Machlup, Morgenstern and the Neues Wiener Tagblatt. Journalistic contributions of Austrian economists, 1931-1934

Between 1931 and 1934 members of the Austrian school of economics - among them Fritz Machlup and Oskar Morgenstern - regularly published columns and commentaries in the Viennese daily Neues Wiener Tagblatt. These consisted, on the one hand, of discussions of general economic questions addressed at a lay audience (Machlup's weekly column "Two Minutes of Economics") and, on the other hand, of comments on topics of economic policy (titled "A Contribution to Economic Reason"). All these writings have hitherto been not studied systematically, neither among historians of economic thought nor economic historians. The goal of this project is to edit a selection of these writings. The task of the editor then will be to clarify the circumstances that in the first instance led to this campaign, to identify the authorship of the writings, most of which were published anonymously, and to comment on their context, with regard to contemporary theoretical controversies as well as to contemporary economic and political events.