看诺贝尔经济学奖得主如何谈投资

Yale University professor best known for his early, accurate prediction that U.S. house prices were a bubble just waiting to burst, has long worked at the intersection of psychology and economics. He recently shared the Nobel in economics for insights into why prices of stocks and houses fluctuate as they do, particularly work showing that markets move too much to be explained by rational investors responding to changing fundamentals.
耶鲁大学教授罗伯特・席勒(Robert Shiller)长期以来都在从事心理学和经济学的交叉研究，他因很早就准确预测到美国房价是即将破裂的泡沫而名声大噪。他最近与人共同分享了诺贝尔经济学奖，因他对股票和房屋价格波动进行了深入研究，尤其是他研究发现，市场波动幅度如此巨大，已经无法解释为这是理性投资者对基本面变化作出反应的结果。

Once lauded as both a 'poet and plumber' or, someone who articulates radical new visions and installs the infrastructure needed to implement them-Shiller also has helped develop new financial products and indexes. He recently met with David Wessel, a contributing correspondent to the Journal and director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. Their edited remarks follow:
席勒曾享有“诗人兼管道工”的美誉──或者说，一个清晰描绘激进的新愿景并为落实这些愿景而构建基础设施的人──他还帮助开发了新的金融产品和指数。席勒最近会见了《华尔街日报》的特约记者、布鲁金斯学会(the Brookings Institution)哈钦斯财政金融政策中心(the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy)主任戴维・韦塞尔(David Wessel)，他们之间谈话编辑如下：

Q: One theme that runs through your work is that people tend to make mistakes over and over again. That's quite different than what I learned in college economics-that people are rational. How did you start thinking about people's mistakes?
问：贯穿你研究工作的一个主题就是人们往往一而再、再而三地犯错误。这与我在大学里所学的经济学──人都是理性的──大相径庭。您是如何开始思考人们的错误的？

A: When you went to college, the economics profession had reached an unnatural state. Mathematical models of rational behavior became the rage. It was just an abnormal time. I was reading more widely and wanting to come back to reality.
答：当你上大学的时候，经济学界已处于一种反常状态，理性行为的数学模型风行一时，那是一段非正常的时期。我当时博览群书，一心想要回到现实中来。

Q: Was there something you saw in reality that led you to this?
问：是不是您在现实中看到了什么，这才促使您做这方面的研究？

A: Well, bubbles. The story about bubbles was that the markets appear random, but that's only because markets respond to new information and new information is always uNPRedictable. It seemed to be almost like a mythology to me. The idea that people are so optimizing, so calculating and so ready to update their information, that's true of maybe a tiny fraction of 1 percent of people. It's not going to explain the whole market.
答：嗯，是泡沫。对于泡沫，通常的说法是，市场虽然看起来呈随机走势，但那只是因为市场会对新信息作出反应，而新信息总是不可预见的。在我看来这种说法几乎像一个神话。认为人们能如此高效、慎重并且迅捷地更新信息的说法，也许只适用于1%那么小的一部分人。没法用它对整个市场做出解释。

Q: Are bubbles always a bad thing, or do they have some good effects?
问：泡沫始终是件坏事吗？它们有没有某些好的作用？

A: First of all, it's a free world and people can do what they want. I'm not proposing we put the straightjacket on these things. The other thing is that human nature needs stimulation and people have to have some sense of opportunity and excitement. I think profits are an important motivator. In the long run, it's hard to say that bubbles are really bad.
答：首先，这是一个自由的世界，人们可以做自己想做的事，我不是建议要给这些东西戴上紧箍咒。另一方面，人的本性需要刺激，而人得有某种机会意识与兴奋感。我认为利润是重要的刺激因素。从长远眼光来看，很难说泡沫就是十足的坏东西。

Take the Internet bubble in the 1990s. What that did was generate a lot of start-ups, some of them foolish, some of them failed, but others survived, so is it a bad thing? I find it hard to think what the alternative would be. We could have had a Federal Reserve that tried to lean against that. Ultimately, our policies in economics are somewhat intuitive and our models are not accurate enough to tell us what the right policy is, so I'm thinking we might have been better off if we tamed these bubbles, but there is no way to be sure.
就拿1990年代的互联网泡沫来说吧，那场泡沫所做的就是产生了很多初创企业，其中有些拙劣难撑，有些经营失败，但其它的却幸存了下来，因此这算是坏事吗？我发现很难想象换一种情形会是什么样子。美联储(Federal Reserve)可能还曾试图倚靠泡沫。归根到底，我们的经济政策有点在凭直觉制定，我们的模型不够准确，无法告诉我们正确的政策是什么，因此我在想，如果当初我们抑制了这些泡沫，我们的日子可能更好过一些，不过这一点也无法肯定。

Q: Do you tell investors that they can pick winners in the stock market, or do you tell them they're not expert enough and that they should go to index funds or other products?
问：您会告知投资者他们能够在股市里挑选赢家，还是会对他们说他们不够专业，应该去投资指数基金或别的产品？

A: I tell people to get an investment adviser; that makes sense to me. The question is often whether it's possible for anyone to pick stocks, and I think it is. It's a competitive game. It's like some people can play in a chess tournament really well, but I'm not recommending you go into a chess tournament if you are not trained in that, or you will lose. So for most people, trying to pick among major investments might be a mistake because it's an overpopulated market. It's hard. You have to be realistic about how savvy you are. But if you are thinking about buying real estate and renting it out, fixing it up and selling it, that's the kind of market that's less populated by experts. And for someone who knows the town, that's doing business, I'm not going to tell someone not to do that.
答：我劝人们去找一名投资顾问，这在我看来是明智之举。问题经常在于，是不是任何人都可能自己选股？我认为是的。这是一场竞争游戏，就像有的人可以在国际象棋锦标赛上出色发挥一样，但如果你没有受过专门训练，我并不建议你去参加象棋锦标赛，否则你会输棋。因此，对大多数人而言，试图在主要投资领域中进行挑选也许是一个错误，因为这是一个投资者过剩的市场，选股很难。你必须面对现实，看看自己到底有多懂行。但如果你在考虑购买房地产然后将其出租，或者重新整修后将其出售，这样的市场里没有那么多专家。对于熟知这座城镇的人来说，这是在做生意，我不会劝人不要那样做。