The archive.

An economics manual can help students pass examinations without teaching them to think economically. In this 1913 joint review of Adler and Quaritsch, Joseph A. Schumpeter makes that distinction concrete: careful definitions and orderly classifications are no substitute for explaining prices, crises or interest. He grants Quaritsch considerable merit within the limits of an examination aid, but asks why Adler’s vocational students should receive outdated doctrine rather than the arguments needed to judge protection and free trade. The review offers a compact statement of Schumpeter’s educational expectations: elementary instruction need not sacrifice explanation, and concrete knowledge of modern economic life is preferable to empty theoretical coverage. His criticism rests on confidence in beginners’ appetite and capacity for understanding.

Does cooperation explain the creation of economic surplus, and monopoly its appropriation by nonworkers? In this 1913 German review of Achille Loria’s La synthèse économique, Joseph A. Schumpeter separates these two claims from the sweeping historical account built upon them. His central objection concerns the poorly defended proposition that productive association requires coercion, exercised in a market economy through exclusion from land and productive resources. Rather than offer an exhaustive rebuttal, Schumpeter tests the explanatory joints of Loria’s system, while acknowledging useful discussions that do not depend on it. The review offers a compact example of his critical method: distinguishing a social vision from the economic mechanisms needed to establish it, amid explicit frustration at economics’ lack of shared standards of proof.

Militant collective action need not imply revolutionary aims. In this 1913 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines German salaried employees’ organizations whose members sought secure careers, rising salaries, and middle-class standing rather than an end to capitalism. Membership figures, association reports, and disputes over noncompetition clauses allow him to test both the promise of cooperation with employers and the expectation that salaried dependence must produce proletarian politics. Established associations retain strength through benefits and recruitment networks, yet conciliatory lobbying fails to guarantee legal protection. Austrian bank employees provide a revealing comparison: union pressure serves demands for permanent appointments, regulated advancement, and pensions. Lederer’s distinctive concern is the gap between organizational methods and social objectives—how employees can fight collectively to preserve differentiated careers within the existing order.

Does the rarity of free competition undermine its usefulness in economic theory? In this 1913 review of Bernard Lavergne’s La théorie des marchés économiques, Joseph A. Schumpeter welcomes an independent contribution to marginal-utility economics while resisting its criticism of Walras. His decisive distinction is between denying entrepreneurial profit and explaining its elimination in equilibrium. Even transport costs, he argues, need not invalidate equilibrium cost equality: disadvantages of location can be reflected in lower valuations of land services. This compact review shows Schumpeter testing theoretical novelty without dismissing it, and offers a concrete example of how an economist can acknowledge the distance between an analytical assumption and observed conditions while defending the explanatory work that assumption performs.

Better pay need not mean greater freedom. In this 1913 social-policy chronicle, Emil Lederer examines how civil servants in Germany and Austria organize against rising prices while remaining divided by rank, occupation, and claims to status. His distinctive concern is the gap between material concessions and democratic rights: associations can win welfare benefits or more predictable advancement without gaining an independent voice in the administration. Austria’s struggle over statutory service conditions makes that tension particularly concrete, as financial distress pushes organizations to accept legislation stripped of protections they had sought. Read alongside Germany’s narrower salary and status campaigns, this case allows readers to distinguish collective mobilization from emancipation—and to see how political alliances and sectional privileges can constrain the very organizations formed to defend salaried employees.

Can workers receive the full value of their contribution while being paid less than their product will eventually fetch? In this 1913 review, Robert Zuckerkandl sympathetically reconstructs Böhm-Bawerk’s answer: goods available now command a premium over otherwise equivalent goods available later. His account connects this valuation difference to the practical demands of production—tools and machinery can increase output, but producers must be sustained while they wait. The review’s distinctive interest lies in its passage from these productive conditions to contested questions of distribution. Zuckerkandl argues that the gap between wages and a product’s future value does not by itself establish exploitation, and that collective ownership would alter the allocation of interest rather than abolish its economic basis. Readers encounter an affirmative defense whose political implications turn on a precise distinction between present and future value.

Stable exchange rates did not necessarily require a legal right to redeem banknotes in gold. That distinction anchors Robert Zuckerkandl’s 1913 article on the renewed privilege of the Austro-Hungarian Bank. His qualified defence of the settlement turns on practical monetary choices: a public that preferred paper to gold coins, reserves concentrated at the bank, and foreign-exchange operations that could sometimes check capital outflows without raising domestic interest rates. Against Hungarian hopes that compulsory redemption would attract foreign capital and Austrian fears of dearer credit, he weighs discretion against legal guarantees. Readers can discover how gold parity, gold circulation, and enforceable convertibility could serve different purposes—and why Zuckerkandl regarded the compromise as defensible for the present, not as the final form of monetary reform.

