1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
This short note, first published in 1949, is Shackle’s reply to critics of Expectation in Economics. It defends his view that many economic decisions cannot be understood through the probability calculus appropriate to repeatable trials. Shackle’s target is not calculation as such, but the assumption that a chooser facing a singular future can treat rival imagined outcomes as additive elements in one statistical expectation.
Shackle’s essay offers a compact map of economic theory after Keynes, organizing inherited doctrines by the kind of time, knowledge, and adjustment each assumes. Its premise is that twentieth-century theory had not merely added new topics to the old canon; it had changed the image of the economy itself, from a system tending toward stable equilibrium to one shaped by uncertainty, hesitation, cumulative movement, and breakdown.
This short theoretical journal article clarifies a central feature of Shackle’s Expectation in Economics: uncertainty cannot be represented by an additive probability calculus when the decision is unique, historically situated, and not repeatable. Shackle’s target is not probability within games of chance, but its illicit extension to “mental states of uncertainty.” He argues that the relevant object is not distributable belief, but a non-additive measure of “potential surprise,” closer to a measure of disbelief or non-acceptability.
This file is a single-author methodological essay. Shackle asks what it means for an economist to believe a theory, and whether ethical practice requires using only theories accepted without reserve. His answer is that such a demand would destroy economics: any usable theory remains partial, contestable, and interesting because it is not final knowledge. Sincerity therefore means disciplined awareness of theory’s limits, not abstention from theory.
Shackle’s essay asks why a familiar theory of investment seemed to conflict with business testimony gathered by the Oxford Economists’ Research Group. The orthodox view says that a fall in interest rates raises the present value of future returns and so should make more investment projects worthwhile. Shackle does not reject this doctrine; he narrows it. Its force depends on how far into the future entrepreneurs can meaningfully value receipts, and on how heavily uncertainty discounts those receipts before the pure rate of interest has much work to do.
Shackle’s essay is a selective theoretical reconstruction of Gunnar Myrdal’s Monetary Equilibrium, framed as a claim about its place in interwar monetary theory rather than as a conventional review. He treats Myrdal as one of the decisive developers of Wicksell’s problem: how to define monetary equilibrium in an economy where investment, saving, and income are realized only through time and under expectations that may be disappointed.
This file is a single-author theoretical article in economics. Shackle’s essay attacks the assumption that economic choice can be modeled as choice among known satisfactions. Standard value theory, he argues, silently assumes perfect knowledge; but many economic goods, especially information itself, exist only because their contents are not already known.
Shackle’s essay develops a theory of decision under uncertainty for cases where action is singular, consequential, and not assimilable to repeated gambling trials. Its central target is the use of mathematical expectation in entrepreneurial and investment choice. The problem is not simply that probabilities are hard to estimate, but that the form of the decision is different: the investor does not buy a divisible share in a large statistical series, but commits to one course whose future will be one realized history among many imagined possibilities.
Shackle’s essay is a theoretical critique of the assumption that probability, understood as frequency-ratio probability, can guide all rational choice. He begins from Keith West’s story of Kwong Hui, a Chinese sentry tempted by rebellion, to show that some decisions cannot be converted into actuarial calculations. The relevant outcome for Kwong Hui is not one member of a class of repeated trials, but a fate that absorbs the whole future of the chooser.
Shackle’s article, first published in 1947, is a theoretical account of fiscal action as a force acting on monetary demand and the supply of goods. It begins from the Keynesian enlargement of the Exchequer’s role: public finance can no longer be treated simply as the collection of enough revenue to meet legally authorized expenditure.
This is a single-author theoretical essay, first published for accountants but addressed to economic theory. Shackle’s thesis is that profit cannot be treated as one simple magnitude. It names both a distributive category in classical theory and a forward-looking object of entrepreneurial conjecture.
George Lennox Sharman Shackle’s “The Logic of Surprise” is a compact theoretical essay in expectation theory, published as an Economica note, that asks how a person can coherently anticipate surprise. Its scope is logical rather than anecdotal: Shackle wants to specify what kinds of imagined future make surprise possible. He treats expectation through “potential surprise,” where to expect an event can mean assigning it zero potential surprise; this creates the opening paradox.