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The Cambridge capital controversy – sometimes called "the capital controversy" or "the two Cambridges debate" – refers to a theoretical and mathematical debate during the 1960s among economists concerning the nature and role of capital goods and the critique of the dominant neoclassical vision of aggregate production and distribution. The name arises because of the location of the principals involved in the controversy: the debate was largely between economists such as Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa at the University of Cambridge in England and economists such as Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The two schools are often labeled "Sraffian" or "neo-Ricardian" and "neoclassical", respectively. Most of the debate is mathematical, but some major elements can be explained in simple terms and as part of the 'aggregation problem'. That is, the critique of neoclassical capital theory might be summed up as saying that it suffers from the fallacy of composition, i.e., that we cannot simply jump from microeconomic conceptions to an understanding of production by society as a whole. The resolution of the debate, particularly how broad its implications are, has not been agreed upon by economists. == Ideological issues == Much of the emotion behind the debate arose because the technical criticisms of marginal productivity theory were connected to wider arguments with ideological implications. The famous neoclassical economist John Bates Clark saw the equilibrium rate of profit (which helps to determine the income of the owners of capital goods) as a market price determined by technology and the relative proportions in which the "factors of production" are used in production. Just as wages are the reward for the labor that workers do, profits are the reward for the productive contributions of capital: thus, the normal operations of the system under competitive conditions pay profits to the owners of capital. Responding to the "indictment that hangs over society" that it involves "exploiting labor," Clark wrote: It is the purpose of this work (1899 'Distribution of Wealth' ) to show that the distribution of the income of society is controlled by a natural law, and that this law, if it worked without friction, would give to every agent of production the amount of wealth which that agent creates. However wages may be adjusted by bargains freely made between individual men (without labor unions and other "market imperfections" ), the rates of pay that result from such transactions tend, it is here claimed, to equal that part of the product of industry which is traceable to the labor itself; and however interest (profit ) may be adjusted by similarly free bargaining, it naturally tends to equal the fractional product that is separately traceable to capital.〔quoted in Jonathan Schlefer, "The Assumptions Economists Make," Harvard: Belnap Press, 2012: p. 101.〕 These profits are in turn seen as rewards for saving, i.e., abstinence from current consumption, which led to the creation of the capital goods. (This of course ignores the work of John Maynard Keynes and his school indicating that saving does not automatically lead to investment in tangible capital goods.) Thus, in this view, profit income is a reward for those who value future income highly and are thus willing to sacrifice current enjoyment. Strictly speaking, however, modern neoclassical theory does ''not'' say that capital's or labor's income is "deserved" in some moral or normative sense. But despite ostensible efforts to separate normative from positive economics, the normative tone appears in many economic works anyway. Some members of the Marxian school argue that even if the means of production "earned" a return based on their marginal product, that does not imply that their owners (i.e., the capitalists) created the marginal product and should be rewarded. In the Sraffian view, the rate of profit is ''not'' a price, and it is not clear that it is determined in a market. In particular, it only partially reflects the scarcity of the means of production relative to their demand. While the prices of different types of means of production ''are'' prices, the rate of profit can be seen in Marxian terms, as reflecting the social and economic power that owning the means of production gives this minority to exploit the majority of workers and to receive profit. But not all followers of Sraffa interpret his theory of production and capital in this Marxian way. Nor do all Marxists embrace the Sraffian model: in fact, such authors as Michael Lebowitz and Frank Roosevelt are highly critical of Sraffian interpretations, except as a narrow technical critique of the neoclassical view. There are also marxian economists, like Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, who consider the sraffian theory of prices, wages and profit to be superior to Marx's own theory.〔Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert, "Quiet Revolution in Welfare Economics", Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990: p. 358.〕 The rest of this article concerns only technical issues. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Cambridge capital controversy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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