[OPE-L:7532] Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Naples on gold

From: Fred B. Moseley (fmoseley@mtholyoke.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 22 2002 - 14:53:03 EDT


On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, mongiovg wrote:

> 
> Another brief response to Rakesh.  I also agree that on questions of money, 
> Marx is superior to Ricardo.  Sraffa was an extremely astute monetary 
> economist--as perceptive, I think, as Keynes. Check out his baccalaureate 
> thesis, on the Italian inflation that accompanied and followed the First World 
> War: a tranmslation appeared in the Cambridge Journal a few years ago.  It's a 
> masterpiece of institutional political economy.  Then there is Sraffa's 
> disabling critique of Hayek's monetary theory of the trade cycle. This work, I 
> think, bears out my claim that questions relating to money can usefully be 
> separated from foundational questions about how prices, distrubution and the 
> technical conditions of produciton are related to one another.

This is a good example of the superior explanatory power of Marx's theory,
discussed in my previous post.  Sraffa may have been an astute monetary
economist, but Sraffa's theory of value and distribution does not explain
money or cycles.  Marx's theory of value and distribution, on the other
hand, does explain money and cycles.  Isn't it better to have a theory
which is able to provide an integrated explanation of these important
phenomena than a theory which cannot and instead treats all these
phenomena "separately" and ad hoc?

Fred



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