官微注：文章摘自《纽约时报》，后附英文原版

一直以来，美国经济学思想的中心都位于马萨诸塞州坎布里奇的一段两英里长的地带，它的两端分别是哈佛大学和麻省理工学院。但现在，在遥远的西部，有了一个竞争者出现了。

　　过去几年里，斯坦福大学将一大批明星经济学家吸引到了加州帕洛阿尔托——并力保自己的经济学家不被哈佛和麻省理工挖走。

　　最新加盟斯坦福的教授包括诺贝尔奖获得者、原先在哈佛的阿尔文·E·罗斯(Alvin E. Roth)，然而最能体现潮流涌动的是，那些顶尖青年经济学家的去向。自2000年以来的11位约翰·贝茨·克拉克奖(John Bates Clark Medal)“40岁以下最佳经济学家”得主中，有四人现在斯坦福，比任何大学都多。其中两人是过去几个月里加入的，他们是原在哈佛研究不平等问题的拉杰·切蒂(Raj Chetty)，以及从芝加哥大学转投斯坦福的马修·基恩茨科夫(Matthew Gentzkow)。

　　斯坦福正在努力将自己塑造成为美国头号大学，招募经济学家方面的成功就是这项行动的一部分。它的吸引力来自两方面，一是作为当今美国最热门的大学——它的本科入学率为全美最低，募资能力也紧随哈佛之后位居第二——还有它的周边拥有全世界最具活力的企业。它和东部大学的对抗，和其他一些产业中的情况是相呼应的，从酒店到汽车生产商，老牌企业在各方面都面临着硅谷资金和创业者的挑战。

　　这也反映了经济学研究层面的一场更广泛的转型，最尖端的工作开始越来越少地依赖那些脑力超群、钻研着数学理论的学者个体，而是更多取决于将大量数据粉碎后从中寻找有价值信息的能力，后者能用于处理各种的问题，可以是社会各阶层的收入差异，也可以是产业的组织方式。

　　“一个为世界营造未来的地方，谁不想去呢?”乔治·梅森大学(George Mason University)经济学家(《纽约时报》长期撰稿人)泰勒·考文(Tyler Cowen)说，他经常通过博客谈论经济学的学术潮流。他说，斯坦福的经济学系“有一种波士顿和坎布里奇没法比拟的活跃气氛”。

　　在经济学界，斯坦福经常被排在哈佛、麻省理工、普林斯顿和芝加哥大学后面，包括《美国新闻与世界报道》(U.S. News & World Report)最近发布的一项2013年的研究生院调查，以及学者论文引用量的计算方面，都是如此。但这一点也许有变。过去四年里，斯坦福的资深教员增加了25%，有11名领受数百万美元累积薪俸的学者，要么是从其他学校的顶尖科系挖来的，要么拒绝这些科系的诱惑留了下来。

　　然而，相比这些大人物的招募，斯坦福的未来更多地要看它培养的博士，他们的学术成就能否得到广泛引用，影响重要的经济学讨论走向，或成为位高权重的政策制定者，不管是作为总统的顾问，还是央行的领导人。最近10任白宫经济顾问委员会主席，都是哈佛或麻省理工的博士(最近一位不是来自这两间学校的是1999年离职的珍妮特·L·耶伦，她是在耶鲁取得博士学位)。近年对全球经济政策有重大影响力的经济学博士中，前美联储主席本·S·伯南克;欧洲央行行长马里奥·德拉吉;即将退休的国际货币基金组织首席经济学家奥利维尔· 布兰查德;联储副主席斯坦利·费希尔(Stanley Fischer)，都出身麻省理工。

