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| 经济学家日历：克努特·维克塞尔 |
作者： 发布时间：2007-11-25 15:24:37 来源： 点击数：48
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Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell
(December 20, 1851-May 3, 1926)
克努特·维克塞尔 Wicksell, (Johan Gustaf) Knut生平及事迹 维克塞尔生于斯堪的纳维亚半岛的斯德哥尔摩。也许是上帝的特意安排，与他同一年出生的还有庞巴维克和维塞尔, 他们都是边际学派的重要代表人物。
早期的维克塞尔对经济学并没有什么兴趣，只打算成为一名数学家或钻研物理学；在接触到德莱斯代尔(G·Drysdale) 的《社会科学的构成》及 J·S·穆勒的一些著作以后, 他的思想才转到“社会问题”上. 和大多年轻人一样，维克塞尔对各类社会问题有着浓厚的兴趣, 并愿意发表看法。他曾就社会主义、卖淫、宗教信仰等内容作过专题演讲. 令我们略微有些吃惊的是，这位未来的大经济学家直到三十多岁才开始接受较正规的经济学训练. 1887－1888年间，他四处求学：曾到斯特拉斯堡大学去听布伦塔诺(Brentano)的劳动经济学课, 纳普(Knapp)的货币和信贷课及辛格(Singer) 的经济分配课；并到维也纳听卡尔·门格尔的课, 到柏林大学听阿道夫·瓦格纳(Adolph Wagner)的公共财政课. 这些经历为他将来的学术发展奠定了基础。
1893年维克塞尔的第一部著作《价值、资本和租金》问世. 在这部倍受庞巴维克和瓦尔拉斯称道的著作中，维克塞尔完成了一个伟大的综合. 他把杰文斯、门格尔和马歇尔的边际效用价值论、边际生产力理论应用于庞巴维克的资本分析, 并把这种结果溶合到瓦尔拉斯的比较静态一般均衡框架中. 从而成为边际生产力分配理论的奠基人之一. 他提出该理论的时间比学界所公认的这一理论的创始人威克斯蒂德还要早一年.
三年后他又发表了专题论文《财政理论研究》. 该论文内容比较庞杂, 重点是将边际效用理论应用于公共部门, 进行公平税制的设计; 同时提供一种定价方法(特别是边际成本定价), 应用于纯粹的和不完全纯粹的公共物品、公用事业服务、寡头产品或卡特尔产品. 此外他众多的理论成果中还有一项是所谓财政和税收的自愿交换(或利益)理论. 维克塞尔(1896) 以此开创了“维克塞尔-林达尔-马斯格雷夫-萨缪尔森-维克里纯公共物品理论”; 在处理公共物品上, 维克塞尔还提供了一种新的方法论. 即没有简单沿用流行的成本-收益分析方法讨论公共物品的供求, 而是采用了一致同意的方法. 布坎南声称, 在这一点上, 他深受维克塞尔的启发. 这里表明了公共选择学派与维克塞尔的渊源.
之后，维克塞尔致力于货币理论与政策的研究. 在《利息与价格》中, 他首次提出被称作维克塞尔主义的“累积过程理论”(详细内容见后文). 这一理论对萨伊的“面纱论”提出质疑, 第一次打破传统的两分法, 将货币理论与价值理论结合起来, 指出货币对经济过程的实质性影响, 成为凯恩斯以及后来主流经济学思想的直接渊源.
以今天的眼光来看，仅仅这三部著作就足以使他跨入一流经济学家的行列。但当时的瑞典还不能完全理解维克塞尔学说的重大意义，致使维克塞尔在找工作时颇费周折. 为争取隆重德大学的一个编外教授职位，他不得不和包括卡塞尔( 即那位以购买力平价理论而著称的古斯塔夫·卡塞尔)在内的另三位对手竞争。幸亏他有法学学位, 才得以如愿以偿. 此后维克塞尔长期执教于隆德大学, 直到退休.
在隆德大学期间, 他分别于1901和1906 年出版了《国民经济学讲义》第一卷和第二卷. 该书对他以前的学术思想作了一下总结, 将庞巴维克的边际效用和瓦尔拉斯的一般均衡理论揉合起来，自成体系，堪与马歇尔的《经济学原理》（当时最流行的教科书）相媲美。熊彼特甚至认为, “还没有掌握维克塞尔《国民经济学讲义》第一卷全部理论的人, 不能说已经完成了经济系学生应受的训练.” 并称维克塞尔是“斯堪的纳维亚的马歇尔”。
1916年维克塞尔从隆德大学退休，此后不再有重要的经济学著作出版。
Johan Gustaf Knut Wicksell, (December 20, 1851-May 3, 1926), Swedish economist.
