Alexander Linsbichler, University of Linz

Gottfried Haberler (1900–95) was an Austrian-American economist who is best known for his work on business cycles and international trade. He studied in Vienna with Friedrich von Wieser and Ludwig von Mises, and later emigrated to the United States, joining the economics department at Harvard University where he worked alongside Joseph Schumpeter. Though influenced by the ideas of the Austrian School of Economics through his teachers, Haberler was never an ideological defender of Austrian views. This paper looks at his first major work, Der Sinn der Indexzahlen (1927)[1] , his habilitation thesis at the University of Vienna. The book has not been translated into English and therefore not received much critical attention in the English-speaking world. Our goals in this paper are (i) to draw attention to this early but very insightful work on the index number problem; (ii) to trace a number of significant ideas of the Austrian School of Economics in this book; (iii) to show how the book foreshadows some contemporary criticisms of widespread uses of index numbers and, finally, (iv) to discuss a number of omissions and limitations of this work.