Joan Robinson (1903 – 1983)
British post-Keynesian economist who made many contributions to economic theory.
There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
Michal Kalecki's claim to priority of publication is indisputable.
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.
The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.
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.
But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them.
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.
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.
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.
I must mention my special intellectual debt to Joan Robinson, with whom I had the opportunity to discuss over a period of nearly twenty years some of the problems analysed here. She, more than anybody else, convinced me of the radical content of Keynesian economics which we could decipher more easily with the help of Marx and Kalecki.
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).
" the merchant had observed that the marginal utility of daughters decreases with surprising rapidity."
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.
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.
It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.