Joan Robinson Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.