【英语生活】一代宗师弗里德曼（上）

Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was the last of the great economists to combine possession of a household name with the highest professional credentials. In this respect he was often compared to John Maynard Keynes, whose work he always respected, even though he to some extent supplanted it.

Moreover, in contrast to many leading economists, Friedman maintained a continuity between his Nobel-Prize winning academic contributions and his current journalism. The columns he contributed to Newsweek every third week between 1966 and 1984 were a model of how to use economic analysis to illuminate events

Both his admirers and his detractors have pointed out that his world view was essentially simple: a passionate belief in personal freedom combined with a conviction that free markets were the best way of co-ordinating the activities of dispersed individuals to their mutual enrichment. Where he shone was in his ability to derive interesting and unexpected consequences from simple ideas. As I knew from my postbag, part of his appeal lay in his willingness to come out with home truths which had occurred to many other people who had not dared to utter them. Friedman would then go on, however, to defend these maxims against the massed forces of economic correctness; and in the course of those defences he, almost unintentionally, added to knowledge.

Those who wanted to write him off as a right-wing Republican were disabused by the variety of radical causes he championed. I was not impressed in my own student years by the claims to a belief in personal freedom of the pro-market British economists whom I first encountered. It was not until I came across Friedman, and learned that he had spent more time in lobbying against the US “draft” than on any other policy issue, that I began to take seriously the wider philosophic protestations of the pro-market economists.

Friedman's iconoclasm endured. He regarded the anti-drugs laws as virtually a government subsidy for organised crime. Even in the financial sphere, he espoused causes such as indexed contracts and taxes as a way of mitigating the harm done by inflation which did not endear him to natural conservatives.

But there was no self-conscious balancing of the political ticket in these positions. He adopted them by following the argument wherever it led. Unlike his fellow exponent of free market capitalism, Friedrich Hayek, he had no great patience for hidden truths that might be embedded in inherited attitudes, rules and prejudices.

There was indeed nothing of the Herr Professor about Friedman. A small voluble figure, he preferred the spoken to the written word, and he took to television as a duck to water. He came to add a good many subtleties to the book Free to Choose, which he wrote with his wife Rose, which were not in the broadcast version. But there is no systematic treatise except some written-up lecture notes outlining Friedmanite economics or even Friedmanite monetary theory.

Those who were won over by his unexpected charm sometimes underestimated his resolve. He would not give a millimetre where his convictions were at stake. Although an unassuming and essentially democratic personality, he was human enough to be aware of, and enjoy, his reputation in the last decades of his life.

His professed attitude to the political process was that of the critical Public Choice theorists. The latter believe that legislators follow their self-interest in a highly defective political marketplace in which geographical and industrially-concentrated special interest groups gain at the general expense. But Friedman's ingrained belief in the power of reason and persuasion always got the better of any such theoretical misgivings. Although he occasionally professed gloom about the future of freedom, such forebodings were best left to the central Europeans whom he met at the Mont Pelerin Society. Friedman himself was an optimistic American to his fingertips.

Early Years

His own career was an archetypical American success story. He was born in New York in 1912 to poor immigrant parents and his father died when he was 15. He nevertheless studied at Rutgers and Chicago. In the 1930s he was on the staff of various research organisations and began an association with the National Bureau of Economic Research, which lasted until 1981 and which sponsored some of his most important work.

In 1938 he married Rose Director, herself an economist who was the co-author of some of his more general books. The closeness of his family life was an important clue to the man. His family circle included his wife's brother, Aaron Director, an economist who published little but whose wisdom was much cherished in the Friedman circle. His son David, in an attempt to avoid following in his father's footsteps, became at first a physicist, but eventually found the lure of socio-economic arguments too difficult to resist. His father was highly tolerant of David's excursions into anarchocapitalism preferring deviations in that direction to lapses towards the conventional left.

During World War Two Friedman not only worked for the US Treasury on tax, but had a spell in the statistical war research group at Columbia. He became professor of economics at Chicago in 1946, where he remained until his retirement. Friedman's own earliest work was in mathematical statistics, where he helped to pioneer some methods, for instance in sampling, which are still in use.

His first work of wider appeal was a study with Simon Kuznets, published in 1945, of income from independent professional practice. The authors found that state control of entry into the medical profession kept up the level of fees to the detriment of patients. These findings never ceased to get under the skin of the profession.