Overcoming distance is the social work that Schwiedland makes the object of this 1918 treatise on Verkehr — transport understood not as machinery but as the bringing together of people, goods, and messages that need completing, and the separating of those tending apart. Technical possibility, he argues, is generative rather than merely serviceable: once paths, vehicles, and motive forces exist, they create relations where advantage can be won. The decisive historical threshold is the professional carrier; from there the account runs through roads, railways, canals, ocean liners, ports, post, telegraph, and press. Railways make bulk goods mobile and translate geography into calculable tariff and schedule, while cheap freight levels prices and forestalls famine even as it exposes weaker regions to distant competition. Transport, he insists, must serve a livable order, not become autonomous circulation.

Der Telegraf überflügelt die Erde in ihrer Umdrehung.

English translation: “The telegraph outstrips the earth in its rotation.”

No column of price statistics can settle a question that only economic theory can decide, Mises insists at the outset of this study of general dearness. He separates true inflation—a fall in the objective exchange value of money—from the particular price rises that tariffs, import bans, or resource scarcity produce. Higher money wages, he argues, do not raise real wages: unions win only transitional gains as employers concede, expecting to recover the cost in product prices, so recurring wage pushes feed a persistent tendency toward depreciation. Against Othmar Spann and the cost theorists he holds that general dearness is at root a monetary phenomenon, and warns that expanding uncovered notes and fiduciary media cannot permanently lower interest without courting crisis and inflation.

Sehen wir von der Tatsache des Geldgebrauchs ab, so ergibt sich klar, daß ein Gut nicht teurer werden kann, ohne daß alle anderen Güter billiger werden.

English translation: “If we set aside the fact of the use of money, it becomes clear that one good cannot become more expensive without all other goods becoming cheaper.”

Liberalism promised that free competition would dissolve society into isolated, harmoniously trading individuals; the reality, this 1913 survey argues, was the reverse. Capitalism shattered the old corporate bonds only to force workers, employers, salaried employees, officials, farmers, the Mittelstand, and consumers to regroup as organized classes, each pursuing the same aim — to organize the market by excluding competition within its own ranks. Lederer maps these associations across German society and extracts a durable concept: ideology as an interest group's double language, egoistic toward its own members, altruistic toward the state and the public. Unions draw depth from socialism, Christianity, or nationalism; employer bodies unite as counter-organizations; consumer cooperatives turn buying itself into class consciousness. Public life, he concludes, is increasingly governed by organized economic power rather than by liberal individual exchange.

Unter Ideologie ist hier und im folgenden das Gedankensystem verstanden, welches die Klassen und ihre Organisationen zur Begründung ihrer Interessen nach außen und innen aufgebaut haben.

English translation: “By ideology, here and in what follows, is understood the system of thought which the classes and their organizations have constructed in order to justify their interests both outwardly and inwardly.”

Schumpeter had argued that interest belongs only to dynamic capitalist development, a temporary levy on the profit of the innovating entrepreneur that vanishes once competition routinizes his new combinations. Böhm-Bawerk declares the thesis mistaken from the outset and dismantles it internally, empirically, and conceptually. He exposes an equivocation between the rare creative pioneer and the mass imitator, insists that possession of the means of production is irrelevant to imputation, and turns Schumpeter's own concession about the greater yield of longer production methods into proof that present goods command an agio even in a static economy. Rental housing, ordinary firms, mortgages, and state securities keep paying interest without entrepreneurial breakthroughs; no real economy, past or present, has ever lacked it. In essence, he maintains, there is only one interest.

Der Kapitalzins ist und bleibt das, wofür ihn alle Welt mit gutem Grund seit jeher gehalten hat: ein statischer Einkommenszweig.

English translation: “Interest on capital is and remains that which, with good reason, all the world has ever taken it to be: a static branch of income.”

Can interest persist in an economy without innovation? In this 1913 concluding rejoinder to Schumpeter, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk argues that time-consuming, roundabout production can generate interest even under stationary conditions. His criticism turns on a concrete distinction: resources may exist somewhere in an economy without being available to the person who needs them. Private ownership and borrowing therefore complicate the image of a static producer already equipped for production. Böhm-Bawerk also presses a quantitative challenge: can entrepreneurial surpluses account for the observed volume of interest payments? The exchange offers readers a focused encounter between rival explanations of interest, showing how assumptions about access to resources and the duration of profits shape what each theory must explain—and how it might be tested.