風蕭蕭_Frank
以文會友
書評：《不平等的代價》
當今分裂的社會如何危及我們的未來。
作者：Joseph E. Stiglitz（W. W. Norton & Co.）
作者：克裏斯托弗·考德威爾 2012 年秋季
吹毛求疵和吹毛求疵是流行經濟學著作中的“Scylla”和“Charybdis”。 經濟學教授要麽用方程、定理和統計數據轟炸讀者，要麽認為他們會滿足於關於競爭力和增長的空洞陳詞濫調。 在美國，優秀的商業作家早已是多如牛毛。 深受廣大讀者喜愛的經濟學作家的名單非常短。 其中包括歐文·費舍爾、約翰·肯尼思·加爾布雷思和保羅·克魯格曼。 如今，其中最著名的是大學教授約瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨（Joseph Stiglitz），他的新書《不平等的代價》在整個夏天都位居《紐約時報》暢銷書排行榜上。
斯蒂格利茨不僅是一位具有說明性散文天賦的好老師。 他是一級學院派經濟學家。 他獲得了 2001 年諾貝爾經濟學獎，據聖路易斯聯邦儲備銀行統計，他被其他經濟學家引用的次數比全世界除他三位同事之外的其他經濟學家都要多。 雖然他的興趣廣泛，但他在信息經濟學方麵做出了開創性的工作，重點關注信息賦予那些擁有信息的人相對於沒有信息的人所賦予的權力。 換句話說，他的作品常常帶有政治色彩，而且他的政治觀點是激進的。 盡管斯蒂格利茨在 20 世紀 90 年代中期擔任比爾·克林頓經濟顧問委員會主席，但他在新書中將克林頓時代描述為“看似繁榮的時代”。 他對克林頓時代的財政部長羅伯特·魯賓 (Robert Rubin) 言辭嚴厲，並對其他官員提出含蓄的批評。 他與巴拉克·奧巴馬(Barack Obama)的看法也不一致。 盡管斯蒂格利茨為 2009 年的刺激計劃辯護，但他指責總統錯誤地衡量了他所繼承的金融危機的嚴重性，而且在起訴銀行家抵押貸款欺詐方麵不如喬治·H·W·布什積極。 斯蒂格利茨對“占領華爾街”運動以及幾年前還被稱為“反全球化”運動的其他表現形式表示最深切的同情。 他首選的政策方案包括更多的集體談判、更多的平權行動和更多的政府支出。 “我進入經濟學領域，”他在諾貝爾獎演講中說道，“希望它能讓我為解決失業、貧困和歧視問題做點什麽。”
然而，如果過於仔細地審視斯蒂格利茨的意識形態，就會發現他與福克斯新聞或微軟全國廣播公司 (MSNBC) 上的大多數嘉賓的共同點。 斯蒂格利茨值得一讀的地方在於他敏銳的推理、快速抓住經濟問題哲學要點的天賦，以及他對數據的靈活運用。
斯蒂格利茨隻用了不到一章的篇幅就闡述了過去三十年來不平等是如何加劇的。 即使您熟悉衡量不平等的常用方法（五分位數和百分位數的收入份額、基尼係數的國際比較），他也會向您展示一些新方法。 例如，二戰後的幾十年裏，生產率和工資始終密切相關，僅在 1980 年左右出現分歧。大約在同一時間，其他令人不安的跡象開始出現。 斯蒂格利茨指出，在此之前，經濟衰退意味著勞動生產率下降。 為什麽？ 因為在員工人數相同的情況下，公司做得更少。 老板們會囤積這些未充分利用的工人，直到經濟好轉為止。 這種情況不會再發生了。 在最近的經濟衰退中，勞動生產率有所上升。 這意味著雇主一出現麻煩跡象就會解雇工人，並從絕望的留下來的工人身上榨取更多的工作。
許多經濟學家（也許是大多數經濟學家）相信，在全球化和技術快速變革的時代，這就是餅幹破碎的方式。 斯蒂格利茨持不同意見。 他認為不平等在很大程度上是政治造成的。 這是精英“尋租”行為的結果。 尋租者不是製造物品或提供有用的服務，而是利用規則向整個社會收取費用。 他們可能會奪取負責監管他們的機構，或者利用關係來開發政府控製的資源，或者收買民選政客的服從。 斯蒂格利茨認為，對不平等負有最大責任的市場——金融、農業、製藥——很難說是自由的。 事實上，他通過訴諸基本的自由市場原則證明了這一點。 “競爭法則，”他寫道，“利潤（超出正常的資本回報）應該被壓為零。” 因為成功的企業會吸引模仿者，所以積累財富應該是一場西西弗斯遊戲。 巨額且可持續的利潤在公開市場上並不常見。
斯蒂格利茨有統計方麵的天賦。 他將它們視為開始思考的契機，而不是像許多經濟學家那樣，視為停止思考的契機。 無論其原因是什麽，日益嚴重的不平等打破了國內生產總值等經濟指標與普通美國人的經曆之間的聯係。 例如，當馬克·紮克伯格和他的投資者從 Facebook 股票首次公開募股中每人獲得數十億美元時，意味著收入增加，但美國人的中產階級並不一定會感覺更好。 事實上，雖然經濟學家經常看到收入平等和經濟表現之間存在權衡，但斯蒂格利茨寫道，“當今美國不平等的嚴重程度及其產生方式實際上會破壞增長並損害效率。” 金融行業的尋租行為吸引了越來越多的美國人來到資金所在的地方，導致“國家最寶貴的資源：人才的分配不當”。
即使斯蒂格利茨談論平等和機會，他也從不感傷，也從不談論做符合所有人利益的事情。 那是不可能的。 在斯蒂格利茨看來，經濟學總是有贏家和輸家。 它充滿了戲劇性。 它孕育著曆史後果。 “人們無法回避分配問題，”他寫道，“即使涉及到組織經濟中最簡單的問題。” 大多數美國人都同意這一點，甚至包括那些不同意他關於分配應該是什麽樣子的觀點的人。
Book Review: "The Price of Inequality"
How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Nitpicking and bloviation are the Scylla and Charybdis of popular writing about economics. Economics professors tend either to bombard their readers with equations, theorems, and statistics, or to assume they will be content with airy clichés about competitiveness and growth. Good business writers have long been a dime a dozen in the United States. The list of economics writers who have made themselves beloved of a wide reading public is a very short one. It has included Irving Fisher, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Krugman. Today, it includes, preeminently, University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, whose new book, The Price of Inequality, spent much of the summer on the New York Times extended bestseller list.
