Joan Robinson (1903 – 1983)
British post-Keynesian economist who made many contributions to economic theory.
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.
'Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.
Time, so to say, runs at right angles to the page at each point on the curve.
Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.
It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.
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.
An agent must have some discretion.
"Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
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.
...the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.
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.
Reality is never a golden age.
The bastard Keynesian doctrine, evolved in the United States, invaded the economic faculties of the world, floating on the wings of the almighty dollar.
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.
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.
Why did the hunters in the Wealth of Nations exchange beavers for deer?
It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries.
A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.