戴開元按﹕
此文來自2009年7月27日博訊網站，不知是否為朗咸平所寫，但確實是一篇分析大陸新興特權階級的好文。
才仅仅10年之前，白领还是一个全社会人人称羡的身份。万科地产甚至将其出版的系列图书命名为《白领》。白领是指那种在高级写字楼里上班的专业技术人员，特点是高学历、高收入。特别是写字楼里外资企业，更是白领群体云集的根据地。
白领意味着体面的工作、优雅的修养、丰富的精神体验。从某种意义上讲，白领简直成为时尚的代名词。
白领必定毕业于名牌大学，甚至是硕士、博士或海归，每天朝九晚五打卡，坐在格子间的电脑旁，MSN，麦当劳，卡布奇诺，丁克，地铁，打的，坐经济舱，住星级宾馆，泡吧，煲电话，听蓝调，加班，圣诞节，斯诺克，暂住证，红酒，抽555，住租来或按揭的公寓，买简约的宜家家具，收藏CD，谈论《老友记》，向往 xz，留恋于丽江，铁杆驴友，不看中文报纸不看中国电影，看《国家地理》《名牌》《读书》杂志，看卡夫卡看张爱玲看伊朗电影，洁癖，乡愁，健身，瑜伽，养吉娃娃，香水衣服鞋子泡吧旅游鲜花买书买CD看电影，月光一族。
白领的产生是中国市场经济发展初级阶段末期的典型现象，证明了“知识改变命运 ”。白领大多只出现在一线城市。面对WTO的前夜，这些有文化有知识的年轻人开始尝试一种西方发达国家中产阶级的雅皮士生活。绅士与淑女，是充满这些新思想的青年人的人生目标。《了不起的盖茨比》和《傲慢与偏见》是他们的必读书。爱情、教养、文化、艺术、体验、精神贵族深深地吸引着他们。
10 年过去，物是人非。回头看看，当年怀着白领梦“范进中举”，当许多大学生兴冲冲踏出大学这个高级职业培训监狱大门的时候，却必须接受与黧黑的农民父亲同场竞聘的残酷现实。曾经的白领已经老去，在一场百年不遇的经济危机面前，破产的破产，失业的失业，离婚的离婚。当孕育白领的贸易、广告、房地产、IT和制造业风吹雨打流水落花，脆弱的白领蓦然发现，曾经雪白挺括的领口，已经被冰冷的汗水洇得皱皱巴巴一片姜黄。春天来的时候，老去的白领继续徘徊于物价和房价飞涨的城市。伫立在林立的写字楼脚下，他今天会收到一个面试通知么……白领的传说就这样陨落了。
与此同时，一个充满神秘色彩的社会群体已经夺去了全中国所有的光芒，他们开着“自己的”大排量名牌汽车，出入高档酒楼，高级夜总会，乘坐头等舱或软卧，住星级宾馆，拥有黄金位置的几处豪宅，购全套红木家具，在位置最好、景观最佳，装修最豪华、质量最安全的办公楼上班，独立办公室，不打卡，饭局，会面，喝茅台五粮液，品天价普洱，抽极品中华，精装《毛评二十四史》，VIP，炒股投资保险理财，收藏古玩字画珠宝黄金，高级会所，劳力士，路易威登，奢侈品，国际顶级品牌服饰，高尔夫，公派出国，移民，护照，拉斯维加斯，美容减肥按摩，组织体检，疗养，免费医疗，贵族学校，MBO，脱产学习，党校，佣人，情人，养藏獒，带薪假……
他们就是在全中国一线二线三线城市遍地开花，全面崛起的新兴黑领阶层。相对于干干净净清清白白的白领，他们的衣服是黑色的，汽车是黑色的，脸色是黑色的。他们的收入是隐蔽的，生活是隐蔽的，工作是隐蔽的……所谓隐蔽，就是像站在黑夜里的黑衣人，你知道他在，他也知道他在，但你不知道他什么样，在做什么。他们就是就职于政府和官有垄断企业的那个庞大群体。
10年间，官有建筑已经屡屡刷新了所有中国城市的高度。在气度辉煌富丽堂皇的官方办公楼面前，商业写字楼登时被压出逼仄吝啬的寒酸来。从容积率、配套、装修等各方面，拔地而起的“大裤衩”成为城市黑领新贵们的“鸟巢”。白领和他的OFFICE一起，被黑领的裤衩遮住了所有的阳光。
10年间，通过土地财政和垄断政治权力，官方组织一步步通过各种手段将社会财富向自己手中集中。不仅以重税和重复收费罚款的方式，从横向上苛刻聚敛社会财富，而且以资源浪费和环境污染等方式，从纵向上大肆透支谋夺子孙后代赖以生存的根基。官有经济在垄断的无竞争市场所向披靡，源源不断的暴利如滚滚长江。水气电油电信金融烟草卫生教育海关公路等行业自不用说，即使出版、邮政、新华书店、市政、环卫、公交、盐业、矿业、铁路、民航、文化、体育、新闻、旅游、土地等这些领域，因为禁止自由竞争，其利润之丰厚仍足以使任何外企眼红得流鼻血。在当下中国随便哪一个城市，一个大腹便便的税务监管员都可以开着路虎SUV上班，他的办公室面积有多大、装修得有多豪华不必说，只消告诉你一句，他可以在单位里健身桑拿游泳……
一个刚刚工作两年的警察就已经买车买房——没要父母的钱也没按揭……一个国家电网公司的抄表员基本月薪达到 8000元……简单推算一下，全国有1000多个省级，20000个厅级，好几万到十来万个县级，这还不包括北京的中央部门和军队警察系统。较发达地区普通黑领年收入10到20万元极普遍，年终发个十万元奖金不是什么稀奇事，而这也不仅仅是税务部门才有这个财力。
这是“合法”的收入，这一部分财产是不怕公示的。去年就有新闻称，南方某地所有的黑领都有两部车，而且很正常。人类都知道，对黑领来说，收入绝对不止薪水这一块，医疗交通吃喝拉撒贪污受贿等等，所有的地方都享受纳税人无偿供养，每月的车贴甚至比农民工辛苦一个月的薪水还要多，他们也可以在超市买个床单裤衩都开发票报销，或者把免费领来的大量昂贵药品卖钱。甚至嫖娼也要发票。可以说，所谓黑领，就是除了没给其配备法律意义上的配偶外，其它都是享受无偿供给的。
黑领阶层之所以生活水平急剧提高，是因为其垄断了包括政治、法律、经济、信息在内的一切社会资源，他们消耗了至少一半以上的中国国民收入。他们的崛起，构成了中国新二元社会的显赫一极。这个群体虽然相对数量少，但是绝对数量庞大。粗略估计一下，这种以寄生垄断为业的黑领在全国约有2000万以上。
比起10年前苍白的小资白领来，只有这些享受和垄断了政治权利的人才真正的实现了几代中国人的梦想，他们绝对已经达到甚至超过欧美发达国家生活的水准。当然，另外一极的其他“普通老百姓”则是标准的第三世界贫穷国家的国民。来自官方背景的黑领对来自民间草根的白领的颠覆，体现了政治权力向自由经济领域的渗透和僭越，以政治权力篡夺经济权力。这种食利自肥的经济身份使官方的超脱精神和公益基础遭到侵犯，合法性受到玷污，政治的伦理尊严荡然无存。官方由民众的仆从变成“民主”——民众的主子，由公共利益的正义仲裁者演化为自身利益集团的代言人，从国家和社会的守夜人退化为自私卑鄙的盗窃者。这是一种极其危险的倾向。
白领阶层可以说是开放的，或者说穷人的孩子可以通过读书实现白领梦。正因为如此，白领在大学扩招后人力资源充沛的中国急剧贬值。相对而言，黑领阶层则完全是封闭的，正因为封闭，才会奇货可居炙手可热。公共机构实际上已经成为官僚权力集团把持的私家后院，普通人家的孩子要想进入这个群体，理论上说不是不可能，只能说——很渺茫。不错，公务员是公开招聘的，垄断官方企业的职位也是面向社会招聘的，只要你拥护那个党，你就可以报名考试。
但地球人都知道这里面的规矩——潜规则，考不考得上并不取决于考试分数。黑领的特殊之处是已经走向组织化和正在走向世袭化，前者巩固，后者继承。在白领黯然陨落之后，黑领的低调崛起在全社会引发了一轮又一轮的考公务员热。同时，黑领也成为所有商家追逐的目标，他们比白领具有更真实更强悍的消费力。他们走到哪里，哪里就物价飞涨;他们对地产的投资，使农民失去了土地，使白领丧失了家园。当白领遇见黑领，立马被压出西装下面的“小” 来。
今天，一个供职于夹缝状态私企的所谓白领，以他微薄的收入仅够维持温饱而已，消费对他来说已经是一个太过夸张和绝望的词语。不久前官商云集(没有几个身家低于千万)的两会上，一个黑领代表或是同情或是鄙夷地建议小白领们应该去卖肉——不是出卖自己的肉体，是卖猪肉。在这场席卷地球的金融风暴中，无数外企破产倒闭、业绩滑坡，覆巢之下，纷纷裁员降薪，白领们仓皇失业。与此相反，中国官有组织却财大气粗逆市飘红，令世界500强为之羡慕，黑领们仍然可以毫无罪恶感的集体加薪。
近水楼台先得月，砸向黑领掌心的4万亿投资计划如同一针鸡血，使无数红了眼的黑领们激动得加额称庆——还是中国好、组织好啊。说实话，贫困潦倒的白领们从这4万亿民脂民膏中想捡点残羹剩饭也是痴心妄想。所以说，“孔乙己”这样卑微的白领如何能与“假洋鬼子”这样傲慢的黑领同日而语?如果说白领曾经掀起一股托福热、小资热的话，黑领的江湖则使传统国学和势利文化大热。易中天的阴谋学、王立群阎崇年的帝王学、于丹的犬儒学和马未都的收藏学等等，无不映照了黑领这个社会核心消费阶层的形成。
黑领的兴起说明，20年前的那场轰轰烈烈的反腐败反官倒运动之后，新兴知识群体在与权力群体博弈中已经完全丧失了主动权。权力经济终于在近10年从量变到质变，完成了对知识经济和自由经济的彻底颠覆。权力组织在文革后重新收复了对共和国的垄断话语权。近年来热映银屏的《激情燃烧的岁月》、《军歌嘹亮》、《金婚》和《天下兄弟》等剧，集中反映了文革时期第一代黑领的优裕生活。权力特权下的文革被营造被演绎得无比温馨富足和谐，根本看不到知识阶层生不如死和农民阶层食不果腹的悲惨灾难。
这种以主旋律色彩出现的怀旧情绪充满复辟邪恶和美化罪恶的企图。曾经的党校高材生、当代厚黑学大师冯仑老板毫不客气地把白领鄙视为“房奴”，一个“奴” 字撕下了一群人看似体面的假领。诚然，白领没有任何社会权利，没有罢工权，没有选举权，没有话语权;他们没有权势，没有资本，没有门第。相反，黑领则是这个国家的上帝选民。
他们的房子票子车子等等除过老婆之外，都一概享受无偿配给，几乎不用跟“普通老百姓”们争来抢去的所谓市场发生任何关系。白领是如此脆弱而不堪一击，一套小小栖身的房子就可以将其压垮;而黑领是如此坚不可催固若金汤，一场导致无数孩子死亡的“三鹿”惨案，也未见一人因职务犯罪被追究法律责任，仅仅纪律处分了事。因为对立法权和司法权的把持，黑领群体成为名义上和实质上的共和国公民，他们普遍享受到一个共和国公民所应当享受的一切政治权利。
从基本人权、财产权、公民权、选举权和一切社会福利，他们都应有尽有的得到了充分保护和满足。与之相反，日渐普遍和经济失宠的白领群体则无法享受到基本人权保证，更遑论公民权和社会福利。他们被官方称之为与“公民”相对立的“普通老百姓”或者“群众”。相对于“ 共和国公民”而言，“普通老百姓”在政治层面和法律意义上，仅相当于“人畜”、“奴隶”或者“机器人”。他们经常被官方作为十几亿的巨额国家财产来看待，说好听点叫作“劳动力资源”。其对外的称呼为“人民”，多用在“伤害中国人民感情”的时候。白领的陨落代表着知识精英的穷途末路和理性精神的落败，黑领的兴盛代表着权力意识形态的扩张，和反知识重权力的血统论和阴谋论王者归来。
“知识贬值”必然带来“读书无用论”的盛行，中国社会从此向封建资本主义进一步靠拢。社会文化日渐沙化和盐碱化，重归流氓文化和宫廷权谋黑幕政治的覆辙。黑领对白领的阻击和绞杀使构成未来社会主流的新兴中产阶级胎死腹中，建立宪政公民社会的启蒙运动被迫土崩瓦解。这种财阀与权贵的合力扼杀使一个民族的创新能力和创造力严重退化直至丧失。社会结构和信息结构进一步被凝固被肢解，青年一代被年迈保守的既得利益者压制封堵在社会最底层。
健康的社会流动和财富循环陷于停滞，推动社会进步的活力和源泉被窒息被堵死。胜者为王的狼图腾文化、不择手段的官场权谋文化、暴殄天物的面子文化和崇高伟大的满清皇帝戏之所以大行其道，正映射着白领规则的陨落与黑领规矩的升起，中国社会由知识和文明的艰难复苏，无可挽回地退回到野蛮与无知的权力通吃、弱肉强食中去。
往高处走，水往低处流。在全社会的羡慕、嫉妒和仇视之中，黑领阶层一方面继续低调的巩固其社会地位(政治地位和经济地位)，另一方面在完成原始积累后，他们开始悄然向新大陆挺进——携款外逃，或者投资移民，实现自己正式加入世界发达国家高级人类的梦想，同时也使自己的后代永远彻底的摆脱水深火热的中国。摘自胡记茶行《对现状的分析——挤不进去，你永远是穷人》：据官方统计，2004年中国农民人均年收入2936元，按年人均纯收入低于668元的标准，中国农村绝对贫困人口为2610万人。如果按照世界上公认的人均1天1美元以下就属贫困的标准，我国目前还有2.1亿贫困人口。“八五”期间，公车车辆消费占到全部国家财政支出的38%，整个国家总计支出37960亿中的37.58%用于供养行政公务人员;公款吃喝公费出国年花费每年达9000亿元以上。
中国社会阶层分类：第一个阶层(也是处于最顶端的王者阶层)是由几百个家族组成，他们拥有骇人听闻的财富，是这个国家的掌控者。在他们之下是第二个阶层——地方性的豪族，数量也许是几万家，这些人控制着地方的权力，自然也拥有无与伦比的财产。第三个阶层是由公务员，事业单位人员、国企管理人员、垄断国企人员和私营企业主等这些人中的佼佼者以及顶级白领阶层等这些群体中的人员组成。第四个阶层是生活比较安逸的一般民众，他们经济上还算比较宽裕，但是社会地位不高，对社会没有什么影响力。第五个阶层是由城市平民和农村中生活比较好的农民组成。第六个阶层是贫困群体，也就是四亿没有购买能力的民众。第七个阶层是一亿没有财富的赤贫阶层，第八个阶层就是最后那一亿灾难性赤贫的阶层。
Monday, July 27, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
What went wrong with economics?
And how the discipline should change to avoid the mistakes of the past
7-16 2009,The Economist print edition
戴開元按﹕這是「經濟學人」雜誌最近發表的社論及兩篇文章，內容是報導和分析這次全球經濟危機和大衰退對經濟學領域的影響，尤其是宏觀經濟學和金融經濟學。經濟學是最「科學化」的社會科學，然而許多經濟學家的研究受政治派別（或者利益集團）的影響很大，因而其一些重大結論或主流看法（如市場萬能論）往往被實際社會所證偽。人們有理由追問﹕經濟學真的是一門科學否？
OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”
In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
In its crudest form—the idea that economics as a whole is discredited—the current backlash has gone far too far. If ignorance allowed investors and politicians to exaggerate the virtues of economics, it now blinds them to its benefits. Economics is less a slavish creed than a prism through which to understand the world. It is a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow. Much of that body of knowledge has no link to the financial crisis and remains as useful as ever.
And if economics as a broad discipline deserves a robust defence, so does the free-market paradigm. Too many people, especially in Europe, equate mistakes made by economists with a failure of economic liberalism. Their logic seems to be that if economists got things wrong, then politicians will do better. That is a false—and dangerous—conclusion.
Rational fools
These important caveats, however, should not obscure the fact that two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined (see article, article). There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.
The first charge is half right. Macroeconomists, especially within central banks, were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles. Financial economists, meanwhile, formalised theories of the efficiency of markets, fuelling the notion that markets would regulate themselves and financial innovation was always beneficial. Wall Street’s most esoteric instruments were built on these ideas.
But economists were hardly naive believers in market efficiency. Financial academics have spent much of the past 30 years poking holes in the “efficient market hypothesis”. A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions.
So there were caveats aplenty. But as insights from academia arrived in the rough and tumble of Wall Street, such delicacies were put aside. And absurd assumptions were added. No economic theory suggests you should value mortgage derivatives on the basis that house prices would always rise. Finance professors are not to blame for this, but they might have shouted more loudly that their insights were being misused. Instead many cheered the party along (often from within banks). Put that together with the complacency of the macroeconomists and there were too few voices shouting stop.
Blindsided and divided
The charge that most economists failed to see the crisis coming also has merit. To be sure, some warned of trouble. The likes of Robert Shiller of Yale, Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the team at the Bank for International Settlements are now famous for their prescience. But most were blindsided. And even worrywarts who felt something was amiss had no idea of how bad the consequences would be.
That was partly to do with professional silos, which limited both the tools available and the imaginations of the practitioners. Few financial economists thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it; and few worried about the effect on the overall economy of the markets for all asset classes seizing up simultaneously, since few believed that was possible.
Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly. Their framework reflected an uneasy truce between the intellectual heirs of Keynes, who accept that economies can fall short of their potential, and purists who hold that supply must always equal demand. The models that epitomise this synthesis—the sort used in many central banks—incorporate imperfections in labour markets (“sticky” wages, for instance, which allow unemployment to rise), but make no room for such blemishes in finance. By assuming that capital markets worked perfectly, macroeconomists were largely able to ignore the economy’s financial plumbing. But models that ignored finance had little chance of spotting a calamity that stemmed from it.
What about trying to fix it? Here the financial crisis has blown apart the fragile consensus between purists and Keynesians that monetary policy was the best way to smooth the business cycle. In many countries short-term interest rates are near zero and in a banking crisis monetary policy works less well. With their compromise tool useless, both sides have retreated to their roots, ignoring the other camp’s ideas. Keynesians, such as Mr Krugman, have become uncritical supporters of fiscal stimulus. Purists are vocal opponents. To outsiders, the cacophony underlines the profession’s uselessness.
Add these criticisms together and there is a clear case for reinvention, especially in macroeconomics. Just as the Depression spawned Keynesianism, and the 1970s stagflation fuelled a backlash, creative destruction is already under way. Central banks are busy bolting crude analyses of financial markets onto their workhorse models. Financial economists are studying the way that incentives can skew market efficiency. And today’s dilemmas are prompting new research: which form of fiscal stimulus is most effective? How do you best loosen monetary policy when interest rates are at zero? And so on.
