JOAN ROBINSON

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

Depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

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

Modern capitalism has no purpose except to keep the show going.

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.

One of the main effects (I will not say purposes) of orthodox traditional economics was ... a plan for explaining to the privileged class that their position was morally right and was necessary for the welfare of society.

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.

Capitalism with near-full employment was an impressive spectacle. But a growth in wealth is not at all the same thing as reducing poverty. A universal paean was raised in praise of growth. Growth was going to solve all problems. No need to bother about poverty. Growth will lift up the bottom and poverty will disappear without any need to pay attention to it. The economists, who should have known better, fell in with the same cry.

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.

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

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

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

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

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.

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.

Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.

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.

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

Reality is never a golden age.

There is an unearthly, mystical element in Friedman's thought. The mere existence of a stock of money somehow promotes expenditure. But insofar as he offers an intelligible theory, it is made up of elements borrowed from Keynes.

Not only subjective poverty is never overcome by growth, but absolute poverty is increased by it. ... Absolute misery grows while wealth increases.

At any moment there is certainly not balanced trade between the various areas of the habitable globe that happens to be under seperate national governments - there is an ever-changing pattern of deficits and surpluses.

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

Utility is a metaphysical concept of impregnable circularity; utility is the quality in commodities that makes individuals want to buy them, and the fact that individuals want to buy commodities shows that they have utility.

It is much easier to organize control over one industry serving many markets than over one market served by the products of several industries.