3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When the Bretton Woods system broke down in 1973, the pressing question was not which technical rule to adopt but why fixed parities had failed at all. Haberler's diagnosis is unsparing: under modern democratic conditions any fixed-rate regime, a resurrected gold standard included, carries an inflationary bias, because governments will not accept the deflation that adjustment requires. Agreeing with Otmar Emminger against gold-standard nostalgics, he argues that correction must then run through inflation in surplus countries, exchange controls, or repeated parity changes, and that the adjustable peg only invites one-way speculation. His remedy is managed floating, sharply distinguished from the 'dirty' floating of split markets and multiple rates. Rereading the competitive devaluations of the 1930s as products of rigidity rather than flexibility, he urges the IMF to police clean floating instead of resurrecting the par-value system.
Floating is here to stay even if a misguided attempt is made to return to “stable but adjustable” parities.
Nairobi settled nothing, and for Haberler that was no calamity. The Committee of Twenty still chased a negotiated return to stable-but-adjustable par values, yet the working system was already one of floating currencies, and world trade had gone on growing beneath the improvisation. His argument hinges on a distinction officials blurred: asset convertibility, turning official balances into gold or SDRs, matters far less to commerce than ordinary market convertibility among currencies, which floating preserved. Restoring dollar convertibility, he insists, would not supply the discipline its advocates want, since the real obstacle is that governments refuse deflation for the sake of external balance. Against Giscard d'Estaing's charge that floating neither halts inflation nor yields true market rates, Haberler answers that flexible rates are a necessary shield for any country determined to stay out of the world's inflation.
If any country wishes to stay out of the world inflation, floating is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Against the postwar faith in fiscal fine-tuning, Haberler binds together three things usually treated separately: economic growth, monetary stability, and personal freedom. Growth matters, he argues, because it widens the practical range of human choice, but the institutions that generate it demand discipline rather than activist management. Severe depressions, he judges, have become largely avoidable, so the live danger is now creeping inflation, and here his reassessment of the Phillips curve does the analytical work. Phillips's own mechanism, he notes, was demand-pull, not cost-push; any apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds only while rising prices go unanticipated, and dissolves once expectations catch up. Set within a classical-liberal frame that reaches from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to wage-push unionism, the book narrows what stabilization policy can honestly promise: no durable bargain between jobs and inflation exists.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that severe depressions are a thing of the past.
Writing after the 1973 oil embargo and OPEC's cartel price rise had transformed the monetary scene, Haberler sets out to calm the panic rather than amplify it. The oil shock, he grants, imposes a real transfer of purchasing power from the industrial world to the producers, but a large transfer is not an insoluble monetary crisis. Treated as a single bloc, the importing countries could bear it while output still expanded; the genuine difficulty is distributional, since exporters' spending and investment will not match each nation's oil bill, and exchange rates must apportion the adjustment. Because no authority can compute the correct new parities, floating is the least bad response to uncertainty. France's decision to let the franc float confirms the lesson, and he cautions Washington to welcome dollar appreciation rather than retaliate with tariffs or quotas.
If they keep their money in liquid form (fail to spend it), it is up to monetary management in the importing countries to neutralize a possible deflationary effect.
Did OPEC's quadrupling of crude prices really cause the stagflation of the mid-1970s? Haberler's answer, developed as the lead paper of this symposium, is a firm no: the oil shock was costly but not the master cause. Dearer oil imposes a terms-of-trade loss that a flexible economy would absorb through a once-for-all fall in real income; only downward-rigid money wages convert it into unemployment or inflation. The shock, he argues, struck an economy already destabilized by an unsustainable boom. On the international side he deflates fears of the 'petrodollar,' since OPEC surpluses must return as purchases or investment and the Euro-dollar market had already recycled them. Rejecting official schemes that quarantine oil deficits from the rest, he insists each country confront its overall balance of payments through floating, IMF borrowing, or domestic monetary and fiscal measures.
The oil price rise was not a major factor in bringing on inflation and recession.
Stagflation, rapid inflation coexisting with substantial unemployment over a considerable period, was not supposed to happen, and the 1974-75 recession, the first worldwide postwar slump, made the anomaly impossible to ignore. Haberler treats it not as a natural feature of competitive markets but as the symptom of institutional obstruction: downward wage rigidity, union bargaining, indexation, farm supports, and regulation prevent relative prices from adjusting. Special factors like the oil and food shocks, he calculates, explain perhaps a fourth of the two-digit inflation; the rest is real-wage resistance by organized groups. His prescription is structural reform to enlarge competition, dismantling marketing orders, Davis-Bacon rules, the Buy American Act, and minimum-wage laws that price out the young, rather than incomes policy or election-year stimulus, which would only reignite inflation and invite the wage-price controls that lead toward rationing and planning.
The policy dilemma of stagflation is this: If macroeconomic monetary and fiscal policies try to counteract inflation, they increase unemployment; if they try to reduce unemployment they intensify inflation.
