Statistician who first solved the transformation of Marx's values into prices of production as a system of simultaneous equations
Born in Saint Petersburg to Polish parents, his father a nobleman in the Russian army, Bortkiewicz graduated in law in 1890 and went to Germany, where he took his doctorate in statistics under Wilhelm Lexis at Göttingen. After teaching at Strassburg he taught statistics at the University of Berlin from 1901 until his death. His Law of Small Numbers (1898) made the Prussian cavalry horse-kick data famous as an application of the Poisson distribution. In "Value and Price in the Marxian System" (1906–1907) he set up a three-sector system of simultaneous equations in which inputs and outputs alike are valued at prices of production, a "correction" of Marx that went almost unnoticed until Paul Sweezy revived it in 1942 and became the standard starting point of the transformation debate.
Also known as: Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz · Ladislaus von Bortkewitsch · Władysław Bortkiewicz
Activities and affiliations
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1895–1897
Germany state institutionsPrivatdozent, University of Strassburg
Scholarship and theory -
1901–1931
Germany state institutionsProfessor of statistics, University of BerlinMain
Scholarship and theory
Career Timeline
- 1893Doctorate at Göttingen under Wilhelm Lexis
- 1898The Law of Small Numbers
- 1906–1907Value and Price in the Marxian System
- 1907On the Correction of Marx's Fundamental Theoretical Construction in the Third Volume of Capital