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On capital theory and professor Schefold: some first observations
Fabio Petri

Last modified: 2019-06-14

Abstract


Professor Bertram Schefold’s recent papers on capital theory argue that the extremely low likelihood of reswitching and reverse capital deepening that emerges (according to him) from the study of empirical input-output tables is confirmed by theoretical results; these results, he concludes, rehabilitate to some extent traditional neoclassical views on capital and show that the Sraffian critics’ insistence on reverse capital deepening as a fundamental criticism of neoclassical theory is misplaced. The present paper reports some doubts I have been recently nurturing about these arguments. I remain unpersuaded by some specific formal arguments and also by some broader conclusions of professor Schefold. In particular his thesis, that a very low likelihood of reverse capital deepening largely rehabilitates traditional long-period general equilibrium theory, seems to forget that Lindahl, Hayek, Hicks concluded that the treatment of capital as a factor of production was indefensible independently of the possibility ‒ unknown to them ‒ of reverse capital deepening. The extremely low likelihood of reverse capital deepening too seems a less solid result than professor Schefold appears to think: I question his theoretical argument to such an effect, advanced in Schefold (2016, Appendix) and in Schefold (2017); as to the empirical evidence based on input-output tables, I find it suffers from serious weaknesses.

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