Joan Robinson Quotes
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 only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.
The first essential for economists ... is to ... combat, not foster, the ideology which pretends that values which can be measured in terms of money are the only ones that ought to count.
Economic theorists should not make such a production about taking a rabbit out of a hat after having put the rabbit into the hat in full view of the audience.
The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.
Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.
science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.
economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.
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.
I came away from the talk with the perception that the risk of adverse side effects is so much greater than the risk of cervical cancer, I couldn’t help but question why we need the vaccine at all.
There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.
Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?
When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.
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.
A sure sign of a crisis is the prevalence of cranks. It is characteristic of a crisis in theory that cranks get a hearing from the public which orthodoxy is failing to satisfy.
Income from property is not the reward of waiting, it is the reward of employing a good stockbroker.
If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.
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.
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.
But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.
New ideas are difficult just because they are new. Repetition has somehow plastered over the gaps and inconsistencies in the old ones, and the new cannot penetrate.
It's a terrible thing to be a worker exploited in the capitalist system. The only worse thing is to be a worker unable to find anyone to exploit you.
Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it. ... Absolute misery grows while wealth increases.
The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
An economy may be in equilibrium from a short-period point of view and yet contain within itself incompatibilities that are soon going to knock it out of equilibrium.
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.