The archive.

Does the loan market determine how future income is valued, or does lending draw its interest rate from valuations already embedded in prices? In this 1927 article, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter argues for the latter: choices between differently timed satisfactions shape the prices of land, machinery, and other durable assets before any explicit loan calculation. His historical and psychological perspective challenges explanations that derive interest from physical productivity alone. The practical stakes emerge in his distinction between new money spent into circulation and bank credit entering first as loanable funds—a distinction that helps explain why rising prices can coexist with low discount rates. Readers can discover how a theory of asset valuation becomes a criterion for judging central-bank stabilization, and why Fetter regards cheap credit as no substitute for confronting scarce resources.

An economist’s defence of a tradition can help undo it. In this brief biographical encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Frank Albert Fetter assesses John Elliot Cairnes as both an influential public writer and an uncertain guardian of classical economics. Cairnes sought to defend Ricardo and Mill against Jevons; Fetter argues that his amendments instead weakened the doctrines he meant to preserve. The sharpest contrast concerns method: Cairnes advocated abstract deduction, yet Fetter finds his strongest work in historical explanation and empirical studies, including The Slave Power and essays on Australian gold. The entry offers a compact, pointed distinction between Cairnes’ contemporary authority and the theoretical achievements Fetter was prepared to credit.

A machine is a productive object; its owner’s investment is a monetary valuation. What goes wrong when economics calls both “capital”? In this encyclopedia article, originally published in 1930 and republished in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter traces that ambiguity through commercial usage and economic theory. His objection is concrete: the usefulness of equipment cannot by itself explain a percentage return on an investment whose value has yet to be explained. Against definitions centred on physical goods, he proposes capital as the market value of individual claims to income, including patents, franchises and other intangible rights. The article offers a compact way to distinguish production from ownership and valuation—and to see why that distinction changes arguments about interest and capitalism.

Can land remain free if its cultivation yields a surplus after all other inputs have been paid? In this 1930 journal comment, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter makes that inconsistency the starting point of his criticism of Albert Benedict Wolfe’s account of rent under increasing returns. His numerical corrections show why returns available on free land must govern the valuation of inputs used elsewhere, and why profitable cultivation turns on additional product exceeding additional cost—not on rising gross yields alone. Fetter’s distinctive position is to defend the marginal logic of Ricardian rent without accepting its restriction to agricultural land. The comment offers a compact encounter with the demands of equilibrium reasoning and with his argument that rent theory’s useful core applies to the services of durable goods more generally.

A house and a machine can both be rented: why, then, should economic theory define rent through land alone? In this encyclopedia article, first published in 1934 and reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the inherited division between land rent and returns on other resources. He traces that division to historical usage and the circumstances of English agriculture, then questions the supposedly unique properties of land on which Ricardian theory rests. His alternative turns on the contract: an owner lends the use of a durable thing that must later be returned, rather than advancing money to be repaid. The article offers a concrete way to reconsider what economic categories distinguish—and what they obscure—by separating a resource’s physical origin from the terms governing its use.

A landowner could raise money by selling a perpetual claim on landed income without promising ever to repay the capital. That distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s brief encyclopedia entry: the rent charge served purposes similar to borrowing, yet escaped the church’s disapproval of ordinary interest-bearing loans. Fetter approaches this medieval legal instrument through the economics of investment, comparing the exchange of fixed incomes for capital sums to a modern bond market. His account makes clear why the absence of a maturity date mattered—not merely as a contractual detail, but as a basis for distinguishing the transaction’s ethical status. Readers gain a compact explanation of how landowners’ need for funds and burghers’ demand for investments met within religious constraints.

