The archive.

Accepting Adam Smith’s economic laws did not necessarily mean accepting economic freedom. In this brief biographical encyclopedia article, Karl Pribram examines Soden’s attempt to reconcile Smith with German cameralism in his nine-volume Die Nationalökonomie. Property, grain trading and guilds expose the limits of that reconciliation: Soden defended existing social institutions when economic liberty threatened them, distinguishing universal economic laws from their administrative application. Pribram’s pointed assessment separates theoretical coherence from intellectual influence. He suggests that the very compromises that troubled orthodox Smithians may have helped stimulate German discussion of Smith—a concrete case of economic ideas gaining a hearing through adaptations that also altered their implications.

Machines can increase output without securing employment or prosperity. In this encyclopedia entry, supplied in its 1937 republication, Emil Lederer asks why technical capacity and social outcomes diverge. His answer turns on the institutions governing investment, wages, markets, and political power rather than on machinery alone. He gives particular weight to displaced workers: lower production costs do not automatically create the capital, demand, or opportunities needed to employ them again. The same resistance to technological determinism informs his contrast between electrification supporting small producers in western Europe and collectivization in Soviet Russia. Readers encounter a precise distinction between what technology makes possible and what an economic order can realize—a distinction that also sharpens Lederer’s criticism of schemes to replace economic valuation with measures of mechanical power.

Price is not a peculiarly capitalist institution but a coefficient of economic choice — a quantitative index of preference among scarce alternatives that any organized society, socialist planners included, must somehow discover. That is the conceptual pivot of this compact essay reprinted from Economic Reconstruction, aimed at reformers who treated prices and profits as removable obstacles to abundance. Schumpeter carries the argument into a centralized socialist state, where planners would still need citizens to register wants with quantitative precision and would still impute values to means of production; producing whisky rather than bread from rye shows that no line divides the economic 'what' from the merely technical 'how.' Yet the essay withholds any laissez-faire comfort, preserving perfect competition only as a diagnostic instrument, since imperfect competition can yield the opposite of its promised results.

Hence rational production can never rest on exclusively technological considerations, at least not as long as all means of production are not at the command of a society in unlimited quantities.

Even a paradise of unlimited goods would leave one resource scarce: the time to enjoy them. In this 1934 article, Paul Narcyz Rosenstein-Rodan makes time an economic problem rather than merely a backdrop to choice. His distinctive move is to connect the limits of anticipation and consumption with the unequal speeds at which markets adjust. Knowing the conditions of equilibrium does not tell us whether an economy will reach it: prices, demand and supply may react at different rates, while fresh disturbances interrupt unfinished adjustments. These frictions, he argues, can change the outcome, not just postpone it. The article offers a precise way to distinguish a tendency towards equilibrium from an actual path through time—and to see what static analysis leaves unexplained.

A country can balance its overall payments while buying more from one partner than it sells in return. Erich Schiff’s 1934 essay asks why this ordinary feature of international specialization should be treated as a national disadvantage. Using Swiss watches, Czechoslovak cloth, and Yugoslav pigs, he traces how restricting imports can deprive exporters of customers—not merely through retaliation, but through the loss of purchasing power elsewhere in the trading network. His distinctive emphasis is on indirect effects: protected producers’ visible gains may conceal export opportunities forgone. Schiff also challenges the apparently milder policy of preserving established bilateral trade ratios, arguing that yesterday’s pattern can obstruct tomorrow’s productive improvements. The essay offers a concrete way to distinguish concerns about foreign indebtedness from the misleading demand for symmetry in every trading relationship.

Financing a longer production process is not the same as having the resources to sustain it. This distinction anchors Fritz Machlup’s 1935 joint review of Richard von Strigl’s Kapital und Produktion and Walter Eucken’s Kapitaltheoretische Untersuchungen. Machlup finds striking agreement in their treatment of capital as a fund maintaining productive factors until consumers’ goods become available, but tests their propositions rather than merely endorsing them. His criticism of Strigl turns on a concrete temporal problem: an unchanged quantity consumed over a longer period means less consumption per unit of time. In Eucken, he values the connection between production time, wages, and productivity. The review shows how shared capital-theoretical premises can illuminate these relationships without establishing agreement on credit expansion or economic fluctuations.

