J. M. Keynes Made It Clear in His Correspondence to J. Robinson between September 8th to November 9th, 1936 that She Was Completely Ignorant of His Liquidity Preference Theory of the Rate of Interest: It Is Simply Impossible that Joan Robinson Was “…One of J.m. Keynes’ Most Brilliant Students, Who Helped Him Draft the Original of His General Theory.”

The myths concocted by Joan Robinson from the late 1940’s to the early 1980’s about J M Keynes live on today in the work of Post Keynesian, Institutionalist, and Heterodox economists. The most damaging of these myths is the one that claims that she worked closely with Keynes when he was writing the General Theory. Thus, according to Gram and Walsh, she was in a position to know exactly what he meant. This myth was presented in a 1983 Journal of Economic Literature paper by H. Gram and V.Walsh. Of course, Gram and Walsh never mention pp.134-148 of the CWJMK in Volume 14 because it completely destroys the foundation for the claim that she worked closely with Keynes when he was writing the General Theory. Keynes‘s final message of November 9th,1936 is that Joan Robinson did not know what she was talking about. Keynes’s two months of exchanges with Robinson, between September 8th and November 9th,1936, show an exasperated Keynes presenting an intellectually devastating and annihilating obliteration of Joan Robinson's understanding of Keynes’s liquidity preference theory of the rate of interest. The only conclusion that can be logically derived from this correspondence is that Joan Robinson had no idea about what Keynes was doing in the General Theory. Her understanding was what Richard Kahn and Austin Robinson taught her. Unfortunately, neither Kahn nor A. Robinson themselves understood Keynes’s theory, which requires a reader of the General Theory to have a complete understanding of what Keynes had done in chapters 6 and 26 of the A Treatise on Probability. How was it that Joan Robinson, who is obviously completely lost in these exchanges with Keynes, is portrayed as the greatest female economist who ever lived? Of course, the answer is that she wasn’t. Joan Robinson’s academic career entailed her being coached, instructed and taught by Richard Kahn, her lover of 50 plus years, as well as by her husband, Austin Robinson, who she later divorced. However, since she needed her ex-husband to keep checking, revising, redrafting and editing her works before they were publishable, she reached an agreement whereby he did not move out after the divorce. Her life parallels in many respects the intellectual maneuvers of Elizabeth Holmes, who succeeded from 2002 -2018 in misrepresenting her contributions in medical blood testing apparatus and the applications of such apparatus. Joan Robinson knew that it was impossible for her to understand Keynes’s General Theory unless it was first explained to her by either/or/and Richard Kahn and Austin Robinson. This intellectual charade continued all of her life. It started in 1930 with Kahn, aided by A. Robinson, allowing J.Robinson to rewrite his 1929 dissertation, The Economics of the Short Period, as her 1933 The Economics of Imperfect Competition. In 1936, however, she made a very severe miscalculation and submitted to Keynes a book that had not been thoroughly checked and vetted first by Richard Kahn and Austin Robinson. Over the course of the two month correspondence from September 8th,1936 till November 13th 1936, Keynes spent a great deal of time and effort trying to correct her many errors about his Liquidity Preference Theory of the Rate of Interest. J. Robinson compounded her original errors by making additional errors as she attempted to argue that it was Keynes who was mistaken, not her. Keynes finally realized that J. Robinson simply did not know what she was talking about because she lacked a basic understanding of introductory level mathematics and economics. Keynes‘s first paragraph in his letter of the 9th of November, 1936, is the following two lines: “I beg you not to publish. For your argument as it stands is most certainly nonsense.” Anyone who ponders Keynes’s conclusion above and who reads this correspondence of 14 pages in Volume 14 of the CWJMK (1973), will soon realize that it was simply impossible for Joan Robinson to have aided or contributed in any way to the development of the General Theory between 1930 and February,1936, given the nature of these exchanges. Joan Robinson was never ”one of Keynes’s most brilliant students“ and Joan Robinson never “helped him draft the original of his General Theory”. R. Skidelsky accused Roy Harrod of covering up certain aspects of Keynes’s life in his 1951 biography of Keynes in order to ”protect” Keynes’s reputation. This is correct, although Skidelsky overlooked Harrod’s additional covering up of Keynes’s original multiplier-accelerator model of August, 1938 and Keynes’s careful tutoring of Harrod in correspondence, between July and September, 1935, of Keynes’s IS-LM model, which is presented in full by Keynes formally in the General Theory in chapter 21 in Part IV on pages 298-299. Unfortunately, Skidelsky has done exactly what he condemned R. Harrod of doing in 1951. Skidelsky has covered up the exchanges between J M Keynes and Joan Robinson in the period between September and November, 1936 because Skidelsky decided to accept Joan Robinson‘s canard about being a close, working collaborator with Keynes in the writing of the General Theory, who was Keynes’s zealous disciple.