Beyond Capitalism: Sraffa’s Economic Theory

Guglielmo Chiodi

Chapter 7 in Sraffa or An Alternative Economics, 2008, pp 187-198 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Immediately after the publication of Sraffa’s book Production of Commodities by means of Commodities (PCC) in I960, a fairly long-lasting and intensive debate took place among the economists which was essentially centred on crucial topics related to capital theory. A nice review of the topics discussed and a summary of the main (provisional) conclusions was provided a decade later by Harcourt (1972), who labelled that debate as the ‘Cambridge controversies’ in capital theory-referring to the two distinct Universities involved (in England and in the USA). More substantially, what was heavily criticized by the English Cambridge was the notion of ‘capital’ characterizing the marginal theory of value and distribution as a ‘quantity’ measurable independently of, or prior to, prices. As a consequence, all the derivative concepts of that notion, such as the ‘marginal productivity of capital’, the demand for and the supply of ‘capital’ functions, the ‘capital/labour ratio’ and some ‘regularities’ (as, for example, the monotonic relationship between the rate of interest and the ‘quantity of capital’) were put under attack, and the use by the marginal theory was found capable of producing only inconsistent results.

Keywords: Marginal Productivity; Production Price; Classical Economist; Alternative Economic; Labour Theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37533-8_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230375338

DOI: 10.1057/9780230375338_8

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().