3,801 works, 471 books, 3,267 articles, 60 other works, 3 awaiting classification, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
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.
Delivered for Henry Hazlitt's seventieth birthday in November 1964, this short tribute expands a birthday homage into a statement of the classical-liberal vocation. Mises honors Hazlitt not as a friend alone but as the writer who, across books, essays, a novel, and a weekly Newsweek column, refused to concede that freedom is an obsolete prejudice—an assumption Mises had lately heard voiced aloud when a listener demanded to know why liberty was worth aiming at. Into the homage he folds his own doctrine: the material lot of the masses can be raised by one method only, the accumulation of capital faster than population grows. Hazlitt is cast as the economic conscience of the nation, heir to Cannan and Bastiat, and the address ends by turning from his generation's defeats to the hope that a rising cohort of liberty's defenders will yet succeed.
But our meeting is not simply a private affair because you do not belong only to us, you belong to the nation and to the world.
Regional integration schemes like the European Common Market are new, this presidential address contends, only in a narrow institutional sense; the deeper story spans two centuries of world economic history. Haberler discerns three great waves of integration that dwarf the postwar regional projects: the internal unification of national markets (the German Zollverein, the U.S. Constitution, Italian unification), the nineteenth-century movement toward freer world trade under British leadership and the gold standard, and the post-1945 restoration of multilateral exchange after the disintegration of 1914 to 1945. That interwar collapse he blames on monetary destruction and institutional failure, not on any contradiction internal to capitalism. His closing warning is pointed: regional blocs such as LAFTA and the EEC may themselves endanger the wider multilateral order they claim to advance.
It was mainly due to the wholesale destruction of money, which in turn was largely the consequence of institutional weaknesses and incredibly poor policies, on the national and international level.
Setting aside Marx the revolutionary, sociologist, and prophet, this retrospective judges only Marx the economist — and finds the system wanting on every count that matters. Haberler locates the fatal defect in the value theory itself: once Volume III introduces equalized profit rates and prices of production, commodities no longer exchange at the labour values Volume I requires, so Böhm-Bawerk's old charge of internal contradiction still stands, now reinforced by Samuelson's analysis of the transformation problem. From logical failure he turns to practical sterility, arguing that even socialist planners improved only by smuggling back interest, scarcity pricing, and comparative cost. The prophecies fare no better: working-class immiseration, the imperialism thesis, and predictions of ever-deepening crises all founder against the economic record.
The assertion that in the capitalist countries real wages have a secular tendency to decline flies in the face of what everyone knows of economic history.
Entrepreneurs must advance wages and materials long before sales proceeds return, and when banks restrict credit, hoard cash, and slow velocity, consumers' purchasing power falls short of producers' costs—so money income and real market product drift apart. Correcting that drift is the task Mahr sets monetary policy in this 1964 study, defending stable purchasing power against 'neutral,' cost-oriented money that would merely finance the creeping inflation of monopoly wages and prices. His central move is to show that technological profit under stable money is non-inflationary, since it springs from falling costs rather than redistribution. Linking the multiplier to circuit velocity through the 'allocation period,' and rereading the New Deal's deficits as real but self-defeating, he shifts the modern danger from deflationary collapse to creeping inflation driven by pressure-group politics.
A policy of stable money creates profits of a non-inflationary character, if we define inflation as an increase of monetary national income beyond real net market product.
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.
Keynesianism as doctrine may be dead, but its slogans still cloud economic understanding—so runs the argument of this 1964 Freeman review of W. H. Hutt's Keynesianism—Retrospect and Prospect. The General Theory succeeded, in Mises's reading, not by advancing theory but by lending scientific respectability to policies governments already wanted: deficit finance, currency devaluation, price intervention, and the coercive privileges of labor unions, the whole machinery of the New Deal. Hutt's value lies in clearing the air, restating the elementary price theory that Keynesian vocabulary had buried. For Mises the decisive charge is that Keynes and his followers simply do not grasp what prices are or how they arise; treating them as administrative quantities to be set by authority replaces voluntary coordination with force and conceals the resulting dislocations beneath a fog of terminology.
The main failure of Keynes and all his disciples and admirers is to be seen in the fact that they simply do not know what prices are, how they originate, and what they bring about.
Paul Samuelson had argued that a theory resting on empirically false assumptions must be discarded; this short polemic answers that the rule would abolish theory as such, since every empirical test yokes a model to assumed occurrences. The sharpest thrust is turned against Samuelson himself. His celebrated factor-price equalization theorem, Machlup notes, derives illuminating conclusions from wildly unrealistic premises about countries, commodities, factors, and technology—precisely the abstract method Samuelson elsewhere condemns. Far from an embarrassment, that theorem exemplifies how strong simple cases point toward truths buried in complex situations. The essay thus enlists a leading formalist's finest work as evidence for the indispensability of unrealistic assumptions in economic reasoning.
What Samuelson does here is to reject all theory.
Looking back from his seventieth birthday in 1964, Hazlitt counts himself a fortunate man, luckiest, he says, in his friends. The address moves from memoir into intellectual genealogy: a poverty-forced start at The Wall Street Journal, the discovery through Philip Wicksteed that economics is a rigorous science of human action, and the decisive debt to Benjamin Anderson, H. L. Mencken, and above all Ludwig von Mises. Yet the mood darkens into civilizational diagnosis. Separating genuine scientific and material progress from what he sees as decadence in art, morals, and politics, he reclaims the word 'liberal' for the defenders of limited government and free markets, then turns the reproach on his own side. Invoking Orwell's Winston Smith, he insists the duty to say two plus two equals four cannot be retired.
But the hard thing must be said that, collectively, we just haven't been good enough.
Strip away the metaphysics, and a right is a legally protected sphere of action that imposes a matching duty on everyone else — this reciprocity is the spine of Hazlitt's 1964 essay in legal and political philosophy. From it he dissolves the fashionable quarrel between 'property rights' and 'human rights,' since both are claims of persons against persons, and rereads natural rights not as self-evident heavenly gifts but as ideal legal rights a just order ought to secure. His sharpest fire falls on 'pseudo-rights': Roosevelt's freedom from want and fear, or the United Nations' rights to paid holidays, which name desirable goods without saying who is obliged to supply them. Rights are inviolable, he concludes, not by mystical descent but because durable social peace depends on principled adherence to them.
Law and Right are correlative terms.
No inquiry begins from bare fact: without a prior sense of what to look for, even patient observation of raw data yields nothing intelligible. From this premise Hayek builds a defence of pattern prediction. He separates simple phenomena, where a few variables permit exact forecasts, from complex phenomena—life, mind, society—where the relevant elements multiply beyond any hope of ascertaining them, so that theory can predict only classes of patterns rather than particular events. Darwinian natural selection becomes his model case: rigorous and falsifiable, yet unable to specify which species will arise. Statistics cannot rescue us, he warns, since it suppresses the very structural relations that make complex wholes what they are. Scientific maturity lies in recognising the boundaries of prediction rather than imitating the methods of simpler domains.
But there seems to exist a fairly easy and adequate way to measure the degree of complexity of different kinds of abstract patterns.