Before the Nobel Prize draws in October every year, Japan always feels like buying lottery tickets at the end of the year. Many people will guess which university’s professors of physics, chemistry, and medicine are likely to win the prize. Many R&D personnel of large companies such as Hitachi are also waiting for the results of the lottery. Japan’s natural sciences already have sufficient reasons to wait for the award, and Haruki Murakami’s voice in literature is very loud, but in terms of economics, Japan has almost missed the Nobel Prize.
The author is considered to have taught economics in a Japanese university and has had many contacts with economics theory circles. In the past 30 years, no matter in formal occasions or when drinking a little, I have talked with professors and experts in economics. It is really not like natural science. When I see Japanese colleagues, I expect someone to win the Nobel Prize in economics. scholarship.
Speaking of it, when the Nobel Prize is awarded, it is nothing more than paying attention to knowledge (technology) with brand-new, infallible and practical characteristics. With the Japanese craftsman spirit, this can indeed be done in many cases in natural science. In recent years, the number of natural science award winners in Japan is second only to the United States, and it has entered a state of great harvest. However, in social sciences, it is too difficult for Japanese scholars to come up with new theories, and it is difficult to do it without error. The last remaining practical is indeed Japan. Economics can overwhelm one of the characteristics of Qunfang, but it is difficult to win awards for this characteristic alone.
In terms of fieldwork, mathematical statistics, and model construction, Japanese economics has done a very rigorous job, and it has performed well in serving the real economy. However, creating a brand new theory to explain one’s own economic point of view, one or several universities jointly creating a certain theory, and jointly contributing to this set of theories originated in Japan in the theoretical society, the author has not yet seen the relevant trend .
In famous Japanese universities, there are quite a few returnee economists. They can use Japanese examples to illustrate the effectiveness of a certain economic theory in the United States, but there is a serious lack of theoretical innovation. The more scholars who study economics in the United States, the less they can go out of the economic framework of the United States. No matter how complicated mathematical formulas are used, they are not new theories, new theories, or even the most useful ones in Japan. combination to verify that economic theory is time-sensitive), there are few decent results.
On the contrary, Marxist economics, whether in economic policy, labor economics, or the impact of industrial technological innovation on economic development, is more closely integrated with the Japanese real economy and has infallible and practical features. slightly insufficient.
Maybe when the Japanese economy developed rapidly from the 1960s to the 1980s, a theoretical explanation for this development would give Japanese economists a chance to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Unfortunately, the Economics Prize was not established until 1969, and At the beginning, the awards were basically given to American economists. Economists who put forward theoretical support for Japan’s economic development and proved in practice that this theory is infallible and practical, such as Nakayama Ichiro, have nothing to do with awards.
Later economists, such as Hirofumi Uzawa, who analyzed the social functions of automobiles, and Masahiko Aoki, who analyzed social systems, may have the chance to win awards, but unfortunately they failed to do so during their lifetime. Moreover, their theories are somewhat different from the market economy, privatization, and deregulation that the Nobel Prize in Economics emphasized; the looming influence of Marxist economics in Uzawa and Aoki’s theories is something that believers in the market economy must not turn a blind eye to. Content.
Recently, Japanese scholars have paid more attention to the related research of Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, a disciple of Uzawa Hirofumi and professor of Princeton University in the United States. Some people think that he may win the Nobel Prize. The author has never read Kiyotaki’s works, so I don’t know how I hope to win awards in the future. Judging from the comparison of Kiyotaki and Chinese Wu Jinglian in the Japanese academic circles, most people feel that Japan is not far behind the international level and Chinese counterparts in economics, and the hope of Japanese scholars winning awards in the next few years is still slim.
