Joan Robinson famous quotes

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

#Purpose #Answers #Study

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.
-- Joan Robinson

#Smell #Ideology

I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all.
-- Joan Robinson

#Cancer #Vaccines #Risk

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.
-- Joan Robinson

#Opposites #India

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

#Long #Investment #Profit

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Elements #Keynes #Made

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Running #Lying #Overcoming

When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.
-- Joan Robinson

#Ideas #October #Economics

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

#Textbooks #Fiction #Normal

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

#Technology

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Fall #Errors #Government

It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.
-- Joan Robinson

#Add #Saving #Flow

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

#Important #Behaviour #Influence

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

#Names

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

#Science #Errors #Progress

Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.
-- Joan Robinson

#Government #Unemployment #Democratic

Reality is never a golden age.
-- Joan Robinson

#Reality #Age #Golden

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.
-- Joan Robinson

#Self #Pessimism #Economics

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Entrepreneur #Energy #Principles

If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.
-- Joan Robinson

#Law #Class #Income

It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.
-- Joan Robinson

#Vices #Saving #Investment

The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
-- Joan Robinson

#Misery #Capitalist

The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.
-- Joan Robinson

#Economics #Capitalism

It's a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you.
-- Joan Robinson

#Growth #Economic #Terrible

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Business #Principles #Economist

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Money #Nature #Work

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

#Reality #Air #Giving

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

#Sheep #Giving #Hatred

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

#Fall #Doe #Wages

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

#Law #Progress #Details

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Gold #Doctrine #Lasts

we make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.
-- Joan Robinson

#Motivation #United States #Moral

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

#Views #May #Economy

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.
-- Joan Robinson

#Teacher #Errors #Long

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

#Complaining #Hearing #Orthodoxy

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

#Air #Car #Choices

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

#Growth #Overcoming #Poverty

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

#Growth #Pay #Poverty

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

#Intellectual #Tragedy #Triumph

New ideas are difficult just because they are new. Repetition has somehow plastered over the gaps and inconsistencies in the old ones, and the new cannot penetrate.
-- Joan Robinson

#Ideas #Gaps #Repetition

One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was ... a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.
-- Joan Robinson

#Class #Purpose #Welfare

It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries.
-- Joan Robinson

#Easier #Organize

Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.
-- Joan Robinson

#Waiting #Income #Rewards

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

#Government #Patterns #Moments

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

#Next #Theory #Prognosis

The first essential for economists ... is to ... combat, not foster, the ideology which pretends that values which can be measured in terms of money are the only ones that ought to count.
-- Joan Robinson

#Essentials #Firsts #Economics

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

#Mean #Light #Economics

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

#Quality #Circularity #Want

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

#Feet #Economics #Hypothesis

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

#Income #Done #Saving

owning capital is not a productive activity.
-- Joan Robinson

#Money #Economics #Productive

Economic theorists should not make such a production about taking a rabbit out of a hat after having put the rabbit into the hat in full view of the audience.
-- Joan Robinson

#Views #Rabbits #Hats