Joan Robinson Quotes

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.

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

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.

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

Reality is never a golden age.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

An agent must have some discretion.

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.