Joan Violet Robinson (1903-1983)
For Joan Robinson, there was “no such thing as a ‘purely economic’ problem [to be] settled by purely economic logic; political interest and political prejudices are involved in every discussion of actual questions” (Robinson 1951-79, Collected Economic Papers, hereafter CEP, V: 1).
Indeed, “the answers to economic problems are only political questions” (Robinson 1975: iv), rooted in morality and ethics. Besides the political, you find, throughout Robinson’s work, that the answers to economic questions are mired in epistemic ambiguities, the basis for her insistence on a distinction between history and equilibrium.An instinct for the ethical dimensions of economic problems is evident from the beginning. “Beauty and the beast” (CEP, I: 225-33), an undergraduate essay, reflecting a deep understanding of what she had learned from Marshall’s Principles (1920), ends in a “happy union of producer’s and consumer’s surplus”, but what sparks our interest is an ethical problem with a decidedly modern ring.
[The] speculator who by intelligent foresight anticipates the future, and who makes his gains by shrewd purchases and sales, renders thereby a public service of no small importance, but when to a normal degree of foresight is added [the Beast’s] supernatural [inside] information, the speculator is in a position to enhance his own gains at the expense of less enlightened members of the community. Such malignant forms of speculation are a grievous hindrance to progress. (CEP, I: 230)
Then there is the enduring moral question of what ought to be for sale. The father of the Beauty “had never been accustomed to regard his daughters either as capital or as stockin-trade”. Not slow to realize the exorbitant price he was about to pay in fulfilment of the contract entered into, he was only
for a moment in some doubt as to the advisability of repudiating his obligations...
[reflecting on his long held belief] that the structure of modern industry could only be maintained by that rigid observance of contracts which is the essential basis for all commercial progress... [and by] the scrupulous integrity with which every member of the business community must refrain from yielding to the vast temptations to fraud which lie in his way. (CEP, I: 231)Unearthing a discomfiting subtext in the moralizing aspects of Marshall’s Principles (1920) would come naturally to a dissenting member of a dissenting family. At the age of 15, Joan witnessed the consequences of the public accusation by her father, MajorGeneral Sir Frederick Maurice, to the effect that the War Cabinet had intentionally misrepresented to Parliament the strength of British troop levels on the Western Front. Standing on principle in her own fight for answers to the problems of unemployment and poverty would be a mark of Joan Robinson’s entire academic life.
She had read history at St Paul’s Girls’ School, followed by economics at Girton College, from 1922 to her graduation in 1925. Her marriage in 1926 to fellow economist Austin Robinson was followed by a two-year stint in India, to which she often returned in later life. Austin had been appointed to a university lectureship in 1928 and it was in that year that Joan began in earnest to establish her own international reputation as an academic economist. All agree that The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson 1933) would have figured prominently in the award to Joan Robinson of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, had it ever come to pass. Still, her appointment in 1934 to an assistant lectureship was not accompanied then or later by a college teaching fellowship, and even that first step caused some grousing (Harcourt and Kerr 2009: 8). The quality of her articles and books, numbering well over 400 items (Marcuzzo 2002), overcame the obstacles standing in the way of academic women.
She became university lecturer in 1937; reader in 1949, a year after being granted, upon a change in the rules, her 1925 degree; and professor in 1965, six years prior to her retirement from teaching duties. Her standing in Cambridge and throughout the world prompted Kings College unanimously to grant to her its first female Honorary Fellowship in 1970. Her standing in the economics profession was evident in the reception she received upon giving the Richard Ely Lecture to the American Economic Association in 1971.The engaging style of writing which infused “Beauty and the Beast” became a hallmark. No potted versions of her essays or books (in many cases a series of essays) measure up to the originals, rich tapestries of impressions and arguments reflecting the contradictory facts of economic life. Even in self-criticism of her first book (CEP, II: 222-45), Robinson offered complex insight into the distinction between firm and industry and the nature and sphere of competition, concluding that there are many ways other than sub-optimum scales of production in which imperfect competition generates waste, while noting that the main benefit of price competition imposed by perfect markets is to be found, not in some notion of Pareto optimality, but in the spur it gives to the introduction of new commodities and new methods of production. In an early paper (CEP, I: 20-34), she grapples with a problem not adequately handled even now. In the presence of abnormal profits in a competitive industry, how many and how large are the new firms? Marshallian economics, freed from the notion of an optimum size firm, underlies Robinson’s insistence on the role of history, bequeathing inconsistencies between stocks and flows, and setting the stage for the myriad ways in which present action causes the future to unfold.
Robinson played a major role in the discussions in Cambridge leading up to Keynes’s General Theory (1936). These began with the formation of the “Circus” in 1930 (Harcourt and Kerr 2009: 23).
