Morgan's Little American Dream

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THE PROCESS AND PROGRESS OF ECONOMICS

经济学的进程与发展
Nobel Memorial Lecture, 8 December, 1982
by
GEORGE J. STIGLER 斯蒂格勒

Some men have superb instincts as to which of the new ideas of the time will repay intensive exploration, but no one is infallible. Even the greatest of economists pursue some problems that take them nowhere. In the last months of his life, Ricardo was still attempting to fashion a precise measure of value, and not advancing one inch. John Stuart Mill and Leon Walras devoted much energy to the propagation of the proposal of nationalization of unanticipated future increments of land values - not  the first time or the last that someone
proposed nationalizing a sum with an expected value no larger than zero. Jevons could not get over the idea that cycles in sunspots left their tracks on commercial cycles. The great Pareto took a detour through the question of the order in which people consumed various products, out of a belief that this was related to the order of integration of a partial differential equation.
Not only great economists, but all economists who pursue anything, pursue will-o'-the-wisps for periods of time that are painful to consider in retrospect.

摘抄上文本也不打算有人能通读一遍,毕竟浮躁社会, 多数人难得静下心来读一读牛人气势恢宏的文章. 但是黑体标出的名字确都是经济学界赫赫有名的. 李嘉图,帕累托,瓦尔拉斯等等, 这些乍听上去几近神话的人,却也做过"死胡同"般的研究, 浪费了不少光阴和精力. 我却觉得这些人是幸运的,因为毕竟他们做出了点什么, 而大多数研究者, 可能正如文中所说, 尽其一生, 一无所成, 仅留下了painful的retrospect. 一条路走到底,有时候也不一定是最优解.