经济学人下载:英国经济学家韦恩·戈德利

Obituary;Wynne Godley;
讣告;韦恩·戈德利;

Wynne Godley, British economist, died on May 13th, aged 83;
英国经济学家韦恩·戈德利于五月十三日辞世，终年83岁;

A certain ambiguity marked Wynne Godley. Was he at heart an aesthete, happiest making music in beautiful buildings among works of art? Or was he more naturally one of the sophisters, economists and calculators whose rise marked, for Edmund Burke, the passing of the age of chivalry? Was he by temperament a dissenter? Or just a typical scion of the British upper classes, an establishment man who played at being a rebel? Was he a determined pessimist, who took some pleasure in his reputation as the Cassandra of the Fens? Or a convivial, witty friend, who entertained with style and had a taste for gambling? Was he a shy violet, trembling before an audience? Or a controversialist who was hardly publicity-averse?

韦恩·戈利这个人的特点带有几分模棱两可。从本质上讲他是不是一个唯美主义者，置身于华美的厅堂上，徜徉于艺术珍品之中，摆弄音乐，陶醉无比？还是说，以天生秉性而言，他更应当被看成是一个辩论大师、经济学家又兼计算高手，当初此等人物的出现曾被埃德蒙·伯克认为标志了骑士时代的终结？他是不是一个从性格上就爱拂逆众见的异议者呢？还是说，他仍未脱英国上流阶级子弟之典型，以体制中人的身份，玩几把反叛的游戏？他真是一个坚定不移的悲观论者并且能从“芬斯地区的悲观预言师”这样的名头上得几分快乐吗？还是说，这位朋友爱交游喜风趣，招待客人讲究排场，还有赌博的雅兴？他是个在听众面前会紧张到发抖的“羞答答的紫罗兰”呢？还是一个好辩的主儿，动起嘴来几不忌惮抛头露面？ 

If the answer to each of these questions is at least partly yes, that may mean no more than that Mr Godley was a man of several talents, many interests and an intelligence to make good use of them. His first love was certainly music, for when he left Oxford, where he read politics, philosophy and economics, he went to the Paris Conservatoire and became a professional oboist. Performing in public, though, filled him with terror, which led him to give up his job as principal oboe in the BBC Welsh Orchestra. He turned to economics instead.

如果对上述每一个问题的回答至少有一部分是“是”，则也许只是意味着——戈德利是一位有几份天资、多种爱好的男人，是一位有智慧对种种爱好善加利用的男人。他第一爱好无疑是音乐，因为当他离开他攻读政治、哲学和经济学的牛津大学后，他去了巴黎音乐学院，并成为一个专业的双簧管吹奏者。可是，由于他在公众场所表演充满紧张，致使他放弃了在英国BBC广播公司威尔士乐团首席双簧管演奏员的工作。他转向了经济学领域。

That, anyway, became his profession. But his love of music never left him, and art remained a part of his life to the end, not least through his marriage to Kitty, the daughter of Sir Jacob Epstein. And though Mr Godley's good looks and elongated figure might seem to have been tailor-made for El Greco, El Greco being unavailable, it was Epstein who took him as the model for a huge bronze statue of St Michael that hangs on the outside of Coventry Cathedral, with the devil vanquished at his feet.

反正经济学成了戈德利的职业。但他对音乐的热爱始终不离不弃，及至人生终点，艺术仍然是他生活的一部分，尤其贯穿于他与爱泼斯坦（1880-1959, 生于美国的英国雕刻家——译者注)爵士之女基蒂的婚姻生活中。此外，尽管戈德利英俊的外貌和高高的身材似乎是为埃尔·格雷考（十七世纪西班牙画家、雕塑家——译者注）量身定做的模特儿，但格雷考无福消受。把戈德利作为圣迈克尔巨型青铜塑像模特儿的是爱泼斯坦，这尊塑像立于考文垂大教堂外面，其脚下是被征服的魔鬼。

In Keynes's footsteps, up to a point

在某种程度上，戈德利是追随凯恩斯的足迹

The devilish intricacies of economics Mr Godley seemed to overwhelm just as effortlessly. After a spell in business and a few years at the Treasury, he was enticed to King's College, Cambridge, which 61 years earlier another economist-aesthete, John Maynard Keynes, had joined as a lecturer, writing (with his mother's help) a letter of resignation from the civil service to his boss, a Sir Arthur Godley. This man was to become the first Lord Kilbracken and eventually grandfather of Wynne.

戈德利先生对于如魔幻般错综复杂的经济学，应对起来似乎毫不费力。在商界和财政部干了一些年头后，他神往起61年前另一个审美学家、经济学家约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯（注1）曾经就读的剑桥国王学院来，他在向其老板老板阿瑟·戈德利男爵写（在其母亲的帮助下）了一封文员辞职信后，成为了该学院的一名讲师。那位男爵就是基尔布拉肯勋爵一世并最终成为韦恩·戈德利的祖父。 

Mr Godley became best known for his outspoken criticisms of Conservative economic policies. In the 1970s he took the view, which he recognised as dissenting, that international trade should be, as he put it, “in some sense, managed” through import controls, adding unpersuasively that this was not really protectionism, since he did not want to reduce imports, merely the propensity to import; and protection should be “as minimally selective as possible”. More creditably, he correctly predicted that the boom generated by the Conservative government under Ted Heath in the 1970s would end in tears. He was also proved largely right in foreseeing the severity of the recession that came later under Margaret Thatcher.

