1891-1948. civil servant in the Reich Ministry of Economics, not an academic economist. Worked during the Great Depression (1929-1933) on the theoretical foundations of an active crisis policy - against the prevailing austerity doctrine.
Lautenbach recognized that the orthodoxy of the time was making a fundamental logical error: it applied Say’s law (supply creates demand) to the economy as a whole and treated supply and demand as independently determinable. This led to the political recommendation to consolidate the budget during the crisis - which Lautenbach proved to be absolutely wrong.
His central result is the Unternehmergewinngleichung:
EU = I + VU - SN
Entrepreneurial income (EU) is the residual income: Investment (I) plus entrepreneurs’ own consumption (VU) minus non-entrepreneurs’ savings (SN). It follows that: Profits are not generated by austerity, but by spending. Government austerity in a crisis inevitably reduces corporate profits and exacerbates the crisis.
Lautenbach formulated this insight almost simultaneously with Keynes en and Kalecki en - independently of both. During his lifetime, he remained an outsider without academic resonance. His writings were only published posthumously in 1952 by Stützel, who acknowledged them as preparatory work for [[Saldenmechanik-en]].
Main work: Zins, Kredit und Produktion (ed. by W. Stützel, 1952).