Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize: Dear Bob, To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point. Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease: The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have […]