Maurice Allais

2010年10月18日 06:22 AM

逝去的预言家

Visionary who warned of bank practices that brought crises

英国《金融时报》 菲尔•戴维森 报道

Maurice Allais, who has died in his native Paris at the age of 99, won the Nobel Prize for Economic	99岁高龄的莫里斯•阿莱(Maurice Allais)在其出生地巴黎去世，他曾获得1988年诺贝尔经济学奖，被视为20世纪后半页最有远见的经济学家之一。他曾把华尔街形容为“名副其实的赌 场”，对于银行业和股票市场中那些最终导致1998年和2008年两次金融危机的做法，他很久之前就发出过警告。
Sciences in 1988 and was considered one of the most visionary economists of the latter half of the 20th century. He once described Wall Street as “a veritable casino” and had long warned against the kind of banking and stock market practices that would lead to the financial crises of 1998 and 2008.	晚年时，他曾对自己心目中全球化的危险进行警告，对世贸组织(WTO)也颇多微词。他曾撰文称“全球化只对跨国公司有利”，并认为一定程度的国家保护主义往往是合理的。
In his later years, Allais warned of what he considered the dangers of globalisation and was highly critical of the World Trade Organisation, writing that “globalisation profits only the multinationals” and arguing that a degree of national protectionism was often justified.	1987年股市崩盘前夕，阿莱曾将当时的全球经济与1929年大崩盘之前做过如下比较：“获利的期许、狂热的投机，以及信用机制中由此产生的潜在不稳定性，这是在用短期储蓄为长期投资提供资金。”
Just before the 1987 stock market crash, Allais compared the global economy with the days before the crash of 1929: “promises to pay, frenetic speculation, and a resulting potential instability in credit mechanisms, that is, financing long-term investments with short-term deposits”.	最近这次金融危机爆发前不久，已经90多岁的他写道：“世界经济完全依托于巨大的债务金字塔，以一种脆弱的平衡互相支撑。这种潜在的不稳定性，从未呈现出过如此巨大的全面崩盘威胁。”
Shortly before the latest financial crisis, already in his nineties, he wrote: “The world economy rests entirely on gigantic pyramids of debt, all supporting themselves on one another in a fragile equilibrium. Never has such potential instability appeared with such a threat of general meltdown.”	法兰西人文院(French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences)院士伊冯•加塔(Yvon Gattaz)表示，“可以说莫里斯•阿莱预言到了眼下发生的所有事情，无一遗漏。”
In the words of Yvon Gattaz, a fellow member of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, “one can say that Maurice Allais predicted everything that is going on now, everything”.	更早获得诺贝尔奖的经济学家保罗•萨缪尔森(Paul Samuelson)表示，如果阿莱的经济学理论能够早一点出英文版，“一代人研究经济学理论的历程都会有所不同。”萨缪尔森在上世纪50年代和60年代 通过独立研究得出的许多理论，与阿莱以法语发表的著作不谋而合，另一位著名的诺贝尔经济学奖得主、英国经济学家约翰•希克斯爵士(Sir John Hicks)的一些著作也是如此。
According to an earlier Nobel economics winner, the American Paul Samuelson, had Allais’ economic theories been published in English earlier, “a generation of economic theory would have taken a different course”. Many of Mr Samuelson’s theories in the 1950s and 60s, reached independently, tallied with those published in French by Allais, as did some of the works of another famous Nobel winner, the Briton Sir John Hicks.	阿莱还是一位卓有声誉的历史学家和物理学家，尤以“阿莱效应”(Allais Effect)著称。该理论提出了爱因斯坦相对论的不足之处，也暗示爱因斯坦抄袭了荷兰物理学家亨德里克•洛伦茨(Hendrik Lorentz)以及法国人昂利•庞加莱(Henri Poincaré)的成果。
Allais was also a historian and a physicist of re-nown, notably for the Allais Effect, which suggested weaknesses in Einstein’s theory of relativity and that Einstein plagiarised research by Hendrik Lorentz, the Dutch physicist, and Frenchman Henri Poincaré.	他发明了一座“类圆锥”摆用于研究重力，并发现在出现日蚀的时候，摆的速度会略微加快。他表示，这一现象“在当前普遍认可的理论框架内很难解释”，暗示爱因斯坦的理论可能存在瑕疵。但多数物理学家认为，所谓的“阿莱效应”并不能作为一种结论。
