This article was written at the invitation of the Editor of this journal. In earlier correspondence the point was made that the author had been "having second thoughts on the decline of some departments of agricultural economics which were of a more applied nature" and that "this year will mark a decade since the emergence of Earl Heady's massive tome", Economics of Agricultural Production and Resource Use, Prentice-Hall, Inc. New Jersey, 1952. The suggestion was made to the author "that perhaps you could review developments in the field of production economics since the birth of the Heady opus". Preferably, the article should be viewed as critical of certain developments in our profession, the origins of which extend back in history prior to the lives of any living person and horizontally in our society beyond the realms of production economics and, for that matter, far beyond the social science disciplines. The need is for criticism of a development and not for criticism of the people who participated in the development.