1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Consumers never merely weigh today's helping of a good against tomorrow's; they confront recurring subsistence needs, postponable wishes, durable purchases, future-only aims, and precautionary reserves. On that typological insight Mahr rebuilds the theory of intertemporal choice, which he judges to have sought one general law where none exists. Present restraint, he shows, is undertaken not to enjoy the same want more intensely later but to fund a different project altogether—dissolving Böhm-Bawerk's doctrine of systematically undervalued future goods; where earlier satisfaction is genuinely preferred, the cause is stronger anticipatory pleasure, not faulty foresight. Interest therefore cannot rest on a universal discounting of the future, and long-term rationality can be judged only by the tendencies discernible when the decision was made, never by its later outcome.
Die Regel ist, daß Einschränkungen an der gegenwärtigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung nur vorgenommen werden, um in der Zukunft neue, anders geartete Bedürfnisse befriedigen zu können.
English translation: “The rule is that restrictions on present want-satisfaction are undertaken only in order to be able to satisfy new, differently constituted wants in the future.”
Bread and wine, bread and butter, coffee and milk: for Mahr these are never interchangeable along a smooth curve but combine in one determinate best proportion, which income and prices may put out of reach. On that observation rests his assault, first advanced in 1954, on the indifference-curve analysis then spreading from Anglo-American economics through Pareto and Hicks. Taking up Hans Mayer's objections—the fictive 'experiment,' infinite divisibility, unlimited substitutability—he denies that a field of equally valued bundles exists at all, and replaces indifference curves with curves of preferred combinations shifting with income and saturation. Extending the argument to the marginal-utility level, he separates broad need-classes from particular goods and locates the one clear margin in the marginal utility of money rather than in any equalization across commodities.
In Wahrheit gibt es regelmäßig nur ein optimales Kombinationsverhältnis zweier Konsumgüter.
English translation: “In truth, there is regularly only one optimal combination ratio of two consumer goods.”
Postwar trade policy broke with the economic nationalism of the interwar years, and reciprocity became its governing principle—the ground on which Mahr, in 1955, builds a case that mutual liberalization, broad enough and paced with care, can raise national income without the feared wave of unemployment. He concedes the transition problem, that sheltered industries contract before resources migrate to exporting ones, but judges it commonly overstated. His decisive addition to foreign-trade multiplier analysis is the acceleration principle: expanding export industries call forth machinery, steel, and construction, a fresh investment demand that outweighs the replacement demand lost in shrinking sectors. Where prior protection ran very high, he allows devaluation over deflation; his caution is reversed against excessive speed, which would overstrain investment-goods capacity. The horizon is OEEC integration, with inner and outer circles of participation.
Therefore the removal of trade barriers, if carried out not too slowly and faint-heartedly, will bestow prosperity upon the industries which produce investment goods.
Business cycles and foreign trade feed on one another, and Mahr maps their interaction across six combinations of domestic and foreign boom and slump: a home upswing leaks abroad through imports, a downturn is cushioned by exports and cheaper foreign goods. From this he weighs the modern, Keynesian case for protection—full employment defended against multiplier leakage—only to warn that in depression protectionism spreads faster than at any other time, tipping into beggar-my-neighbour escalation. His distinctive contribution, written in 1957, is the 'Defensivzoll,' a defensive tariff justified strictly up to the point where it offsets, rather than compounds, the productivity loss inflicted by foreign barriers. List's infant-industry argument is confined to agrarian latecomers; the standing ideal remains reciprocal free trade, and OEEC liberalization, through the accelerator, is read as broadly expansionary.
Vor allem aber wirkt der Protektionismus zu keiner anderen Zeit so ansteckend wie in der Depression.
English translation: “Above all, however, protectionism is at no other time so contagious as during a depression.”
Written in 1933 as the United States' experiment in credit-controlled stabilization was collapsing, this pamphlet—introduced by Harry Gideonse—makes monetary law the guardian of production and employment rather than of abstract justice between creditor and debtor. Its rule is the stabilization of purchasing power through a wholesale-price index, chosen over broader cost-of-living standards that merely register productivity or contracts. Its sharpest theoretical stroke is the contrast between stable money and the Hayekian ideal of neutral money, which Mahr judges administratively unusable because velocity and money substitutes cannot be measured. Reconsidering the 1920s, he concedes that stable prices did not prevent the boom, yet blames the catastrophe on deflationary collapse—and licenses credit-financed public works, disciplined by a legally fixed price target, while demoting gold from principle to mere reassuring camouflage.
If currency policy, however, is legally directed toward the stabilization of purchasing power, the limit of credit expansion would coincide with the attainment of the intended level of prices.
Monopoly prices fall less sharply in a depression than competitive prices — a regularity Alexander Mahr had observed in 1932 and here places on a fuller analytical footing. Starting from the elasticity of demand as the decisive determinant of the monopoly price, he shows that under inelastic or unit-elastic demand a cost reduction is largely pocketed as profit rather than passed to buyers, so that monopoly price adjustment is systematically less elastic than competitive adjustment. Real monopolists, he argues, are nonetheless hemmed in by substitutes, latent competitors, tariffs, and the threat of state intervention. The stakes are macroeconomic: by defending prices through cuts to output and employment, monopoly and cartel pricing convert cyclical contractions into cumulative ones, and Mahr rejects the claim that cartels stabilize the Konjunkturzyklus.
