Joan Robinson Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

Until recently, Marx used to be treated in academic circles with contemptuous silence, broken only by an occasional mocking footnote. But modern developments in academic theory, forced by modern developments in economic life — the analysis of monopoly and the analysis of unemployment — have shattered the structure of orthodox doctrine and destroyed the complacency with which economists were wont to view the working of laissez-faire capitalism. Their attitude to Marx, as the leading critic of capitalism, is therefore much less cocksure than it used to be. In my belief, they have much to learn from him.

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

Why did the hunters in the Wealth of Nations exchange beavers for deer?

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

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.

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

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 high time to abandon the mainstream and take to the turbulent waters of truly dynamic analysis.

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

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

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.