On the Logical Consistency of Sraffa's Economic Theory: A Comment on Savran and Steedman

In a recent article in Capital and C/ass, Savran (1979, p . 131) argues that ' . . . Sraffa's economics is inconsistent and untenable even within its own theoretical framework' and ' . . . that logical consistency requires that Sraffa's theory itself be abandoned' (Savran, 1979, p . 137) . In neoRicardian analysis, the wage/profit frontier for the economic system as a whole is constructed using data for the technological conditions of production in all industries (Figure 1) . The prior specification of one of the distributional parameters (say the wage rate, w a ) determines the value of the other distributional parameter (ra) and the prices of all the commodities . Savran maintains that it is not logically possible to 'close' Sraffa's system in this way . His main objection is that it cannot be known a priori whether a wage rate which has been so determined will be high enough to cover subsistence consumption . Steedman (1979) states that such criticism is misplaced and that Sraffa's system does not suffer from these alleged logical flaws . Whilst we agree with many of the points that Steedman makes, we feel that his summary treatment of Savran's argument is a little misleading. Steedman, quite rightly, treats Sraffa's book, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, as having as its central concern :