The archive.

Economic change looks different when analysis follows people’s plans through disappointment and revision rather than taking a shortcut to equilibrium. In this review of Erik Lindahl’s Studies in the Theory of Money and Capital, Shackle welcomes Swedish “period analysis” for making that process tractable, while questioning the foundation on which it rests. If expectations govern action, is “probability” an adequate account of what individuals do not know about the future? His praise for Lindahl’s framework is qualified by a demand for precise meanings of risk and uncertainty. This short review lets readers see both the appeal of an economics built around changing plans and Shackle’s insistence that its treatment of ignorance cannot remain unspecified.

Delayed access can change the value of an economic argument: what might once have clarified a debate may arrive after its readers have struggled through the same problems themselves. In this brief review of Erik Lindahl’s Studies in the Theory of Money and Capital, Hayek regrets the late availability in English of ideas first outlined in Swedish. Yet his strongest preference is not for Lindahl’s newer monetary analysis, but for the earlier attempt to integrate capital into price theory in Wicksell’s tradition. He praises the distinction between ex ante and ex post perspectives while questioning economics’ increasingly exclusive monetary focus. The review offers a compact view of Hayek’s priorities: theoretical novelty matters, but so does sustained attention to the “real” problems that monetary debate can leave behind.

A close numerical fit need not justify a statistical inference. In this 1940 article, Gerhard Tintner examines what economists can legitimately conclude from observations whose successive values depend on one another. His central tension is that the random fluctuations most amenable to existing probability methods may be less economically revealing than persistent trends and cycles. Distinguishing correlation from the “covariation” of systematic movements, he challenges the assumption that removing a trend makes conventional significance tests valid. His demand for flexible methods grounded in economic theory gives the article a concrete methodological focus: readers can discover why separating components, fitting equations, and establishing evidence are different tasks—and why success at one does not guarantee success at the others.

A fine collection does not necessarily make a useful reference book. In this short review of Elsie A. G. Marsh’s catalogue of Jacob H. Hollander’s economic library, Hayek brings a bibliophile’s pleasure together with a scholar’s exacting demands. He admires the holdings in pre-Smithian and classical English economics, but shows how abbreviated titles, awkward chronological grouping and missing journal names impede their use. The distinction gives this compact piece its interest: readers encounter Hayek assessing not economic doctrine but the practical means by which its sources can be found and studied. His hope that the library will remain intact and accessible sits alongside an amused prediction that collectors will eventually prize the catalogue itself.

American tariff policy cannot be read off a welfare diagram, this 1940 address insists: protection in the United States preceded the republic itself and grew inseparable from the young nation's drive to make its independence economically real, in a world still organized by empire and war. Schumpeter treats the tariff as a historical institution rather than a technical deviation from free trade, and presents America as an unusually strong case for the Hamilton–List infant-industry argument — a continental market and natural wealth muting protection's usual distortions while it hastened industries likely to arise anyway. He concedes the standing objections, and the high-cost dependents such as wool and sugar, yet concludes that in a mercantilist, conflict-prone world protection's value as a shield for an established industrial order remains as strong as ever.

Protection—or non-intercourse acts and so on—then was simply the economic complement of political independence or of the will to buttress that independence.

Why are peaceable peoples so thoroughly organized for war? Rappard, invited by A. Lawrence Lowell to lecture as a second war broke out, sets that paradox against the wreckage of the first peace. He follows the Wilsonian ideal of organized peace from the Fourteen Points into the Covenant's three great instruments—arbitration, collective security under Articles 10 and 16, and disarmament—and charts their erosion across the Geneva Protocol, Locarno, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Disarmament Conference that Germany abandoned in 1933. The League could judge, he argues, but not police; the Aaland Islands were peacefully settled while Abyssinia was left to conquest. Behind each failure stands American abstention and, in Pascal's phrase, a justice never armed with force. His one remaining hope is federation.

