The archive.

Science cannot supply political ends — but it can discipline the pursuit of them. That Weberian conviction anchors Morgenstern's 1956 lecture to the Nordrhein-Westfalen research society, which argues that no policy problem is even defined until one names the permitted means: unemployment looks wholly different if wage cuts, public works, or inflation are allowed. He welcomes mathematics, statistics, and electronic computation — linear programming, input-output analysis, a manganese-supply example — as ways to force objectives, quantities, and timing into the open. Yet formalization is not wisdom. Where the state truly commands its variables, quantitative methods improve decisions; where unions, cartels, and rival states react strategically, there is no single optimum, only game-theoretic solution sets and imputations. Calculation can rank feasible actions, he insists, but it cannot choose values or dissolve political conflict.

Die Theorie zeigt, daß es in diesen Fällen kein „Optimum“ gibt, keine „beste“ Lösung, sondern es gibt unendlich viele Verteilungsschemata oder „Zurechnungen“ für das Ergebnis, von denen jedoch nur einige zusammen als „Lösung“ angesehen werden können.

English translation: “The theory shows that in these cases there is no 'optimum,' no 'best' solution, but rather there are infinitely many distribution schemes or 'imputations' for the outcome, of which, however, only some together can be regarded as a 'solution.'”

For Oskar Morgenstern, von Neumann’s contribution to economics was not simply a supply of powerful mathematical techniques: it challenged what economists understood an economic problem to be. This 1958 obituary, written by his collaborator in game theory, explains why choices whose outcomes depend on other people’s choices cannot be treated as ordinary maximization problems. Morgenstern places that conceptual break within von Neumann’s wider conviction that empirical problems should stimulate mathematical invention, while resisting a final ranking of his achievements. Alongside the scientific assessment, recollections of his memory, humour and generosity give the portrait a personal register. Readers can discover how Morgenstern understood game theory’s still-unfulfilled promise at the moment of his collaborator’s death, rather than through the hindsight of its later development.

A defense system can become more dangerous as it becomes more powerful. In this separately published Sandia lecture, Oskar Morgenstern asks how American scientific and military capacity might preserve room for political choice rather than force an immediate, catastrophic response. Speaking after Soviet space successes, he connects deterrence to the everyday organization of research: interrupted funding, restricted information exchange, and failures of independent weapons evaluation. His case for survivable retaliatory forces rests on the same principle as his criticism of massive retaliation: security should allow time, restraint, and acceptance of limited defeat. Even civilian shelters, he argues, may threaten stability if their rapid construction signals preparations for attack. The report offers a concrete encounter with strategic reasoning in which better weapons are not enough; institutions and signals must sustain a negotiable balance.

If either opponent attempts to win too much from the other he stands to lose all.

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.

A game can treat every player alike without requiring equal payoffs—or even fully symmetric solution sets. In this RAND paper, published in 1961 from a 1946 manuscript, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern investigate a cooperative game in which a coalition wins only if it contains all but at most one player. They impose symmetry on the first n−1 players while leaving the last player outside that requirement. This deliberate asymmetry makes a precise question accessible: how low can the remaining player’s minimum payoff be, and how large can gaps in that player’s possible payoffs become? By redistributing payoffs and testing domination, the authors derive bounds rather than a complete classification. The paper offers a concrete encounter with how symmetry can constrain stable solutions without determining them outright.

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.”