Joan Robinson

Joan Robinsonwas a British economist and academic who contributed to the development and furtherance of Keynesian economic theory.

Joan Maurice studied at the University of Cambridge, earning a degree in economics in 1925. In 1926 she married Austin Robinson, another Cambridge economist. She taught at Cambridge from 1931 to 1971, becoming a full professor in 1965. In 1979 she became the first woman to be made an honorary fellow of King’s College. Although she never won the Nobel Prize for Economics, economists across the political spectrum thought she deserved that level of recognition.

Robinson established her reputation in 1933 with the publication of The Economics of Imperfect Competition (2nd ed., 1969), in which she analyzed distribution, allocation, and the concept of exploitation.

During the 1930s Robinson participated in the Cambridge debates that helped promote the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who maintained a presence at the university after serving in the government. In addition to teaching Keynesian theory, Robinson wrote several books, study guides, and pamphlets designed to introduce economic theory to the nonspecialist. In the early 1940s, however, she began to push the Keynesian model beyond its theoretical framework, introducing aspects of Marxist economics in books such as An Essay on Marxian Economics (1942; 2nd ed., 1966) and Marx, Marshall, and Keynes (1955). As Robinson aged, her left-wing sympathies grew, and ultimately she became an admirer of Mao Tse-Tung’s China and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea.

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). Among the best known of her many books are The Accumulation of Capital (1956; 3rd ed., 1969), Economic Philosophy (1963), and Introduction to Modern Economics (1973). The five volumes of her Collected Economic Papers (1951–79) were reprinted in 1980.