------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (November 2006)
Bill Gibson, editor, _Joan Robinson's Economics: A Centennial
Celebration_. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2005. 395 pp. $130.50
(hardcover), ISBN: 1-84376-932-8.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Michael S. Lawlor, Department of Economics,
Wake Forest University.
This seems an appropriate time to reassess the work of Joan Robinson
and examine just what it was that she was up to and why it is
important for economists to recognize her contributions. Younger
scholars most likely have not read her and know little of her
importance (except perhaps as the author of the 1933 book _The
Economics of Imperfect Competition_, later much discounted by her.)
Nevertheless, Robinson's work was for a long time a staple of some of
the profession's most important theoretical debates, especially
during the so called "capital controversies" of the 1960s. Along with
other giants of the post-WWII era, like Paul Samuelson and Robert
Solow, she became a symbol for many economists of a particular point
of view (not always viewed favorably by the mainstream of American
economists). The argument she symbolized was the Cambridge (U. K.)
critique of the use of an aggregate concept of "capital" and the
attendant "well behaved" properties of production functions (which
economists still use on a regular basis). Moreover, she traversed in
her own career an arc describing the development of much of modern
economics, including many familiar ideas that we value enough to
include in our textbooks. By this I refer to the following facts:
that she was early on a major contributor to the reformulation of the
Marshallian theory of the firm that is often covered in the
monopolistic competition sections of microeconomics texts; that she
actively participated in the advent and rise, as well as witnessed
the eventual decline, of the economics of Keynes and the associated
"Keynesianism" which is still taught in modern macroeconomics texts;
in addition to this, she played a pivotal role in the re-thinking of
capital and growth theory that occupied many of the profession's
great theoretical lights in the 1960s and 1970s, although this is
much less discussed today. That record alone -- and there is more to
her career than even such a list suggests -- is enough to warrant a
reassessment. In fact, is it not too much to ask why there is yet no
full-scale intellectual biography of her? The volume under review,
edited by Bill Gibson, and originating at a conference in 2003 at the
University of Vermont celebrating the centenary of her birth, serves
as a valuable aid to such a reassessment.
First, a truth in reviewing note: Both Robinson's work, and the
contributions to this volume, range over such a vast expanse that no
review can adequately cover the whole field. So, for example, I will
pass over without comment her contributions to international trade
theory, to Marxist economics, to the notion of class conflict in the
distribution of income, and to monetary and financial economics, as
well as her (often controversial) views on underdeveloped economies.
There are many able discussions of these topics in the text under
review, to which the interested reader is enthusiastically directed.
One more short comment is in order on an aspect of the volume that
strikes this historian of economics as new, daring and so noteworthy.
Prue Kerr's chapter, titled "Knowledge without Pain," presents a
picture of Robinson, not as the arch insider, the consummate player
of the economic theory game that she was, but as the popularizer of
economic ideas to a wider audience than to economists alone. In doing
so, Kerr compares her _Economic Philosophy_ (1964), _Economics: An
Awkward Corner_ (1966) and _Freedom and Necessity_ (1970) to the
popular economic works of Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet in the
nineteenth century. One of Kerr's conclusions is that Robinson did
not similarly try to "dumb down" economic discussion so that her
readers could flatter themselves that they were conversant with
difficult topics. Thus she opted, in Kerr's words, for "knowledge
with pain," as her subject required. More of this type of analysis of
the content and quality of popular economics and of economic
journalism would be welcome, and following from Kerr's example, seems
ripe for exploitation by historians. (Vincent Barnett's recent review
on this list of _Economists in Parliament in the Liberal Age
(1848-1920)_, edited by Massimo Augello and Marco Guidi, makes this
point more broadly in the context of a large study of the political
expression of economic ideas across countries and historical time
periods. See http://eh.net/bookreviews/library/1121.shtml.)
