3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
When Richard Lester marshalled questionnaire evidence to argue that businessmen do not think at the margin, Machlup answered with this compact 1947 reply, reprinted here, that concedes almost nothing. Lester’s executives said employment depends chiefly on sales and orders; Machlup responds that sales expectations were always part of marginal productivity reasoning, not an antimarginalist discovery. He works through Lester’s six conclusions on wage rates, variable costs, factor substitution, and multiprocess plants, insisting that marginal analysis never required rising unit costs and that firms can reckon in incremental rather than average terms. His deeper charge is that Lester mistakes the proximate vocabulary of managers — orders, morale, sales effort — for a refutation of the causal structure economists actually analyze.
Incremental costs and revenues can be known without any knowledge of average costs and revenues; the reverse is not true.
When defeated Austria's socialists revived their demand for socialization in 1947, Bayer insisted the slogan meant nothing unless productive means were lifted from private hands and bound into one national economic plan. Isolated, firm-by-firm nationalization he dismissed as primitive and doomed, recalling the failed German and Austrian experiments after 1918. The argument then plunges into the socialist calculation debate: he rehearses Mises's claim that without a capital-goods market prices cannot rank higher-order goods, weighs Barone, Lange, and Taylor on trial-and-error pricing, and answers Hayek's Road to Serfdom charge that planning breeds arbitrary coercion. Crucially, he enlists Austrian marginal-utility theory as valid for any economy, socialist ones included, to conclude that a price-guided planned order is both theoretically and practically possible.
Der Ordnung der Wirtschaft kann nur zugrunde liegen, entweder das Prinzip der Selbstregulierung oder der bewußten volkswirtschaftlichen Entscheidung.
English translation: “The ordering of the economy can rest only on one of two principles: that of self-regulation, or that of conscious economic decision.”
A protective tariff may expand established production—or provoke an industrial reorganization that lowers prices. In this 1947 article, Joseph A. Schumpeter asks why similar circumstances can yield radically different economic histories. His distinction between adaptive and creative response shifts attention from conditions alone to the people who change existing practices. Entrepreneurship, in this account, is neither invention nor ownership: it is the work of making novelty effective against resistance. Schumpeter also complicates the apparent triumph of innovation, setting exceptional fortunes beside failed ventures and the destruction of incumbent firms’ capital. Readers encounter not a formula for predicting change, but a precise historical research agenda: identify who implements innovations, trace how their gains and losses spread, and test whether organized specialist work is displacing the entrepreneurial function.
The inventor produces ideas, the entrepreneur “gets things done,” which may but need not embody anything that is scientifically new.
Once the Exchequer acquires a duty to stabilize aggregate demand, the old arithmetic of matching revenue to authorized expenditure no longer suffices. Written in 1947 in the wake of Keynes, this essay treats every fiscal stream as a force acting on monetary demand relative to the supply of goods, and builds a pair of indices—deflative P and inflative Q—to measure the initial thrust of a specified receipt or disbursement before secondary reactions unfold. Shackle's taxonomy of pensioners, policemen, postmen, palace-builders, and paper-makers shows why a payment that adds no saleable output pushes prices up while a purchase for resale may prove deflative. A tax label alone, he insists, never fixes the direction of pressure; only the composition of spending does.
The Exchequer, in deciding the size, method and timing of its levies and disbursements, must nowadays be guided by two quite distinct sets of considerations.
An equation can be true at every instant yet fail to explain how income changes. This distinction anchors J. J. Polak and Gottfried Haberler’s brief joint restatement, written to reconcile their preceding contributions on the foreign-trade multiplier. They favour an exports-based multiplier for tracing income adjustment under specified conditions, while warning that an export-surplus formula’s validity as an identity does not establish its causal usefulness. Their treatment of consumption makes the difficulty concrete: a stable relationship between current consumption and previous income need not imply a stable ratio of current consumption to current income. The statement offers a compact lesson in what multiplier reasoning requires—explicit timing, defensible assumptions about constant parameters, and restraint where the available relationships cannot support a general prediction.
Can an expansion of exports generate successive rounds of income when imports rise alongside it? In this 1947 comment, Gottfried Haberler challenges Polak’s foreign-trade multiplier analysis by separating accounting identities from causal sequences. A formula that balances income and expenditure does not, he argues, explain how spending unfolds over time. His distinctive concern is with the assumptions behind the calculation: which expenditure is autonomous, how imports respond to income, and whether the relevant behavioral relationships are stable. Haberler allows that balanced trade can bring idle resources into production, but insists that gains from trade need not be multiplier effects. The reader gains a precise way to distinguish an increase in output from a process of expenditure multiplication—and to see why apparently rival formulas may describe different economic situations.
