Joan Robinson Quotes

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

Owning capital is not a productive activity.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

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.

Reality is never a golden age.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.

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.

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

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

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.

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