戈德利因直言不讳地批评保守党的经济政策而变得愈加有名。在上世纪70年代，他发表观点（他意识到此观点不受欢迎）：国际贸易应该像他所指出的那样是通过进口管制实现的“某种意义上的管理”，他还缺乏说服力地补充这确实不是贸易保护主义，因为他并不主张减少进口，只是减少进口倾向；应当“尽可能最少地选择”贸易保护措施。更值得称道的是，他正确地预言到了上世纪七十年代希思治下的保守党政府激发的繁荣，将以泪雨告终。对后来撒切尔夫人时期严重经济衰退的预计，也被证明是大体上正确的。

These doleful prophecies, coupled with his very public loathing of monetarism, earned him no friends in government and the grant for his forecasting group at Cambridge was abruptly stopped in 1982. But he was hardly an outcast. Though not properly trained as an economist, he had proved himself as a macroeconomic modeller, and had been made a university professor of applied economics. He had also become a director of the Royal Opera House. By 1992 he was back in favour at the Treasury, joining the panel of independent forecasters known as the “six wise men”.

上述令人沮丧的预测，连同他对货币主义的公开反感，使得戈德利在政府没有朋友，其剑桥预判小组的政府拨款也于1982年突然停止了。不过，戈德利不大可能成为被抛弃的人。尽管他没有像经济学家那样接受正规高等教育，但他却证明自己是一位宏观经济学缔造者，而且还是一位大学应用经济学教授。他也是皇家歌剧院的懂事。1992年，戈德利在一片赞赏中回到财政部，参加被称作“六智囊”的独立预测员小组。 

On the face of it, this was not a turbulent life. Mr Godley said he had a lonely childhood, involving a violent maiden aunt and the “chamber of horrors of a British prep school”. Later, in his 30s, he lived life “through an artificial self” in “a state of dissociation”, which drove him into the clutches of a fiendish psychoanalyst. This in turn blighted his middle years.

单从表面上看，上述这一切算不上是混沌难驭的人生经历。戈德利说过，他有一个陷于粗暴未婚姑妈和“英国预科学校恐怖屋”之难的孤独童年。后来，在他30多岁期间，他过着“分裂状态”下“自我十足虚假”的生活，这种生活驱使他成为刁钻心理分析学家的掌中物。这种生活也相应地折磨着他的中年。

His background, though it might misleadingly be called privileged, was mixed up. The first Lord Kilbracken had been a protégé of a Liberal prime minister, Gladstone, but was a Conservative; and the second, Wynne's father Hugh, also a Tory, had been madly in love with Violet Asquith, the daughter of another Liberal prime minister. Hugh separated from Wynne's mother about the time he was born, and was impotent, anti-Semitic and alcoholic. Wynne's mother paraded naked in front of him and would tell him, as a child, of the intense pleasure she got from sexual intercourse. But he reached the age of 17 not knowing that women had vaginas.

虽然戈德利·韦恩的出生背景会让人误以为是特权阶层，但其实是模糊不清的。他的祖父基尔布拉肯一世虽曾是自由党首相格莱斯顿的门生，却是个保守派；而他的父亲基尔布拉肯二世休·戈德利也是一名保守党成员，疯狂爱上了另一位自由党首相的女儿维尔莉特·阿斯奎思。休·戈德利大约在韦恩出生后就与韦恩的母亲分居，是一个性欲低下者、反犹太者、嗜酒者。当韦恩还是一个孩子的时候，他妈妈在他面前展示她的裸体，并会告诉他她从性爱中获得的强烈快感。可是，成长至17岁的戈德利·韦恩先生尚不知女性是有阴道的。

He was supremely happy at Oxford, where his tutor was Isaiah Berlin, to whom he said he owed all his higher education. But, he wrote, “Nora [his stepmother] shot herself in the head with a shotgun; my father, his entire fortune squandered, died alone in a hospital where the nurses were unkind to him; my half-sister was committed to a high-security mental institution at Epsom; my mother had a bad stroke and lived out her last six years hemiplegic and helpless, her mind altered. She told her nurses that they were ‘lower-class scum' and complained that I was ‘marrying the daughter of a New York yid'.”

在牛津大学，韦恩快乐无比，他的牛津大学导师是赛亚·伯林，他曾说过他所受的全部的高等教育都是从柏林那儿得来的。不过，他著述称：“继母诺拉用猎枪结束了自己的生命；我父亲花光家财，在一家受尽护士冷眼的医院里孤独离世；我同父异母的妹妹被送进埃普索姆一家管理严格的精神病院；我母亲严重中风，在偏瘫无助中度过生命的最后六年，并改变了观点。她告诉护士：‘他们是低等的贱人'，还抱怨我‘娶了犹太裔纽约人的女儿'”。

Against a background like this, a little waywardness in the world of macroeconomics seems entirely forgivable.

在这样的家庭背景下，在宏观经济学界中，戈德利·韦恩的些许任性似乎是完全可以得到宽恕的。