After graduating from a Viennese secondary school, in 1891 he enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin to study philosophy and sociology, but quit without a degree in 1894.
He remained in Germany for some years, writing novels and plays using the pseudonym Rudolf Golm, and married Marie Rudolph in Leipzig in 1898, returning to Vienna soon afterwards.
His funeral was attended by the city's socialist mayor Karl Seitz, and the municipal council soon afterwards named a street in his honour.
A healthy economy would protect and promote the rights and welfare of all workers: to ignore "the direct and in particular the indirect costs" of phenomena such as lack of education, child labour, the exhaustion of workers and the spread of diseases among the labour force, was to "indulge in a fiction of productivity".
[8][9] Goldscheid's idea of fiscal sociology influenced the economist Joseph Schumpeter's description of the "tax state".