布兰查德采访斯坦利费希尔

Interview of Stanley Fischer, by Olivier Blanchard, Russell Sage Foundation, May 2004. O: When and why did you decide to go into economics? I was a schoolboy in what was then Southern Rhodesia, later Rhodesia, later yet Zimbabwe. The educational system was British, which meant you had to specialize during the last two years of high school. I originally specialized in physics, math, and chemistry, thinking I would become an engineer or maybe a scientist or a mathematician. At some point I had a conversation with the son of friends of my parents. He had studied at the LSE, and told me I should become an economist. He gave me a few lessons, which were interesting – I think we used Samuelson’s introductory book. Also, amazingly enough, I took an economics course during my last year at high school. O: An economics course at school. This sounds very unusual? Well, this was the British sixth form, where students have to specialize. The teacher was extremely good. We studied Hicks’ Social Framework, and I was introduced to Keynes. In the vacation between school and college I read the General Theory and was hooked by Keynes’ use of language, although I’m not sure I understood the book. I had decided to study in England and ended up at the LSE. O: Why LSE? Why not the US? We didn’t think of the US then. For us England was the center of the universe. My teachers told me the choice was Cambridge or the LSE. I ended up at the LSE partly because the person who had introduced me to the subject had gone there and partly because they were willing to give me a very early decision (the academic year in the southern hemisphere ends in December instead of June). Although the LSE had the reputation for being left wing, that was not true of the economics. We took very conventional courses. Richard Lipsey taught the first principles course, and he was very good. Frank Paish taught an applied economics course. I recall his showing his slides early in 1963 and saying: “You see it goes up and it goes down and then it goes up again. And that’s why we’re going to have a balance of payments crisis in 1964. “ The crisis took place on the appointed date, and I was very impressed. O: This was an exciting time at LSE. Did you pick up a sense of that excitement? I had a great time at the LSE, this was my first experience of the big world, and I took advantage of London and of the continent. But I was quite unsophisticated about academic life and intellectual life. That was not something you picked up in my high school—good as it was as a teaching institution. I thought the main aim of studying was to get through the exams. In retrospect I realize there was intellectual excitement there at the time. The LSE was then in the midst of the controversy about the Radcliffe committee report. Richard Sayers, who was at the LSE, was the main intellectual force behind the report. It suggested that monetary policy worked, and was later seen as the beginning of the revival of monetary policy in the UK. But it was full of qualifications. It featured a three-gear view of monetary policy: if you changed gear drastically enough, you could have an impact. Still, it marked the end of the period in which it was believed in the UK that monetary policy didn’t work, and the beginning of a new era in which monetary policy has increasingly been seen as a powerful driver of the economy. Karl Popper was the dominant force in the philosophy department, and everyone became a Popperian in methodology. Phillips of the Phillips Curve was there, though I didn’t take a course from him, but I did see his machine of the economy. And there was a lot of work being done on the Phillips curve. Other memories include a lecture by Bob Solow. He must have been about 40 at the time. But he looked much younger, and was very funny, even in talking about production functions. I remember him saying: “When I say K, I mean Kuznets. Capital is that thing that Kuznets measures. “ I also remember on one occasion being incredibly excited when someone explained to me what an econometric model was. That you could use data to estimate parameters, and then if you put the whole thing together, you had a set of equations that described the economy. That was really exciting, it meant you could control the economy. And it was obvious that was immensely important. At the LSE then you wrote exams only at the end of the first and third years (it was a three year degree), and you didn’t get course grades. So I didn’t really know whether I was a good student or an average student. I had won an economic history prize and some other prize at the end of the first year. But I had no real idea of where I stood in the class. So I planned to work in a bank when I graduated. O: (laughing) It eventually happened, but it took a long time… Touche. ... I wrote the first degree, and it turned out that I did very well. I had gone to Israel to work for the summer, where I got a telegram indicating that I had gotten a scholarship and should come back to do graduate work. So I didn’t know I was going to be an academic until after the first degree O: So passion was not there yet. No it was not there. I really liked the subject, but research was not central to what we did. That came later, with the graduate studies at MIT. Even though I did a master’s degree at LSE, up to that point my view of economics was always that it was what these great professors did and do. Your job as a student was to study what they said. O: Was MIT the logical choice for you when you wanted to go on or was Chicago in the picture? To me, MIT was the logical choice. Everybody said ”Why do you want to go to MIT?” And I’d say “Samuelson and Solow.” Even though Harry Johnson, who was at LSE while I was there, recommended Chicago, and even though we read Friedman’s restatement of the quantity theory, I thought MIT was the best. And I got in there and went there. O: How was MIT? Because I hadn’t thought of going to graduate school until after completing my first degree, I had done a one-year master’s degree at the LSE. So I was better prepared when I went to MIT than most of the students. But that wore off pretty quickly. The faculty member I was most close to, almost by geographic accident, was Miguel Sidrauski who was a Chicago graduate, an