ABSTRACT
I first got to know Geoff Harcourt’s work through his wonderful review essay on the Cambridge Capital Controversy (Harcourt 1969). I had entered graduate school in economics at Columbia University in the Fall of 1967, and helped occupy the buildings in the student strike of 1968, and was generally disrespectful of the neoclassical theory I was being taught. Geoff’s essay had an immediate and powerful impact on my thinking. It introduced me to the works of Joan Robinson, Sraffa, Pasinetti, Garegnani, Bhaduri and many others. It showed me that classical and Marxian economics could be rigorous alternatives to neoclassical theory. Its critique of the notion of an aggregate production function led directly to my first seminar paper, which also became my first publication shortly thereafter, entitled The Humbug production function’. Its discussion led me directly back to Sraffa’s little book, and through it to the classical economists and to Marx. These ideas continue to ground my work to this very day. All in all, Geoff’s article became such an important part of my intellectual arsenal that the very sight of this dog-eared and tattered copy frightened my beleaguered professors (most of whom, however, successfully resisted the temptation to read it).
