The Woman Who Shattered the Myth of the Free Market

Joan Robinson established her economics bona fides at Cambridge University. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the theories of Cambridge scholar Alfred Marshall dominated the economic narrative of the time. Those precepts posited that markets were continually evolving toward a state of perfect competition and that they naturally achieved equilibrium in supply and demand. As a result, consumers benefit by enjoying better goods and prices as companies compete against their peers, and in the labor market, employers and workers reach a balance on wages. Marshall argued that competition and supply-and-demand equilibrium are the natural order, and that deviations from the norm...