　　不难想象，在东海岸的许多顶尖科系看来，坎布里奇在知识界的王者地位是不容撼动的。“斯坦福对招募哈佛教员如此上心，正说明了我们的强大，”哈佛经济系主任戴维·莱布森(David Laibson)说。“我们很容易被盯上，因为全世界最振奋人心、最具创造力和革新力的学者中，有许多在我们这里，斯坦福当然会想得到他们。”他指出本系和哈佛其他院系和诸多合作，加之邻近麻省理工和国家经济研究局(National Bureau of Economic Research)，形成了经济学研究工作的高度集中，并且他的系本身也在大举招募人才。

　　然而斯坦福近年在招募上的成功表明，经济学领域正在进行一场广泛的转型。新加盟的人才虽研究方向各有不同，但都能体现经济学潮流从理论建模向“实证微观经济学”的转变，后者是对真实世界的原理分析，时常要展开复杂的实验，或利用大量的数据。这样的工作需要许多研究助手，进行包括社会学、电脑科学等领域的跨学科研究，尖端电子计算技术的应用，是上一代人无法想象的。

　　在所有领先的经济学院系，这种趋势都显而易见——在那些实力强大的传统经济学院系，也有很多学者在进行实证微观经济学类的研究，比如麻省理工的埃斯特·迪弗洛(Esther Duflo)有关如何检验对抗全球贫困的方法的研究，哈佛大学的小罗兰·G·费赖尔(Roland G. Fryer Jr.)在种族不平等的根源方面的研究。但是，最近和斯坦福大学签约的学者们表示，该校尤其适合做这类研究，因为它有实验室空间、充足的研究预算和唾手可得的工程人才。

　　“之前在芝加哥大学工作，我也很开心，但斯坦福好像有种让人兴奋的感觉，而且这里确实在成就些一些东西，”基恩茨科夫说道。“作为一所大学，斯坦福目前实际上处在非常有利的位置，而且它似乎非常有心将这些资源用于经济学前沿领域的研究。”

　　最新加盟的学者表示，他们的薪酬水平和之前所在的大学差不多，只不过在有些情况下他们手上的科研预算更加宽裕些。教务长约翰·W·埃切门迪(John W. Etchemendy)表示，斯坦福大学的招聘工作从该校的跨院系合作中获益很多，因为经济学家会和诸如计算机科学和统计系的学者交流思想，共享资源。

　　2012年从哈佛跳槽到斯坦福的罗斯列举了他自己在肾脏移植方面的研究工作。他一直致力于建立一个“配对交换”系统，通过这一系统，那些因血型、抗原或抗体不匹配而无法给挚爱亲友捐献肾脏的人，可以将肾脏捐献给与之匹配、同时又有捐赠意愿可以给其他人捐献器官的肾脏接受者。他在和医学院、工程学院的同事合作。“这样的系统在计算上是非常复杂的，”他说。

　　与此同时，切蒂也看到专注于使用大数据的研究会有怎样的益处，这种大型研究的编制和分析非常困难。比如，他所做的项目就研究了幼儿园教师的品质是否会对一个人未来的生活和收入产生持续性的影响。

　　“湾区吸引人的地方就在于，它在数据、方法和机器学习方面，存在一些令人兴奋的机遇，”他说。那类研究所需要的实验室空间与硬科学更接近——斯坦福利用了这一点。

　　相对不那么清楚的是，明星经济学者在斯坦福大学扎堆，是否也能形成其他顶尖大学已具备的一脉相承的学派。

　　以米尔顿·弗里德曼(Milton Friedman)为代表的芝加哥经济学派，是新古典思想中的翘楚，他们强调市场的效率和政府干预的风险。麻省理工学院经济学系一直秉承凯恩斯的传统，培养出多位身居高位的经济决策人士，在过去几年引领世界经济度过了重重风波。

　　“不存在什么斯坦福学派，”斯坦福大学经济学教授B·道格拉斯·伯恩海姆(B. Douglas Bernheim)说。“这不是一个讲究学说的地方。学说往往会简化事物，而我们越来越意识到，我们所要努力解决的社会议题是极为错综复杂的。在斯坦福，我们的主要共识是，研究人员必须对各种研究方法和思维方式保持开放心态，但在自己的研究上则要严格、彻底和谨慎地采用最高标准。”

