Land use and commodity production

Allen J. Scott

pp. 345-359

in: Stephen Gale, Gunnar Olsson (eds), Philosophy in geography, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

One of the central problems of economic theory is the whole question of the inter-relations of the commodity production system and the price system in capitalist economies, and the resulting distribution of profits and wages. A particularly powerful general solution of this problem was published by Sraffa in 1960 — a solution that has in part resuscitated an interest in the classical labour theory of value. At the same time, there exists in geography and regional science a long tradition of land use and land rent analysis generally derivative out of the writings of Von Thünen in the early nineteenth century. This tradition, however, has fairly consistently overlooked precisely the problems of production, pricing and distribution, and has largely been content to show how land use and land rent patterns emerge once these problems have been somehow largely assumed away.