The archive.

Protecting a producer’s price can unsettle everything around it. In this 1939 address, Oskar Morgenstern examines European public monopolies through the incentives their guarantees create, rather than their formal administrative structure. Austria’s milk regulation and Czechoslovakia’s grain monopoly supply concrete cases: protected prices encourage output while consumption falls, leaving authorities to finance surpluses, restrict production, and police unofficial trade. His central contention is that each attempt to preserve the original price commitment demands further controls. Political interests in distribution help explain why retreat proves difficult. The address offers a sharply critical account of the difference between stabilizing prices and stabilizing economic life, tracing how measures intended to protect producers can shift costs onto consumers, employment, and unprotected sectors.

When do statistical graphs substantiate an economic theory, rather than merely illustrate it? In this brief review of Joseph A. Schumpeter’s Business Cycles, Oskar Morgenstern admires the attempt to connect entrepreneurial innovation and credit expansion with economic history, yet questions the evidentiary force of its statistics. His objections are concrete: specialized business-cycle measurements go unused, and graphs sometimes lack scales and index bases. Neither criticism cancels his appreciation of Schumpeter’s discussion of time series and economic waves. The review offers a compact example of methodological judgement: Morgenstern distinguishes theoretical ambition, historically informed explanation, and independently useful statistical evidence without demanding that admiration exclude disagreement.

How should a history of economic theory compare doctrines that changed in response to their critics? In this 1940 review of Gaëtan Pirou’s lectures on marginal utility, Oskar Morgenstern praises exact exposition while questioning comparisons that set early formulations against later objections. His scrutiny is concrete: Austrian attention to monopoly helps explain the challenge to classical value theory, while Pirou’s grouping of Fetter with Seligman risks confusing distinct accounts of welfare and social value. Morgenstern also asks why Carver receives more attention than Fisher. The review offers a compact encounter with his standards for intellectual history: distinguish neighboring concepts, question inherited reputations, and keep the chronology of controversy visible.

Counting equations is not the same as proving that an economic equilibrium exists. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s review of J. R. Hicks’s Value and Capital, which welcomes the ambition to unite static and dynamic economics while challenging the foundations of that synthesis. Morgenstern demands both mathematical proof and a clear relation between theoretical assumptions and observable behaviour. His criticism becomes especially concrete when he considers individual plans: intentions that appear compatible in isolation may destabilize a system when acted upon together, as in simultaneous bank withdrawals. The review offers a pointed account of why expectations, uncertainty, and knowledge of other people’s plans resist simple aggregation—and why, for Morgenstern, a theory of economic fluctuations must earn its connection to the fluctuations it claims to explain.

An armaments boom can raise employment while leaving the long-term unemployed behind and reducing the goods available for civilian life. This tension gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1941 article its sharpest test of conventional unemployment analysis. He treats idle workers, machinery, and materials not as interchangeable reserves but as resources whose particular skills and uses constrain economic adjustment. His skepticism extends to forecasts built on business-cycle regularities and statistics that may assume the patterns they claim to discover. Yet methodological caution does not prevent him from advocating controversial wage reductions, paired with monetary support for the total wage bill. The article lets readers examine both that policy judgment and a concrete problem it cannot settle: how wartime production can expand employment while preparing a difficult transition when military demand ends.

When economies rise and fall together, what establishes that one has transmitted its fluctuations to another? In this 1943 article, Oskar Morgenstern challenges explanations that mistake coincident cycles for causal connections. His alternative begins not with unified national economies but with particular markets: financial sectors across borders may be more closely connected than sectors within the same country. Expectations can travel before money or goods, while aggregate figures can hide capital flows moving in opposite directions. Readers can discover why identifying transmission requires evidence about institutions, timing, and the strength of impulses—not correlation alone. Conceived as a research program rather than a finished theory, the article makes the difficulty of establishing economic interdependence its central subject.

By itself, covariation does not give us information about a possible transmission, because the lags and leads may be due to faults in the material or they may prove to be too shifting.

Economics cannot become exact merely by borrowing the vocabulary of mathematics; it must first clarify what utility, strategy, coalition and stability mean. From that conviction von Neumann and Morgenstern rebuild economic behavior as interdependent choice, where each participant maximizes an outcome he does not control—so games, not single-agent calculation, become the governing model. Read here in the German translation of the 1944 Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, the argument runs from an axiomatic numerical utility through the minimax theorem for two-person zero-sum games, where rational play may demand mixed strategies and probability becomes part of optimal design rather than uncertainty. Extending to n-person games, they replace the single optimal outcome with stable sets of imputations—standards of behavior that resist internal domination—and turn coalitions, bargaining and market organization into formal objects against the Lausanne equilibrium tradition.

