Production is a complex system of interdependent activities, necessary to the system as a whole, which itself depends on the continuance of each individual activity that composes it. In such a system, resources must be committed to specifi c technological purposes long in advance to the ultimate sale of goods to the consumer.

It is Shackle's view that human conduct is chosen with a view to its consequences. But these are in the future, which cannot be directly known. Expectation will confine itself to what is deemed possible, but this leaves it free to entertain widely diverse and rival hypotheses. How can such skeins of mutually conflicting ideas serve the formation of individual or institutional policy? This is the chief question this book examines.

Professor Shackle's book, written along the lines of a Greek dialogue, presents a condensed version of the accepted economic insights.

This second edition examines how one makes a decision and the factors that influence that decision.

In this book Professor Shackle seeks a single, unified and coherent basis which would serve for all economic theories.

Professor Shackle (1903 1992) was best known for his extensive and scholarly work on the theory of the making of business decisions in conditions of uncertainty. He also made important contributions to the theory of rates of interest and showed an exceptional ability to combine theoretical work with a practical understanding of the business world. Professor Shackle believed that economics is not pure logic but is part of the endeavour to describe the integral nature of man. Originally published in 1966, this volume contains a collection of his articles, all concerned in some way to show his...

Even a decade after the end of the 1914 1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except...

This book is a collection of some of Professor Shackle's papers written between 1939 and 1953.

The language and theory of economics is very much a part of our lives; yet most of us know little of the meaning of 'inflation', 'productivity' or 'balance of payments', or of the workings of the bank rate or a national monetary policy. The problem is to bridge the gulf between the economist on the one side and the businessman, the banker, the politician, the journalist and the ordinary man on the other. Professor Shackle has provided the solution. In his book the first part of each chapter presents a familiar situation typifying some aspects of economic theory, the second comments on it and...

Economics is as wholly entangled with time as is history. It is within this framework that Professor Shackle takes a critical look at business decisions and in so doing brings the philosophical problems right into the market place.