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Angus Deaton的大作（英文版）前言如下：
This book is an expanded version of the Clarendon Lectures given in Oxford in May 1991; earlier versions were
presented to the Network for Quantitative Economics in Rotterdam in May 1990, and to my Empirical Modelling course
in Princeton over a number of years. In Oxford, there were three one-hour lectures, and although the book is faithful
to the structure of my verbal presentation, many of the details have been filled in, and there is additional material to
which only passing reference was made in the lectures. Many of those in the Oxford audience were graduate students,
and the lectures were presented at a level designed to be comprehensible to them as well as to advanced (British)
undergraduates. The emphasis is on the development of intuition rather than on the mathematics underlying the
results, and on stylized facts rather than on formal econometric methodology. The book has more mathematics and
more econometrics than the lectures, but I have attempted to retain the original level of accessibility. I hope that my
professional colleagues will be as tolerant of the informality as were the Oxford faculty who attended the lectures.
Attempts by economists to understand the saving and consumption patterns of households have generated some of
the best science in economics. For more than fifty years, there has been serious empirical and theoretical activity, and
the two strands have never been long separated as has happened in so many other branches of economics. Research
has drawn microeconomists interested in household behavior, as well as macroeconomists, for whom the behavior of
aggregate consumption has always occupied a central role in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Econometricians have
also made distinguished contributions, and there has been a steady flow of new methodology from those working on
saving and consumption. Nor have policy concerns ever been far from the surface. The relationships between saving
and business cycles, saving and growth, saving and competitiveness, and saving and welfare have been hotly and
continually debated. It is hard to think of economic issues that are more important than the accumulation of capital,
and the means by which citizens, either individually or collectively, make provision for their futures. All of this has
produced an unusually rich brew, with aromas that attract almost all types of economist. Especially over the last fifteen
years, and in particular since Hall's (1978) paper on the stochastic implications of forward-looking behavior, there has
been a great flurry of activity. This activity paralleled and took off from the earlier explosion of the 1950s, which saw
the development of the then ‘new’ theories of the consumption function, particularly the life-cycle theory of Modigliani and Brumberg (1954, 1979), which is the basis for essentially all modern research on
consumption and saving.
In these chapters I try to tell the story of the most recent burst of research. I do not know whether now is the best time
to try, or whether the best results are just around the corner, perhaps in a working paper of which I am unaware. But
the story as it now stands is a good one; a great deal has been learnt that we did not know before, about methodology,
about the evidence, and about the substance of the issues. So the tale is worth telling, even at the risk that the
conclusions will be transparently wrong only a year or two from now. Indeed, the time can hardly be worse than when
John Muellbauer and I wrote the consumption chapter of Economics and Consumer Behavior in 1978; we had read Hall's
paper and discussed it in the book, but could not anticipate the outpouring of research that it was to engender. To
some extent this book is my attempt to bring that chapter up to date, and to assess how much we have learned in the
last fifteen years.
I have not been a neutral participant in the debate, so that even if it were possible to write a balanced, impartial survey,
I am in a poor position to do so. Instead, I have tried to present a coherent account, fully conscious that the
interpretations are my own, and that there are many who hold different views. The literature on consumption and
saving is so large that the risk of missing something really important is unusually high, and I apologize in advance to
those whose contributions have been neglected. There are also important areas that I have consciously and deliberately
omitted. I have little to say about durables, and even less about labor supply. Each of these topics deserves a chapter,
but these are lectures, not a comprehensive text, and the boundaries must be drawn somewhere. Life-cycle models of
labor supply have remained a largely separate research topic, and I am relatively comfortable discussing consumption
on the assumption that labor income is outside the agent's control. Durables are another matter, and recent work by
Bertola and Caballero (1990) and others on non-convex and asymmetric adjustment costs has at last provided the
foundations for coherent attempts to interpret the data. This work may ultimately have a profound effect on the study
of consumption as a whole, for non-durables as well as durables, and I have excluded it, not for lack of relevance, but
because of the lengthening of the book that would be required to do justice to this very different material.
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