Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk


Eugen Ritter von Böhm-Bawerk was an Austrian economist who made important contributions to the development of the Austrian School of Economics. He served intermittently as the Austrian Minister of Finance between 1895 and 1904. He also wrote a series of extensive critiques of Marxism.

Biography

While studying to be a lawyer at the University of Vienna, Böhm-Bawerk read Carl Menger's Principles of Economics and became an adherent of his theories, although he never studied under him. Joseph Schumpeter saw Böhm-Bawerk as "so completely the enthusiastic disciple of Menger that it is hardly necessary to look for other influences." During his time at the Vienna University, he became good friends with Friedrich von Wieser, who later became his brother-in-law. After Vienna, he studied political economy and social science at the universities of Heidelberg, Leipzig and Jena, under Karl Knies, Wilhelm Roscher and Bruno Hildebrand.
After completing his studies in 1872, he entered the Austrian Ministry of Finance, holding various posts until 1880, when he became qualified as a Privatdozent of political economy at Vienna. The following year, however, he transferred his services to the University of Innsbruck, where he remained until 1889, becoming a professor in 1884. During this time, he published the first two out of the three volumes of his masterpiece, Capital and Interest.
In 1889 Böhm-Bawerk became a counsellor in the Ministry of Finance in Vienna and represented the government in the lower house on all questions of taxation. He drafted a proposal for direct-tax reform. The Austrian system at the time taxed production heavily, especially during wartime, which resulted in huge disincentives to investment. Böhm-Bawerk's proposal called for a modern income tax, which was soon approved and met with success in the next few years.
Böhm-Bawerk briefly became Austrian Minister of Finance in 1895. After a second brief period in the position, after his third appointment to the post he remained in it from 1900 to 1904. There he fought continually for strict maintenance of the legally fixed gold standard and a balanced budget. In 1902 he eliminated the sugar subsidy, which had been a feature of the Austrian economy for nearly two centuries. He finally resigned in 1904, when increased fiscal demands from the army threatened to unbalance the budget. The economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron criticized his "penny pinching, 'not-one-heller-more policies'," and criticised Böhm-Bawerk's unwillingness to spend heavily on public works. Joseph Schumpeter praised Böhm-Bawerk's efforts toward "the financial stability of the country." His image appeared on the one-hundred schilling banknote from 1984 until the euro was introduced in 2002.
In 1897, Böhm-Bawerk became Ambassador to the German court. In 1899, he was elevated to the upper chamber. In 1907 he became vice-president and in 1911 president of the Akademie der Wissenschaften.
He wrote extensive critiques of Karl Marx's economics in the 1880s and 1890s, and several prominent Marxists—including Rudolf Hilferding—attended his seminar in 1905–06. He returned to teaching in 1904, with a chair at the University of Vienna. His many students there included Joseph Schumpeter, Ludwig von Mises and Henryk Grossman. He died in 1914.
George Reisman has called him the second most important Austrian economist "after Ludwig von Mises." And further:
entirely conceivable to me that Mises might have described Böhm Bawerk as the most important Austrian economist.

Published work

The first volume of Capital and Interest, which Ludwig von Mises decreed to be "the most eminent contribution to modern economic theory," was entitled History and Critique of Interest Theories. It is an exhaustive study of the alternative treatments of interest: use theories, productivity theories, abstinence theories, and so on.
Included is a critique of Marx's exploitation theory. Böhm-Bawerk argued that capitalists do not exploit their workers; they actually help employees by providing them with an income well in advance of the revenue from the goods they produce, stating, "Labor cannot increase its share at the expense of capital." In particular, he argued that the Marxist theory of exploitation ignores the dimension of time in production, which he discussed in his theory of roundaboutness, and that a redistribution of profits from capitalist industries will undermine the importance of the interest rate as a vital tool for monetary policy. From this criticism it follows, according to Böhm-Bawerk, that the whole value of a product is not produced by the worker, but that labor can only be paid at the present value of any foreseeable output.
Karl Marx and the Close of His System examined Marx's analysis of value, claiming the basic error in Marx's system to have resulted from a self-contradiction of Marx's law of value, namely how the rate of profit and the prices of production of the third volume of Marx's Capital contradict Marx's theory of value in the first volume. He also attacks Marx for downplaying the influence of supply and demand in determining permanent price, and for deliberate ambiguity with such concepts.
Böhm von Bawerk's Positive Theory of Capital, offered as the second volume of Capital and Interest, elaborated on the economy's time-consuming production processes and the interest payments they entail. Further Essays on Capital and Interest was the third volume, which originated with appendices to the second volume. Book III, Value and Price, develops Menger's ideas of marginal utility outlined in his Principles of Economics, to argue that the idea of subjective value is related to marginalism, in that things only have value insofar as people want such goods. To illustrate the principle, Böhm-Bawerk used the practical example of a farmer who is left with five sacks of corn after harvest to provide for his needs until the next harvest:
Böhm von Bawerk's critique of Marx's theories was put under intense scrutiny by Marxian economists such as Nikolai Bukharin. In his Economic Theory of the Leisure Class, Bukharin argued that Böhm von Bawerk's axiomatic assumptions of individual freedom in his subjectivist theories are fallacious in that economic phenomena can only be understood under the prism of a coherent, contextualised, and historical analysis of society, such as Marx's. By contrast, Austrian economists have regarded his critique of Marx as definitive. For example, Gottfried Haberler argued that Böhm von Bawerk's thorough critique of Marx's economics was so devastating that as of the 1960s, no Marxian scholar had conclusively refuted it.
Many of Böhm von Bawerk's works were brought out in the United States by the Chicago industrialist and avid libertarian Frederick Nymeyer, through Libertarian Press, the US arm of the Austrian School of Economics.
Between 1880 and 1947 Böhm von Bawerk worked on the imputation theory first explained by Carl Menger between 1840 and 1921. It states that factor prices are determined by output prices. Böhm von Bawerk provided a variation of the theory that targeted the entrepreneurs, breaking up into three cases: 1. where the factor combination a + b exists such that neither a nor b as isolated piece produces any value at all. Thus if a or b were to be a loss, the other part of the "group" becomes wholly valueless. This implies that every factor can have the value of the whole group or alternatively can have no value. 2. Where the combination a + b + c exists such that every piece has alternatively two values with a low utility or a lower utility. Then the two values are considered the maximum and minimum. Where a maximum is the group value and the minimum is the value of each individual entity being utilized separately. "Assume that the remaining glove can be used for polishing silverware. Then the maximum is the value of the whole pair minus the use as a polisher, and the minimum is the value as a polisher". 3. This just states how two complementary goods can find employment outside the original combination and the original combination can be preserved by replacing productive elements, which have been lost with other factors.

Miscellaneous