James Galbraith 经济学需要彻底改革

James Galbraith 经济学需要彻底改革

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bR_gDq7JxA&t=3s

2018年7月25日

“开放”和“重组”导致了苏联解体。但如果这也导致了正统经济学的解体，詹姆斯·加尔布雷斯也不会介意。

德克萨斯大学的经济学家概述了该行业如何变得“自私自利”——通过期刊和大学任命创造了一个部落和限制性的等级制度，将不同的学术研究排除在外。几十年前，经济学并不是这样的，但现在它的封闭思想使独立学者无法获得进行真正的开创性研究所需的平台。

加尔布雷斯还讨论了他的德克萨斯大学不平等项目 (UTIP) 的工作，该项目正在努力开发一系列新的全球经济不平等测量方法。
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- 我认为学术界的经济学专业结构迫切需要改革。我想说它需要两件事，公开性和改革，开放性和重组。当然，当你应用这些东西时，整个大厦很可能会像苏联一样倒塌，在这种情况下，这不是一件坏事。
我们有什么？
我们的职业基本上是自私自利的，就像所谓的专业价值等级制度一样；詹姆斯·加尔布雷斯是谁？通过期刊等结构和部门，这些结构具有深刻的部落性，并且具有深刻的限制性，就他们将发表什么、他们将承认什么思想而言。
因此，即使发生这种情况，你也会对此做出反应，即独立学者。这对资金最充足、最负盛名的大学接受来自这些传统的人的意愿没有影响。

因此，与 60、70、80 年前的经济学相比，现在的经济学群体非常多样化。

你现在拥有的是一个产生大量统一思想的机器，它被卡住了，无法真正适应这样一个事实，即这种思想
与我们面临的主要问题并不特别相关。

我是詹姆斯·加尔布雷斯。我在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的林登·约翰逊学院任教，

20 年来，我一直担任和平与安全经济学家委员会主席。我主要研究经济不平等，并对政治经济问题进行一定程度的干预。

好吧，德克萨斯大学不平等项目是一个已经存在 20 多年的研究小组，其成员基本上是博士生和一些硕士生。什么是德克萨斯大学不平等项目？它的目标是
开发一系列新的经济不平等测量方法。主要是薪酬和收入不平等。
在全球范围内，以一致且密集的方式，以便人们能够为世界经济的最大份额构建合理且相当可靠的时间序列。它现在拥有一个最大的全球数据集，大约有 4000 个观测值，涵盖了 150 个国家，可追溯到 1963 年。
因此，它的作用是让研究人员能够以全新的视角看待各国和各时期的经济不平等运动。
这允许人们分析各大洲内、各大洲之间的国家之间的相互关系，并实际上证明不平等运动中存在强大的宏观经济成分，它在很大程度上受到全球金融体系性质变化的驱动，以及布雷顿森林体系的崩溃、20 世纪 80 年代的债务危机、随后的利率降低以及 21 世纪的大宗商品复苏等因素的影响。
这些因素似乎是造成不平等的主要力量，
这与主流文献或著名皮克提团队根据税收记录所做的选择性研究的观点截然不同。

“正常状态的终结”论题“正常状态的终结”论题是，人们需要超越方法论程序，即试图根据过去经济复苏模式的记录来预测大危机等重大事件发生后的未来。

我的观点是，该系统已经出现了一些相当明显的结构性发展。

其中之一与资源成本有关，当然，我们知道，在 2008 年危机爆发前的那个夏天，油价上涨了 148 美元一桶。

从那时起，水力压裂技术得到了发展，这可以说是对高能源价格的一种缓解。但这只是其中一个因素。第二个因素是全球政治局势的不稳定。第三个因素是技术变革的性质，我确实相信，我们几十年来几乎在世界各地引入的技术是不同的。技术变革的性质在于它对经济和环境的影响。

Economics Is in Need of Radical Reform

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bR_gDq7JxA&t=3s
2018年7月25日

"Openness" and "restructuring" led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. But if it also led to the collapse of orthodox economics, James Galbraith wouldn't mind.

The University of Texas economist outlines how the profession has become "self-dealing"—creating a tribal and restrictive hierarchy through journals and university appointments that keep diverse scholarship out. Economics wasn't this way just a few decades ago, but now its closed-mindedness keeps independent scholars from getting the platform they need to do real, pathbreaking research.

