【作者】 曹和平； 张博； 周建波； 张志祥；

【Author】 Zhang Bo,Zhou Jianbo,Cao Heping,and Zhang Zhixiang (School of Economics,PKU; CEMA,CUFE)

【机构】 北京大学经济学； 北京大学经济学院； 中央财经大学经济与管理研究院；

【摘要】 对文明兴衰成因的探究是人类学和历史学的重要课题,经济学家也从其独特视角加入其中。Brander & Taylor(1998)开创性地建立了一个李嘉图-马尔萨斯模型以揭示复活节岛文明崩溃的原因和过程,大量的后继者又相继建立了各类模型来解释封闭小社会崩溃或可持续的原因。但所有这类研究中,都没有把有效地控制生育率作为控制人口增长的手段来加以考虑。而古代摩梭社会正是这样的一个样板。我们发现,基于其宗教信仰和崇母观念,摩梭社会衍生出了清晰的生态意识、明晰的自然资源产权制度和控制人口生育制度。基于此,本文为古代摩梭社会建立了一个动态人口-自然资源系统模型以揭示其社会可持续的动力学机制,其中,人口数量和自然资源储量是系统的状态变量,而生育率和人均资源开采速度是决策变量。我们的模型的主要结论是:摩梭人发现了一条独特的生育和自然资源开采路径,使得其人口-自然资源系统最终单调地趋向于一个非零稳定状态,没有出现大的周期性波动,与复活节岛文明的崩溃形成了鲜明对照。更多还原

【Abstract】 Recently economists have started to explore the rise and fall of civilizations, an important topic in anthropology and history. Brander & Taylor (1998) originated a Ricardo-Malthus model to reveal the reason and the process of the collapse of Easer Island. Many followers built various models to explain the collapse or sustainability of small closed societies. None of them took fertility as an endogenous variable for the control of the population growth, and hence can explain the ancient Mosuo society. We notice that Mosuo society’s religion and culture of maternity worship implied the unambivalent ecological consciousness and institutions on natural resource property rights and human fertility. So we establish a dynamic model of the racial population and natural resource stock for the ancient Mosuo society, in which the racial population and the natural resource stock are the state variables, and the fertility rate and the per capita resource exploitation rate are the decision variables. The main result of our model is that Mosuo people adopted a unique path of fertility and resource exploitation, whereby the Mosuo population and resource stock eventually monotonically approaches a non-zero equilibrium state, in strong contrast with what occurred in Easter Island.更多还原