1,549 works, 150 years of economic thought. Each one summarized and searchable, with cited passages inside.
The entrepreneur who sinks his fortune into a single plant makes a choice no lottery can model — and it is mathematical expectation, the workhorse of investment appraisal, that Shackle attacks in this sequel. Multiplying outcomes by probabilities and summing them, he argues, is legitimate only where an experiment is divisible or seriable, so that a spread of results can be possessed as a statistical aggregate; one business commitment has no such structure. The textbook urn and the game of chance are closed worlds that bar by rule the very unknowns constituting reality. In their place stand focus-values — the strongest gain one can plausibly hope for and the gravest loss one must plausibly fear — standardized on a gambler's indifference map, where a steeper feared loss demands a larger promised gain. The framework recasts Kalecki's principle of increasing risk without objective probability.
When the course of action is a non-divisible non-seriable experiment, such an additive procedure loses entirely the relevance it has for a divisible experiment, and has only one claim to fall back on: that of being a compromise.
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.
Can devaluation cure a trade deficit? The mid-century answer split into two camps, and this 1955 article refuses to let either win outright. Against Sidney Alexander's claim that his 'income-absorption' approach supersedes the older elasticities method, Machlup grants the weaknesses of relative-price reasoning — supply and demand curves for foreign exchange shift once devaluation changes costs and incomes — but shows that the accounting identity Y ≡ A + B, however clarifying, is no causal theory. Alexander's gravest omission is resource reallocation: devaluation can raise real income by moving resources into more valuable uses, an effect no marginal propensity to absorb can capture. Reasoning from identities, Machlup warns, tempts the analyst into implicit theorizing. Neither set of tools can be spared; both relative prices and aggregate spending are needed.
The trade balance is negative when the nation absorbs more than its income.
Appresentation, Husserl's name for the pairing by which something present makes something absent, hidden, or transcendent co-present, becomes the master key to a general theory of signs and symbols. Schütz assembles a graded scale: private mnemonic marks that recover a past intention, indications like smoke for fire, signs proper that carry another person's experience across the intersubjective world, and finally symbols, which alone reach beyond everyday life. Reworking William James's sub-universes into closed provinces of meaning, dream, play, art, science, religion, he argues that the paramount reality is the only sphere in which bodies act, resist, and communicate, and that a symbol is precisely a worldly vehicle appresenting a meaning that belongs to another province. Society itself, its nations, offices, and institutions, is grasped only through such symbolic forms; humankind is animal symbolicum.
Es gibt keine Bestandteile der Erfahrung, die nur Symbole oder nur Bedeutungen sind.
English translation: “There are no components of experience that are only symbols or only meanings.”
Once the Exchequer acquires a duty to stabilize aggregate demand, the old arithmetic of matching revenue to authorized expenditure no longer suffices. Written in 1947 in the wake of Keynes, this essay treats every fiscal stream as a force acting on monetary demand relative to the supply of goods, and builds a pair of indices—deflative P and inflative Q—to measure the initial thrust of a specified receipt or disbursement before secondary reactions unfold. Shackle's taxonomy of pensioners, policemen, postmen, palace-builders, and paper-makers shows why a payment that adds no saleable output pushes prices up while a purchase for resale may prove deflative. A tax label alone, he insists, never fixes the direction of pressure; only the composition of spending does.
The Exchequer, in deciding the size, method and timing of its levies and disbursements, must nowadays be guided by two quite distinct sets of considerations.
'Profit,' Shackle observes, names two quite distinct things: the realized figure an accountant records and the forward-looking conjecture that induces an enterpriser to commit resources at all. Because production takes time, those resources must be specialized before the future market is known, and it is this unavoidable uncertainty that creates the enterpriser's double role as decision-maker and uncertainty-bearer. Written for accountants but aimed at economic theory, the essay dismisses both the rough 'best guess' and mathematical expectation, whose frequency ratios describe repeatable series but say nothing about founding a firm or building a factory. In their place stands potential surprise: ventures compared through focus-gain and focus-loss rather than a single maximized number. Timeless Walrasian equilibrium, he charges, excludes the very time, novelty, and monopoly from which profit springs.
In all production, because it takes time, there is an ineradicable uncertainty.
How can a person coherently expect to be surprised? Shackle's Economica note turns the paradox into a piece of logic. To expect an event, in his vocabulary, is to attach zero potential surprise to it — so a counter-expected outcome, one already imagined and rejected, cannot be the source of true surprise; only the genuinely unexpected, a possibility never before entertained, can. His resolution is the residual hypothesis: a deliberate heading for the possibilities one cannot yet specify, to which zero potential surprise may attach even as its detailed content is bound to astonish, like a nineteenth-century physicist confronted with a digital computer. The economics follows. When residual ignorance threatens widely separated gains and losses on a gambler's indifference map, doing nothing and holding cash may outrank any active policy — a theory of enterprise inhibited by news too obscure to interpret.
