ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, several notable writers charged that neoclassical economics is ‘timeless’ [e.g. Georgescu-Roegen 1971; Shackle 1972] or that it is not ‘in time’ [Hicks 1976]. This charge was considered a serious indictment of neoclassical economics by those who insisted that economic analysis of real-world problems must start from the proposition that real time matters [Dobb 1937; Robinson 1962, 1974]. However, this criticism has yet to be favorably received in the
literature, not least because it is based on a narrow and somewhat misleading interpretation of neoclassical economics.1 Strictly speaking, neoclassical economics is not necessarily timeless. Indeed, several types of neoclassical models have treated time explicitly: as a subscript which locates goods and prices at a point in time [e.g. Arrow and Debreu 1954, Koopmans 1957, Debreu 1959], as a scarce resource [e.g. Becker 1971], and in the form of added time-differential functions or equations which define the rates of change of certain variables [e.g. Frisch 1936, Samuelson 1947/65]. The proper question to ask then is not whether neoclassical economics is timeless but whether its treatment of time is adequate. Whether it is adequate can only be determined with respect to a specific problem.