But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.
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The other-worldly philosophers
Although the crisis has exposed bitter divisions among economists, it could still be good for economics. Our first article looks at the turmoil among macroeconomists. Our second (see article) examines the foundations of financial economics
ROBERT LUCAS, one of the greatest macroeconomists of his generation, and his followers are “making ancient and basic analytical errors all over the place”. Harvard’s Robert Barro, another towering figure in the discipline, is “making truly boneheaded arguments”. The past 30 years of macroeconomics training at American and British universities were a “costly waste of time”.
To the uninitiated, economics has always been a dismal science. But all these attacks come from within the guild: from Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times; and Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics (LSE), respectively. The macroeconomic crisis of the past two years is also provoking a crisis of confidence in macroeconomics. In the last of his Lionel Robbins lectures at the LSE on June 10th, Mr Krugman feared that most macroeconomics of the past 30 years was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst”.
These internal critics argue that economists missed the origins of the crisis; failed to appreciate its worst symptoms; and cannot now agree about the cure. In other words, economists misread the economy on the way up, misread it on the way down and now mistake the right way out.
On the way up, macroeconomists were not wholly complacent. Many of them thought the housing bubble would pop or the dollar would fall. But they did not expect the financial system to break. Even after the seizure in interbank markets in August 2007, macroeconomists misread the danger. Most were quite sanguine about the prospect of Lehman Brothers going bust in September 2008.
Nor can economists now agree on the best way to resolve the crisis. They mostly overestimated the power of routine monetary policy (ie, central-bank purchases of government bills) to restore prosperity. Some now dismiss the power of fiscal policy (ie, government sales of its securities) to do the same. Others advocate it with passionate intensity.
Among the passionate are Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman. They turn for inspiration to Depression-era texts, especially the writings of John Maynard Keynes, and forgotten mavericks, such as Hyman Minsky. In the humanities this would count as routine scholarship. But to many high-tech economists it is a bit undignified. Real scientists, after all, do not leaf through Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” to solve contemporary problems in physics.
They accuse economists like Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman of falling back on antiquated Keynesian doctrines—as if nothing had been learned in the past 70 years. Messrs DeLong and Krugman, in turn, accuse economists like Mr Lucas of not falling back on Keynesian economics—as if everything had been forgotten over the past 70 years. For Mr Krugman, we are living through a “Dark Age of macroeconomics”, in which the wisdom of the ancients has been lost.
What was this wisdom, and how was it forgotten? The history of macroeconomics begins in intellectual struggle. Keynes wrote the “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, which was published in 1936, in an “unnecessarily controversial tone”, according to some readers. But it was a controversy the author had waged in his own mind. He saw the book as a “struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought” he had inherited from his classical predecessors.
That classical mode of thought held that full employment would prevail, because supply created its own demand. In a classical economy, whatever people earn is either spent or saved; and whatever is saved is invested in capital projects. Nothing is hoarded, nothing lies idle.
Keynes appreciated the classical model’s elegance and consistency, virtues economists still crave. But that did not stop him demolishing it. In his scheme, investment was governed by the animal spirits of entrepreneurs, facing an imponderable future. The same uncertainty gave savers a reason to hoard their wealth in liquid assets, like money, rather than committing it to new capital projects. This liquidity-preference, as Keynes called it, governed the price of financial securities and hence the rate of interest. If animal spirits flagged or liquidity-preference surged, the pace of investment would falter, with no obvious market force to restore it. Demand would fall short of supply, leaving willing workers on the shelf. It fell to governments to revive demand, by cutting interest rates if possible or by public works if necessary.
The Keynesian task of “demand management” outlived the Depression, becoming a routine duty of governments. They were aided by economic advisers, who built working models of the economy, quantifying the key relationships. For almost three decades after the second world war these advisers seemed to know what they were doing, guided by an apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment. But their credibility did not survive the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. These condemned Western economies to “stagflation”, a baffling combination of unemployment and inflation, which the Keynesian consensus grasped poorly and failed to prevent.
The Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, eventually defeated American inflation in the early 1980s, albeit at a grievous cost to employment. But victory did not restore the intellectual peace. Macroeconomists split into two camps, drawing opposite lessons from the episode.
The purists, known as “freshwater” economists because of the lakeside universities where they happened to congregate, blamed stagflation on restless central bankers trying to do too much. They started from the classical assumption that markets cleared, leaving no unsold goods or unemployed workers. Efforts by policymakers to smooth the economy’s natural ups and downs did more harm than good.
America’s coastal universities housed most of the other lot, “saltwater” pragmatists. To them, the double-digit unemployment that accompanied Mr Volcker’s assault on inflation was proof enough that markets could malfunction. Wages might fail to adjust, and prices might stick. This grit in the economic machine justified some meddling by policymakers.
Mr Volcker’s recession bottomed out in 1982. Nothing like it was seen again until last year. In the intervening quarter-century of tranquillity, macroeconomics also recovered its composure. The opposing schools of thought converged. The freshwater economists accepted a saltier view of policymaking. Their opponents adopted a more freshwater style of modelmaking. You might call the new synthesis brackish macroeconomics.
Pinches of salt
Brackish macroeconomics flowed from universities into central banks. It underlay the doctrine of inflation-targeting embraced in New Zealand, Canada, Britain, Sweden and several emerging markets, such as Turkey. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed since 2006, is a renowned contributor to brackish economics.
For about a decade before the crisis, macroeconomists once again appeared to know what they were doing. Their thinking was embodied in a new genre of working models of the economy, called “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” (DSGE) models. These helped guide deliberations at several central banks.
Mr Buiter, who helped set interest rates at the Bank of England from 1997 to 2000, believes the latest academic theories had a profound influence there. He now thinks this influence was baleful. On his blog, Mr Buiter argues that a training in modern macroeconomics was a “severe handicap” at the onset of the financial crisis, when the central bank had to “switch gears” from preserving price stability to safeguarding financial stability.
Modern macroeconomists worried about the prices of goods and services, but neglected the prices of assets. This was partly because they had too much faith in financial markets. If asset prices reflect economic fundamentals, why not just model the fundamentals, ignoring the shadow they cast on Wall Street?
It was also because they had too little interest in the inner workings of the financial system. “Philosophically speaking,” writes Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, Columbia University, economists are “materialists” for whom “bags of wheat are more important than stacks of bonds.” Finance is a veil, obscuring what really matters. As a poet once said, “promises of payment/Are neither food nor raiment”.
In many macroeconomic models, therefore, insolvencies cannot occur. Financial intermediaries, like banks, often don’t exist. And whether firms finance themselves with equity or debt is a matter of indifference. The Bank of England’s DSGE model, for example, does not even try to incorporate financial middlemen, such as banks. “The model is not, therefore, directly useful for issues where financial intermediation is of first-order importance,” its designers admit. The present crisis is, unfortunately, one of those issues.
The bank’s modellers go on to say that they prefer to study finance with specialised models designed for that purpose. One of the most prominent was, in fact, pioneered by Mr Bernanke, with Mark Gertler of New York University. Unfortunately, models that include such financial-market complications “can be very difficult to handle,” according to Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton, who has handled more of these difficulties than most. Convenience, not conviction, often dictates the choices economists make.
Convenience, however, is addictive. Economists can become seduced by their models, fooling themselves that what the model leaves out does not matter. It is, for example, often convenient to assume that markets are “complete”—that a price exists today, for every good, at every date, in every contingency. In this world, you can always borrow as much as you want at the going rate, and you can always sell as much as you want at the going rate.
Before the crisis, many banks and shadow banks made similar assumptions. They believed they could always roll over their short-term debts or sell their mortgage-backed securities, if the need arose. The financial crisis made a mockery of both assumptions. Funds dried up, and markets thinned out. In his anatomy of the crisis Mr Brunnermeier shows how both of these constraints fed on each other, producing a “liquidity spiral”.
What followed was a furious dash for cash, as investment banks sold whatever they could, commercial banks hoarded reserves and firms drew on lines of credit. Keynes would have interpreted this as an extreme outbreak of liquidity-preference, says Paul Davidson, whose biography of the master has just been republished with a new afterword. But contemporary economics had all but forgotten the term.
Fiscal fisticuffs
The mainstream macroeconomics embodied in DSGE models was a poor guide to the origins of the financial crisis, and left its followers unprepared for the symptoms. Does it offer any insight into the best means of recovery?
In the first months of the crisis, macroeconomists reposed great faith in the powers of the Fed and other central banks. In the summer of 2007, a few weeks after the August liquidity crisis began, Frederic Mishkin, a distinguished academic economist and then a governor of the Fed, gave a reassuring talk at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He presented the results of simulations from the Fed’s FRB/US model. Even if house prices fell by a fifth in the next two years, the slump would knock only 0.25% off GDP, according to his benchmark model, and add only a tenth of a percentage point to the unemployment rate. The reason was that the Fed would respond “aggressively”, by which he meant a cut in the federal funds rate of just one percentage point. He concluded that the central bank had the tools to contain the damage at a “manageable level”.
Since his presentation, the Fed has cut its key rate by five percentage points to a mere 0-0.25%. Its conventional weapons have proved insufficient to the task. This has shaken economists’ faith in monetary policy. Unfortunately, they are also horribly divided about what comes next.
Mr Krugman and others advocate a bold fiscal expansion, borrowing their logic from Keynes and his contemporary, Richard Kahn. Kahn pointed out that a dollar spent on public works might generate more than a dollar of output if the spending circulated repeatedly through the economy, stimulating resources that might otherwise have lain idle.
Today’s economists disagree over the size of this multiplier. Mr Barro thinks the estimates of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors are absurdly large. Mr Lucas calls them “schlock economics”, contrived to justify Mr Obama’s projections for the budget deficit. But economists are not exactly drowning in research on this question. Mr Krugman calculates that of the 7,000 or so papers published by the National Bureau of Economic Research between 1985 and 2000, only five mentioned fiscal policy in their title or abstract.
Do these public spats damage macroeconomics? Greg Mankiw, of Harvard, recalls the angry exchanges in the 1980s between Robert Solow and Mr Lucas—both eminent economists who could not take each other seriously. This vitriol, he writes, attracted attention, much like a bar-room fist-fight. But he thinks it also dismayed younger scholars, who gave these macroeconomic disputes a wide berth.
By this account, the period of intellectual peace that followed in the 1990s should have been a golden age for macroeconomics. But the brackish consensus also seems to leave students cold. According to David Colander, who has twice surveyed the opinions of economists in the best American PhD programmes, macroeconomics is often the least popular class. “What did you learn in macro?” Mr Colander asked a group of Chicago students. “Did you do the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model?” “We learned a lot of junk like that,” one replied.
It takes a model to beat a model
The benchmark macroeconomic model, though not junk, suffers from some obvious flaws, such as the assumption of complete markets or frictionless finance. Indeed, because these flaws are obvious, economists are well aware of them. Critics like Mr Buiter are not telling them anything new. Economists can and do depart from the benchmark. That, indeed, is how they get published. Thus a growing number of cutting-edge models incorporate one or two financial frictions. And economists like Mr Brunnermeier are trying to fit their small, “blackboard” models of the crisis into a larger macroeconomic frame.
But the benchmark still matters. It formalises economists’ gut instincts about where the best analytical cuts lie. It is the starting point to which the theorist returns after every ingenious excursion. Few economists really believe all its assumptions, but few would rather start anywhere else.
Unfortunately, it is these primitive models, rather than their sophisticated descendants, that often exert the most influence over the world of policy and practice. This is partly because these first principles endure long enough to find their way from academia into policymaking circles. As Keynes pointed out, the economists who most influence practical men of action are the defunct ones whose scribblings have had time to percolate from the seminar room to wider conversations.
These basic models are also influential because of their simplicity. Faced with the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the real world, policymakers often fall back on the highest-order principles and the broadest presumptions. More specific, nuanced theories are often less versatile. They shed light on whatever they were designed to explain, but little beyond.
Would economists be better off starting from somewhere else? Some think so. They draw inspiration from neglected prophets, like Minsky, who recognised that the “real” economy was inseparable from the financial. Such prophets were neglected not for what they said, but for the way they said it. Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories. They will believe something when they can model it.
Mr Colander, therefore, thinks economics requires a revolution in technique. Instead of solving models “by hand”, using economists’ powers of deduction, he proposes simulating economies on the computer. In this line of research, the economist specifies simple rules of thumb by which agents interact with each other, and then lets the computer go to work, grinding out repeated simulations to reveal what kind of unforeseen patterns might emerge. If he is right, then macroeconomists, like zombie banks, must write off many of their past intellectual investments before they can make progress again.
Mr Krugman, by contrast, thinks reform is more likely to come from within. Keynes, he observes, was a “consummate insider”, who understood the theory he was demolishing precisely because he was once convinced by it. In the meantime, he says, macroeconomists should turn to patient empirical spadework, documenting crises past and present, in the hope that a fresh theory might later make sense of it all.
Macroeconomics began with Keynes, but the word did not appear in the journals until 1945, in an article by Jacob Marschak. He reviewed the profession’s growing understanding of the business cycle, making an analogy with other sciences. Seismology, for example, makes progress through better instruments, improved theories or more frequent earthquakes. In the case of economics, Marschak concluded, “the earthquakes did most of the job.”
Economists were deprived of earthquakes for a quarter of a century. The Great Moderation, as this period was called, was not conducive to great macroeconomics. Thanks to the seismic events of the past two years, the prestige of macroeconomists is low, but the potential of their subject is much greater. The furious rows that divide them are a blow to their credibility, but may prove to be a spur to creativity.
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Efficiency and beyond
The efficient-markets hypothesis has underpinned many of the financial industry’s models for years. After the crash, what remains of it?
IN 1978 Michael Jensen, an American economist, boldly declared that “there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the efficient-markets hypothesis” (EMH). That was quite a claim. The theory’s origins went back to the beginning of the century, but it had come to prominence only a decade or so before. Eugene Fama, of the University of Chicago, defined its essence: that the price of a financial asset reflects all available information that is relevant to its value.
From that idea powerful conclusions were drawn, not least on Wall Street. If the EMH held, then markets would price financial assets broadly correctly. Deviations from equilibrium values could not last for long. If the price of a share, say, was too low, well-informed investors would buy it and make a killing. If it looked too dear, they could sell or short it and make money that way. It also followed that bubbles could not form—or, at any rate, could not last: some wise investor would spot them and pop them. And trying to beat the market was a fool’s errand for almost everyone. If the information was out there, it was already in the price.
On such ideas, and on the complex mathematics that described them, was founded the Wall Street profession of financial engineering. The engineers designed derivatives and securitisations, from simple interest-rate options to ever more intricate credit-default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. All the while, confident in the theoretical underpinnings of their inventions, they reassured any doubters that all this activity was not just making bankers rich. It was making the financial system safer and the economy healthier.
That is why many people view the financial crisis that began in 2007 as a devastating blow to the credibility not only of banks but also of the entire academic discipline of financial economics. That verdict is too simple. Granted, financial economists helped to start the bankers’ party, and some joined in with gusto. But even when the EMH still seemed fresh, economists were picking holes in it. A strand of sceptical thought, behavioural economics, has been booming. There are even signs of a synthesis between the EMH and the sceptics. Academia thus moved on, even if Wall Street did not. Nonetheless, the extent to which politicians and regulators trying to reform finance can trust financial economists is an open question.
The EMH, to be sure, has loyal defenders. “There are models, and there are those who use the models,” says Myron Scholes, who in 1997 won the Nobel prize in economics for his part in creating the most widely used model in the finance industry—the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options. Mr Scholes thinks much of the blame for the recent woe should be pinned not on economists’ theories and models but on those on Wall Street and in the City who pushed them too far in practice.
Financial firms plugged in data that reflected a “view of the world that was far more benign than it was reasonable to take, emphasising recent inputs over more historic numbers,” says Mr Scholes. “Apparently, a lot of the models used for structured products were pretty good, but the inputs were awful.” Indeed, the vast majority of derivative contracts and securitisations have performed exactly as their models said they would. It was the exceptions that proved disastrous.
Mr Scholes knows whereof he speaks. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund he founded with, among others, Robert Merton, a fellow Nobel laureate, skidded off the road in 1998. Since then, he has been pointing out dangers ignored or underestimated in the finance industry, such as the risk that liquid markets can dry up far faster than is typically assumed. (That did not stop Platinum Grove, the latest hedge fund in which he is involved, taking a big hit during the recent meltdown.)
He has also been “criticising for years” the “value-at-risk” (VAR) models used by institutional investors to work out how much capital they need to set aside as insurance against losses on risky assets. These models mistakenly assume that the volatility of asset prices and the correlations between prices are constant, says Mr Scholes. When, say, two types of asset were assumed to be uncorrelated, investors felt able to hold the same capital as a cushion against losses on both, because they would not lose on both at the same time. However, as Mr Scholes discovered at LTCM and as the entire finance industry has now learnt for itself, at times of market stress assets that normally are uncorrelated can suddenly become highly correlated. At that point the capital buffer implied by VAR turns out to be woefully inadequate.
Even as financial engineers were designing all sorts of clever products on the assumption that markets were efficient, academic economists were focusing more on how markets fall short. Even before the 1987 stockmarket crash gave them their first real-world reminder of markets’ capriciousness, some of them were examining the flaws in the theory.
In 1980 Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz, another subsequent winner of a Nobel prize, pointed out a paradox. If prices reflect all information, then there is no gain from going to the trouble of gathering it, so no one will. A little inefficiency is necessary to give informed investors an incentive to drive prices towards efficiency. For Mr Scholes, it is the belief that markets tend to return prices to their efficient equilibrium when they move away from it that gives the EMH its continuing relevance.
Economists also began to study “institutional frictions” in markets. For instance, the EMH’s devotees had assumed that smart investors would be able to trade against less well-informed “noise traders” and overwhelm them by driving prices to reflect true value. But it became clear that there were limits to their ability to arbitrage folly away. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist, among others, pointed out that it could be too costly for informed investors to borrow enough to bet against the noise traders. Once it is admitted that prices can move away from fundamentals for a long time, informed investors may do best by riding the trend rather than fighting it. The trick then is to get out just before momentum shifts the other way. But in this world, rational investors may contribute to bubbles rather than preventing them.
In the early years of the EMH, researchers spent little time worrying about the workings of financial institutions—a weakness of macroeconomics too. In 2000, in his presidential address to the American Finance Association, Franklin Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, asked: “Do financial institutions matter?” Lay people, he said, “might be surprised to learn that institutions play little role in financial theory.” Indeed they might. Mr Allen’s explanation was partly that the dominant theories had been shaped at a time when America, especially, was spared financial crises.
In the past decade or so, financial economists have been paying more attention to institutional questions, such as how bankers should be paid. Many of these researchers broadly accept the EMH, but see their role as uncovering sources of inefficiency that can be addressed to make markets more efficient.
