Piero Sraffa FBA (5 August 1898 – 3 September 1983) was an influential Italian political economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge.

Sraffa was also in contact with Filippo Turati, perhaps the most important leader of the Italian Socialist Party, whom he allegedly met and frequently visited in Rapallo, where his family had a holiday villa.

His father Angelo was the target of aggression by a fascist squad and received two very threatening telegrams by Mussolini himself who required a public retraction by Piero on the content of the second article published in the Manchester Guardian.

In May 1924 his friend Antonio Gramsci, who found himself stuck firstly in Moscow and then in Vienna due to the advent to power of fascism, returned to Rome on his election to Parliament.

[5] The difficulties of the system that could, in short, be defined as the cross of the supply and demand curves firstly depend on the heterogeneity of the assumptions on which these two different tendencies are based.

[6] A second difficulty stems from the fact that, as Sraffa notes, in the neoclassical theory of prices the equilibrium of the individual firm is determined on the basis of cost variations deriving from small increases in its production (marginalist theory) and taking the situation unchanged in other companies of the same industry and the entire economy, following the hypothesis of ceteris paribus, i.e. other conditions being equal.

[11] Finally, Sraffa remarks that "everyday experience shows that the majority of which produce manufactured consumers' goods operate in conditions of individual diminishing costs.

Then, again with the help of Keynes, he held a librarian position and could devote himself to study, intertwining relationships with a series of intellectuals destined to leave remarkable and lasting tracks.

In the early thirties there was a controversy between Sraffa and Friedrich von Hayek, who published a criticism of Keynes's conclusions contained in A Treatise on Money (1930).

Sraffa thoroughly analyzed the inconsistencies in the logic of Hayek's theory on the effect of forced capital savings caused by inflation and above all on the definition of natural interest rate.

[14]The critique of neo-classical price theory based on the relations between cost and quantity produced leads Sraffa to abandon the analysis of partial equilibrium.

Since the late 1920s, he began to work on a price theory that takes up the classical concepts of reproducibility, surplus, circularity of production, and freedom of entry.

[16] As in classics, in Sraffa's 1960 book, relative prices are determined by the conditions of production and not on the basis of the functional connection between returns and quantity produced.

In this important work, Sraffa analyzes a linear production model in which it is possible to determine the relative price structure and one of the two distributive variables (rate of profit or wage), exogenously given the other and the technology.

Moreover, as highlighted by Pasinetti, Sraffa's analysis overcomes the limits of the input-output system of Wassily Leontief, in particular with regard to the effects of technical change.

Others see his work as compatible with neoclassical economics as developed in modern general equilibrium models, or as unable to determine a long-period position, just like the Walrasian approach.

In the letter, Sraffa emphasizes the function of bourgeois opposition in the struggle against fascism and the importance of democratic institutions for the social and political development of the proletariat.

Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the fingertips of one hand.

[28] While Wittgenstein made his famous turn from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the Philosophical Investigations wherein he jettisoned the previous idea that the world comprised an atomistic set of propositional facts for the notion that meaning derives from its use within a holistic self-enclosed system.

A popular anecdote claims that Sraffa made successful long-term investments in Japanese government bonds that he bought the day after the nuclear bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[31] Another version of this is that Sraffa bought the bonds during the war when they were trading at distressed prices as he was convinced that Japan would honour its obligations (Nicholas Kaldor, pp. 66–67).