经济学人：为什么经济学家喜欢《鲁滨逊漂流记》
After spending 28 years, two months and 19 days marooned on an island, Robinson Crusoe does not lose his nose for adventure or his “native propensity to rambling”. He crosses the Pyrenees, stalked by “hellish wolves”, witnesses the “pomp and poverty” of China and battles Tartars on the Russian steppe.
在被困在一座岛屿上 28 年零 2 个月零 19 天之后，鲁宾逊·克鲁索并没有失去对冒险的兴趣，也没有失去他“与生俱来的漫无目的的倾向”。他穿越比利牛斯山脉，被“地狱狼”跟踪，目睹了中国的“盛况和贫困”，并在俄罗斯草原上与鞑靼人作战。
The character’s strangest adventure, however, is none of these. It is surely his centuries-long ramble through the literature of economics. Crusoe has appeared in Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory” and Milton Friedman’s Chicago lectures on “Price Theory”. He has an entry in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. And he often washes up in economics textbooks.
然而，这个角色最奇怪的冒险并不是这些。这无疑是他几个世纪以来对经济学文献的漫游。鲁滨逊曾出现在卡尔·马克思的《资本论》、约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯的《通论》和米尔顿·弗里德曼的芝加哥讲座《价格理论》中。 《新帕尔格雷夫经济学词典》中有他的条目。而且他经常在经济学教科书上洗白。
Crusoe’s economic appeal is unsurprising. The sailor spends a few pages escaping pirates and shooting cannibals. But his real battle is against scarcity, which he defeats through careful deployment of the resources at his disposal, including his own labour.
克鲁索的经济吸引力不足为奇。水手花了几页的时间逃离海盗并射杀食人者。但他真正的斗争是对抗稀缺性，他通过仔细部署他所掌握的资源（包括他自己的劳动力）来战胜稀缺性。
After being shipwrecked, Crusoe makes his island prison habitable, even hospitable. Salvaging what he can from the wreck, he fortifies a cave (his “castle”), erects a tent (“my country house”), plants crops, tames goats (and a parrot) and fills his improvised shelves with pigeon, turtle and other foodstuffs.
遭遇海难后，克鲁索让他的岛上监狱变得适合居住，甚至变得热情好客。他从沉船中尽可能地抢救出来，加固了一个洞穴（他的“城堡”），搭建了一个帐篷（“我的乡间别墅”），种植庄稼，驯服了山羊（和一只鹦鹉），并在他临时搭建的架子上放满了鸽子、乌龟和鸟类。其他食品。
Scarcity also stalked Daniel Defoe, the novelist who created Crusoe in 1719. Over a chequered career he traded in bricks, wines, pickles, tobacco and the glands of civet cats. He dabbled in horse-trading. Literally. He defaulted on his debts. Twice. “No man has tasted differing fortunes more,” he wrote. “And thirteen times I have been rich and poor.”
匮乏也困扰着小说家丹尼尔·笛福 (Daniel Defoe)，他于 1719 年创作了《漂流记》。在他坎坷的职业生涯中，他从事砖块、葡萄酒、泡菜、烟草和果子狸腺体的贸易。他涉足马匹交易。字面上地。他拖欠债务。两次。 “没有人比他更能尝到不同命运的滋味了，”他写道。 “我经历过十三次富有和贫穷。”
He wrote allegories that turned dry economic variables into colourful characters like “Count Tariff”, an English nobleman dressed in domestically manufactured cloth, and “Lady Credit” (“if she be once Disoblig’d; no Entreaties will bring her back again). His publication “The Compleat English Tradesman” has been described as the first business textbook.
他写了一些寓言，将枯燥的经济变量变成了丰富多彩的人物，比如“关税伯爵”，一位穿着国产布料的英国贵族，还有“信贷女士”（“如果她一旦被剥夺了；没有任何恳求可以让她再次回来）。他的著作《完整的英语商人》被称为第一本商业教科书。
But it is his island fable that has most resonated, as Michael White of Monash University has documented. Economists are eager to find behavioural laws that apply anywhere. Crusoe’s isolation thus provides a useful thought experiment. Principles that hold true on his island must be elemental, not socially incidental.
