089：Is Economics All About Selfishness and a Lack of Cooperation？

【提示】

本课程是中英双语授课，您可以点击“专辑--节目”选择中文或英文课程进行收听，英文课程由蒂莫西·泰勒本人讲述，对应中文内容是由专业人士完成。谢谢您的订阅，希望您能有所收获。

【音频英文稿】

Hello, Himalaya’s subscribers. My name is Timothy Taylor, and today  we're going to discuss what is economics all about. We're returning to a question that got a very basic answer at the beginning of these lectures, but we can now talk about it with a lot more insight and understanding. Let me tell you about an experience I often have when meeting people. You often have a little conversation. What's the weather like? Are you married？ Any children? What's your job? And of course I tell them I'm an economist. When that happens, the person often gets kind of a strange expression on their face. Like they are trying to think of something to say. 

Or maybe they're just trying to think of something polite to say that doesn't sound like an insult. In many cases, the person says something like“So do you have any good recommendations for the stock market? ” Well, you've been listening to be talk about economics for more than twenty hours at this point. And so you probably know I don't actually do recommendations for the stock market. I say,“ No, I I don't really do that. ”In fact, most economists don't do that. And then we stand there and we look at each other. 

And I kind of imagine the other person is thinking,“Well, what do you actually do then?”But they are too polite to say that out loud. So we go back to talk about the weather some more. At the start of these lectures I tried to give you a basic idea what economics was about, but at that point it was a little bit hard to do. Somebody once said, “Economics is what economists do.” And so you need to spend some time talking about what economists do, all the different topics we've covered in this basic overview of economics,and of course, many other topics I haven't had time to mention. But now we can return to that basic question of what is economics with much more background in mind. And let's break our discussion into three parts. 

What are some things that are not economics? Second we’ll talk about the warehouse metaphor, a way of understanding some basic questions in economics. And third, we'll talk about the range of tools used by economists. Our first subject is, what are some things that are not economics? Well, as I said a moment ago, economics is not advice about how to get rich or what stocks to buy. It's true. Many people who do investment advice have studied economics, and they find economics useful in their work. But many of those same people have also studied other subjects, like math or psychology. And it would be silly to say “Math is about how to get rich, or what stocks to buy or psychology is about, how to get rich and what stocks to buy.” 

Just because something is a useful tool doesn't mean that's what it's mainly about. Similarly, economics is not about how to run a business. Again, many people who run businesses and managing large businesses have studied economics at some point, and they find it useful. But I sometimes say the difference between a business manager and an economist is like the difference between a driver of a car and a mechanic who fixes the car. Yes, both people talk a lot about cars, but they have different skills. The business manager is the driver of a business. 

The driver has all kinds of detailed knowledge about production and sales, advertising, motivating workers, and other topics. Economists usually look at businesses as one element of the overall economic system, including other businesses, and the broader markets for goods, labor, financial, capital, all operating in the context of macro economics. And more economics is not about predicting the future, like what will happen to the economy next week or next month or next year. Again, some people who have that as part of their job have studied economics and find it useful, but most economists don't do that. And personally, I'm no good at predicting the future. 

For example, if you would ask me in early two thousand and seven, if the world economy was about to enter a terrible, great recession, I would have said it's extremely unlikely. Or if you would ask me back in nineteen seventy eight, if China would turn into the world's largest economy in the next thirty or forty years, I would have said, “I don't think that's very likely to happen.” Of course, it wasn't just me. Not many people would have made those predictions. I sometimes say,“I'm pretty good at understanding the economy,”but it usually takes me a year or two before I really understand what is happening right now in the present. You sometimes hear people say“Economics is all about math and statistics.”

And it's true that in advanced economics classes and in economic research use a lot of math and statistics really a lot. But we've been talking about economics for more than twenty hours here with very little math or statistics. So clearly, economics is a lot more than just the math and statistics. And you sometimes hear people say, “Economics is about why private firms and free markets are really great.” And that's not quite correct either. Yes. Economists do point out some situations where competition works well at providing incentives for efficiency and innovation. 

And China has experienced many of those benefits as it shifted toward more private firms during the last few decades. But economists also point out a number of situations where markets don't work all that well, like the negative externalities of pollution, or the positive externalities of technology, or helping the poor, or macro economic policy,and inappropriate regulation of the financial industry. Some cases markets work well in others, not so much. So what is the basic idea of economics? Let's move to our second main theme, what I call the warehouse metaphor. 

