22 Facts About Piero Sraffa

1.

Piero Sraffa was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge.

2.

Piero Sraffa's father was a professor in commercial law and later dean at the Bocconi University in Milan.

3.

Piero Sraffa was in contact with Filippo Turati, perhaps the most important leader of the Italian Socialist Party, whom he allegedly met and frequently visited in Rapallo, where his family had a holiday villa.

4.

Piero Sraffa graduated in November 1920 with a thesis on inflation in Italy during the period of the Great War.

5.

Piero Sraffa's tutor was Luigi Einaudi, one of the most important Italian economists and later a president of the Italian Republic.

6.

Keynes entrusted Piero Sraffa with the Italian edition of his A Tract on Monetary Reform.

7.

In 1922 Piero Sraffa was appointed director of the provincial labour department in Milan, where he frequented socialist circles.

8.

In 1925, Piero Sraffa wrote about returns to scale and perfect competition.

9.

Piero Sraffa arrived in July of 1927 and remained there for life.

10.

Together with Frank P Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sraffa joined the so-called cafeteria group, an informal club that discussed Keynes's theory of probability and Friedrich Hayek's theory of business cycles.

11.

Piero Sraffa thoroughly analyzed the inconsistencies logic of Hayek's theory on the effect of forced capital savings caused by inflation and above all on the definition of natural interest rate.

12.

In 1939, Piero Sraffa was elected to a fellowship at Trinity College.

13.

Piero Sraffa aimed to demonstrate flaws in the mainstream neoclassical theory of value and develop an alternative analysis.

14.

Pasinetti's approach, based on Piero Sraffa's theory, has recently been developed by Kurz and Salvadori.

15.

Piero Sraffa was instrumental in securing Gramsci's prison notebooks from the Fascist authorities after the latter's death in 1937.

16.

Norman Malcolm famously credits Piero Sraffa with providing Ludwig Wittgenstein with the conceptual break that founded the Philosophical Investigations, by means of a rude gesture on Piero Sraffa's part:.

17.

Piero Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand.

18.

Analogously, Piero Sraffa was rebutting the neoclassical paradigm which was similarly atomistic and individualistic.

19.

Piero Sraffa was described as a shy and very reserved man who was devoted to study and books.

20.

Piero Sraffa's library contained more than 8,000 volumes, many of which are now in the Trinity College Library.

21.

Piero Sraffa was involved in Cambridge capital controversy, sometimes called "the capital controversy" or "the two Cambridges debate".

22.

In 1966, Paul Samuelson organized a symposium in the QJE, in which it was accepted by all parties, including Samuelson himself, that David Levhari had made a mistake and that Piero Sraffa's proposition is, of course, robust.