Organizing economic history by problems rather than chronology promises clarity—but what happens to the connections between an economist’s ideas, or to the sequence in which those ideas emerged? In this brief 1941 review of Edmund Whittaker’s A History of Economic Ideas, Hayek weighs that teaching problem against the textbook’s careful exposition and unusual selection of authors. His example is precise: describing Malthus’s account of rent as superior to Ricardo’s can obscure the fact that Malthus published first. Yet Hayek praises Whittaker’s handling of methodological disputes and recommends chronological supplementation rather than rejecting the book. The review offers a compact view of his standards for historical explanation: understanding separate doctrines requires more than collecting their treatments under common headings.

When does a statistical model of business cycles warrant conclusions about economic policy? In this 1941 review of J. Tinbergen’s study of the United States in 1919–1932, Gerhard Tintner admires the ambition of linking economic theory to an extensive system of estimated equations, but scrutinizes the grounds for trusting its results. His objections are concrete: time-series residuals require testing, regression coefficients may change, and expectations remain insufficiently explicit. Findings that public investment dampens fluctuations while price stabilization increases them depend on restrictive conditions, including the absence of a stock-exchange boom. The review offers a compact encounter with econometric judgment: Tintner distinguishes the achievement of constructing a comprehensive model from the reliability of its causal explanations and policy deductions.

Clarity and popularization are not the same achievement in Hayek’s 1941 joint review of studies of early Marx and Feuerbach. Newly available writings by Marx and Engels provide the occasion; the question is what scholars make of them. Hayek praises H. P. Adams for combining careful source study with a readable account of Marx before the Communist Manifesto. His response to Konrad Bekker is more revealingly hesitant: he admits uncertainty about understanding the argument while recognizing the value of its comparisons between Marx and Hegel. Chamberlain’s Feuerbach, by contrast, earns sharp criticism for journalistic embellishment without added understanding. This brief review offers a concrete glimpse of Hayek’s critical standards—and of his willingness to distinguish specialist usefulness from successful exposition.

Can the desire to put science and industry at the service of human welfare justify directing them from a centre? In this 1941 paired review, Hayek welcomes Michael Polanyi’s challenge to scientific and economic planning, emphasizing the gap between benevolent intentions and the specialized knowledge on which discovery and practical judgment depend. Colin Clark’s reconstruction of Soviet economic statistics gives that institutional criticism a concrete test. Hayek draws attention to depressed food consumption and deteriorating housing, but also acknowledges later improvements and industrial gains. Read together, his assessments show why increased production cannot alone settle questions about freedom or material welfare—and how a critic of planning weighs evidence that complicates his own position.

A venture may promise substantial gains yet remain unthinkable if failure would end the entrepreneur’s capacity to try again. In this 1941 article, G. L. S. Shackle connects that asymmetry to a concrete proposal: a public Board would guarantee partial recovery of investment costs when equipment is surrendered, financed by a levy on successful ventures. His distinctive concern is not average expected returns but the imagined extremes of success and disaster that command an investor’s attention. The scheme tests how far public protection can encourage private initiative without removing responsibility for loss. Its uncomfortable provision for scrapping surrendered equipment sharpens the tension between preserving productive assets and opening new investment opportunities. Readers encounter an institutional application of Shackle’s thinking about uncertainty, explicitly offered for experiment rather than as a proven remedy.

Protecting small shopkeepers can preserve their businesses while making them increasingly dependent on political privilege. In this 1941 reply to Reisner, Walter Froehlich examines that tension through Central European retail restrictions: scarce licences acquire prices of their own, while price controls redirect competition toward costly services and additional outlets. His distinctive concern is how protection generates demands for further controls over business size, location, turnover and wages. Froehlich does not claim that retail regulation alone produces Fascism; he argues that it can foster an outlook in which political power replaces economic adaptation. The note offers a concrete way to examine the distance between defending independent proprietors and preserving their independence—and why, in Froehlich’s account, nominal private ownership need not safeguard democratic compromise.