Joan Robinson: An Informal Memoir

Abstract

My first encounter with Joan Robinson was when I was a graduate student and read her Review of Economic Studies article on the concept of capital and the production function. This left me (and apparently many other people) bewildered; in my case not only because I had difficulty in following her argument, but also because due to defects in my education in economics, I was not very familiar with the concept of capital she was attacking. What I had studied of economic theory, general equilibrium theory, made me doubt that it was possible to summarize general production sets in a two-dimensional space, but I was in enough awe of those very successful theorists who asserted that it was possible, that I decided to avoid thinking about the problem too hard.