Shackle’s Economics

Abstract

Shackle lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, Keynes’s revolution, Stalinism, the decline of the British Empire, the Cold War, Maoism and the sexual revolution. The first steps on the moon were in the year he retired. Will and imagination had proved autonomous. In response to macroeconomic turmoil during the 1970s and 1980s, more self-described revolutions and counter-revolutions burst into print. The world and our view of it had often reconfigured. In Shackle’s case, sober realism as well as his leanings to romanticism had shaped his thinking towards kaleidics. The key driver was uncertainty, ‘which gives room for hope, at the price also of being afraid’ (Shackle, 1966a, p. 133).