1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Ten executives gather around the table of a fictional XYZ Corporation, and each proposes a different use for the same surplus — plant expansion, higher dividends, basic research, university gifts, worker bonuses, price cuts — while insisting that his preferred policy serves the company and the national interest alike. From this staged meeting Machlup builds a satirical assault on the doctrine of corporate social responsibility, showing that once profit maximization under competition gives way to an open-ended mandate to serve society, almost any managerial preference can be dressed as public duty. His remedy is competition, which narrows discretion and forces attention back to product and efficiency. The comedy also skewers behavioral theories of the firm, where a surplus of equally plausible motives makes any single corporate decision impossible to predict.
Perhaps they illustrate the enormous difficulties of “behavioral theories”: ten participants in corporate decision making propose ten different courses of action, and there is no warrant for any generalization as to what they are likely to decide after the coffee break.
The oldest claim in the field holds that a booming home market starves exports by raising prices and absorbing goods; an expansionist rival credits growth and scale with strengthening them. Across quarterly data from 1879 to 1961, decomposed into finished manufactures, semimanufactures, crude materials, and foods, Mintz adjudicates between them. The traditional theory, she finds, holds for export quantities but not for values: domestic expansion lifted export prices even as it depressed quantities, so the two effects offset. Fluctuations in world imports, her measure of foreign demand, explain most export movement, while finished manufactures stand apart as the class largely deaf to the domestic cycle. Repressing home demand, she concludes, would not have been a promising route to larger export proceeds.
In fact, export growth is neither favorable nor unfavorable per se.
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.”
Mahr reopens the Austrian puzzle of productive interest by asking precisely what the 'time element' contributes to it. Accepting from Jevons and Böhm-Bawerk that capitalistic production is temporally extended and present factor payments oriented toward future revenues, he defends—against Schumpeter—the persistence of an interest rate in a static economy: statics inherits the rate that development established and finds no force to remove it. His sharpest correction targets Böhm-Bawerk's 'average period of production,' whose inclusion of a capital good's whole past history breeds infinite regress and makes an old mine lengthen a present process merely by age. Distinguishing production period from use period, Mahr rebuilds the concept as the technically necessary time embodied in the portion actually consumed, and denies that more capital must always lengthen production or lower returns.
Die Einbeziehung der Nutzungsperiode der Kapitalgüter in die Berechnung der durchschnittlichen Produktionsperiode scheint mir die hauptsächliche Quelle aller Widersprüche und Ungereimtheiten darzustellen, die diesem Begriff bisher anhafteten.
English translation: “The inclusion of the period of use of capital goods in the calculation of the average period of production seems to me to constitute the principal source of all the contradictions and inconsistencies that have hitherto attached to this concept.”
Where classical physics can specify its variables with precision, the sciences of complex order cannot, and Hayek builds an entire method around that limit. Accepting Popper's view that theories are deductive systems which forbid events and invite falsification, he rejects the further demand that science must always uncover new laws yielding exact predictions. Prediction, on his account, comes in degrees: to exclude a single outcome, narrow a range, or state a disjunction is still to predict. His central instrument is the explanation of the principle, which begins from familiar mechanisms and asks whether their combined operation could generate an observed pattern, evolution by natural selection being the paradigm. For biology, economics, and institutions, the honest goal is orientation and cultivation, not the control the physics template falsely promises.
The practical value of such knowledge consists indeed largely in that it protects us from striving for incompatible aims.
There is no such thing as 'the' interest rate, only a plurality of rates differing by term, market, risk, and realizability—and from that dismantling Mahr builds his central claim. Interest, he holds, has no determinate effect on how much people save but a decisive effect on the form savings take, and thus on the supply of funds for productive investment. Offered here in the German version of a 1955 Italian essay, the study separates risk premia from a narrowed notion of liquidity and faults Keynes for grounding interest wholly in the striving for liquidity. Since saving depends chiefly on income, the rate matters most by steering wealth toward productive credit or away into cash hoards, land, and durable Sachsparen; net interest, Mahr concludes, could never sink to zero of its own accord.
Aber es geht viel zu weit, die Zinserklärung zur Gänze auf dem Liquiditätsstreben zu basieren, wie dies Keynes tut.
English translation: “But it goes much too far to base the explanation of interest entirely on the striving for liquidity, as Keynes does.”
Receiving Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, Franz Joseph described himself as the last monarch of the old school—the self-image from which this lecture works outward. Engel-Janosi studies the emperor not as a picturesque survivor but as a political actor governing through counsel, habit, defeat, and constitutional constraint. His early confidence that lost provinces might be won back gave way, over the reign, to renunciation: Lombardy, Venetia, and German leadership were gone, and the alliance with the Prussia that had humiliated Austria in 1866 was embraced as cold state reason rather than affection. Personal in responsibility yet impersonal in manner, scrupulously constitutional despite his distaste for parliaments and bound by the Ausgleich, this Franz Joseph accepted war in 1914 from a pessimistic sense of duty rather than any appetite for it.
„Die Lombardei werden wir ja wieder erobern“, sagte der Monarch, vom Schlachtfeld von Solferino zurückkehrend.
