----- Original Message ----
From: Mason Gaffney 
Re the Mongiovi-Lee-Colander dialogue, I love Colander's quote from
Robinson, "Neoclassicals change the emphasis from big questions to
price-of-eggs questions". Pithy and on target!

 
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It is probably a good idea to get the quote correct. It comes from Joan Robinson's "Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist" (who was known to be Ronald Meek):

"For Ricardo the Theory of Value was a means of studying the distribution of total output between wages, rent and profit, each considered as a whole. This is a big question. Marshall turned the meaning of Value into a little question: why does an egg cost more than a cup of tea. ...  Keynes changed the question back again. He started thinking in Ricardo's terms: output as a whole and why worry about a cup of tea? When you are thinking about output as a whole, relative prices come out in the wash--including the relative price of money and labour. The price level comes into the argument, but it comes in as a complication, not as the main point. If you have had some practice on Ricardo's bicycle you do not need to stop and ask yourself what to do in a case like that, you just do it. You assume away the complication till you have got the main problem worked out. So Keynes began by getting money prices out of the way. Marshall's cup of tea dissolved into thin
 air. But if you cannot use money, what unit of value do you take? A man hour of labour time. It is the most handy and sensible measure of value, so naturally you take it. You do not have to prove anything. you just do it.

"Well there you are - we are back on Ricardo's large questions, and we are using Marx's unit of value. What is it that you are complaining about?"

Michael Nuwer