1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
For nearly three millennia silver was the money metal of antiquity and the Middle Ages, beside which gold played a modest part; this volume in the series Die metallischen Rohstoffe follows its descent from coinage into the smelter. Kerschagl moves from the chalcophile geology of galena and the Comstock Lode through amalgamation, cupellation, and cyanide leaching to the monetary drama: shifting gold-silver ratios, the Latin Monetary Union's retreat from true bimetallism, and the doomed remonetization schemes of the interwar years. He argues that no one can fix an objective silver price, that most output now comes as a by-product of lead, zinc, and copper mining, and that only twentieth-century industrial demand, not monetary nostalgia, at last stabilized the metal.
Das Silber ist vorläufig in geordnete industrielle Bahnen hinübergelenkt worden und seine monetäre Wiederverwendung weder ein echtes noch auch nur ein sinnvolles Problem mehr.
English translation: “Silver has for the time being been diverted into orderly industrial channels, and its monetary reuse is no longer a genuine or even a meaningful problem.”
Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.
Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.
English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”
Planning becomes meaningful only when it openly ranks competing ends: growth against present consumption, employment against future surplus, equality against efficiency. Rosenstein-Rodan reads India's Five Year Plans less as a statistical exercise than as a theory of democratic development under scarcity, in which a poor society must decide how much the present generation may be asked to forgo for the sake of the future. He treats unemployment and the rural-urban divide as central inequalities rather than side effects, defends general education as social overhead capital whose returns are delayed but transformative, and argues that industrial concentration, often unavoidable where capital and markets are thin, must be restrained by taxation and public investment rather than by price controls. A socialist pattern, on his account, cannot mean redistribution alone, nor can development mean growth alone.
A series of choices between eating ('somewhat' or 'much') less today for the sake of eating ('somewhat' or 'much') more tomorrow has to be made.
National-income statistics fold government spending into "national product" as if a dollar taxed and spent were a dollar of output that consumers had chosen—and that sleight of hand is Rothbard's target. Market productivity, he argues, is validated only by voluntary purchase under scarcity; a million unwanted buggies are not "product" in the sense that chosen automobiles are. Government, funded by coercive confiscation and measured merely by its expenditures, cannot be run like a business and feeds parasitically on the private economy. He proposes subtracting state outlays from national product rather than adding them, answers Galbraith's complaint that public wants are starved by noting that the failing schools and streets cited already lie under government control, and rejects external-benefit defenses of public provision.
But in the public sector, the government's "productivity" is measured—mirabile dictu—by how much it spends!
The annotated books Menger left at his death—his own Grundsätze, his copy of Rau, his Mill—traveled to Tokyo, where they entered the library of Hitotsubashi University and preserved a Menger the published works conceal. From these marginalia Kauder reconstructs an Aristotelian realist rather than a Kantian, a theorist of rational freedom, and a social liberal far from Manchester dogma. The Rau notes of 1867 already reject labor value, assert individual and immeasurable value, and sketch imputation, dismantling the charge that Menger plagiarized Gossen, whom he read only later and rejected. Menger emerges as a critic of luxury and aristocratic idleness who treated poverty itself as a form of bondage, and whose unfinished program—reaching into capital, money, overproduction, and price—passed to Böhm-Bawerk, Wieser, Mises, and Hayek. The Nachlass, Kauder insists, bequeathed far more than a value theory.
Aber die Armen sind durch die Ungunst der Verhältnisse bedrückt, sie sind noch nicht vollständig frei, sie sind »halbe Sklaven, ihre Kette ist länger«.
English translation: “But the poor are oppressed by the adversity of circumstances; they are not yet fully free, they are "half-slaves, their chain is only longer.”
Two economic orders frame this account of how wages are actually set. In an approximately free market, where employers hold positions of equal strength, wage formation follows the general laws of price, structure stays purely functional, and productivity gains reach workers as falling prices, real wages rising with no nominal increase at all. Under the organized market economy of concentration and monopoly, wage structure bends instead to market power and profitability, so real gains now require nominal raises and price pass-through varies between free competition, pure monopoly, and monopolistic competition. Bilateral monopoly, Bayer shows, leaves the wage level indeterminate. His verdict is that automatic wage formation must yield to conscious wage design, and that design can succeed only within a broader economic policy directed against entrenched market power.
Die letzte Verantwortung nimmt uns niemand ab. Gerade darin kommt die Würde des Menschen im wirtschaftlich gesellschaftlichen Geschehen zum Ausdruck; gerade darin liegt eine Chance der Menschlichkeit.
English translation: “No one relieves us of ultimate responsibility. It is precisely in this that the dignity of man in economic and social life finds expression; precisely in this lies a chance for humanity.”
