发帖
雷达卡
Recent indications of a weakening global economy have led many people towonder how pervasive poor economicperformance will be in the coming years. Are we facing a long global slump, or possibly even a depression?
A fundamental problem in forecasting nowadays is that the ultimate causesof the slowdown are really psychological and sociological, and relate tofluctuating confidence and changing “animal spirits,”about which George Akerlof and I have written. We arguethat such shifts reflect changing stories, epidemicsof new narratives, and associated views of the world, which are difficult toquantify.
In fact, most professional economists do not seem overly glum about the global economy’s prospects. Forexample, on September 6, the OECD issued an interim assessment on the near-term globaloutlook, written by Pier Carlo Padoan, that blandlyreports “significant risks” on the horizon – the language of uncertaintyitself.
The problem is that the statistical models that comprise economists’ toolkit are best applied in normal times, soeconomists naturally like to describe the situation as normal. If the currentslowdown is typical of other slowdowns in recent decades, then we can predictthe same kind of recovery.
For example, in apaper presented last spring at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC,James Stock of Harvard University and Mark Watson of Princeton University unveiled a new “dynamic factor model,” estimatedusing data from 1959 to 2011. Having thus excluded the Great Depression, theyclaimed that the recent slowdown in the United States is basically nodifferent from other recent slowdowns, except larger.
Their model reduces the sources of allrecessions to just six shocks – “oil, monetary policy, productivity,uncertainty, liquidity/financial risk, and fiscal policy” – and explains mostof the post-2007 downturn in terms of just two of these factors: “uncertainty”and “liquidity/financial risk.” But, even if we accept that conclusion, we areleft to wonder what caused large shocks to “uncertainty” and to “liquidity/financialrisk” in recent years, and how reliably such shocks can be predicted.
When one considers the evidence about external economic shocks over thepast year or two, what emerges are stories whose precise significance isunknowable. We only know that most of us have heard them many times.
Foremost among those stories is the European financial crisis, which istalked about everywhere around the globe. The OECD’s interim assessment calledit “the most important risk for the global economy.” That may seem unlikely:Why should the European crisis be so important elsewhere?
Part of the reason, of course, is the rise of global trade and financialmarkets. But connections between countries do not occur solely through thedirect impact of market prices. Interacting publicpsychology is likely to play a role as well.
This brings us to the importance of stories – and very far from the kindof statistical analysis exemplified by Stockand Watson. Psychologists have stressed that there is a narrative basis to human thinking: people remember – and aremotivated by – stories, particularly human-interest stories about real people.Popular stories tend to take on moral dimensions, leading people to imaginethat bad outcomes reflect some kind of loss of moral resolve.
The European crisis began with a Greek meltdown story, and it appears thatthe entire global economy is threatened by events in a country of only 11million people. But the economic importance of stories bears no close relationto their monetary value (which can be measured only after the fact, if at all).It depends, instead, on their story value.
The Greek crisis story began in 2008 with reports of widespread protestsand strikes when the government proposed raising the retirement age to addressa pension funding shortfall. Reports beganto appear in global news media portraying anexcessive sense of entitlement, with Greekstaking to the streets in protest, even though the increase was modest (forexample, women with children or in hazardousjobs would be able to retire with full benefits at just 55, up from 50).
That story might have invited some gossip outside of Greece, but it gained little purchase on international attention until the endof 2009, when the market for Greek debt started to become increasinglyunsettled, with rising interest rates causing further problems for thegovernment. This augmented news reports about Greek profligacy,and thus closed a negative feedback loop byattracting intensifying public interest, which eventually fueled crises inother European countries. Like a YouTube video, the Greek story went viral.
One might object that most people outside of Europesurely were not following the European crisis closely, and the least informedhave not even heard of it. But opinion leaders, and friends and relatives ofthe least informed in each country, were following it, and their influence cancreate an atmosphere that makes everyone less willing to spend.
The Greek story seems connected in many people’s minds with the stories ofthe real-estate and stock-market bubbles that precededthe current crisis in 2007. These asset bubbles were inflated by lax lending standards and an excessive willingnessto borrow, which seemed similar to the Greek government’s willingness to take on debt to pay lavishpensions. Thus, people saw the Greek crisisnot just as a metaphor, but also as a morality tale. The natural consequence was to support government austerityprograms, which can only make the situation worse.
The European story is with us now, all over the world, so vivid that, evenif the euro crisis appears to be resolved satisfactorily, it will not beforgotten until some new story diverts public attention. Then as now, we willnot be able to understand the world economic outlook fully without consideringthe story on people’s minds.
京公网安备 11010802022788号
