ABSTRACT
As was observed earlier, Robinson develops an idealized model containing what she considers to be the basic forces and mechanisms of accumulation and then systematically releases some of the idealizing assumptions, step by step. In economics, this method has been known, at least since Wieser (1914, para. 1), as the method of decreasing abstraction and has often been propounded as themethod of economics: start with a highly idealized theory in which all but the forces that are considered to be most relevant are put on hold,1 and subsequently introduce more and more complicating factors.