Depreciation can measure a loss in asset value or guide provision for replacement—but these are not the same task. In this review of R. F. Fowler’s book, Fritz Machlup shows why their separation matters for capital theory and business finance. He welcomes Fowler’s attention to the timing of investment and replacement, while questioning his terminology and identifying neglected changes in complementary costs. Machlup’s distinctive emphasis falls on capital’s time-structure: producing more durable equipment differs from making each piece last longer. The review offers a compact way to see how apparently technical accounting choices bear on investment requirements, dividends, and the contrast between an expanding firm and one maintaining a steady replacement cycle.

To make more durable goods is one thing, to make goods more durable is another.

What does a catalogue of definitions actually explain? In this brief review of Werner Brylewski’s study of capital, Fritz Machlup distinguishes the collection of meanings from the assessment of their theoretical use. He accepts Brylewski’s distinctions among definitions stressing capital’s origin, use, or outward appearance, but asks what this elaborate inventory achieves. His objection is concrete: the study analyzes hundreds of definitions without examining the explanatory purposes they serve, while overlooking several modern economists. The review offers no rival definition of capital. Instead, it gives readers a pointed criterion for judging conceptual scholarship: whether its distinctions help formulate hypotheses and interpret economic phenomena.

A currency can return to gold without recovering the trust once attached to it. That distinction drives Mises’s 1935 review of the third edition of T. E. Gregory’s The Gold Standard and its Future. Praising Gregory’s monetary analysis, Mises questions whether restored gold parities could revive international lending while governments remain willing to depreciate currencies in pursuit of domestic objectives. Protectionism, nominal-wage commitments, and policies favouring debtors enter his account as obstacles to credible monetary restraint. This short review offers a precise way to distinguish a formal monetary rule from the political willingness to honour it—and shows why Mises regards the latter, rather than the technical act of stabilization, as the decisive problem.

The label “Manchester School” obscures the social concerns of the Manchester Statistical Society, Hayek argues in this 1935 review of T. S. Ashton’s centenary history. Investigations into mortality, railway labourers’ conditions and public health supply his concrete counterweight to that familiar image: here were researchers making the problems of industrial towns visible with scant resources. Hayek also reads Ashton as a theoretical economist alert to neglected predecessors. He singles out William Langton’s and T. H. Williams’s discussions of banking and trade cycles, asking whether their work helped shape Jevons’s thinking about cycles and capital. This brief review offers both a corrective to an intellectual stereotype and a carefully conditional lead for tracing the transmission of economic ideas.

Monetary nationalism promised escape: independent paper currencies, variable parities, and wide gold points that would seal a national economy off from foreign shocks. That promise, Hayek argues in this contribution to The Economist's debate over a future international order, is a delusion — real international adjustment cannot be evaded, only redirected, and discretionary depreciation breeds fresh conflict. Yet gold too is defective, since shifts in the demand for gold can inflict grave disturbances. His resolution treats fixed parity as a coordinating rule rather than mere attachment to metal, and proposes regulating gold-exchange reserves — central banks' realizable claims on other currencies — with a body such as the Bank for International Settlements varying the permitted ratio to offset gold's swings while leaving national reserves intact.

If an international standard is wanted, the gold standard, in spite of its undeniable defects, is the only practical choice.

Was the Depression an exceptional disruption, or did ordinary business cycles continue beneath it? In this brief, author-prepared summary, Schumpeter distinguishes the downturn’s cyclical shape from its catastrophic severity. He proposes three overlapping cycles rather than a single wave, interpreting the descent to August 1932 and the ensuing recovery through their coinciding depressive phases. Yet he assigns the catastrophe’s intensity to outside disturbances, including what he regards as mistaken efforts to stabilize “prosperity plateaus.” The distinctive interest is this boundary between cyclical explanation and policy judgement: Schumpeter sketches how theory, historical evidence, and statistics might identify an underlying movement without claiming that it alone explains the disaster.