但正如莫纳什大学的迈克尔·怀特所记录的那样，他的岛屿寓言最能引起共鸣。经济学家渴望找到适用于任何地方的行为规律。因此，克鲁索的孤立提供了一个有用的思想实验。在他的岛上适用的原则必须是基本的，而不是社会偶然的。
William Forster Lloyd, for example, was keen to show that economics had something to say about value even in the absence of markets and exchange. In a publication in 1834, he pointed out that Crusoe prizes his goods more dearly as they become more scarce (“my ink beginning to fail me”, Crusoe says, “I contented myself to use it more sparingly”). He took that as evidence for the principle of diminishing marginal utility: a second bottle of ink is worth less than the first.
例如，威廉·福斯特·劳埃德（William Forster Lloyd）热衷于证明，即使在没有市场和交换的情况下，经济学也能解释价值。在 1834 年的一份出版物中，他指出，随着他的商品变得越来越稀缺，克鲁索更加珍视它们（“我的墨水开始让我失望”，克鲁索说，“我满足于更加节约地使用它”）。他将此作为边际效用递减原理的证据：第二瓶墨水的价值低于第一瓶墨水。
Most economists have turned to the tale not to corroborate a theory but merely to illustrate it. Textbook authors, for example, want to introduce the principles of supply and demand in the simplest possible case, and nothing is simpler than a one-person “Robinson Crusoe” economy.
大多数经济学家转向这个故事并不是为了证实某个理论，而只是为了说明它。例如，教科书作者希望在尽可能简单的情况下介绍供求原则，而没有什么比一个人的“鲁滨逊漂流记”经济更简单的了。
Such an economy features in a textbook by Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. Crusoe must decide how to divide his day between gathering coconuts and working “on his tan”. In keeping with diminishing marginal utility, each extra coconut or hour of sunbathing is worth less than the last. Each hour of work also yields fewer coconuts than the last. Under these assumptions, Crusoe should stop working at the point when an extra coconut is worth no more to him than the additional leisure he must sacrifice to gather it.
谷歌首席经济学家哈尔·瓦里安（Hal Varian）在一本教科书中描述了这样的经济。克鲁索必须决定如何将一天的时间分配在采集椰子和“晒黑皮肤”上。与边际效用递减相一致，每多一个椰子或多一个小时的日光浴，其价值就会比上一个少。每工作一小时产出的椰子也比上一小时少。根据这些假设，克鲁索应该在当一个额外的椰子对他来说并不比他为采集椰子而必须牺牲的额外休闲时间更有价值时停止工作。
A one-person economy has several things going for it. There is no waste. If an extra coconut is not wanted, it will not be collected—supply implies its own demand. There is no unemployment. If Crusoe wants the extra coconut more than the leisure, he will employ himself to gather it. Such an economy, Keynes pointed out, cannot suffer the kind of slump that cursed the 1930s—when people fail to spend enough of their income on the goods the economy could produce.
一人经济有几个好处。没有浪费。如果不需要额外的椰子，就不会被收集——供应意味着它自己的需求。没有失业。如果克鲁索想要额外的椰子而不是闲暇，他就会亲自去采集椰子。凯恩斯指出，这样的经济不会遭受 20 世纪 30 年代那样的衰退——当时人们无法将足够的收入花在经济可以生产的商品上。
Textbooks present Crusoe’s one-man economy as a kind of benchmark, against which more sophisticated economies can be judged. Can its harmony be replicated, even when decision-making is divided up and dispersed—even when consumers and producers do not share the same mind?
