Over at Marginal Revolution, they’re quoting Jagdish Bhagwati:
“Once, Mrs Joan Robinson, my radical teacher at Cambridge University, and Professor Gus Ranis of Yale University, a ‘neo-liberal’ economist, were observed agreeing with each other that Korea had been a great success.
The paradox was resolved when it turned out that Mrs Robinson was talking about North Korea and Professor Ranis about South Korea!
(emphasis added)
Although “Mrs Joan Robinson” was indeed so called in 1956 (when she was teaching Bhagwati), by 1965, she was going by the name of “Professor Joan Robinson”. Gustav Ranis was made a full professor in 1964, according to his CV. So either this conversation took place in the second half of 1964 (or early in 1965), or Bhagwati is making a mistake that is, frankly, all too common when people discuss female academics. Val Dusek points out that Margaret Mead was a frequent victim of this accidental rudeness too.
Update. A number of our commenters appear to be making variants of the same joke about Joan Robinson being stupid for calling North Korea a success. Ahem.
“Like all the postwar Communist states, the DPRK undertook massive state investment in heavy industry, state infrastructure and military strength, neglecting the production of consumer goods. By paying the collectivized peasants low state-controlled prices for their product, and using the surplus thus extracted to pay for industrial development, the state carried out a series of three-year plans, which brought industry’s share of the economy from 47% in 1946 to 70% in 1959, depite the intervening devastation of the Korean War. There were huge increases in electricity production, steel production and machine building. The large output of tractors and other agricultural machinery achieved a great increase in agricultural productivity.
As a result of these revolutionary changes, there is no doubt that the population was better fed and, at least in urban areas, better housed than they had been before the war, and also better than were most people in the South in this period. Even hostile observers agree that standards of living rose rapidly in the DPRK in the later 1950s and into the 1960s, certainly more rapidly than in the South, where there had been no land reform and little industrial development. There was, however, a chronic shortage of consumer goods, and the urban population lived under a system of extreme labor discipline and constant demands for greater productivity.
In other words, between the Korean War and the oil crisis of the 1970s, the North Korean economy was not doing at all badly and it was entirely arguable that it was outperforming South Korea. (Professor) Joan Robinson retired in the early 1970s. Btw, Bhagwati explicitly did not make this mistake; his whole point in the original anecdote was to point out that subsequent events had shown that South Korean state-organised export promoting capitalism was a better system than North Korean state socialism.
Update update It’s just struck me that since JR was the wife of Professor Sir Austin Robinson, there’s probably a case to be made that at the very least, Bhagwati ought to have called her “Lady Joan Robinson”.
