person
Joan Robinson
British economist (1903–1983). Keynes's principal Cambridge collaborator; co-architect of the Cambridge UK side of the capital controversies; foundational figure of the Post-Keynesian tradition.
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Joan Robinson spent her career at Cambridge, where she was a member of Keynes’s “Circus” — the small group of younger economists who worked through The General Theory with Keynes during its drafting. Her own Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) is foundational to industrial-organisation theory; The Accumulation of Capital (1956) is the principal Post-Keynesian growth-theoretic statement; her role in the Cambridge UK side of the capital controversies (1953–1966) produced the reswitching and capital-reversal critiques of neoclassical aggregate capital theory.
Her 1971 AEA presidential address “The Second Crisis of Economic Theory” is a foundational statement of the Post-Keynesian objection to the postwar neoclassical synthesis. She was, by reasonable account, the most distinguished economist of the twentieth century never to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize — variously attributed to her gender, her politics, and her insistence that the prize itself represented a Swedish-bank-funded political intervention in the discipline’s self-understanding.