The archive.

"Optimum" sounds like a clear concept and is nothing of the sort. Responding as a discussant to Abram Bergson and Jan Tinbergen, Morgenstern presses two objections that unsettle the confident vocabulary of welfare planning. First, productivity, so intelligible for physical output, becomes one of the weakest ideas in economics once services dominate national income, leaving comparisons across systems on shakier ground than they claim. Second, an optimum invoked rhetorically is not an optimum proven to exist, and recent theory had produced cases where none does. From there he argues that society cannot in principle be fully formalized, that imposed equality raises the unanswered question of what keeps equal incomes equal, and that identical physical circumstances can sustain rival stable orders. Choosing among them, he concludes, is an ethical and political act, not a scientific result.

There is no scientific reason why one system should be preferred over the other.

Optimization tells us how to choose when the relevant variables are under our control. What does it explain when outcomes depend on other people’s choices? This distinction drives Oskar Morgenstern’s thirteen criticisms of economic theory, first published in 1972 and reprinted here in 1976. From a game-theoretic perspective, he challenges models that remove bargaining, strategic uncertainty and political decisions from the interactions they purport to explain. His concrete objections give familiar abstractions new friction: a durable-goods purchase need not reveal a stable preference ranking, and the effects of new money depend on where it enters the economy. Readers can discover why, for Morgenstern, greater formal precision and closer empirical scrutiny belong together—and why optimizing a decision is not the same as explaining an economic relationship.

Forecasting the future balance of power tempts planners to mistake projection for knowledge, and this collaborative study sets out to discipline the temptation. Morgenstern, Knorr, and Heiss treat power as a composite of economic capacity, technological change, military organization, and political will, elements that resist extrapolation to very different degrees. Engineering development can be projected within wide error bounds; decisive scientific breakthroughs cannot. They dissect the methods of the day, from the Delphi technique and Wilhelm Fucks's physics-styled power indices to Kahn and Wiener's scenarios and the Limits to Growth simulation, faulting each for suppressing the historical turning points that dominate real outcomes. Energy dependence emerges as their one firm warning, leaving Japan and Western Europe strategically exposed, while China's trajectory hinges on unpredictable political persistence. Armed force, they insist, becomes power only through the will to use it.

Our work has impressed us with the inherent difficulties of forecasting although we realize that objects of forecasting vary greatly in their conjecturability.

A strategy is not merely a permissible move: someone must have the resources to carry it out. In this short theoretical article, reprinted in 1976, Oskar Morgenstern asks what happens when resource allocation determines which strategies exist at all. Unlike chess, economic and political “power” games can change their own conditions: winnings may finance new strategic capacities, while coalition partners’ resources may reinforce or obstruct one another. His “integral game” extends this problem to the overlapping activities of earning, buying, and investing, where the same people may be opponents in one encounter and partners in another. The result is a research programme rather than a finished model, showing why, for Morgenstern, allocation cannot be understood through isolated optimization when other players help determine what resources can accomplish.

When John von Neumann published his expanding-economy model in 1937, he gave economics one of its rare transformative events. Morgenstern and Thompson build on it here, synthesizing two decades of work into the KMT model, which removes von Neumann's restrictive assumption that every good figures in every process and admits multiple expansion rates, subeconomies, and game-theoretic solution methods. Across fourteen chapters they extend the framework to open economies that import and export at world prices, to consumption and savings, to trading blocks and a world model bound by a common expansion rate, and, pointedly, to contraction and compression, since resource limits make endless growth no longer self-evidently desirable. Throughout, they insist the models apply to any economy regardless of political organization, deliberately omit money and stochastic elements, and treat expansion, stationarity, and collapse as problems of structure, optimization, and computable linear programming.

What does an anomalous choice refute: a mathematical construction, its empirical reach, or the experiment used to test it? In this essay, Oskar Morgenstern defends the expected utility theory he developed with John von Neumann while acknowledging experiences its axioms may not capture. His objections to tests involving minute probabilities and imaginary fortunes turn on whether respondents can meaningfully assess the choices offered. Yet his defence leaves room for the pleasure of gambling, the effects of time, and preferences that resist a complete ordering. Writing as a co-architect rather than a detached commentator, Morgenstern exposes a productive tension between confidence in formal proof and uncertainty about human preference. Readers can discover why preserving an axiomatic achievement need not mean treating it as a finished account of decision-making.

Behind Theory of Games and Economic Behavior lay a convergence of two unfinished programs. In this memoir, Morgenstern retraces the path from his 1928 work on economic forecasting, where the distinction between "dead" and "live" variables already anticipated strategic interaction and the Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty chase exposed the paradoxes of perfect foresight, to a Princeton encounter he describes as an instantaneous meeting of minds. What began as a short explanatory article grew, through walks and longhand collaboration, into a book that axiomatized expected utility, deployed minimax reasoning, and turned to convexity after his discovery of Jean Ville's proof. He recounts the Vienna Circle background, von Neumann's expanding-economy model, wartime printing by Princeton University Press, and the reviews and translations that followed, an origin story of game theory that doubles as a memorial to a friendship.

We did an enormous amount of work in a very short time, but it was unceasing pleasure and never a time of drudgery.

People compete, cooperate, and act on unequal knowledge; atoms do not. This distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s first-edition preface to Morton Davis’s book on game theory, dated February 1972 and presented here in its 2005 version. Morgenstern argues that social inquiry needs mathematical concepts fitted to purposeful interaction, rather than borrowed from physics. Yet his demand for precision leads not to a dismissal of nontechnical writing but to a defence of it: accessible explanation succeeds when grounded in detailed theoretical knowledge. His endorsement of Davis thus offers a compact account of what rigorous popular exposition should accomplish—and why, in Morgenstern’s view, explaining emotionally charged social problems need not entail passing value judgments.