UNKNOWLEDGE AND CHOICE IN ECONOMICS Also by Stephen F. Frowen CONTROLLING INDUSTRIAL ECONOMIES (editor) BUSINESS, TIME AND THOUGHT: Selected Papers of G. L. S. Shackle (editor) G. L. S. Shackle Photograph by Stephen F. Fro wen taken in 1987 Unknowledge and Choice in Economics Proceedings of a conference in honour of G. L. S. Shackle Edited by Stephen F. Frowen Bundesbank Professor of Monetary Economics The Free University of Berlin Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-08099-1 ISBN 978-1-349-08097-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-08097-7 ©Stephen F. Frowen, I990 Chapter IO © MCB University Press, I990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover I st edition 1990 978-0-333-39480-9 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-02768-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Unknowledge and choice in economics/edited by Stephen F. Frowen. p. em. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-312-02768-1 I. Uncertainty. 2. Risk. 3. Decision-making. 4. Subjectivity. 5. Shackle, G. L. S. (George Lennox Sharman), 1903- . I. Frowen, Stephen F. HB615.U56 1990 330-dcl9 88-26543 CIP Contents Frontispiece G. L. S. Shackle Notes on the Contributors VII Preface xiii George Shackle Conference: List of Participants XV Introduction by G. C. Harcourt xvii G. L. S. Shackle's Place in the History of Subjectivist Thought L. M. Lachmann 2 The Fabric of Economics and the Golden Threads of G. L. S. Shackle 9 Mark Perlman 3 Shackle's Theory of Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Brief Exposition and Critical Assessment 20 J. L. Ford 4 The Use of Scenarios in Business Planning 46 Brian J. Loasby 5 Shackle and Keynes vs. Rational Expectations Theory and the Role of Time- Liquidity and Financial Markets 64 Paul Davidson 6 Imagination, Exchange and Business Enterprise in Smith and Shackle 81 J. A. Kregel 7 Crusoe's Kingdom: Cost, Choice and Political Economy 96 J. Wiseman and S. C. Littlechild 8 Time, Choice and Dynamics in Economics 129 0. F. Hamouda v vi Contents 9 Interest Rates and Investment Decisions 156 Stephen F. Frowen I 0 The Possibility of Possibility 168 John D. Hey 11 Speech by G. L. S. Shackle at the Conference Dinner of the George Shackle Conference, University of Surrey, Guildford, 7 September 1984 192 G. L. S. Shackle: Bibliography 191 Stephen F. Frowen and Catherine Shackle in collaboration with G. L. S. Shackle Index 211 Notes on the Contributors Paul Davidson is the occupant of the J. Fred Holly Chair of Excellence in Political Economy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (USA). He was previously Professor of Economics and Associate Director of the Bureau of Economic Research at Rutgers University. He also held senior visiting posts at the Bank of England, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna and at the Universities of Cambridge and Bristol. Since 1978 he has been editor of the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics. Apart from numerous articles in leading eco­ nomic journals, he has published several books, the most recent of which are Money and the Real World (2nd edition, 1978), Internation­ al Money and the Real World (1982) and (with Greg Davidson) Economics for a Civilized Society (1988). J. L. Ford is Mitsui Professor of Economics and Head of Department at the University of Birmingham. He was Assistant Lecturer and then Lecturer in Economics at the University of Manchester from 1961 to 1968. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in Economics at the New University of Ulster in 1968, moving to the University of Sheffield in 1970 to become Esmee Fairbairn Senior Research Fellow and then Professor of Economics and Head of Department (1972). In 1964---5 he was a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Stanford, Yale and Michigan State Universities; and in 1969 he was Visiting Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests include monetary economics, open-economy macroeconomics and uncertainty and expectations in economics. Amongst his books are: Expectations, Uncertainty and the Term-Structure of Interest Rates (with J. C. Dodds); Choice, Expectation and Uncertainty; Protection­ ism, Exchange Rates and the Macroeconomy (with S. Sen); and Economic Choice under Uncertainty: A Perspective Theory Approach. He has published articles in Economic Journal, Economica, Manches­ ter School, Oxford Economic Papers and many other journals. Stephen F. Frowen is Bundesbank Professor of Monetary Economics in the Free University of Berlin. He was previously Professor of Economics at the University of Frankfurt. For many years he held senior teaching posts at the University of Surrey, following an appointment as Research Officer at the National Institute of Eco- vii viii Notes on the Contributors nomic and Social Research. He has published extensively in monetary economics and banking and has been a visiting professor in several European countries. He is the editor of G. L. S. Shackle's Business, Time and Thought (1988), Controlling Industrial Economies: Essays in Honour of Christopher Thomas Saunders (1983), A Framework of International Banking (1979) and Monetary Policy and Economic Activity in West Germany (with A. S. Courakis and M. H. Miller) (1977). He is also the translator ofKnut Wicksell's Value, Capital and Rent (with a foreword by G. L.S. Shackle; 1954, reprinted 1970). 