Man kann nicht exakte Methoden verwenden, solange keine Klarheit in den Begriffen und Fragen besteht, auf die sie angewendet werden sollen.

English translation: “One cannot employ exact methods so long as there is no clarity concerning the concepts and questions to which they are to be applied.”

A statistical method can succeed on artificial data without earning authority over economic observations. That distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s review of M. G. Kendall’s study of oscillatory time-series. Kendall’s experiments favour correlogram analysis, but Morgenstern asks whether the result follows from building the test series around the very mechanism that method assumes. His objection is concrete: the empirical Beveridge series have not been shown to share that mechanism, and economic processes may change over the span of a long record. Appreciative of Kendall’s computational labour, yet alert to emerging high-speed machines, Morgenstern argues for larger experiments with varied assumptions rather than a premature ranking of methods. This compact review shows how a seemingly technical comparison turns on what counts as evidence about the process producing the data.

A demand curve, in ordinary teaching, is a path along which buyers slide as prices change. That picture is the error Morgenstern sets out to dismantle. The curve, he argues, is first a schedule of mutually exclusive intentions at a single moment — alternative maximum bids, not a record of successive purchases. Once a buyer actually transacts, expenditure and possession change, and the remaining points no longer mean what they did; a one-variable curve is valid for exactly one transaction unless it is reconstructed through a fresh reaction function. Elasticity, price discrimination, monopolistic competition, and the cobweb theorem all inherit the flaw. What begins as immanent critique of Marshall and Schultz becomes a bridge toward a game-theoretic view of markets as strategic situations that shift with every trade.

Eine individuelle Nachfragekurve einer Variablen ist dann, ganz gleich, welches ihre Form ist, gültig nur für eine einzige Verwendung, d. h. für eine Transaktion.

English translation: “An individual demand curve of a single variable is then, whatever its shape, valid only for one single use, that is, for one transaction.”

Each trader may seek the greatest possible gain, yet a market transaction need not be a straightforward maximization problem: its outcome depends on other independent wills. In this 1948 conference paper, Oskar Morgenstern makes that distinction the basis of his case for game theory in economics. His qualitative exposition moves beyond firms’ conjectures about competitors to the coalitions participants can form—and the payments that can hold those coalitions together. Cartels, labor unions, and buyers combining against a monopolist expose the limitations of treating competition or monopoly as fixed arrangements. Readers can discover why Morgenstern locates stability not in a uniquely optimal price or income distribution, but in sets of alternatives whose availability sustains the outcome actually adopted.

Clearly, free competition will not continue to prevail when people can gain by combining.

A computer can solve a system of equations without making its answer economically trustworthy. In this brief 1949 discussion contribution, Oskar Morgenstern responds to Leontief’s input-output analysis by asking what calculation can establish when observational errors remain unknown. His concern reaches beyond misleading decimal precision: the many zero entries in industrial tables may make solutions easier and more stable while reflecting gaps in information rather than actual economic relationships. Supportive of the research programme, he nevertheless distinguishes computational feasibility from empirical warrant. Readers encounter an economist treating numerical stability, data collection, and model assumptions as connected responsibilities—not problems that faster machines can settle on their own.

Often accuracy is identified with detail; for example, the giving of figures with many decimal points when the real inaccuracy has already been permitted to enter into a much rougher figure.

A firm cannot choose its best course without considering what its rivals may do; a union bargains with an employer whose intentions it cannot fully know. In this 1949 Scientific American article, Oskar Morgenstern presents such interdependence as a mathematical problem that isolated individual maximization cannot capture. His account makes the apparent paradox of rational randomization concrete: unpredictability can protect a player from an opponent. Coalitions introduce a different difficulty, since cooperation creates gains without uniquely determining their distribution. Moving between strategic examples and economic disputes, Morgenstern shows why a solution need not be a single best outcome—and why formal privileges may depend on the bargaining arrangements that sustain them. His ambitions for game theory remain checked by the difficulty of calculating even simplified games.

No single person has control of all the variables, but only of a few.