有人在facebook搞民调，是否应该暗杀奥巴马。
纽约时报专栏作家弗里德曼深感不安，他回想起1995年以色列极右派在暗杀总理拉宾之前营造的恐怖气氛。美国极右派也似乎在步以色列极右派的后尘：造谣攻击奥巴马是社会主义者、回教徒，国会议员在奥巴马国会演说时高喊撒谎者、说他不在美国出生甚至不是公民，企图否定奥巴马总统的合法性。
弗里德曼批评美国政治的异常现象还有：金钱腐蚀政治、重划选区、有线电视24小时攻击、博客写作等，导致所有政党所有政客永久性展开竞选，导致无法严肃讨论重要问题，根据国家利益决策，威胁美国基本政治制度的生存。
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
斯蒂格利茨：华尔街的有毒消息
〔机器翻译结果，在整理中〕
目前的危机结束以后，美国式资本主义的声誉会遭到痛击，至少是因为华盛顿的做法与言辞之间存在巨大落差。诺贝尔经济学奖得主约瑟夫～斯蒂格利茨警告说，发展中国家幻想破灭后，也可能抛弃自由市场，会对全球稳定和美国的安全构成新的威胁。
约瑟夫～斯蒂格利茨 （2009年7月“名利场”杂志〕
所有危机都会结束，当前的经济危机虽然形势不佳，也会很快过去。但是，没有哪次危机，特别是目前这种严重的危机，过去之后，不会留下遗产。而其中一个遗产将是全世界的思想斗争：什么样的经济制度可能给大多数人带来最大利益。发生这场斗争最激烈的地方是第三世界，在占世界人口百分之八十的亚洲、拉丁美洲和非洲。1.4亿人每天靠不到1.25美元度日。在美国，称有人社会主义可能只是一个廉价的投篮。在世界的许多地方，但是，资本主义与社会主义，或战斗，至少是许多美国人将标签的社会主义，仍持续存在。虽然可能在目前的经济危机没有赢家，有输家，其中最大的输家是支持美国式的资本主义。这会影响我们的生活很长一段时间来处理。
在柏林墙倒塌1989年，标志着共产主义作为一种可行的想法结束。是的，共产主义的问题已经表现了数十年。但1989年之后，很难说任何人在其辩护词。有一段时间，似乎共产主义的失败意味着，特别是在其美国式的资本主义肯定的胜利。弗朗西斯福山竟然宣布“历史的终结，”界定为社会发展的最后阶段，市场资本主义的民主，并宣布全人类现在在这个方向前进。事实上，历史学家将迎来20年来自1989年以来作为美国必胜信念短的时间。随着大银行和金融间房屋倒塌，和随后的经济混乱，救援混乱的企图，这一时期已经结束。同样，要加强对“市场原教旨主义”的观念，不受约束的市场，完全靠自己，才能确保经济繁荣和增长的辩论。今天，只有迷惑会说，市场的自我纠正，或者我们可以就自我兴趣的市场参与者行为的依赖，以保证一切正常诚实和适当。
经济辩论是在发展中世界，特别是效力。虽然我们在西方往往忘记，190年前一个世界国内生产总值的三分之一是在中国。但是，相当突然，殖民主义剥削和不公平贸易协定，在欧美的技术革命相结合，离开了发展中国家的落后，到了这一地步，到1950年，中国的经济少于5世界GDP的百分之构成在19世纪中叶，英国和法国进行的战争，实际上开放中国对全球贸易。这是第二次鸦片战争，如此命名是因为西方曾与成瘾引起广泛的抵押品价值的影响不大出售给中国不是通过药物，它已被纳入中国市场倾销等。这是一个由西方早期试图纠正的国际收支平衡问题。
殖民主义留下了一个在发展中世界混合遗产，但有明确的结果可以说是那里的人，他们被残酷地剥削看法。在许多新兴的领导人，马克思主义理论提供了他们的经验的解释，它认为，开采事实上是基础的资本主义制度。政治独立，来到第二次世界大战后没有制止经济殖民主义结束殖民地的成绩。在诸如非洲，利用某些地区，自然资源的开采和环境的强奸，回报为微薄的工资全是显而易见的。这是在其他地方更加微妙。在许多世界各地，如国际货币基金组织和世界银行的全球性机构来作为文书后殖民控制上。这些机构推向市场原教旨主义（“新自由主义”，这是经常被称为），一个理想化的概念由美国人认为是“自由和不受约束的市场。”他们敦促金融部门放松管制，私有化和贸易自由化。
世界银行和I.M.F.说他们正在为发展中世界的利益这一切。他们支持由自由市场经济学家队后，从这个自由市场经济的许多教堂，美国芝加哥大学。最后，在“芝加哥男孩”的计划并没有带来所承诺的结果。收入停滞不前。哪里有增长，财富到顶部的。在个别国家的经济危机变得更加频繁，有100多个在过去30年里严重的多。
毫不奇怪，发展中国家的人民变得越来越相信，西方的帮助，是利他主义的动机。他们怀疑这是自由市场的说辞，“华盛顿共识”，因为它是已知的简写，只是对旧的商业利益覆盖。怀疑是加强了西方自己的虚伪。欧美不开放自己的市场向第三世界，这通常是所有这些贫困国家提供农产品。他们强迫发展中国家，以消除旨在创造新的产业补贴，即使他们提供了大量补贴本国农民。
自由市场理念被证明是一种新形式的剥削的借口。 “私有化”的意思，外国人可以购买发展中国家以低廉的价格矿山和油田。这意味着他们可以收获，例如在巨额利润的电信垄断和半垄断。 “自由化”，意味着他们能获得高回报的贷款和贷款时坏了，国际货币基金组织迫使损失社会化，这意味着螺钉对整个人口向银行支付回。 It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent.而资本流入自由，没有劳动，除非在最有才能的个人而言，谁发现，在全球市场的好工作。
这张图片，很明显，涂上过于广泛画笔。总是有在亚洲的谁抵制华盛顿共识。他们把对资本流动的限制。亚洲的巨人，中国和印度经济管理他们自己的方式，产生了前所未有的发展。但在其他地方，特别是在一些国家，世界银行和国际货币基金组织held sway, things did not go well.
