Joan Robinson Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.

Joan Robinson
We make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.

Joan Robinson
Michal Kalecki's claim to priority of publication is indisputable.

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
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
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
It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.

Joan Robinson
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.

Joan Robinson
One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was... a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.

Joan Robinson
The orthodox doctrines of economics which were dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had a clear message. They supported laisser faire, free trade, the gold standard, and the universally advantageous effects of the pursuit of profit by competitive private enterprise.

Joan Robinson
Even if the crises that are looming up are overcome and a new run of prosperity lies ahead, deeper problems will still remain. Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.

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
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
It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.

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
Progress is slow partly from mere intellectual inertia. In a subject where there is no agreed procedure for knocking out errors, doctrines have a long life. A professor teaches what he was taught, and his pupils, with a proper respect and reverence for teachers, set up a resistance against his critics for no other reason than that it was he whose pupils they were.

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
It is the business of economists, not to tell us what to do, but show why what we are doing anyway is in accord with proper principles.

Joan Robinson
It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries.

Joan Robinson
Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

Joan Robinson
The merchant had observed that the marginal utility of daughters decreases with surprising rapidity.

Joan Robinson
Time, so to say, runs at right angles to the page at each point on the curve.

Joan Robinson
Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.

Joan Robinson
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.

Joan Robinson
There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes.

Joan Robinson
A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

Joan Robinson