The archive.

When do long odds make an outcome seem not merely improbable but impossible? In this brief reply to Gould, Shackle acknowledges a difficulty for his account of decision under uncertainty: even someone facing a unique venture may let probabilities shape judgements of what can happen. He welcomes investigation of Gould’s proposed modification while insisting on a prior question—whether the conflicting evidence from which businesspeople form expectations can be expressed as numerical odds at all. The exchange offers a compact view of Shackle responding to criticism without abandoning his central distinction between probability and possibility, and helps readers separate two sources of uncertainty: the rarity of a decision and the difficulty of interpreting its evidence.

Shackle opposes reason to imagination and probability to poetry, without discarding knowledge: business policy, he argues, is an originative art conducted under radical uncertainty, not the solving of a well-posed problem. He builds a scale of openness from dice and cards, which yield a complete list of outcomes, through horse-racing to new enterprise, which has no card of runners and no book of rules. Decision is commitment to a future that does not yet exist, and therefore choice among imagined possibilities rather than known facts. Where probability demands an exhaustive list of contingencies, he substitutes judgments of possibility, surprise, and ascendancy, with focus-gain and focus-loss standing for an enterprise in deliberation. Success, he concludes, needs not only the axial mind that reasons toward a solution but the radial imagination that sees outward into an expanding field of possible histories.

My first proposition is that decision is choice amongst the products of imagination.

One unfinished project links Keynes's Treatise on Money and his General Theory: the attempt to make economics adequate to a future no agent can know. Shackle finds the sharpest tool not in the General Theory but in the Treatise's Fundamental Equations, which he reads as rudimentary sequence analysis—income as anticipated cost, profit as the gap between what was expected and what occurred. From this ex ante/ex post distinction he rebuilds liquidity preference and the marginal efficiency of capital as phenomena of speculative markets, confidence, and mood, not as stable schedules. Economic life becomes kaleidic: neither a march toward equilibrium nor a regular cycle, but a succession of temporary patterns that shifting expectations can shatter in an instant, leaving resources idle as asset-holders retreat into liquidity.

Income, in the Fundamental Equations, is a conjecture which can be wrong.

Thought is the only thing directly known, and its passing is the raw experience from which time itself is abstracted—an unlikely starting point for a theory of choice, and a deliberate one. Shackle builds from it a critique of deterministic economics: if choice genuinely matters, it must be a beginning, an uncaused cause, a taking-place not already implicit in its antecedents, and its sequels cannot be a ready-made list waiting to be ranked. Possibility, for the chooser, becomes the absence of discernible fatal obstacles rather than a measurable frequency; commitment, not calculation, is the vital act, staking self-esteem on imagined outcomes. Marshalling potential surprise, ascendancy, and focus-gain against frequency probability, he makes investment the exemplary economic act—a symbolic wager on a future whose outcomes can never be exhaustively listed.

Possibility, for the chooser, is the absence of discernible fatal obstacles.

The alternatives among which a person chooses are creations of his own thought, not a menu the world hands down — and from that premise Shackle builds this compact statement of subjectivist economics, written to introduce Alexander Shand's survey of the tradition from Plato to Hayek. Choice becomes creative rather than calculative, its consequences unknowable in advance, so that the future is not merely unknown but partly made. Non-determinism and the unpredictability of history-to-come follow, along with a political corollary: central coercion cannot render human affairs predictable, only extinguish the dispersed invention that renews economic life. Markets earn their place by disseminating knowledge after events occur, never by abolishing uncertainty.

Subjectivism credits the individual with the power of the alchemist who can throw into his crucible whatever his fancy has invented but knows not what will emerge.

Originality need not mean abandoning inherited tools: that is Shackle’s judgement of J. E. Meade’s A Geometry of International Trade in this short review. Familiar curves and price lines, meticulously drawn, can make the effects of taxes, subsidies and changing market conditions intelligible within a two-country, two-commodity model. Shackle specifies their achievement as qualitative insight—showing directions of adjustment rather than supplying numerical answers. His distinctive interest lies in the connection between analytical precision and visual craftsmanship: a well-placed label or clearly distinguishable curve helps students see economic relationships. The review offers a compact account of why exposition can itself be an intellectual achievement, and why apparently forbidding diagrams may become lucid once readers learn where to look.

What should an economics textbook explain rather than take for granted? In this brief review of F. Zeuthen’s Economic Theory and Method, G. L. S. Shackle defends methodological reflection as part of a student’s education, not a preamble to skip. He values Zeuthen’s account of Walrasian interdependence and the annotated references that lead readers into original research. Yet his praise leaves room for precise objections: counting equations and unknowns does not settle determinacy, and orthodox dynamics still resembles temporary huts beside a ruined static Acropolis. The review offers a compact view of Shackle’s standards for theoretical teaching—clarity without intellectual shortcuts—and his suspicion that economics has yet to reckon adequately with time.

An explanation of interest under perfect foresight need not explain interest under uncertainty. This distinction drives G. L. S. Shackle’s review of Allais’s Économie et Intérêt. After presenting Allais’s reasons why interest remains positive, Shackle questions whether money and liquidity-preference merely obscure deeper forces of thrift and productivity. Might causation also run the other way, with monetary interest rates shaping capital accumulation, income and ultimately time-preference? His objection gives readers a concrete way to distinguish what a model shows to be possible from what it establishes about economic life. Yet the review is no dismissal: Shackle balances his impatience with perfect foresight against admiration for Allais’s analytical precision and the breadth of his investigation.

The fact that a gas-fire can make a room warm does not imply that a warm room must contain a gas-fire.