However, a second branch of financial economics is far more sceptical about markets’ inherent rationality. Behavioural economics, which applies the insights of psychology to finance, has boomed in the past decade. In particular, behavioural economists have argued that human beings tend to be too confident of their own abilities and tend to extrapolate recent trends into the future, a combination that may contribute to bubbles. There is also evidence that losses can make investors extremely, irrationally risk-averse—exaggerating price falls when a bubble bursts.
Behavioural economists were among the first to sound the alarm about trouble in the markets. Notably, Robert Shiller of Yale gave an early warning that America’s housing market was dangerously overvalued. This was his second prescient call. In the 1990s his concerns about the bubbliness of the stockmarket had prompted Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, to wonder if the heady share prices of the day were the result of investors’ “irrational exuberance”. The title of Mr Shiller’s latest book, “Animal Spirits” (written with George Akerlof, of the University of California, Berkeley), is taken from John Maynard Keynes’s description of the quirky psychological forces shaping markets. It argues that macroeconomics, too, should draw lessons from psychology.
“In some ways, we behavioural economists have won by default, because we have been less arrogant,” says Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, one of the pioneers of behavioural finance. Those who denied that prices could get out of line, or ever have bubbles, “look foolish”. Mr Scholes, however, insists that the efficient-market paradigm is not dead: “To say something has failed you have to have something to replace it, and so far we don’t have a new paradigm to replace efficient markets.” The trouble with behavioural economics, he adds, is that “it really hasn’t shown in aggregate how it affects prices.”
Yet EMH-ers and behaviouralists are increasingly asking the same questions and drawing on each other’s ideas. For instance, Mr Thaler concedes that in some ways the events of the past couple of years have strengthened the EMH. The hypothesis has two parts, he says: the “no-free-lunch part and the price-is-right part, and if anything the first part has been strengthened as we have learned that some investment strategies are riskier than they look and it really is difficult to beat the market.” The idea that the market price is the right price, however, has been badly dented.
Mr Thaler also says that only some of the recent problems were behavioural. Many were due to things that are open to non-behavioural economics, “like better risk analysis, how we identify hidden correlations.” It will be no surprise if, thanks to the catalytic power of the bubble and market meltdown, the distinctions between the two camps disappear and a new paradigm emerges.
One economist leading the effort to define that new paradigm is Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sees merit in both the rational and behavioural views. He has tried to reconcile them in the “adaptive markets hypothesis”, which supposes that humans are neither fully rational nor psychologically unhinged. Instead, they work by making best guesses and by trial and error. If one investment strategy fails, they try another. If it works, they stick with it. Mr Lo borrows heavily from evolutionary science. He does not see markets as efficient in Mr Fama’s sense, but thinks they are fiercely competitive. Because the “ecology” changes over time, people make mistakes when adapting. Old strategies become obsolete and new ones are called for.
The finance industry is in the midst of a transformative period of evolution, and financial economists have a huge agenda to tackle. They should do so quickly, given the determination of politicians to overhaul the regulation of financial markets.
One task, also of interest to macroeconomists, is to work out what central bankers should do about bubbles—now that it is plain that they do occur and can cause great damage when they burst. Not even behaviouralists such as Mr Thaler would want to see, say, the Fed trying to set prices in financial markets. He does see an opportunity, however, for governments to “lean into the wind a little more” to reduce the volatility of bubbles and crashes. For instance, when guaranteeing home loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, America’s giant mortgage companies, could be required to demand higher down-payments as a proportion of the purchase price, the higher house prices are relative to rents.
Another priority is to get a better understanding of systemic risk, which Messrs Scholes and Thaler agree has been seriously underestimated. A lot of risk-managers in financial firms believed their risk was perfectly controlled, says Mr Scholes, “but they needed to know what everyone else was doing, to see the aggregate picture.” It turned out that everyone was doing very similar things. So when their VAR models started telling them to sell, they all did—driving prices down further and triggering further model-driven selling.
Several countries now expect to introduce a systemic-risk regulator. Financial economists may have useful advice to offer. Many of them see information as crucial. Data should be collected from individual firms and aggregated. The overall data should then be published. That would be better, they think, than a system based solely on the micromanagement of individual institutions deemed systemically significant. Mr Scholes favours relying less on VAR to calculate capital reserves against losses. Instead, each category of asset should have its own risk-capital reserves, which could not be shared with other assets, even if prices had not been correlated in the past. As experience shows, correlations can change suddenly.
Financial economists also need better theories of why liquid markets suddenly become illiquid and of how to manage the risk of “moral hazard”—the danger that the existence of government regulation and safety nets encourages market participants to take bigger risks than they might otherwise have done. The sorry consequences of letting Lehman Brothers fail, which was intended to discourage moral hazard, showed that the middle of a crisis is not the time to get tough. But when is?
Mr Lo has a novel idea for future crises: creating a financial equivalent of the National Transport Safety Board, which investigates every civil-aviation crash in America. He would like similar independent, after-the-fact scrutiny of every financial failure, to see what caused it and what lessons could be learned. Not the least of the difficulties in the continuing crisis is working out exactly what went wrong and why—and who, including financial economists, should take the blame.
7-16 2009,The Economist print edition
戴開元按﹕這是「經濟學人」雜誌最近發表的社論及兩篇文章，內容是報導和分析這次全球經濟危機和大衰退對經濟學領域的影響，尤其是宏觀經濟學和金融經濟學。經濟學是最「科學化」的社會科學，然而許多經濟學家的研究受政治派別（或者利益集團）的影響很大，因而其一些重大結論或主流看法（如市場萬能論）往往被實際社會所證偽。人們有理由追問﹕經濟學真的是一門科學否？
OF ALL the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself. A few years ago, the dismal science was being acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behaviour, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling. Wall Street ransacked the best universities for game theorists and options modellers. And on the public stage, economists were seen as far more trustworthy than politicians. John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should “prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.”
In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken a beating. In the public mind an arrogant profession has been humbled. Though economists are still at the centre of the policy debate—think of Ben Bernanke or Larry Summers in America or Mervyn King in Britain—their pronouncements are viewed with more scepticism than before. The profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancour. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst.” Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
In its crudest form—the idea that economics as a whole is discredited—the current backlash has gone far too far. If ignorance allowed investors and politicians to exaggerate the virtues of economics, it now blinds them to its benefits. Economics is less a slavish creed than a prism through which to understand the world. It is a broad canon, stretching from theories to explain how prices are determined to how economies grow. Much of that body of knowledge has no link to the financial crisis and remains as useful as ever.
And if economics as a broad discipline deserves a robust defence, so does the free-market paradigm. Too many people, especially in Europe, equate mistakes made by economists with a failure of economic liberalism. Their logic seems to be that if economists got things wrong, then politicians will do better. That is a false—and dangerous—conclusion.
Rational fools
These important caveats, however, should not obscure the fact that two central parts of the discipline—macroeconomics and financial economics—are now, rightly, being severely re-examined (see article, article). There are three main critiques: that macro and financial economists helped cause the crisis, that they failed to spot it, and that they have no idea how to fix it.
The first charge is half right. Macroeconomists, especially within central banks, were too fixated on taming inflation and too cavalier about asset bubbles. Financial economists, meanwhile, formalised theories of the efficiency of markets, fuelling the notion that markets would regulate themselves and financial innovation was always beneficial. Wall Street’s most esoteric instruments were built on these ideas.
But economists were hardly naive believers in market efficiency. Financial academics have spent much of the past 30 years poking holes in the “efficient market hypothesis”. A recent ranking of academic economists was topped by Joseph Stiglitz and Andrei Shleifer, two prominent hole-pokers. A newly prominent field, behavioural economics, concentrates on the consequences of irrational actions.
So there were caveats aplenty. But as insights from academia arrived in the rough and tumble of Wall Street, such delicacies were put aside. And absurd assumptions were added. No economic theory suggests you should value mortgage derivatives on the basis that house prices would always rise. Finance professors are not to blame for this, but they might have shouted more loudly that their insights were being misused. Instead many cheered the party along (often from within banks). Put that together with the complacency of the macroeconomists and there were too few voices shouting stop.
Blindsided and divided
The charge that most economists failed to see the crisis coming also has merit. To be sure, some warned of trouble. The likes of Robert Shiller of Yale, Nouriel Roubini of New York University and the team at the Bank for International Settlements are now famous for their prescience. But most were blindsided. And even worrywarts who felt something was amiss had no idea of how bad the consequences would be.
That was partly to do with professional silos, which limited both the tools available and the imaginations of the practitioners. Few financial economists thought much about illiquidity or counterparty risk, for instance, because their standard models ignore it; and few worried about the effect on the overall economy of the markets for all asset classes seizing up simultaneously, since few believed that was possible.
Macroeconomists also had a blindspot: their standard models assumed that capital markets work perfectly. Their framework reflected an uneasy truce between the intellectual heirs of Keynes, who accept that economies can fall short of their potential, and purists who hold that supply must always equal demand. The models that epitomise this synthesis—the sort used in many central banks—incorporate imperfections in labour markets (“sticky” wages, for instance, which allow unemployment to rise), but make no room for such blemishes in finance. By assuming that capital markets worked perfectly, macroeconomists were largely able to ignore the economy’s financial plumbing. But models that ignored finance had little chance of spotting a calamity that stemmed from it.
What about trying to fix it? Here the financial crisis has blown apart the fragile consensus between purists and Keynesians that monetary policy was the best way to smooth the business cycle. In many countries short-term interest rates are near zero and in a banking crisis monetary policy works less well. With their compromise tool useless, both sides have retreated to their roots, ignoring the other camp’s ideas. Keynesians, such as Mr Krugman, have become uncritical supporters of fiscal stimulus. Purists are vocal opponents. To outsiders, the cacophony underlines the profession’s uselessness.
Add these criticisms together and there is a clear case for reinvention, especially in macroeconomics. Just as the Depression spawned Keynesianism, and the 1970s stagflation fuelled a backlash, creative destruction is already under way. Central banks are busy bolting crude analyses of financial markets onto their workhorse models. Financial economists are studying the way that incentives can skew market efficiency. And today’s dilemmas are prompting new research: which form of fiscal stimulus is most effective? How do you best loosen monetary policy when interest rates are at zero? And so on.
But a broader change in mindset is still needed. Economists need to reach out from their specialised silos: macroeconomists must understand finance, and finance professors need to think harder about the context within which markets work. And everybody needs to work harder on understanding asset bubbles and what happens when they burst. For in the end economists are social scientists, trying to understand the real world. And the financial crisis has changed that world.
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The other-worldly philosophers
Although the crisis has exposed bitter divisions among economists, it could still be good for economics. Our first article looks at the turmoil among macroeconomists. Our second (see article) examines the foundations of financial economics
ROBERT LUCAS, one of the greatest macroeconomists of his generation, and his followers are “making ancient and basic analytical errors all over the place”. Harvard’s Robert Barro, another towering figure in the discipline, is “making truly boneheaded arguments”. The past 30 years of macroeconomics training at American and British universities were a “costly waste of time”.
To the uninitiated, economics has always been a dismal science. But all these attacks come from within the guild: from Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley; Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times; and Willem Buiter of the London School of Economics (LSE), respectively. The macroeconomic crisis of the past two years is also provoking a crisis of confidence in macroeconomics. In the last of his Lionel Robbins lectures at the LSE on June 10th, Mr Krugman feared that most macroeconomics of the past 30 years was “spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst”.
These internal critics argue that economists missed the origins of the crisis; failed to appreciate its worst symptoms; and cannot now agree about the cure. In other words, economists misread the economy on the way up, misread it on the way down and now mistake the right way out.
On the way up, macroeconomists were not wholly complacent. Many of them thought the housing bubble would pop or the dollar would fall. But they did not expect the financial system to break. Even after the seizure in interbank markets in August 2007, macroeconomists misread the danger. Most were quite sanguine about the prospect of Lehman Brothers going bust in September 2008.
Nor can economists now agree on the best way to resolve the crisis. They mostly overestimated the power of routine monetary policy (ie, central-bank purchases of government bills) to restore prosperity. Some now dismiss the power of fiscal policy (ie, government sales of its securities) to do the same. Others advocate it with passionate intensity.
Among the passionate are Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman. They turn for inspiration to Depression-era texts, especially the writings of John Maynard Keynes, and forgotten mavericks, such as Hyman Minsky. In the humanities this would count as routine scholarship. But to many high-tech economists it is a bit undignified. Real scientists, after all, do not leaf through Newton’s “Principia Mathematica” to solve contemporary problems in physics.
They accuse economists like Mr DeLong and Mr Krugman of falling back on antiquated Keynesian doctrines—as if nothing had been learned in the past 70 years. Messrs DeLong and Krugman, in turn, accuse economists like Mr Lucas of not falling back on Keynesian economics—as if everything had been forgotten over the past 70 years. For Mr Krugman, we are living through a “Dark Age of macroeconomics”, in which the wisdom of the ancients has been lost.
What was this wisdom, and how was it forgotten? The history of macroeconomics begins in intellectual struggle. Keynes wrote the “General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money”, which was published in 1936, in an “unnecessarily controversial tone”, according to some readers. But it was a controversy the author had waged in his own mind. He saw the book as a “struggle of escape from habitual modes of thought” he had inherited from his classical predecessors.
That classical mode of thought held that full employment would prevail, because supply created its own demand. In a classical economy, whatever people earn is either spent or saved; and whatever is saved is invested in capital projects. Nothing is hoarded, nothing lies idle.
Keynes appreciated the classical model’s elegance and consistency, virtues economists still crave. But that did not stop him demolishing it. In his scheme, investment was governed by the animal spirits of entrepreneurs, facing an imponderable future. The same uncertainty gave savers a reason to hoard their wealth in liquid assets, like money, rather than committing it to new capital projects. This liquidity-preference, as Keynes called it, governed the price of financial securities and hence the rate of interest. If animal spirits flagged or liquidity-preference surged, the pace of investment would falter, with no obvious market force to restore it. Demand would fall short of supply, leaving willing workers on the shelf. It fell to governments to revive demand, by cutting interest rates if possible or by public works if necessary.
The Keynesian task of “demand management” outlived the Depression, becoming a routine duty of governments. They were aided by economic advisers, who built working models of the economy, quantifying the key relationships. For almost three decades after the second world war these advisers seemed to know what they were doing, guided by an apparent trade-off between inflation and unemployment. But their credibility did not survive the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. These condemned Western economies to “stagflation”, a baffling combination of unemployment and inflation, which the Keynesian consensus grasped poorly and failed to prevent.
The Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, eventually defeated American inflation in the early 1980s, albeit at a grievous cost to employment. But victory did not restore the intellectual peace. Macroeconomists split into two camps, drawing opposite lessons from the episode.
The purists, known as “freshwater” economists because of the lakeside universities where they happened to congregate, blamed stagflation on restless central bankers trying to do too much. They started from the classical assumption that markets cleared, leaving no unsold goods or unemployed workers. Efforts by policymakers to smooth the economy’s natural ups and downs did more harm than good.
America’s coastal universities housed most of the other lot, “saltwater” pragmatists. To them, the double-digit unemployment that accompanied Mr Volcker’s assault on inflation was proof enough that markets could malfunction. Wages might fail to adjust, and prices might stick. This grit in the economic machine justified some meddling by policymakers.
Mr Volcker’s recession bottomed out in 1982. Nothing like it was seen again until last year. In the intervening quarter-century of tranquillity, macroeconomics also recovered its composure. The opposing schools of thought converged. The freshwater economists accepted a saltier view of policymaking. Their opponents adopted a more freshwater style of modelmaking. You might call the new synthesis brackish macroeconomics.
Pinches of salt
Brackish macroeconomics flowed from universities into central banks. It underlay the doctrine of inflation-targeting embraced in New Zealand, Canada, Britain, Sweden and several emerging markets, such as Turkey. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Fed since 2006, is a renowned contributor to brackish economics.
For about a decade before the crisis, macroeconomists once again appeared to know what they were doing. Their thinking was embodied in a new genre of working models of the economy, called “dynamic stochastic general equilibrium” (DSGE) models. These helped guide deliberations at several central banks.
Mr Buiter, who helped set interest rates at the Bank of England from 1997 to 2000, believes the latest academic theories had a profound influence there. He now thinks this influence was baleful. On his blog, Mr Buiter argues that a training in modern macroeconomics was a “severe handicap” at the onset of the financial crisis, when the central bank had to “switch gears” from preserving price stability to safeguarding financial stability.
Modern macroeconomists worried about the prices of goods and services, but neglected the prices of assets. This was partly because they had too much faith in financial markets. If asset prices reflect economic fundamentals, why not just model the fundamentals, ignoring the shadow they cast on Wall Street?
It was also because they had too little interest in the inner workings of the financial system. “Philosophically speaking,” writes Perry Mehrling of Barnard College, Columbia University, economists are “materialists” for whom “bags of wheat are more important than stacks of bonds.” Finance is a veil, obscuring what really matters. As a poet once said, “promises of payment/Are neither food nor raiment”.
In many macroeconomic models, therefore, insolvencies cannot occur. Financial intermediaries, like banks, often don’t exist. And whether firms finance themselves with equity or debt is a matter of indifference. The Bank of England’s DSGE model, for example, does not even try to incorporate financial middlemen, such as banks. “The model is not, therefore, directly useful for issues where financial intermediation is of first-order importance,” its designers admit. The present crisis is, unfortunately, one of those issues.
The bank’s modellers go on to say that they prefer to study finance with specialised models designed for that purpose. One of the most prominent was, in fact, pioneered by Mr Bernanke, with Mark Gertler of New York University. Unfortunately, models that include such financial-market complications “can be very difficult to handle,” according to Markus Brunnermeier of Princeton, who has handled more of these difficulties than most. Convenience, not conviction, often dictates the choices economists make.
Convenience, however, is addictive. Economists can become seduced by their models, fooling themselves that what the model leaves out does not matter. It is, for example, often convenient to assume that markets are “complete”—that a price exists today, for every good, at every date, in every contingency. In this world, you can always borrow as much as you want at the going rate, and you can always sell as much as you want at the going rate.
Before the crisis, many banks and shadow banks made similar assumptions. They believed they could always roll over their short-term debts or sell their mortgage-backed securities, if the need arose. The financial crisis made a mockery of both assumptions. Funds dried up, and markets thinned out. In his anatomy of the crisis Mr Brunnermeier shows how both of these constraints fed on each other, producing a “liquidity spiral”.
What followed was a furious dash for cash, as investment banks sold whatever they could, commercial banks hoarded reserves and firms drew on lines of credit. Keynes would have interpreted this as an extreme outbreak of liquidity-preference, says Paul Davidson, whose biography of the master has just been republished with a new afterword. But contemporary economics had all but forgotten the term.
Fiscal fisticuffs
The mainstream macroeconomics embodied in DSGE models was a poor guide to the origins of the financial crisis, and left its followers unprepared for the symptoms. Does it offer any insight into the best means of recovery?
In the first months of the crisis, macroeconomists reposed great faith in the powers of the Fed and other central banks. In the summer of 2007, a few weeks after the August liquidity crisis began, Frederic Mishkin, a distinguished academic economist and then a governor of the Fed, gave a reassuring talk at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He presented the results of simulations from the Fed’s FRB/US model. Even if house prices fell by a fifth in the next two years, the slump would knock only 0.25% off GDP, according to his benchmark model, and add only a tenth of a percentage point to the unemployment rate. The reason was that the Fed would respond “aggressively”, by which he meant a cut in the federal funds rate of just one percentage point. He concluded that the central bank had the tools to contain the damage at a “manageable level”.
