A Student's Guide to Economics《字字珠玑》

大师级的综述。

不过很怀疑初学者能否品出其中妙处，文字极其简单（1～2小时足以浏览一遍），但其中的道理相当深湛。

他是这样写 《国富论》 的：

If economics began as most (but not all) economists

believe with the publication in 1776 of Adam Smith’s

Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

then economics originated as an attempt to answer the

question What causes economic growth? The volume of a

nation’s annual production Smith asserted will depend

primarily on “the skill dexterity and judgment” with which

people apply their labor to the natural resources available to

them and this in turn will depend primarily upon the extent

to which they have carried the division of labor or what we

would call specialization. But specialization requires trade

so that when the division of labor has extended itself

sufficiently throughout a society everyone lives by exchanging. Everyone Smith wrote “becomes in some measure a

merchant” and the society becomes “a commercial society.”

Smith set himself the task of explaining how productive

activity is coordinated in a commercial society.

The way in which Smith went about constructing his

explanation established a major part of the agenda for his

successors up to the present day. He saw that the wealth producing activities of a commercial society are coordinated

through movements in the relative prices of goods

both outputs and inputs. And so he had to explain how

these prices are determined. For two centuries the theory

of relative prices has continued to be the core of economics.

What is economics and what will you learn from studying

it? You will learn first of all a theory of relative prices: how

they come to be what they are and what effects they have. If

Adam Smith is in fact the founder of economic science it

is primarily because he first set out this basic agenda.

His questions were better than his answers however.

Smith’s theory of relative prices was fundamentally incomplete

and inconsistent. He tried to explain the prices of goods

by reference to their costs of production. But costs of production are themselves prices: the prices of labor of natural

resources and raw materials and of previously produced

goods that are used in the production process. The wages of

a carpenter and the cost of lumber do indeed determine at

least in part the price of a bookcase. But the prices people

are willing to pay for bookcases and other goods that carpenters

make out of wood also help determine the wage

rates carpenters must be paid and the cost of purchasing

lumber. Relative prices cannot be explained as a result of one-way causation because everything depends on everything

else. Smith had an inkling of this truth as he showed in some of his attempts to explain the evolution of particular

prices over time. But he was unable to incorporate the

concept of mutual determination into his general theory of

prices. For about the next one hundred years neither were

his successors.