Abstract
At one point in 1928 Sraffa thought that the main purpose of his work was to develop a critique of the theory of marginal productivity of capital, as in a note titled ‘Preface’, he wrote:
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Notes
- 1.
I am indebted to Riccardo Bellofiore for this translation.
- 2.
A.S. Besicovitch was a noted mathematician at Cambridge University and a friend of Sraffa who helped Sraffa enormously with his mathematical problems.
- 3.
It should be noted that the direction of causation with respect to switches in techniques in the case of accumulation of capital is not the same as in the case of marginal productivity theory of interest. In the case of ‘accumulation’, a rise in wages due to accumulation of capital leads to a switch in favour of a more machine intensive technique, whereas in the case of marginal productivity theory, the increase in capital intensity leads to a rise in wages. Sraffa used the ‘accumulation’ case to make sense of Marx’s ‘falling rate of profit’ thesis. On this question, see Sraffa’s critique of Bortkiewicz in file D1/91 and Sinha (2014).
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Sinha, A. (2016). ‘My Hypothesis’. In: A Revolution in Economic Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30616-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30616-2_5
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