　　换句话说，更重要的不是学者得出怎样的具体结论，而是得出结论的过程。

　　“我感觉这对经济学而言，是一种进步，”切蒂说道。“我认为从事此类研究的斯坦福，会成为另一个可以和哈佛和麻省理工经济学系相媲美的顶级院系，这类研究证明经济学领域的研究正在变得更加深入。这对整个世界来说，都是天大的好事——我不认为这是非此即彼的零和游戏。”

　　在最近的学者招募中，斯坦福可能已经还有一个天赐的秘密武器。“连今年的天气都很配合我们，”伯恩海姆说。“去年冬天波士顿九尺深的大雪肯定有好处。”

【参考译文】

　　The center of gravity for economic thought in the United States has long been found along the two miles in Cambridge, Mass., that run between Harvard University and M.I.T. But there is new competition for that title, and it is quite a bit farther west.

　　Stanford University has lured an all-star lineup of economists to Palo Alto, Calif., in the last few years — and fended off Harvard’s and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s attempts to woo Stanford economists.

　　The newest Stanford professors include a Nobel laureate — Alvin E. Roth, formerly of Harvard — but the shift is more noticeable among top young economists. Of the 11 people who have won the John Bates Clark Medal for best economist under age 40 since 2000, four are now at Stanford, more than at any other university. Two of them joined in the last few months: the inequality researcher Raj Chetty, who came from Harvard, and Matthew Gentzkow, who left the University of Chicago.

　　Stanford’s success with economists is part of a larger campaign to stake a claim as the country’s top university. Its draw combines a status as the nation’s “it” university — now with the lowest undergraduate acceptance rate and a narrow No. 2 behind Harvard for the biggest fund-raising haul — with its proximity to many of the world’s most dynamic companies. Its battle with Eastern universities echoes fights in other industries in which established companies, whether hotels or automobile makers, are being challenged by Silicon Valley money and entrepreneurship.

　　And it is a reflection of a broader shift in the study of economics, in which the most cutting-edge work increasingly relies less on a big-brained individual scholar developing mathematical theories, and more on the ability to crunch extensive sets of data to glean insights about topics as varied as how incomes differ across society and how industries organize themselves.

　　“Who wouldn’t want to be where the future of the world is being made?” said Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University (and regular contributor to The New York Times) who often blogs about trends in academic economics. Stanford’s economics department, he said, “has an excitement about it which Boston and Cambridge can’t touch.”

　　In economics, Stanford has frequently been ranked just behind Harvard, M.I.T., Princeton and the University of Chicago, including in the most recent U.S. News & World Report survey of graduate school rankings, conducted in 2013, and in calculations of which department’s scholars are most frequently cited in academic literature. That might change. In the last four years, Stanford has increased the number of senior faculty by 25 percent, and 11 scholars with millions in cumulative salary have either been recruited from other top programs or resisted poaching attempts by those programs.

　　That said, Stanford’s reputation in the future may depend less on a few big-name recruits than on its ability to train the Ph.D.s whose scholarship is widely cited and reshapes important economic debates, or who become influential policy makers who advise presidents and lead central banks. The last 10 people to serve as chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers have all had a Ph.D. from either Harvard or M.I.T. (the last without one was Janet L. Yellen, who left the job in 1999, and received hers from Yale). Among the Ph.D. economists who have exerted great influence on global economic policy in recent years, the former Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke; the European Central Bank president, Mario Draghi; the retiring International Monetary Fund chief economist, Olivier Blanchard; and the Fed vice chairman, Stanley Fischer, all studied at M.I.T.

