读书笔记：制度经济学

原书及其作者

Douglass C. North 的 “Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance”，制度经济学的开山泰斗。这篇实际上是我的学习笔记，因为上课被指定了阅读这本书的第1、2、12章，随手写了笔记，发出来备忘。可以当作制度经济学的极简版预览，当然了由于我摘抄必然是经过我的视角筛选让我感兴趣的段落，为了不花费过多时间，记的也很简陋，这么短短一篇笔记连入门介绍都够不上。

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Take away

Chp 1 An introduction to institutions and institutional change

p4 Institutions include any form of constraint that human beings devise to shape human interaction.

p4 Therefore, an essential part of the functioning of institutions is the costliness of ascertaining violations and the severity of punishment. …… obviously depends on the effectiveness of monitoring

p6 The major role of institutions in a society is to reduce uncertainty by establishing a stable (but not necessarily efficient) structure to human interaction.

p4,7 Conceptually, what must be clearly differentiated are the rules from the players. …… Institutions, together with the standard constraints of economic theory, determine the opportunities in a society. Organizations are created to take advantage of those opportunities, and, as the organizations evolve, they alter the institutions.

• 现有社会状况中的交易成本会诱导社会朝向不同的方向演进（恶性循环或良性循环）。

Chp 2 Cooperation: the theoretical problem

…… when it is costly to transact, institutions matter. (p.p. 12)

p12 wealth-maximizing individuals will usually find it worthwhile to cooperate with other players when the play is repeated, when they possess complete information about the other players’ past performances, and when there are small numbers of players. …… Cooperation is difficult to sustain when the game is not repeated (or there is an end game), when information on the other players is lacking, and when there are large numbers of players.

p13-14

Russell Hardin (I982) focuses on the n-person prisoner’s dilemma (PD) and explores the difficulties of collective action in large groups. Hardin emphasizes that the difficulties of collective action depend not just on the size of the group, but also on the ratio of costs to benefits. Conventions (which lead to some form of social order) may arise, particularly when there are asymmetries through which the participants may explore each other’s motivations and capabilities in iterated games.

Michael Taylor (1982, 1987) explores the conditions under which social order can be maintained in anarchy, that is, without the state. He asserts that community is essential for anarchic social order and that the key features of community are shared common beliefs or norms, direct and complex relationships between members, and reciprocity. Taylor argues that the state destroys the very elements of community (an argument that has been made by Titmuss and others) and indeed, to the degree that altruism plays a role, it too can be minimized or destroyed by the coercive action of the state.

Howard Margolis (1982) develops a model in which individual behavior is in part determined by altruistic motives. Margolis argues that individuals have two types of utility functions, those that favor group-oriented preferences and those that favor selfish preferences, and that individuals make trade-offs between the two. His model allows him to explain certain patterns of voting behavior that do not appear to make sense in the behavioral context of a wealth-maximizing individual.

These three works represent major efforts to examine the conditions by which cooperation can be maintained.

p14 The fundamental theoretical problem underlying the question of cooperation is the manner by which individuals attain knowledge of each others preferences and likely behavior. Moreover, the problem is one of common knowledge, since each individual, i, is required not only to have information about others preferences, but also to know that the others have knowledge about i’s own preferences and strategies.

• 新古典主义基于自己的假设体系认为，良好的竞争环境才能催生良好的合作策略。但是很多新古典主义的假设，在现实中能复现多少是很难说的。

p15 Coase began his essay (1960) by arguing that when it is costless to transact, the efficient competitive solution of neoclassical economics obtains. It does so because the competitive structure of efficient markets leads the parties to arrive costlessly at the solution that maximizes aggregate income regardless of the initial institutional arrangements. …… Now to the extent that these conditions are mimicked in the real world, it is because competition is strong enough via arbitrage and efficient information feedback to approximate the Coase zero transaction cost conditions and the parties can realize the gains from trade inherent in the neoclassical argument. That is, competition eliminates the incomplete and asymmetric information that rewards defection in the game theory models.

