3,673 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The classical gold standard is often imagined as a self-regulating machine; this dense National Bureau study replaces that image with a practical arrangement of tolerable deviations and institutional adaptation. Comparing monthly interest rates, exchange rates, gold points, arbitrage, and central-bank discount policy across the United States, Britain, France, and Germany for roughly 1870–1914 and 1925–1938, Morgenstern shows that mint par was rarely touched, that gold points depended on shipping costs and market practice, and that money markets displayed a bounded 'solidarity' rather than exact convergence. A new quantitative measure of inter-market 'effort' or stress runs through the analysis. World War I emerges as the great structural break, shattering a prewar coherence the interwar gold-exchange standard never restored — and throughout, he insists that fragile statistics cannot bear more theory than their quality allows.
Economic statistics are—in the overwhelming majority of cases—not scientific observations.
Nuclear weapons, delivery systems, and the sheer speed of technological change have made national defense a strategic problem that inherited military categories can no longer grasp. Treating the arms race as a grim equilibrium, Morgenstern argues that neither side can safely reduce effort unless reductions are mutual, credible, and enforceable, so survival becomes a constraint prior to any budget. Defense is never a matter of the single best weapon but of strategies tested against an adapting opponent: interception screens answer yesterday's threat while the next generation is designed to evade them, and stopgaps such as keeping bombers permanently airborne founder on fuel and logistics. Cities, valuable and hard to protect, pose the severest problem. Rejecting both panic and wishful thinking, he makes the case that creative technical thinking, not standardized production, will decide survival.
Unilateral action to reduce the arms race is impossible and not compatible with the desire for national survival.
Intelligent diplomats cannot substitute for an institution that prepares them to decide. In this 1960 article, Oskar Morgenstern asks what the United States State Department needs to turn information and expertise into workable foreign-policy alternatives. His case for decision theory begins with practical shortcomings: language skills unrelated to assignments, negotiators without relevant preparation, and military contingencies lacking an advance political framework. He advocates developing analytical methods specifically for diplomacy, rather than simply importing military techniques or expecting mathematics to deliver immediate answers. The revealing tension is between his confidence in systematic analysis and his acknowledgment that applications may fail. Readers can discover a concrete institutional argument for game theory: its value may begin in how officials frame choices, before it yields solutions.
Mathematical precision does not settle whether a model captures the economic problem it claims to solve. In this review of Samuel Karlin’s two-volume Mathematical Methods and Theory in Games, Programming and Economics, Oskar Morgenstern praises lucid proofs and valuable applications while challenging the emphasis on two-person zero-sum games and standard equilibrium models. His objection concerns control: economic participants make decisions under conditions partly determined by other participants, not simply against a fixed background. Readers can discover why he regards n-person, nonzero-sum games as essential to economic analysis—and why his admiration for Karlin’s mathematical achievement coexists with reservations about its modelling choices. His interest in poker as a model of negotiation gives that distinction a concrete, suggestive endpoint.
A single correlation or average lag can conceal different relationships between short-term fluctuations and long-term movements. In this 1961 Princeton research memorandum, Oskar Morgenstern asks what economists could discover by separating those temporal scales rather than imposing familiar business-cycle classifications. Drawing on communication engineering, he advocates spectral analysis as a way to detect rhythms within aggregate data and examine how series interact at different frequencies. His example of New York money-market rates makes the stakes concrete: longer-term components can show greater lags than shorter-term ones. Yet finer measurement is not economic explanation. Morgenstern’s proposal turns on a demanding tension: longer records improve frequency analysis, but also span institutional and technological changes that may undermine its assumptions. Readers encounter a research program in which statistical discovery challenges theory without claiming to replace it.
A faster aircraft or a larger economy does not automatically confer strategic power. In this published address to a naval aviation meeting, Oskar Morgenstern challenges technical forecasts that overlook qualitative change and military calculations that neglect political purpose. His perspective as an economist and game theorist gives the critique its edge: conflict involves an opponent who conceals, bluffs, and deliberately frustrates plans, not merely conditions to be optimized. Ballistic-missile submarines make the distinction concrete—destroying their bases cannot neutralize weapons already at sea. His proposal to measure national power rather than aggregate growth similarly questions what impressive numbers actually establish. The address offers a pointed encounter between technical confidence and strategic uncertainty, including Morgenstern’s contentious Cold War argument for nuclear capabilities in limited war.
