Kaleidics
The term kaleidics ( kalos: "good", "beautiful"; εἶδος eidos: "form", "shape") denotes the ever-changing shape and status of an economy. Uncertainty is the primary kaleidic factor. It is strongly associated with the work of George Shackle, who had a rather radical interpretation of Keynesian economic theory. He surmised that the uncertainty in a capitalist economy was due to the irrational nature of investment, which is often driven by irrational fears, rumors, and superstition, rather than what is traditionally assumed to be cold, hard, calculation. Such theories lead to the view, expressed in Viennese kaleidics, that the turbulence of markets cannot be smoothed through government interference, and must therefore be left to their own devices. Uncertainty in economics British economist George Lennox Sharman Shackle, who has been characterised as a post-Keynesian but also as influenced by Austrian economics, made an attempt to challenge classical rational choice theory. He used the term "kaleidostatics" (or "kaleido-statics"), derived from "kaleidoscope", to describe the status of the economy in the particular posture which prevails at any point in time, a status due to "particular expectations, or rather, particular agreed formulas about the future, [as] are for the moment widely accepted." This status, however, as Shackle continues in defining the term, "can change as swiftly, as completely, and on as slight a provocation as the loose, ephemeral mosaic of the kaleidoscope. A twist of the hand, a piece of 'news', can shatter one picture and replace it with a different one." A status, therefore, that is anything but stable. German economist Ludwig Lachmann, an important contributor to the Austrian School stated, in agreement with Shackle, that the magnitude of profits in an economy, in each period, is shaped mainly by "short-period forces." Lachmann wrote that "a long-run force" is at work, all the time, tending to eliminate these price/cost differences and asserted that "in a long-run equilibrium, in which, by definition, the equilibrating forces have finally prevailed over all the forces of disruption, there are no profits." The persistence of profits in a market economy, Lachmann's argument went, is due to the persistence of disequilibrium in some sector of the economic system; "As in a kaleidoscope, the constellation of forces operating in the system as a whole is ever changing." And, Lachmann concluded, it is "kaleido-statics rather than static equilibrium" the method of analysis that is most appropriate to "the reality of the market economy." This led Lachmann to assert that an "equilibrium rate of profit is...a contradiction in terms." Critics of the notion of "kaleidics" view it as eliminating the prospect of advancing a claim about an objective reality, and to be replacing such claims with statements that are the private property of the observer. Keynesian kaleidics John Maynard Keynes insisted upon dividing the total demand for money into several separate demands, each identified with some specific purpose. In the 1937 article, titled "The General Theory of Employment", in which he elaborates on his 1936 book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Keynes