教科书将鲁滨逊的个人经济视为一种基准，可以根据该基准来判断更复杂的经济体。即使决策被分割和分散——即使消费者和生产者的想法不同，它的和谐能否被复制？
The answer is yes, through the magic of flexible prices and wages. In his own more elaborate version of the parable, Daniel McFadden, a Nobel prize-winning economist who was also Mr Varian’s thesis adviser, introduces a second character (“Friday”). In this version, Crusoe gathers yams not coconuts. Friday acts as a manager, hiring Crusoe’s labour, paying him in yams, and giving him leftover yams as a “dividend”.
答案是肯定的，通过灵活的价格和工资的魔力。诺贝尔奖获得者、经济学家兼瓦里安先生的论文导师丹尼尔·麦克法登 (Daniel McFadden) 在他自己对这个寓言的更详尽的版本中引入了第二个角色（“星期五”）。在这个版本中，克鲁索采集的是山药而不是椰子。星期五充当经理，雇佣克鲁索的劳动力，用山药支付他工资，并将剩余的山药作为“红利”给他。
Mr McFadden shows that there is an hourly wage that will reconcile the demand and supply of labour, and also, miraculously, the demand and supply of yams. But things can go wrong if wages get misaligned or expectations sink too low. If the wage gets stuck at too high a level, for example, Crusoe might find himself unable to work as long as he wants. The yams he could collect in an extra hour may be worth more to him than the leisure he would lose. But if the wage he must receive is higher still, Friday will deny him the extra employment. The island would suffer a recession, combining unmet needs (for yams) with unused resources (Crusoe’s spare labour).
麦克法登先生表明，每小时工资可以调和劳动力的需求和供给，而且奇迹般地还能调和山药的需求和供给。但如果工资失调或期望值太低，事情可能会出错。例如，如果工资水平过高，克鲁索可能会发现自己无法随心所欲地工作。对他来说，多花一个小时收集到的山药可能比他失去的闲暇更有价值。但如果他必须获得的工资更高，周五将拒绝他获得额外的就业机会。该岛将遭受经济衰退，未满足的需求（山药）与未利用的资源（克鲁索的闲置劳动力）结合在一起。
If Friday worries that he will not be able to sell as many yams as he can produce, he may limit his demand for labour. That will curb his customer’s purchasing power, thereby seeming to bear out his pessimistic sales forecast. Crusoe will lack work, because Friday lacks sales. And Friday will lack sales, because Crusoe lacks work.
如果星期五担心他无法出售尽可能多的山药，他可能会限制对劳动力的需求。这将抑制客户的购买力，从而似乎证实了他悲观的销售预测。克鲁索将缺乏工作，因为周五缺乏销售。星期五将缺乏销售，因为克鲁索缺乏工作。
An obvious objection to these parables is their cartoonishness. The concept of a Crusoe economy has become “another cuss-word to people who crave realism and are contemptuous of theory” noted Frank Knight, a Chicago economist, in 1960. But simplification can often aid understanding. Mr McFadden’s parable, for example, illustrates that recessions are not necessary or salutary, but absurd and inefficient.
对这些寓言的一个明显的反对意见是它们的卡通性。芝加哥经济学家弗兰克·奈特 (Frank Knight) 在 1960 年指出，克鲁索经济的概念已经成为“对那些渴望现实主义、蔑视理论的人来说的又一个咒骂词”。但简化往往有助于理解。例如，麦克法登先生的寓言表明，经济衰退没有必要，也没有什么好处，而是荒谬且低效的。
Never too late to be wise明智永远不会太晚
For Crusoe-lovers, however, what is most striking about these exercises is not their distance from reality, but their distance from Defoe’s original tale. Neither coconuts nor yams appear in the book. And far from working on his tan, Crusoe took a “world of pains” to hide from the sun, making a “clumsy, ugly, goat’s-skin umbrella” to ward off its rays. His island is not in the South Seas, as Mr McFadden maintains, but near Trinidad. And Friday and Crusoe do not bargain over labour or anything else. After Crusoe saves him from the cannibals who have carried him to the island by canoe, Friday in effect indentures himself to the sailor. One of the first English words he is taught is “Master”.
