Photo: Tara Hunt Marilyn Waring didn’t expect we’d still be talking about her book 30 years on. In 1988 bookstores around the world were stocking a 280-page essay on how women’s unpaid contributions are excluded from GDP. Counting For Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth was the title. This book remains one of the most incisive critique…

Joan Robinson was one of the most important contributors to economics in the 20th Century. She used theory and graphs, but she also used poetry to expound the great debates between capitalism and socialism over the 20th Century. This is part II of a two-part series on the life of Cambridge economist Joan Robinson. ________________________ Two key t…

In 1933, Joan Robinson popularised a word. That word was monopsony. It’s when you have only a single person or business that can buy something. This theory was outlined in Joan Robinson’s 1933 book, The Economics of Imperfect Competition. Joan was 29 years old. She had just released a book of original insights into market competition. This was her …

Every economist knows the Phillips Curve. It’s this fundamental relationship in the economy. This surprisingly strong connection between inflation and employment. Prices go up, there are more jobs. Rein back inflation, and more people are out work. It’s hotly debated what this all means. The author of the Phillips Curve, Bill Phillips, is almost un…