The Winternitz Solution: A Comment

The Winternitz Solution, which is generally regarded as a receding landmark in the long and still expanding literature on the transformation problem, deserves a closer scrutiny than it has received so far. While the mainstream professional viewpoint regards the Winternitz solution merely as a special case of the general conditions stated in Seton's seminal 1957 article, many students of the history of economic thought in the English speaking world receive their first and often only introduction to the transformation problem from the pages of Mark Blaug's Economic Theory in Retrospect (hereafter ETR-i where i = 1, 2,3,4 denotes the four successive editions of this book). Although Winternitz does not lay out the full economic implications of his solution–presumably because he felt these were of limited mathematical interest, the treatment in Blaug is seriously misleading. Our purpose here is to provide a complete presentation of the Winternitz Solution (Part I) and subsequently to give a critique of Blaug's treatment (Part II).