不确定世界中的经济学

Economics for an uncertain world

World Development · 2023
被引 27
人大 A-ABS 3

中文导读

回顾了经济学中关于不确定性的思想史,指出新古典经济学和主流控制经济学如何忽视不确定性,而当代异端经济学重新重视复杂性、非正式性、位置性和叙事,并以两个案例说明赫希曼思想在应对不确定性中的持续价值。

Abstract

Uncertainty, where we do not know the likelihood of future events, dominates our world. This article examines how economics as a profession and discipline can address uncertainty. From Frank Knight to John Maynard Keynes to Friedrich von Hayek to George Shackle, economics has highlighted the importance of uncertain knowledge and distinguished this from calculable risk. In this article we show how such insights were lost through the rise of narrow neoclassical thinking and were excluded through the emergence of a dominant economics of control that rose to prominence during the twentieth century and especially in the neoliberal era. However, through a range of perspectives in economics that emphasise the importance of complexity, informality, positionality and narratives, uncertainty is once again being embraced within an increasingly heterodox economics. In many ways, this chimes with the work of Albert Hirschman who, starting from the mid-1960s, emphasised the importance of addressing uncertainty in development theory and practice. Through two examples on pastoral development and global financial governance, we highlight the continued relevance of Hirschman’s thinking on the importance of adaptation, flexibility and learning-by-doing as responses to uncertainty and for the development of reliable, robust approaches to development policy and practice. In conclusion, we argue that economics theory, methodologies, professional practice and training need to change, recovering some of the insights from previous generations of economic thinkers and practitioners, in order to reinvent an economics appropriate for our uncertain world.

不确定性异端经济学赫希曼思想适应性治理