为什么经济学家喜爱《鲁滨逊漂流记》| 双语阅读

在孤岛上度过了28年零2个月又19天后，鲁滨逊·克鲁索并没有失去对冒险的嗅觉，也没有丢掉“四处游逛的天性”。他在“地狱般的狼群”的追逐下穿越了比利牛斯山脉，目睹了中国的“浮华与贫困”，在俄罗斯大草原上与鞑靼人作战。

AFTER SPENDING 28 years, two months and 19 days marooned on an island, Robinson Crusoe does not lose his nose for adventure or his “native propensity to rambling”. He crosses the Pyrenees, stalked by “hellish wolves”, witnesses the “pomp and poverty” of China and battles Tartars on the Russian steppe.

然而，这个角色最奇特的冒险并不是这些，而无疑是他几个世纪以来在经济学文献中的漫游。鲁滨逊曾出现在卡尔·马克思的《资本论》、约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯的《就业、利息和货币通论》和米尔顿·弗里德曼在芝加哥主讲的《价格理论》中。《新帕尔格雷夫经济学词典》中有他的条目。而且他还经常冲上经济学教科书的岸头。

The character’s strangest adventure, however, is none of these. It is surely his centuries-long ramble through the literature of economics. Crusoe has appeared in Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital”, John Maynard Keynes’s “General Theory” and Milton Friedman’s Chicago lectures on “Price Theory”. He has an entry in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics. And he often washes up in economics textbooks.

鲁滨逊对于经济学的吸引力并不让人惊讶。这个水手花了几页的时间逃离海盗并射杀食人族。但真正的战斗是对抗稀缺——他通过仔细部署他所掌握的资源（包括他自己的劳动力）来战胜稀缺性。Crusoe’s economic appeal is unsurprising. The sailor spends a few pages escaping pirates and shooting cannibals. But his real battle is against scarcity, which he defeats through careful deployment of the resources at his disposal, including his own labour.……【欢迎订阅《经济学人·商论》继续读完本文双语版】