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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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).”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“Reality is never a golden age.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Time, so to say, runs at right angles to the page at each point on the curve.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“Michal Kalecki's claim to priority of publication is indisputable.”

“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.”

“'Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.”

“It is high time to abandon the mainstream and take to the turbulent waters of truly dynamic analysis.”

“But the tygers of wrath go the other way. Do not ask me why. It is just a fact I noticed when I was looking through field glasses from a machan.”

“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.”

“Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“An agent must have some discretion.”

“The bastard Keynesian doctrine, evolved in the United States, invaded the economic faculties of the world, floating on the wings of the almighty dollar.”

“ the merchant had observed that the marginal utility of daughters decreases with surprising rapidity.”