ABSTRACT

Probably the best known of Joan Robinson's passages is her complaint that neoclassical economists did not state the units in which capital is measured:

The student of economic theory is taught to write O = f(L,C) where L is a quantity of labor, C a quantity of capital and O a rate of output of commodities. He is instructed to assume all workers alike, and to measure L in man hours of labor; he is told something about the index-number problem involved in choosing a unit of output; and then he is hurried on to the next question, in the hope that he will forget to ask in what units C is measured. Before ever he does ask, he has become a professor, and so sloppy habits of thought are handed on from one generation to the next. 1