Galbraith also discusses the work of his University of Texas Inequality Project (UTIP), which is working to develop a new series of measurements of economic inequality at a global scale.
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- I think the structure of the economics profession in the academic world, it's profoundly in need of reform. And I like to say it needs two things, glasnost and perestroika, openness and restructuring.
Of course, when you apply those things the chances are, like the Soviet Union,
the whole edifice will collapse, which would in this case not be a bad thing.
What do we have?
We have a profession which is basically self dealing,and which runs like the let's say
the hierarchy of professional merit；Who is James Galbraith through a structure of journals, and so forth, and departments, which are profoundly tribal, and profoundly restrictive，in terms of what they will publish, what they will admit as a body of ideas.

And so, even when as is happening, you get in reaction to that, Independent scholars.
This has no impact on the willingness of the best funded, and the most prestigious universities to take on board people from those traditions.

And as a result, compared to what economics was 60, 70, 80 years ago, a very diverse group of people. 

What you have now is a machine that produces a substantial uniformity of thought,and which is stuck, cannot really bring itself to adjust to the fact that that thought
is not particularly pertinent to the major problems that we face.
I'm James Galbraith. I teach at the LBJ School, at the University of Texas at Austin,
and I have been was for 20 years, the chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security.I work primarily on economic inequality, and certain amount of intervention in matters of political economy.
Well, the University of Texas Inequality Project is a research group that has been in existence for now over 20 years, with cohorts basically of PhD and a few Master's students. What is the University of Texas Inequality Project And its objective has been
to develop a new whole series of measurements of economic inequality. Mostly pay and income inequality.
At the global scale,and in a consistent and let's say dense way so that one can construct reasonable, and reasonably reliable time series for the largest share of the world economy. It now has about and a single largest global dataset about 4000 observations, covering 150 countries going back to 1963.
And so, what it does is permits a researcher to take an entirely fresh look at the movement of economic inequality across countries, and through time.
And that permits one to analyze the interrelationship between countries within  continents, across continents, and to demonstrate in effect that there is a strong macroeconomic component to the movement of inequality, that it's driven in very substantial ways by the changing nature of the global financial regime, and by such things as the breakdown of Bretton Woods, the debt crisis the 1980s, then the reduction of interest rates, and the commodity recovery of the of the 2000s.
These things appear to be very much the dominant forces in the movement of inequality,
and that's quite a different perspective from what one gets out of either the mainstream literature, or the very selective work that's been done based on tax records by the famous Piketty team.
The thesis of the End of Normal The thesis of the end of normal was that one needed to move past the Methodological procedure of trying to project the future after a major event like the great crisis from the record of what was the past pattern of economic recoveries.
And my argument was that there had been some fairly clear structural developments in the system. One of them had to do with the cost of resources, which of course, we know the oil price went up $148 a barrel in the summer before the crisis of 2008.
Since then there's been the development of fracking, which is kind of a reprieve from the very high energy prices. But that was one factor. Second factor was the instability of the global political situation. A third factor was the nature of technological change, and I really do believe that the kind of technology that we are introducing practically everywhere, and have been for several decades is different The nature of technological change in its effect on economic a

活动比前几波技术发展更活跃。
汽车取代了马匹，带来了运输等活动，
电器带来了各种清洁、烹饪等活动。
数字技术倾向于将事物移出市场领域，
例如，通过使通信基本上成为一项固定成本活动，没有边际成本，对总产品没有额外贡献。
因此，这是我们需要掌握的，因为它减少了投资在 GDP 中的份额。
投资来自进口资本货物这一事实意味着你可以获得进口抵消。
因此，我们看到投资份额较低，对商业建设的需求较少。
与这种投资相伴而生的是，经济正在转向由消费而不是投资周期驱动。
我认为，过去 10 年我们所看到的大部分情况强烈表明，这是正确的分析。第四件事是金融体系发生了什么。
我认为，银行在大危机前所采用和推行的商业模式从根本上摧毁了银行。他们从战后时期的业务模式（主要为商业投资提供融资）转变为为消费者贷款和抵押贷款提供融资，并且采用一种日益衰败和欺诈的商业模式。衰败和欺诈的意思是，在危机前，他们发放了大量贷款，他们知道或应该知道这些贷款永远不会被偿还。这种模式不仅注定要崩溃，而且还会耗尽股本，而股本是当时经济扩张的基础。所以，当这些事情发生时，在我看来，经济思想危机