Chp 12 Institutions, economic theory, and economic performance

p112 Path dependence is the key to an analytical understanding of long-run economic change. The promise of this approach is that it extends the most constructive building blocks of neoclassical theory - both the scarcity/competition postulate and incentives as the driving force - but modifies that theory by incorporating incomplete information and subjective models of reality and the increasing returns characteristic of institutions.

p112 Path dependence comes from the increasing returns mechanisms that reinforce the direction once on a given path. Alterations in the path come from unanticipated consequences of choices, external effects, and sometimes forces exogenous to the analytical framework. Reversal of paths (from stagnation to growth or vice versa) may come from the above described sources of path alteration, but will typically occur through changes in the polity.

关于制度经济学的常见迷思

1. 良好的制度是不是经济发展的充分条件？必要条件？
   • 我觉得是不充分也不必要，但很重要。充分条件的意思是，有好制度就一定有亮眼的经济发展；必要条件的意思是，没有好制度就一定无法有长期健康的经济发展。逐步建立起了在后世眼光中更“先进”的治理体系的国家，也许会陷于很长的学习成本，去尝试驾驭这种谁也没见过的新制度，也许会一次次陷于错误的方向。同样，基于一定制度的国家，它们遇上或者造成一些特定的情况，比方说苏联头几个五年计划的卓著成绩，未必就不能达到亮眼的发展。问题在于我们怎么定义“长期”和“健康的”对于经济发展的意义，
   • 这就像我们参看下图（Phillips Curve and Okun’s Law），这是两个在经济学领域成名已久的理论，就是描述失业率和通胀存在负相关，失业率和经济增长存在负相关的两条曲线。宏观来看，趋势是存在的，但是趋势不是一种绝对规律，离这条拟合线很远的单点也存在，反映在我们的生活中就是，你完全有可能发现自己处于一个和理论模型的预测差很远的社会里。这不能代表统计学意义上来讲，理论所预测的那种关系不存在；但是统计学意义上的相关性，和我们用社会科学的语言讨论“充分”和“必要”时，和我们试图理解自己身处的生活时，并没有一种简单明了的对应关系。
2. 民主化体制是强劲经济发展的前提还是产物？
   • 我觉得这个问题本身问题就很多了，首先，进行一些阅读之后我感觉，制度经济学的视角不应该是大而无当的说某种制度好，某种制度坏，而是某些制度因素会严重影响经济发展的方向，然后在现实之中我们凭经验看到不同制度在实现这些因素方面所能做到的成绩有高下。
   • 制度经济学的视角是基于对古典和新古典经济学的一些预置假设的审视而出发的，那如果我们不经审视的就把制度视角所得出的结论做最片面的吸收，这种视角的“新”的意义其实就失去了。制度经济学的许多著作都把影响经济发展的一些制度因素归结于稳定的营商环境、可预测的社会规则、开放透明的竞争环境，等等。我们确实一般见到现代国际社会中，老牌的发达民主国家在这些方面做得更好，但是各位中文读者也应该知道，一个足够集权的政府也不是不能通过不触及根本体制的政策方法来创造一个这样的临时环境，或者最少说是一个这样的幻觉。
3. 如果制度经济学听起来这么有道理，为什么在经济意义上低效率的体制还是能长期存在于一些国家？
   • 这个问题的前后两个子句其实不关联，就是说制度经济学的解释力并不因为它不能带来一个纯按自己的逻辑中的最好安排来运转的世界而失色。社会中的动态由社会中的行为主体做出，每个主题有自己的决策和自己的利益，你眼中最美的安排并不一定对那个具体的主体而言是可口的。但这和这个理论框架对于“什么安排能让社会的总体收益最大化”，只能说是毫无关系，这就跟你知道什么样的生活方式健康和你能不能做到那种生活方式基本没什么关系。

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Bibliography

• North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.