1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
Nairobi settled nothing, and for Haberler that was no calamity. The Committee of Twenty still chased a negotiated return to stable-but-adjustable par values, yet the working system was already one of floating currencies, and world trade had gone on growing beneath the improvisation. His argument hinges on a distinction officials blurred: asset convertibility, turning official balances into gold or SDRs, matters far less to commerce than ordinary market convertibility among currencies, which floating preserved. Restoring dollar convertibility, he insists, would not supply the discipline its advocates want, since the real obstacle is that governments refuse deflation for the sake of external balance. Against Giscard d'Estaing's charge that floating neither halts inflation nor yields true market rates, Haberler answers that flexible rates are a necessary shield for any country determined to stay out of the world's inflation.
If any country wishes to stay out of the world inflation, floating is a necessary but not sufficient condition.
On the first day of April 1939, crossing into Switzerland before dawn, Engel-Janosi called himself a beggar and was told he was a proud beggar — he reached Zurich with six and a half francs. His memoir traces the long road there: a childhood in liberal Jewish bourgeois Vienna among Mahler, Bruno Walter, and the Freud circle; artillery service on the Isonzo and Piave; the collapse of the Lombard bank; two decades running a parquet factory while writing diplomatic history in the archives; and the Mises Seminar and Hayek's Geistkreis as intellectual homes. Exile carried him through wartime Cambridge to Johns Hopkins, Catholic University, and visits to the confined Ezra Pound, before the 1949 return to a poorer, younger Vienna. Belonging to the Central European lost generation, it composes a life from what fate and inheritance gave.
Was ich in den folgenden Blättern versuchen wollte: wahrhaftig zu sein über mich und über Menschen, denen ich begegnet bin — in verschiedenen Gegenden, in verschiedenen Situationen, während eines nicht kurzen Lebens.
English translation: “What I sought to attempt in the following pages: to be truthful about myself and about the people I have met—in various regions, in various situations, over the course of a not-short life.”
Drafted in August 1973 for the German Council of Economic Experts and printed unchanged as a Kiel lecture, this expert memorandum asks whether the dollar was truly undervalued against the floating currencies, above all the D-Mark. Machlup turns a policy question into a methodological one: once rates are set by markets, expectations, capital flows, and official intervention, terms like “undervaluation” and “equilibrium exchange rate” lose any firm meaning, and calling a free-market rate wrong is merely a forecast of future correction. He rejects purchasing-power parity for small index movements, denies any clean statistical split between short- and long-term capital, and names capital flows the strongest of all forces on the exchange market. No durable, correct external value of the dollar, he concludes, can be computed at all.
Die Behauptung, der Dollar sei über- oder unterbewertet, drückt immer ein Mißtrauensvotum aus.
English translation: “The assertion that the dollar is over- or undervalued always expresses a vote of no confidence.”
Against the postwar faith in fiscal fine-tuning, Haberler binds together three things usually treated separately: economic growth, monetary stability, and personal freedom. Growth matters, he argues, because it widens the practical range of human choice, but the institutions that generate it demand discipline rather than activist management. Severe depressions, he judges, have become largely avoidable, so the live danger is now creeping inflation, and here his reassessment of the Phillips curve does the analytical work. Phillips's own mechanism, he notes, was demand-pull, not cost-push; any apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment holds only while rising prices go unanticipated, and dissolves once expectations catch up. Set within a classical-liberal frame that reaches from the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth to wage-push unionism, the book narrows what stabilization policy can honestly promise: no durable bargain between jobs and inflation exists.
It is probably no exaggeration to say that severe depressions are a thing of the past.
Conservatives, Rothbard charges, have long ceded the moral high ground to the Left, objecting to egalitarian programs only as impractical—a fatal concession, since ideals move the status quo. His 1973 essay therefore attacks the ideal itself. Equality, he argues, is intelligible only with respect to a specific attribute; taken literally it collapses into identity, and identity would demand coercive leveling of beauty, intelligence, and strength—the dystopias of Hartley's Facial Justice and Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron." Grounding human difference in biology as well as culture, he assails egalitarian readings of sex roles, youth quotas, and intelligence, then widens the charge from anthropology to ontology: utopian socialism from Fourier to Lenin becomes a revolt against the very structure of nature. Egalitarianism, he concludes, is not a humane ideal impeded by circumstance but something anti-human at its root.
The egalitarian world would necessarily be a world of horror fiction—a world of faceless and identical creatures, devoid of all individuality, variety, or special creativity.
Ninety days of frozen wages and prices gave Nixon's New Economic Policy of August 1971 its drama, but Haberler asks the harder question of what happens once the freeze is lifted. A freeze, he warns, suspends visible price changes without touching demand, wage bargaining, or credibility; hold it too long and it breeds evasion, bureaucracy, and corruption. The essay's hinge is a distinction between two incomes policies: guideposts and controls that substitute official judgment for the market, and reforms that restore competition by curbing union privileges, revising Davis-Bacon and minimum-wage rules, ending strike subsidies, and opening the door to imports. Sustained inflation, he holds, is always monetary, yet monopoly unions can still force authorities to choose between validating wage push and accepting unemployment. Business monopoly, by contrast, produces mostly one-shot effects and matters far less to a continuing spiral.
