Joan Robinson Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Joan Robinson quote about:
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“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“Ideology is like breath: you never smell your own.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“When I came up to Cambridge (in October 1921) to read economics, I did not have much idea of what it was about.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“There is no such thing as a normal period of history. Normality is a fiction of economic textbooks.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“The nature of technology depends very much upon what the public can be induced to put up with.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“It is impossible to add the stock of money to the flow of saving.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“But, as soon as speculators become an important influence in the market, their business is to speculate on each others behaviour.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“Capital' is not what capital is called, it is what its name is called.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“science progresses by trial and error, and when it is forbidden to admit error there can be no progress.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“Unemployment is a reproach to a democratic government.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“If there is any law governing the distribution of income between classes, it still remains to be discovered.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“It is the rate of investment which governs the rate of saving, and not vice versa.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“The misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“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.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“If a rise in wages does not raise prices, a fall will not reduce them.”
-- Joan Robinson -
“Marx, however imperfectly he worked out the details, set himself the task of discovering the law of motion of capitalism, and if there is any hope of progress in economics at all, it must be in using academic methods to solve the problems posed by Marx.”
-- Joan Robinson
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