2,793 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
A tael is a weight, not a coin: for Hermann Schwarzwald, misunderstanding this distinction leads European observers to misread Chinese money and prescribe unsuitable reforms. His 1914 article examines payments in silver whose value depends on local weight standards and metallic fineness, turning apparent monetary disorder into a challenge to theories that ground money in state authority. Drawing explicitly on Eugen Dühring, Schwarzwald argues that reform should make commercial practice more reliable rather than replace it by decree. His proposal for freely minted, full-weight silver coins gives that position concrete form. The tension is practical as well as theoretical: how can China simplify domestic payments while meeting foreign debts fixed in gold? Readers encounter both the mechanics of silver settlement and a sharply partisan account of the boundary between monetary certification and fiscal exploitation.
Composed in the immediate wake of Böhm-Bawerk's death, this commemorative essay converts personal reverence into a claim about intellectual scale: that the Austrian finance minister and theorist was not merely a capital theorist but a founder of exact economic analysis. Schumpeter reads the major works, from Rechte und Verhältnisse through the Geschichte und Kritik der Kapitalzinstheorien and the Positive Theorie des Kapitals to the Marx critique, as a single architecture built from Menger toward a general theory of the economic process. At its center stands capital as roundabout production and the agio theory of interest, grounded in the higher valuation of present over future goods for three reasons: differing provision, the perspectival underestimation of future wants, and the productivity of longer production. Interest, he insists, is a purely economic category that would persist even in a socialist commonwealth.
Sein Werk gehört nicht einer Generation oder einem Volk, sondern der Menschheit.
English translation: “His work belongs not to a single generation or a single people, but to humanity.”
Can an economics defined by money prices explain valuation—or judge the social worth of private wealth? In this 1914 review of Herbert Joseph Davenport’s The Economics of Enterprise, Frank Albert Fetter welcomes a value-based account of capital but disputes the limits Davenport places on economic inquiry. His sharpest tests are concrete: debts do not themselves create lendable resources, and doubling physical output does not explain interest if prices must also adjust. Writing from the psychological approach to value, Fetter asks what monetary transactions presuppose about choices and future returns. His disagreement also reaches property: he accepts that private gain can diverge from public welfare without accepting Davenport’s sweeping condemnation. The review shows how shared theoretical premises can lead to conflicting explanations of interest and standards of social criticism.
Can systematic observation replace economic theory, or does it need theory to explain what it records? In this 1914 review of François Simiand’s La méthode positive en science économique, republished here in 1952, Joseph A. Schumpeter challenges what he sees as the conversion of a fruitful empirical approach into an exclusive scientific programme. His defence of abstraction turns on concrete distinctions: investment choices depend on risk as well as return, and modelling utility-maximizing behaviour need not mean recommending it. Yet he grants empirical sociology tasks that theory cannot perform, including investigating market organization and competition’s historical extent. The review offers a pointed account of how observation can correct and specify economic models without replacing analytical explanation—and how defending theory can coexist with acknowledging its limits.
An economist’s neutrality does not make economic actors morally indifferent. In this two-part study, Oskar Engländer asks how explanations built on self-interest can accommodate duty, solidarity, and restraint without abandoning their starting point. His answer turns on compatibility: mutually advantageous exchange need not conflict with moral convictions, though particular prices, wages, and bargaining conditions may do so. Drawing on Franz Brentano’s account of objective ethical knowledge, Engländer also challenges the passage from explaining an income to justifying its recipient’s entitlement. Readers encounter a defence of ethical reasoning that nevertheless refuses to derive economic policy from moral principles alone: judging distribution or intervention requires knowledge of incentives, consequences, and feasible alternatives. The resulting tension is precise—economics needs evaluative standards, while ethics cannot settle economic questions without economic investigation.
Why did mass unemployment accompany the withdrawal of workers for military service? In this 1914 article, Emil Lederer examines the apparent paradox through Germany’s disrupted supply chains, lost export markets and curtailed civilian spending. His perspective joins economic interdependence to close scrutiny of the institutions attempting relief: employment exchanges could redistribute workers but not create demand, while unions faced mounting claims as contributions dwindled. Reading union and employer statistics critically, he also exposes how aggregate figures obscure short-time work and women’s search for earnings. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish labour scarcity from the availability of paid work—and to understand why remedies designed for ordinary downturns could fail under wartime conditions.
