面对变革 我们需要什么样的专家

In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the UK foreign secretary commissioned a secret internal inquiry into why British diplomats had failed to predict it. One problem, the report found, was that the embassy in Tehran had little contact with people beyond the elites around the shah.

1979年伊朗革命爆发后，时任英国外交大臣委托进行了一项秘密的内部调查：为什么英国外交官未能预测这场革命。调查报告发现，其中一个问题在于，除了伊朗国王周围的精英人士，英国驻德黑兰大使馆很少与其他人士接触。

Subsequent generations of diplomats have taken this lesson to heart. They prize what they call “ground truth”: how things really feel out there; what people are really thinking. One former ambassador to Iran used to check whether his staff’s shoes were dirty. “If not, I knew they hadn’t been getting out of the embassy and meeting people in town.”

后来的历代英国外交官都将这一教训牢记于心。他们高度重视所谓的“第一线真相”：外面的气氛究竟是怎样的；人们真正在想什么。一位英国前驻伊朗大使会查看使馆人员的鞋子脏不脏。“如果不脏的话，我就知道，他们没有走出使馆走访城里的民众。”

The economics profession could learn from this. Look through a few spreadsheets on the UK economy in recent years and you might wonder why people have not been dancing in the streets. Unemployment is 5 per cent, the lowest in 11 years. Participation in the labour market is near a record high. Income inequality, far from rising, has actually declined since the financial crisis. Yet 52 per cent of voters have just chosen to leave the EU.

经济学专业人士可以从中取经。查阅近几年英国经济的一些数据，你或许会纳闷：为什么人们不在街上欢欣鼓舞？失业率只有5%，为11年最低。劳动力市场参与率接近历史高位。收入不平等程度非但没有扩大，自金融危机以来实际上有所缩小。然而，52%的选民刚刚选择脱离欧盟。

That group is far from homogeneous and many were motivated by topics that have nothing to do with economics. It is clear, though, that some voters felt they had been left behind by the modern economy and had nothing to lose.

支持退欧的群体并不都是同一类人，其中许多人受到了与经济因素无关的议题的推动。不过，明显的是，一些选民感觉自己被现代经济抛在后面，没什么可失去的。

Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, described last month how he encountered this “ground truth” when he met a group of charities in Nottingham, a former industrial city in the Midlands. When he started talking about the economic recovery they stopped him short. They did not see any evidence: homelessness, food bank use, mental health problems were all going up. “The language of ‘recovery’ simply did not fit their facts,” Mr Haldane said.

英国央行(BoE)首席经济学家安迪•霍尔丹(Andy Haldane)上月描述道，当他在英格兰中部的原工业城市诺丁汉与多个慈善组织开会时，他领教了“第一线真相”。当他开始谈论经济复苏时，他们打断了他。他们看不到任何证据：无家可归、食物赈济库(food bank)的利用、精神健康问题都在加重。“‘复苏’一词根本不符合他们的实际情况，”霍尔丹说。

Some economists will flinch at the idea of taking “ground truth” too seriously. They will say — rightly — that anecdotal evidence is almost always unrepresentative and can lead to the wrong conclusions. But so can data if you rely on it too heavily. Combine the two and you can tease out where they differ. You can also find clues as to why.

一些经济学家或许会对拿“第一线真相”太当回事不以为然。他们会理由充分地说，轶事证据几乎从来都不具备代表性，而且会导致错误的结论。但数据也是如此——如果你过于依赖它们的话。结合这两种方式，就可以梳理出其中的区别。你还可以找到有关根本原因的线索。

A few months ago I went to Bolsover, a former mining town in Derbyshire whose economy looked fairly good on paper. Average wages were low but the proportion of people on jobless benefits had dropped below the UK average. Yet the man who ran the pub said he had made all his staff self-employed so he did not have to pay taxes or the minimum wage. The people in the church were giving sleeping bags to young men who had dropped off the benefits register and were living in disused garages. The women working in the shops said all the local retail jobs were part-time and the bus fare was too high to make it worth travelling to a full-time job elsewhere.

几个月前，我去了德比郡(Derbyshire)一个曾经的煤矿小镇博尔索弗(Bolsover)，那里的经济数据看上去相当不错。平均工资很低，但申请失业救济金的人口比例低于英国平均水平。但一位酒吧老板称，他已经让所有员工都成了自雇者，这样他就不必为他们缴税，也不必向他们支付最低工资。教会里的人把睡袋送给已经拿不到救济金、住在废弃车库里的年轻男子。在商店工作的女士们表示，当地所有零售工作都是兼职的，而且因为公共汽车票价太高，不值得去别处谋一份全职工作。

Statisticians do their best to capture these subtleties. But there is a limit to how much you can learn about the economy by staring at a spreadsheet in a London office. And the bits you miss might be the bits that matter.

统计人员尽最大努力捕捉这些细微之处。但一个坐在伦敦办公室盯着电子表格的人，对经济的了解终究是有限的。而你错过的细节或许正是关键的细节。

Of course, there is “ground truth” to be gleaned from newspapers and other secondary sources, but there is no substitute for first-hand knowledge. Take Steve Eisman and his colleagues at the FrontPoint hedge fund. Michael Lewis, who wrote about them in The Big Short , described how they confirmed their hunch about the looming mortgage crisis in 2007 by flying to a glitzy subprime conference in Las Vegas. They chatted to the bankers, investors and rating agency guys who were making money from thin air. When they flew home, they doubled their bet against the US housing market.

当然，从报纸及其他二手资料中也可以收集到“第一线真相”，但第一手资料不可代替。以对冲基金FrontPoint的史蒂夫•艾斯曼(Steve Eisman)及其同事为例。迈克尔•刘易斯(Michael Lewis)在《大空头》(The Big Short)一书中描写道，2007年他们飞往拉斯维加斯参加一场浮华的次贷会议，那段经历使他们确信自己对次贷危机即将来临的预感是正确的。他们与银行家、投资者和评级机构的人士交谈——那些人都在空手套白狼。飞回家后，他们把押注美国住宅市场崩盘的赌注增加了一倍。

Michael Gove, the pro-Brexit former government minister, was wrong when he said we have had enough of experts. As the UK navigates an uncertain future, we need experts more than ever. What we really need is experts with dirty shoes.

当支持退欧的前部长级官员迈克尔•戈夫(Michael Gove)称我们已经听够了专家的高见时，他错了。在英国把握一个不确定的未来之际，我们比以往任何时候都更需要专家。但我们真正需要的是接地气的专家。