Since his presentation, the Fed has cut its key rate by five percentage points to a mere 0-0.25%. Its conventional weapons have proved insufficient to the task. This has shaken economists’ faith in monetary policy. Unfortunately, they are also horribly divided about what comes next.
Mr Krugman and others advocate a bold fiscal expansion, borrowing their logic from Keynes and his contemporary, Richard Kahn. Kahn pointed out that a dollar spent on public works might generate more than a dollar of output if the spending circulated repeatedly through the economy, stimulating resources that might otherwise have lain idle.
Today’s economists disagree over the size of this multiplier. Mr Barro thinks the estimates of Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors are absurdly large. Mr Lucas calls them “schlock economics”, contrived to justify Mr Obama’s projections for the budget deficit. But economists are not exactly drowning in research on this question. Mr Krugman calculates that of the 7,000 or so papers published by the National Bureau of Economic Research between 1985 and 2000, only five mentioned fiscal policy in their title or abstract.
Do these public spats damage macroeconomics? Greg Mankiw, of Harvard, recalls the angry exchanges in the 1980s between Robert Solow and Mr Lucas—both eminent economists who could not take each other seriously. This vitriol, he writes, attracted attention, much like a bar-room fist-fight. But he thinks it also dismayed younger scholars, who gave these macroeconomic disputes a wide berth.
By this account, the period of intellectual peace that followed in the 1990s should have been a golden age for macroeconomics. But the brackish consensus also seems to leave students cold. According to David Colander, who has twice surveyed the opinions of economists in the best American PhD programmes, macroeconomics is often the least popular class. “What did you learn in macro?” Mr Colander asked a group of Chicago students. “Did you do the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model?” “We learned a lot of junk like that,” one replied.
It takes a model to beat a model
The benchmark macroeconomic model, though not junk, suffers from some obvious flaws, such as the assumption of complete markets or frictionless finance. Indeed, because these flaws are obvious, economists are well aware of them. Critics like Mr Buiter are not telling them anything new. Economists can and do depart from the benchmark. That, indeed, is how they get published. Thus a growing number of cutting-edge models incorporate one or two financial frictions. And economists like Mr Brunnermeier are trying to fit their small, “blackboard” models of the crisis into a larger macroeconomic frame.
But the benchmark still matters. It formalises economists’ gut instincts about where the best analytical cuts lie. It is the starting point to which the theorist returns after every ingenious excursion. Few economists really believe all its assumptions, but few would rather start anywhere else.
Unfortunately, it is these primitive models, rather than their sophisticated descendants, that often exert the most influence over the world of policy and practice. This is partly because these first principles endure long enough to find their way from academia into policymaking circles. As Keynes pointed out, the economists who most influence practical men of action are the defunct ones whose scribblings have had time to percolate from the seminar room to wider conversations.
These basic models are also influential because of their simplicity. Faced with the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the real world, policymakers often fall back on the highest-order principles and the broadest presumptions. More specific, nuanced theories are often less versatile. They shed light on whatever they were designed to explain, but little beyond.
Would economists be better off starting from somewhere else? Some think so. They draw inspiration from neglected prophets, like Minsky, who recognised that the “real” economy was inseparable from the financial. Such prophets were neglected not for what they said, but for the way they said it. Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories. They will believe something when they can model it.
Mr Colander, therefore, thinks economics requires a revolution in technique. Instead of solving models “by hand”, using economists’ powers of deduction, he proposes simulating economies on the computer. In this line of research, the economist specifies simple rules of thumb by which agents interact with each other, and then lets the computer go to work, grinding out repeated simulations to reveal what kind of unforeseen patterns might emerge. If he is right, then macroeconomists, like zombie banks, must write off many of their past intellectual investments before they can make progress again.
Mr Krugman, by contrast, thinks reform is more likely to come from within. Keynes, he observes, was a “consummate insider”, who understood the theory he was demolishing precisely because he was once convinced by it. In the meantime, he says, macroeconomists should turn to patient empirical spadework, documenting crises past and present, in the hope that a fresh theory might later make sense of it all.
Macroeconomics began with Keynes, but the word did not appear in the journals until 1945, in an article by Jacob Marschak. He reviewed the profession’s growing understanding of the business cycle, making an analogy with other sciences. Seismology, for example, makes progress through better instruments, improved theories or more frequent earthquakes. In the case of economics, Marschak concluded, “the earthquakes did most of the job.”
Economists were deprived of earthquakes for a quarter of a century. The Great Moderation, as this period was called, was not conducive to great macroeconomics. Thanks to the seismic events of the past two years, the prestige of macroeconomists is low, but the potential of their subject is much greater. The furious rows that divide them are a blow to their credibility, but may prove to be a spur to creativity.
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Efficiency and beyond
The efficient-markets hypothesis has underpinned many of the financial industry’s models for years. After the crash, what remains of it?
IN 1978 Michael Jensen, an American economist, boldly declared that “there is no other proposition in economics which has more solid empirical evidence supporting it than the efficient-markets hypothesis” (EMH). That was quite a claim. The theory’s origins went back to the beginning of the century, but it had come to prominence only a decade or so before. Eugene Fama, of the University of Chicago, defined its essence: that the price of a financial asset reflects all available information that is relevant to its value.
From that idea powerful conclusions were drawn, not least on Wall Street. If the EMH held, then markets would price financial assets broadly correctly. Deviations from equilibrium values could not last for long. If the price of a share, say, was too low, well-informed investors would buy it and make a killing. If it looked too dear, they could sell or short it and make money that way. It also followed that bubbles could not form—or, at any rate, could not last: some wise investor would spot them and pop them. And trying to beat the market was a fool’s errand for almost everyone. If the information was out there, it was already in the price.
On such ideas, and on the complex mathematics that described them, was founded the Wall Street profession of financial engineering. The engineers designed derivatives and securitisations, from simple interest-rate options to ever more intricate credit-default swaps and collateralised debt obligations. All the while, confident in the theoretical underpinnings of their inventions, they reassured any doubters that all this activity was not just making bankers rich. It was making the financial system safer and the economy healthier.
That is why many people view the financial crisis that began in 2007 as a devastating blow to the credibility not only of banks but also of the entire academic discipline of financial economics. That verdict is too simple. Granted, financial economists helped to start the bankers’ party, and some joined in with gusto. But even when the EMH still seemed fresh, economists were picking holes in it. A strand of sceptical thought, behavioural economics, has been booming. There are even signs of a synthesis between the EMH and the sceptics. Academia thus moved on, even if Wall Street did not. Nonetheless, the extent to which politicians and regulators trying to reform finance can trust financial economists is an open question.
The EMH, to be sure, has loyal defenders. “There are models, and there are those who use the models,” says Myron Scholes, who in 1997 won the Nobel prize in economics for his part in creating the most widely used model in the finance industry—the Black-Scholes formula for pricing options. Mr Scholes thinks much of the blame for the recent woe should be pinned not on economists’ theories and models but on those on Wall Street and in the City who pushed them too far in practice.
Financial firms plugged in data that reflected a “view of the world that was far more benign than it was reasonable to take, emphasising recent inputs over more historic numbers,” says Mr Scholes. “Apparently, a lot of the models used for structured products were pretty good, but the inputs were awful.” Indeed, the vast majority of derivative contracts and securitisations have performed exactly as their models said they would. It was the exceptions that proved disastrous.
Mr Scholes knows whereof he speaks. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund he founded with, among others, Robert Merton, a fellow Nobel laureate, skidded off the road in 1998. Since then, he has been pointing out dangers ignored or underestimated in the finance industry, such as the risk that liquid markets can dry up far faster than is typically assumed. (That did not stop Platinum Grove, the latest hedge fund in which he is involved, taking a big hit during the recent meltdown.)
He has also been “criticising for years” the “value-at-risk” (VAR) models used by institutional investors to work out how much capital they need to set aside as insurance against losses on risky assets. These models mistakenly assume that the volatility of asset prices and the correlations between prices are constant, says Mr Scholes. When, say, two types of asset were assumed to be uncorrelated, investors felt able to hold the same capital as a cushion against losses on both, because they would not lose on both at the same time. However, as Mr Scholes discovered at LTCM and as the entire finance industry has now learnt for itself, at times of market stress assets that normally are uncorrelated can suddenly become highly correlated. At that point the capital buffer implied by VAR turns out to be woefully inadequate.
Even as financial engineers were designing all sorts of clever products on the assumption that markets were efficient, academic economists were focusing more on how markets fall short. Even before the 1987 stockmarket crash gave them their first real-world reminder of markets’ capriciousness, some of them were examining the flaws in the theory.
In 1980 Sanford Grossman and Joseph Stiglitz, another subsequent winner of a Nobel prize, pointed out a paradox. If prices reflect all information, then there is no gain from going to the trouble of gathering it, so no one will. A little inefficiency is necessary to give informed investors an incentive to drive prices towards efficiency. For Mr Scholes, it is the belief that markets tend to return prices to their efficient equilibrium when they move away from it that gives the EMH its continuing relevance.
Economists also began to study “institutional frictions” in markets. For instance, the EMH’s devotees had assumed that smart investors would be able to trade against less well-informed “noise traders” and overwhelm them by driving prices to reflect true value. But it became clear that there were limits to their ability to arbitrage folly away. Andrei Shleifer, a Harvard economist, among others, pointed out that it could be too costly for informed investors to borrow enough to bet against the noise traders. Once it is admitted that prices can move away from fundamentals for a long time, informed investors may do best by riding the trend rather than fighting it. The trick then is to get out just before momentum shifts the other way. But in this world, rational investors may contribute to bubbles rather than preventing them.
In the early years of the EMH, researchers spent little time worrying about the workings of financial institutions—a weakness of macroeconomics too. In 2000, in his presidential address to the American Finance Association, Franklin Allen, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, asked: “Do financial institutions matter?” Lay people, he said, “might be surprised to learn that institutions play little role in financial theory.” Indeed they might. Mr Allen’s explanation was partly that the dominant theories had been shaped at a time when America, especially, was spared financial crises.
In the past decade or so, financial economists have been paying more attention to institutional questions, such as how bankers should be paid. Many of these researchers broadly accept the EMH, but see their role as uncovering sources of inefficiency that can be addressed to make markets more efficient.
However, a second branch of financial economics is far more sceptical about markets’ inherent rationality. Behavioural economics, which applies the insights of psychology to finance, has boomed in the past decade. In particular, behavioural economists have argued that human beings tend to be too confident of their own abilities and tend to extrapolate recent trends into the future, a combination that may contribute to bubbles. There is also evidence that losses can make investors extremely, irrationally risk-averse—exaggerating price falls when a bubble bursts.
Behavioural economists were among the first to sound the alarm about trouble in the markets. Notably, Robert Shiller of Yale gave an early warning that America’s housing market was dangerously overvalued. This was his second prescient call. In the 1990s his concerns about the bubbliness of the stockmarket had prompted Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, to wonder if the heady share prices of the day were the result of investors’ “irrational exuberance”. The title of Mr Shiller’s latest book, “Animal Spirits” (written with George Akerlof, of the University of California, Berkeley), is taken from John Maynard Keynes’s description of the quirky psychological forces shaping markets. It argues that macroeconomics, too, should draw lessons from psychology.
“In some ways, we behavioural economists have won by default, because we have been less arrogant,” says Richard Thaler of the University of Chicago, one of the pioneers of behavioural finance. Those who denied that prices could get out of line, or ever have bubbles, “look foolish”. Mr Scholes, however, insists that the efficient-market paradigm is not dead: “To say something has failed you have to have something to replace it, and so far we don’t have a new paradigm to replace efficient markets.” The trouble with behavioural economics, he adds, is that “it really hasn’t shown in aggregate how it affects prices.”
Yet EMH-ers and behaviouralists are increasingly asking the same questions and drawing on each other’s ideas. For instance, Mr Thaler concedes that in some ways the events of the past couple of years have strengthened the EMH. The hypothesis has two parts, he says: the “no-free-lunch part and the price-is-right part, and if anything the first part has been strengthened as we have learned that some investment strategies are riskier than they look and it really is difficult to beat the market.” The idea that the market price is the right price, however, has been badly dented.
Mr Thaler also says that only some of the recent problems were behavioural. Many were due to things that are open to non-behavioural economics, “like better risk analysis, how we identify hidden correlations.” It will be no surprise if, thanks to the catalytic power of the bubble and market meltdown, the distinctions between the two camps disappear and a new paradigm emerges.
One economist leading the effort to define that new paradigm is Andrew Lo, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sees merit in both the rational and behavioural views. He has tried to reconcile them in the “adaptive markets hypothesis”, which supposes that humans are neither fully rational nor psychologically unhinged. Instead, they work by making best guesses and by trial and error. If one investment strategy fails, they try another. If it works, they stick with it. Mr Lo borrows heavily from evolutionary science. He does not see markets as efficient in Mr Fama’s sense, but thinks they are fiercely competitive. Because the “ecology” changes over time, people make mistakes when adapting. Old strategies become obsolete and new ones are called for.
The finance industry is in the midst of a transformative period of evolution, and financial economists have a huge agenda to tackle. They should do so quickly, given the determination of politicians to overhaul the regulation of financial markets.
One task, also of interest to macroeconomists, is to work out what central bankers should do about bubbles—now that it is plain that they do occur and can cause great damage when they burst. Not even behaviouralists such as Mr Thaler would want to see, say, the Fed trying to set prices in financial markets. He does see an opportunity, however, for governments to “lean into the wind a little more” to reduce the volatility of bubbles and crashes. For instance, when guaranteeing home loans, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, America’s giant mortgage companies, could be required to demand higher down-payments as a proportion of the purchase price, the higher house prices are relative to rents.
Another priority is to get a better understanding of systemic risk, which Messrs Scholes and Thaler agree has been seriously underestimated. A lot of risk-managers in financial firms believed their risk was perfectly controlled, says Mr Scholes, “but they needed to know what everyone else was doing, to see the aggregate picture.” It turned out that everyone was doing very similar things. So when their VAR models started telling them to sell, they all did—driving prices down further and triggering further model-driven selling.
Several countries now expect to introduce a systemic-risk regulator. Financial economists may have useful advice to offer. Many of them see information as crucial. Data should be collected from individual firms and aggregated. The overall data should then be published. That would be better, they think, than a system based solely on the micromanagement of individual institutions deemed systemically significant. Mr Scholes favours relying less on VAR to calculate capital reserves against losses. Instead, each category of asset should have its own risk-capital reserves, which could not be shared with other assets, even if prices had not been correlated in the past. As experience shows, correlations can change suddenly.
Financial economists also need better theories of why liquid markets suddenly become illiquid and of how to manage the risk of “moral hazard”—the danger that the existence of government regulation and safety nets encourages market participants to take bigger risks than they might otherwise have done. The sorry consequences of letting Lehman Brothers fail, which was intended to discourage moral hazard, showed that the middle of a crisis is not the time to get tough. But when is?
Mr Lo has a novel idea for future crises: creating a financial equivalent of the National Transport Safety Board, which investigates every civil-aviation crash in America. He would like similar independent, after-the-fact scrutiny of every financial failure, to see what caused it and what lessons could be learned. Not the least of the difficulties in the continuing crisis is working out exactly what went wrong and why—and who, including financial economists, should take the blame.
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
罗骞﹕马克思主义为什么被边缘化?
----时代呼唤马克思的在场!
