The archive.

A ship’s drinking-water supply poses a precise problem for value theory: if stores and remaining needs decline together, does the marginal utility of a tonne remain unchanged? Wilhelm Vleugels uses this example to scrutinize Friedrich Wieser’s rules for valuing stocks, distinguishing successful household planning from an adequate calculation of total value. His objection turns on what a withdrawal would actually cost: halfway through a voyage, surrendering a tonne sacrifices different satisfactions than it would at departure. Against the prospect of reconciling Wieser with Böhm-Bawerk, Vleugels shows why the unit measured and the period of consumption matter. The article gives readers a concrete way to distinguish equal daily benefits from the changing value of a fixed quantity removed from a dwindling supply.

Austria’s postwar transformation was, Schumpeter argues, less a revolution than a breakdown: political destruction proved permanent, social disruption temporary. This distinction anchors his 1927 review of C. A. Macartney’s The Social Revolution in Austria. His sympathy for the vanished Habsburg order coexists with pointed appreciation of Socialist achievements, especially the financial success of Vienna’s municipal government, which he thinks Macartney undervalues. Personal acquaintance informs his defence of Count Stürgkh against the book’s portrayal, while demands for fuller evidence qualify his praise of its treatment of socialised enterprises. The brief review offers a revealing tension between Schumpeter’s historical loyalties and his assessment of Socialist administration—and a concrete example of why the label “revolution” can obscure what actually changed.

An economist can build a system independently without founding a new school. That distinction guides Schumpeter’s review of the fourth edition of Gustav Cassel’s textbook, first published in 1927 and presented here in its 1954 reprint. Admiring Cassel’s clarity, Schumpeter nevertheless challenges his claim to replace value theory with scarcity and monetary calculation: scarcity, he argues, still presupposes wants and valuations. His criticism also tests the practical cost of theoretical elegance. A framework organized around competitive equilibrium cannot adequately address monopoly and restricted competition merely by claiming wider scope. Readers encounter Schumpeter as a discriminating critic of analytical tools—defending useful approximations, recognizing Cassel’s contribution to interest theory, and asking when simplification clarifies economic problems and when it conceals them.

Economists define capital as productive goods, then discuss it as money invested: for Frank Albert Fetter, this shift exposes an unresolved conceptual problem. In this Festschrift essay, first published in 1927 and supplied here in its 1977 reprint, he honors John Bates Clark by pressing beyond Clark’s distinction between concrete capital goods and a fund of value. Fetter connects the inclusion of land within capital to American property conditions and, more tentatively, to the controversy over Henry George’s single tax. His tribute remains critical: Clark’s reform did not fully separate physical production from the valuation of income rights. Readers can discover why seemingly technical definitions determine whether land, machinery, goodwill, and legal claims belong within one account of investment—and why Fetter locates their common basis in valuation rather than material form.

Everyone says prices have risen or money has lost purchasing power, yet no single formula makes such statements exactly measurable — the obstacle, Haberler contends, is not missing data but the vagueness of the concept being measured. Steering between naive faith in index arithmetic and total skepticism, the book first works through the whole apparatus of index theory — arithmetic, harmonic and geometric means, Laspeyres, Paasche, Fisher's "ideal" formula, the circular and reversal tests — to show that formal criteria alone can never fix economic meaning. Only indices traceable to the money cost of one definite bundle of goods are intelligible. Grounding the argument in subjective value and methodological individualism, he concludes that a price level exists only relative to a person or group: there is no objective, supra-personal purchasing power of money to be found.

Das volkswirtschaftliche Preisniveau — ein statistischer Zufall.

English translation: “The economy-wide price level — a statistical accident.”

There is no unified state of science in economics, only a disorderly interaction of problems and traditions, and so this survey of German-language economic theory quickly becomes an anti-nationalist argument about method. Schumpeter accepts Marshall's claim that the nineteenth century built qualitative analysis and that the next task is quantitative and institutional; theory, he insists, is an apparatus, not a worldview. He praises the factual richness of Schmoller, Sombart, and Max Weber while diagnosing German economics as lacking a sustaining tradition and squandering energy on epistemology and methodological labels. Writing after the Methodenstreit, inflation, and the international triumph of marginalism, he defends marginal utility not as one competing doctrine but as the single common instrument of contemporary price theory, shared by Walras, Pareto, Marshall, and the Austrians alike.

Mit keinem dieser „ismen“ ist die Theorie auf Gedeih und Verderb verbunden, mit jedem kompatibel — hören wir doch auf, während ringsum die Probleme locken und drängen, diesen Sand zu pflügen und uns damit zu bewerfen!

English translation: “With none of these "isms" is the theory bound for better or worse; with each it is compatible — let us therefore cease, while problems all around are beckoning and pressing, to plow this sand and to pelt one another with it!”

Supporting a new research institute need not mean trusting its forecasts. In this 1927 article, Oskar Morgenstern endorses Hayek’s proposal for an Austrian business-cycle institute while questioning the predictive authority claimed for American research. His concrete examples expose the gap between statistical precision and economic understanding: correlations require knowledge of institutions, composite indices accumulate errors, and Harvard’s forecast differs less radically from an experienced banker’s judgment than its numerical form suggests. Yet Morgenstern’s skepticism is an argument for better research, not its abandonment. Vienna needs stronger statistics and statistical training, he maintains, alongside theoretical direction. The article offers a pointed examination of how to build a scientific institution without promising that it can immediately cure economic distress.

