Joan Robinson Quotes

57 Sourced Quotes

There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.

Joan Robinson
But once we bring historical time into the argument, it is not so easy to present the free play of the market as an ideal mechanism for maximizing welfare and securing social justice.

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
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
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
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
Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.

Joan Robinson
The bastard Keynesian doctrine, evolved in the United States, invaded the economic faculties of the world, floating on the wings of the almighty dollar.

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
The very nature of economics is rooted in nationalism.... It [was] developed... in the hope of throwing light upon questions of policy. But policy means nothing unless there is an authority to carry it out, and authorities are national.

Joan Robinson
'Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.

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
If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them.

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
Modern technique, as Marx pointed out, fosters the concentration of capital, and the levels of profits is supported by a scarcity of enterprise which is not due to the real cost of risk-bearing, but to the scarcity of individuals who have anything to risk.

Joan Robinson
At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under seperate national governments — there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses.

Joan Robinson
But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.

Joan Robinson
A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.

Joan Robinson
The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.

Joan Robinson
To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a ' burden upon industry '. It is for this reason that when, as a nation, ' we have never had it so good ' we find that we ' cannot afford ' just what we most need.

Joan Robinson
Science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.

Joan Robinson
Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it.... Absolute misery grows while wealth increases.

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

Joan Robinson
Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

Joan Robinson
Economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

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
Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?

Joan Robinson
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
Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

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

Joan Robinson