2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A balance sheet need not disclose the full extent of a company’s obligations. This is the point Felix Somary endorses in his brief 1906 notice of the commemorative volume for Reichsbank President Koch. While noting Rießer’s study of supervisory-board reform, he concentrates on Simon’s distinction between legal rights and liabilities and their recorded accounting representation. Giro liabilities provide the concrete example of what a balance sheet leaves undisclosed. The notice captures Somary’s interest in a precise boundary between law and economics: what accounts record is not necessarily everything a company owes.
Can gains for exporters justify an optimistic account of currency depreciation? In this brief 1906 review of Mitjavile’s study of Spain’s exchange-rate crisis, Felix Somary endorses a sharply different balance sheet: benefits for a narrow group set against dearer food, speculative commerce and heavier foreign debt payments. His judgement combines approval of Mitjavile’s fiscal explanation—government dependence on advances from the note-issuing bank—with appreciation of his caution about evidence. Tariff changes and returning colonial capital complicate even apparently striking exchange-rate data. The review offers a compact view of what Somary values in monetary analysis: attention to who gains and loses, institutional causes, and restraint in attributing economic effects.
A single-family house can offer worse sleeping conditions than a much-criticized tenement. In this 1906 review of a Bremen housing survey, Emil Lederer tests an architectural ideal against measurements: 44 percent of living rooms were no larger than eight square metres, and subdivision squandered already scarce space and air. His criticism targets the assumption that homeownership or small buildings necessarily produce healthy accommodation. Yet he also separates the improvement of housing from the explanation of rents, asking how tenants’ opportunities to buy constrain what landlords can charge. This brief review offers a concrete encounter with Lederer’s differentiated approach to housing reform: neither architectural labels nor a single account of speculation can explain both unhealthy rooms and costly shelter.
Reliable tables can outlast an unsuccessful introduction: that distinction anchors Felix Somary’s brief 1906 review of Wagon’s study of German joint-stock companies. Somary praises the annual financial tables, whose accuracy he tested by spot checks, while stressing their restriction to shares listed in Berlin. His interest is comparative rather than merely descriptive. Drawing on his own comparison with Austria, he singles out borrowing, higher average profits, and greater sensitivity to economic fluctuations among German companies. The review offers a compact example of how Somary evaluates statistical evidence: separating the quality of compilation from that of exposition, and asking what international comparisons the available figures can support.
A sugar manufacturer who stood to gain from protection yet campaigned as a consistent free trader, refused the cartel, and quietly diverted his unavoidable trust profits into a pension fund for his clerks—Rudolph Auspitz is memorialized by Schumpeter as both a public man of rare disinterest and a first-rate mathematical economist. The obituary weighs his work on taxation and the 1896 fiscal reform, then turns to the 1889 Untersuchungen über die Theorie des Preises, written with Richard Lieben. Auspitz, it argues, held marginal value theory to complete and partly correct Ricardo rather than overthrow him, and from the parallel treatment of production and consumption drew the consumer's rent, the producer's rent, and the gain of the community.
It is, generally, a characteristic point, which deserves to be noted, that during his whole political life he was not only completely free from any personal aspiration, but also from class interest.
Inama-Sternegg reviews Gustav Schmoller's general economics in the long shadow of the Methodenstreit, pressing the question of whether a historically grounded economics can still be theoretical. He rejects both extremes, timeless deductive laws detached from history and a descriptive historicism unable to generalize, and defends abstraction, but only when drawn from comparable social-economic formations. Collections of facts, however exact, remain economic history until organized into concepts of recurrent processes. Schmoller's own practice, he argues, proves that historical-realistic research can be theoretically fruitful, nowhere more than in its anatomy of markets, prices, rent, and distribution, where the old problem of the just price returns as a matter of market order rather than scholastic moralism. His reservations are firm: too much borrowed psychology and sociology, and a theory of production left underdeveloped beside organization and exchange.
Zwar der Vorwurf, der von hier aus der klassischen Nationalökonomie gemacht wurde, sie habe sich mit ihren abstrakten Lehren von Wert und Preis, Lohn und Rente vermessen, allgemein gültige Gesetze zu formulieren, ist innerlich nicht begründet.
English translation: “The reproach made from this quarter against classical economics—that with its abstract doctrines of value and price, wages and rent, it presumed to formulate universally valid laws—is not, in its inner substance, well founded.”
