專欄有效市場

Ingenuity and stupidity endure, but they defy all prediction

As the financial crisis continues to evolve, the Queen’s question at the London School of Economics – why have academic economists so little to contribute to predicting the course of events – continues to be all too pertinent.

Robert Lucas, professor of economics at the University of Chicago and Nobel Prize winner for his seminal contributions to macroeconomics, proffered an answer in 2009. The crisis was not predicted, he explained, because economic theory predicts that such events cannot be predicted. Faced with that response, a wise sovereign will seek counsel elsewhere.

Still, Prof Lucas’s assertion that “no one could have predicted it” contains an important insight. There can be no objective basis for a prediction of the kind “Lehman Bros will go into liquidation on September 15”, because if there were, people would act on that expectation and Lehman would go into liquidation straight away. The economic world, far more than the physical world, is influenced by our beliefs about it.

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約翰•凱

約翰•凱(John Kay)從1995年開始爲英國《金融時報》撰寫經濟和商業的專欄。他曾經任教於倫敦商學院和牛津大學。目前他在倫敦經濟學院擔任訪問學者。他有著非常輝煌的從商經歷,曾經創辦和壯大了一家諮詢公司,然後將其轉售。約翰•凱著述甚豐,其中包括《企業成功的基礎》(Foundations of Corporate Success, 1993)、《市場的真相》(The Truth about Markets, 2003)和近期的《金融投資指南》(The Long and the Short of It: finance and investment for normally intelligent people who are not in the industry)。

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