然而，对于克鲁索爱好者来说，这些练习最引人注目的不是它们与现实的距离，而是它们与笛福最初的故事的距离。书中没有出现椰子和山药。克鲁索并没有努力把自己的皮肤晒黑，而是费尽了“千辛万苦”来躲避阳光，制作了一把“笨拙、丑陋的山羊皮伞”来遮挡阳光。正如麦克法登先生所坚称的那样，他的岛屿并不在南海，而是在特立尼达岛附近。星期五和克鲁索不会就劳工或其他任何事情讨价还价。克鲁索从食人者手中救了他，食人者用独木舟把他带到了岛上，星期五实际上与水手签订了契约。他学到的第一个英语单词是“Master”。
Obliviousness to Defoe’s tale does not invalidate the textbook parables. Little of importance hangs on whether Crusoe gathers coconuts, yams or grapes, in the South Seas or anywhere else. But the neglect is nonetheless a missed opportunity. There is a lot of economic incident and insight in the original story. Economists might enjoy rediscovering it.
对笛福故事的忽视并不意味着教科书上的寓言就无效了。克鲁索是否在南海或其他地方采集椰子、山药或葡萄，并不重要。但这种忽视仍然是一个错失的机会。原著中有很多经济事件和见解。经济学家可能会喜欢重新发现它。
They could start not with coconut-gathering but with bread-making. “Few people have thought much upon...the strange multitude of little things necessary in the providing, producing, curing, dressing, making, and finishing [of] this one article of bread,” Crusoe says, as he struggles to make some for himself. In trying to start from near-scratch, Crusoe discovers that even the simplest product is a minor miracle of economic choreography. His thoughts resemble the classic essay, “I, Pencil”, written by Leonard Read in 1958, which details the “genealogy” of the humble pencil, with its wood from Oregon, graphite from Sri Lanka and rubber from Indonesia, all collected, transported and refined by machines that have their own even more complex genealogy.
他们可以不从采集椰子开始，而是从制作面包开始。 “很少有人考虑过……在提供、生产、腌制、调味、制作和完成这一篇面包时所必需的奇怪的小事情，”克鲁索一边说，一边努力制作一些面包。为他自己。在尝试从头开始的过程中，克鲁索发现，即使是最简单的产品也是经济编排的一个小奇迹。他的思想类似于伦纳德·里德 (Leonard Read) 1958 年写的经典文章《我，铅笔》，其中详细介绍了不起眼的铅笔的“谱系”，其木材来自俄勒冈州，石墨来自斯里兰卡，橡胶来自印度尼西亚，所有这些都是收集和运输的并由拥有更复杂谱系的机器进行改进。
After bread-making, economists could turn to Crusoe’s pottery. It takes him about two months to make a pair of jars—“two large, earthen ugly things”—in which to store his grain. Preserving resources is no easy matter: pests threaten his crops and decay unravels his clothes. In his 1916 book “The Natural Economic Order”, Silvio Gesell imagines how grateful Crusoe would be to lend his spare provisions to another islander, like Friday, in return for similar provisions a few years hence. He would accept the deal even if Friday pays no interest, because merely keeping wealth intact represents a victory against the relentless forces of decay. It is a useful thought experiment for anyone who resents today’s financial system, which for all its flaws, allows people to preserve their wealth in convenient savings accounts, not misshapen jars.