Industrial monopolies or oligopolies are not much of a problem as far as inflation is concerned.
A market transaction is not the transport of goods but the transfer of a title; free-market economists, Rothbard insists, therefore cannot defend voluntary exchange without also defending the justice of the ownership behind it. His 1974 essay presses this against the utilitarians Coase and Demsetz, whose deference to whatever government defines as property collapses, he argues, into legal positivism—ready to endorse arbitrary redistribution or even slavery so long as it is legal. Against them he builds a natural-rights theory from two principles: self-ownership of one's body, and the homesteading of unused nature through labor, from which exchange, wages, saving, and bequest follow. Applied to real titles it cuts both ways, condemning holdings rooted in conquest or state grant, as with coercive Latin American landlords, while validating many others—making it as anti-conservative as it is anti-socialist.
Whichever way he decides, the economist cannot escape a judgment, a theory of justice in the ownership of property.
One unfinished project links Keynes's Treatise on Money and his General Theory: the attempt to make economics adequate to a future no agent can know. Shackle finds the sharpest tool not in the General Theory but in the Treatise's Fundamental Equations, which he reads as rudimentary sequence analysis—income as anticipated cost, profit as the gap between what was expected and what occurred. From this ex ante/ex post distinction he rebuilds liquidity preference and the marginal efficiency of capital as phenomena of speculative markets, confidence, and mood, not as stable schedules. Economic life becomes kaleidic: neither a march toward equilibrium nor a regular cycle, but a succession of temporary patterns that shifting expectations can shatter in an instant, leaving resources idle as asset-holders retreat into liquidity.
Income, in the Fundamental Equations, is a conjecture which can be wrong.
What could children's liberation actually mean—perhaps, Rothbard suspects, little more than a right to kick adults in the shins on a guaranteed income from long-suffering parents? Beneath the joke, his 1972 essay puts a genuine puzzle to libertarian theory: the infant is neither a full self-owner nor an owned object. His move is to shift from vague "freedom" to jurisdiction over property. Parents may set household rules as conditions of residence on their own property, but may never own the child's body; every child must therefore hold an absolute right to run away, forced return amounting to kidnapping. The parent is trustee-owner and guardian, morally bound to rear and educate yet not legally compelled to do so. Rothbard extends the logic to a market in guardianship and against compulsory schooling and child-labor law, liberating child and parent alike from the State.
Therefore, the child must always be free to run away; he then becomes a self-owner whenever he chooses to exercise his right to run-away freedom.
Writing after the 1973 oil embargo and OPEC's cartel price rise had transformed the monetary scene, Haberler sets out to calm the panic rather than amplify it. The oil shock, he grants, imposes a real transfer of purchasing power from the industrial world to the producers, but a large transfer is not an insoluble monetary crisis. Treated as a single bloc, the importing countries could bear it while output still expanded; the genuine difficulty is distributional, since exporters' spending and investment will not match each nation's oil bill, and exchange rates must apportion the adjustment. Because no authority can compute the correct new parities, floating is the least bad response to uncertainty. France's decision to let the franc float confirms the lesson, and he cautions Washington to welcome dollar appreciation rather than retaliate with tariffs or quotas.
If they keep their money in liquid form (fail to spend it), it is up to monetary management in the importing countries to neutralize a possible deflationary effect.
Strip away the civic pieties and the State stands revealed, in this 1965 essay, as something other than society organized for the common good. Rothbard opposes the comfortable equation of government with "we the people," insisting that taxation, conscription, and imprisonment are impositions by one organized group upon another. Borrowing Franz Oppenheimer's distinction between the "economic means" of production and exchange and the "political means" of seizure, he casts the State as the institutionalized political means—born of conquest and tribute, not social contract. Because rulers are always a minority, they enlist intellectuals to manufacture legitimacy; because constitutions are interpreted by the very power they would bind, limits become licenses. War, feared alongside revolution, is the great engine of expansion. History itself becomes a race between social power and State power, cooperation against predation.
It forbids private murder, but itself organizes murder on a colossal scale.
Accepting the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize amid accelerating inflation, Hayek turned the occasion into an indictment of his own discipline. Economists, he charges, have made policy blunders by aping the physical sciences, a scientistic reflex that mistakes measurability for importance and prefers elegant aggregates like total demand management to the dispersed, local knowledge through which markets actually coordinate. Borrowing Warren Weaver's distinction between organized and unorganized complexity, he argues that social phenomena permit only falsifiable pattern predictions, never precise forecasts, and that inflationary stimulus buys employment by drawing labour into uses sustainable only under continued expansion. The lecture closes on the market as a spontaneous communication system and on a plea for humility against the charlatanry of social engineering.
We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.