来源：马克思主义评论网（2009-06-9）
这两年国内讨论政治经济学被边缘化，产生了一定反响。至于说科学社会主义是否被边缘化，这样的问题已经无法提出来了。作为学科建制，实事求是地说，科学社会主义差不多处于临终状态。在马克思主义三大学科中，唯有哲学似乎还比较景气、繁荣。然而，丢失了政治经济学批判和科学社会主义，马克思主义在哲学中的挺立是彰显了马克思思想的生命力呢，还是相反，它是以某种特殊形式自觉或不自觉地消解着其生命力？更加严重地说，这种挺立如果只是徒有其表的“孤立”，甚至只是脱离实践的“唯灵论”存在，它是否迟早会轰然倒塌？如果问题是从这样的高度提出来的，那么，如何看待国内马克思主义研究的这一状况，就不是一个形式的、随便的问题，也不单纯是学科建设本身合理与否的问题。
即便不讨论政治经济学和科学社会主义边缘化的实践基础本身，也不讨论学科建制中三大板块的划分在方便教育普及的同时，实际上是否导致了马克思主义总体性的分化，仍然可以追问的是：国内马克思主义哲学体制内的景气，是否得益于它作为哲学远离了实践，并且得益于这种板块划分使它作为较抽象的学科能够保持这种远离而免遭打击？
实践不能停留于观念
这样的提问似乎毫无道理。马克思主义哲学研究这些年的进展不正在于强调实践，并且以实践标志马克思哲学的基本性质吗？然而，问题在于何种实践性：有人认为马克思哲学的基本意义在以实践观点终结了陷入困境的形而上学；有人认为马克思哲学的特征在于针对现实提问，让现实成为理论密切关注的对象。概而言之，就是实践成为原则，或者成为内容，两者之一或兼而有之，这就是所谓马克思哲学之当代性的基本内涵。不论哪一种情况，马克思哲学的意义都指向了思想史内部的革命性变革，被阐释为当代思想的一种本质形态。这样一来，马克思如何批判现代，历史之变迁如何对马克思思想构成挑战，就不再是根本性的东西了，即便在衰败乃至在卑污的实践中，马克思哲学也仍然能因其密闭而保持常新，高高在上，远离在实践中被击落的部分。
且不说马克思曾经激烈地批判观念论内部的自我旋转，就算以理论的方式切中了现实之本质，亦即是正确地解释了世界，难道就是马克思所说的实践性吗？当哲学家们用《费尔巴哈提纲》第十一条指证马克思开启实践哲学的时候，他们没有看到这至多落在该条提纲的前半部分，即解释世界的层面，因此是马克思所批判的层面。这些年国内马克思主义哲学之所以“繁荣”，就在于找到了这个层面，并且待在这个层面上。如果说传统解释是把哲学都做成了马哲，把马哲做成了政治，那么，这些年的进展则是把马哲做成哲学，把哲学做成学术！这样的进展当然也算得上是进展，至少在纠正对马克思思想之粗疏的理解方面是重要的，具有思想史的意义，因此，这种“回到马克思”的工作不可或缺。但问题是，这样回到的马克思只是思想史硬壳中的马克思，而不是那个真正立足于历史存在基础之上，并且力图去改造这一基础的马克思。在这种视角中，我们至多能看到，马克思在观念斗争中一次又一次地打了胜仗，成为一个伟大的思想英雄。然而，这不正是马克思要不断告别的形象吗？马克思批评费尔巴哈只是一个哲学家、理论家。对马克思哲学当代性的阐释，始终面临着马克思终结哲学的困扰。
按照马克思的问题逻辑，真正说来，研究马克思思想的意义，不在于为马克思在思想史中争得并捍卫一个地盘，这一点当然重要，但进而更为重要的是，在马克思思想与历史的变迁之间进行双重对话，让马克思的思想批判性地走进现实。这里的批判性是指，马克思的思想不可能原封不动、不加修正地移入现实，同时也是指，现实的直接性不能非批判地成为剪裁和评判马克思思想的标准。按青年马克思的正确提法，光是思想竭力体现为现实是不够的，现实本身应当力求趋向思想。在这种思想与实现辩证关系的意义上，因而在真正实践的意义上，“回到马克思”之后本质重要的是“迎候马克思”，让马克思以一种鲜活的形象走进“历史的此在”。不难想象，如果没有列宁在现实与理论的交汇点上所作的贡献，没有由其引发的马克思思想的第二次降生，不管它是哪样一种性质的降生，哪有今天这个形象的马克思，哪有马克思主义哲学呢？看看科尔施列举的西方哲学史对马克思主义哲学轻描淡写的提及，这一点就显而易见了。
马克思岂能是饭碗
研究的意义绝不只在于还马克思思想的本来面目，让它如其所是，而在于“迎候马克思”，让马克思走向我们，让这个世界精神骑到马背上！统治者们历来不怕把马克思作为思想大师，不怕把马克思主义作为伟大的思想，不怕迂腐的专家们拿着放大镜或显微镜寄生在马克思思想的躯体上考古，他们才不在乎这个躯体本身的死活呢，大不了，最后一哄而散！
在这样的热闹中，高度强调实践的理论没有了实践，因为实践只是被做成了的理论，做成了终结传统形而上学的形而上学范畴！那个在哲学上，从而在观念上被高度颂扬的马克思雄踞在思想的高峰，成为一个观念的神。曾经打破观念拜物教的马克思再度成为拜物教的观念。问题还在于，如今这种观念的拜物教只剩下了拜物教的外表，“先知先觉”的教士们早就解除了思想武装，他们只是徒有其表地“拜”一个自知并不在场的上帝，因为这样有肉吃。这就像西方宗教改革的前夜，不少教士已经率先在内部开始腐烂，因而并不是真正的教士一样！一个看似强大的形式可能因此瞬间轰然坍塌！
那么，这种状况，比如说苏东剧变等等，是否意味着马克思思想生命力的衰竭呢？不是，我们没有权利“把这些巡回传教士的学说”同马克思思想混淆起来。也许恰恰相反，只有解除了各种观念拜物教的魔法和话语泛滥之后，在外在的形式爆裂之后，我们才能发现真理的瑰宝，再一次迎候马克思思想的降生。
时代呼唤马克思
马克思思想的效果历史不会是一次完成的，它提供的是一种观察社会历史的方法。问题的关键就在于，马克思如何分析和批判现实，如何以马克思的方式，或者说立足于马克思思想的基础剖析现实，并且不把这种剖析仅仅看成是理论对现实的直观，而是改变现实的内在环节。以这样的方法来看待马克思主义本身，它就不是一个给定了的静止的思想实体，而是当代历史变迁中最为内在的流动因素。发达资本主义的自我改良和东方社会主义实践已经分别从两个不同的方向展示了这一点。因此，真正的问题在于秉承马克思将理论实践化、历史化的思路，在历史的演进中考察马克思思想的存在论意义及其变迁，让他如其所愿地走出阿门塞斯冥国，来到我们当中，参与造就一种历史的生成状态。
今天，这种可能性因为历史的因素更加朗若白昼般地呈现在我们面前了。这倒不只是说如今日益蔓延的经济危机印证了马克思穿透历史的洞察力，因此马克思思想是科学，而是说，马克思思想的担当意识及其以各种方式造成的历史状态使我们不可能在没有马克思的情况下走向未来。当然，经济危机对马克思思想的佐证是显著的。在西方国家，我们看到了《资本论》在经济危机中畅销，这至少表明，想象中的马克思思想的死亡并不是所谓铁板钉钉的事情，对于那些自称在马克思的棺材上钉上了最后一颗钉子的人，也许还不值得我们以圣人之言回敬：“小人无知无畏，狎大人，侮圣人之言”。
中国发展需要超越现代性
就当今中国来说，经济危机对世界的冲击至少让那些急速奔赴资本的步伐慢了下来，市场原教旨主义开始龟缩了。在持剑经商的资本逻辑中，以美国的方式成为美国，以及“彼可取而代之”的那种黑社会意识也许也会因此有所收敛。因为显而易见的是，这种取代只是模仿，没有真正的未来，况且老大今天的日子也不好过呀！当然，在现实的残酷面前，在诱惑面前，翻身做主的欲望总是异常强烈，激动人心。中国的发展已经被称为威胁，难道它真的将不可避免地重走西方资本霸权崛起之路吗？
在我们看来，中国实践的“大目标”和“大方向”不该是“成为现代”，不应该仅仅是在现代霸权结构中实现一次身份的倒转，模仿马克思的说法，它应该是力图达到现代尚未达到的人的解放的水平，由此开启一种超越现代的人类存在方式和文明形态。人从来不是通过在狼群中成为狼而与狼共舞，即便可能，它也不是人的方式。人类实践具有超越之可能性。从当前的经济危机中——本质上说，这是一种人类文明形态的危机，中国看到的不应该是成为“美国”或超过美国的诱惑，而应该珍视自己的历史和现实，以一种超越视角检视资本文明的限度和困境，将中国特色社会主义实践牢固地建立在扬弃现代原则的目标指向上，并将此提升和强化为坚定的实践意志。在理论上，需要直接明确它与马克思思想的内在差异和关联，由此形成和展示能够标志当今时代精神的思想成果。在这样的意义上，我们的实践才是有理念的，我们才有可能抓住历史机遇，通过民族的伟大复兴，担当开创未来的使命，而不是以复古的民族主义拒斥现代文明，或者仅仅力图在资本的角逐中争得一个有利的、甚至是霸主的席位。真正说来，这样的席位不是太高，而是太低了。
因此，所谓“迎候马克思”，就不是停留于观念上为其优越性证明，而是让它从单纯观念的操作中解放出来，在实践中为他准备一个名副其实的位置，于历史的呼唤中真正历史地在场，与我们一道面对存在的困境，伴随并促成未来的降临。
当代中国实践需要建构性政治
中国的建设实践蕴含着一种建构性政治理念，它需要自觉地明确并且突出此一理念，以重塑启蒙以来的政治形象，在自由主义的消极政治和传统马克思主义的革命政治之后，形成独具中国特色的政治实践。这种建构性政治不仅是当代中国社会发展和民族复兴之需要，也是人类面临困境、政治职能日益强化不可避免的趋势。
当代中国建设实践需要什么样的政治理念，由于两方面的事实，这个问题的分量日益加重了：其一，随着改革开放的深入，我国社会变革从经济领域拓展到所有方面，包括政治方面，对政治性质、功能和意义的不同理解正在消解传统政治共识；其二，随着全球性问题的凸显，尤其是当下世界经济危机的不断蔓延，政治的形象和责任面临重大调整，政治将在人类事务中发挥什么样的作用、并且如何发挥作用，极大地引起了人们的关注。在这样的处境中，明确中国当代政治的基本理念事关重大，它是中国发展模式最为内在的因素之一。在我看来，中国的建设实践蕴含着一种建构性政治理念，它需要自觉地明确并且突出此一理念，以重塑启蒙以来的政治形象，在自由主义的消极政治和传统马克思主义的革命政治之后，形成独具中国特色的政治实践。这种建构性政治不仅是当代中国社会发展和民族复兴之需要，也是人类面临困境、政治职能日益强化不可避免的趋势。
中国不可与消极政治调情
何为消极政治？简单地说，就是以最大限度地削弱政治职能和责任为核心理念的自由主义政治。政治的职能被限定为维持秩序、保护现场、当守夜人，政治权力只是作为“必要的恶”加以限制。大体可以说，近代以来的这种西方政治在告别中世纪神学政治的同时，也告别了古典政治的德性，政治成了中性的、技术性的公共管理。现代政治的世俗性严重地消解了其超越性，人类社会最具有推动性和创造性的领域封闭在对现成事物的服务上。
消极政治最初对黑暗和专制具有强烈冲击力，但这种冲击力恰恰是来自于限制政治职能和制约公共权力，政治可能释放的创造历史的意义在这种消极政治中隐没了。因为：首先，这种政治蕴含着一种自发性的社会历史观，认为通过市场这只“看不见的手”，社会能够自发地实现发展与和谐，因此，它将政治国家看成是补充性的结构。其次，这种政治以个人主义为前提，确立了个体权利的优先地位，为了防止政治干预个人生活和市民社会而主张削弱政治职能。再次，这种政治蕴含着“性恶论”的伦理假定，认为绝对的权力产生绝对的腐败，制约和规范政治权力成为主要内容。最后，此种政治不是将走向未来，而是将维持现在作为基本目标，启蒙最初的解放诉求变成了一种保守主义的立场，拒绝通过政治变革社会历史，消解了政治的创造性。
近代以来，这种消极政治概念曾长期占据主导地位，甚至成为一个国家是否实现现代化的重要标准。今天，这种消极政治已经不能应对人类面临的各种存在论困局了。不论在国际还是在国内的生活中，政治都日益发挥着重要职能，政治活动再也不能看成是售后服务和垃圾清理，必须重新突出强调政治的德性价值和担当意识，告别消极政治，强化政治在处理各种当代问题和开创理想文明形态中的建构性作用是当代社会发展的迫切需要。
对致力于民族伟大复兴和开创新的社会发展道路的当代中国来说，削减政治职能和放弃政治担当，含混地与消极政治调情，将消磨我们坚强的政治意志。消极政治明显与当代政治职能的强化趋势背道而驰。然而，在中国却有不少人还将这种已经被理论和实践击败了的消极政治作为追求目标，将倒退视为进步。这不仅包括了代表市场和经济的力量向政治要权，而且也包括政治力量“减担子”和“扔包袱”的强烈愿望，当然，权力的腐败等消极现象也在民间激起了对这种诉求的呼应。
如果这种削弱政治的消极政治在中国实践中得到实现，我们必将失去创造历史的机遇，失去民族伟大复兴的内在驱动力。中国实践的开创性意义和优势应该在于克服这种消极政治，在规范权力运行的同时，突出政治在超越现代困境中的强劲作用，而不是作茧自缚、裹足不前，将自残当成自救。因为，中国当代政治实践在没有达到现代政治发展水平时，已经目睹了现代政治的困境，如果只是以自由主义的消极政治作为自己的最高追求，只能是一种拙劣的重复和模仿。
中国应完成革命政治遗嘱
马克思主义的革命政治是在洞察了近代消极政治限度的基础上走向历史舞台的。马克思主义认为，现代自由主义政治以市民社会和政治国家的二元论为前提，虽然在政治层面上实现了自由平等，但在私人生活领域，尤其是经济领域，却存在以剥削为核心的普遍异化，因此本质上只是一种抽象的、形式上的自由平等。马克思的革命理论越出政治解放和思想解放，认为人的全面、自由发展必须变革社会经济基础、推翻资本主义生产方式。解放话语由此被激进化为一种与消极政治相对的革命政治。
我们今天仍然生活在马克思主义革命政治造成的社会历史后果之中，对于当代中国建设实践来说尤其如此。在由革命、建设向改革的社会变迁中，如何对待革命政治是当代中国面临的重大问题。有人认为，改革建设已经逐渐背离了革命方向和革命精神，进而以革命理想批评现实的妥协和退让；而另一些人则以所谓理性的精神批判“非理性”的革命意识，要求告别暴力。这种对立和紧张，恰好是真正缺乏历史理性的粗陋表现，革命好像是一种可以呼来唤去的东西，而不是根源于社会历史的存在状况。正因为如此，他们也都没有真正理解中国今天的实践道路以及政治在其中的作用，好像它只是几个政治领导人拍脑门决定的事情，而不是由历史和现实的处境决定的。
十月革命开始的社会主义实践，包括中国的革命实践，虽然吸取并极大地得益于马克思主义的革命理论，但其面临的条件、任务都与马克思主义创始人的理论存在着差异。这种差异给创造性实践留下空间，也带来难题：在没有达到现代水平的情况下如何实现对现代的超越？面临着既“苦于资本主义之不发展”也“苦于资本主义之发展”的双重局面，对现代原则的抽象批判或肯定都不可能抓住实践的根本。这种双重困境，决定了建设实践必然具有“不彻底性”。建构性政治表现了一种辩证的历史智慧，是连接理想和现实的本质力量。一方面，它必须面对资本主义之不发展这一实情，有限度地接纳商品资本原则，并通过政治强有力的组织尽快推动社会全面发展；但另一方面，这只能是一种有原则的“退让”，不仅是革命的历史渊源，就是现实状况也不再容许对资本采取盲目崇拜的姿态，而必须是凭“远见卓识”将超越资本现代性作为内在的目标。
因此，中国建设实践的理性立场在于：以渐进过程完成革命的政治遗嘱，既不是以所谓历史理性的名誉粗暴地否定革命的历史，忽视社会的结构性矛盾与对抗始终是革命的基础和原因，从而麻木地陷入虚幻的“团结”；也不应该以夸张的激情重复革命高调，对实践中出现的问题缺乏渐进解决的耐心和宽容，从而陷入缺乏建设性意见的抽象批判。历史虚无主义否定革命，是数典忘祖、自毁长城；同样，忽视历史发展的渐进性和现实条件，用抽象理想剪裁现实，看不到实现理想的曲折性和过程性，同样会带来实践的灾难。一种积极的建构性政治才是中国当代实践之真正需要。
中国需要建构性政治
在冲突和动荡的当今世界，政治不仅是人类的自我解放、自我完善，而且是人类维系自身存在的必要力量。对政治的这一理解要求回归古典政治至高的德性层面，而且赋予政治庄严的历史使命。自从经济自由主义的自发性概念理论上被击破并且在实践中式微以后，政治已经被迫承担了调节社会存在基础的职能，但它并没有将这种承担升华为自觉意识，而只是在策略性的意义上延伸其职能。建构性政治在对消极政治和革命政治双重反思的基础之上，将革命政治指向未来的超越性熔铸到建构性实践过程之中，有理由成为开创人类新型文明形态和人类自我解放与自我救赎的本质路向。
首先，在建构性政治概念中，政治不只是存在的一个方面，而是存在诸方面的构成性维度。因此，这一概念反对独立于道德和经济等等理解政治的职能及本性，将政治限制在话语商谈的层面，而是从人类存在论的总体性高度领会政治的性质及其意义。
其次，面临当代的存在困境——不仅是以剥削为核心的异化的加深，而且是人类自我毁灭的切实可能性，建构性政治在秉承革命政治解放话语的同时，将人类“自救”突出为政治的又一使命，因为更好地存在必须建立在能够存在的基础之上。不论从解放还是救赎的意义来看，建构性政治都要求强化政治的职能和担当意识。因此，如果今天中国政治改革的取向仅仅是“服务政治”、“大社会、小政府”等等，必然成为一种致命的耽搁，把戏仿当成创新。
再次，在革命后的建设实践中，政治只能通过权力的介入改造社会存在基础，将社会导向和谐发展的方向，趋向革命的价值目标，而不能无限制地夸大革命的作用，将非常态的革命不恰当地强调为解决常态问题的手段，导致自我折腾，或者自我毁灭。建构性政治不只是强调历史的断裂，尤其强调跳跃之后的常态进展。
又次，由于强化了政治的超越职能和德性担当，建构性政治并不抽象地否定任何规范权力的要求，将权力假定得绝对纯洁，恰恰相反，它把权力的规范运行看成是政治完成其存在论使命的必要环节，消极政治制约和规范权力的要求不是被放弃了，而是在更基本的意义上被着重强调。
最后，建构性政治蕴含着过程意识，这种意识并不预设历史的透明终点，当然也不寻找绝对根基，而是以可能性概念为实践提供依据。在对历史的理解中，自发性和决定论都没有给政治的创造性留下空间，而可能性乃是实践主体性的内在依据，它将存在的历史理解为建构性的动态过程，由此才有人为的存在世界，才有创造性的生成，才有政治的建构！
总之，对于当代中国的建设实践来说，问题只在于，在复杂的处境中能够以一种坚定的意志将现实推向未来。这就是实践中历史的生成。这一实践所蕴含的建构性姿态，继承革命政治超越现代的遗产，展现了连接理想与现实的真正历史理性，预示着人类历史可能告别自发性发展和暴力驱动的恶性轮回。就像朝阳初生，我们已经感受到了此一实践所带来的敞亮与光辉。也许，高卢雄鸡将因此移居我们这片日久弥新的东方大地。果真如此，我们就可以高兴地呼喊，中华文明复兴之伟大意义，不在于它是金鸡孤鸣、国家发展，而是人类文明新纪元的报晓，就像文艺复兴乃是现代之孕育和发端一样，五千年文明古国的涅槃不会是对过去、也不会是对现代的简单模仿，而是新原则的诞生！
