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1 Introduction 2 the Economics of Imperfect Competition Notes 1 Introduction 1. It should be noted that Joan Robinson might have been very angry at being so described. Marjorie Turner, in discussing Mary Paley Marshall’s reaction to The Economics of Imperfect Competition (Robinson, 1933a), points out that Joan Robinson ‘thought of her own reputation as being that of an economist and not a woman-economist’ (Turner, 1989, 12–13; see also below, 8–9. 2. Luigi Pasinetti brilliantly describes their approaches and interrelationships, and evaluates their collective contributions in his entry on Joan Robinson in The New Palgrave (Pasinetti, 1987; see also 2007). 3. The editors of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, of which she was a Patron, had been preparing a special issue in honour of her eightieth birthday. Sadly, it had to be a Memorial issue instead (see the special issue of December 1983). 4. For an absorbing account of the Maurice debates and the events and issues surrounding them, see Wilson and Prior (2004, 2006). 5. In private conversation with GCH. 6. It was widely thought at Cambridge, in pre- and post-war years, that Marjorie Tappan-Hollond was responsible for Joan Robinson never being elected to a teaching fellowship at Girton (it was only after Joan Robinson retired that she became an Honorary Fellow of Girton and the Joan Robinson Society, which met on 31 October (her birth date) each year, was started). Marjorie Turner documents that there was mutual personal affection between them and even concern on Tappan-Hollond’s part for her former pupil but that she strongly disapproved of Joan Robinson’s ‘messianic’ approach to teaching. (Tappan- Hollond was an ally of Dennis Robertson who never got on well with Joan Robinson; see Turner (1989), 14.) 7. JVR/vii/62/5. Berlin enjoyed their ‘intellectual gaiety’ but was critical of her understanding of dialectical reasoning. 8. The ‘Circus’ was a small group of scholars formed by Sraffa in the Michaelmas term of 1930 to discuss A Treatise on Money by Keynes (1930); see Chapter 3, n1, 230. 9. But see Chapter 2, n6. 2 The Economics of Imperfect Competition 1. Writing to Joan Robinson in October 1936, Sraffa (1936, JVR/vii/431/14–15) thanks her for her letter: ‘I shall hang it next to an extract from Sidgwick where, after lecturing Ricardo on how meaningless it is to talk of a quantity of labour, goes on cheerfully himself to talk of quantities of utility.’ Only someone ‘debauched by economics’ could be so ‘dotty’. 2. In his report to Macmillan, Keynes wrote that the tone of the ‘Introduction’, but not of the ‘Preface’, could be interpreted as pretentious, ‘not exactly 228 Notes 229 pretentious, but … to have some sort of flavour which might give readers that feeling’ (1932; Kerr and Harcourt (eds.) 2002, vol. 1, 150). 3. The background to the writing of the article and a detailed analysis of her arguments are to be found in the manuscript (2007) on the young Joan Robinson by Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes. We are indebted to the authors for allowing us to see the manuscript. 4. Evidently Austin Robinson’s ‘very bright’ pupil, Charles Gifford, introduced Joan and Richard Kahn to the book’s central concept while Austin himself named it marginal revenue. In the preface to the first edition, after referring to ‘the number of explorers … added to the rapidly growing crowd at the Marginal Revenue Pole’ (xiv), Joan Robinson writes that ‘the conception of the “elasticity of substitution” provides another example of this kind of coincidence, for Mr J.R. Hicks published his formulation of it in his Theory of Wages some time after I first made use of it’ (xv). We are indebted to Robert Dixon for reminding us of this. 5. ‘No student of monopoly could fail to obtain a firmer or more inclusive grasp on the subject by reading her book, or to be grateful to her for sav- ing the necessity of resorting to inferior or more cumbrous sources’ Kaldor (1934a; Kerr with Harcourt (eds.) 2002, vol I, 153). 6. In 1983, Kahn reread his dissertation and was impressed by it ‘as a contribu- tion made at the time’. He wished he had published it straight away and his advice to young authors with ‘striking but incomplete’ pieces of work was to publish ‘without delay’. See Kahn (1929; 1989, xii, emphasis in the original). 7. There is some evidence that Sraffa did not think pure theory should have to handle time, a view which underlies the construction of the theoretical propositions of his 1960 book. 8. A very early article by Kaldor published in the first issue of the Review of Economic Studies, (Kaldor, 1934b) is possibly the earliest statement of the possibility of path-dependence by the (then) younger generation of modern economists. 