IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v45y2021i5p989-1007..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the relevance of Knight, Keynes and Shackle for unawareness research

Author

Listed:
  • Ekaterina Svetlova

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the interpretation of Knightian and Keynesian uncertainty as a situation of unawareness in which agents lack perfect knowledge of possible future states (not just of probabilities assigned to those states). So far, a systematic and nuanced debate of unawareness with relation to Knight’s and Keynes’ legacy has been largely neglected. The paper aims to fill this gap. It discusses in detail how Knight’s, Keynes’ and also Shackle’s ideas about the state space, surprises and ignorance are echoed (but often unacknowledged) in contemporary unawareness research. Parallel reading of these two streams of the literature reveals strong commonalities in argumentation, suggesting that the topic of unawareness could facilitate the dialogue between Post-Keynesians and mainstream economics. The paper concludes with a list of research questions relevant to the development of such a dialogue.

Suggested Citation

  • Ekaterina Svetlova, 2021. "On the relevance of Knight, Keynes and Shackle for unawareness research," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 45(5), pages 989-1007.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:45:y:2021:i:5:p:989-1007.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/beab033
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:45:y:2021:i:5:p:989-1007.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.