Between the wars, the restored gold standard was never the specie standard of 1914 but a fragile gold-exchange construction, hobbled by an overvalued pound, an undervalued franc, reparations, and the sterilization of gold in Paris and Washington. Tracing its restoration after 1923 and its collapse across the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan, Haberler—here in the English translation of his 1976 German essay—argues that the Great Depression was no ordinary cyclical downswing but the product of banking failures, timid central banks, and the adjustable peg that turned devaluation into competitive depreciation. He weighs Hayek and Robbins's Austrian theory of credit-induced malinvestment against Hansen's secular stagnation and the structural-maladjustment school, and closes by contrasting the deflationary 1930s with the inflationary crisis of the 1970s.
If a death certificate for the gold standard is required, September 21, 1931 would be a reasonable date to put on it.
Ever since serious discussion of the international monetary system began, economists have worried whether the world holds enough reserves, and this exchange pits Haberler against Robert Triffin over whether that worry still makes sense once currencies float. Haberler traces the anxiety through bimetallism, Marshall's symmetallism, commodity-reserve schemes, and Keynes's Clearing Union, arguing that nearly every such proposal presumed fixed or adjustable parities. Under Bretton Woods, defensible but revisable par values made speculation rational and enlarged the appetite for reserves; under generalized floating, the master problem of reserve control simply dissolves. Reserves matter, he insists, only through national choices such as monetary restraint, sterilization, and intervention, so the IMF should practice surveillance rather than act as a world central bank. Triffin's reply presses the opposite case, keeping dollar-centered reserve creation in view.
Under the Bretton Woods system, in contrast, "complete confidence" in the existing rates was no longer possible.
Trade theory has been weakened, this Nobel Symposium survey argues, by a set of artificial oppositions: Ricardo against Heckscher-Ohlin, theory against empirics, factor proportions against technology. Read properly, Haberler insists, the tradition running from Ricardo through Mill and Marshall to Ohlin and Samuelson is continuous and plural, for Ricardo belongs not to the labour theory of value but to opportunity cost within a general price system. He faults the textbook shrinking of Heckscher-Ohlin into a two-factor capital-labour model, restores natural resources and their heterogeneity to theoretical importance, and reads the modern literature on skills, R&D, technological gaps, and product cycles as, in his phrase, pure Schumpeter. What emerges is not a single predictive law but a disciplined mosaic of overlapping models, with general equilibrium preserved as an indispensable ideal type.
No sophisticated theory is required to explain why Kuwait exports oil, Bolivia tin, Brazil coffee and Portugal wine.
By the time the IMF's Interim Committee met at Kingston in 1976, floating exchange rates were already the reality; Jamaica and the Manila assembly merely legalized and disciplined them while easing the Fund away from gold-centered convertibility toward surveillance of national policy. Haberler reads the collapse of Bretton Woods not as a descent into disorder but as the predictable end of an adjustable peg undone by inflation differentials and one-way speculative bets. Against Manila's critics he denies that floating causes inflation - it merely exposes domestic monetary excess sooner - and he sharply distinguishes legitimate smoothing of disorderly markets from "dirty floating," the split rates and multiple-currency schemes that mimic controls. Skeptical of reference rates and target zones, and of pressure on Germany and Japan to inflate away their surpluses, he defends managed but disciplined floating.
The conclusion is that widespread floating is here to stay.
By 1979 the postwar liberal order, GATT, the IMF, convertibility, nondiscriminatory tariffs, faced a pincer: demands for a New International Economic Order from the South and resurgent protectionism in the North. Haberler answers with a historical defense whose recurring move is to distinguish liberalism from laissez-faire and market order from policy failure. Nineteenth-century growth he calls capitalist success confirmed even by Marx; the Great Depression he reads not as capitalism's contradiction but as monetary and banking collapse under a rigid gold standard. Reviewing Lipsey and UNCTAD data, he denies any secular deterioration in developing-country terms of trade and reverses the indictment: the damage came not from open markets but from quotas, voluntary restraints, and the wage and price rigidities that generate stagflation.
Obviously, it is not liberal policies that hurt the LDCs but deviations from liberalism.
Pigou, Keynes, and Jöhr had built the business cycle partly on waves of optimism and pessimism, and Haberler begins there to stage a wider reckoning with rational expectations at the moment it was reshaping macroeconomics. He grants the new school its central insight, that anticipated inflation erodes any stimulus and no permanent Phillips-curve trade-off exists, but rejects its strong claim that systematic monetary and fiscal policy touches only nominal variables. That neutrality, he argues, assumes homogeneous, model-consistent agents and instantly clearing markets, and so neglects downward money-wage rigidity, unions, and contracts. Invoking Arrow against shared-model assumptions and Barro on the 1973-74 oil shock, he defends limited monetary accommodation when nominal wages cannot fall. His preferred synthesis is Fellner's credibility hypothesis: disinflation works only when wage- and price-setters believe the authorities will persist.
But money illusion is a fairly hardy plant.