A View of Joan Robinson’s Last Decade

I first met Joan in 1971, and in an important sense I met her at just the right time to be open to her influence. One of the odder characteristics of the United States in the late sixties and early seventies was the existence of younger economists (and graduate students) who, although they had become deeply distrustful of establishment policies, notably the war in Vietnam, still accepted more or less without question orthodox economic theory. Although not nearly as young as most of the people whom I have in mind, in other respects I was a case in point. I had just published what can certainly be described as a neoclassical book.