Railroad share battles, the advertising war between Lestoil and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola against Pepsi, European cartel threats and compensations — business life, this essay argues, is a tissue of strategic situations that ordinary maximization cannot describe. Conceding that game theory stands as an autonomous branch of mathematics, Morgenstern presses the harder claim that economic reality is itself frequently a game: the moment a rival controls a decisive variable and reacts, the normal maximum assumptions fail. Walrasian equilibrium and the crossing of demand and supply curves become special constructions that hide number, timing, and coalition. His strongest preference is for cooperative n-person theory, which can model mergers, wage bargains, proxy fights, and above all 'Macht' — power that marginal-productivity theory has no place for. Where power exists, he concludes, the prevailing theory must give way.
Es gibt kein Geschäft ohne Geschäftsgeheimnis.
English translation: “There is no business without a business secret.”
Ragnar Nurkse's path ran from Estonia through Edinburgh and Vienna to the League of Nations, Columbia, and an early death in 1959, and Haberler's introduction to his collected writings reads that path as a single sustained inquiry into international economic order. The apparently scattered concerns — capital movements, monetary equilibrium, balance-of-payments adjustment, balanced growth — cohere, he argues, because Nurkse joined rigorous theory to careful statistics without letting either dominate. Haberler traces the Viennese early work, shaped by Hayek and Mises, on capital flows arising when stages in the structure of production sit in different countries, through the League studies that produced the classic International Currency Experience, to the development essays. Crucially, he insists Nurkse drew no protectionist or central-planning moral from balanced growth.
There is no sense in committing suicide in order to avoid death.
A child masters the grammar of its language long before it could state a single rule of syntax — a fact Hayek takes as the key to human conduct at large. This British Academy lecture argues that we are governed everywhere by rules we can follow but cannot articulate: in craftsmanship and athletics, in the sense of justice, and above all in perception, where we read gestures, moods, and purposes without knowing the cues that guide us. Drawing the theory of classification from his Sensory Order into linguistics, ethology, and social-science method, he distinguishes patterns we can specify from those we intuitively recognize but never fully state, defending the latter as indispensable data for understanding action. The argument closes on a Gödelian limit: no mind can wholly specify the rules on which its own workings depend.
What we recognize as purposive conduct is conduct following a rule with which we are acquainted but which we need not explicitly know.
Treating a schoolteacher's lecture, a corporate research memo, a television broadcast, and a patent application as outputs of a single vast industry, this survey builds the first full accounting of what Machlup calls knowledge production in America. He measures education, research and development, the communication media, information machines, and the professional services, then sorts every knowledge worker into transporter, transformer, processor, interpreter, analyzer, or original creator. The reckoning startles: total knowledge production reached roughly $136 billion in 1958, near 29 percent of adjusted GNP, while knowledge-producing occupations tripled their share of the labor force between 1900 and 1959. Along the way he argues that government itself produces knowledge when it frames and communicates rules, and that American schooling could be compressed into markedly fewer years.
The production of knowledge is an economic activity, an industry, if you like.
Begin not with heaps of data but with the plain fact that men act—selecting means to reach chosen ends—and you have, Mises argues, the true starting point of economic science, which he presents as the most elaborated branch of praxeology. The essay rests on a theory of mind: sense data become knowledge only through the categories that order them, and causality itself is a precondition of all thought and action, not a mere laboratory habit. From this follows a sharp line between physics, which experiments and measures constants, and the sciences of human action, which have no constants to find—so that statistics and history record events without disclosing the theory that renders them intelligible. Against positivism, behaviorism, and the dream of social engineering, Mises defends methodological individualism and the categories by which human beings understand themselves as choosing agents.
For thousands of years the minds of physicians did not perceive germs and did not divine their existence.
Knowledge is no ornament and its diffusion no work for court jesters, Kerschagl insists — it is as materially vital as the erection of industrial plants. That conviction anchors this treatment of development aid, written just after its author took the presidency of the Austrian UNESCO Commission, which ranges across population theory from Malthus to Nurkse's circular causation, the psychology of entitlement and colonial guilt, and the institutional scaffolding of trade unions, honest bureaucracy, and stable currency. Identifying mass poverty and illiteracy as the true marks of a development area, it ranks agriculture before heavy industry, holds up the Marshall Plan as a model that cannot be transplanted into pre-industrial economies, and presses throughout the principle of Hilfe für Selbsthilfe against both beggar ideology and condescending charity.
Das Verhältnis zwischen Helfenden und Hilfe Empfangenden kann nicht das von Gönnern und Bettelnden sein, sondern nur das echter Partnerschaft.
English translation: “The relationship between those giving aid and those receiving it cannot be that of patrons and beggars, but only that of genuine partnership.”