Joan Robinson

Joan Violet Robinson (née Maurice; 31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983) was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory.

One of the most prominent economists of the century, Joan Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century.

Joan Maurice was born in 1903, a year after her father's return from Africa.

During World War II, Robinson worked on a few different Committees for the wartime national government.

During this time, she visited the Soviet Union as well as China, gaining an interest in underdeveloped and developing nations.

Robinson was a frequent visitor to Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, India.

She studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge, and immediately after graduation in 1925, she married the economist Austin Robinson.

Robinson crossed swords with the economist Marjorie Hollond, Girton's director of studies, over the teaching of economics.

Robinson wanted to teach the latest economic theories whereas Hollond believed that they were as yet unproven.

In 1933, her book The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Robinson coined the term "monopsony", which is used to describe the buyer converse of a seller monopoly.

Monopsony is commonly applied to buyers of labour, where the employer has wage setting power that allows it to exercise Pigouvian exploitation and pay workers less than their marginal productivity.

Robinson used monopsony to describe the wage gap between women and men workers of equal productivity.

She started out as a Marshallian; became, after 1936, one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians; and ended up as a leader of the Neo-Ricardian and Post-Keynesian schools.

Before leaving to fight in the Second Boer War, Joan's father, Frederick Maurice, married Margaret Helen Marsh, the daughter of Frederick Howard Marsh, and the sister of Edward Marsh, at St George's, Hanover Square.

As a member of "the Cambridge School" of economics, Robinson contributed to 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 1937, Robinson became a lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge.

In 1942, Robinson's An Essay on Marxian Economics famously concentrated on Karl Marx as an economist, helping to revive the debate on this aspect of his legacy.

In 1956, Robinson published her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, which extended Keynesianism into the long run.

Robinson also 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 edn, 1976), in which she praised the Cultural Revolution.

She joined the British Academy in 1958 and was elected a fellow of Newnham College in 1962.

In 1962, she published Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, another book on growth theory, which discussed Golden Age growth paths.

Afterwards, she developed the Cambridge growth theory with Nicholas Kaldor.

Between 1962 and 1980, she wrote many economics books for the general public.

Robinson suggested developing an alternative to the revival of classical economics.

The Cultural Revolution in China is written from the perspective of trying to understand the thinking that lay behind the revolution, particularly Mao Zedong's preoccupations.

Mao is seen as aiming to recapture a revolutionary sense in a population that had known only, or had grown used to, stable Communism, so that it could "re-educate the Party" (pp. 20, 27); to instill a realisation that the people needed the guidance of the Party as much as the other way round (p. 20); to re-educate intellectuals who failed to see that their role in society, like that of all other groups, was to 'Serve the People' (pp. 33, 43); and finally to secure a succession, not stage-managed by the Party hierarchy or even by Mao himself but the product of interaction between a revitalised people and a revitalised Party (p. 26).

In October 1964, Robinson also visited North Korea, which was effectively a single-party Communist state, and wrote in her report "Korean Miracle" that the country's success was due to "the intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride" under Kim Il Sung, "a messiah rather than a dictator."

She also stated in reference to the division of Korea that "[o]bviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism."

During her last decade, she became more and more pessimistic about the possibilities of reforming economic theory, as expressed, for example, in her essay "Spring Cleaning."

Robinson was a strict vegetarian.

She slept in a small unheated hut at the bottom of her garden all year round.

She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.

In 1965 she assumed the position of full professor and fellow of Girton College.

She was a visiting fellow at the Centre in the mid-1970s.

She instituted an endowment fund to support public lectures at the centre.

Professor Robinson donated royalties of two of her books (Selected Economic Writings, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1974, Introduction to Modern Economics (jointly with John Eatwell), Delhi; Tata McGraw Hill, 1974) to CDS.

In 1979, just four years before she died, she became the first female honorary fellow of King's College.

She was a frequent visitor to the centre until January 1982 and participated in all activities of the centre and especially student seminars.

In 1984, Robinson was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Near 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.