2024年諾貝爾經濟學獎被美國學術界詬病_風聞

為什麼今年的諾貝爾經濟學獎如此具有爭議性？

該獎項引起了異常強烈的批評--這是有道理的。

Why This Year’s Nobel in Economics Is So Controversial

The award has elicited unusually strong criticism—and for good reason.

By Howard W. French, a columnist at Foreign Policy.

OCTOBER 25, 2024

每年諾貝爾經濟學獎頒發時，我都會想象關注新聞的公眾在聽廣播或閲讀頭條新聞時，邊喝早咖啡邊默默點頭致謝。他們認為，經濟學家用自己的語言説話，他們的工作內容過於狹隘或深奧，沒有理由質疑瑞典學院的判斷。

今年的獲獎作品卻與眾不同。共同獲獎的三位學者--亞倫-阿西莫格魯（Daron Acemoglu）、西蒙-約翰遜（Simon Johnson）和詹姆斯-A-羅賓遜（James A. Robins）--的研究很容易被沸騰。事實上，阿斯莫格魯和羅賓遜 2012 年的著作《國家為何失敗》就是他們獲獎的部分原因。(約翰遜並非該書的共同作者，但他們三人經常合作）。

這不僅僅是書名的問題。他們著作中的許多論點也可以用一句話來概括：在過去的幾個世紀裏，隨着歐洲人對世界的控制不斷擴大，殖民者在一些地方定居並建立了強大而持久的社區--比如早期的美國--往往會繁榮昌盛；而歐洲人在一些地方的定居則更加不穩定--尤其是熱帶非洲的大部分地區--則並不繁榮。

When the Nobel economics prize is awarded most years, I imagine the news-following public to simply nod in silent acknowledgment over their morning coffee as they listen to the radio or read the headlines. Economists speak in their own language, they figure, and the substance of their work is just too narrow or arcane to justify questioning the judgment of the Swedish Academy.

This year’s prize-winning work is different. The research of the three scholars who share the award—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson—readily lends itself to boiling down. Indeed, the title of Acemoglu and Robinson’s 2012 book, which partly earned them the award, is Why Nations Fail. (Johnson did not cowrite the book, but the three are frequent collaborators.)

It’s not just the title, though. The broader thesis of much of their work also lends itself to fairly neat summary: As Europeans extended their grip on the world in past centuries, places where colonizers settled and built robust and lasting communities—think the early United States—have tended to prosper; places where European settlement was much more precarious—notably, most of tropical Africa—have not.

經濟學家們認為，造成這種情況的原因是，前者形成了強大的政治和經濟體制，而後者則在歐洲殖民者放棄直接政治控制很久之後，定居下來，形成了一直延續到獨立時代的榨取型經濟活動模式。三人在 2003 年的一篇論文中寫道，這些定居模式往往受到流行病學的影響，在瘧疾等致命傳染病流行的地方定居的歐洲人較少。

今年的獎項引起了學術界異常強烈的批評。這暴露了經濟學家與其他社會科學家（從歷史學家、社會學家到政治學家）之間長期存在的明顯分歧。社會科學家經常認為經濟學家偽裝成科學家，而經濟學家則反駁説，其他領域的專家對國家經濟生活中的可衡量因素知之甚少。

The reason for this, the economists argue, is that the former formed strong political and economic institutions, while the latter settled into extractive patterns of economic activity that have endured into the independence era, long after European colonizers relinquished direct political control. And as the three wrote in a 2003 paper, these settlement patterns were often driven by epidemiology, with fewer Europeans settling in places where deadly infectious diseases such as malaria were prevalent.

This year’s award has elicited unusually strong criticism from within academia. This has laid bare a stark and long-standing divide between economists and other social scientists, from historians to sociologists to political scientists. For many years, each has regarded the other with a degree of scorn; social scientists often argue that economists masquerade as scientists, while economists retort that specialists in the other fields have scant appreciation of the measurable factors that go into the economic life of a nation.

阿斯莫格魯、約翰遜和羅賓遜的不同之處在於，在他們新近獲獎的作品中，他們假裝對歷史的理解遠遠超過了他們應得的説法。這引起了歷史學家的特別嘲笑。對於他們作品中的歷史運用，最不屑一顧的評論之一是，讀起來就像 “帶有迴歸的維基百科條目”。

作為一名非專業歷史學家和一名專門研究非洲並在世界上幾乎所有地區工作過的記者，我們很容易發現三人提出的計劃的例外情況。津巴布韋（前羅得西亞）就是一個例子。該國有一個歷史悠久的白人定居社區，其中一些人仍留在國內。與許多鄰國相比，甚至與整個撒哈拉以南非洲相比，津巴布韋具有不利於熱帶疾病生長的環境，瘧疾和其他古老的傳染病病原體較少。然而，津巴布韋卻經常徘徊在失敗國家的邊緣。

有些讀者可能會認為，我在這樣一個特例上打鈎是不公平的，説這不足以否定經濟學家們的一般模式。但我對他們的論點有更廣泛的疑問，首先是其中的一些主要內容明顯缺乏新意。

What is different about Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson is that in their newly awarded work, they have pretended to understand history far more than they deserve to claim. This has aroused particular derision from historians. One of the most dismissive comments about the use of history in their work was that it read like “Wikipedia entries with regressions.”