He invented a “paraconical” pendulum to study gravity and found that, during solar eclipses, the pendulum speeded up slightly. He said it was a phenomenon “quite inexplicable within the framework of the currently-accepted theories” and suggested a possible flaw in Einstein’s theory. A majority of physicists believe the so-called Allais Effect is inconclusive.	阿莱被称作是唯一获得令人觊觎的诺贝尔经济学奖的法国人，不过他的学生杰拉德•德布鲁(Gérard Debreu)曾在1983年荣膺这一奖项，但当时德布鲁已加入美国国籍。
Allais was described as the only Frenchman to have won the coveted economics prize although Gérard Debreu, one of his pupils, had won it in 1983, by then, however, a naturalised US citizen.	虽然阿莱把自己描述成“社会自由派”（他总是会加上一句“欧洲意义上的自由派”），但他却赞成限制移民，还认为在生活水平差距极大的国家之间，“理性的保护主义不但合理，而且绝对必要”。
Although he described himself as a “socialist liberal” (he always added the phrase “liberal in the European sense”), Allais believed in restricted immigration and that “a reasoned protectionism is not only justified but absolutely necessary” between countries with distinctly different standards of living.	早在上世纪40年代，他就提出了一种“均衡定价”的数学等式，认为是价格在供需之间建立了平衡。1947年，他又撰文指出，一个经济体的利率不应超过其经济增长率。
As long ago as the 1940s, he produced a mathematical equation for “equilibrium pricing,” where prices created a balance between supply and demand. In 1947, he wrote that interest rates should not exceed the growth rate of an economy.	1953年，他对人们如何在不确定性情况下进行决策的主流理论发起了挑战。在他给出的选择情况下，多数人自然倾向于采取的行动，在主流理论看来非理性的，这种情况后来被称之为“阿莱悖论”。
In 1953, he challenged the dominant theory of how people made choices in the face of uncertainty. In what became known as the Allais Paradox, he presented choice situations in which most people’s natural inclination would be to act in ways the theory deemed irrational.	上世纪90年代，阿莱曾是法国为数不多的几位反对欧洲单一货币的经济学家之一。但并不是反对单一货币本身，而是认为应等到欧洲成为一个更强大的政治和经济联盟之后。
In the 1990s, he was one of the few French economists to oppose the single European currency, not per se but until Europe had become a stronger political and economic union.	莫里斯•菲力克斯•夏尔•阿莱1911年5月31日出生于巴黎。他的父亲参加第一次世 界大战、并死在德国战俘营之后，孩提时代的阿莱便帮助寡母料理家中的奶酪作坊。阿莱从巴黎综合理工学院(Ecole Polytechnique)工程专业毕业后，加入了国家矿业管理机关法国国家矿业局(Corps National de Mines)。让他改变志向的，是1933大萧条期间的一次美国之行，他当时亲眼目睹了贫困和饥饿。“我要知道原因何在。我（投身经济学领域）的动机 是……给困扰世界的问题找到解决之道。”
Maurice Felix Charles Allais was born in Paris on May 31 1911. As a child, he often helped his widowed mother in the family fromagerie after his father went to the Great War and died in a German prisoner-of-war camp. After graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique in engineering, he joined the state-run French Corps National de Mines, the national mines administration. It was a trip to the US in 1933, during the Great Depression, where he witnessed poverty and starvation that changed his goals. “I needed to know why. My motivation [for going into economics] was . . . to find a remedy to problems facing the world.”	10月9日，阿莱在巴黎郊区的圣克卢无疾而终。法国总统尼古拉•萨科齐 (Nicolas Sarkozy)今年早些时候向阿莱授予了法兰西最高荣誉——法国荣誉勋位团大十字勋章(Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur)。阿莱的妻子雅克利娜(Jacqueline)已于2003年辞世，二人育有一女。
Allais died of natural causes at home in the Paris suburb of Saint-Cloud on October 9. He was elevated earlier this year by President Nicolas Sarkozy to France’s highest award, the Grand Cross of the Légion d’Honneur. His wife Jacqueline died in 2003 and he is survived by a daughter.	译者/王柯伦