0. F. Hamouda is Assistant Professor in Economics at Glendon College, York University, Toronto. He was a lecturer at the Univer­ site de Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, in 1978, a Visiting Professor at the University of Moncton in 1979 and Professor at the University of Sherbrooke, Canada, from 1980 to 1985. His principal fields of interest are economic development methods and theories, economic development of less developed countries and domestic monetary and financial theory and institutions. He has published articles in leading economic journals and amongst his books are Expectations, Equi­ librium and Dynamics (with R. Rowley; 1988), Controversies in Political Economy (editor; 1986) and Keynes and Public Policy after Fifty Years (editor with J. N. Smithin; 1988). G. C. Harcourt is university lecturer in economics and politics, University of Cambridge, and President and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is Professor Emeritus of the University of Adelaide, where he worked for twenty-seven years. He was university lecturer in economics and politics and a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 1964-6. In 1971 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and in 1988 he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Letters of the University of Cambridge. Among his books are Economic Activity (with P. H. Karmel and R. H. Wallace, 1967); Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital (1972); (ed.), The Microeconomic Foundations of Macroeconomics (1977), The Social Science Imperialists: Selected Essays (ed. by Prue Kerr (1982)); (ed.) Keynes and his Contemporaries (1985) and Controversies in Political Economy: Selected Essays of G. C. Harcourt (ed. by 0. F. Hamouda, 1986). He has written and co-authored many articles which have appeared in, for example, the Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Review, Journal of Notes on the Contributors IX Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Economica, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Record, Australian Economic Papers and History of Political Economy. John D. Hey is Professor of Economics and Statistics and Co­ Director of the Centre for Experimental Economics at the University of York. He is Managing Editor of the Economic Journal. His main research is into the economics of uncertainty. Apart from articles in learned journals and in books edited by others, he has published several books, including Uncertainty in Microeconomics (1979) and Economics in Disequilibrium (1981), and two volumes Britain in Context (1979) and Surveys in the Economics of Uncertainty (1981) of which he is the joint editor. J. A. Kregel is Professor of International Economics and Associate Director of the Bologna Centre of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He taught in universities in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Germany before taking up his present position in 1985. He has published a number of books and articles in the field of post-Keynesian economic theory including The Reconstruction of Political Economy (1975). He has recently edited Barriers to Full Employment (with A. Roncaglia and E. Matzner, 1988) and Inflation and Income Distribution in Capitalist Crisis: Essays in Memory of Sidney Weintraub (1988). L. M. Lachmann was a graduate student under Professor F. A. Hayek at the London School of Economics specialising in trade-cycle theory. Here he met George Shackle as a fellow student. He subsequently became Leon Research Fellow at the University of London (1938-40) and Acting Head of the Department of Economics, University of Hull (1943-48). From 1948 to 1972 he was Professor of Economics and Economic History in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannes­ burg, South Africa. During the latter period, from 1961 to 1963, he served as President of the Economic Society of South Africa. From 1975 to 1987 he held a Visiting Research Professorship at New York University. After 1975 he took an active part in the revival of Austrian economics. In 1986 he was awarded the Doctor of Economic Science Honoris Causa, University of the Witwatersrand. He has published numerous articles and a number of books including Capital X Notes on the Contributors Structure (1956), The Legacy of Max Weber (1971), Capital, Expec­ tations and the Market Process (1977) and The Market as an Economic Process (1986). S. C. Littlechild is Professor of Commerce and Head of Department of Industrial Economics and Business Studies at the University of Birmingham.