A city counted in anticipation of a siege is not necessarily a city counted in ordinary life. In this article, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg uses fifteenth-century enumerations from Nürnberg, Straßburg, Freiburg im Uechland, and Nördlingen to challenge inflated estimates of medieval urban populations—and to ask what their figures actually measure. Refugees could swell totals; “citizens” did not constitute a uniform age group; “servants” could include journeymen and apprentices. His distinctive concern is the boundary between recorded evidence and editorial reconstruction, making access to original lists essential to checking demographic claims. Readers encounter both an argument that relatively small cities could wield substantial political and economic power and a concrete demonstration of why counting inhabitants is more secure than reconstructing their social composition.
Rejecting mathematics in economics does not protect social complexity; it only deprives theory of its most adequate logical language. Schumpeter argues that once economics reasons about value, price, exchange, labor, interest and time, it is already handling quantities, so the economist who states proportionalities and marginal changes in words is doing arithmetic while refusing the calculus his own arguments require. Mathematics, on this view, is a logical form that imports nothing foreign and can therefore introduce nothing false; it clarifies functional dependence, continuity, and maxima even where numerical data are missing. Drawing on Cournot's proof that monopoly price exceeds competitive price and Walras's system of exchange equations, he shows the method uncovering relations that verbal exposition confuses—while insisting it can never calculate a practical policy out of a formula.
Also: Arbeit, Ware, Zeit, Preis, Zins u. s. w. sind Quantitäten.
English translation: “Thus: labor, commodity, time, price, interest, etc., are quantities.”
Forty years of agricultural reports do not necessarily yield forty years of comparable evidence. In this 1906 assessment, Karl Theodor von Inama-Sternegg shows how British agricultural statistics changed as smaller holdings entered the returns, livestock counts shifted season, and voluntary participation became nearly universal. His praise centres on the practical machinery behind the figures: revenue officials with local knowledge, trained harvest estimators, and publication schedules that put results into farmers’ hands before the reporting cycle was complete. The expansion from ten tables to 160 matters less as an accumulation of numbers than as a widening capacity to answer agricultural questions. This concise article offers a concrete account of how statistical reliability is built—and why timely circulation belongs alongside accuracy in judging a public information service.
Reviewing Paul Leroy-Beaulieu's popular guide to placing and managing a fortune, Inama-Sternegg turns a manual for cautious savers into a question about what capital owes a nation. He grants the advice its prudence — shun speculation, distrust financial adventurers, prefer safe state, railway, and municipal bonds — and credits its author as a seasoned man of affairs rather than a system-building theorist. But he warns that the security of even land and houses now depends on the competence of the manager, and that a whole class trained to live off coupons imperils French economic vitality against more enterprising English, American, and German capital. Elevated from private counsel into a national ethic, the rentier's quietism would, he predicts, avenge itself a hundredfold on France's economic strength and its very position among the powers.
Zwar, es ist eine durchaus populäre Schrift, aber sie ist damit noch lange nicht eine seichte Arbeit.
English translation: “To be sure, it is a thoroughly popular writing, but that by no means makes it a shallow work.”
Framed as a survey of recent English-language work on capital and interest — Carver, Cassel, Seager, Fetter, Seligman — this offprint, here in the German rendering of Böhm-Bawerk's 1906–07 English essay, sharpens into a single sustained assault on J. B. Clark. Its charge is that Clark's "true capital," a permanent fund distinct from the concrete goods that embody it, is a grammatical illusion: an abstraction can neither help spin yarn nor bear interest. Clark's boasted "perfect mobility" is dismissed as simply false, and his account of interest condemned as a relapse into productivity theory that assumes the very net surplus it should explain. In a closing thrust, Böhm-Bawerk aligns Clark's value-jelly with Marx's labor-jelly and defends a sound, natural doctrine of capital against a mythology of it.
Wer Wahrheit ernten will, darf nicht Entstellung säen, und wäre es die scheinbar harmloseste und bestgemeinte Entstellung.
English translation: “He who would reap truth must not sow distortion, even were it the seemingly most harmless and best-intentioned distortion.”
How much of a labour market’s rhythm disappears when observations are grouped into weeks or months? In this brief review of Alfred Gürtler’s study, Karl-Theodor von Inama-Sternegg identifies daily recording as a methodological achievement with practical consequences for employment offices. Gürtler’s evidence—4,300 cases of male job seekers recorded in Graz in 1904—earns approval not for supporting sweeping conclusions, but for showing what finer intervals of observation can disclose. Inama-Sternegg combines attention to administrative recordkeeping with restraint about statistical inference: establishing a reliable relationship between wages and market conditions would require years of data and finer occupational distinctions. The review offers a compact account of why the scale of measurement matters, and where a promising demonstration must stop short of a general claim.