> I've tried several times to read Sraffa and was bored to death. What am I missing?
Yeah it's the longest hundred-page book you will ever read. As Michael says, it's modeled on Wittgenstein's Tractatus and they were friends. I agree with Michael's assessment - it's main role was as a weapon in the critique of the neoclassical theory of distribution, because it showed that there was no way of measuring 'capital' prior to the determination of the profit rate. It has less to offer as a positive program, and arguably it was never meant to. But a lot of people would disagree, it's also been interpreted as a kind of alternative classical general equilibrium theory of relative prices, with distribution taken as exogenous. There are actually a few Sraffians in the Economics department here at Sydney.
There's a good textbook intro to Sraffa by J.E. Woods, which is three times as long as Sraffa's book itself, and works through it very slowly with exercises at the end of each chapter.
Funnily enough, later in the 1970s, in the years just before she died, Joan Robinson turned against the Sraffians, arguing that the attempt to build a long-period 'centre-of-gravity' theory of prices was sterile. Instead she recommended Kalecki's rough-and-ready mark-up analysis and concentrating on the evolution of prices over a succession of short periods in historical time. In the textbook with Eatwell, which Michael also mentions, Sraffa and Kalecki mix together a little awkwardly. The Sraffians would probably object that the Kalecki mark-up analysis ignores the deeper problem of the system of relative prices as a whole - it can't be mark-ups all the way down.
This is all in John King's History of Post-Keynesian Economics, which is great. Incidentally, King also wrote with Michael Howard the two-volume History of Marxian Economics about 20 years ago, and more recently they wrote 'The Rise of Neoliberalism in Advanced Capitalist Economies: A Materialist Analysis', which is very interesting. King and Howard are great examples of the blurred boundaries between Marxian and post-Keynesian economics. King was an examiner of my PhD thesis.
Mike