The archive.

Can Kant’s account of scientific knowledge survive the physics that overturned his assumptions about space? In this essay, Felix Kaufmann examines Cassirer’s answer: preserve the inquiry into the conditions of objective experience while relinquishing Kant’s commitment to Euclidean geometry. Scientific objects emerge through relations and laws, not as ready-made things merely copied by observation. Kaufmann tests this perspective against relativity, quantum indeterminacy, and mathematical concept formation, asking what allows changing theories to remain comparable. His sympathy is qualified: Cassirer illuminates the organization of knowledge, but Dewey offers a stronger account of how claims are tested. The resulting tension gives readers a precise way to distinguish a philosophy of scientific objectivity from an account of the procedures that warrant scientific belief.

Generating models that oscillate is not the same as explaining actual business cycles. In his contribution to this 1949 collective discussion, Gottfried Haberler asks how researchers can choose among proliferating theories without dismissing what they already know. His criticism cuts both ways: ambitious econometric techniques may promise more than they deliver, but failed research programmes can still leave useful evidence and methods. Against the search for one encompassing explanation, he proposes testing narrower causal claims through historical as well as statistical evidence. Readers can discover a concrete alternative to both theoretical overconfidence and theory-free measurement: inquiry centred on income, employment, and the limited propositions that economists can reasonably share.

However, the more models we have, the less we seem to know of the real business cycle.

A wage increase cannot protect living standards if rising food prices, utility charges and production costs absorb it. In this 1949 article, Hans Bayer treats Austria’s third wage–price agreement as a necessary emergency compromise, not a programme for recovery. His distinctive concern is what stabilization buys time to do: coordinate investment with export markets, redirect labour, and distinguish spending that expands productive capacity from spending that merely raises costs. He challenges both the dismissal of planning as hostile to private initiative and the promise that fiscal repair can burden the population without reducing its purchasing power. The article offers a concrete way to examine the agreement’s limits: not simply by asking who pays for reconstruction, but by asking whether economic policy makes those burdens smaller.

Italy’s factories could produce more without providing enough work for its unemployed. This tension drives Hans Bayer’s 1949 article, which moves from Rome’s fashionable Via Veneto to a working-class suburb and judges reconstruction by the livelihoods it promises. His sharpest example is steel: modernization could cut jobs while lowering costs for manufacturers who might then employ more people. Against projected industrial output growth of roughly 50 percent, Bayer sets anticipated employment growth of only 10–15 percent. His social-policy perspective makes visible what production targets conceal: recovery, competitiveness, and employment are distinct achievements. The article offers a concrete account of why industrial expansion seemed indispensable to postwar Italy—and why, in Bayer’s judgement, even successful expansion would leave its central social problem unresolved.

Money has no essence independent of its economic order; it is a creature of a particular economic form, and once that order changes so does money itself. From the wartime and postwar experience of rationing, blocked balances, black markets, and administrative allocation, Kerschagl rereads the classic problems—deposits and credit creation, quantity theory, exchange rates, gold, inflation, currency reform—around a single insight: legal payment power and general purchasing power can come apart. Ration cards, coupons, price controls, and occupational privileges shift access to goods from money toward administrative entitlement, so that identical nominal incomes carry unequal real content. Planning alters money qualitatively, personalizing it until, at the limit of full socialism, it decays into a mere Rechenpfennig. Sound policy, he insists, demands clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.

Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.

English translation: “Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.”

The claim that every line of a consumer's spending is pushed to the same weighted marginal utility—Gossen's second law, and the hinge of the equilibrium systems of Jevons, Walras, and Pareto—is here dismantled as an aprioristic construction unsupported by experience. Following Hans Mayer, Mahr argues that consumption does not adjust in equal infinitesimal steps: as income rises some quantities stay fixed, inferior goods give way to better ones, and new wants awaken, so no common marginal level is ever revealed. Bread and potatoes remain 'overmarginal' for the well-off, their utility above that of money; genuine leveling appears only in the poorest budgets. What survives the critique is narrow—the marginal utility of money—and a warning that elegant equations must not be allowed to remake economic fact. First published in 1949.

