The archive.

A small change in reported growth can become a large political claim—but what if the uncertainty in the underlying figures exceeds the change itself? In this article, originally published in Fortune and here republished in the Congressional Record, Oskar Morgenstern challenges the precision routinely claimed for economic statistics. His concern is not merely faulty counting: an official exchange rate may be recorded exactly yet misrepresent actual transactions, while unemployment totals depend on contested definitions. Hypothetical growth calculations show how modest errors can even reverse an apparent trend. Morgenstern’s demand for published error estimates offers readers a concrete way to distinguish useful measurement from unwarranted inference, without abandoning either economic theory or quantitative evidence.

When economists identify cycles by picking peaks and troughs, how much information do they leave unused? In this 1964 foreword to C. W. J. Granger’s Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series, written in association with M. Hatanaka and republished here in 2015, Oskar Morgenstern sets computational methods against familiar habits of economic interpretation. His account is also personal: he recalls plans with John von Neumann to apply Fourier analysis to economic data, frustrated by computing constraints and ultimately ended by von Neumann’s death. The distinctive interest of this brief introduction lies in Morgenstern’s view of computers not merely as calculating aids but as tools for exploration that could guide theory—and force economists to reconsider what they believed they saw in fluctuations.

What counts as a fair objection to a theory that deliberately leaves things out? In this 1964 address, Oskar Morgenstern defends game theory without claiming that it can encompass every decision or resolve the problem of war. His sharpest distinction concerns rationality: strategic analysis, he argues, does not merely assume rational conduct but seeks to define it when each actor’s prospects depend on others’ choices. He acknowledges unresolved mathematical problems while challenging critics to explain how appeals to intuition or judgment handle complexities that formal models omit. Readers can discover why multiple solutions might reflect social relations rather than theoretical failure—and why acknowledging a model’s limits need not mean abandoning its discipline.

A gift can leave everyone else’s possessions untouched yet give its recipient power over them. This possibility anchors Oskar Morgenstern’s challenge to the apparent simplicity of Pareto improvement: who can establish that nobody is worse off when additional resources change what people can do? In this 1964 research memorandum, he treats bargaining, strategic testimony, and shifts in economic power as central to welfare analysis rather than inconvenient exceptions. His examples range from money sufficient to establish a firm to adaptive computers entrusted with decisions whose consequences their designers cannot fully anticipate. The resulting critique shows how judgments about resource distributions depend on assumptions about knowledge, cooperation, and future action. Morgenstern points toward game-theoretic standards of behavior, while acknowledging that the required reconstruction remains unfinished.

A research project can matter to a government objective without addressing it directly: its results may enable another discovery, instrument, or experiment along a chain of influence. In this 1965 technical report, Oskar Morgenstern, R. W. Shephard, and H. Grabowski make those indirect effects central to the allocation of research support. Their directed graphs and transfer matrices offer a way to trace scientific interdependence without confusing an agency’s existing portfolio with the full range of relevant knowledge. Yet the authors distinguish mathematical possibility from managerial reliability: coefficients must be estimated, objectives specified, and the model tested against actual research. The report lets readers examine both the promise of network-based funding decisions and the measurement difficulties that keep calculation dependent on scientific judgment.

The test for relevance is whether there exist connected paths between the given research activity and the particular government problem studied.

How can an action be judged rational—or morally defensible—when its consequences depend on uncertain events and other people’s deliberate responses? In this 1966 paper, Oskar Morgenstern approaches that problem through economics, game theory, and a reconsideration of Jacques Rueff’s account of scientific knowledge. He distinguishes learning from physics’ standards of inquiry from borrowing its models: a strategic opponent cannot safely be treated as a passive source of statistical regularities. The ethical stakes become concrete in resource depletion, pollution, and remote warfare, where distant or dispersed harms complicate responsibility. His speculative question about nature’s possible hostility remains unresolved; it tests confidence in discovery rather than asserting a cosmology. The paper’s distinctive connection is between economic decision and moral judgment: both require reasoning about consequences that knowledge cannot fully secure.

