Joan Robinson 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

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

— Joan Robinson

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

— Joan Robinson

“Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“Science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.”

— Joan Robinson

“Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.”

— Joan Robinson

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

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

“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

“Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“Owning capital is not a productive activity.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.”

— 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.

— 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.”

— Joan Robinson

“If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them.”

— Joan Robinson

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

“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

“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

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

— Joan Robinson

“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

“Reality is never a golden age.”

— 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.”

— Joan Robinson

“There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.”

— 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.”

— Joan Robinson

“It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.”

— Joan Robinson

“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

“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

“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

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

— Joan Robinson

“It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.”

— Joan Robinson

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

— 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.

— 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.

— Joan Robinson

Economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

— Joan Robinson

“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

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

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

“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”

— Joan Robinson

“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