Born: October 31, 1903, Camberley, Surrey, England
Died: August 5, 1983, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire
Joan Robinson (1903-1983), British economist and writer, credited with making many significant contributions to the field of economics. Born Joan Violet Maurice, in Camberley, Surrey, England, Robinson received a degree in economics from Cambridge University, England, in 1925. In 1926 she married Austin Robinson, an economist at Cambridge.
Joan Robinson taught at Cambridge for 40 years, from 1931 to 1971. She was one of a group of distinguished academics associated with noted British economist John Maynard Keynes during the late 1920s and early 1930s. During this formative time in the field of economics, Keynes developed his seminal work, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1935). As a member of this academic circle, the Cambridge Keynesians, Robinson was one of the originators of what is now known as the Keynesian revolution in economic thought, which among other things, advocated increased government spending during economic recession. Throughout her life Robinson continued to defend and elaborate critical insights of Keynesian theories, stressing their radical implications and rejecting the views of those who saw Keynesian economics as merely a set of tools for managing the business cycle.
Robinson, a neoclassical econimist, is also known for adding a new dimension to the politically conservative neoclassical economic theory. In 1933, she published her first book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition, and nine years later, in 1942, she published An Essay on Marxian Economics. This book was a particularly important contribution to economic theory because it was the first time a neoclassical economist had approached Marxian (socialist) economics as a source of valuable insights and ideas, and not as not as an erroneous deviation. Robinson never considered herself a Marxist, but she took the writings of Karl Marx more seriously and learned more from his writings than most of her mainstream predecessors.
In her 1956 book The Accumulation of Capital, considered by some to be her most important work, Robinson shifted her attention away from the urgent problems of the 1930s-unemployment, depression, and economic stagnation-to the long period of post-World War II (1939-1945) expansion. Moving away from the static assumptions underlying Keynes’s General Theory, she explored the dynamic technological, demographic, and sociopsychological conditions that would have to be fulfilled for capital accumulation to be relatively smooth and sustainable. Her strong opposition to the political and military policies of the United States and its allies emphasized anew her affinity with major currents of Marxist thought. Among other things, in 1951 Robinson wrote a sympathetic introduction to an English translation of The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism, a book written in 1912 by German socialist leader Rosa Luxemburg.
Robinson was an ardent traveller and a keen observer of global trends and events. She made numerous trips to North America and China. As a result of her visits to China, Robinson wrote three books: China: An Economic Perspective (1958), The Cultural Revolution in China (1969), and Economic Management in China (1975).
