Like many students of Economics in the late Seventies, I was brought up to believe that Joan Robinson had subverted Marshallian orthodoxy not so much by her theory of imperfect competition as by her Keynesian elision of the conventional term 'sex-donkey' in referring to Amartya Sen as 'young, hung and full of dung'. Needless to say, the verdict of history has not been kind to my adolescent pieties. By the time Nahid Aslanbeigui & Guy Oakes published 'The provocative Joan Robinson' in 2009, it was clear that Alfred Marshall was right. Women are good Economists but terrible theorists. They don't understand that the true function of a sex-donkey bears little correlation with its capacity to produce dung. It is only within a broader Capabilities approach to Development as Freedom to achieve Equality of Autonomy as a Sex Donkey that Public Reasoning can be properly grounded.
Why was this not always obvious?
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