Her own influential Essays in the Theory of Employment appeared in 1937, followed by a pamphlet, “The problem of full employment”, published in various versions during the 1940s. An intuition “that there was a certain sympathy between Keynes’s theory of employment and effective demand and Marx’s theory of crises” (Harcourt and Kerr 2009: 33) resulted in An Essay on Marxian Economics (Robinson 1942). Lectures given in 1955 on “Marx, Marshall and Keynes” (CEP, II: 1-17) signal Robinson’s enduring belief that all economic theory contains an ideological point of view which must be ferreted out before the theory can be made useful. This is as true of Marx, the revolutionary, who gives the best defence of capitalism, as it is of Marshall, the complacent defender who exposes its greatest defect, and of Keynes, seeking to “devise means to save it from destroying itself” (CEP, II.: 1) while setting the stage for policy initiatives of the most pernicious sort.Towards a Dynamic Economics (Harrod 1948), though critically reviewed by Robinson (CEP, I: 155-74), became the inspiration for her first attempt at a “Generalisation of the General Theory” (Robinson 1952 [1979]). In an effort to move on, she had drawn the distinction between capital as a fund of finance and as a stock of equipment in a paper universally regarded (Robinson 1953) as the first volley in a long and surprisingly bitter controversy, a paper “met, not only with incomprehension, but with ridicule and indignation” (Robinson 1975: vi). Paul Samuelson’s attribution to J.B. Clark of the concept of a capital to labour ratio, “continuously squeezed up or spread out, as [capital] accrues, so as always to preserve equilibrium”, ruled out “every objective of Keynesian and post-Keynesian analysis... straddling like the impenetrable Boyg [Ibsen, Peer Gynt, act II, sc. 7] across the path to reasoned argument” (Robinson 1975: vii; cf. Robinson 1962: 1). In giving her own answer to the question of how capital is substituted for labour as accumulation takes place in the absence of technological change, Robinson acknowledged Ruth Cohen for pointing out the possibility of what would later be called the reswitching of techniques (Robinson 1953: 106).
She did not make much of it, calling it a “curiosum” in The Accumulation of Capital (Robinson 1956: 109), while acknowledging, in a postscript to the third edition of her magnum opus, that it was not to be “unduly deprecated” (Robinson 1969: 427). However, by then, following an unsuccessful effort to prove its impossibility, reswitching had become a cause celebre. True to form, within a few years, she warned that her analysis was “not recommended to anybody... [for it had not] repudiated the concept of accumulation in a given state of knowledge nearly thoroughly enough” (Robinson 1975: ix).Thus there came a double parting of the ways. Reswitching implies no general presumption that a reduction in the real wage, however brought about, can be guaranteed to make an economy more labour intensive, however measured. This result, if not given prominence, risks leaving in place the argument that it is only the rigidity of wages that explains the prevalence of unemployment as substitution of labour for capital is held up by market “imperfections”. Partly for this reason, those who continue the work of reviving the standpoint of “the old Classical economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo” (Sraffa 1960: v) and who might be expected to find in Robinson’s work much upon which to build, rarely cite her. As for mainstream theorists, they have long ceased to concern themselves with Robinson’s questions, putting past controversies down to the inability of a literary economist to appreciate the subtleties of dynamic programming. However, her questions were never answered. Samuelson left hanging in the air, in his reply to Robinson’s paper on “The unimportance of reswitching” (CEP, V: 76-89), a telling reference to the “Hahn problem”, failing to grant to her precisely the points he had himself made (Samuelson 1967: 228-30) and which so well expressed her own theoretical concerns.
It has been said that Robinson became “more and more pessimistic, even nihilistic” (Harcourt and Kerr 2009: 223) about the prospect of grafting onto the Keynesian approach a Marxian/Kaleckian analysis of historical economic development, taking into account the ethical and moral dimensions of economic problems.
Yet, what emerges from her penchant for drawing a sharp distinction between history and equilibrium may be something quite hopeful. Throughout her work there are constant reminders, often thrown out only as hints, that what matters most for the future development of economic theory is the role of firms in creating technological change, for good or ill. Citing Kaldor (1972), she writes: “The growth of output itself creates opportunities for specialization and ‘increasing returns’ in Allyn Young’s sense and new inventions and discoveries are continually being adapted to industrial processes” (Robinson 1975: x). Brian Loasby, whom Robinson cited in connection with the problem of knowledge (CEP V: 7-8), has long argued for all manner of connections between the epistemic questions underlying her distinction between history and equilibrium and the work of Smith, Young, Shackle, Schumpeter, and Penrose, all of whom Robinson recognized at various points in her work.Harvey Gram
See also:
Cambridge School of economics (II); Capital theory (III); Economics and philosophy (III); Roy Forbes Harrod (I); Richard Ferdinand Kahn (I); John Maynard Keynes (I); Alfred Marshall (I); Karl Heinrich Marx (I); Piero Sraffa (I).
References and further reading
Harcourt, G.C. and P. Kerr (2009), Joan Robinson, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Harrod, R. (1948), Towards a Dynamic Economics, London: Macmillan.
Kaldor, N. (1972), ‘The irrelevance of equilibrium economics’, Economic Journal, 82 (328), 1237-55.
Keynes, J.M. (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, London: Macmillan. Marshall, A. (1920), Principles of Economics, an Introductory Volume, 8th edn, London: Macmillan. Robinson, J.V. (1933), The Economics of Imperfect Competition, London: Macmillan.
Robinson, J.V. (1937), Essays in the Theory of Employment, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Robinson, J.V. (1942), An Essay on Marxian Economics, London: Macmillan.
Robinson, J.V. (1949), The Problem of Full Employment, London: The Workers’ Educational Association.
Robinson, J.V. (1951-79), Collected Economic Papers, 5 vols, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Robinson, J.V. (1952), The Rate of Interest and Other Essays, London: Macmillan, republished 1979 as The Generalisation of the General Theory and Other Essays.
Robinson, J.V. (1953), ‘The production function and the theory of capital’, Review of Economic Studies, 21 (2), No. 55; partially reprinted in J.V. Robinson (1951-79), Collected Economic Papers, vol. II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Robinson, J.V. (1956), The Accumulation of Capital, London: Macmillan, 2nd edn 1969.
Robinson, J.V. (1962), Economic Philosophy, London: C.A. Watts.
Robinson, J.V. (1975), ‘Introduction 1974’, Collected Economic Papers, vol. II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Samuelson, P.A. (1967), ‘Indeterminacy of development in a heterogeneous-capital model with constant saving propensity’, in K. Shell (ed.), Essays on the Theory of Optimal Economic Growth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sraffa, P. (1960), Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.