Whatever form it takes, the possession of the imaginative gift transforms the problem of accounting for human conduct. For now it is not a question o… - G. L. S. Shackle

A discipline, a region of the world of thought, should seek to know itself. Like an individual human being, it has received from its origins a stamp of character, a native mode of response to the situations confronting it. Right responses, 'responsibility', will require of the profession as of the individual an insight into the powers and defects of the tool which history has bequeathed to it.

Before the Treatise, the interest- rate was determined by tastes and objective circumstances, by the persuasibility of income-earners to transfer consumption from the present to the future, and the desire of business men to transfer the means of free enterprise from the future to the present, thus altering the productive possibilities and enlarging the prospective income of the society including themselves.

The bond price, and, as an arithmetical and rigid consequence, the interest rate is an inherently restless variable.