological effect cannot substitute for structural cure: Austria cannot be set right by formulas and slogans. Every office, revenue source, and state enterprise must be reformed separately, or the bank becomes another engine of inflation, its note reserve financing a depreciation worse than the present. So long as the government cannot commit to a definite crown rate, any success can only be temporary. Chances exist, and so do dangers demanding a moral energy Austria has rarely possessed in abundance.

Natürlich ist das ein kühner Schritt, dessen Rechtfertigung nur im Erfolg liegen kann.

English translation: “Naturally this is a bold step, whose justification can lie only in success.”

A government can balance its books while its currency continues to fall. In this 1922 newspaper article, Emil Lederer explains why that possibility matters for Germany’s external obligations: collecting taxes does not automatically provide the foreign means of payment needed to meet them. He distinguishes fiscal balance from the balance of the national economy, showing how taxation that forces asset sales can transfer productive property abroad without relieving exchange-rate pressure. His argument turns on the difference between resources drawn from genuine savings and payments financed by selling accumulated wealth. Without dismissing budgetary discipline, Lederer challenges its sufficiency as a remedy and makes international credit and confidence central to the problem. The article offers a concrete way to understand why sound public accounts and currency stability need not coincide.

Identical resources and identical rankings of needs need not produce identical valuations: everything depends on how long the resources must last. In this 1922 installment of his investigation, Hans Mayer presses marginal-utility theory to account for recurring needs and the time required to replenish supplies. His concern is not to reject marginal valuation, but to establish conditions that its usual derivations leave unspecified. Economizing, on his account, means allocating common means among competing ends—a distinction that leads him to classify the enterprise’s pursuit of monetary income as technical activity, while locating its economic foundations in households. Readers can discover why a period of provision matters to value theory, and why market prices cannot independently explain the valuations from which they are supposedly derived. The promised derivation of the valuation law remains for a subsequent article.

Against theories that lodge value in labor, cost, or the object itself, this short monograph — later folded into Schwiedland's Volkswirtschaftslehre — grounds value in a subjective consciousness of dependence on useful and scarce goods. Utility, he argues, names an objective suitability, whereas value is the felt dependence of the economizing subject; hence his correction of both 'objective value' language and the Austrian preference for 'Grenznutzen.' Price, by contrast, is external, negotiated, social — an actual counter-performance received in exchange, one requiring not equal values but divergent valuations, so that barter enriches both sides. Translating usefulness and scarcity into supply and demand, Schwiedland tracks seller competition in abundance, buyer competition in shortage, hoarding, panic selling, cartels, and monetary policy, yet ends in methodological modesty: no single theory can capture every real price.

Wert ist ein Gefühl, Preis eine tatsächliche Gegenleistung: die Menge von Gütern, die man beim Austausch für andere empfängt.

English translation: “Value is a feeling, price an actual counter-performance: the quantity of goods one receives in exchange for others.”

Asian monetary practice becomes a pointed challenge to German monetary theory in Ludwig von Mises’s brief review of the third edition of William F. Spalding’s Eastern Exchange, Currency and Finance. Mises argues that Knapp and his followers missed the essential identity between the Austro-Hungarian Bank’s foreign-exchange policy and the gold exchange standard used in British India, as well as its connection to Ricardo’s proposals. His recommendation of Spalding is thus more than approval of a useful handbook: it identifies comparative institutional knowledge as a corrective to theoretical misunderstanding. Readers can see precisely why Mises valued Spalding’s otherwise hard-to-access account of wartime and early postwar developments, alongside its practical treatment of Asian trade and customs.

Social upheaval does not necessarily produce new art—and those who gain power may retain the tastes of the groups they displace. This mismatch anchors Emil Lederer’s inquiry into how art belongs to its time without merely reflecting it. His 1922 essay places metropolitan capitalism’s fragmented encounters alongside Expressionism’s search for elemental forms, while insisting that social explanation must also reckon with the internal development of artistic vision. Genius, in his account, gives form to questions an age has not yet learned to ask. Readers can discover why artistic innovation, political transformation, and public recognition move at different speeds—and how sociology can illuminate those differences without claiming the authority to judge artistic value.

Higher interest rates may restrain inflation—but what if they also destroy the production needed for recovery? In this 1922 review of Gustav Cassel’s Das Geldproblem der Welt, Emil Lederer tests monetary remedies against the material and social conditions of postwar reconstruction. He accepts Cassel’s insistence that credit cannot substitute for real resources, yet questions policies whose success depends on unemployment forcing down wages. Unemployment relief, political resistance, and obligations to those without work are not external complications: they help determine whether stabilization can succeed. Lederer’s alternative emphasis on restoring production is itself qualified by the problem of finding markets. The review offers a concrete encounter between monetary discipline and reconstruction, showing why neither balanced budgets nor increased output alone can secure economic recovery.

The entrepreneurs capable of rebuilding industry may also acquire the power to bend national policy to private ends. This tension gives Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s 1923 review of Herbert von Beckerath’s book its focus. In presenting Beckerath’s account, Schwiedland explains why postwar shortages and mismatched resources favoured integrated industrial combines rather than cartels of separate firms. He then presses the question of leadership: can roughly two dozen powerful figures supply the judgement these vast organizations require, accommodate workers, and ease international antagonisms? His explicit insistence that economic problems are also ethical questions sharpens the review’s interest. Readers encounter an argument for entrepreneurial coordination whose confidence in practical competence stops short of confidence in the responsible exercise of power.

Can geography explain both the formation of nations and the growth of world wealth? In this brief 1923 review of O. D. von Engeln’s Inheriting the Earth, Eugen Peter Schwiedland finds stimulating material without being persuaded that it forms a unified account of economic development. He reports Engeln’s claim that shared surroundings, rather than race, language or religion, create nations, but reserves his strongest appreciation for the factual discussion of resources and exchange between temperate and tropical regions. The review’s interest lies in this selective judgement: Schwiedland questions the book’s coherence while welcoming the knowledge and prospects offered by its treatment of tropical cultivation, migration and settlement colonies.