Prices and Production and Other Works

Prices and Production and Other Works is the Mises Institute’s collected edition of Hayek’s principal works on money, capital, and the business cycle, with an editorial introduction by Joseph Salerno. Together the four texts develop the Austrian theory of the business cycle: credit expansion by the banking system distorts the structure of production and produces an inevitable corrective downturn.

What the Volume Contains

The Mises Institute’s Prices and Production and Other Works is a collected volume of Hayek’s interwar monetary and capital-theory writings (1929–1939). The major works it gathers, and the ones this wiki draws on, are:

• Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1929 / English 1933) — Hayek’s earliest statement, situating the cycle in monetary disturbances rather than non-monetary “real” causes.
• Prices and Production (1931, expanded 1935) — the central theoretical statement, presenting the structure of production via the famous Hayekian triangles and showing how credit-expansion-induced lower-than-natural interest rates lengthen and distort the production structure.
• Monetary Nationalism and International Stability (1937) — Hayek’s defense of an international gold-standard-like discipline against the rise of national fiat-money management.
• Profits, Interest, and Investment (1939) — later refinements responding to interwar critiques and to Keynes’s General Theory.

The volume also reprints shorter pieces — “The Paradox of Saving,” “Reflections on the Pure Theory of Money of Mr. J. M. Keynes,” “The Mythology of Capital,” and “Investment That Raises the Demand for Capital” — which extend the same monetary-and-capital line.

Why It Matters in This Wiki

This volume is the wiki’s primary source for the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. Until now the wiki’s monetary discussion has lived inside Man, Economy, and State and The Economics and Ethics of Private Property. Hayek’s account is the proximate ancestor of Rothbard’s; including it grounds the wiki’s claim that the Austrian business-cycle position is a substantive theoretical alternative rather than a single author’s hypothesis.

Scope of the Full-Text Ingest

The current raw source is the Mises Institute’s PDF (592 pages), extracted with pdftotext -layout. It contains all four collected works plus Salerno’s editorial introduction and the original prefaces.

Relation to Hayek’s Other Texts and to Mises

This is the technical-economic side of Hayek’s project. Its concerns barely surface in The Road to Serfdom, which is political. Its theoretical complement is Individualism and Economic Order, where the knowledge problem is developed; together those two volumes are the core of mature Hayekian economics. The book is also the bridge between Mises’s 1912 The Theory of Money and Credit and the cycle-theoretic chapters of Man, Economy, and State.

See Also

• F. A. Hayek - author node
• Austrian Business Cycle Theory - concept article centered on this volume
• Credit and Deferred Payment - draws on Hayek’s treatment of book credit and other forms of commercial credit (p. 290)
• Austrian Economics - school whose monetary theory this volume develops
• Man, Economy, and State - Rothbard’s continuation in the same theoretical line
• Individualism and Economic Order - Hayek’s epistemological companion volume
• Ludwig von Mises - originator of the monetary tradition Hayek extends here
• The Theory of Money and Credit - Mises’s 1912 treatise that laid the proto-cycle groundwork Hayek’s Prices and Production lectures (1931) develop into the mature ABCT
• America’s Great Depression - related work in this corpus
• Austrian Economics vs Keynesianism - Why Hayek and Rothbard hold that the Keynesian cure is the Austrian disease — and why reasoning in aggregates can’t see it.
• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money - Keynes’s 1936 General Theory: effective demand, the multiplier, liquidity preference, and the case for managing aggregate demand — the foundational Keynesian text and the Austrian critique’s target.

Sources

• Prices and Production and Other Works (Full Text Aggregate) - full collected-edition PDF as a wiki-ingestable aggregate
• Prices and Production and Other Works - Mises library page metadata and descriptive framing