1,721,025 research outputs found
Recensione di Susumu Takenaga (ed) (2016). Ricardo and the Japanese Economic Thought. Selection of Ricardo studies in Japan during the interwar period. Routledge History of Economic Thought no.14, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 259. ISBN: 978-1-138-85361-4 (hbk), 978-1-315-64251-2 (ebk).
No full textRecensione di Heinz D. Kurz (2016). Economic Thought. A Brief History (translated by Jeremiah Riemer). New York: Columbia University Press, pp. ix + 208. ISBN: 978-0-231-17258-5.
No full textEconomic Logic with Internal Consistency (and Not Only Formal Rigour). Realism and Internal Consistency in Piero Sraffa
No full textAs is well known, during his life Sraffa never published a work explicitly devoted to epistemological issues. This fact should not be
interpreted to indicate Sraffa’s lack of interest in such concerns. From Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts – kept at the Wren Library of Trinity
College, Cambridge, and from the books of his personal library – we see that Sraffa had a strong interest in questions of philosophy of
8science (Kurz and Salvadori, 2005). Therefore, a reconstruction of Sraffa’s epistemological theory can only be conjectural and must not
leave out of consideration his unpublished manuscripts. In a previous work (Salvadori and Signorino, 2007), we analysed a specific aspect of Sraffa’s epistemology, the threefold relationship between ‘economic reality’, ‘the economist’ and ‘economic theory’, and we focused almost exclusively on the published material and used unpublished manuscripts only sparingly to show that our statements based on the published contributions were confirmed by, or at least consistent with, the unpublished material. In this chapter, we shift our attention to a somewhat related theme, the relevance of the realism of the premises in the assessment of a theory, and we make extensive use of unpublished manuscripts, while being aware of the necessary caution in using material that an author has not published. (Caution is even more significant in the case of an author such as Sraffa who is particularly careful with his choice of words and extremely reluctant to publish anything except after a long period of reflection.)
Was It a “Fatal Error”? Sraffa and Samuelson on Marshall's Partial Equilibria Method
No full textSamuelson commented several times on Sraffa’s 1926 Economic Journal paper, while for presumably linguistic reasons he never commented on the 1925 Italian article, which was translated into English only in 1998 (Sraffa [1925] 1998). He eventually consid ered the conclusion Sraffa reached in the first part of his 1926 Economic Journal paper an error (see Samuelson 1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1991) and did not change his view even when Eatwell (1990), Garegnani (1990), Schefold
(1990), and Panico (1991) brought to his attention the fact that his and Sraffa’s analyses were quite similar. In this article we pursue the following aims. We
1. highlight similarities and differences between Sraffa 1925 and
Samuelson 1971,
2. reconstruct the evolution of Samuelson’s thought concerning Sraffa’s
1926 critique of Marshallian economics,
3. obtain new insights from Sraffa’s unpublished manuscripts about
Sraffa’s thought on the role and significance of the constant costs
case within Marshallian economics,
4. take account of a change in Sraffa’s assessment of Marshallian par tial equilibrium methodology that took place in the second half of
the 1920s,1 and
5. reconsider the previous debate on these issues in the light of unpub lished documents that were not available at the time of the debate
Sraffa and the problem of returns : a view from the Sraffa archive
No full textAbout a quarter of a century ago, Carlo Panico and one of the authors of this
chapter published a paper on ‘Sraffa, Marshall and the problem of returns’
(EJHET 1994) in which they explored links between Sraffa’s mid-1920s critique of Marshallian economics and the analysis developed some 35 years later
in Production of Commodities. The 1994 contribution focused exclusively on
Sraffa’s published works since his unpublished manuscripts were not yet freely
accessible. With the benefit of hindsight, it may be claimed that Sraffa was a
scholar who, during his lifetime, published little but wrote a lot (Kurz, 2008).
Hence, when in December 1994 Trinity College Cambridge, UK, opened the
Sraffa Archive, a huge amount of hitherto unknown material became available
to the scientific community. Our aim in this chapter is to reconsider some of
the results achieved in the 1994 contribution in the light of the new evidence
provided by Sraffa’s manuscripts.
