ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the first volume of her Collected Economic Papers Joan Robinson declared that when she "worked out The Economics of Imperfect Competition on static assumptions," she "took the wrong turning"; the correct path would have entailed "abandoning the static analysis and trying to come to terms with Marshall's theory of development." 1 This chapter is intended to suggest how Robinson came to take what later appeared to be the wrong path, and to indicate some of the consequences of this error (if an error it was). To do so it is necessary to examine the path for some little distance before the turning, and the features of the landscape and the guidebooks that made the wrong path appear so obviously right. We must therefore pay particular, if selective, attention to Marshall, Pigou, and Sraffa.