An efficiency gain for one factory need not be a gain for workers—or for the economy as a whole. In this 1914 essay, republished in 2011, Emil Lederer asks what follows if Taylorist work organization spreads rapidly across industry. Taking Taylor’s productivity claims as premises, he distinguishes reorganizing labor from installing machinery: the former can displace workers without generating comparable employment in equipment manufacture and construction. More output, he argues, does not itself supply the purchasing power to buy it. His distinctive move is to connect this economic tension to the weakening of craft skills and craft unions. Readers can discover why productive efficiency might encourage broader worker solidarity while undermining bargaining power—and why unions, socialist parties, and consumer cooperatives could have conflicting stakes in the same transformation.
How can mass unemployment persist when war removes millions of workers from civilian life? In this 1914 article, Emil Lederer locates the answer in disrupted economic relationships rather than labour shortages alone: military suppliers prosper while civilian producers lose customers, and rising food prices drain purchasing power from industry. His distinction between stabilizing credit and securing actual supplies makes monetary success an unreliable measure of economic health. Lederer argues for administrative coordination of production and distribution without nationalizing productive property, insisting that privately unprofitable output may nevertheless be necessary for collective subsistence. The article offers a concrete way to examine the friction between military procurement and civilian provision—and to understand why price ceilings, emergency lending, and appeals to reopen factories cannot, in his account, resolve it separately.
Divide economic life into two orders of fact, the repeated equilibrium of statics and the innovation of dynamics, and the central phenomena of capitalism fall into place. Reading Schumpeter's early system, Amonn shows that a purely static economy, where production and exchange merely reproduce themselves, forecloses every specifically capitalist income, interest, capital, and credit alike, since under full competition prices reduce to wages and rent. Everything else requires the entrepreneur, who breaks the routine by introducing a new combination and buys inputs at old prices while the transformed product commands a higher valuation. Profit is that temporary gap; interest is a share split from it; and crisis erupts when too many uncoordinated innovations obstruct one another's readjustment, collapsing the whole value-and-price system.
Gewinne können in der statischen Wirtschaft nicht entstehen.
English translation: “Profits cannot arise in a static economy.”
Domestic crisis symptoms and tighter credit surfaced across Austria-Hungary before either the world slump or the Balkan War could account for them. Taking Böhm-Bawerk's diagnosis of the passive trade balance as his starting point—the monarchy consumes too much and produces too little—Mises turns to the internal causes: a swollen public administration and loss-making state railways, backward tariff-protected agriculture, hostility to large-scale enterprise, and above all the Borgsystem of long goods-credit chains binding consumers, retailers, wholesalers, and producers into uncollectible receivables. He reads the insolvencies of 1912-13 as the overdue liquidation of that credit structure rather than its cause, and holds that only the radical removal of policy-made obstacles to production, together with expanded exports, can right the monarchy's balance of payments.
Die großen öffentlichen Unternehmungen sind der wundeste Punkt des öffentlichen Haushaltes in Österreich.
English translation: “The great public enterprises are the sorest point of the public finances in Austria.”
Could a depression arise even if entrepreneurs made no mistakes? In this 1914 article, Joseph A. Schumpeter locates the source of recurrent fluctuations in successful innovation itself. Bank credit enables pioneers to redirect resources; their success lowers barriers for followers, producing a cluster of new enterprises rather than a steady stream. The resulting changes in costs, prices, and markets can overturn business plans that were sound when made. Schumpeter thus distinguishes the economy’s adjustment to innovation from panics, fraud, and speculative excess, which may intensify a downturn without explaining it. His account offers a precise tension to explore: the same developments that expand productive possibilities can unsettle established livelihoods, while falling prices may benefit consumers even as businesses experience depression.
Delivered to the Lower Austrian Trade Association in February 1914, this lecture reports back from the fourteenth session of the International Statistical Institute, whose forty-nine printed reports Meyer sifts for what economic statistics had achieved. He dwells on the hardest problems of comparability: rival methods for estimating national income and national wealth, weighed through Kiaer's tax-list approach and Fellner's contested Austro-Hungarian valuations; Neymarck's running census of the world's negotiable securities; the semiology of index numbers and whether diverse indicators may be fused into one; and the vexed measurement of unemployment. Throughout, Meyer treats the Institute not as a popular congress but as a cooperative body harmonizing national data for the use of governments, and he insists that technical care in statistics serves the larger understanding of economic regularity.
La paix du monde, paix internationale entre les peuples et les gouvernements, la paix intérieure entre les hommes s'imposent pour maintenir l'échafaudage actuel de papiers de crédit et d'affaires qui existe.
English translation: “World peace—international peace between peoples and governments, and internal peace among men—is indispensable to maintain the existing scaffolding of credit paper and business affairs.”