Abstract
This paper addresses the scholarly influence of Joseph A. Schumpeter on Paolo Sylos Labini and briefly discusses their personal relationship. Although they met at Harvard only one year before Schumpeter died, they had the opportunity to interact frequently and Sylos attended both the graduate courses taught by the Austrian economist during the 1948-49 academic year. They had very different personalities and political attitudes. Nevertheless, Schumpeter’s intellectual influence on Sylos was very significant. Its analysis is structured here along Schumpeter’s three most important contributions to social sciences: an evaluation of past economic theories, a theory of economic development, and a few contributions to a theory of social and institutional change. Even if Sylos had a different conception of economics as a discipline, he caught fire from Schumpeter’s teachings, whose imprint is self-evident in most of his important contributions
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Notes
To avoid confusions, Sylos’ critics to Marx are mostly concerned with his moral conduct and political activism. Therefore, they are not related to the intellectual influence that the German thinker had on Schumpeter.
To stress his interest for Schumpeter’s works (and to emphasize the length of Business Cycles!), Sylos was used to remark ironically that he was one of the only six persons worldwide who red the whole book.
See also the opinion expressed by Vianello (2007) (p.3), who was Sylos’ student.
Schumpeter, in the last year of his life, even recognized that mathematical models in the business cycle research had been relatively sterile and argued that the historical method had been by far more important (Schumpeter 1949b).
The following quotation is particularly revealing: ”In truth we can learn not so much from his [Adam Smith] prescriptions as from the nature of his approach, which is at once theoretical and historical and points to the necessity of studying economies in their global movements”. (Sylos Labini 1984)
In this respect, it is worth mentioning an episode related to the the note handed by Sylos to Schumpeter when he was at Harvard. He questioned whether a reduction of the interest rate had an impact on the capital intensity of the production processes, as neoclassical theory implies. When Sylos had the chance to discuss his controversial opinion with Schumpeter, he objected that, if Sylos was right, an essential part of traditional theory had to be rejected.
On this point, see for example Scherer (1992). Note that innovation and technical progress are used as synonymous.
An article remained unknown until 1993 suggests that Schumpeter himself was conscious that in his works the explanation of novelty (that in the realm of economic life is innovation) remains to a good extent unsolved (Schumpeter 2005).
To be sure, in another part of BS innovation is also defined more broadly as ”doing things differently in the realm of economic life” (Schumpeter 1939, 84).
See Sweezy (1943) for a discussion on this point.
For a critical assessment see Langlois (2003) and the literature cited therein.
See Sylos’ opinion expressed in Roncaglia (1988).
”I studied at Harvard with Schumpeter [...] and I was strongly influenced — I hope for the good reasons — by him; hence my vision of innovation is not only economic, but also social”. My translation from (Sylos Labini 1985, 18).
Sylos’ disagreement on the usefulness of Schumpeter’s distinction between growth and development is also addressed in the note he handed to Schumpeter while he was at Harvard and that Schumpeter addressed publicly in two classes (Roncaglia 1988).
According to Sylos, diminishing returns in agriculture and mining make growth without innovation impossible. In his chapter for Sylos Festschrift, (Baumol 1993) shows with a formal model that the above conjecture is valid under the assumptions of sufficiently strong decreasing returns to scale and capital depreciation rates.
Among others, two quotes are particularly revealing of Sylos thought. ”Many economists — andSchumpeter is among them — consider innovation as exogenous or autonomous, i.e. they include them among the shocks that influence economic activity from the outside.” My translation from Sylos Labini (1989), p.55. ”Schumpeter[...] concentrated on the inventions originated, exogenously, by individual inventors [...] and by the scientists and research workers operating in firms’ laboratories” (Sylos Labini 1998, 347).
The English translation reported here is from Sylos Labini (1984), p.55.
Sylos Labini (1983a) provides an empirical investigation on the importance of the above sources in Italy and the US.
”[...] Schumpeter recognized that his own views on the role of the large firms in the economy had a large ideological content [...]” (Mason 1951, 142).
Arguably, Sylos’ position is bolder than Shumpeter’s. He was used to say that textbook perfect competition never existed.
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Acknowledgments
I wish to thank Alessandro Roncaglia, Stefano Sylos Labini, and Fernando Vianello for very helpful comments and discussions. The usual disclaimers apply
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Labini, M. A ”conservative Marxist” at Harvard: the influence of Joseph A. Schumpeter on Paolo Sylos Labini. J Evol Econ 25, 311–321 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-014-0369-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00191-014-0369-1