The article celebrates Joan Robinson all right.  What the author fails 
to do is to examine carefully Robinson's claims to have undermined 
Alfred Marshall's alleged application of prefect competition to the 
labor market with her "The Economics of Imperfect Competition."  Joan 
must not have been much familiar with Marshall's /Principles/ (1920), 
especially where he discusses competition in the labor market. Marshall 
notes, "It may be well to insist again that we do not assume that 
competition is perfect.  Perfect competition requires a perfect 
knowledge of the state of the market; ... it would be an altogether 
unreasonable assumption to make when we are examining the causes that 
govern the supply of labour in any of the lower grades of industry.  For 
if a man had sufficient ability to know everything about the market for 
his labour, he would have too much to remain long in a low grade" (pp. 
448-49).

Perhaps it also may be expecting too much of Joan to have been very 
familiar with Adam Smith's description of what happens in the labor 
market: "What are the common wages of labour, depends every where upon 
the contract usually made between [employers and employees], whose 
interests are by no means the same.  The workmen desire to get as much, 
the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to 
combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of 
labour" (/WN/, 1: 74).  Joan's description of the labor market is little 
different from what Smith says.

Also, it's strange that Joan, who sets aside the classical quantity 
theory of money's explanation of inflation and rather blames inflation 
on rising money wages gets cast as arguing on labor's behalf.  She 
claims, "The essence of inflation is a rapid and continuous rise of 
money wages. Without rising money wages, inflation cannot occur, and 
whatever starts a violent rise in money wages starts inflation" (1938, 
pp. 510-11).  Where in the world does what she claims resemble reality?

I think historians of economic thought have a lot more work to do in 
correcting misrepresentations of sound economic analysis of the kind in 
the works of Joan Robinson.  Quite a pity the author of the article, 
Zachary Carter, fails to do any of that.

James Ahiakpor

Charles Loic wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> There was an interesting opinion column  on Joan Robinson and her 
> contribution to the history of economics, in last Saturday's edition 
> of the New York Times.
> Follow the link: 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/24/opinion/joan-robinson-economy-monopoly-labor.html
>
> Yours,
>
> Loïc Charles
> University of Paris 8
>


-- 
James C.W. Ahiakpor, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Department of Economics
California State University, East Bay
Hayward, CA 94542
510-885-3137
510-885-7175 (Fax; Not Private)


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