Fällt das Gesetz vom Grenznutzenniveau, dann werden auch die n (m—1) Gleichungen — n repräsentiert dabei die Zahl der Individuen und m die Zahl der Waren —, in denen dieses Gesetz zum Ausdruck kommt, hinfällig.

English translation: “If the law of the marginal-utility level falls, then the n(m−1) equations—where n represents the number of individuals and m the number of goods—in which this law is expressed, also become invalid.”

Why does a state that owns enterprises and controls prices still need taxes? Richard Kerschagl’s 1949 article makes this question central to a comparison of American and Soviet public finance. He distinguishes the outward form of a tax from its function within a particular system of ownership and government. American federal, state, and municipal authorities compete over overlapping tax bases; Soviet authorities use taxes to absorb enterprise surpluses, differentiate among ownership sectors, and preserve incentives for skilled work. Kerschagl argues that recognizable fiscal techniques can serve sharply different political and distributive purposes. The comparison gives readers concrete grounds for understanding why progressive income taxes or turnover levies cannot be interpreted apart from price controls, production costs, and the allocation of governmental power.

If buyers’ valuations depend on incomes earned at existing prices, can those valuations explain how prices arise? In this 1949 article, Ewald Schams confronts the circularity objection to Austrian price theory without abandoning its account of subjective motivation. His distinctive move is to place price formation within the circulation of goods, money and income: capital advances finance purchases, sales validate incomes, and receipts replenish capital. On this view, reciprocal dependence is not necessarily a defect in reasoning; it may belong to the economic process being explained. Readers can discover why Schams distinguishes the causal explanation of a particular exchange from the simultaneous relations sustaining a price system—and how isolating one price from that system can manufacture the very logical difficulty theory seeks to resolve.

Farmers building their own oil refineries give Hans Bayer a concrete alternative to accounts of American economic life dominated by free competition or monopoly. In this two-installment journal article, he follows cooperatives that moved beyond purchasing and marketing into production when powerful suppliers threatened their independence. Their expansion raises the central tension: how can organizations acquire the scale needed to confront large corporations without sacrificing democratic control? Bayer locates the answer in federations built from below, linking local initiative to national coordination. His affirmative account lets readers examine economic democracy through practical arrangements—member ownership, collective investment, and representation in agricultural planning—rather than as an abstract ideal. The distinctive interest lies in his treatment of industrial scale as a possible instrument of self-help, not necessarily its enemy.

A computer can solve a system of equations without making its answer economically trustworthy. In this brief 1949 discussion contribution, Oskar Morgenstern responds to Leontief’s input-output analysis by asking what calculation can establish when observational errors remain unknown. His concern reaches beyond misleading decimal precision: the many zero entries in industrial tables may make solutions easier and more stable while reflecting gaps in information rather than actual economic relationships. Supportive of the research programme, he nevertheless distinguishes computational feasibility from empirical warrant. Readers encounter an economist treating numerical stability, data collection, and model assumptions as connected responsibilities—not problems that faster machines can settle on their own.

Often accuracy is identified with detail; for example, the giving of figures with many decimal points when the real inaccuracy has already been permitted to enter into a much rougher figure.

Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.

I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.

An explanation of interest under perfect foresight need not explain interest under uncertainty. This distinction drives G. L. S. Shackle’s review of Allais’s Économie et Intérêt. After presenting Allais’s reasons why interest remains positive, Shackle questions whether money and liquidity-preference merely obscure deeper forces of thrift and productivity. Might causation also run the other way, with monetary interest rates shaping capital accumulation, income and ultimately time-preference? His objection gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what a model shows to be possible from what it establishes about economic life. Yet the review is no dismissal: Shackle balances his impatience with perfect foresight against admiration for Allais’s analytical precision and the breadth of his investigation.

The fact that a gas-fire can make a room warm does not imply that a warm room must contain a gas-fire.