The 1994 paper investigated four issues: (i) the chronological development
of Sraffa’s thought in the second half of the 1920s, (ii) the analysis of the firm
in the 1920s and in 1960, (iii) the determinants of variable returns in the 1920s
and in 1960 and, finally, (iv) interdependence among sectors and the assumption of given quantities. In this chapter, we focus on the last two issues
since, as regards item (ii), we were not able to find elements of interest in the
Sraffa Archive while Garegnani (2005) and Kurz and Salvadori (2005a) have
provided a thorough scrutiny of unpublished material related to item (i)
Review of Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes (eds) (2013). Mark Blaug: Rebel with Many Causes. Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar
No full textMark Blaug passed away on November 18, 2011. To honor his memory, two events were held in March 2012: a Memorial Conference at the Erasmus Institute for Philosophy and Economics, Rotterdam (NL), and a seminar hosted by the Scottish Centre for Economic Methodology at the University of Glasgow (UK). As Marcel Boumans and Matthias Klaes point out in their editorial Introduction, this book contains a collection of papers given at these two events and includes some additional papers submitted by people who were not able to attend the meetings “at such short notice” (p. 5). In addition, the book carries a Foreword by Alan Peacock and consists of two parts: part I has four chapters—written by John Maloney, Ruth Towse, Bruce Caldwell, and Thomas Mayer—that are devoted to personal appreciations and memoirs of Blaug; part II has twelve chapters—written by Richard G. Lipsey, David Laidler, Geoffrey M. Hodgson, Jack Vromen, Harro Maas, Roger E. Backhouse, John B. Davis, Marcel Baumans, Andrea Salanti, Victor Ginsburgh, Christian Handke and Erwin Dekker, and D. Wade Hands—that discuss some of Blaug’s favorite topics and put forward critical assessments of his specific contributions to the issues at hand. An extensive bibliography of Blaug’s publications and on-line sources ranging through twenty-nine pages rounds off the book
The Ricardian System and the Industrial Revolution
No full textThe goal of the paper is to study the determinants of the dynamics of the
labour share (the ratio between total labour income and output) in a Ricardian
economy, where factors’ compensations do not strictly follow the rule of marginal
returns and the main driver of changes is technological progress and the
accumulation of circulating and fixed capital. In particular, we intend to apply our
Ricardian model to the explanation of the dynamics of factor shares in UK in the
period between 1770 and 1860, i.e. during the Industrial Revolution. We focus on
the labour share since the latter has had a deep impact on several topics,
particularly as concerns the distinctive features of a capitalist economy regarding
the division of gains from economic growth among the various social classe
Piero Sraffa and Counterfactuals: A View from Sraffa's Unpublished Papers in the Late 1920s
No full textWe reconstruct Sraffa’s position with regard to counterfactual reasoning in the second half of the 1920s as documented by his hitherto unpublished papers. While Sraffa did not use the term “counterfactual”, it is precisely this concept he had in mind, when he examined certain non-purely observational propositions and discussed the responses to ‘What if?’ questions. He did so with respect to different contexts. His attention focused however primarily on the marginal theory of value and distribution. Sraffa’s method of inquiry can be interpreted as an instance of abductive reasoning. The paper confirms Sen’s interpretation that Sraffa met counterfactual reasoning with suspicion, since it might easily lead to highly misleading propositions. But Sraffa’s manuscripts do not support the extreme view (not entertained by Sen) that any counterfactual reasoning ought to be rejected
Adam smith on monopoly theory. making good a Lacuna
Full text linkThis article analyses Adam Smith's views on monopoly by focusing on Book IV and V of The Wealth of Nations. It argues that the majority of scholars have assessed Smith's analysis of monopoly starting from premises different from those, actually though implicitly, used by Smith. We show that Smith makes use of the word 'monopoly' to refer to a heterogeneous collection of market outcomes, besides that of a single seller market, and that Smith's account of monopolists' behaviour is richer than that provided by later theorists. We also show that Smith was aware of the growth-retarding effect of monopoly and urged State regulation. © 2014 Scottish Economic Society
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