Le choix des techniques et les th\ue9ories du capital, des prix et de la r\ue9partition du revenu

This article is a follow-up to the Capital Theory Controversy that took place in 1960s-70s. In broad terms, the controversy unfolded between the two Cambridges \u2013 one in the United Kingdom and the other in the United States (Massachusetts) \u2013 though it also involved economists of other nationalities. The American economists (the most renown of whom was Samuelson) claimed that there exists a way \u2013 also within linear models \u2013 to build a neoclassical, aggregate (Samuelson called it \u2018surrogate\u2019) production function, in other words, a function that gives rise to an inverse monotonic relation (in income distribution) between the rate of profit and capital intensity (as was always claimed by the traditional neoclassical theory). Sraffa had in the meantime published his famous book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which discussed, to everyone\u2019s surprise, the \u2018return of previously discarded techniques\u2019, on the scale of variation of the distribution of income between wages and profits. It was not clear at the beginning how all this was relevant to capital theory, until in 1965 a PhD student of Samuelson\u2019s, David Levhari (from Israel), published an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics where he claimed to have proved that a \u2018return to previously discarded techniques\u2019 in linear formulations is impossible. There followed a long discussion on this topic that involved many economists on both sides of the Atlantic (a discussion too long to refer here). At any rate, among all the economists, LLP was the first to demonstrate that the supposed proof by Levhari-Samuelson on the \u2018non-switching of techniques\u2019 \u2013 as it came to be called \u2013 contained an analytical error. By overall consensus, Sraffa\u2019s results were thereby confirmed