English translation: “We shall reconquer Lombardy after all," said the monarch as he returned from the battlefield of Solferino.”
Why does a country's current account normally settle back toward balance when money is neither inflated nor deflated? Mahr's answer, from 1957, discards purchasing-power parity—too blind to non-traded goods, tariffs, freight, and capital movements—and grounds external equilibrium in the budgets of individual households and firms, which cannot forever spend without income or receive without spending. From this micro-foundation, refined out of Wieser by shifting the emphasis from claims to actual receipts and expenditures, he traces how a passive balance depresses income and so curbs imports (the income effect), while falling prices and wages, where they are permitted, speed correction (the price effect). Where monopolies and rigid wages block the price effect, adjustment falls instead on output and unemployment; flexible exchange rates, he warns, breed uncertainty and protectionism.
Die Tendenz zum Gleichgewicht in der Zahlungsbilanz ist die Folge einer analogen Tendenz, die innerhalb der Budgets der Einzelwirtschaften wirksam ist.
English translation: “The tendency toward equilibrium in the balance of payments is the consequence of an analogous tendency operating within the budgets of individual economic units.”
History is bound to factual correctness, yet it reaches again and again for symbolic and mythic forms when it tries to express a deeper truth. That tension organizes this compact essay, which runs from Jacob Burckhardt—the summit of historicism, for whom historical consciousness separates the cultivated from the barbarian—to Nietzsche's demand that history serve life rather than claim sovereign autonomy. Along the way Engel-Janosi finds myth already at work: Herodotus keeping his distance from the marvels he transmits, Machiavelli stylizing Cesare Borgia and Castruccio Castracani into the political savior-hero who acts as his mission demands. Through Vico, Romanticism, and Bachofen he traces myth's rehabilitation, closing with Arnold Toynbee, the modern historian who no longer merely studies myth but becomes its maker, reaching for an eternal ideal history behind particular ones.
Leopold von Ranke hat einmal Politik und Religion als die beiden Hauptthemen der Geschichte genannt. Sind sie nicht auch die beiden Felder, die der Mythos vorzugsweise besponnen hat?
English translation: “Leopold von Ranke once named politics and religion as the two chief themes of history. Are they not also the two fields around which myth has preferentially spun its web?”
Notorious in his own century as a satirist who declared private vices public benefits, Bernard Mandeville is recovered here, in the German translation of Hayek's 1966 British Academy lecture, not as an economist but as a profound psychologist of human nature. The scandalous paradox of The Fable of the Bees, Hayek argues, is the lesser insight; the greater is that complex social order arises from actions that pursue private aims while intending none of the larger outcomes they produce. Mandeville thus becomes an early theorist of spontaneously grown institutions, law, morality, language, money, markets, against the seventeenth-century rationalism of Descartes and Hobbes. The essay traces a line of descent from Mandeville through Hume and Adam Smith to Ferguson's formula about results of human action but not human design, and onward to Darwin.
Ich befürchte, die meisten Zeitgenossen von Bernard Mandeville würden sich im Grabe umdrehen, wüßten sie, daß er der Britischen Akademie inzwischen als »master mind« gilt.
English translation: “I fear that most of Bernard Mandeville's contemporaries would turn in their graves if they knew that he is now regarded by the British Academy as a "master mind".”
Against the post-Keynesian notion of an 'equilibrium income' defined by the equality of saving and investment, Mahr insists that a growing economy has no fixed point of rest, only balanced growth—the harmonious movement of its aggregate magnitudes. Attacking Samuelson's tabular model, he argues that investment merely matched by current saving reproduces income rather than enlarging it; expansion requires investment to outrun saving, the excess financed by monetary and credit expansion. The multiplier is reinterpreted as a temporal process bound to the income velocity of money, and saving is assigned a stabilizing office, absorbing purchasing power while long-gestation projects—power stations, housing, factories—create incomes before goods. First published in 1956, the essay ends where the social market economy begins: value-stable monetary policy, backed when needed by fiscal policy and measures against monopoly power.
Es gehört geradezu zu den Voraussetzungen eines störungsfreien Wachstumsprozesses, daß die Investitionen höher sind als die Ersparungen, wobei das Mehr an Investitionen durch Erweiterung des Zahlungsmittelumlaufs finanziert wird.
English translation: “It belongs, indeed, among the prerequisites of an undisturbed growth process that investments be higher than savings, the excess of investments being financed through an expansion of the circulation of means of payment.”
Supermarket boycotts misidentify their villain: the housewives picketing chain stores before the 1966 elections blame merchants for prices that government, not retailers, produced. Only Washington can legally run the printing presses that depreciate the currency, Sennholz argues, yet the Johnson administration exploits a semantic shift—redefining inflation as mere price increase—so that businessmen absorb the blame officials have earned. He turns the charge back on the picketers, many of whom champion the very spending programs that breed the deficits behind rising prices, and traces the cost of a can of tomatoes through farm supports, crop restriction, subsidized exports, embedded taxation, and union work rules. Chain supermarkets, he counters, are low-margin, fiercely competitive institutions; the boycott is coercion by a minority against the majority's own preference.
They themselves are infected with the very bacillus that is breeding the inflation.