As both a lay historian and a journalist who has specialized in Africa and worked in nearly region of the world, it is easy to find exceptions to the trio’s proposed scheme. Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) comes immediately to mind. The country had a long-established white settler community, some of which remains in the country. And compared with many of its neighbors, and indeed sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, it has a favorable tropical disease environment, with less malaria and other old infectious pathogens. Yet Zimbabwe has often flirted with failed state status.

Some readers may find it unfair of me to tick off an exception like this, saying that it isn’t enough to invalidate the economists’ general pattern. But I have broader problems with their thesis, starting with the fact that some of its main elements are strikingly unoriginal.

20 世紀 80 年代初，當我開始在西非做記者時，我從許多領域的學者以及該地區的外交官那裏聽到的最常見的看法之一是，疾病環境對非洲來説是毀滅性的。在大多數情況下，他們並不是在談論缺乏歐洲定居者社區的問題。他們的意思是，傳染病對非洲人本身造成了巨大損失，嚴重削弱了成年人的生產力，損害了兒童的大腦發育。懲罰性的疾病環境還導致嬰兒、兒童和產婦死亡率居高不下，使婦女不得不生下許多孩子，以確保其中一些孩子能夠活到成年，從而剝奪了她們一生中重要的生產時間。

流行病學也不僅僅是人類疾病的問題。正如許多學者所指出的那樣，從古至今，撒哈拉以南的非洲人在很大程度上缺乏人類最重要的役畜和快速陸路旅行的來源--馬的勞動力。這是因為采采蠅的廣泛存在，它會給牲畜傳播致命的疾病。南美洲本身就是歷史上偉大帝國的所在地，但由於一系列不同的原因，南美洲也缺乏這種重要的馱獸。

When I was getting my start as a reporter in West Africa in the early 1980s, one of the most common observations I heard from scholars in many fields, as well as from diplomats in that region, was that the disease environment was devastating for Africa. For the most part, they weren’t talking about the lack of European settler communities. What they meant was that infectious diseases exacted a huge toll on Africans themselves, massively sapping the productivity of adults and harming the cerebral development of children. The punishing disease environment also inflicted high rates of infant, child, and maternal mortality, robbing women of vital portions of their productive lives by obliging them to bear many children just to be sure that some would survive into adulthood.

Epidemiology is not just a matter of human disease, either. As many scholars have pointed out, throughout the ages, sub-Saharan Africans have largely lacked the labor of humankind’s most important draft animal and source of fast overland travel: the horse. That is because of the widespread presence of the tsetse fly, which transmits deadly diseases to livestock. For a different set of reasons, South America, itself a site of great historic empires, also lacked this crucial beast of burden.

甚至一些持同情態度的經濟學家也批評了阿斯莫格魯、約翰遜和羅賓遜的工作。例如，彼得森國際經濟研究所（Peterson Institute for International Economics）的高級研究員阿爾文德-蘇布拉馬尼安（Arvind Subramanian）最近寫道，他們 “認為制度很重要的觀點，即使不是亞當-斯密，也至少和道格拉斯-諾斯（Douglas North）一樣古老；他們關於殖民化影響制度演變的見解既不新穎，也沒有歷史質感，甚至也不準確； 他們從殖民化的自然實驗中找出因果關係的策略值得商榷，因為這種策略無法區分殖民者前往的地方和他們帶來的人力資本；他們的關鍵變量，即’定居者死亡率’的數據存在缺陷，而且是有選擇性地選擇的；最後，由於上述原因，他們的實證研究結果……是不穩固和不可靠的。最後，由於這些原因，實證研究結果……是不可靠的。 ”

Even some sympathetic economists have criticized the work of Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. Arvind Subramanian, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, for example, recently wrote that their “idea that institutions matter is at least as old as Douglas North if not Adam Smith; their insight that colonisation shaped the evolution of institutions is neither novel nor historically textured nor even accurate; their strategy of teasing causation out of the natural experiment of colonisation is debatable because it cannot distinguish between the places that colonisers went to and the human capital they brought along with them; the data for their key variable, namely ‘settler mortality,” is flawed and selectively chosen; and finally, for some of these reasons, the empirical findings … are shaky and non-robust.”

