Comes from Shackle’s singular 1972 work, Epistemics and Economics:
“If there is a fundamental conflict between the appeal to rationality and the consideration of the consequence of time as it imprisons us in actuality, the theoretician is confronted with a stark choice. He can reject rationality or time. The theory which rejects time has certain technical features, often referred to as, respectively, subjective marginalism, the market mechanism, and partial equilibrium…
…The other road consists in abandoning, not the word ‘time’, but its meaning of a forceps which grips us between the past which is unchoosable and the future which is unknowable.”
Shackle’s Orphic prose accurately captures the strangeness of our predicament. We are, in a sense, imprisoned by time. Despite that, our species moves through time and into an unknowable future and not only survives, but thrives. The strangeness stems from the fact that it shouldn’t be possible beyond the most basic of plans. Yet complex plans are carried out, economic calculations are accurately made, people are fed, clothed, housed, entertained, etc. And not in spite of the complexity of society, but because of it. The greatest attribute of our species is its ability to unwittingly generate vast cultural and social complexity as a way to solve the problems of time and ignorance.
