Michael P. forwarded a message from Robert Vienneau"
Recently, Paul raised the question of empirical work in the Sraffa
tradition. He might be interested in a post on my blog:
http://robertvienneau.blogspot.com/2006/05/empirical-evidence-exists-
on-sraffa_16.html
Robert V. has put together a very interesting list of 15 empirical papers
supporting the Sraffian position against the neoclassics on the issue of
choice of techniques/capital theory/reswitching. A useful contribution and
a list worth examining for people following this issue.
But for clarity's sake, to people on the list who may not have followed the
Sraffians, I hope I got across that I was focusing on a somewhat different
issue. Walt's question had been about economic growth and on this issue I
find the Sraffian movement in two camps.
a) Most Sraffians either don't write about growth or endorse a
version of a Keynesian position. There ARE real theoretical and political
differences within this camp - e.g. Pasinnetti vs Garegnani who takes a bit
more of a "left" position arguing that Sraffian capital theory/reswitching
shows that the economy can have upward sloping "demand" curves, so that for
micro reasons the macro economy is inherently unstable (and one does not
need to rely on "imperfections", money, expectations or fundamental
uncertainty to show this as the "pure" Keynesians do). [Soula A. points
out that John Weeks does this too.]
BUT all of the Sraffians in this camp would reject classical political
economy's (CPE) view of long run dynamics and the limits it places on
Keynesian policies. For them Sraffa is about value and distribution -- not
capitalism's growth dynamics in a direct way. Effective Demand - not
profits - regulate long run growth. Hence, although for some of these
Sraffians capitalism is inherently very unstable, theoretically they lean
towards being able to solve these problems through smart technocratic
macro-economic policies.
b) Sraffa's biggest contribution was to help revive the use of
the rate of profit. A few Sraffians (Kurz, Salvadori), to the "left" of
the main group, apply this directly to the macro economy by twinning
effective demand in the short run with the rate of profit in the long
period (as per CPE). This puts them close to the Marxian tradition on this
specific point (obviously the labor theory of value and other issues remain
important differences).
Part of this effort should be to apply these theoretical positions to
actual situations. There is far too little of this work from any of the
schools of CPE, so their analysis would be a serious contribution. How
does one define the Sraffian rate of profit in the statistical world and do
resultant numbers illuminate the ups and downs of actual economies in the
past? What would that tell us about the future of today's economies?
I am also concerned that people see the policy and political implications
of theoretical positions and see how this compares with other schools. For
this group, Keynesian policies can be effective only in certain situations
and in other circumstances can even undermine long run growth. I
can imagine policies that could emerge from the "left" Sraffians but this
is putting words in their mouths and would prefer to encourage them to
produce such work. Just to give people a flavor of policies that seem to
have specific links to the theoretical POV of these Sraffians:
- bringing down capitalists' costs through public infrastructure
or lower corporate taxes;
- Taxing rich households to reduce the budget deficit (a deficit
*can* lower the long run rate of growth in classical pol econ) while giving
businesses greater incentive to retain earnings and invest; -
Raising productive capacity through state owned enterprises.
[Jaimee Moudud developed just this sort of list - but from a left-Harrodian
- perspective in the last issue of Challenge.]
However left Sraffians*might* also logically emphasize that the nature of
the Sraffian wage-profit tradeoff combined with the inherent pressures of
capitalism require workers to maintain a constant state of vigilance and
organize independent class based structures accordingly (in Italy there
used to be a great interest in Sraffa among the "autonomisti"). The "left"
Sraffians' CPE view of accumulation process *might* lead them to say that
this is also in the larger social interest if stagnation or even collapse
is to be avoided.
Some work like this has been done from Marxist and neo-Marxist perspectives
of CPE. It seems to me that this is the kind of statistical/empirical and
political work that left-Sraffians would need to develop (anyone know of
any such work?).
Paul
