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.
伦敦—我一直批评经济学不接地气,所产生的人类行为“模型”充其量只能作作讽刺漫画,甚至可以说只是对真实世界的拙劣模仿。在我的新书《经济学有什么问题?》(What’s Wrong with Economics?)中,我指出,经济学家试图建立放之四海而皆准的定律,而一厢情愿地忽视了历史和文化的特殊性。
经济学家兼社会学家索尔斯坦·凡伯伦(Thorstein Veblen)睿智地捕捉到这一盲点。在一篇1908年的文章中,凡伯伦想象经济学家要用效用最大化解释“一群用耙子和魔法咒语在海藻和海浪间寻找贝壳的阿留申群岛岛民”的行为。
在十九世纪,经济学的实践者决定要让他们的研究与所谓的“硬科学”,特别是物理学联系起来,与历史学等“人文”学科拉开距离。经济学研究的是人如何处理生计这一普通行为。他们的野心是要构建社会的“物理学”,社会结构就像自然结构那样遵循亘古不变的定律。于是,解释行星围绕太阳运动的轨道的万有引力定律,有了它在经济学中的对等物——确保市场均衡的自利定律。
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