A tjurunga is not a soul but a second body, binding an Aranda man to his totem ancestor and arming him with creative power; kugi, in central New Guinea, names an undifferentiated swarm of the dead, of illness, and of the uncanny. Assembled as a reader in the history of religion, this 1927 volume gathers source accounts of Australian, Papuan-Melanesian, and Polynesian-Micronesian belief, arranged so that each idea sits inside its own social and material culture. Thurnwald sets tjurunga songs and kangaroo-increase rites beside the Kai notion of Seelenstoff—soul-substance clinging to shadow, name, and voice—and the Marind-anim Majo cult of coconut fertility. The Polynesian materials turn on mana, against which no one can prevail, and on tapu, which means not holy or defiled but forbidden through sanctity or custom.

Die Welt der „Seelenstoffe“ umgibt den Eingeborenen ringsum mit geheimnisvollen Kräften, so daß er kein Ding, keine Begebenheit, abstrakt betrachten kann.

English translation: “The world of "soul-substances" surrounds the native on all sides with mysterious forces, so that he cannot contemplate any thing or any event in an abstract manner.”

European commerce in China could expand even as European political privileges disappeared: this is the tension Emil Lederer explores in his 1927 article. Rather than treating Chinese modernization as a foreign achievement, he foregrounds domestic savings, banks, industrial enterprises, and the intermediaries on whom foreign merchants depended. The boycott of British goods beginning in May 1925 makes the stakes concrete: established commercial networks could not guarantee access to politically mobilized buyers. His comparison of British and Japanese investments also distinguishes ordinary economic participation from lending and industrial expansion pursued for strategic ends. Readers can discover why Lederer regarded accommodation to Chinese sovereignty—not the defence of concessions—as a practical condition for sustaining European trade and investment.

Because modern bank credit creates purchasing power rather than merely transferring existing savings, it needs an external restraint, and gold, for all its flaws, supplies one. Written after Britain's 1925 return to gold, the essay concedes every fashionable objection: gold circulation is a superfluous luxury, money need not be materially backed, and gold discoveries can trigger arbitrary price revolutions. Against Keynes, who would free credit policy from exchange parity to fight unemployment and stabilize prices, Schumpeter argues that discretion alone is not safer. His theory of credit as forced saving, with entrepreneurs outbidding old users of labor and machinery and then repaying as new goods appear, explains cyclical price movements without reducing the cycle to money, as he thinks Hawtrey wrongly does. Gold is defensible because it works automatically yet still permits development.

Und wirklich, die Goldwährung wirkt wie eine Bremse an der Maschine des Kredits, indem sie bei freier Einlöslichkeit der Kreditinstrumente der Kreditausdehnung dort eine Grenze setzt — sonst aber nie —, wo die Parität zwischen Goldgeldeinheit und Kreditgeldeinheit in Gefahr kommt.

English translation: “And indeed, the gold standard acts like a brake on the machinery of credit, in that—given free redeemability of the credit instruments—it sets a limit to credit expansion there, but never otherwise, where the parity between the gold-money unit and the credit-money unit comes into danger.”

Industrial capitalism gathers workers under shared technical and disciplinary conditions, so that, Lederer and Marschak argue, their conduct can never be explained by the isolated choices of classical market theory. Workers react not as individuals but as a class, and the labor market itself is transformed once unions and employers' associations bargain as collective subjects. Collective agreements move to the center of the analysis: they translate antagonism into general rules, and autonomous bargaining typically precedes the law that later codifies it. From this the study follows the whole institutional apparatus, from strikes and lockouts, conciliation, and yellow unions to works councils, labor exchanges, and the reach toward economic self-government. First drafted in 1913 and expanded by Marschak through the 1920s, it binds the workplace formation of class to the larger problem of governing a modern economy.

Der „Arbeitsmarkt“ ist jetzt nicht mehr unter dem Bilde einer Auktion oder eines Bazars aufzufassen, mit individuellen Käufern und Verkäufern, sondern die Gesamtheit von Arbeitern und Unternehmern ist es, welche zu je einem Subjekt zusammenwächst.

English translation: “The "labor market" is now no longer to be conceived on the model of an auction or a bazaar, with individual buyers and sellers; rather, it is the totality of workers and of entrepreneurs which coalesces into a single subject on each side.”

An economic barometer can indicate where an economy stands without reliably telling when it will turn. This 1927 article, published anonymously and attributed to Friedrich August von Hayek, tests that distinction by adapting Harvard’s business-cycle indicators to Austria. Missing data demand concrete substitutions: securities-clearing payments stand in for share prices, while twelve wholesale prices form a new index. The resulting patterns offer guidance, but departures from the expected sequence resist mechanical prediction. Combining attention to money, credit, and uneven industrial expansion with statistical measurement, the article shows why seasonal adjustment, trend removal, and correlation still require economic judgment. Its Austrian experiment makes visible both the practical ingenuity involved in constructing a forecasting instrument and the limits imposed by war, structural change, and imperfect evidence.