Suchergebnisse

The study discusses Krishna Bharadwaj's elaboration of the Sraffian critique of the currently dominating supply-and-demand equilibrium theories that are based on the marginalist approach by making use of documents from the Sraffa archive. Starting from Krishna Bharadwaj's astute observation that the law of diminishing returns 'was the thin end of the wedge by which the marginal analysis was introduced and generalised' the study is concerned with Sraffa's critique of the marginalist treatment of intensive diminishing returns and his return to a pre-marginalist and non-mechanical analysis of the intensification of land use. In the opening part of the article, the development of the friendship and collaboration between Piero Sraffa and Krishna Bharadwaj is briefly recalled, based on information provided in the correspondence files and diary entries in Sraffa's papers. JEL Code: B24, B31, B51

Richard Jones's 1831 critique of David Ricardo's theory of rent is generally viewed as ill-founded. The present paper shows that Jones's Essay on the Distribution of Wealth contains an important analytical insight: Jones noticed that Ricardo's treatment of agricultural improvements was seriously incomplete, because it failed to accommodate the historically important case of agricultural improvements that involve the use of fixed capital. More generally, it is suggested that Jones was correct in pointing out that Ricardo had not properly taken into account fixed capital in his analysis of rent and of agricultural improvements.

This paper is concerned with the meaning and validity of the 'Ricardo effect'. It is shown that the machinery substitution effect contemplated by David Ricardo (a) is not caused by a rise in the real wage rate, (b) is independent of the so‐called 'price effect', and (c) presupposes very special assumptions about the available set of production methods. The paper also investigates whether Ricardo's machinery substitution argument anticipates the principle of factor substitution with regard to capital and labour in marginalist theory.