来源：马克思主义评论网（2009-06-9）
这两年国内讨论政治经济学被边缘化，产生了一定反响。至于说科学社会主义是否被边缘化，这样的问题已经无法提出来了。作为学科建制，实事求是地说，科学社会主义差不多处于临终状态。在马克思主义三大学科中，唯有哲学似乎还比较景气、繁荣。然而，丢失了政治经济学批判和科学社会主义，马克思主义在哲学中的挺立是彰显了马克思思想的生命力呢，还是相反，它是以某种特殊形式自觉或不自觉地消解着其生命力？更加严重地说，这种挺立如果只是徒有其表的“孤立”，甚至只是脱离实践的“唯灵论”存在，它是否迟早会轰然倒塌？如果问题是从这样的高度提出来的，那么，如何看待国内马克思主义研究的这一状况，就不是一个形式的、随便的问题，也不单纯是学科建设本身合理与否的问题。
即便不讨论政治经济学和科学社会主义边缘化的实践基础本身，也不讨论学科建制中三大板块的划分在方便教育普及的同时，实际上是否导致了马克思主义总体性的分化，仍然可以追问的是：国内马克思主义哲学体制内的景气，是否得益于它作为哲学远离了实践，并且得益于这种板块划分使它作为较抽象的学科能够保持这种远离而免遭打击？
实践不能停留于观念
这样的提问似乎毫无道理。马克思主义哲学研究这些年的进展不正在于强调实践，并且以实践标志马克思哲学的基本性质吗？然而，问题在于何种实践性：有人认为马克思哲学的基本意义在以实践观点终结了陷入困境的形而上学；有人认为马克思哲学的特征在于针对现实提问，让现实成为理论密切关注的对象。概而言之，就是实践成为原则，或者成为内容，两者之一或兼而有之，这就是所谓马克思哲学之当代性的基本内涵。不论哪一种情况，马克思哲学的意义都指向了思想史内部的革命性变革，被阐释为当代思想的一种本质形态。这样一来，马克思如何批判现代，历史之变迁如何对马克思思想构成挑战，就不再是根本性的东西了，即便在衰败乃至在卑污的实践中，马克思哲学也仍然能因其密闭而保持常新，高高在上，远离在实践中被击落的部分。
且不说马克思曾经激烈地批判观念论内部的自我旋转，就算以理论的方式切中了现实之本质，亦即是正确地解释了世界，难道就是马克思所说的实践性吗？当哲学家们用《费尔巴哈提纲》第十一条指证马克思开启实践哲学的时候，他们没有看到这至多落在该条提纲的前半部分，即解释世界的层面，因此是马克思所批判的层面。这些年国内马克思主义哲学之所以“繁荣”，就在于找到了这个层面，并且待在这个层面上。如果说传统解释是把哲学都做成了马哲，把马哲做成了政治，那么，这些年的进展则是把马哲做成哲学，把哲学做成学术！这样的进展当然也算得上是进展，至少在纠正对马克思思想之粗疏的理解方面是重要的，具有思想史的意义，因此，这种“回到马克思”的工作不可或缺。但问题是，这样回到的马克思只是思想史硬壳中的马克思，而不是那个真正立足于历史存在基础之上，并且力图去改造这一基础的马克思。在这种视角中，我们至多能看到，马克思在观念斗争中一次又一次地打了胜仗，成为一个伟大的思想英雄。然而，这不正是马克思要不断告别的形象吗？马克思批评费尔巴哈只是一个哲学家、理论家。对马克思哲学当代性的阐释，始终面临着马克思终结哲学的困扰。
按照马克思的问题逻辑，真正说来，研究马克思思想的意义，不在于为马克思在思想史中争得并捍卫一个地盘，这一点当然重要，但进而更为重要的是，在马克思思想与历史的变迁之间进行双重对话，让马克思的思想批判性地走进现实。这里的批判性是指，马克思的思想不可能原封不动、不加修正地移入现实，同时也是指，现实的直接性不能非批判地成为剪裁和评判马克思思想的标准。按青年马克思的正确提法，光是思想竭力体现为现实是不够的，现实本身应当力求趋向思想。在这种思想与实现辩证关系的意义上，因而在真正实践的意义上，“回到马克思”之后本质重要的是“迎候马克思”，让马克思以一种鲜活的形象走进“历史的此在”。不难想象，如果没有列宁在现实与理论的交汇点上所作的贡献，没有由其引发的马克思思想的第二次降生，不管它是哪样一种性质的降生，哪有今天这个形象的马克思，哪有马克思主义哲学呢？看看科尔施列举的西方哲学史对马克思主义哲学轻描淡写的提及，这一点就显而易见了。
马克思岂能是饭碗
研究的意义绝不只在于还马克思思想的本来面目，让它如其所是，而在于“迎候马克思”，让马克思走向我们，让这个世界精神骑到马背上！统治者们历来不怕把马克思作为思想大师，不怕把马克思主义作为伟大的思想，不怕迂腐的专家们拿着放大镜或显微镜寄生在马克思思想的躯体上考古，他们才不在乎这个躯体本身的死活呢，大不了，最后一哄而散！
在这样的热闹中，高度强调实践的理论没有了实践，因为实践只是被做成了的理论，做成了终结传统形而上学的形而上学范畴！那个在哲学上，从而在观念上被高度颂扬的马克思雄踞在思想的高峰，成为一个观念的神。曾经打破观念拜物教的马克思再度成为拜物教的观念。问题还在于，如今这种观念的拜物教只剩下了拜物教的外表，“先知先觉”的教士们早就解除了思想武装，他们只是徒有其表地“拜”一个自知并不在场的上帝，因为这样有肉吃。这就像西方宗教改革的前夜，不少教士已经率先在内部开始腐烂，因而并不是真正的教士一样！一个看似强大的形式可能因此瞬间轰然坍塌！
那么，这种状况，比如说苏东剧变等等，是否意味着马克思思想生命力的衰竭呢？不是，我们没有权利“把这些巡回传教士的学说”同马克思思想混淆起来。也许恰恰相反，只有解除了各种观念拜物教的魔法和话语泛滥之后，在外在的形式爆裂之后，我们才能发现真理的瑰宝，再一次迎候马克思思想的降生。
时代呼唤马克思
马克思思想的效果历史不会是一次完成的，它提供的是一种观察社会历史的方法。问题的关键就在于，马克思如何分析和批判现实，如何以马克思的方式，或者说立足于马克思思想的基础剖析现实，并且不把这种剖析仅仅看成是理论对现实的直观，而是改变现实的内在环节。以这样的方法来看待马克思主义本身，它就不是一个给定了的静止的思想实体，而是当代历史变迁中最为内在的流动因素。发达资本主义的自我改良和东方社会主义实践已经分别从两个不同的方向展示了这一点。因此，真正的问题在于秉承马克思将理论实践化、历史化的思路，在历史的演进中考察马克思思想的存在论意义及其变迁，让他如其所愿地走出阿门塞斯冥国，来到我们当中，参与造就一种历史的生成状态。
今天，这种可能性因为历史的因素更加朗若白昼般地呈现在我们面前了。这倒不只是说如今日益蔓延的经济危机印证了马克思穿透历史的洞察力，因此马克思思想是科学，而是说，马克思思想的担当意识及其以各种方式造成的历史状态使我们不可能在没有马克思的情况下走向未来。当然，经济危机对马克思思想的佐证是显著的。在西方国家，我们看到了《资本论》在经济危机中畅销，这至少表明，想象中的马克思思想的死亡并不是所谓铁板钉钉的事情，对于那些自称在马克思的棺材上钉上了最后一颗钉子的人，也许还不值得我们以圣人之言回敬：“小人无知无畏，狎大人，侮圣人之言”。
中国发展需要超越现代性
就当今中国来说，经济危机对世界的冲击至少让那些急速奔赴资本的步伐慢了下来，市场原教旨主义开始龟缩了。在持剑经商的资本逻辑中，以美国的方式成为美国，以及“彼可取而代之”的那种黑社会意识也许也会因此有所收敛。因为显而易见的是，这种取代只是模仿，没有真正的未来，况且老大今天的日子也不好过呀！当然，在现实的残酷面前，在诱惑面前，翻身做主的欲望总是异常强烈，激动人心。中国的发展已经被称为威胁，难道它真的将不可避免地重走西方资本霸权崛起之路吗？
在我们看来，中国实践的“大目标”和“大方向”不该是“成为现代”，不应该仅仅是在现代霸权结构中实现一次身份的倒转，模仿马克思的说法，它应该是力图达到现代尚未达到的人的解放的水平，由此开启一种超越现代的人类存在方式和文明形态。人从来不是通过在狼群中成为狼而与狼共舞，即便可能，它也不是人的方式。人类实践具有超越之可能性。从当前的经济危机中——本质上说，这是一种人类文明形态的危机，中国看到的不应该是成为“美国”或超过美国的诱惑，而应该珍视自己的历史和现实，以一种超越视角检视资本文明的限度和困境，将中国特色社会主义实践牢固地建立在扬弃现代原则的目标指向上，并将此提升和强化为坚定的实践意志。在理论上，需要直接明确它与马克思思想的内在差异和关联，由此形成和展示能够标志当今时代精神的思想成果。在这样的意义上，我们的实践才是有理念的，我们才有可能抓住历史机遇，通过民族的伟大复兴，担当开创未来的使命，而不是以复古的民族主义拒斥现代文明，或者仅仅力图在资本的角逐中争得一个有利的、甚至是霸主的席位。真正说来，这样的席位不是太高，而是太低了。
因此，所谓“迎候马克思”，就不是停留于观念上为其优越性证明，而是让它从单纯观念的操作中解放出来，在实践中为他准备一个名副其实的位置，于历史的呼唤中真正历史地在场，与我们一道面对存在的困境，伴随并促成未来的降临。
当代中国实践需要建构性政治
中国的建设实践蕴含着一种建构性政治理念，它需要自觉地明确并且突出此一理念，以重塑启蒙以来的政治形象，在自由主义的消极政治和传统马克思主义的革命政治之后，形成独具中国特色的政治实践。这种建构性政治不仅是当代中国社会发展和民族复兴之需要，也是人类面临困境、政治职能日益强化不可避免的趋势。
当代中国建设实践需要什么样的政治理念，由于两方面的事实，这个问题的分量日益加重了：其一，随着改革开放的深入，我国社会变革从经济领域拓展到所有方面，包括政治方面，对政治性质、功能和意义的不同理解正在消解传统政治共识；其二，随着全球性问题的凸显，尤其是当下世界经济危机的不断蔓延，政治的形象和责任面临重大调整，政治将在人类事务中发挥什么样的作用、并且如何发挥作用，极大地引起了人们的关注。在这样的处境中，明确中国当代政治的基本理念事关重大，它是中国发展模式最为内在的因素之一。在我看来，中国的建设实践蕴含着一种建构性政治理念，它需要自觉地明确并且突出此一理念，以重塑启蒙以来的政治形象，在自由主义的消极政治和传统马克思主义的革命政治之后，形成独具中国特色的政治实践。这种建构性政治不仅是当代中国社会发展和民族复兴之需要，也是人类面临困境、政治职能日益强化不可避免的趋势。
中国不可与消极政治调情
何为消极政治？简单地说，就是以最大限度地削弱政治职能和责任为核心理念的自由主义政治。政治的职能被限定为维持秩序、保护现场、当守夜人，政治权力只是作为“必要的恶”加以限制。大体可以说，近代以来的这种西方政治在告别中世纪神学政治的同时，也告别了古典政治的德性，政治成了中性的、技术性的公共管理。现代政治的世俗性严重地消解了其超越性，人类社会最具有推动性和创造性的领域封闭在对现成事物的服务上。
消极政治最初对黑暗和专制具有强烈冲击力，但这种冲击力恰恰是来自于限制政治职能和制约公共权力，政治可能释放的创造历史的意义在这种消极政治中隐没了。因为：首先，这种政治蕴含着一种自发性的社会历史观，认为通过市场这只“看不见的手”，社会能够自发地实现发展与和谐，因此，它将政治国家看成是补充性的结构。其次，这种政治以个人主义为前提，确立了个体权利的优先地位，为了防止政治干预个人生活和市民社会而主张削弱政治职能。再次，这种政治蕴含着“性恶论”的伦理假定，认为绝对的权力产生绝对的腐败，制约和规范政治权力成为主要内容。最后，此种政治不是将走向未来，而是将维持现在作为基本目标，启蒙最初的解放诉求变成了一种保守主义的立场，拒绝通过政治变革社会历史，消解了政治的创造性。
近代以来，这种消极政治概念曾长期占据主导地位，甚至成为一个国家是否实现现代化的重要标准。今天，这种消极政治已经不能应对人类面临的各种存在论困局了。不论在国际还是在国内的生活中，政治都日益发挥着重要职能，政治活动再也不能看成是售后服务和垃圾清理，必须重新突出强调政治的德性价值和担当意识，告别消极政治，强化政治在处理各种当代问题和开创理想文明形态中的建构性作用是当代社会发展的迫切需要。
对致力于民族伟大复兴和开创新的社会发展道路的当代中国来说，削减政治职能和放弃政治担当，含混地与消极政治调情，将消磨我们坚强的政治意志。消极政治明显与当代政治职能的强化趋势背道而驰。然而，在中国却有不少人还将这种已经被理论和实践击败了的消极政治作为追求目标，将倒退视为进步。这不仅包括了代表市场和经济的力量向政治要权，而且也包括政治力量“减担子”和“扔包袱”的强烈愿望，当然，权力的腐败等消极现象也在民间激起了对这种诉求的呼应。
如果这种削弱政治的消极政治在中国实践中得到实现，我们必将失去创造历史的机遇，失去民族伟大复兴的内在驱动力。中国实践的开创性意义和优势应该在于克服这种消极政治，在规范权力运行的同时，突出政治在超越现代困境中的强劲作用，而不是作茧自缚、裹足不前，将自残当成自救。因为，中国当代政治实践在没有达到现代政治发展水平时，已经目睹了现代政治的困境，如果只是以自由主义的消极政治作为自己的最高追求，只能是一种拙劣的重复和模仿。
中国应完成革命政治遗嘱
马克思主义的革命政治是在洞察了近代消极政治限度的基础上走向历史舞台的。马克思主义认为，现代自由主义政治以市民社会和政治国家的二元论为前提，虽然在政治层面上实现了自由平等，但在私人生活领域，尤其是经济领域，却存在以剥削为核心的普遍异化，因此本质上只是一种抽象的、形式上的自由平等。马克思的革命理论越出政治解放和思想解放，认为人的全面、自由发展必须变革社会经济基础、推翻资本主义生产方式。解放话语由此被激进化为一种与消极政治相对的革命政治。
我们今天仍然生活在马克思主义革命政治造成的社会历史后果之中，对于当代中国建设实践来说尤其如此。在由革命、建设向改革的社会变迁中，如何对待革命政治是当代中国面临的重大问题。有人认为，改革建设已经逐渐背离了革命方向和革命精神，进而以革命理想批评现实的妥协和退让；而另一些人则以所谓理性的精神批判“非理性”的革命意识，要求告别暴力。这种对立和紧张，恰好是真正缺乏历史理性的粗陋表现，革命好像是一种可以呼来唤去的东西，而不是根源于社会历史的存在状况。正因为如此，他们也都没有真正理解中国今天的实践道路以及政治在其中的作用，好像它只是几个政治领导人拍脑门决定的事情，而不是由历史和现实的处境决定的。
十月革命开始的社会主义实践，包括中国的革命实践，虽然吸取并极大地得益于马克思主义的革命理论，但其面临的条件、任务都与马克思主义创始人的理论存在着差异。这种差异给创造性实践留下空间，也带来难题：在没有达到现代水平的情况下如何实现对现代的超越？面临着既“苦于资本主义之不发展”也“苦于资本主义之发展”的双重局面，对现代原则的抽象批判或肯定都不可能抓住实践的根本。这种双重困境，决定了建设实践必然具有“不彻底性”。建构性政治表现了一种辩证的历史智慧，是连接理想和现实的本质力量。一方面，它必须面对资本主义之不发展这一实情，有限度地接纳商品资本原则，并通过政治强有力的组织尽快推动社会全面发展；但另一方面，这只能是一种有原则的“退让”，不仅是革命的历史渊源，就是现实状况也不再容许对资本采取盲目崇拜的姿态，而必须是凭“远见卓识”将超越资本现代性作为内在的目标。
因此，中国建设实践的理性立场在于：以渐进过程完成革命的政治遗嘱，既不是以所谓历史理性的名誉粗暴地否定革命的历史，忽视社会的结构性矛盾与对抗始终是革命的基础和原因，从而麻木地陷入虚幻的“团结”；也不应该以夸张的激情重复革命高调，对实践中出现的问题缺乏渐进解决的耐心和宽容，从而陷入缺乏建设性意见的抽象批判。历史虚无主义否定革命，是数典忘祖、自毁长城；同样，忽视历史发展的渐进性和现实条件，用抽象理想剪裁现实，看不到实现理想的曲折性和过程性，同样会带来实践的灾难。一种积极的建构性政治才是中国当代实践之真正需要。
中国需要建构性政治
在冲突和动荡的当今世界，政治不仅是人类的自我解放、自我完善，而且是人类维系自身存在的必要力量。对政治的这一理解要求回归古典政治至高的德性层面，而且赋予政治庄严的历史使命。自从经济自由主义的自发性概念理论上被击破并且在实践中式微以后，政治已经被迫承担了调节社会存在基础的职能，但它并没有将这种承担升华为自觉意识，而只是在策略性的意义上延伸其职能。建构性政治在对消极政治和革命政治双重反思的基础之上，将革命政治指向未来的超越性熔铸到建构性实践过程之中，有理由成为开创人类新型文明形态和人类自我解放与自我救赎的本质路向。
首先，在建构性政治概念中，政治不只是存在的一个方面，而是存在诸方面的构成性维度。因此，这一概念反对独立于道德和经济等等理解政治的职能及本性，将政治限制在话语商谈的层面，而是从人类存在论的总体性高度领会政治的性质及其意义。
其次，面临当代的存在困境——不仅是以剥削为核心的异化的加深，而且是人类自我毁灭的切实可能性，建构性政治在秉承革命政治解放话语的同时，将人类“自救”突出为政治的又一使命，因为更好地存在必须建立在能够存在的基础之上。不论从解放还是救赎的意义来看，建构性政治都要求强化政治的职能和担当意识。因此，如果今天中国政治改革的取向仅仅是“服务政治”、“大社会、小政府”等等，必然成为一种致命的耽搁，把戏仿当成创新。
再次，在革命后的建设实践中，政治只能通过权力的介入改造社会存在基础，将社会导向和谐发展的方向，趋向革命的价值目标，而不能无限制地夸大革命的作用，将非常态的革命不恰当地强调为解决常态问题的手段，导致自我折腾，或者自我毁灭。建构性政治不只是强调历史的断裂，尤其强调跳跃之后的常态进展。
又次，由于强化了政治的超越职能和德性担当，建构性政治并不抽象地否定任何规范权力的要求，将权力假定得绝对纯洁，恰恰相反，它把权力的规范运行看成是政治完成其存在论使命的必要环节，消极政治制约和规范权力的要求不是被放弃了，而是在更基本的意义上被着重强调。
最后，建构性政治蕴含着过程意识，这种意识并不预设历史的透明终点，当然也不寻找绝对根基，而是以可能性概念为实践提供依据。在对历史的理解中，自发性和决定论都没有给政治的创造性留下空间，而可能性乃是实践主体性的内在依据，它将存在的历史理解为建构性的动态过程，由此才有人为的存在世界，才有创造性的生成，才有政治的建构！
