Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy
Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy
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未来经济的投机微观经济学
DOI：
10.5210/fm.v5i2.726
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发表时间：
2000
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
A. Froomkin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Delong;A. Froomkin
押注于市场体系的政府和社会在物质上更加繁荣，在技术上更加强大。通常从这个经济成功的故事中得出的教训是，在绝大多数情况下，政府能为经济做的最好的事情是制定背景规则--界定财产权，建立诚实的法院，也许重新安排收入分配，征收少量税收和补贴，以补偿定义明确、具体范围狭窄的“市场失灵”--否则，政府就不应干预市场体系。
市场体系的主要论点是价格所起的双重作用。一方面，价格起到了限制需求的作用：任何不愿意支付市场价格的人都得不到商品。另一方面，价格的作用是吸引生产：任何能够以低于市场价格生产商品或提供服务的组织都有强大的经济动机这样做。生产出来的东西都给了那些最珍惜它的人。生产的东西是由那些能使它最便宜的组织制造的。最终用户最看重的就是产品。
数据处理和数据通信革命动摇了市场标准案例的基础。在一个用户所看重的大部分商品都是可以廉价复制的信息商品的世界里，通过定价来限制需求并不是社会最优选择。在一个廉价复制产生巨大规模经济的世界里，生存和盈利的生产者不是那些能够以最低成本生产或生产用户最看重的产品的生产者;相反，蓬勃发展的生产者是那些首先建立自己地位的生产者。在一个价值链与用户的最终价值仅存在微小关系的世界里--比如说，生产商通过向广告商出售眼球来赚钱--无法确定生产的产品是否是用户最看重的。
市场体系很可能被证明比其传统的捍卫者所认为的更强硬，并且比那些看不见的手的捍卫者通常列出的更微妙和强大的优势。然而，至少辩护者需要新的论据。最多，我们需要发展一种新的经济学，为经济组织的老问题找到新的答案。
Governments and societies that bet on the market system become more materially prosperous and technologically powerful. The lesson usually drawn from this economic success story is that in the overwhelming majority of cases the best thing the government can do for the economy is to set the background rules - define property rights, set up honest courts, perhaps rearrange the distribution of income, impose minor taxes and subsidies to compensate for well-defined and narrowly-specified "market failures" - but otherwise the government should leave the market system alone.
The main argument for the market system is the dual role played by prices. On the one hand, prices serve to ration demand: anyone unwilling to pay the market price does not get the good. On the other hand, price serves to elicit production: any organization that can make a good, or provide a service, for less than its market price has a powerful financial incentive to do so. What is produced goes to those who value it the most. What is produced is made by the organizations that can make it the cheapest. And what is produced is whatever the ultimate users value the most.
The data processing and data communications revolutions shake the foundations of the standard case for the market. In a world in which a large chunk of the goods valued by users are information goods that can be cheaply replicated, it is not socially optimal to charge a price to ration demand. In a world in which cheap replication produces enormous economies of scale, the producers that survive and profit are not those that can produce at the least cost or produce the goods that users value the most; instead, the producers that flourish are those that established their positions first. In a world in which the value chain is only tangentially related to ultimate value to users - in which producers earn money by selling eyeballs to advertisers, say - there is no certainty that what is produced will be what users value the most.
The market system may well prove to be tougher than its traditional defenders have thought, and to have more subtle and powerful advantages than those that defenders of the invisible hand have usually listed. At the very least, however, defenders will need new arguments. And at the most, we will need to develop a new economics to discern new answers to the old problem of economic organization.