Brief von Bertram Schefold an Josef Steindl

Schefold, Bertram; Bharadwaj, Krishna

MEASUREMENT AND AGGREGATION: A COMMENT ON J. STEINDL In his paper Professor Steindl raises the question whether macroeconomists should be interested in Sraffa’s Standard commodity, ’since measurement and aggregation must ultimately be of concern to them’, particularly ’when longer series of data are used.’ The answer he gives is in the affirmative: in section 6 of the paper it is contended that Sraffa’s concept has meaning ’both for the comparison of one economy over time, and for the comparison of entirely different economies’. In this brief comment I shall not enter into a discussion of the more technical parts of Professor Steindl’s argument and especially his elaboration on the Standard System. I shall rather focus attention on some conceptual issues and point out differences between Professor Steindl’s reading of Sraffa and mine. In my opion the key to a proper understanding of the concept of the Standard commodity can be found in an oral intervention of Sraffa’s at the 1958 Corfu Conference on the theory of Capital. There Sraffa argued that ‘one should emphasize the distinction between two types of measurement. First, there was the one in which the statisticians were mainly interested. Second, there was measurement in theory. The statistician’s measures were only approximate and provided a suitable field for work in solving index number problems. The theoretical measures required absolute precision... If we found contradictions, then these pointed to defects in the theory, and an unability to define measures of Capital accurately’ (cf. Lutz and Hague, 1961, pp. 305-306; emphasis added). This distinction appears to be also lurking in the back in the following passage taken from Sraffa’s Introduction to Ricardo’s Works: 'The search for what has been called "the chimera of an invariable Standard of value" preoccupied Ricardo to the end of his life. However, the problem which mainly interested him was not that of finding an actual commodity which would accurately measure the value of com or silver at different times and places: but rather that of finding the conditions which a commodity would have to satisfy in order to be invariable in value - and this came close tb identifvina the problem of a measure with that of the law of value’ (Sraffa, 1951, pp. xl-xli; emphasis added). Ricardo’s unfortunate tendency to confound these two radically different issues caused a lot of confusion and turned out to be an obstacle in the way of a proper understanding of the role of the Standard commodity in Sraffa’s approach to the theory of value and distribution. Indeed, many Interpreters wrongly considered Sraffa’s ingenious concept an attempted solution to ’the’ Ricardian problem.

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