总之，对于当代中国的建设实践来说，问题只在于，在复杂的处境中能够以一种坚定的意志将现实推向未来。这就是实践中历史的生成。这一实践所蕴含的建构性姿态，继承革命政治超越现代的遗产，展现了连接理想与现实的真正历史理性，预示着人类历史可能告别自发性发展和暴力驱动的恶性轮回。就像朝阳初生，我们已经感受到了此一实践所带来的敞亮与光辉。也许，高卢雄鸡将因此移居我们这片日久弥新的东方大地。果真如此，我们就可以高兴地呼喊，中华文明复兴之伟大意义，不在于它是金鸡孤鸣、国家发展，而是人类文明新纪元的报晓，就像文艺复兴乃是现代之孕育和发端一样，五千年文明古国的涅槃不会是对过去、也不会是对现代的简单模仿，而是新原则的诞生！
Monday, July 13, 2009
曹天予﹕后冷战时代的中国民族主义
苏东剧变、冷战结束之后，代议民主和私有制自由市场经济几近跨国共识，再捎带上发展主义、消费文化和个人主义-自由主义的社会政治伦理学说，征服全球、不容挑战。随着信息技术的频频突破，发达国家的金融资本，借助其控制的国际贸易、借贷机构的政策压力和新自由主义的话语霸权，敲开发展中民族国家的大门，在日益整合的国际市场上横冲直撞，追逐超常利润而不必承担由此引起的种种（生态、资源、社会、政治等）后果。新一波的经济一体化浪潮在二十世纪九十年代汹涌壮阔、势不可当。
面对这一全球化大潮，世界主义者认为，只有摆脱过时的民族主义情结，顺应历史潮流“全面接轨”，落后国家才能实现现代化，汇入人类文明主流。中国的民族主义者则不同意，认为全面接轨的道路不能走，也走不通；只有站在坚定的民族主义立场上，才有可能利用全球化的契机实现本民族的现代化。以下就两股思潮对抗涉及到的几个问题作些简短的评论。
一. 中国民族主义从何而来？
以民族国家为依托的民族主义本身是现代化过程的产物。现代性的本质是社会（经济政治文化各领域及每一领域内的）功能分解及（循工具理性[经济理性和政治-科层理性]、认知理性和批判理性原则的）理性重组；而其在历史上的首次充分实现形式是资本主义。资本主义的兴起和发展，包括其所必需的资源、劳力、市场、法权，特别是契约关系，只有得到一定领土范围内的政治权力的保护和组织，才有可能。霍布斯的利维坦，表达的就是这个必要性。因此，现代化与民族国家的兴起是一个同步的过程。
然而以追逐利润扩张资本为驱动力的资本主义发展，不可避免地引起一系列结构性问题：资源短缺、生态破坏、市场饱和、阶级矛盾激化以及随之而来的廉价劳动力的消失和社会趋于动荡。这些问题在资本主义的经济理性和制度框架内不可能得到解决。但是，它们可以通过转移、输出而得到中短期的缓解。按鲍曼（Zygmunt Bauman）的说法，历史上资本主义生存发展的基本手段和指导思想就是内部矛盾，外部“解决”；局部难题，全球“解决”。于是，资本主义的民族国家，为资本主义的进一步发展，担负起了新的历史功能，即推行殖民主义帝国主义政策的功能；必要时不惜以战争形式来为“内部问题外部解决”铺平道路。
殖民主义的时代已经过去。把全球化说成是一个旨在建立新世界帝国的阴谋，权作比方可以，经不起认真推敲。作为现代资本主义的新发展，后冷战时代的全球化本质上仍然是“内部问题外部解决”，却是定而不移的事实。全球化中走得最快的是经济。其具体表现是国际分工。当今国际分工的基本特点是，发达国家中资源消耗大、环境污染和生态破坏严重的生产部门大量转移到落后国家或地区；与此同时，不管世界主义者在道义上可以从人权角度提出多少自由主义的论辩，劳动力的反向“自由流动”受到的严格控制，明白无误地宣示了经济全球化的内在限度。换言之，撇开社会经济之外的其它内容，全球化只是发达国家民族主义的另一表现形式。借用世界体系的语言，新一波全球化不过是中心对外围加紧压迫掠夺以缓解其内部结构性困境的一种更加有效的手段而已。
有发达国家针对欠发达国家的民族主义，就有后者的回应。正向现代化奋进的中华民族，从中国革命继承了、又在二战后和冷战后国际关系的挤压中发展了自己的民族主义，是理所当然的事情。
二．为什么放弃民族立场的“全面接轨”不能使中国现代化？
首先，“全面接轨”意味着无条件接受发达国家强势资本制定的游戏规则。也就是说，就生产要素的自由流动而言，落后国家必须接受资本的自由流动，而发达国家却可以不接受劳动力的自由流动；就按比较优势实行国际分工而言，发达国家在知识产权保护下的高附加值高科技产品与落后国家以廉价劳动、高消耗、高污染为代价生产出来的低附加值初级产品实行“公平交换”、“分工合作”。其结果是，富国愈富（打入它国市场、主宰全球经济、并享受进口的廉价消费品），穷国愈穷：廉价劳动的恶性（国际国内）竞争迫使劳动力价格趋于底线。尽管穷国中依附外资的买办阶层可能迅速致富，甚至人民生活也可能因经济发展而有某种总体性的提高，但人口中的大多数却不可能长期受益。
其次，在上述游戏规则限定的格局中，落后民族的依附经济即使有所发展，也必然受到其内生的结构性矛盾的制约，并为发达国家转嫁进来的种种困境付出沉重的代价。由此，全面接轨的结果不是国际经济秩序的改变，而是该秩序被不断重新肯定和强化：落后民族将继续处于国际分工阶梯的底层而不能自拔。
更何况即使这种高代价、低回报的经济发展也必难持久。来自资源、环境、生态等方面的压力很快会逼近极限；在业廉价劳动及无业游民在社会转型期的承受力，也将难以为继。于是，比较优势消失，资金回报率下降而风险率（社会-政治危机）却在增加。当投资环境恶化到一定程度时，著名的“拉美现象”就会出现：外资撤离、经济崩溃、社会动荡。
社会一旦动荡，稳定就会压倒其它一切考虑，包括民主政治的建设和某些基本的人权民权。如此，落后民族的现代化就象海市蜃楼一样，可望而不可即。表面上的灯红酒绿、高楼大厦乃至整个社会屈从于市场力量而进入“风险生活”，不过是一种扭曲的、畸形的、依附性的现代化。
三．中国民族主义的基本内容
后冷战时代的中国民族主义，其出发点既不是某种种族意识，也不是特定的文化认同。在相当重要的意义上，它是对全球化浪潮的回应。以美资为主的跨国资本要求中国对外开放，为的是占领其广阔的市场和剥削其廉价的劳动力，而不是为了使其强大，成为一个有力的竟争者。因此，以美国为首的发达国家的长期战略目标，是在经济、政治、军事、外交等各方面遏制中国的发展。这一战略必然会在其对华关系的各个方面表现出来，但由于错综复杂的实际情势，有时难以看清。面对表面友好实质敌对的外部环境，民族意识的高涨，是不可避免的。
当然，这一意义上的中国民族主义，只是西方民族主义在中国的翻版；与东亚拉美发展型国家的民族主义，也无实质性区别。后者在操作上有别于西方，在目标上却并无二致，即向发达的资本主义国家看齐。目前国内有人主张发展海上力量、促进海外投资，等等，也想走“内部问题外部解决”的道路。但是，这是一条极其危险、并且绝对走不通的道路。首先，美国日本不会容忍。全面对抗乃至军事解决将是极大的灾难。更重要的是，它没有道义基础，因而不能得到广大中国人民的支持。如要一意孤行，势必先得对内压制、实行军事独裁，然后才谈得上对外扩张。除了少数极端分子，谁也不愿看到中国采纳这样的民族主义。
实际上，后冷战时代中国民族主义的主要内容与此极不相同。为了看清这一点，我们必须注意，它不仅是对全球化的回应，而且更重要的是对传统社会主义模式深刻反思的结果。
文革结束后，经过长达十五年对四九年革命胜利后社会主义实践的深刻反省和理论创新，中国最终选择了市场社会主义的方向：市场是发展生产力的手段，目的是建设社会主义。在全球化的历史条件下，以这样一种坚定的（与其它所有民族不同的）民族立场和特定的民族角色参与国际市场，以我为主，振兴中华，这才是后冷战时代中国民族主义的题中应有之义。
更具体地讲，传统社会主义作为对资本主义的否定，在经济方面主张公有制和计划经济，因为私有制被认为是剥削和社会不公正的根源；而盲目的市场力量将导致生产的无政府状态和周期性经济危机。社会主义的生产目的是为了满足劳动者不断增长的物质和文化需要。相反，由利润驱动的发展主义和消费主义，不但误导或忽视这些需要，还势必导致无法解决的生态资源危机。在政治和意识形态方面，它坚持党的领导和民主集中制，强调集体主义和公众利益。在原则上，它并不反对主体自由和个性解放。但以阶级斗争为纲的政治路线与独立思考的个人互不相容。
传统社会主义在实践中的表现极为复杂。党的领导蜕变为以党代政、包办一切。宪政民主成了一纸空文。政治运动不断，公民的基本人权缺少法制保障。由于生产领域内的实际控制权，从而利润分配权，集中在少数干部手中，名义上的公有制并未带来实际上的经济平等。政企不分造成以长官意志为准的指令经济。软约束和大锅饭等种种弊端，使国民经济失去了内在的动力。更由于长期推行行政权力控制下的群众路线，中国经济既无市场经济的活力，又少苏式计划经济的秩序和平衡，导致灾难重重和资源的极大浪费。就生产目的而言，外部压力迫使决策者全神贯注于国防工业以及为之服务的重工业；落后民族的赶超心态又促成了高积累和大跃进。于是“满足劳动者的物质文化需要”成了一句空话，实际上出现的是一种极为粗糙的发展主义，以及与之形影相随的环境污染和生态破坏。
在这样的背景下，改革不可避免。问题只是什么样的改革。反思社会主义传统、发展市场社会主义理论的中国民族主义者，其出发点仍然是马克思主义。这里说的马克思主义，既不是斯大林毛泽东的解释, 也不是个别论点, 而是主要由马克思创立的理解人类社会以及中国现状的一个批判的、历史的和辩证的概念框架。
马克思主义是批判的, 特别是对资本主义的雇佣劳动制度和资本(及其人格化身)对雇佣劳动者的剥削和压迫, 它坚决批判，彻底否定。马克思主义者对资本主义其它方面的一切肯定或否定的分析, 都是为这一基本批判目标服务的。放弃这一批判态度, 就是放弃马克思主义。
根据马克思主义的历史主义，任何社会现象，只有在特定的历史背景中才能得到理解。例如, 市场经济，既有其一般特点 (契约与竞争)，又有其在资本主义制度中的特殊表现形式, 特别是资本雇用劳动时形式平等的契约的特定历史含义。马克思主义者不接受任何脱离历史实际的“个人理性”、“自由交易”、“最佳平衡”等抽象概念作为立论的出发点。
方法论上, 马克思主义关于主观客观的辩证法, 为理解社会结构及其历史演变提供了迄今为止最为透彻、清晰、灵活而又逻辑严谨的解释。比如, 市场或其它任一社会经济结构, 按照马克思主义的辩证观点, 都是人类社会交往的产物, 是客观化了的人类活动。这种结构, 作为在社会交往过程中形成的集体理性, 通常表现为一套规则, 制约着人们的活动。但是, 人们在活动时, 又总是对规则不断地进行重新解读甚至改写。当这种重新解读和改写，导致某一经济制度的基本规则发生了变化, 就出现了所谓的制度变迁。这样的解释, 既避免了意志论, 承认既存结构对行为的制约, 又避免了经济决定论, 承认文化、政治和法律等因素在结构转型中的能动作用。
与传统的社会主义者不同，中国的马克思主义者勇敢地承认，市场具备有效处理经济信息、降低交易费用、提高生产效率、保持活力与创新精神的潜力。但与右翼自由派不同，他们同时又清醒地认识到，市场作为一种特定的制度安排，其结构特色是剥削、竞争与不稳定；其相应的社会风气是贪婪与恐惧。即使仅限于生产力的发展，市场也只是一个必要条件。没有其它条件（恰当的发展战略、科技创新和制度创新以及政府干预）的配合，它的作用或者极其有限，或者反具破坏力。
就发展战略而言，既然出口导向的短期收益无法抵偿依附性带来的长远损失，中国要在国际分工中占据一个与人平等的位置，就得提高民族经济的整体效率（而不仅是单个企业的竞争力）。为此必须立足于本土企业和国内市场，通过扩大内需，使民族产业形成规模体系、实现科技升级。这里的关键是扩大内需。同时，生产率的持续提高，有赖于劳动者在组织管理工艺技术等方面经验的积累和增长、学习和创新。劳动者的学习创新能力，与扩大内需一样，又取决于收入的增长。
但在雇佣劳动市场条件下，大量失业阻碍劳动者收入水平的提高。按照现有的产权制度，劳动者收入的增加会影响产品价格和出口竞争力。这在整个经济极度依赖出口的情况下，势必对生产的发展和就业压力的缓解产生消极的影响。由此可见, 改变（劳动力）市场规则、调整产权结构，对选择恰当的发展战略、提高劳动者的学习创新能力，也就是说，对发展生产力，有着决定性的意义。
在探讨社会主义市场经济时，中国的马克思主义者强调，没有劳动者的活劳动, 就不可能创造剩余。因此, 劳动产权，即劳动者因其付出劳动（投入生产的人力资本）而享有的剩余索取权，应在产权结构中享有核心地位。理论上，劳动产权概念并不否定作为市场经济哲学基础的自由主义，反而正是其道德责任理论的推广和逻辑结论。劳动者作为自主自决的道德主体, 对自身行为和活动负有不可推卸的责任，也享有不可让渡的权利。劳动产权是劳动投入这一道德行为的法律表示。因此, 对它的侵犯, 构成了对社会经济生活道义基础的挑战。
确认劳动产权，意味着确认劳动者在企业或其它劳动组织形式中的主体地位及其应享的剩余索取权和剩余控制权。这将极大地提高劳动者的积极性和学习创新能力、提高生产率；同时也从资源和制度两方面为参与民主和社会公正提供了牢靠的基础。民主的实质不在程序 (如事事得人人投票), 而在自治，即治理得到被治理者的同意和授权。在得到员工授权和监督的情况下，等级制集中管理完全可行。这样的治理结构, 当然会比在资本控制下、劳资对立、容忍剥削压迫的委托-代理结构有更高的管理效率。
今天的马克思主义者, 可以接受市场, 甚至接受产权社会化条件下的生产资料私有制。但绝不向剥削和压迫妥协。劳动产权的实施使私有的生产资料不能成为剥削的手段，从而使私有制和市场经济与剥削压迫脱钩成为可能。当资本主义的市场规则, 由于劳动产权的引入, 从根本上 (在雇工契约的意义上) 被改写时, 资本主义制度就演变成了社会主义制度。
就政府干预而言，一个强有力的政府，对于保证市场经济的正常运行及其社会主义性质，具有决定性的意义。从微观调控撤出，政府的职能在于制定发展战略、建立市场秩序、确保公平竞争，并积极主导经济的宏观平衡、公共物品的提供、外部性的处理和民族产业的保护等方面的政策制定及其贯彻实行。对于劳动产权这一劳动者的基本权利, 政府必须动用法律武器，予以全力保护。这样，经济和社会生活中的结构性不平等才能真正消除，市场经济才能沿着向社会主义过渡的方向前进。
应该指出，中国民族主义纲领中的社会主义不是国家主义。它在政治文化与制度层面上突破了党国一体、高度集中、家长制等国家主义传统。个人自由和人权民权，包括独立的民间组织维护自身权益的政治权利，必须得到充分的宪法和法律保障，不受任何干预。政府应大力资助文教科技医疗保健等社会事业的发展，但实际工作却必须由非政府的专业机构去组织推动。政治上，国家权威的合法性必须以民主授权为基础，使之不受特权阶层的操纵控制，从而根治专制腐败。同时，社会主义政党的领导作用不可替代。不是以党代政，指挥和包办一切；而是经过一定程序的民主授权，指导政府活动，引导舆论，教育群众，把握国家经济、政治、文化生活的社会主义方向。
社会主义文化的基本特征，是以现代性中个人解放与人类解放这一终极价值为依据来评价现存的制度文化，寻求适当的制度安排，发展相应的哲学、经济、政治和文化理论。作为迄今为止最彻底的批判理性和人类精神创造力的最高表现，它是观念创新和制度创新的灵感源泉。
以社会主义为依托，中国民族主义者所追求的现代性超越了自由主义现代性所体现的资本扩张逻辑。它以彻底的人道主义为归宿，把平等和公正原则落实到社会经济生活的核心领域，即生产的民主控制和剩余的公正分配，从而为每个人的自由发展提供了物质前提。它与传统社会主义的区别，在于经济上的市场导向，政治上的民主理想和思想上的自由人权民权信念。
四．新型民族主义的普遍正当性
近来有论者对“利用全球化实现现代化”的民族主义纲领提出质疑。首先是可能性：面对跨国资本的全球扩张，单个或几个发展中国家能否成功地“各人自扫门前雪”？更重要的是它的正当性：既然全球化的直接后果是加强剥削、损害生态和人性、阻碍经济发展和政治民主化，那么为什么不联合一切被压迫被剥削的民族和人民予以反对，而是采取民族主义的立场，默许它在其它地方继续为害？（见董正华：“全球化：歧义纷沓的解说与真实的历史进程”，《北京行政学院学报》2004年第5、第6期）。
可能性问题涉及到对全球化的认识。全球化在为跨国资本开道的同时，也为发展中国家利用后发优势发展民族经济、提升产业结构实现现代化提供了机会。面对全球化大潮，随波逐流固然会受人宰制、难以翻身；但拒绝参与、自我孤立，即使可能，也会不利于技术-经济层面上的现代化。
问题的关键在于，在加入全球化的过程中，坚持民族立场的中国究竟有没有可能顶住跨国资本的压力、挣脱其强加的分工格局、独立自主地解读、修改乃至参与制定游戏规则、跳出依附陷阱、实现民族经济的现代化？应该看到，中国如此之大，有建国五十多年来形成的颇具规模的产业科技基础，有广阔的国内市场，又有强大的人力资源和组织资源，在与跨国资本周旋时，有着极大的回旋余地。如果能以明确的民族意识，在主动参与全球化的过程中以本国发展为目标，以本土企业和国内市场为主要依托，以主权国家为后盾，并运用适当的产业政策和发展战略，利用跨国资本的资金技术和市场渠道，学习其科学技术和管理经验，有选择地移植其为规范的市场经济所设置的法律金融框架，那末“利用全球化实现现代化”并不是不可能的。
民族主义纲领道义上的正当性或普遍性则涉及它所追求的现代性与资本主义现代性之间的关系。就自主个人的自由发展这一终极价值而言，在理性地组织社会生活、特别是按价值目标判断一切的批判理性的发展方面，两类现代性没有本质的区别。但依此为准，即使是在西方现代性取得最高成就的美国或欧盟，理念与现实也相距甚远。西方社会在经济上的严重不平等，在很大程度上掏空了其法律政治上平等的实际内容，使民主徒具形式，并使个性发展和积极意义上的自由成为仅供少数人享有的特权。而中国的民族主义，尽管源于中国特殊的民族处境，但其纲领却超越民族界限，与其他民族的利益发生联系。这是从特殊情境中衍发出来的一种处于萌生状态的普遍原则。由于中国民族主义追求远比美国自由主义更彻底更普遍的价值目标，它所实施的体现社会主义现代性的各种政策举措，势必遭到以美国为首的资本主义世界的指责和压力。这一以中国民族主义对世界主义（或“文明主流”）形式出现的对抗，实际上是两种现代性的对抗。国际范围内的对抗和斗争，反映到国内，就是坚持社会主义的民族主义与向往资本主义的世界主义之争。
