Joan Robinson Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

I began to read Capital, just as one reads any book, to see what was in it; I found a great deal that neither its followers nor its opponents had prepared me to expect.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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