Wicksell was born at Stockholm, Sweden on December 20, 1851. His father was a relatively successful businessman and real estate broker. He lost both his parents at a relatively young age - his mother died when he was only six years old, and his father died when he was fifteen. His father's considerable estate allowed the now fatherless child to enroll at the University of Uppsala in 1869 to study mathematics and physics. He received his first degree in two years, but continued in graduate studies until 1885 when he received his doctorate in mathematics. In 1887, Wicksell received a scholarship to study on the continent where he heard lectures by the economist Carl Menger in Vienna. In the following years, his interests began to shift toward the social sciences, and in particular, economics.
As a lecturer at Uppsala, Wicksell had attracted attention for his opinions about labor. At one lecture, he condemned drunkenness and prostitution as alienating, degrading, and impoverishing. Although he was sometimes identified as a socialist, his solution to the above problem was decidedly Malthusian in advocating birth control - a theory he would defend to the end of his life. Although he had attracted some attention for his fiery ideas, his first work in economics, Value, Capital and Rent, published in 1892, was largely unnoticed. In 1896, he published Studies in the theory of Public Finance, applying the ideas of marginalism to progressive taxation, public goods, and other aspects of public policy, attracting considerably more interest.
Wicksell had taken a common-law wife, Anna Bugge, in 1887, although he found it difficult to support his family on his irregular positions and publications. Economics in Sweden at the time was taught as part of the law school and Wicksell was unable to gain a chair as a professor until he was awarded a law degree. He returned to the University of Uppsala where he completed a four-year law degree in two years, and subsequently became an associate professor at that university in 1899. The next year, he became a full professor at the University of Lund, where he would endeavor in his most influential work.
After a lecture in 1908 satirizing the Immaculate Conception, Wicksell was briefly imprisoned for two months. Eight years later, in 1916, Wicksell retired from his post at Lund and took a position at Stockholm advising the government on financial and banking issues. In Stockholm, Wicksell associated himself with other future great economists of the so-called "Stockholm School," such as Bertil Ohlin and Gunnar Myrdal. He also taught a young Dag Hammarskj鰈d, the future Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Wicksell died in 1926 while writing a final work on the theory of interest. Elements of his public policy were taken strongly to heart by the Swedish government, including his vision of a limited welfare state. Wicksell's contributions to economics have been described by some economists, including Mark Blaug, as fundamental to modern macroeconomics.
Theoretical contributions
Wicksell was enamored with the theory of L閛n Walras (the Lausanne school), Eugen von B鰄m-Bawerk (the Austrian school), and David Ricardo, and sought a synthesis of the three theoretical visions of the economy. Wicksell's work on creating a synthetic economic theory earned him a reputation as an "economist's economist." For instance, although the marginal productivity theory - the idea that payments to factors of production equilibrate to their marginal productivity - had been laid out by others such as John Bates Clark, Wicksell presented a far simpler and more robust demonstration of the principle, and much of the present conception of that theory stems from Wicksell's model.
Extending from Ricardo's investigation of income distribution, Wicksell concluded that even a totally unfettered economy was not destined to equalize wealth as a number of Wicksell's predecessors had predicted. Instead, Wicksell posited, wealth created by growth would be distributed to those who had wealth in the first place. From this, and from theories of marginalism, Wicksell defended a place for government intervention to improve national welfare.
Wicksell's most influential contribution was his theory of interest, published in his 1898 work, Interest and Prices. He made a key distinction between the natural rate of interest and the money rate of interest. The money rate of interest, to Wicksell, was merely the interest rate seen in the capital market; the natural rate of interest was the interest rate that was neutral to prices in the real market, or rather, the interest rate at which supply and demand in the real market was at equilibrium - as though there were no need for capital markets. This connected to the theory of the Austrian School, which theorized that an economic boom happened when the natural rate of interest was higher than the market rate.
This contribution, called the "cumulative process," implied that if the natural rate of interest was not equal to the market rate, demand for investment and quantity of savings would not be equal. If the market rate is beneath the natural rate, an economic expansion occurs, and prices, ceteris paribus, will rise.
This idea would be expanded upon by the Austrian school, which used it to form a theory of the business cycle based on central bank policy - changes in the level of money in the economy would shift the market rate of exchange in some way relative to the natural rate, and thus trigger a change in economic growth. The cumulative process was the leading theory of the business cycle until John Maynard Keynes' The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Wicksell's theory would be a strong influence in Keynes's ideas of growth and recession, and also in Joseph Schumpeter's "creative destruction" theory of the business cycle.
