过去10年最有影响的经济学家:Ben Bernanke, John M. Keynes, Jeffery Sachs,
Hyman Minsky, Paul Krugman
金融危机后谁的经济学观点最重要:Raghuram Rajan, Robert Shiller, Kenneth Rogoff,
Barry Eichengreen, Nouriel Roubini
Influential economists
The contemporary Keynes
Which economist is doing most to shape post-crisis thinking?
Feb 10th 2011 | Washington, DC | from PRINT EDITION
DISMAL economies are often dismal for economists. Respected figures
find themselves defending discredited theories or justifying why
they failed to see trouble coming. But calamity can also clear
paths for new ideas. The Depression was the backdrop for the work
of John Maynard Keynes. The stagflationary 1970s vindicated Milton
Friedman: a generation of liberalisation followed.
The Economist asked members of “Economics by invitation”, our
online forum of more than 50 prominent economists, to nominate
colleagues with the most important ideas for a post-crisis world.
The respondents came up with nearly 20 different names. None won an
absolute majority, but a few cropped up more often than others (see
table).
First among them is Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago,
whose book “Fault Lines” argues that rising inequality led
governments to facilitate credit growth, contributing to the crisis
(. Robert Shiller of Yale University has long warned of the dangers
of irrational exuberance, and urges colleagues to consider “animal
spirits” in assessing economic fluctuations. Kenneth Rogoff’s work
on debt bubbles with Carmen Reinhart placed the crisis in an
800-year continuum of borrowing and collapse: his papers have
earned the most academic citations of the table-toppers in our poll
(WW: 中文译本:这次不一样?800年金融荒唐史http://product.dangdang.com/product.aspx?product_id=20862526).
Barry Eichengreen has written excellent works on the history of the
gold standard and the danger of fixed-exchange-rate regimes. (WW:
Eichengreen的新书,Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the
Dollar and the Future of the International Monetary System. Oxford
University Press; 似乎还没有中译本,姑且翻译为“美元霸权:美元的兴衰及国际货币体系的未来”) Nouriel
Roubini earned the nickname “Dr Doom” for warning of an impending
global crash.
This is a tiny sample, of course, and the respect of peers does not
always translate into wider influence. Since the beginning of 2009
the provocative Mr Roubini has been mentioned in prominent Western
newspapers far more frequently than the rest of our top five. Mr
Rajan, our economists’ favourite, got the fewest press mentions.
Paul Krugman’s academic work earned him a Nobel prize but his New
York Times column and blog give him greater celebrity than any of
the names above him in the poll.
When it comes to real power, however, no one can compete with Ben
Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr Bernanke
handsomely won the vote for the most influential economist of the
past decade, beating Keynes into second place, and his policies
will fuel research for decades to come.
from PRINT EDITION | Finance and Economics