Robert Skidelsky, a member of the British House of Lords and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at Warwick University, was a non-executive director of the private Russian oil company PJSC Russneft from 2016 to 2021. The author of a three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes, he began his political career in the Labour party, became the Conservative Party’s spokesman for Treasury affairs in the House of Lords, and was eventually forced out of the Conservative Party for his opposition to NATO’s intervention in Kosovo in 1999. He is the author of The Machine Age: An Idea, a History, a Warning (Allen Lane, 2023).
伦敦—2014 年时任美联储主席本·伯南克(Ben Bernanke)在谈论美联储的债券购买计划时曾打趣说,量化宽松 (QE) 的问题是“它在实践中行得通,但在理论上行不通。”你可以对一般的宏观经济政策说同样的话,因为它背后没有可靠的理论。政府通常会“刺激”经济以“对抗”失业,但所用的理论认为根本不存在需要对抗的失业。
撇开数学上的改进不谈,经济学又回到了一个世纪前的样子:研究给定资源的分配,加上货币数量论。宏观经济学——由约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯 (John Maynard Keynes) 发明的总体产出理论——几乎消失了。
例如,失业的原因是什么?教科书的标准答案是“向下的工资刚性”。一位要求每小时 14 美元工资,但只能以每小时 13 美元获利的美发师选择不工作。因此,这种选择是自愿的,反映了对休闲的偏爱,或不做美发师的决定。一个经济体中的所有工人也是如此。在这种观点下,所谓的失业是一种不工作的选择。
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