澄清了这一点，对中国的民族主义，以及中国在国际谈判和国际组织中有必要联合其它发展中国家的立场，就没有疑问了。但由于各国情况不同以及各种利益冲突，在当前情况下，很难想象能够组成一个在全球范围内有效地反对资本主义全球化的民族国家联盟。中国民族主义的正当性只有在其纲领获得成功时，才能为其它发展中民族所借鉴、所仿效，得到普遍的承认。中国的民族主义，不过是社会主义现代性走向世界、成为普遍原则的第一步。榜样的力量是无穷的。
（《现代化、全球化和中国道路》，社科文献，2003；原载《劳动产权和中国模式》375页，社科文献，2006）
（轉自烏有之鄉，2009-7-9）
面对这一全球化大潮，世界主义者认为，只有摆脱过时的民族主义情结，顺应历史潮流“全面接轨”，落后国家才能实现现代化，汇入人类文明主流。中国的民族主义者则不同意，认为全面接轨的道路不能走，也走不通；只有站在坚定的民族主义立场上，才有可能利用全球化的契机实现本民族的现代化。以下就两股思潮对抗涉及到的几个问题作些简短的评论。
一. 中国民族主义从何而来？
以民族国家为依托的民族主义本身是现代化过程的产物。现代性的本质是社会（经济政治文化各领域及每一领域内的）功能分解及（循工具理性[经济理性和政治-科层理性]、认知理性和批判理性原则的）理性重组；而其在历史上的首次充分实现形式是资本主义。资本主义的兴起和发展，包括其所必需的资源、劳力、市场、法权，特别是契约关系，只有得到一定领土范围内的政治权力的保护和组织，才有可能。霍布斯的利维坦，表达的就是这个必要性。因此，现代化与民族国家的兴起是一个同步的过程。
然而以追逐利润扩张资本为驱动力的资本主义发展，不可避免地引起一系列结构性问题：资源短缺、生态破坏、市场饱和、阶级矛盾激化以及随之而来的廉价劳动力的消失和社会趋于动荡。这些问题在资本主义的经济理性和制度框架内不可能得到解决。但是，它们可以通过转移、输出而得到中短期的缓解。按鲍曼（Zygmunt Bauman）的说法，历史上资本主义生存发展的基本手段和指导思想就是内部矛盾，外部“解决”；局部难题，全球“解决”。于是，资本主义的民族国家，为资本主义的进一步发展，担负起了新的历史功能，即推行殖民主义帝国主义政策的功能；必要时不惜以战争形式来为“内部问题外部解决”铺平道路。
殖民主义的时代已经过去。把全球化说成是一个旨在建立新世界帝国的阴谋，权作比方可以，经不起认真推敲。作为现代资本主义的新发展，后冷战时代的全球化本质上仍然是“内部问题外部解决”，却是定而不移的事实。全球化中走得最快的是经济。其具体表现是国际分工。当今国际分工的基本特点是，发达国家中资源消耗大、环境污染和生态破坏严重的生产部门大量转移到落后国家或地区；与此同时，不管世界主义者在道义上可以从人权角度提出多少自由主义的论辩，劳动力的反向“自由流动”受到的严格控制，明白无误地宣示了经济全球化的内在限度。换言之，撇开社会经济之外的其它内容，全球化只是发达国家民族主义的另一表现形式。借用世界体系的语言，新一波全球化不过是中心对外围加紧压迫掠夺以缓解其内部结构性困境的一种更加有效的手段而已。
有发达国家针对欠发达国家的民族主义，就有后者的回应。正向现代化奋进的中华民族，从中国革命继承了、又在二战后和冷战后国际关系的挤压中发展了自己的民族主义，是理所当然的事情。
二．为什么放弃民族立场的“全面接轨”不能使中国现代化？
首先，“全面接轨”意味着无条件接受发达国家强势资本制定的游戏规则。也就是说，就生产要素的自由流动而言，落后国家必须接受资本的自由流动，而发达国家却可以不接受劳动力的自由流动；就按比较优势实行国际分工而言，发达国家在知识产权保护下的高附加值高科技产品与落后国家以廉价劳动、高消耗、高污染为代价生产出来的低附加值初级产品实行“公平交换”、“分工合作”。其结果是，富国愈富（打入它国市场、主宰全球经济、并享受进口的廉价消费品），穷国愈穷：廉价劳动的恶性（国际国内）竞争迫使劳动力价格趋于底线。尽管穷国中依附外资的买办阶层可能迅速致富，甚至人民生活也可能因经济发展而有某种总体性的提高，但人口中的大多数却不可能长期受益。
其次，在上述游戏规则限定的格局中，落后民族的依附经济即使有所发展，也必然受到其内生的结构性矛盾的制约，并为发达国家转嫁进来的种种困境付出沉重的代价。由此，全面接轨的结果不是国际经济秩序的改变，而是该秩序被不断重新肯定和强化：落后民族将继续处于国际分工阶梯的底层而不能自拔。
更何况即使这种高代价、低回报的经济发展也必难持久。来自资源、环境、生态等方面的压力很快会逼近极限；在业廉价劳动及无业游民在社会转型期的承受力，也将难以为继。于是，比较优势消失，资金回报率下降而风险率（社会-政治危机）却在增加。当投资环境恶化到一定程度时，著名的“拉美现象”就会出现：外资撤离、经济崩溃、社会动荡。
社会一旦动荡，稳定就会压倒其它一切考虑，包括民主政治的建设和某些基本的人权民权。如此，落后民族的现代化就象海市蜃楼一样，可望而不可即。表面上的灯红酒绿、高楼大厦乃至整个社会屈从于市场力量而进入“风险生活”，不过是一种扭曲的、畸形的、依附性的现代化。
三．中国民族主义的基本内容
后冷战时代的中国民族主义，其出发点既不是某种种族意识，也不是特定的文化认同。在相当重要的意义上，它是对全球化浪潮的回应。以美资为主的跨国资本要求中国对外开放，为的是占领其广阔的市场和剥削其廉价的劳动力，而不是为了使其强大，成为一个有力的竟争者。因此，以美国为首的发达国家的长期战略目标，是在经济、政治、军事、外交等各方面遏制中国的发展。这一战略必然会在其对华关系的各个方面表现出来，但由于错综复杂的实际情势，有时难以看清。面对表面友好实质敌对的外部环境，民族意识的高涨，是不可避免的。
当然，这一意义上的中国民族主义，只是西方民族主义在中国的翻版；与东亚拉美发展型国家的民族主义，也无实质性区别。后者在操作上有别于西方，在目标上却并无二致，即向发达的资本主义国家看齐。目前国内有人主张发展海上力量、促进海外投资，等等，也想走“内部问题外部解决”的道路。但是，这是一条极其危险、并且绝对走不通的道路。首先，美国日本不会容忍。全面对抗乃至军事解决将是极大的灾难。更重要的是，它没有道义基础，因而不能得到广大中国人民的支持。如要一意孤行，势必先得对内压制、实行军事独裁，然后才谈得上对外扩张。除了少数极端分子，谁也不愿看到中国采纳这样的民族主义。
实际上，后冷战时代中国民族主义的主要内容与此极不相同。为了看清这一点，我们必须注意，它不仅是对全球化的回应，而且更重要的是对传统社会主义模式深刻反思的结果。
文革结束后，经过长达十五年对四九年革命胜利后社会主义实践的深刻反省和理论创新，中国最终选择了市场社会主义的方向：市场是发展生产力的手段，目的是建设社会主义。在全球化的历史条件下，以这样一种坚定的（与其它所有民族不同的）民族立场和特定的民族角色参与国际市场，以我为主，振兴中华，这才是后冷战时代中国民族主义的题中应有之义。
更具体地讲，传统社会主义作为对资本主义的否定，在经济方面主张公有制和计划经济，因为私有制被认为是剥削和社会不公正的根源；而盲目的市场力量将导致生产的无政府状态和周期性经济危机。社会主义的生产目的是为了满足劳动者不断增长的物质和文化需要。相反，由利润驱动的发展主义和消费主义，不但误导或忽视这些需要，还势必导致无法解决的生态资源危机。在政治和意识形态方面，它坚持党的领导和民主集中制，强调集体主义和公众利益。在原则上，它并不反对主体自由和个性解放。但以阶级斗争为纲的政治路线与独立思考的个人互不相容。
传统社会主义在实践中的表现极为复杂。党的领导蜕变为以党代政、包办一切。宪政民主成了一纸空文。政治运动不断，公民的基本人权缺少法制保障。由于生产领域内的实际控制权，从而利润分配权，集中在少数干部手中，名义上的公有制并未带来实际上的经济平等。政企不分造成以长官意志为准的指令经济。软约束和大锅饭等种种弊端，使国民经济失去了内在的动力。更由于长期推行行政权力控制下的群众路线，中国经济既无市场经济的活力，又少苏式计划经济的秩序和平衡，导致灾难重重和资源的极大浪费。就生产目的而言，外部压力迫使决策者全神贯注于国防工业以及为之服务的重工业；落后民族的赶超心态又促成了高积累和大跃进。于是“满足劳动者的物质文化需要”成了一句空话，实际上出现的是一种极为粗糙的发展主义，以及与之形影相随的环境污染和生态破坏。
在这样的背景下，改革不可避免。问题只是什么样的改革。反思社会主义传统、发展市场社会主义理论的中国民族主义者，其出发点仍然是马克思主义。这里说的马克思主义，既不是斯大林毛泽东的解释, 也不是个别论点, 而是主要由马克思创立的理解人类社会以及中国现状的一个批判的、历史的和辩证的概念框架。
马克思主义是批判的, 特别是对资本主义的雇佣劳动制度和资本(及其人格化身)对雇佣劳动者的剥削和压迫, 它坚决批判，彻底否定。马克思主义者对资本主义其它方面的一切肯定或否定的分析, 都是为这一基本批判目标服务的。放弃这一批判态度, 就是放弃马克思主义。
根据马克思主义的历史主义，任何社会现象，只有在特定的历史背景中才能得到理解。例如, 市场经济，既有其一般特点 (契约与竞争)，又有其在资本主义制度中的特殊表现形式, 特别是资本雇用劳动时形式平等的契约的特定历史含义。马克思主义者不接受任何脱离历史实际的“个人理性”、“自由交易”、“最佳平衡”等抽象概念作为立论的出发点。
方法论上, 马克思主义关于主观客观的辩证法, 为理解社会结构及其历史演变提供了迄今为止最为透彻、清晰、灵活而又逻辑严谨的解释。比如, 市场或其它任一社会经济结构, 按照马克思主义的辩证观点, 都是人类社会交往的产物, 是客观化了的人类活动。这种结构, 作为在社会交往过程中形成的集体理性, 通常表现为一套规则, 制约着人们的活动。但是, 人们在活动时, 又总是对规则不断地进行重新解读甚至改写。当这种重新解读和改写，导致某一经济制度的基本规则发生了变化, 就出现了所谓的制度变迁。这样的解释, 既避免了意志论, 承认既存结构对行为的制约, 又避免了经济决定论, 承认文化、政治和法律等因素在结构转型中的能动作用。
与传统的社会主义者不同，中国的马克思主义者勇敢地承认，市场具备有效处理经济信息、降低交易费用、提高生产效率、保持活力与创新精神的潜力。但与右翼自由派不同，他们同时又清醒地认识到，市场作为一种特定的制度安排，其结构特色是剥削、竞争与不稳定；其相应的社会风气是贪婪与恐惧。即使仅限于生产力的发展，市场也只是一个必要条件。没有其它条件（恰当的发展战略、科技创新和制度创新以及政府干预）的配合，它的作用或者极其有限，或者反具破坏力。
就发展战略而言，既然出口导向的短期收益无法抵偿依附性带来的长远损失，中国要在国际分工中占据一个与人平等的位置，就得提高民族经济的整体效率（而不仅是单个企业的竞争力）。为此必须立足于本土企业和国内市场，通过扩大内需，使民族产业形成规模体系、实现科技升级。这里的关键是扩大内需。同时，生产率的持续提高，有赖于劳动者在组织管理工艺技术等方面经验的积累和增长、学习和创新。劳动者的学习创新能力，与扩大内需一样，又取决于收入的增长。
但在雇佣劳动市场条件下，大量失业阻碍劳动者收入水平的提高。按照现有的产权制度，劳动者收入的增加会影响产品价格和出口竞争力。这在整个经济极度依赖出口的情况下，势必对生产的发展和就业压力的缓解产生消极的影响。由此可见, 改变（劳动力）市场规则、调整产权结构，对选择恰当的发展战略、提高劳动者的学习创新能力，也就是说，对发展生产力，有着决定性的意义。
在探讨社会主义市场经济时，中国的马克思主义者强调，没有劳动者的活劳动, 就不可能创造剩余。因此, 劳动产权，即劳动者因其付出劳动（投入生产的人力资本）而享有的剩余索取权，应在产权结构中享有核心地位。理论上，劳动产权概念并不否定作为市场经济哲学基础的自由主义，反而正是其道德责任理论的推广和逻辑结论。劳动者作为自主自决的道德主体, 对自身行为和活动负有不可推卸的责任，也享有不可让渡的权利。劳动产权是劳动投入这一道德行为的法律表示。因此, 对它的侵犯, 构成了对社会经济生活道义基础的挑战。
确认劳动产权，意味着确认劳动者在企业或其它劳动组织形式中的主体地位及其应享的剩余索取权和剩余控制权。这将极大地提高劳动者的积极性和学习创新能力、提高生产率；同时也从资源和制度两方面为参与民主和社会公正提供了牢靠的基础。民主的实质不在程序 (如事事得人人投票), 而在自治，即治理得到被治理者的同意和授权。在得到员工授权和监督的情况下，等级制集中管理完全可行。这样的治理结构, 当然会比在资本控制下、劳资对立、容忍剥削压迫的委托-代理结构有更高的管理效率。
今天的马克思主义者, 可以接受市场, 甚至接受产权社会化条件下的生产资料私有制。但绝不向剥削和压迫妥协。劳动产权的实施使私有的生产资料不能成为剥削的手段，从而使私有制和市场经济与剥削压迫脱钩成为可能。当资本主义的市场规则, 由于劳动产权的引入, 从根本上 (在雇工契约的意义上) 被改写时, 资本主义制度就演变成了社会主义制度。
就政府干预而言，一个强有力的政府，对于保证市场经济的正常运行及其社会主义性质，具有决定性的意义。从微观调控撤出，政府的职能在于制定发展战略、建立市场秩序、确保公平竞争，并积极主导经济的宏观平衡、公共物品的提供、外部性的处理和民族产业的保护等方面的政策制定及其贯彻实行。对于劳动产权这一劳动者的基本权利, 政府必须动用法律武器，予以全力保护。这样，经济和社会生活中的结构性不平等才能真正消除，市场经济才能沿着向社会主义过渡的方向前进。
应该指出，中国民族主义纲领中的社会主义不是国家主义。它在政治文化与制度层面上突破了党国一体、高度集中、家长制等国家主义传统。个人自由和人权民权，包括独立的民间组织维护自身权益的政治权利，必须得到充分的宪法和法律保障，不受任何干预。政府应大力资助文教科技医疗保健等社会事业的发展，但实际工作却必须由非政府的专业机构去组织推动。政治上，国家权威的合法性必须以民主授权为基础，使之不受特权阶层的操纵控制，从而根治专制腐败。同时，社会主义政党的领导作用不可替代。不是以党代政，指挥和包办一切；而是经过一定程序的民主授权，指导政府活动，引导舆论，教育群众，把握国家经济、政治、文化生活的社会主义方向。
社会主义文化的基本特征，是以现代性中个人解放与人类解放这一终极价值为依据来评价现存的制度文化，寻求适当的制度安排，发展相应的哲学、经济、政治和文化理论。作为迄今为止最彻底的批判理性和人类精神创造力的最高表现，它是观念创新和制度创新的灵感源泉。
以社会主义为依托，中国民族主义者所追求的现代性超越了自由主义现代性所体现的资本扩张逻辑。它以彻底的人道主义为归宿，把平等和公正原则落实到社会经济生活的核心领域，即生产的民主控制和剩余的公正分配，从而为每个人的自由发展提供了物质前提。它与传统社会主义的区别，在于经济上的市场导向，政治上的民主理想和思想上的自由人权民权信念。
四．新型民族主义的普遍正当性
近来有论者对“利用全球化实现现代化”的民族主义纲领提出质疑。首先是可能性：面对跨国资本的全球扩张，单个或几个发展中国家能否成功地“各人自扫门前雪”？更重要的是它的正当性：既然全球化的直接后果是加强剥削、损害生态和人性、阻碍经济发展和政治民主化，那么为什么不联合一切被压迫被剥削的民族和人民予以反对，而是采取民族主义的立场，默许它在其它地方继续为害？（见董正华：“全球化：歧义纷沓的解说与真实的历史进程”，《北京行政学院学报》2004年第5、第6期）。
可能性问题涉及到对全球化的认识。全球化在为跨国资本开道的同时，也为发展中国家利用后发优势发展民族经济、提升产业结构实现现代化提供了机会。面对全球化大潮，随波逐流固然会受人宰制、难以翻身；但拒绝参与、自我孤立，即使可能，也会不利于技术-经济层面上的现代化。
问题的关键在于，在加入全球化的过程中，坚持民族立场的中国究竟有没有可能顶住跨国资本的压力、挣脱其强加的分工格局、独立自主地解读、修改乃至参与制定游戏规则、跳出依附陷阱、实现民族经济的现代化？应该看到，中国如此之大，有建国五十多年来形成的颇具规模的产业科技基础，有广阔的国内市场，又有强大的人力资源和组织资源，在与跨国资本周旋时，有着极大的回旋余地。如果能以明确的民族意识，在主动参与全球化的过程中以本国发展为目标，以本土企业和国内市场为主要依托，以主权国家为后盾，并运用适当的产业政策和发展战略，利用跨国资本的资金技术和市场渠道，学习其科学技术和管理经验，有选择地移植其为规范的市场经济所设置的法律金融框架，那末“利用全球化实现现代化”并不是不可能的。
民族主义纲领道义上的正当性或普遍性则涉及它所追求的现代性与资本主义现代性之间的关系。就自主个人的自由发展这一终极价值而言，在理性地组织社会生活、特别是按价值目标判断一切的批判理性的发展方面，两类现代性没有本质的区别。但依此为准，即使是在西方现代性取得最高成就的美国或欧盟，理念与现实也相距甚远。西方社会在经济上的严重不平等，在很大程度上掏空了其法律政治上平等的实际内容，使民主徒具形式，并使个性发展和积极意义上的自由成为仅供少数人享有的特权。而中国的民族主义，尽管源于中国特殊的民族处境，但其纲领却超越民族界限，与其他民族的利益发生联系。这是从特殊情境中衍发出来的一种处于萌生状态的普遍原则。由于中国民族主义追求远比美国自由主义更彻底更普遍的价值目标，它所实施的体现社会主义现代性的各种政策举措，势必遭到以美国为首的资本主义世界的指责和压力。这一以中国民族主义对世界主义（或“文明主流”）形式出现的对抗，实际上是两种现代性的对抗。国际范围内的对抗和斗争，反映到国内，就是坚持社会主义的民族主义与向往资本主义的世界主义之争。
澄清了这一点，对中国的民族主义，以及中国在国际谈判和国际组织中有必要联合其它发展中国家的立场，就没有疑问了。但由于各国情况不同以及各种利益冲突，在当前情况下，很难想象能够组成一个在全球范围内有效地反对资本主义全球化的民族国家联盟。中国民族主义的正当性只有在其纲领获得成功时，才能为其它发展中民族所借鉴、所仿效，得到普遍的承认。中国的民族主义，不过是社会主义现代性走向世界、成为普遍原则的第一步。榜样的力量是无穷的。
（《现代化、全球化和中国道路》，社科文献，2003；原载《劳动产权和中国模式》375页，社科文献，2006）
（轉自烏有之鄉，2009-7-9）
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