Joan Robinson

In June 2019, the United States Supreme Court used Robinson's monopsony theory in its decision for Apple v. Pepper. Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered the majority opinion, stating Apple can be sued by application developers, "on a monopsony theory."

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 1984, Robinson was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Robinson was a frequent visitor to 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.

In 1962, she published Essays in the Theory of Economic Growth, another book on growth theory, which discussed Golden Age growth paths. Afterwards, she developed the Cambridge growth theory with Nicholas Kaldor. She was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964.

Near the end of her life, she studied and concentrated on methodological problems in economics and tried to recover the original message of Keynes' General Theory. Between 1962 and 1980, she wrote many economics books for the general public. Robinson suggested developing an alternative to the revival of classical economics.

During the 1960s, she was a major participant in the Cambridge capital controversy alongside Piero Sraffa.

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."

In 1956, Robinson published her magnum opus, The Accumulation of Capital, which extended Keynesianism into the long run.

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.

In 1948, she was appointed the first economist member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission.

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 1942, Robinson's An Essay on Marxian Economics famously concentrated on Karl Marx as an economist, helping to revive the debate on this aspect of his legacy.

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).

In 1933, her book The Economics of Imperfect Competition, Robinson coined the term "monopsony," which is used to describe the buyer converse of a seller monopoly. Monopsony is commonly applied to buyers of labour, where the employer has wage setting power that allows it to exercise Pigouvian exploitation and pay workers less than their marginal productivity. Robinson used monopsony to describe the wage gap between women and men workers of equal productivity.

Joan Maurice married fellow economist Austin Robinson in 1926. They had two daughters.

She studied economics at Girton College, Cambridge, and immediately after graduation in 1925, she married the economist Austin Robinson. In 1937, she 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.

Joan Violet Robinson FBA (née Maurice; 31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983) was a British economist well known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. She was a central figure in what became known as post-Keynesian economics.

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 Maurice was born in 1903, a year after her father's return from Africa.