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6 - Wrestling with Complexity

Wirtschaftsprognose and Beyond

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

Robert Leonard
Affiliation:
Université du Québec à Montréal
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Summary

Again Holmes would have calculated that, and therefore would have chosen Dover. Thus, Moriarty would have acted differently. And from so much thinking, there would have come no action, or the less intelligent one would have handed himself to the other at Victoria Station because all the fleeing would have been unnecessary. Examples of that kind could be taken from everywhere. Chess, strategy, etc.

Morgenstern, Wirtschaftsprognose, 1928, pp. 98–99

Rockefeller Years

When Morgenstern entered the University of Vienna, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial had been in existence for several years. Named after John D. Rockefeller's widow, its endowment ran more than $70 million and it had become the main source of Rockefeller support for the social sciences before being absorbed into the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929. The Memorial's favourable disposition towards social science research during the 1920s was attributable largely to its director, Beardsley Ruml. He arrived at Rockefeller with a doctorate in experimental psychology from the University of Chicago and was interested in the construction of a less “abstract and remote” social science that would be of immediate use to the “social engineer”.

Ruml established a system of grants, placing emphasis on empirical research and preferring universities that also emphasised teaching. In the United States, the universities of Chicago, Harvard, Columbia, and Iowa State, and the National Bureau of Economic Research were amongst the main beneficiaries. In England, money was given initially to the London School of Economics and later to Oxford. The Cambridge of Keynes and Robinson, on the other hand, showed little interest in shifting focus in response to Rockefeller, and was passed over. In Continental Europe, Rockefeller tended not to support universities directly, in the belief that European social science was still highly speculative, the universities were often torn by internecine strife, and the risks of wasting money through bureaucracy were high. Consequently, the Foundation devoted its efforts to a programme of fellowships intended to free future teachers “from the traditional conceptual thinking and a priori generalizations of the present generation of teachers” and to the funding of institutions that were independent of universities.

Type
Chapter
Information
Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory
From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960
, pp. 93 - 109
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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  • Wrestling with Complexity
  • Robert Leonard, Université du Québec à Montréal
  • Book: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory
  • Online publication: 05 December 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511778278.009
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  • Wrestling with Complexity
  • Robert Leonard, Université du Québec à Montréal
  • Book: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory
  • Online publication: 05 December 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511778278.009
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Wrestling with Complexity
  • Robert Leonard, Université du Québec à Montréal
  • Book: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory
  • Online publication: 05 December 2013
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511778278.009
Available formats
×