TIME IN ECONOMIC THEORY

Joan Robinson

Kyklos, 1980, vol. 33, issue 2, 219-229

Abstract: Everyday, in real life, the past is irrevocable and the future predicted with a margin of uncertainty. In a theoretical model, time can be frozen but it is a common error to confuse a comparison of static positions with a movement between them. E. H. Carr claims that historians and natural scientist are alike in having given up the search for grand ‘laws’ and are now content to try to learn ‘how things happen’. To improve the status of economics it is necessary to get rid of logical contradictions, which involves eliminating the concept of static equilibrium; to guard against conception by ideological prejudice and to use the study of history, as it unfolds, to check up on the hypotheses that theory suggests.

Date: 1980
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