| 作者 |
 西方思想家百人之第六十八：约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) |
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也不完全 -- 网客JT - (1427 Byte) 2009-4-16 周四, 06:40 (419 reads) |
网客JT
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作者：网客JT 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
https://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_17/b4128026997269.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index+-+temp_dialogue+with+readers
What Good Are Economists Anyway?
Why they failed to predict the global economic crisis—and why their help is still crucial to a recovery
By Peter Coy
Economists mostly failed to predict the worst economic crisis since the 1930s. Now they can't agree how to solve it. People are starting to wonder: What good are economists anyway? A commenter on a housing blog wrote recently that economists did a worse job of forecasting the housing market than either his father, who has no formal education, or his mother, who got up to second grade. "If you are an economist and did not see this coming, you should seriously reconsider the value of your education and maybe do something with a tangible value to society, like picking vegetables," he wrote on patrick.net.
Take that, you pointy-headed failures! Go jump off a supply curve!
To be fair, economists can't be expected to predict the future with any kind of exactitude. The world is simply too complicated for that. But collectively, they should be able to warn of dangers ahead. And when disaster strikes, they ought to know what to do. Indeed, people pay attention to economists at times like this precisely because of their bold claim that they know how to prevent the economy from sliding into a repeat of the Great Depression. But seven decades after the Depression, economists still haven't reached consensus on its lessons. The debate has only intensified in recent weeks.
To fight the downturn, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers are attempting an unprecedented combination of massive fiscal stimulus and extreme monetary policy. If it produces a sustained recovery—and there are some early signs of hope—they will look like heroes. For now, though, it's disturbing that they've had to resort to policy measures that in scale and scope are way outside what the economics profession had studied or even contemplated in recent years.
The rap on economists, only somewhat exaggerated, is that they are overconfident, unrealistic, and political. They claim a precision that neither their raw material nor their skill warrants. Too many assume that people behave like the mythical homo economicus, who is hyperrational and omniscient. And they take sides in quarrels that freeze the progress of research. Those few who defy the conventional wisdom are ignored.
Critics are scathing. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the scholar of rare events who wrote Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan, says: "We have to build a society that doesn't depend on forecasts by idiotic economists." Says Paul Wilmott, a quantitative finance expert: "Economists' models are just awful. They completely forget how important the human element is."
In the face of such withering criticism, it's tempting to ignore the whole profession. But that won't do. For one thing, getting out of this mess and making sure it doesn't happen again will require the very best thinking of a generation. Macroeconomists—that is, those who specialize in business cycles and growth—have made important contributions. For example, research in the 1970s helped many countries eliminate chronic high inflation by highlighting the importance of having a strong, independent central bank.
Even now, progress is being made. Scholars of all stripes are belatedly getting up to speed in modern finance. Because they are trained to think of financial markets as efficient, most economists weren't primed to spot the dangers posed by lax mortgage lending, overleveraged financial institutions, and impenetrably complex derivatives. "The time is absolutely right for
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作者：网客JT 在 海归茶馆 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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