Joan Robinson Quotes

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

An agent must have some discretion.

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

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

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.

Reality is never a golden age.