The archive.

'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.

Business can stall not because the news is bad, but because people cannot make intelligible pictures of what might happen. In this 1953 article, Shackle approaches that economic problem through an apparent contradiction: can someone expect to be surprised? He distinguishes outcomes considered and rejected from outcomes never imagined, introducing a “residual hypothesis” to acknowledge possibilities whose details remain unspecified. A nineteenth-century physicist confronted with an electronic computer illustrates how one might anticipate an explanation while being unable to conceive its content. The economic consequence, Shackle argues, is that recognised gaps in imagination can make holding cash preferable to acting. The article offers a precise distinction between pessimism about known possibilities and hesitation before possibilities one cannot yet describe.

Marginal utility was discovered long before it was believed. Kauder's puzzle is the gap: French, Italian, and Swiss writers had utility and scarcity, Bernoulli its mathematics, Lloyd its marginal insight, yet British classical economics clung to objective labor and cost value. His boldest explanation is theological. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century split was not ignorance but the antagonism of two moral worlds—Calvinist culture, which placed work at the center of social order and made labor value morally compelling, against an Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition that oriented economic life toward need, satisfaction, and the good life. For the nineteenth-century delay Kauder shifts ground, rejecting hedonism, neo-Kantian revival, and bourgeois apologetics alike: what blocked marginalism was the prestige of Ricardian value and the anti-theoretical climate of the historical school, until Menger, Jevons, and Walras wrote where theory still had standing.

Before 1870 the history of the theory of value shows rather strange features, not easily paralleled in the history of any other science.

The complete economist, on Shackle's mischievous accounting, would need mathematics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, geography, politics, prose, and practical finance all at once—an impossible portrait meant to show that no single technique defines the field. Theory, he argues, is the disciplined imaginative construction of recurrent structures; it grows rigorous not by turning algebraic but by drawing out implications and testing them against rival forms. Keynes stands as proof, since abler mathematicians produced no revolution of their own. From this breadth follows an educational program: recruit able rather than residual students, delay premature specialization, and keep mathematics the servant of economic problems. An economist, on this view, is formed by breadth disciplined into judgment—the capacity to quantify without forgetting the people economics is finally about.

Economics emphatically is about chaps.

Even a fully developed economic theory, Morgenstern contends, would leave many policy problems unsolvable — because policy adds demands theory never faces: aims stated quantitatively, timing, tolerated side-effects, feasible computation, and, decisively, a list of admissible means. A problem impossible under one set of permitted operations may become trivial under another, as squaring the circle, Columbus's egg, and the Gordian knot each illustrate. Unemployment could be 'solved' by conscription, work camps, or forced relocation; ruling those out changes the problem itself. Invoking Gödel as a reminder that decidability runs deep, he separates the theoretical solution from the policy solution and warns that civilization, by narrowing the morally acceptable instruments of action, tends to make its economic problems harder even as economic knowledge advances.

The statement that a problem has no solution for a given set of means is exactly equivalent to stating that a contradiction prevails.

Adam Smith did not lay the foundation stone of political economy but its keystone: with this revision Mises opens his 1953 introduction to a selection from The Wealth of Nations, recasting Smith less as a solitary inventor than as the synthesizer who gave the liberal tradition durable architecture and impeccable literary form. Smith's importance, he argues, is civilizational—his laissez-faire principles dismantled mercantilism and secured even the less industrious a standard of living above the well-to-do of earlier days, all under the discipline of consumer sovereignty. Against socialist caricatures of Smith as an apologist for greed, Mises enlists Buckle and Bagehot. Yet the essay ends in warning: read Smith for the origins of freedom, never as a substitute for studying modern economics, any more than reading Euclid replaces mathematics.

Its publication date—1776, the year of the American Declaration of Independence—marks the dawn of freedom both political and economic.

