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Resurgent interest in the life and work of the Italian Cambridge economist Piero Sraffa is leading to New Directions in Sraffa Scholarship. This chapter introduces readers to some of these developments. First and perhaps foremost is the fact that as of September 2016 Sraffa’s archival material has been uploaded onto the website of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge University, as digital colour images; this chapter introduces readers to the history of these events. This history provides sharp relief on the extant debates over the role of the archival material in leading to the final publication of Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, and readers are provided a brief sketch of these matters. The varied nature of Sraffa scholarship is demonstrated by the different aspects of Sraffa’s intellectual legacy which are developed and discussed in the various entries of our Symposium. The conclusion is reached that we are on the cusp of an exciting phase change of tremendous potential in Sraffa scholarship.

Two issues have dominated the recent employment experience of the major industrial countries: first, the common rise in unemployment throughout the OECD; second, the diversity in the scale and content of that rise as between, on the one hand, the core of the European Union and Australia, and, on the other hand, North America. The growth and persistence of unemployment may be the result of the deregulation of global financial markets in the 1970s that has been followed by huge growth in short‐term capital flows. These flows have produced a significant increase in risk aversion in public sector and private sectors. This is the major source of deflationary pressures and persistent unemployment throughout the world. Those pressures could have been substantially mitigated if a key lesson had been drawn from the development of domestic financial markets – liberal markets are only efficient if they are efficiently regulated.

The new rich of the nineteenth century were not brought up to large expenditures, and preferred the power which investment gave them to the pleasures of immediate consumption. In fact, it was precisely the inequality in the distribution of wealth which made possible those vast accumulations of fixed wealth and of capital improvements which distinguished that age from all others. … The immense accumulations of fixed capital which, to the great benefit of mankind, were built up during the half century before the war, could never have come about in a Society where wealth was divided equitably. [Sic!] — John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919/20; Chap. II, sec. III), “Europe before the War,” “The Psychology of Society.”

Capital theory has taken a new turn with the theoretical discovery that wage curves tend to get linear in random systems, the larger they are, and with the confirmation that empirical wage curves do not deviate a great deal from linearity. The present chapter adds to these results by arguing that reswitching becomes less likely for larger systems, while Wicksell effects are almost surely present. But it can also be shown that the elasticity of substitution is likely to be small in random systems so that a policy to lower real wages will not easily generate much additional employment in a closed economy. A new perspective on employment policies is therefore called for.

The focus of this paper is the economic theory of the plans for the European Monetary Union. Part 1 demonstrates that economists, bankers and policy makers know very little about monetary policy. Part 2 explains the errors of the common practice of defining money by its functions. Because any monetary policy must rest on a definition of money it seems reasonable to conclude that a flawed definition might lead to problems with monetary policy. Part 3 applies this insight to the plans for a common currency in Europe. Because of uncertainties about the timing and details of the implementation, some important considerations are necessarily speculative. They are relegated to appendices. Appendix 1 comments on the timing and authorship and responsibility for the official reports with their unspecified authors. Appendix 2 supplies some grounds for doubting the ultimate durability of the European Monetary Union focusing on reasons that are historical, economic and pragmatic. Because the entire movement is driven by politics, not economics, Appendix 3 considers some of the relevant political issues. The conclusions summarize and speculate on possible reasons for successful outcomes.

While unemployment has been the common experience of OECD countries over the last three decades, there have also been significant differences in its severity and extent. These differences were characterised in the 1990s as a “trade‐off” between unemployment and wage inequality. According to this argument, the USA has achieved relatively low unemployment at the cost of widening inequality, while Europe has only been able to maintain equality at the cost of high unemployment. This introduction to selected papers from Australia’s 6th National Conference on Unemployment questions whether such a trade‐off is well grounded in the evidence, and suggests that it may instead be thought of as an ideological construct which has been deployed to make a case for US‐style labour market deregulation and “workfare” against the supposedly inflexible European social democratic model.