On Sraffa’s Challenge to Causality in Economics

The Keynesian Economics Working Group is pleased to announce that we will live-stream Maria Cristina Marcuzzo’s seminar “On Sraffa’s Challenge to Causality in Economics” to be held at the INET office in New York on 27 January, 10am ET. We invite you to join online!

Maria Cristina Marcuzzo will discuss her current research based on the Sraffa’s Archives, focusing on the contributions related to Sraffa’s challenge to causality in economics. She argues that Sraffa’s entire research project is a struggle to escape from mechanical, causal theory, and to develop a geometrical representation of the economic structure. While a geometrical theory refers to an instant in time and is concerned with logical relations, a mechanical theory refers to processes that happen in real-time, in which causality is involved. Marcuzzo discusses his reasons to embark on this project, related to how he sees causal explanations too stringent to be applied to economics, and what the recent literature argues. This argument helps understand Sraffa’s work but also addresses limits and potentials of economic investigation.