Joan Robinson and MIT

Abstract

Roger Backhouse begins his essay on “MIT and the Other Cambridge” (Backhouse, 2014; hereafter RB with page numbers only) citing Joan Robinson’s “challenge to what she chose to call the neoclassical theory of production” (RB, p. 252). His title referred, of course, to Robinson’s protagonists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; in particular, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. After developing his thesis that disequilibrium macroeconomics emerged as a by-product of the capital theory controversy, Backhouse concludes with the observation: “The controversy between the two Cambridges eventually came to be seen by MIT economists (and most of the economics profession) as a waste of time” (RB, p. 269).