Joan Robinson Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

An economy may be in equilibrium from a short-period point of view and yet contain within itself incompatibilities that are soon going to knock it out of equilibrium.

Joan Robinson
When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.

Joan Robinson
Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.

Joan Robinson
Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx's penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value provides the incantations.

Joan Robinson
The fundamental differences between Marxian and traditional orthodox economics are, first, that the orthodox economists accept the capitalist system as part of the eternal order of Nature, while Marx regards it as a passing phase in the transition from the feudal economy of the past to the socialist economy of the future.

Joan Robinson
In general, the nightmare quality of Marx's thought gives it, in this bedevilled age, an air of greater reality than the gentle complacency of the orthodox academics. Yet he, at the same time, is more encouraging than they, for he releases hope as well as terror from Pandora's box, while they preach only the gloomy doctrine that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

Joan Robinson
In all the talk in the Principles (as opposed to the formal analysis) it is not the saving of rentiers but the energy of entrepreneurs which governs accumulation.

Joan Robinson
Until recently, Marx used to be treated in academic circles with contemptuous silence, broken only by an occasional mocking footnote. But modern developments in academic theory, forced by modern developments in economic life — the analysis of monopoly and the analysis of unemployment — have shattered the structure of orthodox doctrine and destroyed the complacency with which economists were wont to view the working of laissez-faire capitalism. Their attitude to Marx, as the leading critic of capitalism, is therefore much less cocksure than it used to be. In my belief, they have much to learn from him.

Joan Robinson
If knowledge develops as capital accumulates, there need be no tendency to diminishing returns, and with constant returns there can be no tendency for the rate of profit to fall (always assuming that the problem of effective demand as ruled out).

Joan Robinson
I do not regard the Keynesian revolution as a great intellectual triumph. On the contrary, it was a tragedy because it came so late. Hitler had already found out how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occured.

Joan Robinson
But the tygers of wrath go the other way. Do not ask me why. It is just a fact I noticed when I was looking through field glasses from a machan.

Joan Robinson
I began to read Capital, just as one reads any book, to see what was in it; I found a great deal that neither its followers nor its opponents had prepared me to expect.

Joan Robinson
It seems that neither the Keynesian nor the Marxian prognosis of the future of capitalism is being fulfilled and we are left without any particular theory as to what will happen next.

Joan Robinson
It is high time to abandon the mainstream and take to the turbulent waters of truly dynamic analysis.

Joan Robinson
Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.

Joan Robinson
The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.

Joan Robinson
Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.

Joan Robinson
Rosa Luxemburg maintained that the capitalist system can keep up its rate of investment (and therefore its profits) only so long as it is expanding geographically.

Joan Robinson
Why did the hunters in the Wealth of Nations exchange beavers for deer?

Joan Robinson
When a large part of the market for British textiles was in the colonies, a fall in the price of tea and cocoa caused unemployment in Lancashire.

Joan Robinson