Joan Robinson
Joan Robinson
Joan Violet Robinson FBAwas a British economist who was well known for her work on monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. She was the daughter of Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, 1st Baronet, and was married to Austin Robinson, a fellow economist. Together, they had two children...
views may economy
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.
teacher errors long
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.
complaining hearing orthodoxy
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.
law progress tasks
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.
saving flow add
It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.
fall errors government
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.
normal textbooks fiction
There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
ideas october economics
When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.
gold doctrine lasts
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.
entrepreneur analysis saving
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.
elements keynes made
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.
long investment profit
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.
reality age golden
Reality is never a golden age.
names
Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.