9. Shove had taken John Hicks severely to task on similar incoherence when he reviewed the latter’s The Theory of Wages (1932) (Shove, 1933b), so much so that Hicks never issued a second edition or attempted to reply to Shove until well after the end of the Second World War. In 1946, Hicks visited the US for the first time. He found ‘rather to [his] distress that [he] was being received, not as the author of Value and Capital (1939) …, of which [he] was … proud, but as the author of The Theory of Wages, of which [he] was not proud at all’, but which Schumpeter, for one, thought was a ‘good’ book. This was so not least because of its (embryonic) Walrasian–Wicksellian approach. This emboldened Hicks to reissue his book with a long commentary responding to Shove’s many criticisms (see Hicks, 1963, 311–20). 10. Chamberlin’s supervisor at Harvard was Allyn Young who was subsequently to lecture on these themes at the LSE at the end of the 1920s (see Kaldor’s lecture notes of Young’s lectures in Sandilands (ed.) (1990, 18–114). 11. Keynes in his letter to Ohlin (29 April 1937) implies that neither he nor Joan Robinson thought market structures were relevant for the issues they were tackling. Keynes wrote: ‘The reference to imperfect competition is very per- plexing. I cannot see how on earth it comes in. Mrs Robinson. … read my proofs without discovering any connection’ (C.W., vol. XIV, 1973b, 190). 230 Joan Robinson 3 Joan Robinson and her Circle in the Run-up to and Aftermath of Publication of The General Theory 1. In the summer term of 1931, however, there was ‘A seminar with other members of the Faculty and the best of the third year students’, so May 1931 marked the end of the period of the ‘Circus’ (Kahn, 1985, 44; C.W., vol. XIII, 1973a, 338–9). 2. Keynes, as editor of the Economic Journal, had, of course, asked Sraffa to write the review article which has surely been the role model for effective hatchet reviews ever since. 3. As Robert Skidelsky (1992, 447) put it, ‘God ensured that the widow’s jar was always full of water however much the prophet Elijah drank from it; by con- trast the Danaides of Greek legend had to carry water to the city of Argos in broken jars.’ He added: ‘These stories suggested to Keynes a striking analogy with the cumulative processes which might be set in train by the emergence of windfall profits and losses.’ 4. These ideas came to their fulfillment in Kaldor’s greatest theoretical paper, ‘Speculation and economic stability’ (Kaldor, 1939). 5. In the introduction to her first collection of economic papers, she writes that the article (… written for the first number of the Review of Economic Studies, a jour- nal … founded … by some of the younger members of the London School of Economics and of the Cambridge Faculty to get together behind the backs of their embattled seniors) … gives an outline of Keynes’s theory as far as it had got in 1933. She adds that she wrote the Economica article ‘in the summer of 1931 … attempting to explain Keynes’s answer [to] the “buckets-in-the-well theory”, that … when thriftiness increases the demand for capital goods … rises by an equal amount’. She thought the article to be ‘somewhat tedi- ous’ now and she never reprinted it, wrongly in our view. She says she never knew why it was not published until 1933, a few months before the Review of Economic Studies article came out, leading Paul Samuelson and Lawrence Klein ‘to date the birth of The General Theory between February and October 1933. [She told] this tale as an awful warning to historians’. (Robinson, C.E.P., vol. I, 1951, viii–ix) 6. We are indebted to Cristina Marcuzzo for this point. 7. As with virtually all North Americans, we believe, Tarshis never did take to Marmite (or Vegemite) and so had to leave his rooms in Trinity until Lerner had eaten his Marmite sandwiches in them (see Harcourt, 1982a; 1982b; Sardoni (ed.), 1992, 361–2). 8. Commenting on what became p. 219 of The General Theory, she wrote: ‘[i]n what sense is there “long-period equilibrium” if investment is still going on? You have stopped [sic] rather suddenly … out of the short period with fixed equipment to which the rest of the book belongs.’ After further comments, she concludes: ‘I have been working out this long-period stuff … one needs to bring in several considerations that are not really relevant to your main theme … the elasticity of substitution is an important factor … this section is Notes 231 in a limbo between long and short period; you could make your point without bringing the long period in … if you do … a definition of “equilibrium” is essential.’ 9.
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