Argentine, who started as an Assistant Professor at MIT the same year I arrived. We happened to live in the same apartment building in Cambridge, and became very friendly. Miguel was a terrific mentor. The relationship of the young assistant professor with the student is a very nice one, because you are so close in age. I worked a lot with Miguel in my first summer as a research assistant for him and Duncan Foley. Tragically Miguel died of cancer at the end of his second year at MIT. I also worked for Don Patinkin, who was visiting MIT and was one of my heroes. So I really got into things. My MIT experience was truly formative. The professors were great and the courses were great. The department emphasized good teaching, and most of the professors were available if you wanted to talk to them. And we had enough term papers to do to be drawn into research. Samuelson used to say interesting things in class and throw out interesting problems. Sidrauski was an excellent teacher, who made you understand the economics that was represented in his phase diagrams, and Bob Solow did that too. Frank Fisher taught econometrics, and had a big influence on the students. And there were many others who influenced us. No less important, I was with a really remarkable group of fellow students. The class above me in particular included a whole host of people whose names you know. Bob Hall was there, as was Bill Nordhaus, Avinash Dixit, Bob Gordon, Ray Fair, Mike Rothschild, Joe Stiglitz and others who later made their mark. Avinash Dixit could do the Times crossword puzzle in about 10 seconds. Bob Merton arrived a year after me, and we shared an office for a year. O: Your thesis was on macro. Why? I focused on macro as a graduate student, as I had at the LSE. I think I liked macro because I was interested in big questions but that may be an ex -post rationalization. Maybe it was because I had read Keynes’ General Theory and was intrigued. I had this image of the world as we knew it having nearly collapsed in the 1930s, and that these guys had saved it. My thesis was actually on lifetime portfolio choice. We were very much into the microfoundations of macro at the time, and that topic was about the microfoundations of portfolio choice and saving, in the presence of life insurance. In part I chose that topic because Paul Samuelson was working on lifetime portfolio choice at the time, as was Bob Merton. O . Then, you moved to Chicago. I went to Chicago as a post-doc, financed partly through Al Harberger’s Latin America workshop. It was the best university that made me an offer. My first year as post-doc I went to the Money Workshop, Harberger’s Latin American workshop, the trade workshop, Milton Friedman’s money course, and no doubt much else. That was also the year I met Rudi Dornbusch and Jacob Frenkel, and other outstanding students, including Mike Mussa. Chicago enabled me to combine MIT’s analytics with the policy relevance that Milton Friedman typified. O: MIT was more in theory mode? That was the impression I had at the time. I remember a discussion at MIT with the faculty during the student disturbances at Harvard in 1968 when I said that “we know a lot of economics, but we don’t know much about the economy.” And Chicago then was the perfect antidote for this. Plus Chicago too had an extraordinary group of students. I taught micro with Harberger and later taught macro. But as I reflect on the question, I realize I must have been thinking of what I did at MIT, rather than what was happening there in the late 1960s. After all, that was when Franco Modigliani and his students were working on the FRB-MIT- Penn macromodel, and Bob Solow was the devotee par excellence of using small tractable analytic models to get to the essence of a problem. O: How central was Milton Friedman in all of this? To the macro? Absolutely central. Macro was the money workshop. It was his workshop. In those days I regretted that they did not have people from another tradition except for a few of us, Bob Gordon in particular. Later, I decided that if Chicago wasn’t Chicago, who would be? It was all right for them to pursue a particular line. But, as an assistant professor, although I benefited in the long run, it was at times difficult. O: But did it change the way you did macro? The way you thought about macro? Your choice of topics? It did have a long-run impact. I started working then on monetary rules with Phil Cooper, an MIT fellow-student, who became an Assistant Professor at the Chicago Business School. I also talked a lot to Rudi Dornbusch, and served on his thesis committee, and wrote a few papers with Jacob Frenkel. O: You went back to MIT in 1973? During the time I was at Chicago I had taken a six month sabbatical at the Hebrew University. And we had very seriously thought about living in Israel. When I went back to MIT in the fall of ’73, I thought that it might be an interesting two year interlude on the way to living in Israel and teaching at the Hebrew University. The first course I co-taught when I got back to MIT was monetary economics with Paul Samuelson. That was intimidating. He would insist on taking the chalk and explaining things better than me. Then, I sort of eased into the role with which you are familiar. You came in 1973, right? O: Right. 73. … And gradually I became a decent teacher. I taught the introductory macro, got a lot of students over the course of time. Coming from Chicago where the money workshop was so central, I built up the money workshop at MIT. Franco Modigliani was the star attraction. I loved advising on theses. Then in 75, I persuaded my colleagues to bring Rudi Dornbusch to MIT. He had taught at Rochester and then went back to Chicago. He was very analytic. Not very interested in the real world. Very pure. He wrote his ``overshooting’’ article within a few months of coming to MIT. Our collaboration grew, and that also made a huge difference. So I had terrific elder colleagues, terrific students, and a great contemporary colleague in Rudi. Probably an ideal setup. O: Did Israel recede as an option? We always maintained a close contact, and took several sabbaticals there. But after we made up our mind to live in the States, around 1975, we didn’t look back. At least not more than once every two weeks or so… But