Production technology alone does not determine how an economy holds together or how fast it can expand. In this 1966 research report, Oskar Morgenstern and Gerald L. Thompson extend von Neumann’s growth model to distinguish the effects of private and public consumption and saving. Their example of wheat, entertainment and diamonds makes a precise point: consumer demand can connect sectors that production requirements leave separate. The extension also breaks the original model’s equality between expansion and interest factors. Using matrix games and numerical examples, the authors distinguish proving that equilibrium exists from explaining which equilibrium will prevail. Readers can discover how preferences and government allocations reshape a formal growth economy—and why identical technological and preference data may still leave its outcome undetermined.

What counts as rational action when the conditions of success are partly controlled by someone pursuing a contrary interest? In this conference contribution, Oskar Morgenstern argues that social science needs more than the mathematics of isolated maximization. Game theory must explain rationality within relationships of rivalry, cooperation, and coalition. His account gives randomization a concrete purpose: making one’s actions unpredictable can prevent an opponent from exploiting them. It also challenges the expectation that a rigorous theory must yield a single outcome, presenting sets of possible distributions as standards of behavior. Readers can discover why strategic uncertainty is not simply ignorance to be eliminated—and where Morgenstern acknowledges unfinished work, from violations of rules to people’s simultaneous participation in several interdependent games.

Game Theory does not assume rational behavior but wishes to explain it, to give it precise mathematical meaning.

Cheap explosive energy is not the same as useful industrial work: this distinction anchors Oskar Morgenstern and Klaus-Peter Heiss’s 1967 assessment of peaceful underground nuclear explosions. Prepared for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the report argues for experimental development while making commercial promise depend on unresolved recovery processes, contamination risks, and safety constraints. Its distinctive economic perspective emerges where apparent savings become misleading: cheaper copper extraction may leave too much valuable metal underground, and larger excavation blasts may face tighter safety limits. Equally revealing is its case for public research funding when experimental knowledge benefits firms that cannot individually justify paying for it. The reader encounters technological advocacy tested—though not always restrained—by calculations of uncertainty, foregone opportunities, and costs beyond the explosion itself.

No participant in a strategic encounter controls all the conditions of success. In this 1968 encyclopedia article, Oskar Morgenstern explains why that fact requires something different from ordinary individual maximization. His perspective as a cofounder of game theory gives particular weight to cooperation: coalitions can create gains, but cannot by themselves determine how those gains should be divided. Moving between mathematical concepts and questions of social organization, he shows why voting weights need not measure effective power and why the same resources may sustain different stable distributions. Readers encounter both the precision of minimax reasoning and the less determinate world of bargaining, where multiple solutions can express alternative institutional arrangements rather than a failure of analysis.

Weapons can take years to develop, yet the political conditions governing their use may change before they enter service. In this March 1968 research report, Klaus Knorr and Oskar Morgenstern confront military planning’s dependence on forecasts that cannot reliably predict wars, revolutions, or shifts in alliances. Their answer is not greater predictive confidence but disciplined conjecture: explicit, criticizable reasoning from incomplete evidence. Declining access to overseas bases provides a concrete test, linking political pressures to choices about range, transport, and infrastructure without predicting the fate of any single installation. Equally important is their institutional argument: political expertise must help shape military requirements, not merely comment on technical decisions already made. The report shows how acknowledging uncertainty can change both what planners prepare for and whose judgment counts.

Conjecture is reasoned inference from admittedly defective evidence.

A financier without an academic appointment, Karl Schlesinger helped shape economic arguments whose influence outstripped his small published output. In this concise encyclopedia entry, Oskar Morgenstern connects that discrepancy to specific intellectual contributions: Schlesinger’s account of why cash balances have utility in their own right, and his reformulation of production equations that helped stimulate Abraham Wald’s equilibrium research. Morgenstern’s portrait brings mathematical reasoning into contact with banking experience and the informal discussions of Vienna’s economists. Readers can discover both the substance of an underrecognized monetary theorist’s ideas and the channels—conversation, collaboration, and practical financial judgment—through which Morgenstern argues they mattered.