Joan Robinson
English economist (1903–1983)
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Through Economics, British Raj and Princely state
Early life and education
Before leaving to fight in the Second Boer War, Joan's father, Frederick Maurice, married Margaret Helen Marsh, the daughter of Frederick Howard Marsh, and the sister of Edward Marsh, at St George's, Hanover Square. Joan Violet Maurice was born in Camberley, Surrey, in 1903, a year after her father's return from Africa. She was the third of five siblings.
Joan Maurice studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge. She completed her studies in 1925 but due to Cambridge University's refusal to grant degrees to women until 1948, she did not formally graduate. Following her marriage to economist Austin Robinson the next year, she became known as Joan Robinson.
The couple moved to India shortly after their marriage where Joan Robinson became interested in the relations between the British Raj and the Indian princely states and wrote a report on the subject. This time in India was a formative experience on Robinson, shaping her future research interest in both the country and her studies of developing economies. In 1928, the couple returned to Cambridge and Robinson started teaching in the early 1930s as a Junior Assistant Lecturer.
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Career
Robinson crossed swords with the economist Marjorie Hollond, Girton's director of studies, over the teaching of economics. Robinson wanted to teach the latest economic theories whereas Hollond believed that they were as yet unproven. In 1937, Robinson became a lecturer in economics at the University of Cambridge. She joined the British Academy in 1958 and was elected a 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 honorary fellow of King's College.
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).
During World War II, Robinson worked on a few different committees for the wartime national government. During this time, she visited the Soviet Union as well as China, gaining an interest in underdeveloped and developing nations.
Robinson was a frequent visitor to the Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Thiruvananthapuram, India. She was a visiting fellow at the Centre in the mid-1970s. She instituted an endowment fund to support public lectures at the centre. She was a frequent visitor to the centre until January 1982 and participated in all activities of the centre and especially student seminars. Professor Robinson donated royalties of two of her books (Selected Economic Writings, Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1974, Introduction to Modern Economics (jointly with John Eatwell), Delhi; Tata McGraw Hill, 1974) to CDS.
Robinson also 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 edn, 1976), in which she praised the Cultural Revolution. In October 1964, Robinson also visited North Korea, which was effectively a single-party Communist state, and wrote in her report "Korean Miracle" that the country's success was due to "the intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride" under Kim Il Sung, "a messiah rather than a dictator." She also stated in reference to the division of 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."
Robinson was a strict vegetarian. She slept in a small unheated hut at the bottom of her garden all year round.
Achievements
In 1945, she was appointed to the Ministry of Works' Advisory Committee on Building Research, the only economist and the only female member of that committee.
In 1948, she was appointed the first economist member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.
In 1949, she was invited by Ragnar Frisch to become the vice-president of the Econometric Society but declined by saying she that could not be part of the editorial committee of a journal that she could not read.
During the 1960s, she was a major participant in the Cambridge capital controversy alongside Piero Sraffa.
At least two students who studied under her have won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel; they are 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". In his own autobiography notes, Sen described Robinson as "totally brilliant but vigorously intolerant."
She, along with Nicholas Kaldor, also greatly influenced Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his approach towards economic policies.
Discussion surrounding the Nobel Prize
Robinson never received a Nobel Prize for her contribution to economics. She was widely anticipated to receive the prize for Economics in 1975, and Rachel Reeves described her as 'the most famous economist not to be awarded the Nobel Prize'. Of all 93 recipients of the Nobel Prize in Economic Science, only 10 winners have been cited more widely than Robinson. It is widely assumed that the committee's oversight of Robinson was due to ideological bias within the awarding committee against her support of Mao's economic policies in China, while others have argued this was instead due to sexist biases.
Family
Robinson's father was Frederick Maurice, her mother was Margaret Helen Marsh. The London surgeon and Cambridge academic Howard Marsh was Joan Robinson's maternal grandfather.
Joan Maurice married fellow economist Austin Robinson in 1926. They had two daughters.
Recognition
In 2016, the Council of the University of Cambridge approved the use of Robinson's name to mark a physical feature within the North West Cambridge Development.
In April 2024, a blue plaque was erected in Kensington Gardens, London, to honour Robinson's life and work. English Heritage, the awarding organisation, described her as 'one of the first women to achieve academic prominence in the discipline of economics'.
The economics society of Girton College, Cambridge is named the Joan Robinson Society.
Major works
- The Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933)
- Essays in the Theory of Employment (1937)
- An Essay on Marxian Economics (1942), 2nd Edition (1966) (The Macmillan Press Ltd, ISBN 0333058003)
- "The Production Function and the Theory of Capital", The Review of Economic Studies (1953)
- The Accumulation of Capital (1956)
- Exercises in Economic Analysis (1960)
- Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth (1962)
- Economic Philosophy: An Essay on the Progress of Economic Thought (1962)
- Freedom and Necessity: An Introduction to the Study of Society (1970)
- Economic Heresies: Some Old Fashioned Questions in Economic Theory (1971) (Basic Books, New York, ISBN 046501786X)
- Contributions to Modern Economics (1978) (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, ISBN 0631192204)
- Further Contributions to Modern Economics (1980) (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, ISBN 0631126244)
Texts for the lay reader
- Economics Is a Serious Subject: The Apologia of an Economist to the Mathematician, the Scientist and the Plain Man (1932), W. Heffer & Sons
- Introduction to the Theory of Employment (1937)
- The Cultural Revolution in China, Harmondsworth: Pelican Original (1969)
- An Introduction to Modern Economics (1973) with John Eatwell
- The Arms Race (1981), Tanner Lectures on Human Values