Alfred Amonn, “Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Dynamik”

Amonn’s essay presents Schumpeter’s theory as an integrated architecture organized by the contrast between equilibrium and development:

Im Anschluß an moderne amerikanische Autoren, insbesondere an Clark und auch an die klassischen englischen Autoren, vor allem an J. St. Mill unterscheidet auch Schumpeter im wirtschaftlichen Geschehen zwei verschiedene Gruppen von ökonomischen Tatsachen, Tatsachen des wirtschaftlichen Gleichgewichts einerseits und Tatsachen der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung andererseits, und demgemäß auch zwei prinzipiell verschiedenartige d. h. verschieden bedingte Gruppen von nationalökonomischen Problemen, Probleme des wirtschaftlichen Gleichgewichts oder statischen Probleme und Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung oder dynamischen Probleme.

English translation: Following modern American authors, especially Clark, and also the classical English authors, above all J. St. Mill, Schumpeter too distinguishes in economic life two different groups of economic facts—facts of economic equilibrium on the one hand and facts of economic development on the other—and accordingly two fundamentally different, that is, differently conditioned, groups of economic problems: problems of economic equilibrium, or static problems, and problems of economic development, or dynamic problems.

Statics does not mean immobility, but repetition under given conditions. A static economy is one in which knowledge, wants, resources, techniques, and conduct reproduce themselves:

Wir können dies als das eigentliche Wesen des statischen Gleichgewichtszustandes bezeichnen, demgegenüber wir im wiederholten Ablauf der gleichen wirtschaftlichen Vorgänge nur die äußere Form oder das Symptom und in den unter gegebenen Verhältnissen und mit gegebenen Mitteln erreichbaren höchsten Befriedigungszustand die innere Bedingung des Gleichgewichts sehen.

English translation: We may designate this as the actual essence of the static equilibrium state, in contrast to which we see in the repeated running of the same economic processes only the outward form or symptom, and in the highest state of satisfaction attainable under the given conditions and with the given means the inner condition of equilibrium.

Amonn translates this into marginalist equilibrium theory: goods and productive services receive values through marginal utilities; exchange coordinates subjective valuations into prices; and under full competition prices tend to equal costs. Since costs ultimately reduce to wages for labor and rents for land, the static system leaves no theoretical place for specifically capitalist residual incomes. Its decisive negative conclusion is therefore:

Gewinne können in der statischen Wirtschaft nicht entstehen.

English translation: Profits cannot arise in a static economy.

This absence becomes the foundation of dynamics. Profit, capital, interest, credit, and crisis are not accidental irregularities within equilibrium; they require a different explanatory principle. Amonn locates that principle in the entrepreneur, who differs from the routine manager by interrupting repetition:

Das Wesentliche am Unternehmer ist, daß er nicht das tut, was der statische Wirtschaftsleiter an seiner Stelle tun würde, nämlich den Wirtschaftsprozeß, wie er in der abgelaufenen Wirtschaftsperiode vor sich gegangen ist, einfach in unveränderter Weise wiederholen, sondern daß er irgend etwas Neues in den Wirtschaftsprozeß einführt, wodurch nun dieser anders abläuft, als er bisher abgelaufen ist.

English translation: The essential thing about the entrepreneur is that he does not do what the static business manager in his place would do—namely simply repeat the economic process unchanged, as it ran in the elapsed economic period—but that he introduces something new into the economic process, whereby it now runs differently than it has hitherto.

Development is thus not movement in general, since static economies also move through recurring production and exchange. It is the purposive reorganization of production toward a surplus: new tools, methods, organizations, qualities, routes, or markets that promise more output for the same cost or the same output for less cost. The entrepreneur buys productive means at prices formed in the old system, while the new combination may yield returns based on a higher valuation. Profit is the temporary gap between inherited costs and transformed results.

Amonn’s account of capital and interest follows from this same dynamic interval. Because entrepreneurs usually lack the purchasing power required for new combinations, they borrow; the lender’s return is interest, and the money fund thereby functions as capital. Amonn accepts Schumpeter’s stress on credit but weakens any claim that bank credit is logically indispensable. Interest is not an independent productivity income; it is derived from entrepreneurial surplus, a separated share of dynamic gain. When innovations spread, imitation and competition erode entrepreneurial profit, raise input prices, lower output prices, and restore the cost law. Yet the restored equilibrium is not the old one: it has incorporated the innovation.

The crisis theory extends the same argument. Pure statics contains no endogenous crisis, while dynamics in principle moves toward a new equilibrium. Crisis arises in the transition, when innovations disturb interdependent systems of value, price, demand, supply, cost, and return. If many changes are uncoordinated and mutually obstructive, readjustment may fail:

Dieser Zusammenbruch des Wert- und Preissystems einer Volkswirtschaft ist das, was wir Krise nennen

English translation: This collapse of the value and price system of a national economy is what we call a crisis.

The essay’s significance lies in its disciplined separation of equilibrium theory from dynamic theory. Amonn shows that the central phenomena of capitalism can be understood only as transformations of an interdependent value-price structure: equilibrium explains repetition and cost regulation, while dynamics explains the temporary divergences through which entrepreneurship, profit, credit, capital, interest, and crisis arise.