Life
Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, of Polish descent, was born in St Petersburg on 7 August 1868. His father was a colonel and military instructor teaching artillery and mathematics. Ladislaus studied several subjects - law at the university of his home town, where he graduated in 1890, political economy and statistics first in Strasbourg from 1891 to 1892, then under the supervision of the eminent German statistician Wilhelm Lexis in Gottingen in 1892, followed by study visits to Vienna and Leipzig.
He received his PhD in 1893 from Gottingen University. From 1895 to 1897 he lectured on statistics and actuarial science as a Privatdozent in Strasbourg. He returned to Russia, where he worked as a clerk and then as a teacher until 1901, when he became an extraordinary professor of statistics at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University of Berlin. In 1920 he was appointed to the chair of statistics and political economy. He stayed in Berlin until he passed away on 15 July 1931.Bortkiewicz received several honours, including membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Royal Statistical Society, the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute. It is perhaps interesting to note that when Walras’s health deteriorated and caused him to retire from his chair in Lausanne in 1892, he asked Bortkiewicz whether he would become his successor, reflecting an enormous esteem for the 24-year-old. It was only after Bortkiewicz had told him that he had turned to statistics and was not interested that Walras, upon Maffeo Pantaleoni’s advice, supported the appointment of Vilfredo Pareto.
Bortkiewicz published over 100 articles and a number of books. His work is wide- ranging, covering mathematical statistics, actuarial science, economics, mathematics and physics. He was well read in all major economic theories, including those of David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Leon Walras, Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk and Vilfredo Pareto, and he was keen to identify the differences and similarities between them and whether and when there was progress in the discipline.
For example, his observations on major authors, such as Ricardo, Marx, or Bohm-Bawerk, were typically embedded in more general discussions and assessments of the developments in economic analysis. Bortkiewicz’s main interest was the theory of value, capital and income distribution. He admired David Ricardo, but also Marx and Walras. His analytic mind was acute and uncompromising. He did not allow sloppy arguments to pass unnoticed and therefore was feared as a “taskmaster” in the profession. Joseph Schumpeter (1954: 851) severely underestimated his achievements by calling him a “comma hunter”, who “had no eye for the wider aspects and deeper meanings of a theoretical model”. More to the point, he and Bortkiewicz held fundamentally different views about what the latter dubbed the “touchstone” of an explanation of interest (that is, profits) (see below).In this entry the main focus is on Bortkiewicz’s contributions to economics. A brief summary account of his works on statistics is followed by a discussion of his “collaboration” with Leon Walras. Then his comparative assessment of the theories of value and distribution of David Ricardo and Karl Marx are dealt with.