Sraffian Economics: Reviving Classical Political Economy

Piero Sraffa spent decades editing the works of David Ricardo at Cambridge. In a short, dense book, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960), he showed how prices and the distribution of income between wages and profits can be analyzed without supply and demand curves, reviving the "surplus approach" of the classical economists.

Sraffa's work fueled the Cambridge capital controversies, in which Joan Robinson, Luigi Pasinetti, and Pierangelo Garegnani in Cambridge, England, challenged Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1966 Samuelson conceded a key technical point, known as reswitching.

You will work through Sraffa's system step by step, read Ricardo and the classical economists, and understand why the capital debates still matter for theories of growth and distribution.

Mainstream economists accept the logic of reswitching but argue it is rare in practice and that simple aggregate models remain useful. Marxians debate Steedman's claim that labor values are redundant. Post-Keynesians disagree with Sraffians about long-period analysis. You will study these exchanges and decide how much they change economics.

Elton's program is pluralist: your professors help you understand each school on its own terms, weigh it fairly against the evidence, and reach your own conclusions.