The archive.

A move in chess reshapes the whole board; so, Shackle insists, does a genuinely crucial economic decision, one that cannot be repeated because it alters the very conditions under which any later choice would occur. Replying here to critics of Expectation in Economics, he defends the distinction between unique, isolated, and crucial trials against those who would treat rival imagined futures as additive terms in a single statistical expectation. Mutually exclusive outcomes, he argues, cannot be summed like fractions drawn from an urn; the chooser confronts an act, a moment, and a set of hypotheses. Against Baumol and Graaff he deploys his focus-value method, the φ-function, and potential surprise, rejecting 'degree of belief' as any general rescue of probabilistic ordering.

Now when an experiment, a question about the future, is unique, isolated, or crucial, it does not make sense to add together its rival hypothetical outcomes or answers.

Numerical probability divides a fixed unit of belief among rival hypotheses; that additive structure, Shackle contends, is exactly what makes it useless for describing genuine uncertainty, where several incompatible outcomes may each be perfectly possible with nothing known against them. The remedy proposed is potential surprise, a non-additive measure of disbelief that lets rival hypotheses coexist without competing for a common total. Dividing experiments into 'divisible' series, where frequency ratios can render an aggregate outcome knowable in advance, and unique 'non-divisible' acts, where such ratios are meaningless, he weighs an integrative decision rule, drawn via Ralph Turvey from Ingvar Svennilson, against his own focus-values solution and rejects the former as psychologically artificial. Expectation, he concludes, is an act of creative imagination, not rational calculation on incomplete data.

For a non-divisible, unique experiment it is plain that no frequency-ratio can have any meaning or relevance.

These are not the famous treatise but dense student notes from a 1949 Institute of World Affairs lecture, circulated by Arthur Smithies as the fullest exposition he knew of Schumpeter's late thought. Against Trotsky's claim that imperialism is capitalism's last stage, Schumpeter advances laborism: a society, exemplified by Britain, where labor's interests become the state's governing purpose. Higher wages, shorter hours, subsidies, and cheap money redirect the fiscal state away from capital renewal and defense toward present labor consumption. His feudal analogy is deliberately provocative, since modern redistribution does not abolish the class use of the state but inverts it. A laborist Britain, he predicts, cannot sustain great-power burdens and grows dependent on America, while a dictatorial Russia mobilizes for power politics Britain cannot match.

The working class has replaced Mme. du Barry, and we have the inverse of the feudal system.

Money has no essence independent of its economic order; it is a creature of a particular economic form, and once that order changes so does money itself. From the wartime and postwar experience of rationing, blocked balances, black markets, and administrative allocation, Kerschagl rereads the classic problems—deposits and credit creation, quantity theory, exchange rates, gold, inflation, currency reform—around a single insight: legal payment power and general purchasing power can come apart. Ration cards, coupons, price controls, and occupational privileges shift access to goods from money toward administrative entitlement, so that identical nominal incomes carry unequal real content. Planning alters money qualitatively, personalizing it until, at the limit of full socialism, it decays into a mere Rechenpfennig. Sound policy, he insists, demands clarity in the creation of money and truth in monetary accounting.

Jede Planwirtschaft — und dabei muß es sich noch keineswegs etwa um eine vollsozialisierte Wirtschaft handeln — ändert sofort grundlegend den Charakter des Geldes.

English translation: “Every planned economy — and this need not by any means be a fully socialized economy — immediately alters the character of money in a fundamental way.”

The claim that every line of a consumer's spending is pushed to the same weighted marginal utility—Gossen's second law, and the hinge of the equilibrium systems of Jevons, Walras, and Pareto—is here dismantled as an aprioristic construction unsupported by experience. Following Hans Mayer, Mahr argues that consumption does not adjust in equal infinitesimal steps: as income rises some quantities stay fixed, inferior goods give way to better ones, and new wants awaken, so no common marginal level is ever revealed. Bread and potatoes remain 'overmarginal' for the well-off, their utility above that of money; genuine leveling appears only in the poorest budgets. What survives the critique is narrow—the marginal utility of money—and a warning that elegant equations must not be allowed to remake economic fact. First published in 1949.

Fällt das Gesetz vom Grenznutzenniveau, dann werden auch die n (m—1) Gleichungen — n repräsentiert dabei die Zahl der Individuen und m die Zahl der Waren —, in denen dieses Gesetz zum Ausdruck kommt, hinfällig.

English translation: “If the law of the marginal-utility level falls, then the n(m−1) equations—where n represents the number of individuals and m the number of goods—in which this law is expressed, also become invalid.”

Why does a state that owns enterprises and controls prices still need taxes? Richard Kerschagl’s 1949 article makes this question central to a comparison of American and Soviet public finance. He distinguishes the outward form of a tax from its function within a particular system of ownership and government. American federal, state, and municipal authorities compete over overlapping tax bases; Soviet authorities use taxes to absorb enterprise surpluses, differentiate among ownership sectors, and preserve incentives for skilled work. Kerschagl argues that recognizable fiscal techniques can serve sharply different political and distributive purposes. The comparison gives readers concrete grounds for understanding why progressive income taxes or turnover levies cannot be interpreted apart from price controls, production costs, and the allocation of governmental power.

