1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Gold seemed the one balance-of-payments figure a statistician could trust: physically definite, internationally traded, central to gold-standard theory. Applying a single reciprocal test — country A's reported gold exports to B should match B's reported imports from A — Morgenstern finds the trust misplaced. For the United Kingdom, United States, Germany, France, and Canada in 1900, 1907, 1928, and 1935, the paired ratios refuse to cluster near unity and sometimes turn absurd, worst of all in the classical gold-standard years. Earmarking, transit trade, misclassification of gold and silver, and traveler-carried coin all corrupt the record, and no scientific ground exists for preferring one nation's figures over another's. If the best-looking data are this poor, he warns, a sound theory cannot rest on them — and trade statistics are likely worse still.
There is no reason why, say, an American economist or a man from Mars should prefer one set of these statistics over the others.
Two rival redrawings of the φ-surface, one by J. Mars and one by H. G. Johnson, prompt this comparison, though the stakes are conceptual rather than merely graphical. Shackle defends a deliberate division of labour: the φ-surface locates the standardized focus-values of a venture, while a separate indifference-map registers the chooser's temperament toward possible gain and loss. Mars's version, by making φ algebraically summable across gains and losses, would let the surface rank ventures on its own and render that map redundant, dissolving the independent representation of an individual's attitude to uncertainty. Through profiles, translated lines, and 'crank-handle' constructions Shackle exposes the cost, and defends his 'subliminal' region, where tiny gains under extreme potential surprise command no attention. Johnson's wooden three-dimensional model he treats more warmly, as suggestive but not decisive.
By abandoning, or drastically circumscribing the role of, the gambler indifference-map, Mr Mars loses an essential ‘degree of freedom’ which my system possesses.
Twenty years after Richard Kahn's 1931 article first set the multiplier out precisely, this survey weighs what that achievement really was. Kahn's originality, Shackle argues, lay less in an unprecedented intuition than in converting a vague, politically urgent idea about public works into a usable analytical instrument, above all by asking when extra spending would raise output rather than prices. He traces three tributaries into the General Theory: Kahn's employment multiplier, Meade's ex post equality of saving and investment, and Warming's insistence that net saving cannot exist without the investment that generates it. Yet the elementary geometric series, he cautions, conceals problems of aggregation, distribution, timing, and expectation. Comparative statics cannot separate past from future or intention from outcome, which is why he sets Hicks's elegant but deliberately non-expectational trade-cycle model against his own expectation-reaction view.
This is the bare bones of the multiplier principle. Its simplicity and ‘obviousness’ are illusory.
How can ethnology compare cultures across continents without flattening them into evolutionary stages or freezing them into isolated culture areas? Composed in 1945 and published a decade later, this methodological essay answers by way of source criticism: ethnographic “facts” are produced through uneven encounters between observers who differ in patience, language, and purpose, and cannot be treated as interchangeable units. Thurnwald credits the culture-circle theory of Gräbner, Ankermann, and Schmidt with recognizing diffusion, yet rejects its rigid Kulturkreis schemata; he embraces Malinowski’s functionalism for attending to living institutions, then faults it for excluding history. Insisting that no single continent suffices for developmental history, he treats subsistence — hunting, hoe agriculture, pastoralism, seafaring — as the engine of hierarchy and assimilation, and makes cultural history a form of human self-knowledge.
Wir dürfen uns diese Vorgänge nicht statisch vorstellen, sondern im ganzen dynamischen Ablauf.
English translation: “We must not conceive these processes statically, but in their entire dynamic course.”
The complete economist, on Shackle's mischievous accounting, would need mathematics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, prose, and practical finance all at once—an impossible portrait meant to show that no single technique defines the field. Theory, he argues, is the disciplined imaginative construction of recurrent structures; it grows rigorous not by turning algebraic but by drawing out implications and testing them against rival forms. Keynes stands as proof, since abler mathematicians produced no revolution of their own. From this breadth follows an educational program: recruit able rather than residual students, delay premature specialization, and keep mathematics the servant of economic problems. An economist, on this view, is formed by breadth disciplined into judgment—the capacity to quantify without forgetting the people economics is finally about.
Economics emphatically is about chaps.
Against a literature on codetermination he concedes is already vast, Bayer justifies one more treatment by insisting the question be examined from the economy rather than from social psychology. He rejects the picture of the economy as a self-regulating mechanism of supply and demand, calling it instead an organism centered on responsible human beings, so that those who shape the economy must share in governing it. From this he derives a staged, subsidiarity-like structure and tests three models: isolated plant-level codetermination, faulted for breeding plant egoism; integrated codetermination on the Montan pattern; and supra-company codetermination reaching across branches and regions. The second industrial revolution of automation and atomic energy only sharpens the tensions, concentrating power in large firms and demanding countervailing labor institutions rather than empty firm-bound partnership rhetoric.
Die Peitsche der Konkurrenz zwingt den einzelnen, die Dynamik der Technik voll in die Wirtschaft zu übernehmen.
English translation: “The whip of competition compels the individual to absorb the dynamism of technology fully into the economy.”
An exiled Scottish gambler, versed in goldsmith banking and colonial companies, talked Regency France into the first central note-issuing bank the world had seen — and into the speculative ruin of the Compagnie des Indes. Working from rare multilingual sources, Kerschagl reconstructs John Law's life, his Money and Trade Considered, and his land-backed money scheme, whose fatal flaw was the confusion of credit, capital, and money: fiduciary credit may mobilize productive factors but cannot conjure the consumer goods that new purchasing power demands. He catalogs Law's errors against Keynesian parallels, salvages his genuine insights into central banking and legal tender, and traces the wreckage outward to the assignats of the Revolution and the banknote imagery of Goethe's Faust.
