Shackle’s essay is a reflective lecture on economic formation: part epistemology, part disciplinary map, part educational manifesto. It begins with an intentionally impossible portrait of the complete economist, whose competence would have to include mathematics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, prose, practical business, finance, administration, languages, and the literature of economics itself. The joke is not ornamental. It establishes the essay’s core claim that economics cannot be identified with a single technique, because its object is human conduct under institutions, scarcity, and uncertainty.
Shackle then turns to theory. For him, theory is the disciplined imaginative construction of recurrent forms. It does not merely collect facts, nor does it become rigorous simply by becoming algebraic. It chooses a structure, draws out its implications, and tests those implications against other plausible structures.
The business of creating theoretical knowledge consists in describing structures which repeat themselves.
This makes economics creative as well as logical. Hypotheses have to be invented, but their meaning emerges only as they are expanded, interpreted, and brought into conflict with rival claims. Shackle’s economist must therefore possess selective imagination and analytic patience. Keynes becomes exemplary not as a superior calculator alone, but as someone able to recast the subject’s premises and reveal a different pattern in familiar phenomena.
Many men have studied economics whose capacity for handling mathematical tools was by no means inferior to that of Keynes; but they did not produce the Keynesian revolution.
Shackle locates economics initially in the market-place, where wants and efforts meet through exchange. Yet he refuses to let this origin narrow the field. Prices matter because persons value, expect, choose, bargain, and organize; goods matter because they enter lives shaped by institutions and meanings. Psychology is needed for expectation and decision; politics because public authority allocates resources and frames markets; anthropology because money and custom are social inventions; geography and history because all economic life is situated. Technology supplies constraints and possibilities, but by itself it does not determine economic significance.
Economics emphatically is about chaps.
The educational argument follows from this breadth. Shackle wants able, not residual, students: people with mathematical interest, linguistic precision, historical imagination, and geographical curiosity. Yet he doubts that school is the right place for premature specialization in economics. Earlier education should strengthen exact expression, numerical reasoning, scientific habit, and awareness of place and history. University economics can then introduce students to interdependence, institutional complexity, and unintended consequences, teaching them to move among unstable questions rather than merely to recite settled doctrines.
The final pressure point is mathematics. Shackle accepts its necessity: economics deals with quantities, rates, relations, and comparisons. His warning is against letting mathematical form impose a false metaphysics, especially the deterministic habits of classical mechanics. Economic agents do not act in a world where all consequences are known; they form expectations in the face of futures that cannot be fully specified. Models that erase uncertainty may become elegant by ceasing to be humanly economic.
Mathematics must be the servant of economics and not its master.
Thus the answer to the title question is neither genius nor technique alone. An economist is formed by breadth disciplined into judgment: the capacity to abstract without forgetting people, to quantify without surrendering interpretation, to reason rigorously without mistaking closure in a model for knowledge of an open world. Shackle’s lecture defends economics as a theoretical science, but a humane one, grounded in recurrent structures that are always inhabited by expectations, institutions, language, history, and uncertainty.
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