我们必须面对这样一个事实：未来的世界与以前的世界不同。而一个统计预测简单地说，只要增加需求，

你就会得到更高的产出率，更高的潜在产出率，这种说法已经不再正确，也不是分析我们现在生活的世界的好方法。
嗯，我认为，在政策危机的背后是经济思想危机，
从另一个角度来看，我的意思是，2015 年春天，我在雅典与亚尼斯·瓦鲁法基斯在希腊共事，很明显，我们面对的是
一套由极其不正常的思想驱动的政策，这些思想实际上并不恶意，但在一定程度上是恶意的。
但向希腊提供的是一个复苏计划，一个可以恢复希腊经济竞争力的计划，这与任何实地人士都能看到的现实完全不符。
毫无疑问，目前世界上存在这种情况。
希腊人无法通过削减工资来吸引德国工业来到雅典，他们也无法通过削减工资来吸引中国工业。
因此，他们被困在工业发展的两极之间，而像希腊这样的小国要想繁荣，就必须进行不同类型的投资。
它必须采取不同类型的战略，并且必须拥有支持该战略的资源。
他们没有承认这一点，甚至不愿意面对这一点。
相反，国际货币基金组织、欧盟委员会，尤其是欧洲中央银行的经济学家为希腊提出的是一个方案，与在印度尼西亚、韩国和他们实施计划的其他地方尝试过但失败的方案完全相同。
因此，他们一心想保持自己的想法，因为他们已经投入了这些想法，而不是适应现实情况。尽管任何拥有更多基于现实观点的人，包括国际货币基金组织的理事，都清楚地告诉他们，这是一个注定要失败的计划。
前几天我读到一句话，如果你对新思想感兴趣，就读旧书，去图书馆，挑出那些绝对不在你的阅读清单上的东西，然后读它们。
这会让你有所收获。事实上，我在德克萨斯州的课堂上就是这么做的。
我们有斯密、李嘉图、马克思，但特别是凡勃伦、熊彼特、凯恩斯和我的父亲。这让学生们感受到经济学在有用的时候是怎样的。这是一门对社会和经济秩序进行深刻批判的学科，通过批判来理解问题所在，它让人们做好准备，至少是少数人，在危机来临时，你确实需要有人的专业知识，至少要有一定程度的统计或数学训练，以了解如何处理经济系统产生的数字，以及如何灵活地处理它们。

ctivity than the previous waves of technological development.
The automobiles replaced the horses and brought activities like transportation,
appliances brought activities like all kinds of cleaning and so forth, and cooking into the market sphere.
The digital technologies have tend to move things out of the market sphere
by making communications for example basically a fixed cost exercise,no marginal cost,no extra contribution to the gross product.
And so this is something we need to come to grips with because it reduces among other things the share of investment in GDP.
The fact that investment comes from imported capital goods means that you get an import offset.
And so we see a low share of investment,less need for commercial construction.
to go with that kind of investment,and an economy, which is shifting to being driven by consumption rather than by the cycle of investment.
Much what we've seen in the last I think 10 years,strongly suggests that this was the correct analysis.And the fourth thing was this,what happened to the financial system.
The banks in my view were fundamentally broken by the business models that they adopted,and pursued in the run up to the great crisis.They moved from what they had been doing in the Post-War period, which substantially financing business investment
to financing consumer loans and mortgages, and to doing so on an increasingly decrepit,
fraudulent business model.
Decrepit and fraudulent in the sense that they were
in the run up to the crisis,making vast numbers of loans,vast volumes of loans,that they knew,or should have known,would never be repaid.
And this was a model which was destined not only to collapse,but also to deplete the equity,which was the foundation for economic expansion up to that point.
So, when these things happen,The crisis of economic ideas it seems to me
we have to come to grips with the fact that the world going forward is not the same
as the world that existed before.
And a statistical projection that says simply,well, you just add to demand,
you'll get a higher rate of output, higher rate of potential output isn't correct anymore, isn't a good way to analyze the world that we're now living in.
Well, I think there is a crisis of economic ideas underlies the crisis of policy,
and to take this into another sphere, I mean, I was working with Yanis Varoufakis in Greece in the Athens spring of 2015, and it was very clear that we were up against
a body of policy that was driven by profoundly dysfunctional ideas to the extent that they weren't actually malicious, which they were to a degree.
But the notion that what was being offered to Greece was a recovery program, something which would restore the competitiveness of the Greek economy was just profoundly out of sync with the reality that anybody on the ground could see.
There's no question in the world that presently exists.
The Greeks cannot attract German industry to Athens by cutting their wages, and they can't attract the Chinese industry either by cutting their wages.
So, they're stuck between these poles of industrial development, and in order for a small country like Greece to prosper, it has to have investment of different kind.
It has to have a strategy of a different kind, and it has to have the resources to back that up.
There was no recognition,no willingness even to confront this.
Instead what the economists of the IMF, and the European Commission, and especially the European Central Bank were advancing for Greece was a formula, exactly the same kind of formula that tried and failed in Indonesia, tried and failed in Korea, and every place else where they run a program.
And so, they were intent upon maintaining their ideas because they were invested in them, not in adjusting to the realities of the situation. Even though anybody who had a more, let's say reality based view, including directors of the IMF were clearly telling them that this was a program destined to fail.
There's a remark I read the other day, Reading old books if you're interested in new ideas, read old books, go to the library, pick out the things which are definitely not on your reading list, and read them.
That will get you somewhere. And I do this actually with my classes in Texas.
We have Smith, Ricardo, Marx, but especially Veblen, Schumpeter, Canes, my father. And this gives the students a sense of just how economics was when it was a useful subject. It was a discipline that was invested in a kind of profound sense of criticism of the social and economic order, understanding through criticism of what the problems were, and it prepared people,at least a few people who were at least ready to be useful when there were crises, and you actually needed to have someone's expertise.
And that plus a certain amount of I think it is essential to have a certain amount of statistical or mathematical training to understand how you can deal with the kind of numbers that economic systems generate, and to deal with them flexib

