1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
To train officials, lawyers, and politicians worthy of the name, Schumpeter argues in this 1911 memorandum, the University of Graz needs more than its lecture-and-exam regime, which leaves students meeting Nationalökonomie only as examination material and never as a living discipline. He proposes an Institute for Staatsrecht und Nationalökonomie that would join legal and economic instruction through seminars, guided reading, written research, and a working library, advanced together with his colleagues Hauke and Layer. Against the better-funded institutes at Prague and Vienna, he insists that such training is at least as important and far cheaper, and he specifies the sums, some 15,000 Kronen for furniture and books plus annual running costs, warning that any serious reduction would doom the project. Knowledge, for him, is organized practice.
Auf diese Weise gibt es speziell für die Nationalökonomie – der Referent erlaubt sich nicht, über andere staatswissenschaftliche Fächer zu sprechen – schlechthin keine Möglichkeit eines der Idee der Universitäten entsprechenden Studiums.
English translation: “In this way, specifically for political economy — the rapporteur does not permit himself to speak of other political-science subjects — there is simply no possibility of a course of study corresponding to the idea of the universities.”
Profit and loss enter the analysis where certainty ends. The second volume—continuing the German translation of Man, Economy, and State—moves from the static market into dynamic change, treating entrepreneurial profit as the reward for correctly appraising underpriced factors and loss as the penalty for error. From here Rothbard mounts his assault on rival doctrines: he denies that a monopoly price can be identified on an unhampered market, dismantles the Keynesian multiplier and consumption function, rejects Fisher's quantity equation and its 'price level' as pseudo-measurements, and defends 100 percent gold reserves against fractional-reserve banking, which he calls fraud. Unions, he argues, win restrictive wages for some only by forcing others into unemployment. Value, throughout, flows from consumer demand back to factor prices, never from cost forward to price.
Das Kapital erzeugt keinen Gewinn. Das tun nur kluge unternehmerische Entscheidungen.
English translation: “Capital does not generate profit. Only shrewd entrepreneurial decisions do.”
Even the laissez-faire economist, Rothbard charges, harbors a contradiction: he defends market liberty yet keeps a tax-funded monopoly over police and courts, though the state can supply protection only by violating the very property it claims to guard. Concluding the treatise—here as the German translation of Power and Market (1970)—this volume sketches competing defense agencies and private courts, then anatomizes intervention itself. Following Oppenheimer, Rothbard divides the economic means from the political means and classifies every intrusion as autistic, binary, or triangular—price controls that breed shortages and black markets, licensing and tariffs as monopoly privilege, patents that curtail rather than defend property, and a taxation that, whatever its form, can never be made neutral.
Die einzigen Menschenrechte sind, kurz gesagt, die Eigentumsrechte.
English translation: “The only human rights, in short, are property rights.”
Compulsory protection against sickness, accident, invalidity, and old age marked, for Lederer, something historically new: neither charity nor the older law shielding workers at the bench, but the incorporation of wage earners into state-organized security. He traces its origins to Bismarck's conservative answer to socialist agitation and the Sozialistengesetz, weighs Brentano's liberal objections, and identifies compulsion as the decisive innovation that voluntary mutual aid could never supply. Comparative chapters set Britain's approved societies against Soviet Russia's employer-financed system; accident insurance, he argues, matters most where it shifts industrial risk onto the Berufsgenossenschaften. After the war, inflation and mass unemployment loosen the tie between contribution and benefit, turning insurance into public provision. Part of the Grundriss der Sozialökonomik, the chapter reads social insurance through a set of durable oppositions: insurance versus provision, compulsion versus the self-administration of the insured.
Mit Recht sieht man in der Unfallverhütung ein volkswirtschaftlich wichtigeres Ziel als in der Unfallentschädigung.
English translation: “Accident prevention is rightly regarded as an economically more important goal than accident compensation.”
The health of business-cycle research is measured, Hayek insists in this 1933 Festschrift essay, not by the mounting heap of contemporary statistics but by insight into causes—facts being the ever-changing object against which theory is tested, never its substitute. Crisis theory, he judges, has outrun the theory of depression. He gathers the Wicksellian, Misesian and Spiethoffian strands into one diagnosis: credit expansion unbacked by voluntary saving lengthens and distorts the structure of production, and the resulting 'capital shortage' is identical with relative overconsumption. What remains unsolved is recovery—how relative prices, stocks and the direction of resources must be revalued, and how to distinguish price falls that undo prior maladjustment from secondary deflation that persists past its use. Capital maintenance, wage rigidity, expectations and cash balances he names as the field's next work.
Keynes defines the multiplier as the reciprocal of one minus the marginal propensity to consume — and in that definition, this methodological critique argues, the celebrated result is already smuggled in. To infer a large multiplier from a high propensity to consume explains nothing, Haberler contends, unless that propensity has been established independently; otherwise the argument merely renames the unknown magnitude it claims to illuminate. He separates the formal aggregate propensity, which is just the algebra of the multiplier, from the psychological propensity describing how people actually spend, and shows that leakages, time lags, monetary velocity and displaced investment stand between them. The same defect, he adds, runs through Keynes's Treatise, where saving and investment are defined into equality and then made to explain one another. Identities can clarify accounts while misleading theory when mistaken for mechanisms.
By assuming something about the marginal propensity to consume he assumes something about the multiplier, but this is no more an explanation of the multiplier that pauvreté is an explanation of poverty.
