Piero Sraffa - Early Life

Early Life

He was born in Turin, Italy, to a wealthy Italian Jewish family, to Angelo and Irma Sraffa. His father was a Professor in commercial law and later dean at the Bocconi University in Milan. Despite being raised to a Jewish family, he later on became an agnostic. Sraffa studied in his town and graduated at the local university with a work on inflation in Italy during and after World War I. Notably, his tutor was Luigi Einaudi, one of the most important Italian economists and later a president of the Italian Republic.

From 1921 to 1922 he studied in London at the London School of Economics. In 1922, he was appointed as Director of the provincial labour department in Milan, then as Professor in Political economy first in Perugia, and later in Cagliari, Sardinia. In Turin he met Antonio Gramsci (the most important leader of Italian Communist Party). They became close friends, partly due to their shared ideological views. He was also in contact with Filippo Turati, perhaps the most important leader of Italian Socialist Party, whom he allegedly met and frequently visited in Rapallo, where his family had a holiday villa.

In 1925, he wrote about returns to scale and perfect competition, underlining some doubtful points of Alfred Marshall's theory of the firm. This was amended for British readers and published in 1926 as The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions.