An eccentric introductory work, structured in the form of a Socratic dialogue, with Shackle setting out 140 important questions and answers across 14 chapters covering such topics as exchange, production, prices, time, employment, foreign trade, and policy.
Shackle’s ‘contributions to economics were wide-ranging but focused on the treatment of time, expectations, and decision-making under conditions of uncertainty, his greatest theoretical innovation being the development of a non-probabilistic theory of decision-making’ (ODNB). His later works were motived by ‘a fundamental criticism of the whole of received economic theory for ignoring the problem of pervasive uncertainty’, here ‘tracing the precise points at which the economics of the interwar years went wrong, leaving little doubt that what is now needed is a total reconstruction of economic theory’ (Blaug, Great Economists since Keynes).
