George Lennox Sharman Shackle (14 July 1903 – 3 March 1992) was an English economist. He made a practical attempt to challenge classical rational choice theory and has been characterised as a "post-Keynesian", though he is influenced as well by Austrian economics. Much of his work is associated with the Dempster–Shafer theory of evidence.
Life He was born in Cambridge, son of Robert Walker Shackle (1851-1934), a mathematics-teacher father who had coached John Maynard Keynes to an Eton scholarship, and Fanny Sharman (1865-1936). Shackle attended The Perse School; but his parents could not afford to support him through university, so he started work as a bank clerk. Later becoming a teacher, he studied in his own time for a University of London BA degree which he took in 1931. He started work on a PhD under the supervision of Friedrich Hayek at the LSE but switched to an interpretation of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. He obtained his doctorate in 1937. At LSE he became good friends with German born economist Ludwig Lachmann, who was inspired by Shackle's own work on uncertainty; and developed his own theory of divergent expectations based on Shackle's writing. Following a number of academic posts, at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Shackle was appointed to S-Branch, Sir Winston Churchill's inner office of economists. There he served along with Donald MacDougall and Helen Makower under the leadership of Frederick Lindemann. Following the war, a short stint at the Cabinet Office under James Meade and at the University of Leeds led to appointment as Brunner Professor of Economics at the University of Liverpool, a post he held until his retirement in 1969.
Overview Shackle was influenced by Keynes and Gunnar Myrdal and challenged the conventional role of probability in economics, contending that it failed adequately to deal with "surprising" events. The grounds of his thinking can be seen in Keynes's remark:
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