On April 23, Nobel Laureate Professor Thomas Sargent visited School of Economics and Commerce. He gave a lecture on “Basic Economics Lessons: Applications for China” in the Academic Hall, HEMC campus. Professor Wu Yechun, assistant principal and secretory of party committee in SEC, received Professor Sargent. Professor Wang Renzeng, executive dean of SEC, hosted the lecture.
At the beginning of the lecture, Professor Sargent told the audience that he chose economics as his major on the basis of his personal interest in mathematics, history and society structure at the young age. Economics was a beautiful and useful course in his mind. It could help to understand the complicated and messy world. He said economics was organized commonsense. Based on his professionalism and social vision, Professor Sargent shared a couple of economic principles with audience at site in an interesting and humorous way. By citing his personal choice between football quarterback player and economics research, he proposed that “many things that are desirable are not feasible”, “individuals and communities face tradeoffs”, “there are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency”. As for the social public affairs, he explained that the social safety nets didn’t always end up working as intended was because “everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help”, “in the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver.” He suggested that before we made a promise, think about whether we would want to keep it if and when our circumstances changed, which was the way we earn a reputation. At the end of his lecture, he quoted two Chinese proverbs to summarize his points: people can always find a way to cope with government policies; unless you have a plan about the long run, you will certainly run into troubles for the short run.
In the Q&A section, Professor Sargent answered questions on China’s present economic system, the tradeoffs between rational expectations and behavior and Max’s work Capital with great patience from insightful perspectives.
Before the lecture, Professor Sargent paid a visit to SEC’s lab and planted a banyan tree at the grass lawn in SEC’s square, which was crowned as Sargent Tree and witnessed the Nobel Laureate’s visit in this spring.
Professor Sargent is one of the leaders of the “rational expectations revolution”, which argues that the people being modeled by economists can predict the future, or the probability of future outcomes, at least as well as the economist can with his model. He published huge number of pioneering research papers and book, greatly contributed to human knowledge about macro-economy. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2011 together with Christopher A. Sims “for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macro-economy”. (Translated and Edited by Huang Xiaoting)
 |  |  |
| Prof. Sargent giving a lecture | | Assistant principal, Prof. Wu Yechun receiving Prof. Sargent |
 | |  |
| Audience at Site | | Report at Site |
 | |  |
| Prof. Sargent visiting SEC's lab | | Group Photo |
 | |  |
| Planting Sargent Tree | | Showing Prof. Sargent around the campus |
