Knowledge that Transforms

This book is a collection of some of Professor Shackle's papers written between 1939 and 1953 is largely concerned with the problems of 'expectation' and 'uncertainty' and with reducing these universal factors to some sort of plausible rules. Also included are essays on interest rates, on investment and employment, and on the philosophy of economics. This book, by one of the finest economic writers of his time, will appeal to anyone with an interest in the history of economics.

The problem of aggregating individual preference orderings to form a social ordering took a new turn when Arrow organized the subject abstractly. We study here his celebrated theorem that five plausible conditions on the method of aggregation are inconsistent. This theorem is in fact false in general, as a counterexample shows. When we increase the amount of disagreement which is allowed to occur, then the inconsistency is restored. The modified result preserves much of the impact of the original theorem.