　　Unsurprisingly, many of those with top East Coast programs view Cambridge’s intellectual leadership role as safe. “Stanford’s keen interest in recruiting Harvard faculty is testimony to our strength,” said David Laibson, chairman of the Harvard economics department. “We’ve got a big target on our back because many of the world’s most exciting, creative, and innovative scholars are on our faculty, and Stanford is rightly going for some of them.” He notes that his department has lots of collaboration with other schools at Harvard, and that nearby M.I.T. and the National Bureau of Economic Research create a deep concentration of economic thinking, and said the department is on a recruiting push of its own.

　　But the recent recruiting success of Stanford shows something broader about how the economics profession is changing. The specialties of the new recruits vary, but they are all examples of how the momentum in economics has shifted away from theoretical modeling and toward “empirical microeconomics,” the analysis of how things work in the real world, often arranging complex experiments or exploiting large sets of data. That kind of work requires lots of research assistants, work across disciplines including fields like sociology and computer science, and the use of advanced computational techniques unavailable a generation ago.

　　That trend is evident across leading economics departments — the traditional powerhouses have plenty of scholars doing work in the same vein, including work by Esther Duflo at M.I.T. on how to test ways to fight global poverty and by Roland G. Fryer Jr. at Harvard on the roots of racial inequality. But the scholars who have newly signed on with Stanford described a university particularly well suited to research in that vein, with a combination of lab space, strong budgets for research support and proximity to engineering talent.

　　“I was very happy where I was in Chicago, but it felt like there is a sense of excitement and really building something at Stanford,” Mr. Gentzkow said. “Stanford as a university is in a really strong position right now, and has a lot of resources, and seems very committed to using those resources to build on the frontier of economics.”

　　Recent hires said that their compensation packages were about the same as their previous employers offered, though in some cases with more generous research budgets. Provost John W. Etchemendy argued that the university’s recruiting had benefited from cross-departmental work as economists share ideas and resources with, for example, computer science and statistics departments.

　　Mr. Roth, who joined Stanford from Harvard in 2012, cited his own work on kidney transplants as an example. He has led efforts to build a “paired exchange” system through which people who cannot donate a kidney to a loved one because of a mismatch in blood type, antigens or antibodies can instead donate a kidney to a recipient who is a match and who has a donor willing and able to donate to the other recipient. He collaborates with colleagues from the medical and engineering schools. “This gets very computationally complex,” he said.

　　Mr. Chetty, meanwhile, saw benefits in the concentration of research that uses Big Data, large sets of research that are hard to compile and analyze. His work has examined, for example, whether the quality of a kindergarten teacher has long-lasting effects on a person’s life and earnings.

　　“Some of the attraction of the Bay Area is simply the fact that there are exciting opportunities with data and methods and machine learning,” he said. And that type of work requires lab space that more closely resembles that needed in the hard sciences — a fact Stanford has exploited.

　　Less clear is whether the agglomeration of economic stars at Stanford will ever amount to the kind of coherent school of thought that has been achieved at some other great universities.

　　The Chicago School, under the intellectual imprint of Milton Friedman, was a leader in neoclassical thought that emphasizes the efficiency of markets and the risks of government intervention. M.I.T.’s economics department has a long record of economic thought in the Keynesian tradition, and it produced several of the top policy makers who have guided the world economy through the tumultuous last several years.

　　“There isn’t a Stanford school of thought,” said B. Douglas Bernheim, chairman of the university’s economics department. “This isn’t a doctrinaire place. Generally doctrine involves simplification, and increasingly we recognize that these social issues we’re trying to figure out are phenomenally complicated. The consensus at Stanford has focused around the idea that you have to be open to a lot of approaches and ways of thinking about things, and to be rigorous, thorough and careful in bringing the highest standard of craft to bear on your research.”

　　In other words, it is less about the specific conclusion a scholar reaches, and more about how they get there.

　　“My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”

　　And in its recent recruiting, Stanford may have had a secret weapon, coming from the skies. “Even the weather cooperated with us this year,” Mr. Bernheim said. “Nine feet of snow in Boston this past winter couldn’t have hurt.”

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