经济学的过程与进展

THE PROCESS AND PROGRESS OF ECONOMICS
Nobel Memorial Lecture, 8 December, 1982
by
GEORGE J. STIGLER
Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago,
1101 East 58th Street, Chicago, Ill. 60637, USA
In the work on the economics of information which I began twenty some years
ago, I started with an example: how does one find the seller of automobiles who
is offering a given model at the lowest price? Does it pay to search more, the
more frequently one purchases an automobile, and does it ever pay to search
out a large number of potential sellers? The study of the search for trading
partners and prices and qualities has now been deepened and widened by the
work of scores of skilled economic theorists.
I propose on this occasion to address the same kinds of questions to an
entirely different market: the market for new ideas in economic science. Most
economists enter this market in new ideas, let me emphasize, in order to obtain
ideas and methods for the applications they are making of economics to the
thousand problems with which they are occupied: these economists are not the
suppliers of new ideas but only demanders. Their problem is comparable to
that of the automobile buyer: to find a reliable vehicle. Indeed, they usually end
up by buying a used, and therefore tested, idea.
Those economists who seek to engage in research on the new ideas of the
science - to refute or confirm or develop or displace them - are in a sense both
buyers and sellers of new ideas. They seek to develop new ideas and persuade
the science to accept them, but they also are following clues and promises and
explorations in the current or preceding ideas of the science. It is very costly to
enter this market: it takes a good deal of time and thought to explore a new idea
far enough to discover its promise or its lack of promise. The history of
economics, and I assume of every science, is strewn with costly errors: of ideas,
so to speak, that wouldn’t run far or carry many passengers. How have
economists dealt with this problem? That is my subject.
I begin by distinguishing the pre-scientific stage of a discipline from its
scientific stage. A science is an integrated body of knowledge, and it is pursued
and developed by a group of interacting practitioners called scientists. The
validation and extension of that body of knowledge is the intellectual goal of the
scientists, although of course the pursuit of that goal in turn serves whatever
personal goals such as prestige, reputation, and income the scientists seek.
These are only definitions, but I hope they are not strained or unnatural ones.