在制作面包之后，经济学家可以转向克鲁索的陶器。他花了大约两个月的时间制作了一对罐子——“两个又大又丑的土制东西”——用来储存谷物。保护资源绝非易事：害虫威胁着他的庄稼，腐烂毁坏了他的衣服。西尔维奥·格塞尔 (Silvio Gesell) 在其 1916 年出版的《自然经济秩序》一书中想象，如果鲁滨逊将自己的备用物资借给另一个岛民（比如星期五），以换取几年后类似的物资，他会多么感激。即使星期五不支付利息，他也会接受这笔交易，因为仅仅保持财富完好无损就代表着对无情腐朽力量的胜利。对于那些憎恨当今金融体系的人来说，这是一个有用的思想实验，尽管金融体系存在种种缺陷，但它允许人们将财富保存在方便的储蓄账户中，而不是畸形的罐子里。
The Crusoe in the textbooks is a rational man, always equating marginal this with marginal that. He is the stock character of economics 101. The Crusoe in Defoe’s story is more mercurial and conflicted. As such, he lends himself to more recent, psychologically informed theories of decision-making. He could become an icon of “behavioural economics”.
教科书中的鲁滨逊是一个理性的人，总是把边缘这个和边缘那个等同起来。他是经济学101的典型人物。笛福故事中的克鲁索更加善变和矛盾。因此，他致力于研究最新的、心理学上的决策理论。他可能成为“行为经济学”的偶像。
The want of thankfulness for what we have对我们所拥有的事物缺乏感恩之心
At one point, Crusoe uses his scarce ink to take stock of his predicament, drawing up a kind of balance-sheet of comforts and miseries, credits and debits. He is a lone castaway (a debit), but he is alive (a credit). The island is uninhabited, but it is not barren. He has no defences, but the island has no obvious predators. No companion survived the wreck, but provisions could be salvaged from it.
有一次，克鲁索用他稀缺的笔墨来评估自己的困境，绘制了一份舒适与痛苦、贷项与借项的资产负债表。他是一个孤独的漂流者（借方），但他还活着（贷方）。该岛无人居住，但并不荒芜。他没有防御措施，但岛上没有明显的掠食者。没有同伴在沉船中幸存，但可以从其中打捞出食物。
Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel prize in economics, and Amos Tversky have shown that when assessing their lives, people often evaluate not their level of well-being, but their gains or losses from some “neutral” reference point.
诺贝尔经济学奖获得者丹尼尔·卡尼曼（Daniel Kahneman）和阿莫斯·特沃斯基（Amos Tversky）表明，在评估自己的生活时，人们通常不是评估自己的幸福水平，而是从一些“中立”参考点评估自己的得失。
The choice of reference point is not always obvious. On each line of his balance sheet, Crusoe entertains alternatives. His shipwrecked isolation represents a grievous loss from where he was. But it counts as a gain from an alternative scenario—not hard to imagine—in which he drowned or washed up on a more perilous shore. Mr Kahneman and Tversky point out that in dreaming up these alternative scenarios, people follow certain rules. They reimagine the chain of events leading up to their predicament, removing any strange or surprising twists of fate.
参考点的选择并不总是显而易见的。在他的资产负债表的每一行上，鲁滨逊都考虑了其他选择。他遭遇的海难与世隔绝代表着他与原来相比的严重损失。但这也算是另一种情况的收获——不难想象——在这种情况下，他被淹死或被冲到更危险的海岸上。卡尼曼和特沃斯基指出，在想象这些替代场景时，人们遵循某些规则。他们重新想象导致他们陷入困境的一系列事件，消除任何奇怪或令人惊讶的命运转折。
After Crusoe abandons the wrecked ship, it drifts closer to shore, allowing him to return to it and strip it bare. That, Crusoe recognises, was unlikely (100,000 to one, he says). It is therefore easy for him to imagine an alternative reference point in which he rescued nothing from the wreck. That helps him psychologically.
克鲁索抛弃了失事的船后，它漂到了离海岸更近的地方，让他可以返回并把它剥光。鲁滨逊承认，这不太可能（他说是十万比一）。因此，他很容易想象出另一个参考点，在这个参考点中他没有从沉船中救出任何东西。这在心理上对他有帮助。
Indeed, Crusoe later concludes that he can be happier within the tight compass of his island than he would be in the outside world, where he had once lived a “wicked, cursed, abominable life”. He also immediately admits to himself that if offered the chance to escape, he would nonetheless take it.
