Joan Robinson and MIT

Harvey Gram and Geoffrey Harcourt

History of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 49, issue 3, 437-450

Abstract: Roger Backhouse remarks in “MIT and the Other Cambridge†(History of Political Economy 46, supplement) that the capital theory controversy came to be seen by most of the economics profession as a waste of time. Joan Robinson's 1953 paper “The Production Function and the Theory of Capital†started the controversy. An abbreviated version, published in the second volume of her Collected Economic Papers, made clear that her critique came in two parts. The “constructive†part drew attention to the phenomena of reverse capital deepening and re-switching of techniques and attracted the interest of theorists at MIT and elsewhere. The “negative†part concerned the problem of getting into equilibrium and was, for Robinson, the essence of the controversy. A close reading of the literature shows not only that Robinson was never credited with an understanding of the Achilles' heel that plagues dynamic general equilibrium models, but also that the problem, though variously recognized, was essentially ignored. The suggestion that the capital theory controversy was a waste of time fails to recognize that Robinson had drawn attention to a fundamental unsolved problem in economic theory.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi-org.proxy.lib.duke.edu/10.1215/00182702-4193020 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Joan Robinson and MIT (2016)
Working Paper: Joan Robinson and MIT (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hop:hopeec:v:49:y:2017:i:3:p:437-450

Access Statistics for this article

History of Political Economy is currently edited by Kevin D. Hoover

More articles in History of Political Economy from Duke University Press Duke University Press 905 W. Main Street, Suite 18B Durham, NC 27701.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Center for the History of Political Economy Webmaster ().