Anything may happen, but what happens cannot be deduced from the income equation.
Ten years after The General Theory appeared — and in the year of Keynes's death — Haberler set out to weigh the book as a scientific system rather than an object of discipleship, a verdict he revisits sixteen years on without softening it. He grants Keynes the systematic use of income effects, the multiplier, and a transformed vocabulary of macroeconomic model-building, but denies any overturning of monetary and cycle theory's logical foundations. The demonstration of a static competitive underemployment equilibrium, he argues, rests entirely on money-wage rigidity; admit flexible wages and the Keynes and Pigou effects erode it. Say's Law, properly stated, had already been abandoned by serious neoclassical theorists. Praise without idolatry is the essay's discipline.
Hero worship is nowhere less appropriate than in science.
Provisional notes rather than a finished theory, this essay asks how economists and historians should define, measure, and explain long-run change without turning theory into metaphysics. For Schumpeter theory is only an empirical toolbox: growth itself has no all-purpose measure, and he adopts the rise of trend per capita output merely as a working definition. His three theses cut against reductionism, that growth cannot be isolated from politics, institutions, and habit, that no single factor explains it, and that it interacts reciprocally with its supposed causes, while he rejects Marxist determinism outright. Naming a factor like war or the sixteenth-century Spanish precious-metal inflation is worthless, he argues, until its mechanism is specified. Against the automatism of the Smith-Mill-Marshall tradition he sets the creative response and entrepreneurship, the recombination of resources that no prior condition can predict.
Economic growth is not an autonomous phenomenon, that is to say, it is not a phenomenon that can be satisfactorily analyzed in purely economic terms alone.
Can market equilibrium itself generate cyclical price movements? In this French article, Gerhard Tintner makes expectations the hinge between Walrasian equilibrium and economic fluctuations: buyers and sellers anticipate future prices by extrapolating present prices and their rates of change. His deliberately restrictive linear model shows how interdependent markets can produce oscillations that persist, grow, or decay. Applied to American stock, agricultural, and non-agricultural price indices for 1920–1942, it yields a damped cycle of 12.82 years alongside a secular trend. Tintner regards the comparison with observed periodic movements as an approximate fit, not a complete explanation. The article offers a concrete way to examine how assumptions about expectations create cyclical motion—and why a fading cycle need not imply stable prices.
Economic planning already operates within capitalist cartels and trusts: for Hans Bayer, the question is not whether to plan, but how planning can serve freedom rather than concentrated power. This 1947 critical review essay challenges Hayek’s identification of planning with dictatorship, drawing on Hermann Finer while developing Bayer’s own case for democratic coordination. Its distinctive proposal retains competition, private enterprise and prices as signals of individual needs within a partly socialized economy. Bayer also shifts the test of freedom from formal permission to buy goods to the actual means to obtain them, including protection against prolonged unemployment. Readers encounter a pointed dispute over whether prices and democratic oversight can reconcile collective direction with personal initiative—and whether market insecurity itself limits liberty.
Scare quotes do deliberate work in this programmatic restatement of liberalism: the pretended defenders of 'free enterprise' are often, Hayek charges, defenders of tariffs, cartels, and privilege who fear real rivalry as much as any socialist. A genuine competitive order, he insists, is no natural growth that appears wherever the state withdraws; it depends on law—property rules, contract, monetary stability, limits on coercive private power—deliberately built to keep rivalry effective. From this juridical liberalism he attacks the mechanical extension of property to patents and trademarks as a manufacture of monopoly, criticizes steep progressive taxation for eroding the social mobility and independent means that sustain free opinion, and refuses to demand discipline of trade unions before employers have surrendered their own protections. The long-run battle, he argues, is over beliefs, not present political feasibility.
The purpose of a competitive order is to make competition work; that of so-called “ordered competition,” almost always to restrict the effectiveness of competition.
Gerhard Tintner’s 1948 review of Paul Anthony Samuelson’s Foundations of Economic Analysis turns admiration for mathematical rigor into a pointed question: what can maximizing behavior alone tell us about actual economic conduct? Writing from an econometric perspective, Tintner praises Samuelson’s theoretical achievement while challenging the narrow assumptions behind its treatment of dynamics. His most concrete objection concerns expectations and uncertainty: understanding how anticipations form, he argues, offers a more useful bridge from statics to dynamics than formal relations among equilibria alone. This short review lets readers examine the distinction Tintner draws between powerful economic mathematics and empirically informative economics—and why he regards statistical investigation as a necessary complement, rather than an alternative, to theory.