1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Pollution and resource depletion are real, Rothbard concedes—but he denies that capitalism, technology, or acquisitiveness is to blame. Writing amid the first wave of 1970s environmental alarm, he insists that "the environment" be broken apart into distinct problems: aesthetic complaints about cities, fears of crowding, resource conservation, and pollution. Private ownership, he argues, already contains an automatic principle of conservation, since a mine or forest owner prices future yields into present decisions; overuse arises only where title is public, collective, or politically managed and no one can capture the value of restraint. Pollution he reframes not as an inevitable market byproduct but as an invasion of person and property, to be enjoined under common law. The remedy is juridical rather than administrative—strict property rights against polluters rather than taxpayer-funded programs.
Surely every man's private property in his own body is his most precious resource; and the fact that air pollutants injure that private property should be enough for us to obtain court injunctions preventing that pollution from taking place.
Left with Arthur Spiethoff before Schumpeter sailed for Harvard, then set aside for decades, this posthumous and partly fragmentary manuscript, edited by Fritz Karl Mann, pursues a single question: what money essentially is. The answer inverts orthodoxy. Money is no commodity but a technical instrument of social accounting, and payment is at bottom a matter of crediting and debiting, of clearing claims through a social ledger. From general-equilibrium reasoning Schumpeter extracts a 'critical number' that fixes absolute prices and imposes the Geldligament, the specifically monetary constraint on the economy. He demolishes the 'deposit legend' that banks merely lend out entrusted funds, holds that every bank credit creates a deposit, contests Mises and Weber on socialist calculation, and turns Knapp's state theory of money into a cautionary tale of fruitless doctrine.
From a Salzburg lecture delivered in 1970 comes Hayek's most concentrated assault on constructivism—the seemingly innocuous belief that because human beings made their institutions, they may redesign them at will. The error, he argues, confuses human origin with deliberate design: reason did not precede culture but grew with it, so it cannot stand outside language, morality and law to remake them from nothing. Social order depends on inherited rules, mostly negative prohibitions, whose function exceeds the understanding of those who obey them; the market itself is neither miracle nor natural harmony but the unintended product of property and contract. Yet this is no defence of blind tradition. Legitimate criticism, he concludes, must be immanent, testing contested values against those a society still presupposes rather than rebuilding the whole from scratch.
Die Vorstellung vom Menschen, der sich dank seiner Vernunft über die Werte seiner Kultur erhebt, um sie wie von einer höheren Warte von außen zu beurteilen, ist eine Illusion.
English translation: “The notion of the human being who, by virtue of his reason, rises above the values of his culture in order to judge them, as it were from a higher vantage point, from outside, is an illusion.”
Education and income rise together, but which drives which? Machlup's compact study, expanded from a 1969 lecture, insists the causation runs both ways and on different clocks: schooling may raise productivity only after long lags, while prosperity quickly raises the demand for education — and, crucially, its cost. He is skeptical of residual-growth accounting that credits education with large unexplained gains, warns that in poor agrarian societies schooling can breed aversion to manual work and urban frustration, and separates the long payoff of formal schooling from the faster returns of on-the-job training. His most durable point is structural: because teaching is labor-intensive and resists productivity gains, education grows dearer as wages climb in the sectors that do, the logic later christened Baumol's cost disease.
Educational efforts may be regarded as consumption, investment, waste, or drag.
Presented frankly as a mystery story, this essay treats the explosive growth of Euro-dollar deposits as a conceptual puzzle before an empirical one. Machlup's verdict is a disciplined agnosticism: Euro-banks may have created dollar money, but the statistics cannot say how much, because the debate keeps confusing deposits with loans, credit with money, and flows with stocks. He polices those categories relentlessly — distinguishing legal form from economic function, primary from derivative deposits, genuine money creation from the interbank redepositing that inflates gross totals through London-Zurich-Milan chains. His preferred analogy is the American nonmember bank, holding claims on member banks as reserves and building liabilities atop them. Offshore dollars, he concludes, are real, regulation-sensitive, and largely invisible to any national money-stock measure — stateless money.
Words guide the attention of the audience; the use of the word "market" may divert attention from the important nonmarket aspects of the Euro-dollar system.
Strip a share of its metaphysics and nothing intrinsic remains—only a valuation sustained transaction by transaction. From that deflationary premise Granger and Morgenstern mount an empirical assault on market folklore, insisting first that 'prediction' be defined before it is tested. Deploying spectral analysis across daily, weekly, and monthly series, they find price changes broadly following a random walk—not because the future is unknowable, but because past prices yield no usable linear forecast. The book's discipline lies in its distinctions: absolute price versus relative movement, direction versus magnitude. Volume, they show, says nothing about whether a stock will rise or fall, yet tracks the size of its swings. Optimal-allocation claims, seasonal cycles, and profitable filter rules fall in turn.
The value of a stock is only what someone else will pay for it — in cash, in another stock or whatever it may be.
