UK economist, educated at Cambridge University where she met her husband Austin Robinson and taught in the Economics Faculty from 1929 to 1971, being appointed a professor in 1965.
A passionate theorist and socialist, she made major contributions to economics through her Economics of Imperfect Competition (1933) which influenced the teaching of microeconomics thereafter by producing independently of CHAMBERLIN a theory of the firm for markets both competitive and monopolistic. Her long guardianship of the KEYNESIAN heritage began with Introduction to the Theory of Employment (1937). However, the influence of SRAFFA and KALECKI led her to develop Keynesian theory from comparative statics to a dynamic growth theory, particularly in her The Accumulation of Capital (1956). Many of her works, especially An Essay on Marxian Economics (1942), attempted a synthesis of socialist and Keynesian economics.
Although trained in Marshallian analysis she became increasingly opposed to his time analysis: she moved from studying perfect competition to oligopoly, selling costs and product differentiation. In doing so, she provided a new box of tools in her theory of imperfect competition. Increasingly she saw her role as a developer of Keynesian theory but her attempt to do so in her Accumulation of Capital was not broad enough to achieve a satisfactory model of long-term development. Her interest in development was long-standing, dating back to her first visits to India in the 1920s and later including an on-thespot study of Mao’s China.
For the last thirty years of her life she was engaged in controversies with SOLOW and SAMUELSON about CAPITAL THEORY. The ferocity of her polemical and entertaining pen is evident in her Collected Papers (1951–79). In a supplementary obituary notice in The Times, her lodger of ten years’ standing, Dr Carmen Blacker, wrote of ‘her spartan way of life’: A strict vegetarian, she slept all the year round in a small creeper-covered hut at the bottom of the garden. It was entirely unheated, and open on one side to all weathers, but no storm, deluge or frost could persuade her to sleep in the house…. In the early spring she was often woken by tits pecking at her hair for material for their nests.’
