Joan Robinson

Who was Joan Robinson?

Joan Violet Robinson FBA was a post-Keynesian economist who was well known for her work on monetary economics and wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. She was the daughter of Major-General Sir Frederick Barton Maurice, 1st Baronet, and was married to Austin Robinson, a fellow economist. Together, they had two children.

The current Indian prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was a student at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s, said in an interview in 2005: "At university I first became conscious of the creative role of politics in shaping human affairs, and I owe that mostly to my teachers Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor. Joan Robinson was a brilliant teacher, but she also sought to awaken the inner conscience of her students in a manner that very few others were able to achieve. She questioned me a great deal and made me think the unthinkable. She propounded the left-wing interpretation of Keynes, maintaining that the state has to play more of a role if you really want to combine development with social equity."