Joan Robinson, a leading Keynesian during the 1930s, provides a new look at the theory of value, distribution and accumulation to propose a fundamental reorientation of economic theory to look at the problems of modern life. In this chapter Robinson argues that increasing and diminishing returns have – in origin – nothing in common. The author looks at a change (in output, prices or costs) as an event that alters the situation in which the change took place and brings historical time into the argument about increasing/diminishing returns. “Economic history is notoriously a scene of conflicting interests, which is just what the neoclassical economists did not want to discuss.”