事实上，克鲁索后来得出的结论是，他在他的岛屿的严密范围内比在外面的世界更快乐，他曾经在那里过着“邪恶的、被诅咒的、可憎的生活”。他也立即向自己承认，如果有机会逃跑，他仍然会抓住。
Behavioural economists stress that more choice is not always better. People may be unable to resist choices they know will hurt them in the long run. Choice also invites regret. It obliges us to compare our fate with the alternative we could have chosen. Forced to stay on his island, Crusoe can be happy. But if he were to choose his isolation, he would be haunted by the alternative life he could have chosen elsewhere.
行为经济学家强调，更多的选择并不总是更好。人们可能无法抗拒他们知道从长远来看会伤害他们的选择。选择也会带来遗憾。它迫使我们将我们的命运与我们本可以选择的替代方案进行比较。被迫留在他的岛上，克鲁索可以很高兴。但如果他选择与世隔绝，他就会被他本可以在其他地方选择的另一种生活所困扰。
As these examples show, economists might profit from greater familiarity with the Crusoe story. And the trade could be two-way. Defoe scholarship could and has benefited from a closer acquaintance with economics. There are several corners of Defoe’s works that require some economic knowledge to appreciate.
正如这些例子所示，经济学家可能会因更加熟悉克鲁索的故事而受益。而且贸易可以是双向的。笛福的学术研究可以而且已经从对经济学的更深入了解中受益。笛福的作品中有几个角落需要一定的经济学知识才能欣赏。
When Crusoe embarks on his ill-fated voyage to Guinea to buy slaves, he leaves behind a growing tobacco plantation in Brazil that would soon be worth “three or four thousand pounds”. It is hard for a reader today to make sense of such a figure. Drawing on the work of economic historians, David Spielman, formerly of Penn State University, calculates that the income on such a sum would have put Crusoe in the top 5% of English families at the time. With so much wealth in prospect, Crusoe has no reason to take risks. His voyage was as “preposterous” as he himself admits.
当克鲁索踏上前往几内亚购买奴隶的不幸航行时，他在巴西留下了一个正在生长的烟草种植园，该种植园很快将价值“三四千英镑”。今天的读者很难理解这样一个数字。宾夕法尼亚州立大学前教授大卫·斯皮尔曼根据经济历史学家的研究成果计算出，按照这样的收入，鲁滨逊可以跻身当时英国家庭前 5% 的行列。拥有如此多的财富前景，鲁滨逊没有理由冒险。正如他自己所承认的那样，他的航行是“荒谬的”。
Economists might also resolve some other mysteries. After his return from the island, Crusoe reclaims his plantation and sells it. In the first six editions of the book, he receives 328,000 pieces of eight, worth about £72,000. But in later ones, a zero is deleted. That matters for the interpretation of the story. Does Crusoe finish the novel a rich man or a very rich one?
经济学家还可能解开其他一些谜团。从岛上回来后，克鲁索收回了他的种植园并将其出售。在该书的前六版中，他收到了 328,000 册，共八册，价值约 72,000 英镑。但在后来的版本中，一个零被删除了。这对于故事的解释很重要。小说结束后，克鲁索是一个有钱人还是一个非常富有的人？
Literary scholars pride themselves on their sensitivity to every nuance of a text. But the decimation of Crusoe’s wealth has barely registered. “Despite the careful attention that the textual history of Robinson Crusoe has received, no one has even noticed a problem,” Mr Spielman has pointed out. Economists may have lost sight of Robinson Crusoe’s richness. But literary scholars have overlooked most of his riches. ■
文学学者为自己对文本每一个细微差别的敏感而感到自豪。但鲁滨逊的财富却几乎没有遭受损失。斯皮尔曼先生指出：“尽管《鲁滨逊漂流记》的文本历史受到了仔细的关注，但没有人注意到其中的问题。”经济学家可能忽视了鲁滨逊漂流记的丰富性。但文学学者却忽视了他的大部分财富.
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