Uncertainty in economics and other reflections
Shackle, G. L. S.
Uncertainty in economics and other reflections - Cambridge Cambridge university pres 1955 - 267 p.
The strand of thought which links these essays is the nature and effects of uncertain expectation. But only the first of the four parts of this book is concerned with the evolution since 1949 of the ideas which I then put forward in Expectation in Economics. The first essay of all is an attempt to express those ideas without any technical apparatus of diagrams or mathematical notation. Of the three cardinal ideas which constitute my theory of expectation, the most difficult to explain has proved to be that of potential surprise. This difficulty appeared with especial vividness when I was honoured by an invitation to take part in the Colloquium on the Theory of Risk in Econometrics held at the Sorbonne in May 1952. Amongst the other members of the Colloquium I found only three who seemed able to place themselves at my viewpoint, Professor Kenneth Arrow, M. Pierre Massé and Professor Herman Wold. It was the last-named whose profound and sympathetic examination of my approach mainly inspired me to try to make still clearer its point and purpose, and to express more systematically my objections to the use of probability as a means of analysing and describing a mental state of uncertainty, and my grounds for claiming that the difficulties could be resolved by the concept of potential surprise. The occasion for this attempt was provided by the invitation to deliver a Special University Lecture at the University of London in October 1952, and this lecture is here reprinted as the second essay of Part I. The editor of Metroeconomica, Professor Eraldo Fossati (to whom I feel the warmest gratitude for great and repeated kindness), having published what appear here as Essays I and II, then asked me to complete the restatement of my ideas by writing Essay III. Essay IV seeks to push the analysis of the nature of expectation a step further, in one direc tion, than was done in Expectation in Economics. Essays V, VI and VII were written in the effort to get those elements of my theory, which critics found hardest to assimilate, understood and accepted. The last two essays of Part I seek to make the theory a means of stating, if no more, the problem of profit in a form which is not stultified by failure to distinguish between past and future.
Economics
330 Sha
Uncertainty in economics and other reflections - Cambridge Cambridge university pres 1955 - 267 p.
The strand of thought which links these essays is the nature and effects of uncertain expectation. But only the first of the four parts of this book is concerned with the evolution since 1949 of the ideas which I then put forward in Expectation in Economics. The first essay of all is an attempt to express those ideas without any technical apparatus of diagrams or mathematical notation. Of the three cardinal ideas which constitute my theory of expectation, the most difficult to explain has proved to be that of potential surprise. This difficulty appeared with especial vividness when I was honoured by an invitation to take part in the Colloquium on the Theory of Risk in Econometrics held at the Sorbonne in May 1952. Amongst the other members of the Colloquium I found only three who seemed able to place themselves at my viewpoint, Professor Kenneth Arrow, M. Pierre Massé and Professor Herman Wold. It was the last-named whose profound and sympathetic examination of my approach mainly inspired me to try to make still clearer its point and purpose, and to express more systematically my objections to the use of probability as a means of analysing and describing a mental state of uncertainty, and my grounds for claiming that the difficulties could be resolved by the concept of potential surprise. The occasion for this attempt was provided by the invitation to deliver a Special University Lecture at the University of London in October 1952, and this lecture is here reprinted as the second essay of Part I. The editor of Metroeconomica, Professor Eraldo Fossati (to whom I feel the warmest gratitude for great and repeated kindness), having published what appear here as Essays I and II, then asked me to complete the restatement of my ideas by writing Essay III. Essay IV seeks to push the analysis of the nature of expectation a step further, in one direc tion, than was done in Expectation in Economics. Essays V, VI and VII were written in the effort to get those elements of my theory, which critics found hardest to assimilate, understood and accepted. The last two essays of Part I seek to make the theory a means of stating, if no more, the problem of profit in a form which is not stultified by failure to distinguish between past and future.
Economics
330 Sha