Bei unelastischer Nachfrage oder wenn die Nachfrageelastizität gleich eins ist, wird also der Monopolpreis trotz Änderung der Kosten ganz überwiegend unverändert bleiben, während der Konkurrenzpreis sich durchaus der Kostenänderung anpassen würde.
English translation: “With inelastic demand, or when the elasticity of demand equals one, the monopoly price will therefore, despite a change in costs, remain overwhelmingly unchanged, whereas the competitive price would fully adjust to the change in costs.”
Multiplier theory, as Keynes bequeathed it, sums an endless sequence of income effects without ever fixing the accounting period national income actually requires—and for Mahr the neglect of the time factor is its cardinal defect. Since income is reckoned by the year, the multiplier too must be annual: he redefines it as the coefficient linking a rise in circulating money to the rise in monetary national income, and identifies it with the marginal velocity of circulation, the number of income-forming turnovers a newly issued unit performs within the year. Hoarding, on this account, is not an external leakage but a lowering of that average velocity. The Keynesian investment multiplier and the export multiplier become mere special cases of a broader principle: supplying a growing economy with means of payment. Marked here as previously unpublished.
Der entscheidende Mangel der herrschenden Multiplikatortheorie liegt in der Vernachlässigung des Zeitfaktors.
English translation: “The decisive defect of the prevailing multiplier theory lies in the neglect of the time factor.”
Entrepreneurs must advance wages and materials long before sales proceeds return, and when banks restrict credit, hoard cash, and slow velocity, consumers' purchasing power falls short of producers' costs—so money income and real market product drift apart. Correcting that drift is the task Mahr sets monetary policy in this 1964 study, defending stable purchasing power against 'neutral,' cost-oriented money that would merely finance the creeping inflation of monopoly wages and prices. His central move is to show that technological profit under stable money is non-inflationary, since it springs from falling costs rather than redistribution. Linking the multiplier to circuit velocity through the 'allocation period,' and rereading the New Deal's deficits as real but self-defeating, he shifts the modern danger from deflationary collapse to creeping inflation driven by pressure-group politics.
A policy of stable money creates profits of a non-inflationary character, if we define inflation as an increase of monetary national income beyond real net market product.
The suspicion that sound economic conduct must collide with ethical obligation rests, Mahr argues, on a false definition of economy. Against the caricature of homo oeconomicus as pure profit-seeker, he recovers the subjectivist conception: economizing is not a realm of money or goods but the ordering of scarce means toward chosen ends, whatever their moral content. Altruistic, religious, cultural, and political aims become economic the moment they compete for scarce resources; a seller who favors a friend satisfies two needs at once, and unwirtschaftlich conduct means only the irrational use of means, never the refusal to maximize gain. The closing pages defend a qualified Wertfreiheit against Max Weber's shadow: economists may render moral judgments, but derivation and proof must stay free of them.
Es handelt sich eben nur um das Disponieren über die knappen Mittel zwecks maximaler Zielerreichung.
English translation: “What is involved is simply the disposition of scarce means with a view to maximal attainment of ends.”
'Collective needs' ranks among the most contested terms in the theory of public finance, and Mahr sets out to demystify it. He rejects in turn the organic fiction of a state that feels its own wants, Sax's individualist account of socially conditioned needs, and the circular definition that identifies collective needs with whatever the public authorities happen to provide. The deeper trouble lies in the word 'need' itself, a hedonistic residue he would replace with 'goals.' Only internal legal protection and external security appear intrinsically tied to the state; beyond that minimum, the scope of public activity is not deduced from any natural class of wants but set by whichever part of the population holds political power. Scarcity stays economic; the allocation of public purposes is political.
Kollektivziele sind demnach die Ziele, welche jener Teil der Bevölkerung, der die politische Macht innehat, für die staatliche Tätigkeit festgelegt hat.
English translation: “Collective goals are accordingly the goals which that part of the population which holds political power has set for state activity.”
Mahr rejects the classical specie-flow orthodoxy: gold movements are too small and mistimed to explain how international claims and liabilities rebalance. Writing from interwar Vienna in 1927, amid reparations, hyperinflation, and violent currency swings, he fuses Angell's credit-volume theory with Wieser's account of the balance of payments as the sum of individual payment balances, deriving external equilibrium from the interdependence of debtors, creditors, and domestic-only actors. Inflation is the great disruptor, swelling nominal purchasing power that spills into foreign goods and securities; against Cassel and Keynes he denies that purchasing-power parity governs the exchanges, insisting the causation often runs the other way. Speculation, he argues from the Austrian crown and the wartime mark, is no mere forecast but itself a cause—capable of igniting fresh inflation.
Andererseits ist die Erkenntnis, daß die fortgesetzte Inanspruchnahme der Notenpresse zur Deckung eines staatlichen Defizits unweigerlich zur Kurswertsenkung führt, heutzutage wohl schon Gemeingut der ganzen Welt.
English translation: “On the other hand, the insight that the continued resort to the printing press to cover a state deficit inevitably leads to a fall in the exchange rate is today probably common knowledge throughout the world.”