Joan Robinson's biography and the role in it of her circle of
teachers, colleagues and students at Cambridge, are interestingly
described by the contributions of Bill Gibson, G. C. Harcourt and
Christina Marcuzzo. One aspect of particular significance to
Robinson's thought was the lasting influence of her early education
in economics, which was dominated by the teachings of Alfred
Marshall. But it is important to note that when she came to Cambridge
in the 1920s, Marshall was no longer a sacrosanct figure. Though
still a towering influence on Cambridge, Marshall's economics was
thought to be lacking in crucial ways that undermined its
effectiveness in dealing with then modern developments such as the
credit cycle, the public corporation, and unemployment. Consequently
much intellectual activity in the 1920s and 1930s by such figures as
A. C. Pigou and Dennis Robertson went into updating Marshallian
economics to meet these challenges.
In fact, almost from the beginning of her education in the subject,
Robinson mainly learned Marshall's economics in order to understand
the criticisms of it that were then being offered. Two of these in
particular were to be of lasting influence on her. The critique of
the Marshallian theory of the firm that she got directly from the
lectures of the enigmatic, but piercingly brilliant, Piero Sraffa
were one influence (as to a lesser extent was her discussion of these
issues with Richard Kahn). The other, eventually more long lasting
for Robinson's work, was the more outwardly transparent and worldly,
but equally brilliant, ideas of John Maynard Keynes. It is not
explicitly stated by Harcourt or Marcuzzo, but it can be inferred
from their excellent narratives, that Robinson's theoretical soul
could be seen as forming an intellectual battleground between the
alternative visions of Sraffa's and Keynes's critiques of Marshall,
and through those critiques much of then received economic theory.
From Sraffa, Robinson took her life-long penchant for clever
questioning of fundamental and unexamined assumptions of analysis. In
the early work of both, this revolved around what conception of the
firm is most appropriate to capture the facts of modern competition
and is able to be expressed in the form of a logically watertight
system. Later, after the publication of Sraffa's insightful
introduction to Ricardo's _Works_ (Sraffa, 1951) and the related, and
much delayed, release of his alternative (to any resort to an
aggregated capital notion) picture of the intricacies of the
relationship between output prices, production by (disaggregated)
capital goods and the returns to "capital" and labor (Sraffa, 1960),
Robinson could at last see Sraffa's complete vision of the production
process. I think one way to interpret the evidence presented in this
volume (particularly in Marcuzzo's contribution) is that this marked
Robinson's parting of the ways with Sraffa. I mean that although she
had accepted, and arguably did much to publicly advance, Sraffa's
long-held view of the circularity of the definition of capital that
economists (then and now) often use in positing an inverse
relationship between "the quantity of capital" and "the return to
capital," she nevertheless came to see Sraffa's positive alternative
vision of the production process as a sterile starting point for the
kinds of questions she really wanted to answer. These were especially
how to model growth and accumulation in a competitive private system
that was moving through time.
In was in this endeavor that she might be said to have chosen the
Keynesian-Marshallian path to doing economics over the
Sraffian-Classical one. A number of things that contributed to this
(maybe unconscious) choice on her part are highlighted in the
contributions noted above, but also, more technically, by the
contributions of Donald Harris, Amitava Dutt and Peter Skott. Only a
bare sketch can be offered here, but the interested reader is urged
to consult these excellent discussions.
As noted above, Robinson cut her teeth on a project that set out to
make the Marshallian theory of the firm capable of explaining modern
conditions of competition, particularly large-scale production units
(see especially Robinson 1933 and the very revealing introduction to
that work she added in 1969). She was then almost immediately cast
into the role of technical advisor and general sounding board (with
others) for Keynes, as a member of the famous "Cambridge Circus" --
the small group of young faculty and graduate students that searched
Keynes's _Treatise on Money_ for basic flaws in its argument. From
here she went on to become one of an even smaller group of trusted
critics that vetted the drafts of the _General Theory_ (and here
Robinson appears to have risen to prominence in Keynes's eyes,
according to the evidence in his _Collected Works_). This much is
well known to historians of economics, but what is not so well
appreciated, and that these authors make us more aware of, is that
Robinson bore the mark of this baptism in doing economic theory in a
Marshallian-Keynesian mode for all of her later life.