We have to make decisions not against nature, but against a consciously interfering adversary.
A symmetric game need not have a fully symmetric solution. In this brief research abstract, Oskar Morgenstern reports incomplete joint work with the late John von Neumann on games whose minimal winning coalitions contain all but one player. He isolates solutions that treat every player symmetrically except one, then examines the set of payoffs available to that exceptional player. Two announced, optimal bounds constrain both the lowest attainable payoff and the gaps between attainable payoffs. The abstract offers a compact example of how symmetry can restrict an asymmetry without eliminating it; the proofs are reserved for a separately announced RAND paper.
Railroad share battles, the advertising war between Lestoil and Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola against Pepsi, European cartel threats and compensations — business life, this essay argues, is a tissue of strategic situations that ordinary maximization cannot describe. Conceding that game theory stands as an autonomous branch of mathematics, Morgenstern presses the harder claim that economic reality is itself frequently a game: the moment a rival controls a decisive variable and reacts, the normal maximum assumptions fail. Walrasian equilibrium and the crossing of demand and supply curves become special constructions that hide number, timing, and coalition. His strongest preference is for cooperative n-person theory, which can model mergers, wage bargains, proxy fights, and above all 'Macht' — power that marginal-productivity theory has no place for. Where power exists, he concludes, the prevailing theory must give way.
Es gibt kein Geschäft ohne Geschäftsgeheimnis.
English translation: “There is no business without a business secret.”
Morgenstern’s brief, signed preface places two advance chapters at a precise moment in the revision of On the Accuracy of Economic Observations: on July 9, 1962, he expected the rewritten second edition to reach the printer within weeks. Its interest is documentary rather than argumentative. Readers can establish the chapters’ relation to the larger book and trace the acknowledged contributions of Econometric Research Program collaborators and typist Lois A. Crooks. The preface records publication circumstances and working relationships, not a thesis about statistical accuracy.
Can stock-price changes look random while price levels retain a structure that a random walk cannot explain? In this 1962 research memorandum, Clive W. J. Granger and Oskar Morgenstern use spectral analysis to separate movements at different time scales. Their distinctive finding is not a dependable market cycle, but a methodological tension: differencing prices can obscure slow fluctuations, making a model appear more adequate than it is. Short-run movements largely support the random-walk benchmark; longer-run variation exceeds its predictions. Yet weak seasonal and business-cycle components offer little support for cyclical investment rules. The memorandum shows readers why evidence against a simple model need not yield a usable forecast—and how statistical transformations can conceal precisely the features an inquiry seeks to understand.
Destroying an enemy’s communications might unleash the weapons it was meant to disable. This possibility gives Oskar Morgenstern’s 1962 memorandum, a lightly revised invited address, its central tension: nuclear security depends not only on the capacity to strike but on preserving political control on both sides. Morgenstern treats command as an organizational problem involving human judgment, selective information and resilience under attack—not simply faster signals or more reliable electronics. Safeguards against unauthorized action can impede legitimate orders; economical networks can prove dangerously fragile. His case for survivable communications available to adversaries offers a concrete way to examine why military advantage and strategic safety may diverge, and why an opponent’s ability to restrain its forces and negotiate can be a condition of one’s own security.
Are there limits to the use of mathematics in economics? The question, this essay answers, is wrongly posed: the obstacle lies not in the subject but in whether economists understand what mathematics is and formulate their problems well. Morgenstern dismisses the usual objections — psychology, non-quantitative data, expectations, unmeasurable utility — by noting that mathematics is not merely quantitative, that no deep gulf separates a simple addition from an integration. Economics erred not by too much formalism but by shallow model-building, borrowing equilibrium from mechanics and casting agents as solitary maximizers under fixed conditions. Game theory marks the conceptual break, supplying a mathematics fitted to strategic interdependence; expected utility, axiomatized, replaces cumbersome indifference curves. Since natural science once remade mathematics, he expects social science to do the same, leaving no fixed boundary that can honestly be drawn.
Nichts ist leichter, als die eigene Beschränktheit für die der Methode oder des untersuchten Gegenstandes zu halten.
English translation: “Nothing is easier than to mistake one's own limitations for those of the method or of the subject under investigation.”