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.

Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.

The point of studying economics is so as not to be fooled by economists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I do not regard the Keynesian revolution as a great intellectual triumph. On the contrary, it was a tragedy because it came so late. Hitler had already found out how to cure unemployment before Keynes had finished explaining why it occured.

Marxism is the opium of the Marxists.

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

Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.

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

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.

It is a popular error that bureaucracy is less flexible than private enterprise. It may be so in detail, but when large scale adaptations have to be made, central control is far more flexible. It may take two months to get an answer to a letter from a government department, but it takes twenty years for an industry under private enterprise to readjust itself to a fall in demand.

science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

Reality is never a golden age.

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

Where is the pricing system that offers the consumer a fair choice between air to breathe and motor cars to drive about in?

Unequal distribution of income is an excessively uneconomic method of getting the necessary saving done.

Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.