Starting from the three "disbeliefs" of the great economist Hayek.
Hayek did not believe that a healthy national economy could be centrally managed and scientifically planned; Hayek did not believe that organizations could control the greed for power; Hayek was even less convinced that the intellectual elite could really discover absolute truth.
We can only truly believe in what we don't believe.
Today's China is at a complex crossroads, and while the economy is still very important, it is visible to the naked eye that more factors than the economy are rising in importance.
It is true that for us today, we have already passed the era of "going all out to fight for the economy", and we have also gone through the era of rapid development, but this does not mean that the economy is not important, and for economists, the most important thing is to "not believe in something" in order to really believe in something.
Hayek's wisdom, through the power of time, can still provide the most solid foundation for thinking about the mainland's macroeconomic development and even the future from the bottom of the ladder today.
This kind of wisdom also affects Xu Xiaonian.
In 1975, Xu Xiaonian graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong University; He graduated from Renmin University in 1981 with a master's degree in industrial economics. From 1991 to 1995, he was an assistant professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, USA.
In the same year as Xu Xiaonian, he entered Renmin University to study economics, and Zhou Qiren, who later became more famous as a big economist, but these two economists later took different paths.
Compared with Zhou Qiren, Xu Xiaonian was deeply influenced by studying in the United States, and was better at using theory and logical operations to look at the real economic world.
With his dissertation on the mainland securities market, Xu Xiaonian won the "Sun Yefang Economics Award", the highest award in the mainland economics field, and since then, the economist who has returned from studying in the United States has begun to pay attention to domestic economic issues.
In May 2010, the famous economist Xu Xiaonian was interviewed by NetEase Finance "Opinion China - Interview with Economists", and now 14 years have passed, and many of Xu Xiaonian's views and opinions in this interview are still deafening.
As we all know, Xu Xiaonian and Zhou Qiren are both market-oriented economists, and they have always adhered to the belief in the market, and for Xu Xiaonian, the belief in the market comes from two places, one is from the perspective of social ethics, and the other is from the perspective of efficiency.
From the perspective of social ethics, Xu Xiaonian said that the most important thing in modern society is people's common understanding of social justice and goodness.
In modern society, the most important aspect of the market is respect for individual rights, which rises to the level of social ethics. Adam Smith, the originator of economics, said that the market can guarantee the freedom of individual transactions, and that individuals can use all the means available to them to pursue their own economic interests under the legal framework, and any restriction on his pursuit of his own economic interests is unjust and immoral.
Further, in order to guarantee this freedom of trade, it is necessary to have a market economy, not a planned economy, still less to intervene in the economy, unless the whole people allow him to do so.
Any intervention in the economy is a restriction on the individual's freedom to trade.
This is also the deep wisdom behind Hayek's three "disbeliefs" in big economics.
Taking real estate as an example, more than 70% of the houses are under 90 square meters, which is virtually a restriction on the freedom of choice of consumers, and in modern society, the freedom of choice of consumers and the freedom of business operation are very important things.
From the perspective of social justice, we must engage in a market economy, because only a market economy can guarantee people's freedom of trade.
When it comes to economists' response to the economic crisis, Xu Xiaonian used the word "very disappointed".
Xu Xiaonian, Zhang Weiying and even Zhou Qiren are highly similar in a sense, that is, they emphasize that they should not intervene too much in the economy, and they can be regarded as Hayek's "loyal believers", while Xu Xiaonian is even more critical of Keynesianism from the perspective of the free market.
After the Great Depression in the United States in 1930, Keynesianism was born, and Keynesianism had many loopholes from an academic point of view, and Keynesians have not given a good answer to this day.
After World War II, Keynesianism was popular for decades, until everyone felt that Keynesianism could not be carried out, so there was a change between the East and the West.
The change in the West is very simple, that is, the reflection on Keynesianism, the negation of Keynesianism, and the beginning of a return to the track of the market, while the East is the negation of the planned economy and the move towards a market economy.
And the discussion behind every economic crisis, and even the answers given by the economics profession to avoid it, still influence the decision-making of countries.
Since the Great Depression in the United States in 1930, there have been two major factions of economists, represented by Keynes and Hayek; Acknowledging the imperfections of the market and admitting that the market has many defects, people are still more willing to choose the defects of the market than the defects of the planned economy.
The biggest problem with Keynesianism is that it assumes a flawless government while seeing the flaws in the market.
Although Keynes himself did not propose to replace the market with the government, in the practice of Keynesianism in various countries around the world, based on the needs of various interests, a tendency to replace the market with administration has gradually formed, and this tendency is very bad and we need to pay a heavy price for it.
Although this cost has not yet been realized, the day we see the cost will remind us of the prescient arguments of economists like Hayek and Friedman about the efficiency and fairness of markets.
When talking about the biggest problem in the domestic economic circles, Xu Xiaonian said that the biggest problem in the domestic economic circles is that economists do not study problems, do not study practical problems in depth, and do not think about theoretical problems.
Modern society requires intellectuals to be independent, and their goal is to discover and disseminate the truth, neither flattering nor flattering.
Xu Xiaonian said that the economist I admire the most is Adam Smith, then Hayek, and finally Schumpeter and Friedman.
For Xu Xiaonian, the most important quality of an economist is to be loyal to his conscience, and the worst quality is to violate his conscience.
Xu Xiaonian is straightforward, outspoken, and one of the rare scholars in China who can be called intellectuals.
Southern People Weekly once commented on Xu Xiaonian, a liberal economist and a thinker of China's fate. He believed that the purpose of criticism was to improve.
Indeed, at such a special point in time, the voice of criticism has not only not become unimportant, but on the contrary it has become more scarce, and we need to listen to the voice of the wise, and we need to believe what to believe and what not to believe.
For economists, it may be a mockery to fail to solve economic problems, but perhaps more important is not the ability to solve economic problems, but the ability to stay true to one's conscience.
end.
Author: Luo sir, concerned about the economy, society and everything in our world, curious about the logic behind the development of things, optimistic pessimist.