Zusammenfassung
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.

Inhalt

THEORY AND THE SCHEME OF THINGS ENTIRE, 1. Economic Theory and the Formal Imagination, 2. Time, novelty, geometry, 3. Self-subsistent and non-self-subsistent sciences, 4. Valuation, variety and scalar quantity, 5. Formal codes and their efficiency, 6. Orientations, 7. Reason versus knowledge, BOOK II. THE RISE OF THE RATIONAL IDEAL, 8. The construct of reason, 9. Subjective marginalism, 10. The concept of value, 11. Quantity versus form, 12. The rational ideal as the core of economic theory, 13. Cost and the meaning of choice, 14. Perfect competition and conceptual illusionism, 15. The value-construct in the round, BOOK III. THE DISSOLUTION OF THE RATIONAL IDEAL, 16. Expectation: the dissolution of determinacy, 17. Chapter 2 of the General Theory: two entrances for involuntary unemployment, 18. Kaleidic investment-values, 19. Lender's uncertainty and the nature of interest-rates, 20. Liquidity: its nature, 21. Prices as convention, 22. The dissolution of rational determinacy, BOOK IV. STATICS: THE REJECTION OF TIME, 23. The calculus and the subjective ideal, 24. Simultaneous equations and the market ideal, 25. Partial equilibrium, 26. The rejection of time, BOOK V. DIACHRONISM: THE ARTEFACT OF TIME, 27. Diachronism: the assimilation of time to space, 28. Marshall's accommodation of time, 29. Capital, or the time-net of production, 30. Business cycle engines, 31. History, theory and world-picture, 32. The sovereignty of theory, BOOK VI. EPISTEMICS VERSUS AXIOMATICS, 33. The science of imprecision, 34. Languages for expectation, 35. Profit, 36. Game theory's exclusion of tactical surprise, 37. Kaleidic economics, 38. Economic theory unbound, Index