Sraffa on von Bortkiewicz
It is interesting to note that among Piero Sraffa’s unpublished papers there is a notebook of 1942-43 with extensive excerpts from, and critical comments on, three contributions of Bortkiewicz: his criticism of Bohm-Bawerk’s theory of capital and interest (Bortkiewicz 1906, 1907b) and his essay on “Value and price in the Marxian system” (Bortkiewicz 1906-07).
Sraffa in his comments on Bortkiewicz’s essay on the “cardinal error” in Bohm-Bawerk’s theory of interest approved of Bortkiewicz’s specification of the task of interest theory - a task Sraffa had in fact established independently of him and accomplished (with regard to single production) with his “second equations” relating to an economy with a surplus and given real (that is, subsistence) wages elaborated towards the end of 1927. Sraffa held Bortkiewicz in high esteem because of his “dictum” concerning the criteria that the theory of value and distribution ought to satisfy, but he also accused him of having put forward misleading interpretations of Ricardo and Marx and of inconsistencies in the 1906-07 article. Sraffa’s main criticism concerned the fact that Bortkiewicz, who had considered Marx’s analysis as a “regression” from the state of the classical theory of value and distribution achieved by Ricardo, had not seen that Marx had indeed contributed a major analytical insight. He had shown that with circular production relations, which Ricardo had for simplicity set aside in his analysis of the wage-profit relationship, the rate of profits is always bounded from above (that is, there is a finite maximum rate of profits) - with important implications for the theory of distribution, capital accumulation, and technical change. (For an in-depth discussion of Sraffa’s comments on Bortkiewicz, see Gehrke and Kurz 2006.) As regards Bortkiewicz’s treatment of the “transformation problem”, Sraffa objected that while Bortkiewicz had assumed different organic compositions of capital between the three departments under consideration, he had implicitly assumed the same organic compositions of all industries within each department.Christian Gehrke and Heinz D. Kurz
See also:
Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev (I); Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (I); General equilibrium theory (III); Karl Heinrich Marx (I); David Ricardo (I); Piero Sraffa (I); Value and price (III); Marie-Esprit-Leon Walras (I).