Whether rights and relations belong among genuine economic goods looks like a minor classificatory puzzle, and Böhm-Bawerk shows it is anything but. This early inquiry argues that the unclear status of immaterial goods has quietly distorted the central doctrines of capital, interest, and credit. He dismantles MacLeod's claim that credit creates wealth, granting that it follows with sound but blind logic from premises the prevailing theory itself supplies, then rejects the evasion of negative goods and faults Roscher for treating rights as goods for the individual economy but not for the whole. No verdict on rights is possible, he concludes, until the general concept of an economic good is itself made clear, the foundational task to which his later value and capital theory would answer.
Ein Praktiker könnte sich vielleicht damit zufrieden geben, daß die irrigen Resultate abgelehnt worden sind. Der Theoretiker darf es nicht: er muß fordern, daß die Ablehnung auch aus dem richtigen Grund erfolge.
English translation: “A practitioner might perhaps be content that the erroneous results have been rejected. The theorist must not be: he must demand that the rejection proceed from the correct ground as well.”
"Overcapacity" is less an industrial fact, this 1936 lecture contends, than a political dogma — the belief that competition either adopts new techniques too slowly or squanders capital by scrapping serviceable machines. Hayek dissolves the charge by separating technical from economic capacity: a machine may still run yet be worth nothing, because new capital does not duplicate the old but economizes on labor and materials, freeing them for use elsewhere. Old plant should survive only while the new method's total cost exceeds its bare operating cost. From this he attacks "capital preservation" as a false end, whether protecting railways against motor traffic or shielding state assets, and ridicules forced standardization for letting an authority decide what consumers ought to like. Idle plant, he adds, may signal a scarcity of capital, not a surplus.
Die Normierungsfanatiker begeben sich da auf ein außerordentlich gefährliches Feld, und ich wenigstens kann mich nicht für die Idee begeistern, daß jemand anderer für mich entscheiden soll, was mir gefallen oder schmecken soll und was nicht.
English translation: “The fanatics of standardization are venturing here onto extraordinarily dangerous ground, and I, at least, cannot warm to the idea that someone else should decide for me what I ought to like or find tasty and what not.”
Ten years after The General Theory appeared — and in the year of Keynes's death — Haberler set out to weigh the book as a scientific system rather than an object of discipleship, a verdict he revisits sixteen years on without softening it. He grants Keynes the systematic use of income effects, the multiplier, and a transformed vocabulary of macroeconomic model-building, but denies any overturning of monetary and cycle theory's logical foundations. The demonstration of a static competitive underemployment equilibrium, he argues, rests entirely on money-wage rigidity; admit flexible wages and the Keynes and Pigou effects erode it. Say's Law, properly stated, had already been abandoned by serious neoclassical theorists. Praise without idolatry is the essay's discipline.
Hero worship is nowhere less appropriate than in science.
Medieval apocalyptic prophets, modern futurologists, and chart-wielding investment gurus share one trick, Rothbard argues: the fudge factor that lets a failed prediction be reinterpreted rather than admitted. From that sociology of forecasting he turns on the Kondratieff long cycle, the supposed 54-year rhythm he calls the flimsiest alleged cycle of all. Its evidence survives only after Kondratieff detrended his data, divided by population, and smoothed it with nine-year moving averages, erasing the very industrial growth that disproved it. Falling nineteenth-century prices, Rothbard insists, marked productivity and abundance, not depression, and the alleged long booms were merely short wartime inflations. Against this statistical mysticism he sets the Austrian account of booms and busts as products of central-bank credit expansion, comparing hidden multiple cycles to Ptolemaic epicycles.
The cause of the boom-bust cycle is not some mystical periodic Force to which man must bend his will; the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
What Hayek defends under the name 'neutral money' is a tool of theoretical analysis, not a norm for central banks—a distinction he presses against Koopmans and Egle. The concept names an imagined case in which a money economy would leave relative prices to the 'real' determinants of barter-equilibrium theory, a counterfactual for detecting when money becomes an independent force. Its starting point is that money breaks the identity of supply and demand that barter enforces in every market: hoarding, dishoarding, newly created and destroyed money each inject demand without supply, or the reverse. From this follows the benchmark of a constant money stream. Yet sticky prices, long-term money contracts and downward wage rigidity create frictions, so practical policy may need a compromise—perhaps stabilizing an index of original-factor prices—which must not be confused with neutrality itself.
Der Begriff neutrales Geld war bestimmt, als Instrument der theoretischen Analyse zu dienen und sollte keineswegs in erster Linie eine währungspolitische Norm bilden.
English translation: “The concept of neutral money was designed to serve as an instrument of theoretical analysis and by no means was intended primarily to constitute a norm for monetary policy.”
Interest rates, in a normal depression, fall and prepare the recovery; in the crisis after September 1929 they fell fast and then rose again, leaving the world economy stranded short of any natural upturn. From this paradox Strigl works toward an uncompromising verdict on the demands of the day — cheaper money and a halt to falling prices, urged by Keynes in England and defended by Cassel against the specter of gold scarcity. Both amount to the same thing, and both are inflation: new money never enters evenly, but favors particular sectors first, distorting relative prices and calling forth production that no real supply of goods can sustain. Such stimulus destroys capital by misdirecting it, and any monetary attempt to obstruct the crisis's necessary liquidation is, for him, already inflation before the currency visibly collapses.
Billiges Geld bedeutet mehr Geld, bedeutet höhere Preise.
English translation: “Cheap money means more money, means higher prices.”