ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The imperfect communication between Leontief and Sraffa: no meeting, no citation, no attention?
Author: Parys Wilfried
In many writings Paul Samuelson showed his admiration for the works of Wassily Leontief and Piero Sraffa. In his influential 1971 article in the Journal of Economic Literature he even coined the expression ‘this age of Leontief and Sraffa’. However, in various publications Samuelson regretted that Leontief and Sraffa never cited each other, that they provided too few bibliographical details about their precursors, and that neither of the two seemed to feel the need to know about the other’s work. Leontief himself, in an interview with Duncan Foley, suggested he never met Sraffa. Surprisingly, some archival evidence leads to significant corrections with respect to these widely held views about zero personal contacts and zero attention to each other’s work. Sraffa attended only a few international conferences in his career, and did not meet Leontief there. Sraffa never travelled to the U.S.A., but Leontief often visited the U.K. Contrary to the information in the Foley interview, there were several personal contacts between Leontief and Sraffa in the 1950s, and at least one in 1970. Sraffa’s unpublished papers and his library show a genuine interest in Leontief’s work. Sraffa owned a copy of Leontief’s classic 1941 book and even had a copy of its rare mimeographed statistical supplement. Moreover, Sraffa attentively looked at Leontief’s American input-output table of 1919, and patiently made a lot of extra calculations, the ultimate purpose of which is not completely clear. In a 1942 document, Sraffa’s notation comes close to that used by Leontief’s book. Similarly, Leontief showed more interest in Sraffa’s theoretical results than suggested by his zero number of explicit citations to Sraffa. In the 1980s Leontief wrote a detailed empirical paper on the U.S. economy, which was full of Sraffian topics, like the wage-profit curves and the problem of reswitching of techniques. The paper was rejected by the American Economic Review in 1985 and then was published rather inconspicuously in a 1986 compilation of Leontief papers on input-output economics (all other papers were reprints). Leontief’s tables in the appendix of the new 1986 paper show some erratic movements in relative prices when the rate of profits changes. I construct a simple reswitching example using prices computed by Leontief.
Registred web users only can download this paper - Go back
Please note that files available for download have not been checked for viruses. These files have been submitted by authors of the conference to this web site. Conference organisers can't accept any responsibility for damages caused to users by downloading such files.