Recollections of Joan

I made Joan Robinson’s personal acquaintance in September 1950, soon after my arrival in Cambridge, where I spent an academic year on an Italian research scholarship. At that time I was studying the business cycle both from a theoretical and from an empirical point of view. (During the 194950 academic year I had been in the United States, first in Chicago, then at Harvard, where my supervisor was Joseph Schumpeter, the great theorist of the cyclical development of capitalism.) In Cambridge — the old Cambridge — I asked for and obtained, as my supervisor, Dennis Robertson, author of one of the best books ever written on industrial fluctuations. From the United States — at that time under the strong theory and policy influence of Keynesian ideas (quantum mutatum ab illo!) — I had written a long letter to an economist friend of mine in Rome, where I was criticizing rather sharply certain theses worked out by Keynes in his General Theory; that letter was then published (Sylos Labini, 1949).