到处，围绕思想争论仍在继续。即使在这方面做得很好的国家，其中有一个信念的教育和影响力，对游戏规则没有得到公平的。他们认为，尽管他们做了不公平的规则，他们也走软的在发展中世界谁也没有做，所有的朋友和同情。
在美国的批评风格的第三世界，认为美国已对当前经济危机的方式一直是资本主义的最后一根稻草。在东亚金融危机，仅在10年前，美国和国际货币基金组织要求受影响的国家削减开支的削减赤字，即使在泰国，这有助于在艾滋病流行的，或者即使重新抬头，在印度尼西亚，这意味着削减粮食补贴的挨饿。美国和I.M.F.迫使国家在某些情况下提高利率，超过百分之五十。 They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out.多么可怕的先例，这会成立，他们所说的，在瑞士的自由市场机制，可怕的时钟干预。
之间的东亚金融危机的处理危机和美国形成鲜明对比的努力没有白费。拉孔的美的，我们现在看到的开支和庞大赤字大量增加，尽管利率已下降至零。银行正跳伞左右。是谁在华盛顿与东亚金融危机处理一些相同的官员现在管理向美国危机的反应。因此，在第三世界人民的要求，是美国管理不同的药给自己？
许多发展中国家还是聪明的戏弄他们多年接受：他们应该采取美国的机构，按照我们的政策，进行放松管制，开放本国市场，美国的银行，使他们能够了解“好”的银行业务，以及（并非巧合）出售他们的公司和银行的美国人，尤其是在防火，在危机期间的价格出售。是的，华盛顿表示，这将是痛苦的，但最后你会因此而更美好。美国派出的财政部长（从双方）围绕地球的宣传。在眼中整个发展中世界的许多，旋转门，这使美国的金融领导人将无缝地从华尔街到华盛顿和华尔街回，给他们更有公信力，这些人似乎结合起来，权力和金钱权力政治。美国金融领导人正确地认为是好的东西对美国或世界金融市场是好的，但他们在不正确思想的交谈，那什么是对华尔街好是为美国和世界上的良好。
这与其说是幸灾乐祸的激励由美国的经济失败发展中国家的严格审查，因为它是一个真正的需要发现什么样的经济制度可以为他们工作的未来。事实上，这些国家都在美国看到一个快速复苏的兴趣。他们知道，自己不能做美国的所作所为，试图重振经济。他们知道，即使是这样的消费金额不工作非常快。他们知道，从美国的低迷尘已进入贫困在短短几年的时间内增加20000.0万人。他们越来越相信，任何可能支持美国经济的理想是理想的运行，而不是拥抱。
为什么我们要关心，世界已成为与美国的资本主义模式破灭？我们的思想，促进受损，但也许是一件好事，它可能无法修复受损。我们不能存活，甚至不一样好，如果不是每个人都遵守美国的方式？
可以肯定的是，我们的影响将会减少，因为我们不太可能举行的典范，但是这是在任何情况下发生的。美国经常玩一种在全球资本的关键作用，因为其他人认为，我们有一个风险管理和分配财政资源的特殊人才。没有人认为，现在，和亚洲在世界上发生的许多储蓄今天已经发展自己的金融中心。我们不再是资金的主要来源。全球最大的三家银行目前中。美国最大的银行是下跌了5号位。
美元一直是储备货币，美元的国家举行，为了备份自己的货币和政府的信心。但它已逐渐在世界各地曙光，美元未必是一个很好的价值储存在中央银行。它的价值一直起伏不定，并不断恶化。在美国的债务大幅增加，在当前的危机，美国联邦储备委员会的大量贷款相结合，增加了对美元未来的忧虑。在中国公开提出，将发明一些新的储备货币，取代它的想法。
与此同时，处理危机的成本挤占了其他方面的需要。我们从来没有在我们的慷慨援助贫穷国家。但是，事情越来越糟。近年来，中国在非洲的基础设施投资已超过世界银行和非洲开发银行，合并，而且美国相形见绌的。非洲国家正在运行的北京，在这场危机中的援助，而不是华盛顿。
但是，我这里关切的是思想领域更多。 I worry that, as they see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions.一些国家和美国本身也许，将吸取正确的教训。他们会认识到，什么是成功需要的是一个制度，市场和政府的作用是平衡的，并在一个强大的国家管理的有效管理。他们会认识到，特殊利益的权力必须受到限制。
