Joan Robinson quotes

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 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. View quote
Joan Robinson
There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Robinson
Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true. View quote
Joan Robinson
Reality is never a golden age. View quote
Joan Robinson
The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Robinson
Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker. (Joan Robinson)
A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism. View quote
Joan Robinson
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all. View quote
Joan Robinson
But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Robinson
It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Robinson
If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them. View quote
Joan Robinson
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered. View quote
Joan Robinson
At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under separate national governments - there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses. (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. View quote
Joan Robinson
It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Joan Robinson