Decision Order and Time in Human Affairs

Originally published in 1969 the second edition of Professor Shackle''s book has a fresh preface an extra chapter and a number of additions to its bibliography. The extra chapter is concerned with the point at which one would decide to abandon an old policy and replace it with a new one. It is in the words of the author a further rather radical development of the Stockholm sequence analysis. Professor Shackle examines how a decision can be rational only in a special sense that of exploiting to the best present effect on the decision-maker''s state of mind the scope afforded to imagination by what is known and by the gaps in that knowledge. The attempt made in this book to provide a theory of such decision has been called ''an existentialist economics''.