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  3. 【F1】When Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, clashed with Niall Ferguson, a famous historian, over how best to respon

【F1】When Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, clashed with Niall Ferguson, a famous historian, over how best to respon

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问题     【F1】When Paul Krugman, a Nobel prize-winning economist, clashed with Niall Ferguson, a famous historian, over how best to respond to the economic crisis,Prof Ferguson’s response was humorously humble. "A cat may look at a king," he wrote, "and sometimes a historian can challenge an economist. "
    There has been some self-examination and soul-searching within the economics profession since the onset of the financial crisis.【F2】Joseph Stiglitz, another Nobel prize-winning economist, has suggested that: "If science is defined by its ability to forecast the future, the failure of much of the economics profession to see the crisis coming should be a cause of great concern. " Yet Prof Stiglitz’s conclusion is disappointingly mild: economists must simply search for new "paradigms" and then presumably go back into the business of scientific prediction.
    For somebody educated as a historian, there is an obvious alternative conclusion to draw from Prof Stiglitz’s opening observation. And that is to conclude that the entire attempt to treat economics as a "science .. . defined by its ability to forecast the future" is misconceived.【F3】The late Geoffrey Elton, a professor of modern history at Cambridge, argued that the function of the historian was to concentrate on the particular and the specific and to puncture the pretensions of social scientists, with their constant and futile effort to derive general, predictive laws from the study of the past.
    In the current intellectual climate, it seems that Elton was saying something important. He was defending the empirical method and setting boundaries for what can be expected from the study of the past. Historians know that their work cannot be used to predict the future. History can suggest lessons and parallels and provide wisdom—but what it cannot do is provide a sociological equivalent of the laws of physics. Yet this seems to be the aspiration of many economists, who notoriously suffer from "physics envy".
    Yet economists seem unlikely to abandon the belief that theirs is a discipline that makes "progress" and settles issues, in a way that resembles a hard science such as physics or chemistry.【F4】Ben Bernanke, the current head of the Federal Reserve, exemplified this belief in a famous speech in 2004 on the "Great Moderation", in which he argued that there had been a "substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility", largely because of improved monetary policy, based on advances in economic thinking.
    The subsequent financial and economic crash may have dented the confidence of some economists in particular tenets of their discipline.【F5】But the Great Recession seems unlikely to dissuade many economists from the more fundamental belief that there are, indeed, predictive "laws" out there, just waiting to be discovered. Rather than seeking to ape physicists, however, perhaps it is time for economists to learn a few lessons from history, or more precisely from historians.
【F3】
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答案剑桥大学现代史已故教授杰弗里?埃尔顿主张，历史学家的角色是专注于特殊和特定的事情，戳破社会科学家的自命不凡，凭借持续而无用的努力，从对过去的研究中得出普遍而预见性的规律。
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