The archive.

Can falling prices deepen a depression, while rising prices undermine recovery? In this 1938 article, Emil Lederer refuses to choose between correcting price imbalances and stimulating investment. He argues that flexible prices can accelerate contraction as falling wages and receipts erode demand, while particular rigid prices—especially those of steel and building materials—can make new investment prohibitively costly. Drawing on price and production evidence from 1929–1937, he distinguishes rigidity that restrains deflation from rigidity that obstructs expansion. The resulting policy tension is concrete: public works may launch recovery yet raise the material costs that discourage private projects. Readers encounter an analysis of why stimulus must attend not only to how much is spent, but also to the prices and production costs through which spending takes effect.

Japan’s industrial expansion looks different when low wages and depressed farm incomes enter the explanation. Reviewing the July 1937 Japan issue of Weltwirtschaftliches Archiv, Emil Lederer values its economic evidence while questioning the political assumptions that shape its interpretation. His criticism becomes concrete in the conflict over rice prices: cheap rice helps sustain low industrial wages, but threatens farmers’ livelihoods; support for farmers puts pressure on workers’ real incomes. Rather than dismissing the collection as propaganda, Lederer distinguishes its empirical strengths from its neglect of competing social interests and peaceful alternatives to territorial expansion. This short review offers a pointed example of how a critic can use a publication’s own evidence to challenge the national necessities its contributors take for granted.

What makes an annotated statute useful as a record of legal change? In this brief review, Helene Lieser singles out the earlier Austrian laws appended to Edmund Prochaska’s edition of the new Czechoslovak instalment-transactions law. Her approval rests on that juxtaposition: current legislation becomes clearer when its predecessors are available alongside it. The notice records a concise judgment about legal documentation rather than an assessment of particular statutory provisions.

Confusion about the calculus, the authors contend, usually springs not from calculus itself but from shaky command of the algebra, geometry, and limits beneath it. Written for beginners rather than as a treatise on mathematical economics, this primer builds from graphing total cost against output toward the ideas an economist must handle to read the published literature: the limit, the derivative, marginal cost and marginal utility as special cases of it, maxima and minima, Lagrange multipliers for constrained cost minimization, Euler's theorem and the exhaustion of product under competition, least-squares regression, and Cramer's rule for market equilibrium. W. L. Crum credits Joseph Schumpeter with the volume's major additions, and the economic example — never abstract rigor for its own sake — governs every step.

The derivative of $y$ with respect to $x$ is the instantaneous rate of change of $y$ with $x$.

Can an economy hoard money even when its total cash holdings remain unchanged? In this reply to R. F. Kahn’s review of Prosperity and Depression, Gottfried Haberler argues that it can: expenditure and income may fall without any reduction in the money stock. This distinction anchors his defence of a monetary account of economic fluctuations against Kahn’s criticisms. Haberler’s distinctive concern is to separate differences of vocabulary from differences of explanation—especially where saving–investment identities threaten to substitute for accounts of how adjustment occurs. His qualified acceptance of public works sharpens the stakes: additional government spending must increase total demand, not merely displace expenditure elsewhere. The reply offers a focused encounter with the contested boundary between monetary circulation, effective demand, and the financing of recovery.

Confident opinion at the turn of the century assumed democracy's advance was as irreversible as the tide; by 1938 Bolshevism, Fascism, and National Socialism had made that assumption look naive. Across six lectures given on the Harris Foundation at Chicago, Rappard defines democracy not by its etymology but by the paired ideals of liberty and equality, then traces its uneven rise from Athens through Britain, France, and his native Switzerland. He reads the three great dictatorships as offspring of the World War—Lenin's from defeat, Mussolini's from disappointed victory, Hitler's from Versailles and slump—and diagnoses the strain within surviving democracies as a crisis of parliamentarism rather than of democracy itself. The remedy he presses is unfashionable: a retreat of the state from economic life, without which self-government becomes an illusion.

Democracy thrives on peace, and dictatorships on war.