Does industrial monopoly follow inevitably from efficient production, or from legal arrangements and deliberate attempts to control prices? In this 1937 review of Arthur Robert Burns’s The Decline of Competition, Frank Albert Fetter tests the claim of inevitability against Burns’s own evidence. His crucial distinction is between a large, efficient plant and a firm that acquires many plants to gain market power: financial concentration need not improve production. Fetter values Burns’s account of industrial practices but challenges the move from documenting monopoly to accepting it as unavoidable. His criticism sharpens when Burns proposes state control: why should officials deemed unable to preserve competition prove capable of administering concentrated industry? The review connects precise questions of industrial organization with the competence and accountability of economic government.

Does capital mean a company’s assets, its shareholders’ wealth, or the cost of goods used in production? In this 1937 article, reprinted in 1977, Frank Albert Fetter argues that economics has handed accounting a vocabulary unable to keep these distinctions clear. His alternative treats capital as the present monetary value of investors’ rights to future income, not as a collection of physical objects. This makes ownership and valuation inseparable: corporations own assets, while shareholders own capital; enterprises earn profits, while individuals receive income. Fetter’s respect for accountants’ practical difficulties sharpens his challenge to historical cost. Readers can discover why apparently verbal disagreements affect the interpretation of balance sheets—and why recording past expenditure cannot, in his view, settle the question of present worth.

Does steel production make monopoly inevitable, or do pricing rules help create the concentration they are invoked to justify? In this 1937 review essay, Frank Albert Fetter challenges the defense of basing-point pricing advanced in The Economics of the Iron and Steel Industry. He distinguishes large producing plants from corporations controlling many plants, and investors’ hopes of recovering costs from rights to protected returns. His case for mill-base pricing rests not on perfect competition but on weakening discrimination and centralized price control. Especially pointed is his treatment of investment losses: established firms’ objections to reform leave unheard the businesses already displaced or prevented from forming. The essay offers a concrete way to examine the passage from explaining industrial concentration to defending it as necessary.

Clearly it is not overhead costs but monopoly that permits fixing prices to realize overhead costs.

Economic freedom can be threatened by private concentration as well as state planning: this is the tension Frank Albert Fetter draws out in his 1943 review of Wilhelm Röpke’s Die Gesellschaftskrisis der Gegenwart. Fetter clarifies Röpke’s elusive diagnosis of social disintegration as a change in structure—the replacement of independent proprietors by employees dependent on large aggregations of capital. His sympathy for this constructive liberalism does not prevent him from questioning Röpke’s idealization of the eighteenth century or his estimate of modern technology. This brief review offers a sharply defined encounter between liberal commitments and the problem of business scale, with Fetter weighing economic independence and human worth against both concentrated power and nostalgia for smaller enterprise.

Bureaucracy is a symptom, not the underlying evil: this distinction anchors Frank Albert Fetter’s 1945 review of Ludwig von Mises’s book. Fetter locates its real target in the transfer of decisions about prices and production from private enterprise to government. His distinctive contribution is to connect that argument to an older dispute over price theory, presenting Austrian subjective valuation as a basis for consumer sovereignty and political liberalism. Yet his endorsement has limits: he questions whether Mises sufficiently distinguishes bureaucratic administration from the system it serves, and whether capitalism deserves so much credit for scientific and cultural progress. This brief review shows where a sympathetic defender of free enterprise qualifies Mises’s claims—and why Fetter does not read the book as a demand for unrestricted laissez-faire.

Can reduced consumption impoverish society when it finances future production? In this 1945 article, Frank Albert Fetter tests Lauderdale’s oversaving theory against the distinction between present expenditure and accumulated productive wealth. His criticism turns on what Lauderdale’s account leaves out: future yields from investment, the gradual decline in returns to additional capital, and the tax liabilities extinguished by public debt repayment. Fetter also gives the dispute a political edge, interpreting Lauderdale’s attack on saving as an argument against Britain’s sinking fund and as protective of creditors facing lower reinvestment yields. The result is a pointed encounter between economic reasoning and fiscal interests, showing why temporary disruption, reduced consumption, and permanent loss of wealth cannot simply be treated as equivalent.