经济学革命刻不容缓

    我毕业于普林斯顿大学（Princeton University），并获得了经济学学士学位。当我回首旧时的教科书和教学大纲，并聆听以前的教授争论当前的经济学问题时，我不禁觉得自己仿佛【借用我最喜爱的电影《心灵捕手》（Good Will Hunting）中的台词】“花掉了150,000美元，接受到了从公共图书馆花1.5美元就能够获得的教育”。

    但我似乎并不是特例。上个月，哈佛大学（Harvard）70名大一新生集体退课，离开了格雷戈里•曼昆的经济学入门10讲课堂。他们给这位著名的经济学家写信，声称他的课程“赞成某种特定而狭隘的经济学观点，但我们相信，这种观点会让当前社会中纰漏百出而且效率低下的经济不平等体制继续存在。”他们还说：“由于你的课程不提供第一手资料，也很少提供学术期刊上的文章，因此我们几乎接触不到其它经济学研究方法。”

    后凯恩斯经济学家史蒂夫•基恩写道：“经济学太重要了，不能单单靠经济学家来研究它。”如果你从来没有听说过他，那只是因为，尽管他因为“率先并最令人信服地预告了即将到来的全球金融危机”而在2010年赢得了经济学尊崇奖（Revere Award for Economics），他却并不在纽约时报（the New York Times）撰写文章，也不出席达沃斯（Davos）的盛宴。

    作为《揭穿经济学真相》（Debunking Economics）的作者，基恩是主流经济学家的严厉批评者。早在2001年，他就警告说：“经济学理论正在同流合污，怂恿美国的投资公众再次上当受骗，陷入危机当中。”艾伦•格林斯潘、本•伯南克、和蒂莫西•盖特纳等新古典主义经济学家是当代经济学的领军人物，鼓动私营部门发展到不可持续的水平（私营部门债务占国内生产总值的300％），丝毫没有警觉到迫在眉睫的危险。直到今天，他们依然没有采取恰当的政策，消除当前的经济衰退，因为他们并不知道产生危机的原因。

    基恩就像那些哈佛新生，毫不畏惧地说当今“经济学界的皇帝”没有穿任何衣服。他说的没错。

    如今决定全球至关重要的货币政策的经济学家们与当初在演讲厅里给我讲课、撰写教科书的是同一帮人。他们的理论尽管看似很吸引人，然而却缺乏实证证据，充满了内在的矛盾，立论的根据也非常脆弱。具体来说，他们的模型建立在这些假说之上：向下倾斜的需求曲线、向上倾斜的供给曲线、完全竞争、理性的消费者、仁慈的独裁者和一般均衡。他们并没有做动态分析，也没有考虑到不平衡状态以及私营部门债务所起的作用。

    现实世界中有什么市场经济是遵循这些经济领军人物所定义的原则的呢？

    一个也没有。因此，米尔顿•弗里德曼主张，不能根据其假设来衡量某种理论，而仅仅应该根据其预测的精确性。但是，所有的新古典主义经济学家都没能预测金融危机以及随之而来的经济衰退，因此这种辩解根本站不住脚。事实上，2008年8月，麻省理工学院（MIT）的教授奥利维尔•布兰查德【目前担任国际货币基金组织（IMF）的首席经济学家】明确地说：“宏观态势良好。”莫名其妙的是，甚至当集体做出的政策决策导致全球动荡之时，经济学界的领军人物们也没有能够根据预测的精确性来衡量经济学的思维模式。因此，盖特纳、伯南克等人即使在2008年前后被证明出错以后，仍然在经济系统中扮演着重要的角色。

    I graduated with a degree in economics from Princeton University; looking back at old textbooks and syllabi, and listening to former professors debate current economic issues, I can't help but feel like I "dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education [I] could've gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges from the public library," to quote one of my favorite movies, Good Will Hunting.

    But it seems that I'm not alone. Last month, seventy freshmen at Harvard walked out of Gregory Mankiw's introductory Economics 10 lecture; they wrote to the well-known economist that his course "espouses a specific – and limited – view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today." And that, "As your class does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals, we have very little access to alternative approaches to economics."

    Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen wrote that "Economics is too important to leave to the economists." If you've never heard of him it's because he doesn't write for the New York Times or dine in Davos, though in 2010 he did win the Revere Award for Economics for being "the economist who first and most cogently warned the world of the coming Global Financial Crisis."

    Keen, author of Debunking Economics, is a harsh critic of mainstream economists. While he warned as early as 2001 that "economic theory has been complicit in encouraging America's investing public to once again delude itself into a crisis," neoclassicists like Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner were our economic leaders that empowered the private sector to lever up to an unsustainable level (private sector debt to GDP of 300%) and gave no warning of imminent danger. Even today they fail to apply appropriate policies to lift us out of the recession because they don't understand what caused it.

    Like those Harvard freshmen, Keen isn't afraid to say that today's 'Emperors of Economics' aren't wearing any clothes. He's right.

    The economists that make the world's crucial monetary policy decisions are the same economists that I listened to in lecture halls and who authored my textbooks. While superficially appealing, their theories lack empirical evidence, are riddled with internal inconsistencies, and are based upon tenuous assumptions. Specifically, their models are built on downward sloping demand curves, upward sloping supply curves, perfect competition, rational consumers, benevolent dictators, and general equilibrium; there is no dynamic analysis, no consideration of disequilibrium, and no role of private sector debt.

    What real-world, market economy adheres to the principles defined by our leading economists?

    There isn't one. That's why Milton Friedman argued that a theory cannot be judged by its assumptions, but only by the accuracy of its predictions. But that defense doesn't hold up so well after every neoclassical economist failed to predict the financial crisis and ensuing recession. In fact, in August 2008, Olivier Blanchard, professor at MIT and now chief economist at the IMF plainly stated that, "The state of macro is good." Somehow, even when groupthink's policy resulted in turmoil the world over, economic leaders failed to judge modes of economic thought by the accuracy of their predictions. As a result, the same actors – Geithner, Bernanke et al. – remain in systemically-important roles even after being proved wrong pre- and post-2008.