另一種批評則認為，三人小組沒有強調歐洲對所謂新大陸的剝削，特別是對非洲奴隸的剝削，是如何促進了歐洲的財富和制度，而這些正是獲獎者常常認為是非洲大陸與生俱來的特質。這與我在最近出版的新書《生於黑人》（Born in Blackness）中的發現十分吻合： 非洲、非洲人和現代世界的形成，1471 年至第二次世界大戰。在這本書中，我認為正是榨取推動了歐洲在 16 世紀及以後的經濟崛起。我所説的 “榨取 ”可能並不是諾貝爾獎得主或大多數讀者心目中的那種榨取，而是將數百萬被奴役的非洲人大量運過大西洋，讓他們從事改變歷史的商品生產，如蔗糖和棉花。

我的書認為，這些產品及其帶來的收入推動了歐洲大規模的社會和政治變革。通過使歐洲人在大西洋彼岸的大陸上定居在人口上可行、經濟上有利可圖，這種榨取創造了我們所説的 “西方”。

Another type of criticism takes the trio to task for not highlighting the ways in which European exploitation of the so-called New World, and of enslaved Africans in particular, fostered European wealth and the very institutions that the prize winners often treat as somehow innate qualities of that continent. This strongly accords with my own findings in my most recent book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. In it, I argue that it was precisely extraction that drove Europe’s economic ascent in the 16th century and beyond. Not the kind of extraction that the Nobel winners—or most readers, for that matter—probably had in mind but rather the high-volume traffic of millions of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to be put to work in the production of history-changing commodities such as sugar and cotton.

My book argues that these products and the revenues they generated drove social and political change on a huge scale in Europe. By making Europeans’ settlement of the continents on the other side of the Atlantic both demographically feasible and economically profitable, this kind of extraction forged the very creation of what we think of when we speak of “the West.”

我不是一個抨擊艾斯莫格魯、約翰遜和羅賓遜的人。我讀過他們的許多作品，也在公共政策課上講授過艾斯莫格魯和約翰遜的最新著作《權力與進步》： 在公共政策課上，我講授了艾斯莫格魯和約翰遜的最新著作《權力與進步：我們為技術和繁榮進行的千年鬥爭》。具有諷刺意味的是，我借鑑了他們的另一本研究報告《歐洲的崛起》： 大西洋貿易、制度變遷和經濟增長》一書的中心論點。那篇文章中的數據顯示，參與非洲奴隸和商品貿易的歐洲面向大西洋的國家不僅迅速繁榮起來，而且與歐洲其他地區相比享有持久的經濟優勢。

I am not one to bash Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson. I have read much of their work, and I have taught Acemoglu and Johnson’s most recent book, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity, in public policy classes. Ironically, I drew on another of their studies, “The Rise of Europe: Atlantic Trade, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth,” in building the argument at the center of Born in Blackness. The data from that article shows that Europe’s Atlantic-facing nations that participated in the African slave and commodities trades not only rapidly prospered but have enjoyed lasting economic advantages over other parts of Europe.

此外，三位作者還將這些國家民主制度的早期發展歸功於剝削非洲人所帶來的繁榮和階級動態：

[歐洲的崛起不僅反映了大西洋貿易和殖民主義的直接影響，也反映了由這些機遇引發的重大社會變革。……英國和荷蘭的大西洋貿易……改變了政治力量的平衡，使王室圈子之外的商業利益（包括各種海外商人、奴隸販子和各種殖民地種植園主）富裕起來並得到加強。通過這一渠道，它促進了保護商人對抗王權的政治體制的出現。

What is more, the three authors credit the early development of democratic institutions in these countries to the prosperity and class dynamics driven by the exploitation of Africans:

[T]he rise of Europe reflects not only the direct effects of Atlantic trade and colonialism but also a major social transformation induced by these opportunities. … Atlantic trade in Britain and the Netherlands … altered the balance of political power by enriching and strengthening commercial interests outside the royal circle, including various overseas merchants, slave traders, and various colonial planters. Through this channel, it contributed to the emergence of political institutions protecting merchants against royal power.

最近的諾貝爾獎似乎忽視了三人關於大西洋強國如何變得強大和繁榮的研究，因此，我們可能會看到西方屈從於一種自我奉承--輕信本國人民在決定國家命運方面的美德，卻忘記了他們定居、殖民或征服的土地上的人民的勞動可能是現代最決定性的因素。

In the latest Nobel prize, which seems to ignore the trio’s work on how Atlantic powers grew strong and prosperous, we may therefore have a case of the West succumbing to a kind of self-flattery—a credulous belief in the virtues of its own people in determining the fates of nations while forgetting how the labor of the people whose lands they settled, colonized, or conquered may have been the modern era’s most decisive factor.

Howard W. French is a columnist at *Foreign Policy,*a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. X: @hofrench