"Die Banknote ist nichts anderes als eine Anleihe ohne Zinsen".
English translation: “The banknote is nothing other than an interest-free loan.”
Borrowing Friedrich Gundolf's method of tracing a great figure through the history of his fame, Schütz asks what philosophy has been able to hear in Mozart's operas, and what it distorts. Hermann Cohen reads them through love as pure feeling; Kierkegaard concentrates the musical-erotic in Don Giovanni; Wilhelm Dilthey comes closest to a hermeneutics of dramatic form. Against all three, and against the assumption that Mozart's figures are stable characters like Wagner's, Schütz contends that they "act character" within closed musical situations rather than developing as unified personalities. Recitative, orchestra, and ensemble translate visible stage action into inner time and make social simultaneity audible, an intersubjective "we." The true theme, he concludes, is not love but the metaphysical mystery of human sociality, music, in Schopenhauer's phrase, as hidden metaphysics.
Die Musik jedoch ist ein Prozeß, der in der Dimension der inneren Zeit, in der Durée, wie Bergson sie nennt, stattfindet.
English translation: “The action on the stage takes place before our eyes in outer space and outer time. Music, however, is a process that unfolds in the dimension of inner time, in the durée, as Bergson calls it.”
Even sympathetic critics concede that market allocation may be efficient while inherited wealth renders its results unjust—unless the state periodically redistributes. That concession is the target here. The mistake, Lachmann argues, lies in treating the distribution of wealth as a fixed datum rather than a continuously revised outcome of the market process. He separates the two senses of 'datum'—something merely observed at an instant, and an independent determinant in equilibrium theory—and denies wealth the second role. Because capital goods are heterogeneous and their value hangs on complementarities discovered only under change, the market itself redistributes through capital gains and losses, passing wealth to those quicker to read new scarcities. The result is Pareto's circulation of elites: a leveling process, a game of skill rather than chance, in which no class of owners—shareholder or bondholder—escapes revaluation.
The owners of wealth, we might say with Schumpeter, are like the guests at a hotel or the passengers in a train: They are always there but are never for long the same people.
Within the primordial sphere of ownness, Husserl set out in the fifth Cartesian Meditation to defeat solipsism: bracket everything foreign, apprehend the other's body analogically as another living body, and from there build up common nature, common time, and the community of monads. Schütz's immanent critique is that each step tacitly relies on what it claims to generate. My own body is lived kinesthetically, not perceived as one object among others, so the similarity that analogical transfer demands is already compromised; and communication cannot supply the missing bridge, since every gesture and sign already operates within the common world it was supposed to build. The elementary phenomenon, he argues, is the We-relation. Intersubjectivity is not a problem the transcendental ego can solve but a given of the life-world, and the attempt to create a world-for-everyone from solitary subjectivity proves impossible.
Alle Kommunikation, ob es sich um eine sogenannte Ausdrucksbewegung, eine Zeigegeste, oder den Gebrauch visueller oder akustischer Zeichen handelt, setzt bereits einen äußeren Vorgang in eben jener gemeinsamen Umwelt voraus, die nach Husserl erst durch die Kommunikation konstituiert werden soll.
English translation: “All communication—whether it involves a so-called expressive movement, a pointing gesture, or the use of visual or acoustic signs—already presupposes an external process within precisely that common environment which, according to Husserl, is only to be constituted through communication.”
Science cannot supply political ends — but it can discipline the pursuit of them. That Weberian conviction anchors Morgenstern's 1956 lecture to the Nordrhein-Westfalen research society, which argues that no policy problem is even defined until one names the permitted means: unemployment looks wholly different if wage cuts, public works, or inflation are allowed. He welcomes mathematics, statistics, and electronic computation — linear programming, input-output analysis, a manganese-supply example — as ways to force objectives, quantities, and timing into the open. Yet formalization is not wisdom. Where the state truly commands its variables, quantitative methods improve decisions; where unions, cartels, and rival states react strategically, there is no single optimum, only game-theoretic solution sets and imputations. Calculation can rank feasible actions, he insists, but it cannot choose values or dissolve political conflict.
Die Theorie zeigt, daß es in diesen Fällen kein „Optimum“ gibt, keine „beste“ Lösung, sondern es gibt unendlich viele Verteilungsschemata oder „Zurechnungen“ für das Ergebnis, von denen jedoch nur einige zusammen als „Lösung“ angesehen werden können.
English translation: “The theory shows that in these cases there is no 'optimum,' no 'best' solution, but rather there are infinitely many distribution schemes or 'imputations' for the outcome, of which, however, only some together can be regarded as a 'solution.'”
No person is equal or unequal in himself, Schütz insists; comparison always presupposes a problem, an interest, and a domain of relevance within which selected traits count. Equality, on this account, is not homogeneity, and confusion begins the moment distinct relevance-domains are forced onto a single scale, a man may be equal as a citizen, unequal in wealth, and incomparable as a friend. From Plato's arithmetical and geometrical equality and Aristotle's flute-players, Schütz turns the question over to the sociology of knowledge: every group inherits its own hierarchy of relevances and legitimates it through a central myth. The distinction between subjective and objective meaning then drives his analysis of discrimination, minority rights, and equal opportunity, domination beginning when one imposed trait, race or origin or creed, is made to stand for the whole person.
Typisieren heißt, das zu übergehen, was das Individuum einmalig und unersetzbar macht.
English translation: “To typify means to pass over what makes the individual unique and irreplaceable.”