“What are the questions?”

In a 1977 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, Joan Robinson [17] asked the same question. She suggested in that paper that the questions economists ask, as well as the answers they provide, are determined more by political outlook and ideology than anything else. “In economics,” she wrote [17, p. 1318], “arguments are largely devoted, as in theology, to supporting doctrines rather than testing hypotheses.” She then went on to criticize the questions posed and addressed within the mainstream conventional wisdom of the economics establishment of the time.