Joan Robinson

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Joan Robinson : biography

31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983

Joan Violet Robinson FBA (31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983) was a post-Keynesian economist who was well known for her work on monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. She was the daughter of Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, 1st Baronet and was married to fellow economist Austin Robinson. Together they had two children.

Biography

Robinson read economics 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 assumed 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 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 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 to revive the debate on this aspect of his legacy.

During the Second World War, 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 much of what is now understood in this area of economics.

In 1948 she was appointed the first economist member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.Stephen Wilks, In the Public Interest: Competition Policy and the Monopolies and Mergers Commission, p. 93

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

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.

During the 1960s she was a major participant in the Cambridge capital controversy alongside Piero Sraffa.

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. Between 1962 and 1980 she wrote many economics books for the general public. Robinson suggested developing an alternative to the revival of classical economics.

At least two students who studied under her have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences: Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz. In his autobiographical notes for the Nobel Foundation, Stiglitz described their relationship as "tumultuous" and Robinson as unused to "the kind of questioning stance of a brash American student"; after a term, Stiglitz therefore "switched to Frank Hahn".Stiglitz, Joseph E. , Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, December 2002. Retrieved on 8 May 2012. In his own autobiography notes, Sen described Robinson as "totally brilliant but vigorously intolerant".Sen, Amartya , Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 1998. Retrieved on 8 May 2012.

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. She also stated in reference to divided 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”.Harcourt, .