The archive.

Germany’s imperial inheritance tax of 1906 taxed each beneficiary’s share rather than the estate as a whole, making kinship as important as wealth in determining liability. In this short note, Frank Albert Fetter explains how exemptions for close family transfers coexist with progressive rates reaching 25 percent. His attention to a safeguard limiting abrupt tax increases at bracket boundaries shows why the rate table alone cannot describe the burden. Fetter combines precise fiscal exposition with a wry awareness of the statute’s interlocking qualifications. His closing remarks report fears that a popularly elected Reichstag might use the tax against saving and property, while noting the states’ retained taxing powers. The result is a compact account of how family distinctions, progression, and divided authority shape a revenue measure.

Can a distinction between stocks and flows explain capital and income, or does it conceal the role of valuation? In this 1907 review of Irving Fisher’s book, republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter praises Fisher’s mathematical treatment of capitalization while arguing that its strongest results have outgrown its original definitions. Durable goods are not stored quantities of their future services; their capital value depends on expected incomes. Fetter makes this conceptual dispute tangible through deferred annuities, capital appreciation, and taxation, asking whether income means earnings available to save or spend, or only consumption actually enjoyed. His qualified endorsement offers a way to examine how apparently simple accounting terms can shift meaning—and how those shifts alter economic arguments.

Does a gain cease to be income if its owner saves rather than spends it? In this conference discussion, originally published in 1908 and reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter challenges Irving Fisher’s definition by separating monetary acquisition from the enjoyment wealth eventually affords. His concrete test is ordinary business practice: wages, interest, rent, and increases in capital value need not await consumption to count as income. Fetter accepts the relevance of psychic satisfaction but disputes its use as the exclusive measure of income. The disagreement also bears on taxation of gains from land speculation. This compact intervention shows why accrual, saving, expenditure, and enjoyment must be distinguished before an apparently verbal dispute can be settled.

We are discussing a question of terminology but not a question “merely” of terminology.

Can a physical increase in output explain a rate of interest without first assuming the valuations it is meant to explain? In this 1914 rejoinder to Harry Gunnison Brown, reproduced in the supplied 1977 edition, Frank Albert Fetter tests that question through a deceptively simple example of trees and fruit. More fruit is a physical fact; a percentage return requires a valuation of the trees against their future yield. Fetter argues that Brown’s productivity theory smuggles this value relationship into its supposed physical explanation. His further test—what happens when one production method displaces another—clarifies why he assigns time-preference, rather than technical productivity, the governing role. This brief exchange offers a precise distinction between explaining productive income and explaining the value of its source.

Enter the value relation disguised as a rate of physical productivity.

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.

A machine’s productivity explains why it yields goods—but does it explain why its purchase price falls below the value of its future returns? In this 1914 article, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter makes that distinction the test of competing interest theories. Challenging Seager, Brown, and even his apparent ally Irving Fisher, he argues that contractual interest reflects the discounting already embodied in prices of future services. His capitalization perspective brings land, machinery, and consumption goods within the same problem of valuation through time. Readers can discover why, for Fetter, calling a return “productive” risks assuming the very surplus that needs explaining, and why time preference means more than impatience for immediate enjoyment.

When does disagreement with an economic theory become misrepresentation of it? In this 1916 rejoinder to H. J. Davenport’s review of Economic Principles, Frank Albert Fetter makes definitions and the sequence of exposition tests of fair criticism. He argues that Davenport confuses subjective value with commercial price, mistakes reported business usage for theoretical endorsement, and treats preliminary discussions of time-preference as a finished account of loan interest. These objections offer a concrete view of Fetter’s effort to distinguish individual valuation from market transactions. The reply also exposes a tension in scholarly polemic: Fetter demands patient, contextual reading while answering his critic with pointed sarcasm. Readers can examine how conceptual disputes become disputes over what an author has actually said.

What makes a farm, a mine, a waterfall, and an urban site members of the same economic category? In this brief discussion of Richard T. Ely’s paper, originally published in 1917 and reprinted here in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter questions the inherited distinction between land and capital. Cultivation complicates the classification of land as natural; extracted ore exposes a shift from origin to transportability as the dividing criterion. Fetter’s alternative is to examine the qualities and separable uses of material things rather than classify whole objects. His response offers a compact demonstration of how an apparently familiar category can conceal incompatible standards—and why, in his view, that confusion obstructs both rent theory and clear thinking about property legislation.

Landed property is not an economic concept, but a juristic one.

A price can explain what someone will pay without establishing what serves their well-being. In this December 1920 sequel article, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the claim that contemporary economics is converging on money and prices as its governing framework. His criticism is pointed because he defends price theory as a legitimate analytical undertaking while refusing to make market valuations standards of welfare. Reading Marshall and Mitchell against their own qualifications, he exposes the tension between monetary precision and humanitarian purpose. Capitalized property rights sharpen the problem: their value may depend on restricting services rather than satisfying needs. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish explaining economic choices from judging their consequences, without discarding the tools of price analysis.

Where does one seller’s market end and another’s begin? In this theoretical article, Frank Albert Fetter makes the boundary depend on prices as well as distance: customers compare the cost of goods delivered, not simply proximity to a trading centre. For homogeneous goods, with freight proportional to distance and transport following straight routes, he derives a hyperbolic boundary that shifts as relative prices change. The practical force of this geometry emerges in his criticism of shipment statistics: drawing an arbitrary district can manufacture an apparent shortage and support a misleading pricing argument. Readers can discover how transport costs protect local sellers, how lower prices enlarge their territories, and why an elegant spatial model must remain a first approximation when confronted with actual freight schedules and geography.

By the 1880s American economics had broken from English classical laissez-faire, and this survey—Fetter's contribution to a German comparative handbook, read here in that German translation—maps what grew in its place. He tells how German-trained scholars like Ely and Clark founded the American Economic Association, how Simon Patten's emphasis on consumption and psychology prepared the ground, and why Austrian marginal utility found unusually fertile soil in a country already reading Jevons and J. B. Clark. Fetter defends the 'psychological school' as a shift of interest from the outer physical world to human wants and valuations, blames the mistranslation of Nutzen as 'utility' for false charges of Benthamite hedonism, and answers Veblen and the institutionalists of The Trend of Economics before laying out ten trends he expects American theory to pursue.

Über die Unwirklichkeit des „homo oeconomicus“ wird nicht länger disputiert und es wird eingesehen, daß die ökonomischen Motive ihre Quellen in allen Bereichen des menschlichen Lebens haben können.

English translation: “The unreality of the "homo oeconomicus" is no longer disputed, and it is recognized that economic motives may have their sources in all spheres of human life.”

Economists define capital as productive goods, then discuss it as money invested: for Frank Albert Fetter, this shift exposes an unresolved conceptual problem. In this Festschrift essay, first published in 1927 and supplied here in its 1977 reprint, he honors John Bates Clark by pressing beyond Clark’s distinction between concrete capital goods and a fund of value. Fetter connects the inclusion of land within capital to American property conditions and, more tentatively, to the controversy over Henry George’s single tax. His tribute remains critical: Clark’s reform did not fully separate physical production from the valuation of income rights. Readers can discover why seemingly technical definitions determine whether land, machinery, goodwill, and legal claims belong within one account of investment—and why Fetter locates their common basis in valuation rather than material form.