Private ownership does not guarantee economic freedom, Hans Bayer argues, when concentrated power restricts production and leaves workers bearing the costs of failed investment. This 1953 article asks how deliberate economic coordination might instead protect individual development within social security. Bayer’s answer is neither unrestricted competition nor comprehensive nationalization, but a mixed arrangement of private firms, public enterprises, and democratic cooperatives. His distinctive concern is how their investment decisions can be coordinated around anticipated demand and collective welfare without hardening into bureaucracy. Examples from British coal production and Benelux investment cooperation give practical substance to the argument. Readers can examine a conception of freedom that requires protection from private domination while explicitly subordinating individual opportunities to the interests of the community.

For Hans Bayer, economic freedom in postwar Austria requires more than lifting state restrictions: it depends on repairing the institutions that constrain production and sustain monopoly power. This 1953 article treats the economy as a patient whose repeated wage–price settlements have relieved symptoms without addressing their causes. Fragmented farms, poorly coordinated industrial exports, and rigid cartel pricing underpin his argument that inflationary danger follows structural weakness, rather than explaining it. Against the Kamitz programme, Bayer proposes coordinated investment and a public-interest sector of cooperatives and municipal and state enterprises. His distinctive tension lies in making collective economic organization a condition of individual freedom. The article shows concretely how that claim translates into choices about credit, productivity, and the purposes of enterprise.

Accurate forecasts of Swedish food consumption anchor Gerhard Tintner’s favorable assessment of Herman Wold’s Demand Analysis, written in association with Lars Juréen. In this short review, Tintner weighs the study’s combination of ordinal utility theory, classical least-squares estimation, and time-series corrections against its empirical results. He singles out the predictions for 1949–50 as evidence of stable consumption patterns and contrasts their success with other econometric forecasting efforts. His judgement also distinguishes the mathematical expertise needed to assess the book’s original contributions from the accessibility of its introductory and empirical sections. The review offers a concise view of what Tintner valued in demand analysis: theoretical foundations, statistical methods, and forecasts tested against observed consumption.

How can economic agents calculate with subjective values if those values cannot be measured? In this 1953 essay contributed to the Festschrift for Alfred Amonn, Hans Mayer proposes that the missing element is time. A stock allocated across recurring needs differs from one consumed in a single episode: repeated satisfactions of equal importance may, he argues, permit calculation without a numerical measure of utility. Writing from Menger’s account of value, Mayer challenges indifference analysis for overlooking finite quantities, distinct needs, and limits to substitution. His constructive proposal lets readers examine precisely where ranking might become arithmetic—and how shared production inputs might connect otherwise unlike goods. The interest lies in this attempted bridge between ordinal valuation and practical planning, rather than in a claim to have made subjective experience measurable.

How should a theory of choice under uncertainty be judged: by its mathematical consistency, its account of actual conduct, or its rules for rational action? In this 1954 review of the proceedings of the 1952 Paris econometrics colloquium, Gerhard Tintner admires Maurice Allais’s mathematical work without accepting that psychological objections settle the dispute over von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theory. His distinctive concern is methodological: axioms need not be self-evident, descriptions of behavior must be separated from prescriptions, and an idealized model should not be rejected merely because it leaves some motives unexplained. Yet abstraction does not excuse neglect of evidence. The review offers a pointed assessment of where mathematical economics illuminates uncertainty—and where an ostensibly econometric discussion falls short of empirical inquiry.

It is disappointing that a colloquium entitled Econometrics should contain so little empirical material.

Defending Plato against charges of totalitarianism may concede too much if the charges themselves impose categories foreign to philosophy. This is Eric Voegelin’s central reservation in his 1954 joint review of John Wild’s and Ronald B. Levinson’s defenses of Plato. He commends Wild’s grounding of natural law in ontology and Levinson’s painstaking correction of mistranslations and distorted interpretations, yet asks whether textual refutation alone can challenge the accusers’ premises. His dispute with Karl Popper turns on the meaning of an “open society”: drawing on Bergson, Voegelin presents openness to transcendent reality as a source of liberation rather than oppression. The review offers a pointed distinction between correcting an accusation and questioning the standards by which it is made.

Plato was not a democrat or fascist, not a totalitarian or humanitarian, not a friend or an enemy of the open society, for the good reason that he was a philosopher and not a political ideologist.