The archive.

An optimal cropping plan calculated from average yields leaves a farmer’s exposure to poor outcomes unresolved. M. M. Babbar, Gerhard Tintner, and Earl O. Heady address that gap by attaching probability estimates to a linear-programming solution for an Iowa farm. Their example turns on seasonal labor bottlenecks: corn and flax offer the best return under mean input coefficients, but historical yield variation changes the range of possible production and revenue. The article shows how lower profit bounds might help distinguish equally profitable plans, while making its restrictive assumptions explicit—small, normally distributed coefficient errors and, in the numerical application, fixed prices. Readers can examine a concrete attempt to connect resource optimization with downside risk, rather than treating a calculated optimum as a sufficient basis for decision.

A model chosen for its economic usefulness may still yield misleading measures of statistical precision. In this brief discussion of three agricultural-marketing papers, Gerhard Tintner welcomes modern econometric methods while warning that trying several models before selecting one introduces biases that affect reported standard errors. He also suggests that restrictive linearity assumptions may help explain modest forecasting results. His perspective is constructive rather than merely corrective: he connects agricultural decision models with economic and statistical theory, and values methods that make the choice among alternative technologies part of production analysis. The contribution offers a compact distinction between fitting data, forecasting reliably, and representing the decisions producers actually face.

Can devaluation cure a trade deficit? The mid-century answer split into two camps, and this 1955 article refuses to let either win outright. Against Sidney Alexander's claim that his 'income-absorption' approach supersedes the older elasticities method, Machlup grants the weaknesses of relative-price reasoning — supply and demand curves for foreign exchange shift once devaluation changes costs and incomes — but shows that the accounting identity Y ≡ A + B, however clarifying, is no causal theory. Alexander's gravest omission is resource reallocation: devaluation can raise real income by moving resources into more valuable uses, an effect no marginal propensity to absorb can capture. Reasoning from identities, Machlup warns, tempts the analyst into implicit theorizing. Neither set of tools can be spared; both relative prices and aggregate spending are needed.

The trade balance is negative when the nation absorbs more than its income.

Can international institutions secure cooperation when national economies are organized to obstruct it? In this 1955 review of the revised second edition of Wilhelm Röpke’s Internationale Ordnung – heute, Alfred Amonn endorses an answer that shifts attention from treaties and agencies to domestic economic and moral foundations. Competitive markets, convertible money, and limits on governmental economic power become, in his account of Röpke, conditions of international order rather than merely national policy choices. Exchange controls and persistent foreign-exchange shortages provide concrete tests of that position. Amonn’s unusually emphatic approval makes the review revealing in its own right: readers can examine how a diagnosis of monetary disorder becomes an argument against national planning, and where exposition turns into advocacy for Röpke’s liberal programme.

We encounter people directly, but how do we encounter a friendship, an institution, or society itself? In this essay, reprinted in 1967, Alfred Schütz examines how tangible things make present what lies beyond immediate experience. His phenomenological approach distinguishes reminders, indications, and signs from symbols that connect everyday life with such different provinces of meaning as religion, art, and science. The central tension is reciprocal: individuals inherit socially established meanings, yet symbols also enable them to apprehend the collectivities to which they belong. By separating these kinds of reference, Schütz gives readers a precise way to ask how shared meanings support communication without erasing differences of perspective—and why the same representation can sustain belonging for one group while provoking disagreement in another.

Joining the ends of a series makes a difficult sampling problem tractable—but what does that simplification buy, and when might it be useful beyond the circular case? Gerhard Tintner studies variance estimates formed from finite differences of normally distributed observations. Overlapping differences remain dependent; his distinctive move is to exploit circular symmetry, factoring their quadratic form by frequency to obtain explicit sampling distributions. Readers can see why an unbiased estimate need not have a familiar finite-sample distribution, and how sample size and the order of differencing affect its uncertainty. Examples with seven and eight observations compare exact densities with normal approximations. Tintner also cautiously proposes using the circular results for non-circular series when endpoint effects are small, making the boundary assumption both the method’s strength and its practical qualification.

How much economic detail does an input-output model need to produce useful results? In this joint conference contribution, Oskar Morgenstern and Thomson M. Whitin report Princeton experiments in which two industries remain distinct while the rest of the economy becomes a single sector. These small systems often approximate selected results from a forty-four-sector model surprisingly well. The authors treat that success as a puzzle, not a universal rule: the larger model is itself an aggregate, and exact calculation cannot remove uncertainty in its underlying observations. Their distinctive combination of computational ingenuity and caution lets readers examine when selective detail matters—and why numerical precision alone cannot decide whether an economic approximation is adequate for its purpose.

Between apriorism and a crude empiricism that would test every assumption in isolation, Machlup marks out a middle path for what 'verification' can mean in economics. He lowers the stakes deliberately: verification is not access to final truth but a disciplined comparison between what a theory implies and what inquiry discloses. His pivotal distinction separates particular historical propositions, checkable directly, from general hypotheses that yield conclusions only when joined to auxiliary assumptions about conditions and change. Fundamental postulates such as rational action need no independent sense-verification; they make conduct intelligible and are judged by the fruitfulness of the systems they support. Steering past both Misesian apriorism and Hutchison-style ultra-empiricism, and drawing on physics, Einstein, and Braithwaite, he holds that economics stays empirically disciplined while a hypothesis, at most, survives as not disconfirmed.

The hypothesis is confirmed if reasonable correspondence is found between the deduced and the observed, or more correctly, if no irreconcilable contradiction is found between the deduced and the observed.

That the United States had become the world's most prosperous nation was, by 1955, a fact no one contested; what puzzled Mises was why so many treated that abundance as a crime to be redistributed rather than an achievement to be explained. Reviewing William E. Rappard's study, he accepts its four causes—mass production, applied science, the passion for productivity, competition—but drives them toward a single Austrian conclusion: American wealth was not extracted from poorer nations but built at home through capital accumulation. Better tools, plants, and mines raise the marginal productivity of labor, and technical know-how is worthless where saving is discouraged and property insecure. Against Marx, Keynes, and the anti-saving doctrines of the New Economics, he makes the secret plain—prosperity is accumulated, never seized.

America is prosperous because its people wanted prosperity and resorted to policies fitted to the purpose.

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.

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.”

A currency may buy goods without giving its holder freedom to choose what to buy. This distinction anchors Richard Kerschagl’s 1955 article on convertibility and economic organization. Ration cards provide his concrete test: when purchasing requires a personal entitlement as well as money, equal nominal incomes no longer confer equal command over goods. Kerschagl argues that monetary rules cannot function independently of the institutions governing production, credit, and trade. Yet his criticism of intervention does not become a blanket rejection of transitional arrangements: multilateral clearing, including the European Payments Union, can help advance convertibility. The article offers a way to distinguish restrictions that diminish money’s general usefulness from arrangements that may widen it, making convertibility a question of economic freedom and institutional compatibility rather than exchange technique alone.