Stiglitz is not just a good teacher with a gift for expository prose. He is an academic economist of the first rank. He won the Nobel Prize in economics for 2001, and he is cited by other economists more often than all but three of his colleagues worldwide, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which charts such things. While his interests are broad, he has done groundbreaking work in the economics of information, focusing on the power it confers on those who have it over those who do not. In other words, his work often has a political edge to it, and his politics are of a radical kind. Although Stiglitz served as the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the mid-1990s, in his new book he describes the Clinton era as “one of seeming prosperity.” He has harsh words for Clinton-era treasury secretary Robert Rubin and makes veiled criticisms of other officials. Nor does he see eye to eye with Barack Obama. Although Stiglitz defends the 2009 stimulus, he faults the president for mismeasuring the severity of the financial crisis he inherited and of being less aggressive than George H. W. Bush in prosecuting bankers for mortgage fraud. Stiglitz’s profoundest sympathies are with Occupy Wall Street and other expressions of what until a few years ago was called the “anti-globalization” movement. His preferred policy prescriptions include more collective bargaining, more affirmative action, and more government spending. “I entered economics,” he said in his Nobel lecture, “with the hope that it might enable me to do something about unemployment, poverty, and discrimination.”
To look too closely at Stiglitz’s ideology, though, is to focus on what he has in common with a majority of the guests you’ll see on Fox News or MSNBC. What makes Stiglitz worth reading is his acute reasoning, his gift for getting quickly to the philosophical gist of an economic problem, and his agile deployment of data.
It takes Stiglitz less than a chapter to lay out how inequality has increased in the past thirty years. Even if you are familiar with the usual ways of measuring inequality — income shares of quintiles and percentiles, international comparisons of Gini coefficients — he will show you some new ones. For decades after World War II, for instance, productivity and wages were always closely correlated, diverging only around 1980. Other troubling signs began to appear at about the same time. Before then, Stiglitz notes, a recession meant that labor productivity went down. Why? Because firms were doing less with the same number of workers. Bosses would hoard these underutilized workers until good times returned. That doesn’t happen anymore. In recent recessions, labor productivity has gone up. That means employers are ditching workers at the first sign of trouble, and wringing more work out of the desperate ones who remain.
A lot of economists — perhaps most of them — believe that in an age of globalization and rapid technological change, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Stiglitz dissents. He sees inequality as for the most part politically created. It is the outcome of “rent seeking” behavior by elites. Instead of manufacturing things or performing useful services, rent seekers take advantage of the rules to collect payments from society at large. They may capture the agencies meant to regulate them, or use connections to exploit government-controlled resources, or buy the obedience of elected politicians. Stiglitz argues that the markets most culpable for inequality — finance, agriculture, pharmaceuticals — are hardly free. In fact, he proves it, by resorting to basic free-market principles. “The laws of competition,” he writes, “say that profits (beyond the normal return to capital) are supposed to be driven to zero.” Because successful businesses attract imitators, building a fortune ought to be a Sisyphean game. Huge and sustainable profits are not something one tends to see in open markets.
Stiglitz has a knack for statistics. He takes them as an occasion to start thinking, not, as many economists do, as an occasion to stop. Whatever its cause, growing inequality breaks the link between such economic measures as gross domestic product and the experience of the average American. When, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg and his investors get billions apiece from an initial public offering of Facebook stock, mean incomes rise, but the median American does not necessarily feel better off. Indeed, whereas economists frequently see a tradeoff between income equality and economic performance, Stiglitz writes that “the magnitude of America’s inequality today and the way it is generated actually undermine growth and impair efficiency.” Rent seeking in the finance industry has drawn more and more Americans to where the money is, leading to a “misallocation of the country’s most valuable resource: its talent.”
Even when Stiglitz talks about equality and opportunity, he never does so sentimentally, and he never talks about doing things that are in the interest of all. That is an impossibility. Economics, in Stiglitz’s view, always has winners and losers. It is fraught with drama. It is pregnant with historical consequence. “One cannot escape issues of distribution,” he writes, “even when it comes to the simplest problems in organizing an economy.” Most Americans have come to agree, even those who don’t share his opinion on what that distribution ought to look like.