A pension system can balance its long-term accounts while worsening the downturn in which workers must pay for it. This tension shapes Karl Pribram’s 1938 examination of old-age benefit reserves. Bringing actuarial reasoning into contact with public budgeting and business-cycle analysis, he asks what reserves actually secure—and who benefits when public subsidies replace them. His scrutiny of the American plan exposes a distributive problem: subsidies covering deficits may support larger pensions more generously than smaller ones. Against this, he proposes equal public supplements alongside earnings-related insurance, and payroll taxes that fall during depression and rise during prosperity. The article offers a concrete way to distinguish financial stability from rigid financing, and public assistance from contributory entitlement.

Saving connects today’s purchases with tomorrow’s possibilities—but what does that connection require of a consumer’s valuations? In this compact mathematical article, Gerhard Tintner extends the equalization of marginal utility per unit of expenditure across consumption dates. Expected interest rates link the marginal utilities of money at different times, rather than entering as a separately imposed psychological discount factor. His distinctive approach allows utility to depend on an entire consumption plan, without assuming independent satisfactions at each date, and carries this logic from discrete choices to continuous consumption streams. Readers can discover how successive budgets become a single discounted constraint, and why ratios of marginal utilities carry the relevant economic content. Tintner also marks the limits of his derivation: equilibrium conditions alone do not guarantee a maximum, and empirical verification remains unfinished.

Reliable predictions about railways and postal services do not require knowledge of every participant’s motives. For Felix Kaufmann, such ordinary cases unsettle the opposition between exact natural science and an irreducibly subjective study of society. In this 1938 article, he argues that both domains depend on interconnected, revisable judgments, while explaining why understanding purposeful conduct requires introspection as well as knowledge of external causes. Methodology offers no philosophical guarantee of truth: its task is to expose assumptions and clarify the rules by which claims are accepted, tested, and withdrawn. His comparison of scientific statements to club members—with admission requirements, ranks, and weighted votes—gives readers a concrete way to distinguish disciplinary boundaries from evidential warrant, and reliable knowledge from claims insulated against correction.

A change in expected interest rates alters not only the value of future income but also the relative cost of consumption at different dates. In this article, Gerhard Tintner extends Hicks and Allen’s demand theory to that intertemporal problem, treating dated commodities as parts of a single consumption plan constrained by a discounted budget. His derivation shows how saving and substitution across dates enter demand’s response to expected incomes, prices, and accumulation rates. The analysis also makes a revealing distinction: demand derived from definite expectations becomes demand expressed through past economic conditions only if the dependence of those expectations on the past is known. Readers can discover both the mathematical structure of this extension of ordinal utility theory and the precise point at which a separate theory of expectations is still needed.

The double meaning of the word Volk, Amonn contends, has quietly corrupted the foundations of economics by fusing the pure theoretical categories of the exchange economy with the practical concepts of Volkswirtschaftslehre. This introduction to economic thinking—second edition of 1944, essentially unchanged from the 1938 original—treats concepts frankly as instruments made by thought and defines each by the problem it is meant to solve. Moving from economic goods, scarcity, and Wohlstand through the production factors, prices, money, credit, and comparative costs, he denies that Volkswirtschaft is any real unit like a household, insisting it is only an ideational association of separate economies. Four appendices turn the method against Max Weber, Sombart, Gottl, and Englis, whose definitions he finds either candidly stipulative or objective merely in appearance.

Begriffe sind Denkwerkzeuge.

English translation: “Concepts are tools of thought.”

Making money costly to hold might encourage spending—but could it also shrink the money supply? In this brief 1938 review of A. Dahlberg’s When Capital Goes on Strike, G. L. S. Shackle examines a proposal to tax bank balances and depreciate notes. His distinctive interpretation is that the scheme would make liquidity expensive for money holders while making borrowing cheap. Yet attempts to escape the tax through debt repayment or purchases of banks’ securities could reduce the quantity of money. Sympathetic to further investigation, Shackle nevertheless asks whether a steady incentive can withstand a slump’s self-reinforcing momentum. The review offers a compact distinction between changing the rewards for holding money and adjusting policy to an approaching downturn.