Schumpeter traces the entrepreneur through the history of economic thought, from Cantillon and Say who grasped him to Smith, Ricardo, and Marx who dissolved him into the capitalist, in order to isolate a function that ownership, management, and risk-bearing all fail to capture. The entrepreneur is whoever institutes new combinations, breaking routine rather than administering it, and his gain is neither wage nor monopoly rent but a surplus that congeals into industrial fortunes. That function may be corporate or collective as easily as individual, and banks figure not as passive intermediaries but as organs that call new industries into being. The essay's second half turns concept into a research program, pairing theory with the history of firms, finance, and technology, and refusing to equate the cultural imprint of entrepreneurial mentality with direct political rule.

I shall state frankly that I consider power to be one of the most misused words in the social sciences, though the competition is indeed great.

Six recent English books, by Baster, Franks, Harrod, Jewkes, Meade, and Robbins, give Schumpeter his occasion to ask whether economists have drawn a serious analytic harvest from Britain's postwar experiment in state management. His first move is to prise apart three questions habitually merged under planning: socialism, meaning central control of production; laborism, meaning labor's political ascendancy within a still-private economy; and the sheer readjustment of exports, saving, and solvency after the war. Nationalizing coal or transport, he insists, proves neither socialism nor its absence; the telling fact is that the wage rate has become a political datum, protected as a matter of course while profits and rents are compressed. Britain's dollar shortage he reads as the outward face of domestic maladjustment, conceding that under laborite constraints direct controls may be forced expedients rather than doctrinal choices.

Nevertheless, there is point in keeping these three topics distinct, if only in order to show how they interact to produce the English problem.

Addressed directly to the champions of economic dirigisme, this open letter concedes their ends—higher living standards, human dignity, protection of wage-earners—and attacks only their means. Rueff's wager is that a price held away from its market-clearing level must produce either disorder or coercion: queues, shortages, black markets, rationing, and finally an economic police. Free prices, he counters, are the condition of a society of free persons, and price control is not egalitarian but malthusian, since it organizes scarcity instead of redistributing wealth. The volume pairs the Épître with Le Dilemme français, which frames postwar France's choice starkly: a plan enforced with the coercion of Vichy or Hitler's Germany, or liberated prices disciplined by a balanced budget and honest social intervention.

Dès qu'un produit est taxé, les acheteurs font queue à la porte des boutiques où on le vend.

English translation: “As soon as a product is subject to a price ceiling, buyers queue at the doors of the shops that sell it.”

An investment cannot always be treated as one trial in a repeatable gamble. How, then, can an economist analyse a decision whose consequences may be unique? Shackle locates its motives in present experiences of imagined futures: the gains that excite hope and the losses that command fear. His alternative to numerical probability, “potential surprise,” measures how astonishing an outcome would seem rather than assigning it a share of total likelihood. The resulting model offers a striking account of waiting: an investor may postpone commitment because information is coming, even without knowing what it will say. Readers can examine both the explanatory reach and the psychological demands of a theory in which two compelling possibilities—not an average across all outcomes—govern a venture’s attraction.

Monopoly prices fall less sharply in a depression than competitive prices — a regularity Alexander Mahr had observed in 1932 and here places on a fuller analytical footing. Starting from the elasticity of demand as the decisive determinant of the monopoly price, he shows that under inelastic or unit-elastic demand a cost reduction is largely pocketed as profit rather than passed to buyers, so that monopoly price adjustment is systematically less elastic than competitive adjustment. Real monopolists, he argues, are nonetheless hemmed in by substitutes, latent competitors, tariffs, and the threat of state intervention. The stakes are macroeconomic: by defending prices through cuts to output and employment, monopoly and cartel pricing convert cyclical contractions into cumulative ones, and Mahr rejects the claim that cartels stabilize the Konjunkturzyklus.

Bei unelastischer Nachfrage oder wenn die Nachfrageelastizität gleich eins ist, wird also der Monopolpreis trotz Änderung der Kosten ganz überwiegend unverändert bleiben, während der Konkurrenzpreis sich durchaus der Kostenänderung anpassen würde.

English translation: “With inelastic demand, or when the elasticity of demand equals one, the monopoly price will therefore, despite a change in costs, remain overwhelmingly unchanged, whereas the competitive price would fully adjust to the change in costs.”

A Chinese sentry, Kwong Hui, weighs loyalty against treachery in a choice he can make only once — and for whom, as Shackle drily observes, a severed head is rather final. From Keith West's parable Shackle draws his standing objection to orthodox decision theory: frequency-ratio probability describes a series of repeatable trials, but says nothing about the single occasion whose outcome absorbs a person's whole future. Such crucial experiments may destroy the very conditions under which they were run, so they cannot be rerun. In their place he offers not calculation but imaginative appraisal, where rival hypotheses are ranked by their power to stir hope or fear and by their degree of potential surprise, and choice settles on a representative focus-gain and focus-loss. It is a founding statement of the Knight–Keynes–Shackle line dividing calculable risk from genuine uncertainty.

For a non-divisible non-seriable experiment the concept of frequency-ratios is wholly irrelevant.