Source value China net Zheng Weiqiang
As far as long-term economic history is concerned, the most important variables are resource structure, population structure and technology structure. The unit of time measurement here is "one hundred years". Therefore, the short-term structure is ignored. Within the concept of resource structure, economists have classified all natural environmental factors of economic activities. Within the concept of population structure, economists are classified as human factors in economic activities. Within the concept of technical structure, economists are classified as all knowledge factors of economic activities.
Long-term economic history is a study of the evolution process of human material life, second only to natural evolution and biological evolution. Shorter than the research perspective of this evolutionary process, such as the research perspective of social evolutionary history that Elias is good at, and the "long period" research perspective that economists pay attention to.
As long as we admit the "path dependence" of evolution, it is difficult for us to avoid such a basic methodological problem: how to choose the length of research perspective? In the literature of the history of economic thought, we can see that Marshall's "short-term" and "long-term" economic analysis perspectives have caused many difficult logical problems in economic interpretation. For example, according to Marshall's theory, in terms of "short-term", the production of enterprises in an industry can encounter strong "external effects". As far as "long-term" is concerned, all external effects can not exist in the end. I remember Professor Zhang Tao from the Department of Economics of HKU once wrote an article commenting on this methodological issue of Marshall's economic analysis, trying to cancel the distinction between "long-term" and "short-term" and establish a unified economic analysis framework. Unfortunately, no relevant papers have been published so far.
In recent years, evolutionary theory has made great progress in mainstream economics schools, which provides a promising solution for the methodological basis of Marshall's economic analysis. That is, the general equilibrium pattern at each moment is regarded as a part of the "tradition" of future social games. Here, "tradition" should be understood as Weber's "collection of all possible histories". In other words, tradition exists in and only exists in the mind of every member of society, which means that in addition to historical events that have happened, there are countless histories that have not happened but may happen. Derived from such a pluralistic, Bergson-like historical time, at any given moment, based on a given tradition, members of society participate in new games and put forward their own different interpretations of the new equilibrium pattern. Finally, those explanations that can be accepted by enough majority or influential members of society as "* * * knowledge" will enter the history of "sharing". The history of public sharing is different from the general possible history, which provides the participants in the current social game with a historical basis for choosing a realistic and possible equilibrium from all possible equilibrium models.
Unfortunately, we know that the evolutionary theory mentioned above is still difficult to form a logically consistent interpretation system. Because, in the above evolution process, what kind of power does each realized equilibrium pattern rely on to break through the existing equilibrium pattern and evolve towards the future equilibrium pattern? The logic of game equilibrium cannot accommodate completely open "tradition", although it has been able to accommodate "probable history"-that is, giving specific subjective probability to every possible historical event. Only when the tradition is closed to players in the sense of probability, so that the different interpretations of history by game participants may contain some knowledge, can social games have a balanced pattern. In addition, the above arguments show that once in a state of balance, such a society will stay there forever.
The progress of natural science, especially physics and biology, is accompanied by the important progress of mathematics. There is no doubt that the progress of mathematics is crucial to the progress of western thought. The discovery of Brouwer's fixed point theorem makes Nash's existence theorem of game equilibrium possible, thus making all the conclusions of contemporary economic analysis logically self-consistent.
On the other hand, the research of irrational numbers, Newton or Leibniz and the demonstration of mathematical intuitionists show that the progress of thought is also crucial to the progress of mathematics. In fact, the progress of game theory in mathematics is almost always put forward by economists and realized by mathematical economists. Due to historical reasons, economists in China failed to raise the issue of game theory earlier. Therefore, in the decades before 1980, only Mr. Wang Jianhua from the Department of Applied Mathematics in Tsinghua University wrote a pamphlet called Game Theory for us.
The study of long-term economic history, in my opinion, is likely to provide an opportunity for the breakthrough of evolution. At present, one of the difficult problems of social evolution theory, the so-called "group selection problem", or similarly, "the evolution problem of culture and biology", is waiting for such a breakthrough. In recent years, combining the Neolithic archaeology, cognitive archaeology, social psychology and brain functional imaging technology, we have seen that many research results published in academic journals show such a breakthrough hope.
In China Economic Research Center of Peking University, Interdisciplinary Social Science Research Center of Zhejiang University and Sino-German Evolutionary Economics and China Economic Development Research Center of Nanjing University, we look forward to cooperating with more economists and scholars in other fields to promote the study of China's social evolution theory.