What exactly is a Marshallian-Keynesian is more than we can document
here (see Lawlor, 2006), but it is enough to say two things. One is
that however far Robinson rode the Keynesian horse into new fields --
and her quite ambitious goal in this regard was to "generalize" the
_General Theory_ to a dynamic story of growth -- she would not do so
by abstracting from the fact emphasized by Keynes, that modern
economies are sometimes prone to settle into states of inadequate
aggregate demand to sufficiently employ their labor forces. Second,
Robinson, like Keynes, continued to accept Marshall's method of
theorizing, while rejecting in many different ways the Victorian
constructs of the Marshallian economic system. Thus her frequent
comments on the good things to be found in Marshall, especially when
compared to what she saw as the more abstract and unreal postwar
tendency to elevate Walrasian theorizing to the apogee of economic
theory (see Robinson, 1962a).
One thing she particularly saw as useful in Marshall was his
awareness of the difficulty of treating time by equilibrium
constructs. Thus, rather than the highly artificial dynamic
equilibria of modern theories of growth (of any stripe), she wanted
dynamic economics to be "open" to uncertain expectations,
technological change, habits, and the possible irreversibility that
came with the "choice of technique." In other words, she insisted
that a theory of economic growth should be alive to the kinds of
issues that, economic history teaches, have been real aspects of
capitalist economies of the past, making her work particularly
relevant to this list's readers. She did not want to construct models
that would reach the same "equilibrium" from radically different
starting points, but ones that depended crucially on where a system
began to determine part of where it ends up. In short, she wished for
a dynamic economics in which a particular set of institutions and a
particular history ought to be given its due as a factor that could
influence the time path of an economy.
But as Donald Harris particularly emphasizes, this is no easy task.
In fact one could say that her long struggle with a variety of
complex approaches to such questions in the theory of economic growth
(her most mature statements on this topic are to be found in
Robinson, 1956 and 1962b) ended in her rejecting "equilibrium"
altogether as a way to capture the manifold influences of "history"
(Robinson, 1985). But perhaps this nihilistic attitude, reached in
old age, is not so important to the modern reader as is the
fearlessness with which she faced the many obvious and not so obvious
faults of much of economic theory, and the suggestions she made for
making it better.
References:
M. S. Lawlor, 2006. _The Economics of Keynes in Historical Context:
An Intellectual History of the General Theory_. London: Palgrave
Macmillan.
J. V. Robinson, 1933. _The Economics of Imperfect Competition_.
London: Macmillan. Second edition with a new preface, 1969.
J. V. Robinson, 1956. _The Accumulation of Capital_. London: Macmillan.
J. V. Robinson, 1962a. "The General Theory after 25 Years," a review
of H. G. Johnson, _Money, Trade and Economic Growth_, in the
_Economic Journal_ 71. Reprinted in _Collected Papers of Joan
Robinson_, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 100-02.
J. V. Robinson, 1962b. _Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth_.
London: Macmillan.
J. V. Robinson, 1964. _Economic Philosophy_. Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin Books.
J. V. Robinson, 1966. _Economics: An Awkward Corner_. London: George
Allen and Unwin.
J. V. Robinson, 1970. _Freedom and Necessity: An Introduction to the
Study of Society_. London: George Allen and Unwin.
J.V. Robinson, 1985. "The Theory of Normal Prices and the
Reconstruction of Economic Theory," in G. Feiwel, editor, _The Theory
of Normal Prices and the Reconstruction of Economic Theory_.
P. Sraffa, 1951. "Introduction to D. Ricardo, Principles of Political
Economy and Taxation," in P. Sraffa and M. Dobb, editors, _Works and
Correspondence of David Ricardo_, Volume I. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
P. Sraffa, 1960. _Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities:
Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory_. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Michael S. Lawlor is the author of _The Economics of Keynes in
Historical Context: An Intellectual History of the General Theory_.
London: Palgrave Macmillan (2006).
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