Wicksell's main intellectual rival was the American economist Irving Fisher, who espoused a more succinct explanation of the quantity theory of money, resting it almost exclusively on long run prices. Wicksell's theory was considerably more complicated, beginning with interest rates in a system of changes in the real economy. Although both economists concluded from their theories that at the heart of the business cycle (and economic crisis) was government monetary policy, their disagreement would not be solved in their lifetimes, and indeed, it was inherited by the policy debates between the Keynesians and monetarists beginning a half-century later.
Knut Wicksell (1851-1926)
Economist Knut Wicksell made his name among the Swedish public with a series of provocative lectures on the causes of prostitution, drunkenness, poverty, and overpopulation. A Malthusian (see Malthus), the young Wicksell advocated birth control as the cure for these social ills. His image as a radical social reformer did much to attract the attention of the press and the Young Socialists with whom he sympathized. But his rejection of Marx and Marxism limited his popularity.
Wicksell was not so much an innovator as a synthesizer. His integration and refinement of existing microeconomic theories helped earn Wicksell recognition as the "economists' economist." In his 1893 book, Value, Capital, and Rent, Wicksell analyzed and praised the Austrian theory of capital as elaborated by B鰄m-Bawerk In his Lectures on Political Economy, I, Wicksell concluded that B鰄m-Bawerk's idea of roundaboutness did not make sense, and agreed with Irving Fisher that waiting was a sufficient explanation for interest rates.
Wicksell also laid out marginal productivity theory, the theory that the payment to each factor of production equals that factor's marginal product. Economists Philip Wicksteed, Enrico Barone, and John Bates Clark had already elaborated this theory, but Wicksell's exposition of it was superior. Wicksell also emphasized that an efficient allocation of resources is not necessarily just, because the allocation depends crucially on the preexisting distribution of income, and nothing guarantees that this preexisting distribution is just.
Wicksell is best known for Interest and Prices, his contribution to the fledgling field now called macroeconomics. In this book and his 1906 Lectures in Political Economy, II, Wicksell sketched out his version of the quantity theory of money (monetarism). The standard view of the quantity theory before Wicksell was that increases in the money supply have a direct effect on prices—more money chasing the same amount of goods. Wicksell focused on the indirect effect. In elaborating this effect, Wicksell distinguished between the real rate of return on new capital (Wicksell called this the "natural rate of interest") and the actual market rate of interest. He argued that if the banks reduced the rate of interest below the real rate of return on capital, the demand for loan capital would increase and the supply of saving would fall. Investment, which equaled saving before the interest rate fell, would exceed saving at the lower rate. The increase in investment would increase overall spending, thus driving up prices. This "cumulative process" of inflation would stop only when the banks' reserves had fallen to their legal or desired limit, whichever was higher.
In laying out this theory, Wicksell began the conversion of the old quantity theory into a full-blown theory of prices. The Stockholm school, of which Wicksell was the father figure, ran with this insight and developed its own version of macroeconomics. In some ways this version resembled later Keynesian economics. Among the young Swedish economists who learned from Wicksell were Bertil Ohlin, Gunnar Myrdal, and Dag Hammarskj鰈d, later secretary general of the United Nations.
For much of his adult life, Wicksell depended on several small inheritances, grants, and the meager income earned through public lectures and publications. Not until 1886, when he was awarded a major grant, did he begin to pursue economics seriously. With financial support secured, Wicksell traveled to universities in London, Strasbourg, Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. By 1890 Wicksell had returned to Stockholm, but being "too notorious" and unqualified to teach—he held degrees in mathematics, but economics instructors were then required to have formal degrees in law and economics—he returned to free-lance writing and lecturing.
In 1900, when Wicksell was forty-eight years old, he was granted his first teaching position at the University of Lund, which he retained until retirement in 1916. His quirky habits, friendly demeanor, and willingness to actively defend his beliefs earned him respect and popularity among his students. Throughout his lifetime Wicksell never lost his penchant for radicalism. He forfeited a professorship by refusing to sign the application with the conventional "Your Majesty's most obedient servant." In 1910 he was jailed for two months by the Swedish government for a satirical public lecture he delivered on the Immaculate Conception. In spite of his disdain for ceremony and fanfare, his common-law widow consented to an extravagant funeral upon his death at age seventy-four.
Selected Works
Lectures on Political Economy, I. 1901. Translated by E. Classen. 1934.
Lectures on Political Economy, II. Translated by E. Classen. 1935.
Value, Capital and Rent. 1893. Translated by S. H. Frowein, 1954. Reprint. 1970.
"The Influence of the Rate of Interest on Prices", Economic Journal, (1907).
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