Joan Robinson on Environment and Ecology

Abstract

The last works of Joan Robinson showed increasing preoccupation with ecological and environmental issues. Some of these preoccupations were already present in some of her main earlier works, but as she approached old age, the discussion of these questions became more frequent, as well as of other issues such as the arms race and the nuclear threat to the human race. However, Robinson had not dealt with ecological and environmental questions by means of a systematic approach. This article evaluates Robinson’s views on ecology and environment not only because this is a gap in the literature on her work, but mainly because some of Robinson’s insights on these questions are yet to be fully developed. Therefore, this article mixes the history of economic thought with political economy, Robinson’s perspectives being summarized and then analyzed in light of the ecological critique as established by Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen. The article shows that despite the fact that Robinson could have developed more profoundly the logical consequences of some of her core contributions to economic theory to a broader ecological critique, many of her theoretical perspectives overlap with Georgescu-Roegen’s ecological economics, being able to contribute to a heterodox critique of the neoclassical approach.