Thomas Sargent

Thomas Sargent, now a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, has taught at the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and Harvard, and currently teaches at New York University. Since the early 1970s, Sargent has been a leading figure of the rational expectations school and has made outstanding contributions to the establishment and development of the neoclassical macroeconomics system. Sargent has a deep understanding of most areas of modern economics and finance, with his academic expertise in dynamic macroeconomics and econometrics. Along with Robert Lucas Jr., Neil Wallace, and Robert Barro, he was an important representative of the rational expectations school, studying the term structure of interest rates, classical unemployment, and the Great Depression. He is also the author of several seminal papers. Two American economists, New York University professor Thomas J. Sargent and Princeton University professor Christopher A. SIMS, have been awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work in explaining the interplay between policy and the economy, the Nobel Prize Committee announced in Stockholm, Sweden, on October 10, 2011. According to the Nobel Committee, Sargent has made a significant contribution to the interpretation of data in macroeconomics, through which people can discover and learn about the effects of national policies, as well as other factors such as sudden price changes and sudden changes in the supply of products. The measurement tools he brought, under the national policy, are of great significance to economic research all over the world. In the world of serious economic theory, another characteristic of Thomas Sargent is plain language, easy to understand. He is good at sharing many simple but profound economic principles. For example, when people asked him if rational expectations theory could be applied to predicting asset prices, his answer was that because market prices aggregate information from all traders, it is difficult to predict stock prices, interest rates, exchange rates, etc. Sargent also said that many things can be met but not sought, that there are trade-offs between the individual and the collective, between equality and efficiency; Other people know more about their abilities, efforts, and preferences than you do. Sargent also talked about why there are certain promises you want to keep but can't. No one will believe you when you make those promises, because people know it's not in your interest to keep them in the future. What we need to learn is that before we make a commitment to someone else, think about whether we would stick to it if our circumstances changed. That's how you make a good name for yourself.