Joan Robinson Quotations

We were actually talking about it at work this morning. It just does not fee as if justice was done. Seems like a really serious crime with a pretty small consequence.

we make a great fuss about national conscience, but it consists mainly in insisting upon everyone ascribing our national policy to highly moral motives, rather than in examining what our motives really are.

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.

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.

New ideas are difficult just because they are new. Repetition has somehow plastered over the gaps and inconsistencies in the old ones, and the new cannot penetrate.

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.

economics limps along with one foot in untested hypotheses and the other in untestable slogans.

A depression is a situation of self-fulfilling pessimism.

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

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