In contrast with this I define an unexpected event as one which has never been formulated in the individual’s imagination, which has never entered his mind or been in any way envisaged.
Split cleanly in two, the Keynesian multiplier here becomes an instantaneous logical ratio implied by the marginal propensity to consume and a dynamic process by which output actually adjusts over time. The first follows at once from how income-receivers divide any increment between spending and accumulation; but that behaviour alone, Shackle stresses, cannot explain why firms would expand the output of consumption goods. Only assumptions about entrepreneurs' reactions to sales, inventories, and expected income turn the ratio into a theory of production. Where earlier writers assumed intended accumulation and realized saving simply coincide, he foregrounds their possible divergence: an attempt to raise the pace of accumulation runs down consumer-goods stocks unless output follows. The open-economy extension folds an export surplus into the same field as domestic investment, so a rising surplus can set expansion going exactly as investment does.
Hitherto in expressing the multiplier principle authors have assumed *equality*.
Can the word 'profit' keep a precise role in economic theory once production is recognized as action stretched through time and shadowed by uncertainty? Shackle's answer is that it cannot serve as one concept, because it silently names two: the imagined inducement that draws an enterpriser into a venture and the recorded result by which the finished venture is judged. Productive services are committed long before the product's exchange value can be known, so contractual payments merely shift uncertainty onto the equity owner rather than abolishing it. Ex ante profit, on this account, is no scalar to be maximized but a configuration of hoped-for gain and feared loss, handled through focus-gain, focus-loss, and the φ-surface. To confuse that conjectural lure with its retrospective outcome, he warns, is an error bred by static, timeless thinking; the argument was spurred by J. A. Stockfisch and J. Fred Weston.
It is only in a static analysis, the description of a situation which is essentially timeless, that a single concept of ‘profit’ could ever be enough.
Before asking how interest-rates are determined, Shackle insists on a prior matter — what interest actually is, and what realities it manifests. His answer breaks with time-preference theory, which presumes agents already know their future, and pushes Keynes's liquidity-preference further by refusing to tame the unknown with probability. Wealth, held for 'possessor-satisfaction' as much as future consumption, may take the form of banknotes, bonds, or equipment; a man who trades banknotes for a bond swaps a known for an unknown quantity of money, and pure interest is the premium for surrendering that certainty. From gain- and loss-epitomes and uncertainty indifference curves the argument builds toward an aggregate model in which saving equals investment by identity, and finally to the British cheap-money drive of 1945–47, where reversing gilt-edged prices betray interest as a manifestation of uncertainty rather than credit standing or thrift.
The rate of interest is, of all prices, the one most inseparably bound up by the logic of its very nature with expectation and uncertainty.
Between apriorism and a crude empiricism that would test every assumption in isolation, Machlup marks out a middle path for what 'verification' can mean in economics. He lowers the stakes deliberately: verification is not access to final truth but a disciplined comparison between what a theory implies and what inquiry discloses. His pivotal distinction separates particular historical propositions, checkable directly, from general hypotheses that yield conclusions only when joined to auxiliary assumptions about conditions and change. Fundamental postulates such as rational action need no independent sense-verification; they make conduct intelligible and are judged by the fruitfulness of the systems they support. Steering past both Misesian apriorism and Hutchison-style ultra-empiricism, and drawing on physics, Einstein, and Braithwaite, he holds that economics stays empirically disciplined while a hypothesis, at most, survives as not disconfirmed.
The hypothesis is confirmed if reasonable correspondence is found between the deduced and the observed, or more correctly, if no irreconcilable contradiction is found between the deduced and the observed.
Rappard, a Geneva economist who had taught at Harvard, set out to explain a fact many Europeans preferred to explain away: that the United States enjoyed a material abundance no rival approached, and had done so well before two world wars widened the gap. Offered here in the 1955 English translation of his 1954 French study, and prefaced by Henry Hazlitt, the argument marshals figures on national income, population, and production before turning to observers from Adam Smith and Tocqueville to Mill. The wealth, he concludes, springs less from virgin soil than from labor and its productivity—driven by mass production, the marriage of laboratory and workshop, a sheer passion for output, and above all the spirit of competition that European cartels had smothered. Economic superiority, he cautions, implies no superiority of soul.
The United States are today by far the richest nation in the world because they produce by far the most wealth.