Everything about Joan Robinson totally explained
Joan Violet Robinson (
October 31,
1903 in
Surrey -
August 5,
1983 in
Cambridge) was a
post Keynesian economist who was well known for her knowledge of
monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. She is the daughter of
Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, 1st Baronet.
Biography
Robinson was educated at
St. Paul's Girls' School,
London, and at
Girton College,
Cambridge. Immediately after graduation in
1925, she married economist
Austin Robinson. In
1937, she became a
lecturer in economics at the
University of Cambridge. She joined the
British Academy in
1958 and was then elected fellow of
Newnham College in
1962. In
1965 she was given the position of full professor and fellow of
Girton College. In
1979, just four years before she died, she became the first female fellow of
King's College.
Initially a supporter of
neoclassical economics, she changed her mind after getting acquainted with
John Maynard Keynes. As a member of the "
Cambridge School" of economics, Robinson assisted with the support and exposition of Keynes'
General Theory, writing especially on its employment implications in
1936 and
1937 (it attempted to explain employment dynamics in the midst of the
Great Depression).
In
1933, in her book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Robinson coined the term, "
Monopsony," which is used to describe the buyer converse of a seller
monopoly.
In
1942 Robinson's
An Essay on Marxian Economics famously concentrated on
Karl Marx as an
economist, helping revive the debate on this aspect of his legacy.
During the
Second World War, Joan Robinson worked on a few different Committees for the
wartime national government. During this time, she visited the
Soviet Union as well as
China. She developed an interest in underdeveloped and
developing nations and contributed a lot that's now understood in this section of economics.
In
1949, she was invited by
Ragnar Frisch to become the vice president of the
Econometric Society but declined, saying she couldn't be part of the editorial committee of a journal she couldn't read.
In
1956, Joan Robinson published her
magnum opus,
The Accumulation of Capital, which extended Keynesianism into the long-run. Six years later, she published another book about
growth theory, which talked about concepts of "Golden Age" growth paths. Afterwards, she developed the
Cambridge growth theory with
Nicholas Kaldor.
Close to the end of her life she studied and concentrated on methodological problems in economics and tried to recover the original message of Keynes' General Theory. Between 1962 and 1980 she wrote many books to try and bring several economic theories to the general public. Robinson suggested developing an alternative to the revival of
classical economics
Also, Robinson made several trips to China, reporting her observations and analyses in China: An Economic Perspective (1958), The Cultural Revolution in China (1969), and Economic Management in China (1975; 3rd ed., 1976), in which she praised the Cultural Revolution, which caused significant damage to her reputation, and possibly cost her Nobel Prize.
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Major works
- The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933)
- An Essay on Marxian Economics (1942)
- Accumulation of Capital (1956)
- Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth (1962)
- Economic Philosophy: An essay on the progress of economic thought (1962)
Texts for the lay reader
Economics is a serious subject: The apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man,(1932) Publisher: W. Heffer & Sons
Introduction to the Theory of Employment (1937)
An Introduction to Modern Economics (1973) with John Eatwell
The Arms Race (1982), Tanner Lectures on Human Values
Quotes
"The purpose of studying economics isn't to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists."
"Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true."
Further Information
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