2024年诺贝尔经济学奖被美国学术界诟病

为什么今年的诺贝尔经济学奖如此具有争议性？

该奖项引起了异常强烈的批评--这是有道理的。

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

每年诺贝尔经济学奖颁发时，我都会想象关注新闻的公众在听广播或阅读头条新闻时，边喝早咖啡边默默点头致谢。他们认为，经济学家用自己的语言说话，他们的工作内容过于狭隘或深奥，没有理由质疑瑞典学院的判断。

今年的获奖作品却与众不同。共同获奖的三位学者--亚伦-阿西莫格鲁（Daron Acemoglu）、西蒙-约翰逊（Simon Johnson）和詹姆斯-A-罗宾逊（James A. Robins）--的研究很容易被沸腾。事实上，阿斯莫格鲁和罗宾逊 2012 年的著作《国家为何失败》就是他们获奖的部分原因。(约翰逊并非该书的共同作者，但他们三人经常合作）。

这不仅仅是书名的问题。他们著作中的许多论点也可以用一句话来概括：在过去的几个世纪里，随着欧洲人对世界的控制不断扩大，殖民者在一些地方定居并建立了强大而持久的社区--比如早期的美国--往往会繁荣昌盛；而欧洲人在一些地方的定居则更加不稳定--尤其是热带非洲的大部分地区--则并不繁荣。

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.

经济学家们认为，造成这种情况的原因是，前者形成了强大的政治和经济体制，而后者则在欧洲殖民者放弃直接政治控制很久之后，定居下来，形成了一直延续到独立时代的榨取型经济活动模式。三人在 2003 年的一篇论文中写道，这些定居模式往往受到流行病学的影响，在疟疾等致命传染病流行的地方定居的欧洲人较少。

今年的奖项引起了学术界异常强烈的批评。这暴露了经济学家与其他社会科学家（从历史学家、社会学家到政治学家）之间长期存在的明显分歧。社会科学家经常认为经济学家伪装成科学家，而经济学家则反驳说，其他领域的专家对国家经济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.

阿斯莫格鲁、约翰逊和罗宾逊的不同之处在于，在他们新近获奖的作品中，他们假装对历史的理解远远超过了他们应得的说法。这引起了历史学家的特别嘲笑。对于他们作品中的历史运用，最不屑一顾的评论之一是，读起来就像 “带有回归的维基百科条目”。

作为一名非专业历史学家和一名专门研究非洲并在世界上几乎所有地区工作过的记者，我们很容易发现三人提出的计划的例外情况。津巴布韦（前罗得西亚）就是一个例子。该国有一个历史悠久的白人定居社区，其中一些人仍留在国内。与许多邻国相比，甚至与整个撒哈拉以南非洲相比，津巴布韦具有不利于热带疾病生长的环境，疟疾和其他古老的传染病病原体较少。然而，津巴布韦却经常徘徊在失败国家的边缘。

有些读者可能会认为，我在这样一个特例上打钩是不公平的，说这不足以否定经济学家们的一般模式。但我对他们的论点有更广泛的疑问，首先是其中的一些主要内容明显缺乏新意。

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 世纪 80 年代初，当我开始在西非做记者时，我从许多领域的学者以及该地区的外交官那里听到的最常见的看法之一是，疾病环境对非洲来说是毁灭性的。在大多数情况下，他们并不是在谈论缺乏欧洲定居者社区的问题。他们的意思是，传染病对非洲人本身造成了巨大损失，严重削弱了成年人的生产力，损害了儿童的大脑发育。惩罚性的疾病环境还导致婴儿、儿童和产妇死亡率居高不下，使妇女不得不生下许多孩子，以确保其中一些孩子能够活到成年，从而剥夺了她们一生中重要的生产时间。

流行病学也不仅仅是人类疾病的问题。正如许多学者所指出的那样，从古至今，撒哈拉以南的非洲人在很大程度上缺乏人类最重要的役畜和快速陆路旅行的来源--马的劳动力。这是因为采采蝇的广泛存在，它会给牲畜传播致命的疾病。南美洲本身就是历史上伟大帝国的所在地，但由于一系列不同的原因，南美洲也缺乏这种重要的驮兽。

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.

甚至一些持同情态度的经济学家也批评了阿斯莫格鲁、约翰逊和罗宾逊的工作。例如，彼得森国际经济研究所（Peterson Institute for International Economics）的高级研究员阿尔文德-苏布拉马尼安（Arvind Subramanian）最近写道，他们 "认为制度很重要的观点，即使不是亚当-斯密，也至少和道格拉斯-诺斯（Douglas North）一样古老；他们关于殖民化影响制度演变的见解既不新颖，也没有历史质感，甚至也不准确； 他们从殖民化的自然实验中找出因果关系的策略值得商榷，因为这种策略无法区分殖民者前往的地方和他们带来的人力资本；他们的关键变量，即'定居者死亡率'的数据存在缺陷，而且是有选择性地选择的；最后，由于上述原因，他们的实证研究结果......是不稳固和不可靠的。最后，由于这些原因，实证研究结果......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.”

另一种批评则认为，三人小组没有强调欧洲对所谓新大陆的剥削，特别是对非洲奴隶的剥削，是如何促进了欧洲的财富和制度，而这些正是获奖者常常认为是非洲大陆与生俱来的特质。这与我在最近出版的新书《生于黑人》（Born in Blackness）中的发现十分吻合： 非洲、非洲人和现代世界的形成，1471 年至第二次世界大战。在这本书中，我认为正是榨取推动了欧洲在 16 世纪及以后的经济崛起。我所说的 “榨取 ”可能并不是诺贝尔奖得主或大多数读者心目中的那种榨取，而是将数百万被奴役的非洲人大量运过大西洋，让他们从事改变历史的商品生产，如蔗糖和棉花。

我的书认为，这些产品及其带来的收入推动了欧洲大规模的社会和政治变革。通过使欧洲人在大西洋彼岸的大陆上定居在人口上可行、经济上有利可图，这种榨取创造了我们所说的 “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.”

我不是一个抨击艾斯莫格鲁、约翰逊和罗宾逊的人。我读过他们的许多作品，也在公共政策课上讲授过艾斯莫格鲁和约翰逊的最新著作《权力与进步》： 在公共政策课上，我讲授了艾斯莫格鲁和约翰逊的最新著作《权力与进步：我们为技术和繁荣进行的千年斗争》。具有讽刺意味的是，我借鉴了他们的另一本研究报告《欧洲的崛起》： 大西洋贸易、制度变迁和经济增长》一书的中心论点。那篇文章中的数据显示，参与非洲奴隶和商品贸易的欧洲面向大西洋的国家不仅迅速繁荣起来，而且与欧洲其他地区相比享有持久的经济优势。

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，三位作者还将这些国家民主制度的早期发展归功于剥削非洲人所带来的繁荣和阶级动态：

[欧洲的崛起不仅反映了大西洋贸易和殖民主义的直接影响，也反映了由这些机遇引发的重大社会变革。......英国和荷兰的大西洋贸易......改变了政治力量的平衡，使王室圈子之外的商业利益（包括各种海外商人、奴隶贩子和各种殖民地种植园主）富裕起来并得到加强。通过这一渠道，它促进了保护商人对抗王权的政治体制的出现。

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.

最近的诺贝尔奖似乎忽视了三人关于大西洋强国如何变得强大和繁荣的研究，因此，我们可能会看到西方屈从于一种自我奉承--轻信本国人民在决定国家命运方面的美德，却忘记了他们定居、殖民或征服的土地上的人民的劳动可能是现代最决定性的因素。

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