Robinson was a genius, and her points on our lack of ability to generalise lessons on capital were true – however, instead of following what seemed like the logical conclusion of this (we know less than we think we do about investment) she wandered off and became a big fan of central planning.

I didn’t realise how unclear my statement was until I saw your reply – I often start defending against things before they’ve turned up in an argument, that is a bad habit and I need to get it under control 🙂

I hope to see you pop up with points in these discussions in the future – they will be on all sorts of issues, some of the quotes will even be things I completely disagree with!

Funny, I was just reading some Joan Robinson yesterday, and found her making a lot of sense. No, really. Mind you, it was a small amount of sense amid a sea of non-sense.

Happy to accept your apology, and disappointed to hear entrepreneurs lost a champion.

“Not everything that is valuable can be measured, and not everything that can be measured is valuable.”

Ahh sorry, the last sentence was not targeted at you and the term entrepreneur at all – it was targeted at a common view of what people think economists do (which I was trying to say is not what we do). Rereading I realise that wasn’t clear, my apologies!

I also think your comments can be generous, I was just concerned your point was tarring all economists, and economics, with a certain brush that wasn’t appropriate. We are not all Joan Robinson 😉

I am very interested in entrepreneurs, I wanted to do my Masters thesis on entrepreneurship – specifically discussing it along an extensive and intensive margin (within firm and externally of the firm). But in the end I moved along to a different topic looking at when we would expect firms to overhire managers as a form of ‘capacity’ for competition.

I also think entrepreneurs can get too ignored, and that dynamic efficiency gets too ignored as it is “harder to measure” than static measures. This is dangerous. It is an important for economists not to confuse what is measurable with what is important!

The criticisms I’ve raised are along the lines of things I think you agree with, no? And I think they’d be neat points for having a debate about the quote I popped up, rather than simply stating as blanket fact that most economists are ignorant of the ideas 😉

Well, I never said I was generous. There you are: I’m not generous.

But I’m astonished to hear you think entrepreneur is “a vague group term.”

(And, by the way, who do economists think makes productivity “efficient” in *both* senses?)

LOL, what an incredibly ungenerous comment!

Economists do know the difference between static and dynamic efficiency. We just also recognise that these questions are difficult, and that we have to attempt to answer small but tightly defined questions to create knowledge.

A determination to throw around vague group terms and pretend we have universal rules is in the purview of charlatans, not economists.

Well, since most economists don’t even recognise entrepreneurs let alone try to “sneak” them into their production functions and equilibrium equations, I guess you being able to spell the word counts for something.

Hahaha, it depends how we defined “menu” I guess.

I don’t think this quote was uttered by anyone. I just have a series of different little metaphors and thought experiments I thought I’d put down in absence of posts 😛 . It is fun to tear apart, or even try to defend, these types of half formed statements.

I was going to sneak entrepreneurs in there – I was going to put them in as the ones making the meal. But I thought there was enough to argue about in the arbitrary metaphor to start with 🙂

Nice use of the metaphor, I like it a lot