Thinkers Timeline

Joan Robinson was a British economist. She was one of the most important economists of the 20th century. Many people think she should have won the Nobel Prize in Economics. She never did, almost certainly because she was a woman and because her views were politically uncomfortable. She was born in 1903 in Camberley, Surrey, in southern England. Her birth name was Joan Maurice. She came from an upper-middle-class family. Her father was a soldier and her mother was the daughter of a famous classics professor. Joan studied economics at Cambridge from 1922. The university had only recently begun allowing women to take degree examinations. She married another young economist, Austin Robinson, in 1926. They had two daughters. She became part of the famous group of Cambridge economists around John Maynard Keynes. Keynes was working out his revolutionary new theory of how economies actually work. Joan was one of his closest collaborators. She helped develop his ideas. She also did major original work of her own. Her 1933 book The Economics of Imperfect Competition introduced ideas that became standard in economics. She taught at Cambridge for over 50 years. She was finally promoted to a full professorship in 1965, much later than she should have been. She was sharp, sometimes difficult, and often controversial. She visited China multiple times during the Cultural Revolution and wrote about it more positively than later events would justify. She also visited North Korea and admired aspects of its economy. Some of these political judgements have aged badly. She remained intellectually active until shortly before her death in 1983.