AI 中文总结
从物理学家视角探讨非平衡经济学，借助“玩具”模型展示过度波动等现象可从非平衡动态自然出现，介绍了三种通用机制，强调这是现象学情景，指出当前无确凿证据，认为举证责任在均衡阵营。
AI 中文摘要
金融和经济历史充满了各种泡沫、崩溃、繁荣、萧条、危机和动荡。理解这些事件的起源是经济理论中最重要的问题之一：经济是否本质上不稳定，能否“稳定不稳定的经济”？在这篇综述中，我从物理学家的角度认为，均衡概念——主流经济思维的核心——在大型、复杂、相互作用的系统中可能是例外而非规则。借助一系列程式化的“玩具”模型，我展示了过度波动、内生危机和崩溃、通胀膨胀和持续不平等如何都能从真正的非平衡动态中自然出现，而无需引入大的外生冲击。三种通用机制反复出现：被困在多个依赖历史的均衡中；动态达到均衡的不可能性，导致振荡和混沌；以及向脆弱、边缘稳定状态的自发演化——自组织临界范式。我强调这些是现象学情景而非校准理论：现阶段没有“确凿证据”。但我认为，举证责任应在均衡阵营。
英文摘要
Financial and economic history is strewn with bubbles and crashes, booms and busts, crises and upheavals of all sorts. Understanding the origin of these events is arguably one of the most important problems in economic theory: are economies intrinsically unstable, and can one ``stabilize unstable economies''? In this review I argue, from a physicist's vantage point, that the concept of equilibrium -- so central to mainstream economic thinking -- is likely to be the exception rather than the rule in large, complex, interacting systems. Drawing on a series of stylized ``toy'' models, I show how excess volatility, endogenous crises and crashes, inflation swells and persistent inequalities can all emerge naturally from genuinely out-of-equilibrium dynamics, without invoking large exogenous shocks. Three generic mechanisms recur throughout: trapping in a multiplicity of history-dependent equilibria; the impossibility of dynamically reaching equilibrium, leading to oscillations and chaos; and the spontaneous evolution towards fragile, marginally stable states -- the self-organized criticality paradigm. I stress that these are phenomenological scenarios rather than calibrated theories: there is, at this stage, no ``smoking gun''. But the burden of proof, I contend, should be on the equilibrium camp.
CommentsContribution to the two-day conference "Persistent Puzzles and Paradoxes in Economics'' (June 2026). To appear as a perspective in Europhysics Letters