"It is high time," Rothbard announces, that someone blew the whistle on Women's Liberation. His 1970 polemic answers Betty Friedan and NOW with Austrian economics rather than sympathy: women's lower average wages, he contends, reflect interrupted careers, childrearing, turnover costs, and marginal productivity, not irrational discrimination—which a competitive market would punish anyway, since a biased employer forfeits profit and labor to rivals. He dismisses the feminist "brainwashing" thesis as unfalsifiable, recasts domesticity as a freely chosen division of labor, and reinterprets marriage as a contract binding men to support women and children. Turning from Friedanite liberalism to the anti-family "New Feminism" of Valerie Solanis and Robin Morgan, he treats objections to women as "sex objects" as an assault on heterosexual attraction itself. The result is a combative fusion of libertarian theory and cultural backlash.
Woman as “sex objects”? Of course they are sex objects and, praise the Lord, they always will be.
Record American deficits piled up through the late 1960s, yet confidence in the dollar held—a puzzle Haberler and Willett resolve by arguing that the world had drifted onto a de facto dollar standard in which the currency was inconvertible into gold for large official sums, and that the very gap between the gold stock and dollar liabilities made mass conversion unthinkable. From this they draw the case for what they call benign neglect: because the United States cannot unilaterally devalue a currency everyone else pegs to, it should pursue domestic stability and curb inflation while leaving adjustment to surplus countries, which may accumulate dollars, appreciate, expand, or lower trade barriers. Written just before the August 1971 suspension of convertibility, the essay presses for modest exchange-rate flexibility—crawling pegs, wider bands, floating—over the distortions of capital and trade controls.
whenever a serious dilemma or conflict between the requirements of external and internal equilibrium arises, domestic policy objectives should take precedence over balance-of-payments considerations
An object glimpsed in a dark corner might be a coiled rope or a snake, the ancient example, drawn from the skeptic Carneades, through which Schütz unfolds his theory of relevance. Why anything at all steps forward from the taken-for-granted field, how the stock of knowledge selects the types that interpret it, and why the interpretation matters for what one is about to do: these he sorts into thematic, interpretive, and motivational relevance, three aspects of a single phenomenon. Around them he builds a phenomenology of the natural attitude, sedimentation, familiarity and strangeness, embodiment, the 'empty place' whose unknown contents are already prefigured by their contours. Left unfinished at his death and here rendered into German from the English reflections of 1970, the manuscript reads as the hidden architecture beneath all his work on the life-world.
Die vorgängige Aufgliederung in Thema und Horizont ist die Grundlage für jede Geistestätigkeit.
English translation: “The prior articulation into theme and horizon is the foundation of all mental activity.”
Growth and development economics, for all its bulk, conceals a yawning gap: it has mislaid the entrepreneur. Kirzner sets out to recover him, distinguishing the routine economizing that allocates given means to given ends from the entrepreneurial element proper, alertness to opportunities, ends, and means not yet noticed. Against Schumpeter, whose innovator disrupts a placid circular flow, he casts the entrepreneur as an equilibrating force, one who perceives the gaps between input costs and output values that only disequilibrium and imperfect knowledge create. Development, on this reading, is not an external shock but the discovery and seizing of profit opportunities already waiting; the market's distinctive virtue is that its profit signals prompt that discovery, where nonmarket systems supply no equivalent mechanism.
The theory of the market explores the extent to which economizing decisions of many independent market participants can be carried out simultaneously.
Liberal Catholicism was not the work of one man; it arose from the confluence of many springs. Engel-Janosi's essay reconstructs that current as a transnational Catholic response to the collapse of throne-and-altar certainties between the Enlightenment, Napoleon, 1848, and the Syllabus of 1864. He tracks its national forms—Lamennais, Lacordaire, and Montalembert seeking liberty of press and conscience under the banner "Dieu et la liberté"; Gioberti and the neo-Guelphs imagining the pope as leader of a federated Italy; Döllinger and Acton in Germany turning historical scholarship itself into a discipline of conscience, where popes and councils stand under the same moral law as everyone else. The hopes briefly raised by Pius IX's election died with 1848, and Quanta cura and the Syllabus turned condemnation into lasting rupture.
Das Mark aller Kulturgeschichte ist ethisch und nicht metaphysisch.
English translation: “The marrow of all cultural history is ethical and not metaphysical.”
Lachmann casts Mises as the economist who decisively rejected equilibrium as the master concept of economics and put the market process in its place. Contemporary neoclassical theory he indicts as 'late classical formalism,' mathematically elegant yet mute on real problems like permanent inflation, because it abstracts from choice, alternatives, and uncertainty. The newer models of steady growth—Cassel, Harrod, Domar, Solow—fare no better, since continuous coordination would demand perfect foresight and the instantaneous rearrangement of heterogeneous capital. Because knowledge is unevenly held and interpreted, expectations diverge and plans must fail. What survives is individual equilibrium, never the system-wide kind; the market is millions of people seeking their own equilibria within an order that never reaches a general one.
But in doing so they have taken the shadow of the formal apparatus for the substance of the real subject matter.