Friedman's next book, Essays in Positive Economics, published in 1953, contained a famous essay on method. While many other economists were embarrassed by the over-simplified view of human nature in much economic theory, he was characteristically non-apologetic. The fruitfulness of a theory, in both the physical and the social sciences, he declared, depended on the success of the predictions which could be made with it and not on the descriptive realism of the assumptions. One of his famous examples was the proposition that the leaves of a tree spread themselves to maximise the area of sunlight falling upon them. The value of the theory depended on whether the layout of the leaves corresponded to this prediction and not on whether the tree made any such conscious effort.

This essay generated a still-running controversy which has consumed many acres of forest. But Friedman, having issued his manifesto, left others to argue about it and was more concerned to apply it in practice. Similarly, in his later expositions of the case for capitalism, he stated his own values, and cited corroborative evidence, but resisted the temptation to argue about theories of freedom, justice, the state and so on.

Friedman's methods came as a breath of fresh air to many of the academic defenders of market capitalism who had previously felt themselves to be beleaguered armchair thinkers in contrast to the econometricians and other quantitative researchers who claimed to be the wave of the future and wanted to use their methods for planning and intervention. Here at last was somebody who could hold his own with the most advanced of whiz kids and was quicker on his feet than most of them, but who was on the side of the market indeed with far fewer reservations and qualifications than most of its other supporters.

Despite the unfashionable nature of his policy views, Friedman spoke the same language as the post-war Keynesians, fitted equations to time series and provided a new field for economists in the investigation of “demand for money” functions. Indeed, his contribution was essential. For if age-old verities about the relations between money and prices, or the futility of nations trying to spend themselves into full employment were to be rehabilitated, it had to be in modern statistical dress.

著名美国经济学家米尔顿•弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)于2006年11月16日去世，享年94岁。他是最后一位既家喻户晓又拥有最高专业成就的伟大经济学家。在这方面，人们常常将他与约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)相提并论。弗里德曼始终对凯恩斯心怀敬意，尽管他本人在某种程度上已经取代了凯恩斯。

此外，与许多著名经济学家不同，弗里德曼赢得诺贝尔经济学奖的学术文献与他在报刊上发表的文章之间，保持了连贯性。1966年至1984年间，他每隔两周为《新闻周刊》(Newsweek)撰写的专栏，乃是运用经济分析阐明当下事件的典范。

从简单的想法中得出耐人寻味的结论

弗里德曼的赞赏者与批评者都指出，他的世界观本质上很简单：坚定信仰个人自由，深信自由市场是协调个人活动、实现共同富裕的最佳途径。他的闪光点在于能够从简单的想法中，得出耐人寻味而出人意料的结论。我从读者来信中得知，弗里德曼的部分吸引力在于，他愿意说出其他许多人想到、但不敢说出来的逆耳忠言。然后，他还会继续捍卫这些主张，对抗“经济正确”(economic correctness)的强大势力；而在捍卫自己见解的过程中，他几乎是无意识地增长了知识。

有人曾想把弗里德曼贬低为右翼共和党人，但弗里德曼对各种激进事业的拥护，使他们打消了念头。在我的学生时代，我最初遇到的英国市场派经济学家信仰个人自由的主张，并没有给我留下太深的印象。直到我遇到弗里德曼，得知他花在游说抵制美国征兵制度上的时间，比其它任何政策课题都要多时，我才开始认真看待市场派经济学家们言论的广泛哲学意义。

弗里德曼对传统的反叛，经受了岁月的流逝。他认为，禁毒法律无异于政府为有组织犯罪提供补贴。即使是在金融领域，他赞成将指数化合约和税收等作为减轻通胀损害的手段，这让他无法得到传统保守派的钟爱。

但是，弗里德曼采取这些立场，并非是在有意识地寻求政治平衡，而是遵循理性辩论的结果。与同样赞成自由市场资本主义的弗里德里希•哈耶克(Friedrich Hayek)不同，他没有那么大的耐心，去揭示可能深藏在代代相传的态度、规定和偏见中的真理。

没有一点教授的架子

弗里德曼没有一点教授的架子。这位身材矮小的健谈者，更喜欢说而不喜欢写，面对电视仿佛如鱼得水。他在与妻子罗斯(Rose)合著的《自由选择》(Free to Choose)一书中，添加了很多没有出现在电视版中的细节内容。但书中没有系统的论文，只有一些整理成文的演讲注释，概括了“弗里德曼经济学说”和“弗里德曼货币政策学说”。

被弗里德曼意想不到的魅力所折服的人，有时会低估他的决心。当有人怀疑他的信念时，他不会作出丝毫让步。尽管他秉性谦虚，在本质上信奉民主，但他也有普通人的一面 —— 他在下半生意识并喜爱自己的盛名。

