The archive.

Higher productivity does not by itself guarantee higher real wages: this is the unresolved problem Emil Lederer identifies in Th. Brauer’s programme for trade unions. In this short 1912 review, he reads Brauer’s emphasis on productive cooperation, vocational training and education as a shift in Christian unionism away from struggles over distribution. His objection is precise: if unions accept the limits of private enterprise as their governing standard, what means remain to secure workers a larger share of increased output? Lederer distinguishes preparedness for industrial conflict from a policy that still regards strikes as useful. The review shows how an apparently practical programme of education and efficiency could, in his judgement, change the purpose of union organisation and strengthen employers’ bargaining position.

Producers can profit by withholding goods; consumers who withhold purchases must leave their own needs unsatisfied. This asymmetry drives Emil Lederer’s examination of whether organized consumers can force prices below competitive levels. Combining abstract price models with an analysis of consumer cooperatives, he argues that collective purchasing chiefly removes trading margins and checks existing monopolies rather than creating a mirror image of producer power. Yet lower prices are not the only stakes: organization can also loosen buyers’ contractual dependence and bring production under collective control. The article exposes both the possibilities and the vulnerabilities of cooperative provision, especially when powerful suppliers of raw materials can absorb its savings—a concrete tension between cheaper consumption and greater economic independence.

Shareholder rights mean little if those who exercise managerial power escape corresponding responsibility and investors lack the knowledge to judge their actions. In this 1912 contribution, Julius Landesberger tests Austrian company law against German arrangements for professional management and independent supervision. His case for reform is selective rather than imitative: administrative borrowing needs enforceable legal duties, while voting safeguards need reliable reporting and sustained minority representation. His proposal that a substantial minority deposit its shares for at least a year to secure a supervisory-board representative makes that distinction concrete. The article offers a compact account of how authority, liability, and information must work together—and of why taxation and speculative responses to hidden reserves cannot simply be corrected by rewriting company law.

A newspaper can gain readers without improving its returns: more copies may multiply the gap between selling price and production cost. In this short 1913 review of Max Garr’s study of newspaper economics, Franz Xaver Weiss questions whether diminishing production returns adequately explain that problem. He points instead to the extra pages required by advertising and asks whether advertising revenue has financed editorial improvements that readers’ payments cannot sustain. His appreciation of Garr thus opens a precise unresolved question: how can editorial costs and advertising income be disentangled when the quality of the former helps secure the latter? The review offers a compact encounter with Weiss’s economic reasoning, distinguishing the costs of expanded circulation from the mutually supporting roles of news and advertisements.

The same wet years could spoil European harvests while improving those in North America: this regional contrast anchors Eugen Peter Schwiedland’s brief review of Eduard Brückner’s lecture on climate and migration. Schwiedland affirmatively presents Brückner’s explanation of how rainfall and grain yields could combine to encourage transatlantic emigration, rather than offering an independent critique. His emphasis falls on agricultural livelihoods as the link between weather and population movement. The review lets readers examine that concrete mechanism alongside Brückner’s much broader attribution of ancient migrations to climatic fluctuations, while its closing formulation identifies harvest failures as an important—not exclusive—cause of migration.

A clear history of banking institutions can still leave monetary history incomplete. In this brief 1913 review, Ludwig von Mises credits Ernst Wilmersdoerffer’s account of Italian banks of issue since unification with filling a gap in German economic literature. His reservation is precise: the book neglects the broader economic consequences of currency fluctuations. Without offering an alternative account, Mises draws a useful distinction between documenting institutional change and explaining its economic effects, while preserving his appreciation for Wilmersdoerffer’s informative scholarship.

Can consumers buy their way to socialism? In this brief 1913 review of H. Domack’s dissertation, Emil Lederer challenges the assumption that consumer cooperatives could simply acquire all national production. Monopolized industries, sectors unsuited to cooperative organization, and the incorporation of agriculture present obstacles that Domack, he argues, fails to confront. Lederer’s distinctive demand is to separate what consumer organizations are, what they might theoretically achieve, and how those possibilities could actually be realized. The review offers a compact critique of the gap between cooperative expansion and economic transformation, while acknowledging the dissertation’s historical material on the English and German cooperative movements.

Can small shopkeepers be defended without frustrating consumers’ demand for cheaper living? In this 1913 review of H. Lambrechts, Eugen Peter Schwiedland separates evidence of commercial abuses from the case for restricting department stores and consumer cooperatives. He acknowledges Lambrechts’s disturbing examples of inferior goods, pressure on suppliers and hardships among employees, but doubts that moral appeals or legislative exclusion offer a workable remedy. Drawing on his own studies of trade and cooperation, he instead considers how independent retailers might acquire the advantages of scale through collective purchasing, shared premises or affiliation with larger firms. This brief review makes a precise distinction: sympathy for threatened livelihoods need not entail preserving their existing business arrangements.

For economists without legal training, labour-protection statutes could remain sources known only at second hand. Emil Lederer’s 1913 review of J. Jastrow’s Arbeiterschutz identifies a concrete remedy: a sourcebook whose selection and arrangement make the laws approachable without isolating them from the conditions that prompted them. He values the juxtaposition of literary descriptions of industrial life, Engels’s account of workers’ conditions, imperial decrees and Rerum Novarum with statutory texts. This short review shows what Lederer wanted from an introduction to labour protection: neither legal provisions alone nor commentary in their place, but historical and ideological context that leads readers back to the legislation itself.

What makes prices, profits, wages and interest rates rise together? In this brief 1913 review of Jean Lescure’s pamphlet, Eugen Peter Schwiedland highlights a dispute over whether changes in circulating money are the principal cause of economic fluctuations. He presents Lescure’s challenge to that explanation—directed particularly at Irving Fisher—as a successful refutation, and reports Lescure’s alternative emphasis on supply and demand. The notice offers a compact glimpse of Schwiedland’s favourable reception of this argument, rather than an independent demonstration of its validity.

A monetary-theory reader sells out in scarcely two years: for Mises, this is both encouraging and troubling. In this brief 1913 review of the second, revised and expanded edition of Diehl and Mombert’s Zur Lehre vom Geld, he welcomes students’ renewed interest in economic theory but questions its restriction to older writers. His concrete evidence is the recommended reading list, which omits Menger, Walras, Irving Fisher, and Kinley. The review offers a compact glimpse of Mises’s standards for economic education: a revival of theoretical study should be judged not merely by demand for textbooks, but by attention to newer theoretical work.

Strong unions confronted a fragmented field of enterprises in the German woodworking industry: what kind of employers’ organization emerged from that encounter? In this brief 1913 review of Wilhelm Carlsson’s study, Emil Lederer identifies a comparative question that he finds the book leaves unanswered. Carlsson describes an association apparently reconciled to organized labour and collective agreements, but, in Lederer’s judgement, largely reproduces its publications rather than explaining what distinguishes it from other employers’ bodies. The review offers a compact statement of Lederer’s critical standard: institutional history and statutes are not enough without an account of the specific conditions shaping collective action.