The archive.

Who bears the cost of investment: voluntary savers, or workers whose real wages fall as prices rise? Walter Froehlich’s review of Erich Preiser’s collected essays makes this distributional question central to his assessment of their economic reasoning. He values Preiser’s careful separation of monetary from real relations and underemployment from full employment, while resisting claims of novelty for arguments already familiar in American literature. His discussion also shows how property ownership enters theories of distribution through concrete market conditions: workers with land need not respond to low wages as propertyless workers do. This short review offers a measured encounter with Preiser’s formulations, distinguishing explanatory clarity from theoretical innovation and tracing the social assumptions within apparently technical accounts of saving, investment, and income.

Land cannot be manufactured, but does its fixed supply make ownership economically passive? In this reply to Georgist critics, first distributed in 1957 and reprinted here in 2011, Murray N. Rothbard uses an unexpected comparison—land and Rembrandt paintings—to challenge the case for taxing away land rent. Both assets are scarce; neither, he argues, allocates itself to users without owners’ judgment and incentives. His Austrian account of capitalization and entrepreneurial foresight gives the dispute a concrete focus: what happens to site allocation, assessment, and long-term improvements when owners lose their returns? The ethical defence is more qualified than a blanket endorsement of existing titles: Rothbard defends first use and subsequent transfer, not conquest. The reply exposes the distinct economic and moral premises on which his opposition to Georgism rests.

A public works project may be useful yet poorly suited to fighting a recession: it can take too long to begin and prove difficult to stop. In this 1957 contribution to congressional papers on federal expenditure policy, Walter Froehlich supports countercyclical spending while challenging the apparent precision of budget totals and multiplier estimates. He follows expenditure beyond the accounts, distinguishing authorization from production and payment, and asking when government action stimulates—or displaces—private investment. His skepticism also reaches the measure of success: recording public services at cost does not, he argues, establish an equivalent gain in welfare. The paper offers a concrete way to assess stabilization programs through their timing, reversibility, and effects on employment, rather than through the size of the appropriation alone.

Employee shares can give workers a stake in their firm without making productive wealth more widely accessible. In this 1957 journal article, Hans Bayer examines that gap by asking where the money for ownership comes from—and whose interests the resulting arrangements serve. His distinction between entrepreneurial profit and monopoly rent sharpens the problem: sharing a privileged firm’s gains with its workforce need not benefit society at large. Against schemes financed from already inadequate wages, he considers participation in wealth growth across enterprises, while warning that investment earmarks can suppress necessary consumption. The article offers a concrete way to assess ownership reform beyond the number of shareholders: by its financing, its distribution of benefits, and its compatibility with secure employment and sustained economic activity.

A pointing gesture can communicate only within a world already shared: for Alfred Schütz, this poses a precise difficulty for Husserl’s attempt to ground intersubjectivity in the transcendental ego. In this 1957 essay, Schütz tests that project against the experiences it seeks to explain—encountering another person, inhabiting one’s own body, and understanding signs. His critique works from within phenomenology: my body as lived through movement is not given in the same way as another body perceived from outside. Can analogy between them bear the weight Husserl places on it? Schütz proposes that intersubjectivity belongs to the life-world before reflection begins. The essay clarifies what social inquiry can retain from phenomenological analysis of meaning without accepting a derivation of the shared world from solitary subjectivity.

Science cannot supply political ends — but it can discipline the pursuit of them. That Weberian conviction anchors Morgenstern's 1956 lecture to the Nordrhein-Westfalen research society, which argues that no policy problem is even defined until one names the permitted means: unemployment looks wholly different if wage cuts, public works, or inflation are allowed. He welcomes mathematics, statistics, and electronic computation — linear programming, input-output analysis, a manganese-supply example — as ways to force objectives, quantities, and timing into the open. Yet formalization is not wisdom. Where the state truly commands its variables, quantitative methods improve decisions; where unions, cartels, and rival states react strategically, there is no single optimum, only game-theoretic solution sets and imputations. Calculation can rank feasible actions, he insists, but it cannot choose values or dissolve political conflict.

Die Theorie zeigt, daß es in diesen Fällen kein „Optimum“ gibt, keine „beste“ Lösung, sondern es gibt unendlich viele Verteilungsschemata oder „Zurechnungen“ für das Ergebnis, von denen jedoch nur einige zusammen als „Lösung“ angesehen werden können.

English translation: “The theory shows that in these cases there is no 'optimum,' no 'best' solution, but rather there are infinitely many distribution schemes or 'imputations' for the outcome, of which, however, only some together can be regarded as a 'solution.'”

Austria’s 1957 sale of shares in two nationalized banks promised to turn collective wealth into personal property—but how much ownership could it confer without a voice in management? Richard Kerschagl welcomes the experiment as a redistribution of capital rather than a means of raising it, while examining the compromises that preserved state and party control. Small investors could pay in installments and receive a minimum dividend, yet the publicly offered preference shares carried no voting rights. His assessment connects the heavily oversubscribed offering with investors’ desire for security backed by real assets, not simply income. The article makes a concrete distinction between distributing financial claims and fostering a sense of co-ownership: for Kerschagl, even limited participation would have strengthened the scheme’s promise of personal independence.

Automation can make shorter working hours possible without making workers more secure. In this 1957 journal article, Hans Bayer locates that contradiction not in machinery itself but in the economic arrangements governing its use. He tests the reassuring sequence by which lower costs supposedly yield lower prices, greater demand, and renewed employment, showing why each transition may fail. His standard is neither output nor consumption alone, but the material security and leisure needed for personal development. Advertising-driven replacement purchases and deliberately shortened product lifetimes sharpen his distinction between selling more and living better. The article offers a concrete way to examine technological progress: ask who receives its gains, who bears its displaced costs, and whether increased productive capacity actually enlarges human freedom.

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.”

A country may be poor with no promising resources to develop, or rich while sitting on vast undeveloped opportunities — 'how splendid to be rich and yet underdeveloped,' Machlup remarks, and the irony sets the tone for this 1957 map of development economics. Rather than treat 'economic development' as one measurable thing, he sorts the field's quarrels into disputes over definitions, objectives, recommendations, and theories, showing that total income, income per head, output per worker, and mass living standards can each move in opposite directions. Ends get confused with instruments: full employment, industrialization, and 'economic independence' harden into doctrines prized for their own sake. Behind the policy clashes he finds contested theories — autarky, infant-industry protection, balanced growth, terms-of-trade strategy — and asks of each exactly what exception to comparative advantage is being claimed.

The recommendation of labor-saving, capital-using investments in countries with abundant labor and scarce capital is a genuine paradox.

No accidental byproduct of capitalism, lasting mass unemployment is for Mises the predictable effect of wage rates held above what the market would clear—by minimum-wage law, or by unions that raise members' pay only by excluding outsiders. From marginal productivity and consumer sovereignty he builds toward a monetary argument: unwilling to confront union power, governments turned to currency devaluation to cut real wages by stealth, until unions learned to index their demands to the cost of living. Keynes enters as no true theorist but the man who gave old inflationism a fresh watchword. The only genuine cure for mass unemployment, Mises concludes, is the return of freedom to the labor market; sound money and free labor pricing stand or fall together.

All Keynes accomplished was to coin a new slogan — “full employment” — which became the motto of present-day policies of inflation and credit expansion.

In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle offers an endorsement rather than a counterargument: he praises Gould’s reasoning and supports the directions of inquiry proposed. Its interest lies in the research priority Shackle states with unusual directness—decision-making as perhaps the richest and most central problem in the human sciences. The note records that commitment and agreement without elaborating a theory or specifying the methods by which inquiry should proceed.