乐观的美国人

他对政治程序的态度，和那些批评现有制度的公共选择(Public Choice)理论者是一致的。这些人认为，议员们在一个有严重缺陷的政治市场追求自身利益，在这个市场，代表地域和行业特殊利益的集团以公众利益为代价得到好处。但弗里德曼深信，理性与劝说的力量，总能战胜理论上的疑虑。虽然他偶尔也会对自由的前景表示担心，但这类不祥的预感更多还是属于他在“朝圣山学社”(Mont Pelerin Society)结识的中欧人。弗里德曼本人从头到脚都是一个乐观的美国人。

早年生平

弗里德曼的职业生涯，可说是典型的美国成功故事。他1912年生于纽约一个贫苦的移民家庭，父亲在他15岁时就去世了，但他仍得以到罗格斯大学(Rutgers)和芝加哥大学就读。上世纪30年代，他先后供职于各种研究机构，并与美国国家经济研究局(National Bureau of Economic Research)建立了联系，这种关系一直持续到1981年，该机构为他一些最重要的工作提供了资助。

1938年，弗里德曼与罗斯•戴瑞克特(Rose Director)结婚。罗斯本人也是一位经济学家，是弗里德曼一些较为通俗的著作的合著者。亲密的家庭关系是他一个重要的灵感来源。在他的家庭圈子中，妻子的哥哥艾伦•戴瑞克特(Aaron Director)也是一位经济学家，虽然著述不多，但他的学识在弗里德曼的圈子内备受重视。弗里德曼的儿子戴维 (David)最初不想子承父业，于是当了一名物理学家，但他最终发现社会经济学主张的诱惑太大，无法抵挡。对于戴维选择进入“无政府资本主义”(anarchocapitalism)领域，宁愿在这一领域探索，也不愿回归传统左派经济学道路，父亲弗里德曼表现出高度的容忍。

二战期间，弗里德曼不仅在美国财政部的税务部门供职，还在哥伦比亚大学(Columbia University)战争研究部的统计研究组工作过一段时间。他于1946年成为芝加哥大学(Chicago University)的经济学教授，在那里一直工作到退休。弗里德曼最早从事的是数理统计工作，他帮助开创的一些统计方法，例如抽样法，一直延用至今。

他首部受到广泛欢迎的著作于1945年出版，是与西蒙•库兹涅茨(Simon Kuznets)合著的对独立职业活动收入进行的研究。两位作者发现，国家控制进入医生行业的人数，使医疗费用高企，损害了患者利益。这些发现一直让医生们不适。

弗里德曼的第二部著作《实证经济学论文集》(Essays in Positive Economics)于1953年出版，其中包含一篇有关方法论的著名论文。尽管许多经济理论中对人性过于简单的看法，令其他许多经济学家感到尴尬，但弗里德曼的个性意味着，他是不会对此表示歉疚的。他宣称，无论是自然科学还是社会科学，理论的成效，取决于其产生的预测成功与否，而非其假设在描述上是否逼真。

关于树叶分布的命题

他的一个著名例证是这样一个命题：一棵树上树叶的分布，是为了追求落在树叶上的阳光面积的最大化。该理论的价值取决于树叶的分布是否符合这种预测，而不取决于树木是否做出了有意识的努力。

这篇论文引发的争议至今仍在延续，想必其消耗的纸张已导致大片森林被砍伐。但弗里德曼把发表的宣言留给他人去争论，自己更关心的是如何将理论运用到实践中。同样，在后期倡导资本主义的论述中，他陈述了自己的价值观，并列举出佐证，但终究没有去探讨自由、公正和国家等方面的理论。

弗里德曼的方法，为许多自由市场资本主义的学术捍卫者带来一缕新鲜空气。这些学者以前感到，相对于宣称自己符合未来潮流、希望用自己的方法规划和干预经济的计量经济学家和其他定量研究人员，自己就像是脱离实际的空想家。而今终于出现了一个可以和任何年轻怪才相媲美、而且脚步比他们中的大多数都快的人，这个人站在自由市场的一边，实际上，他比其他多数支持者都更加没有保留和顾虑。

尽管弗里德曼的政策观点当时不受欢迎，但他与战后的凯恩斯主义者(Keynesians)说着相同的语言，将时间序列引入方程式中，为研究“货币需求”函数的经济学家提供了一个崭新的领域。的确，他的贡献是不可或缺的。因为要修正货币与价格关系的古老真理、以及国家试图通过增加支出而实现充分就业的徒劳性的古老真理，就只能“披上现代统计的外衣”。

（待续）