这也是当前教育的一个巨大缺陷，因为你学到了什么？你学到了某种代数，它旨在构建方程系统，你可以将其放入期刊文章中，你还学到了某种统计学，它本质上是用于处理抽样调查。
这就是经济学家，特别是微观经济学家所认为的处理方式。
现在，新发展经济学家开始进行随机对照试验。
好吧，你有统计学上的显著差异，你有答案。好吧，在现实世界中，为了运行一个系统，你需要衡量该系统的运行情况。
你需要能够处理国民收入账户，也需要处理工业账户、就业账户和系统的其他功能。
并能够以建设性的方式使用这些数据。
回到德克萨斯大学不平等项目，我们所做的方法论上很有趣，就是利用大量被忽视的数据，这些数据继续由世界各地的公共机构生成，并表明，为了研究不平等问题，这种方法非常有用、非常可靠，而且比等待、资助一项调查和一项大规模调查，
并等待结果出来要便宜得多，也更及时。
因此，我们能够发现，2000 年后，由于新自由主义的退却，拉丁美洲的不平等现象有所减少，这比其他人开始发表这方面的文章要早得多。
我们能够在调查显示中国出现转折点的数年前就确定中国的情况，而且我们只是使用中国和拉丁美洲国家定期发布的数据。
因此，从某种意义上说，某种处于边缘的技术培训可能对更多人非常有用，如果你按照这种思路继续下去，你会从中得到更多有用的研究。我没有花很多时间去改革我认为本质上没有改革的经济学专业。
我在一所公共政策学院任职，非常感谢。从这个角度来看，我认为大学有必要创建较小的自治单位，不一定是政策学院，但你可以有社会经济学系、政治经济学系。
这类机构是自治的，不依赖于同样狭隘的晋升等级。这样你就会开始有多元化的观点。你开始拥有一些经济学家认为的健康系统的标志，也就是所谓的竞争，而这在当今的经济学专业中显然是缺失的。

ly. And that also is a big deficiency by the way of the current education, because what do you get? You get a certain kind of algebra, which is intended to build equations systems that you can put in journal articles, and you've got a certain kind of statistics, which is intended to deal with sample surveys essentially.
That's what economists, particularly micro economists are considered to be the way of dealing.
And now the new development economists with their randomized controlled trials.
Okay, you have statistically significant differences,you have an answer.Well, in the real world,in order to run a system,you need to have measures of how that system is performing.
You need to be able to deal with the national income accounts, but also with the industrial accounts, and the employment accounts,and the other features of the system.
And to be able to use that data in a constructive way.
And to come back to the University of Texas Inequality Project,what we did which was methodologically interesting was to take up this vast neglected body of data, which continues to be generated by public agencies all over the world,and to show that for the purpose of studying inequality was only very useful, very reliable, but much cheaper, and much more up to date than waiting, funding a survey and a vast survey,
and waiting for the results to come in.
So, we were able to find the decline in inequality in Latin America as a result of the retreat from neo liberalism following 2000 well before anybody else started publishing on that.
We were able to identify the turning points in China years before the survey showed that they were there, and was just using the data that the Chinese were publishing on a regular basis, and the Latin American countries were.
So, there is a sense in which a certain kind of technical training which has been on the fringe, could be very useful for a larger number of people, and you'd get a lot more useful research out of it if you proceeded along those lines.I've not spent a lot of my time in attempts to reform what I consider to be essentially unreformed economics profession.
I've got my appointment in a public policy school,thank you very much.and what I think is necessary from that standpoint is for universities to create smaller autonomous units,not necessarily policy schools, but you could have a department of social economics, department of political economics.
This kind of thing that were autonomous, and that were not dependent on the same narrow hierarchy of promotion.So then you begin to have a diversity of views.You begin to have what some economists consider to be the sign of a healthy system, namely it's called competition, something which is manifestly absent inside the economics profession these days.