we never really came close to changing our minds because MIT was such a wonderful place to be. And because we liked Boston. And our kids were growing up O: When did you shift towards more applied topics? I should have mentioned that one of the things that got me interested in economics, peculiarly, was that Dag Hammarskjold was an economist. When I was in high school, Dag Hammarskjold was this great man. Then he was killed in the then-Belgian Congo, right next door. I knew he had done good in the world and my parents had brought me up to believe I should do good in the world. I realized that economics would help you do good. So I always wanted to use what I had learned. That factor was probably there and moved me over the course of time. My first really intense applied work was when I visited the Bank of Israel and spent a month there in 1979. They gave me a lot of applied questions, since they were suffering from high inflation. My real opportunity came in 1983 when George Shultz asked me join an advisory group he was creating on the Israeli economy. I had in the meantime become somewhat of an American expert on the Israeli economy. That was when I got into the policy game. It was a very fortunate introduction. It’s extremely unusual to have the Secretary of State take some young guy he doesn’t know and appoint him as an adviser, and then let him have an active role. Herb Stein and I were appointed as George Shultz’s advisers on the Israeli economy. On the occasions Herb and I traveled to Israel, we essentially had George Shultz’s authority behind us. And we could say, “The Secretary of State believes this.” As a professor, that didn’t especially impress me. But when you say “the Secretary of State believes’’ to a government that depends on the United States, they are not listening only to the economics. O: Was the shift to more applied topics in the air in the 1980s ? Rudi Dornbusch moved in a similar way at the same time. Well, there were all those high inflations around, and we’d studied and taught about them. There were countless conferences on what to do about inflation and that seemed to be the general policy problem of most of the countries we were working with. Also, foreign travel was exciting. I went to Japan in 1981, together with Ben Friedman and Jeff Sachs, on a trip organized by Ezra Vogel of Harvard. I had never been to the East. There was this incredibly exciting economy, Japan, which was doing the most amazing things, growing by leaps and bounds. It was exciting. So I can’t quite explain my transition, except that these opportunities came along and they were interesting. I guess it was a combination of being interested in the real world, wanting to be useful, being able to travel, and being given interesting problems. O: That’s the right transition to the next stage: the World Bank. The World Bank was another opportunity to be in the policy world, and so I was very happy to take the offer. O: What did you know about development at the time? I had studied development and taken development economics as one of my fields in the MIT generals. And on the macro side, I did know the economies of developing countries. Also, at that time, the main issues were stabilization and the debt crisis, and I knew a lot about them. At the World Bank, I got into structural adjustment and associated issues. I visited China, visited India for the first time. I spent ten days in China and met Zhou Ziang, then the premier, about six months before Tiananmen Square. I was impressed by how much he knew about western economics. He told me that my views differed from those of Milton Friedman and from those of Lawrence Klein. I couldn’t imagine that the Prime Minister was studying all these matters, but he was. Visiting India was also a wonderful experience. I was gripped by the problem of development. And that problem hasn’t left me. I grew up in a very small town in Northern Rhodesia for the first 13 years of my life, living among Africans. So the development issue was with me all the time. I also began to understand a lot both about the way organizations work, because the World Bank is an unusually complex organization, and also about the problems confronting the world. And so I left with a much better idea of what mattered and what needed to be done. O: You stayed at the World Bank for two years? It was originally a two-year term and it ended up being two and a half years. I did think about staying, and giving up my MIT tenure. But because I was not ready to give up MIT tenure, and for family reasons, we decided to go back to MIT. It was hard readjusting. I remember going to theory seminars and saying to myself, what difference does it make whether this guy is right or wrong, why should anyone care about that theorem and so forth. But I did somewhat readjust. I was obviously more interested in the policy side of things. I continued my involvement with Israel. I began writing a column for an Italian newspaper. I tried my hand at writing occasional columns for American newspapers. I was interested in both international problems and American problems but I became tagged as an international expert more than a macro expert. When I got back everyone thought I would revolutionize development at MIT, but I didn’t. The younger generation, which came not so long after, including Abhijit Banerjee, probably did. O: Do you think we have today the macro tools we need to understand the world? The quantity theory goes a very long way in dealing with inflation. And the intertemporal budget constraint, and the equation for debt dynamics, take you further along… I’d say the political economy is much harder. There’s a bunch of guys who try to get policies done and the question is how they get them done. This became clear to me even before the World Bank, when, in 1985, I was involved in the implementation of the Israeli stabilization. That stabilization was the work of Michael Bruno and colleagues. Discussions about how to do it were exciting, and I learned a tremendous amount. But I learned even more watching the administrative and political battles that had to be fought in making the program work. O: How much does it matter at those critical moments to have people with clear minds? Oh! It matters entirely. The Bruno team understood what i