Piero Sraffa (1898-1983) was an influential Italian economist whose book The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics.
Early life
He was born in Turin, Italy, the son of Angelo Sraffa, a Professor in commercial law, and Irma. He studied in his town and graduated at the local university with a work on inflation in Italy during and after WWI. Notably, his tutor was Luigi Einaudi, one of the most important Italian economists and later a president of the Italian Republic.
From 1921 to 1922 he studied in London at the London School of Economics. In 1922 he was appointed as Director of the provincial labour department in Milan, then as Professor in Political economy first in Perugia, and later in Cagliari, Sardinia. Here he met Antonio Gramsci (the most important leader of Italian Communist Party). They became close friends, partly due to their shared ideological views - Sraffa was at this time a radical marxist[1]. He also was already in contact with Filippo Turati, perhaps the most important leader of Italian Socialist Party, whom he allegedly met and frequently visited in Rapallo, where his family had a holiday villa.
In 1925 he wrote about returns to scale and perfect competition, underlining some doubtful points of Alfred Marshall's theory of the firm. This work was completed in an article he published the following year.
Major work
In 1927, his as yet undiscussed theory of value, but also his risky political ideas, his compromising friendship with Gramsci (who had already been imprisoned under Fascism - notably, Sraffa had brought him the materials, literally pens and paper, with which Gramsci would write his "Quaderni dal Carcere"), brought John Maynard Keynes to prudentially invite Sraffa to the University of Cambridge, where he was initially assigned a lectureship. After a few years, Keynes created ex novo for him the charge of Marshall Librarian. Sraffa joined the so-called "cafeteria group", together with Frank P. Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a sort of informal club that discussed of Keynes' theory of probability and Friedrich Hayek's theory on business cycles. At this time, also due to Keynes' influence, Sraffa began his research into the life and work of David Ricardo, which he undertook with an extraordinary degree of conscientiousness: George Stigler was to write later "Ricardo was a fortunate man... And now, 130 years after his death, he is as fortunate as ever : he has been befriended by Sraffa."
His Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities was an attempt to perfect Classical Economics' theory of value, as originally developed by David Ricardo and others. He aimed to demonstrate flaws in the mainstream neoclassical theory of value and develop and alternative analysis. In particular, Sraffa's technique of aggregating capital as dated inputs of labour led to the Cambridge capital controversy.
Economists disagree on whether Sraffa's work refutates neoclassical economics. Many post-Keynesian economists use Sraffa's critique as justification for abandoning neoclassical analysis and exploring other models of economic behavior. Others see his work as compatible with neoclassical economics, as developed in modern general equilibrium models. Nonetheless, Sraffa's work, particularly his interpretation of Ricardo and his The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, is seen as the starting point of the Neo-Ricardian school in the 1960s.
Recent work on the history of mathematics suggests that work remains to be done linking Sraffa and "Production" to the history of early twentieth-century mathematics. He was enthusiastic about Poincare's Science and Hypothesis but his lack of study of contemporary mathematics made him susceptible to Poincare's polemical program in that famous book.(dubious assertion—see talk page) Poincare was looking for a mathematics which would avoid the paradoxes of set theory. However, recent work has called into question the existence of the paradox associated with the history of set theory. Did Sraffa adopt a mathematical approach which is now beginning to reveal anomalies? Alejandro Garciadiego's landmark book, Bertrand Russell and the Origins of the Set-theoretic 'Paradoxes' (1992) inaugurated a renewed look at the influence of "natural" mathematics on the history of twentieth-century thought, including Sraffa's.
Personal connections
Norman Malcolm famously credits Sraffa with providing Ludwig Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Sraffa's part:
Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' [1]
Sraffa was described as a very intelligent man, with a proverbial shyness and a real devotion for study and books. His famous library contained more than 8,000 volumes, now partly in the Trinity College Library.
In 1972 he was awarded a honorary doctorate by Paris' university (Sorbonne), and in 1976 he received another one from Madrid's university.
He became rich after a long-term investment on Japanese government bonds, made the day after the nuclear bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; a popular story tells that he'd received a huge amount of money which for more than a decade he'd refused to invest, waiting for a "safe" opportunity. He correctly reasoned that Japan wouldn't remain a poor country for long.[citation needed]
Notes
- ^ Norman Malcolm. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 58-59.
External links