The warehouse metaphor works like this. Let's think about the economy as a giant warehouse. When you produce something, whatever it is, goods or services, you bring it around to the entrance store and you can deposit your production in the warehouse. When you consume something, whatever it is, goods or services, you have to go around to the exit door and collect whatever it is from the warehouse. The problem for every economy is to think about the rules for making this happen. Now, there's an immediate problem here. There are many many different items in an economy, and there's a division of labor about producing them. 

But the specific mixture of goods and services that gets produced and put into the warehouse needs to be the same as the mixture of goods and services that are taken out of the warehouse and consumed. For example, if everyone in a society runs a fishing boat and all that goes into the warehouse is fish, then everything that comes out of the warehouse is also fish. No one can get grain or clothes or cars or anything else out of the warehouse. With this warehouse we want to avoid waste and we want to avoid waiting time. 

It would be wasteful and pointless to have lots of things go into the warehouse with no one actually wanting them. It would also be nice to avoid a situation where lots of people are waiting at the exit door of the warehouse for something where there just isn't very much available. Now, one approach to the warehouse problem is let's just give everyone some encouragement and let them decide. We could tell everyone work hard, contribute as much as you can on whatever you want, and bring it to the warehouse. And when it comes to taking things out, just take what you want. 

Now, that idea might sound good to a philosopher, but it's not very practical. Economic output is not a machine. It involves people, and people react to the incentives that they face. We need a system that gives the right incentives to real, actual human beings. We want to reward those who bring things to the warehouse that are highly valued and that many people want. And we want to place some limits on people taking things out of the warehouse. So people won't be wasteful or unreasonable in what they use. And you've had some economics now. So you should almost feel terms of economics quivering out on the tip of your tongue. 

The production side of what goes into the warehouse is supply. What comes out of the warehouse is demand，forces of supply and demand come together to determine prices and quantities. In a little broader sense, the warehouse idea starts us thinking about all the factors that influence business supply, private sector firms, publicly owned firms. We think about different goods. We think about local markets, national markets and international markets. We think about the role of government in regulation, taxes, spending, helping the poor, education, technology. We think about all the trade-offs that happen as all of these decisions are made. In short when we're thinking about this warehouse this basic problem of economics, we are really thinking about how a society answers the big questions, how to produce, what produce, and who gets what is produced. 

Those are three big questions we are asked way back in the very first lecture. Economics is the language and the study looking at all the different issues that arise of how to answer these three basic questions about the giant warehouse of production and consumption that forms any economy. Let's end here by talking about our third point, the range of tools used in economics. Good economists are going to need to use a lot of different tools. Ah, some are theoretical ideas or logical deductions about those ideas, like what economists mean by supply, demand, equilibrium, or what economists mean by the balance of trade. 

Some of the tools economists use are statistics, which requires a knowledge of what data is being collected, and how that data fits with the conceptual ideas of economic theory. There will be times when economists need to study and understand examples from history. There will be times when economists need to understand how government works, how politics works. They'll even be times when economists need philosophy, like thinking about when inequality might be more justified or less justified. 

And economists will also be making connections between all of these different categories, sometimes jumping from an idea in theory over to real world evidence, and then thinking about how that evidence fits with the theory and jumping back to the evidence one more time or jumping from a very general idea down to a specific example at a certain country or a certain industry or a certain place and time. 

Other times, using a specific example to think about what general idea it might represent. Sometimes we'll be jumping from history to the present or back to history again. The great British economist John Maynard Keynes, certainly one of the greatest economies of all our greatest economists of all time, describe how economists combine all of these skills. And this is a quotation from John Maynard Keynes. Keynes wrote, “The master economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. 

He must reach a high standard in several different directions and must combine talents not often found together. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher in some degree, he must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate the particular in terms of the general and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought. He must study the present in light of the past for the purposes of the future, no part of man's nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard. He must be purposeful and disinterested in a simultaneous mood, as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician.” 

Now of course Keynes was talking about the master economist. He's talking about a combination of skills and abilities that I am still working on developing in myself and hoping to get better and better at, and in fact, many economists are still hoping to reach. Let's end this lecture by talking about a few review questions. Think back to the time before you started these lectures. If someone had asked you then, what is economics or what do economists do, or what skills do economists need? What would you said? 

How did your answer then from the beginning of these lectures compare with answer you would give now, and in thinking about how you answer that question, maybe you think a little bit about the warehouse problem or the comment I just quoted to you from John Maynard Keynes. Our next lecture will be our final one. And we will conclude by discussing the importance of economic thinking. 

I'm Timothy Taylor. Thank you for listening to Himalaya.