但是，对于许多其他国家，其后果将是更加杂乱，和深刻的悲剧。前共产主义国家普遍转向，后其战后制度令人沮丧的失败，市场资本主义，取代米尔顿弗里德曼作为神卡尔马克思。新的宗教，不利于他们。许多国家可以得出结论不能简单地，毫无约束的资本主义，美国式的，但并没有对市场经济的概念已经失败了，而且确实是在任何情况下是不可行的。旧式共产主义不会回来，而是过度干预市场的各种形式的回报。而这些都将失败。穷人受的苦在市场原教旨主义，我们滴了经济学，而不是涓滴经济学。但是穷人却再次受到这些新的制度下，不会实现增长。没有发展就不可能有可持续的减贫。目前还没有成功的经济尚未大量依赖市场。贫困饲料不满。不可避免的衰退，难以管理在任何情况下，但带来的基础上对美国的愤怒式的资本主义上台的政府，尤其是这样，会导致更多的贫困。结果表明，Con？全球稳定序列和美国的安全是显而易见的。
过去有一间美国和美国的共同价值观教育世界各地的精英。经济危机已经削弱了这些精英的信誉。我们已给予批评谁反对美国对资本主义的放荡的形式大量弹药鼓吹更广泛的反市场哲学。我们不断给他们更多的弹药。虽然我们承诺在自己最近的G - 20会议不搞保护主义，我们把“买进到我们自己的经济刺激计划，美国”的规定。然后，软化，从我们的欧洲盟国的反对，我们修改这一规定，实际上只有对贫穷国家的歧视。全球化使我们更加相互依存的;什么世界一个地方发生的事会影响另一个那些事实作出的经济困难，传染明显。要解决全球性问题，必须有合作和信任，包括共同的价值感。这种信任是没有强有力的，是按小时削弱。
对民主的信仰是另一个受害者。在发展中世界，人们在华盛顿看，看到的政府系统，使华尔街写自我服务的规则，危及整个全球经济，然后，当清算的日子来了，转向华尔街管理经济复苏。他们认为，持续的财富重新分配的金字塔的顶端，透明的普通公民的代价。他们认为，在短，政治问责制美国的民主制度这个根本问题。当他们看到这一切，也只不过是一个短暂的步骤得出结论，认为事情是致命的错误，必然如此，与民主本身。
美国经济最终将复苏，又何尝不是如此，在某种程度上，在国外，我们的地位。美国是很长一段时间是世界上最受尊敬的国家，我们仍然是最富有的。无论喜欢与否，我们的行动受到分钟的考试。我们成功的榜样。但是，我们的失败被看成与蔑视。这使我回弗朗西斯福山。他错误地认为，自由民主和市场经济力量将必然胜利，并有可能不归路。但是，他不会错误地认为，民主和市场力量是必不可少的一个公正和繁荣的世界。 The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have.这也许是实情，世界正在走向历史的终结，但现在航行顶风上的，我们当然为自己规定的。
(约瑟夫斯蒂格利茨，诺贝尔经济学奖获得者，现为哥伦比亚大学教授)
目前的危机结束以后，美国式资本主义的声誉会遭到痛击，至少是因为华盛顿的做法与言辞之间存在巨大落差。诺贝尔经济学奖得主约瑟夫～斯蒂格利茨警告说，发展中国家幻想破灭后，也可能抛弃自由市场，会对全球稳定和美国的安全构成新的威胁。
约瑟夫～斯蒂格利茨 （2009年7月“名利场”杂志〕
所有危机都会结束，当前的经济危机虽然形势不佳，也会很快过去。但是，没有哪次危机，特别是目前这种严重的危机，过去之后，不会留下遗产。而其中一个遗产将是全世界的思想斗争：什么样的经济制度可能给大多数人带来最大利益。发生这场斗争最激烈的地方是第三世界，在占世界人口百分之八十的亚洲、拉丁美洲和非洲。1.4亿人每天靠不到1.25美元度日。在美国，称有人社会主义可能只是一个廉价的投篮。在世界的许多地方，但是，资本主义与社会主义，或战斗，至少是许多美国人将标签的社会主义，仍持续存在。虽然可能在目前的经济危机没有赢家，有输家，其中最大的输家是支持美国式的资本主义。这会影响我们的生活很长一段时间来处理。
在柏林墙倒塌1989年，标志着共产主义作为一种可行的想法结束。是的，共产主义的问题已经表现了数十年。但1989年之后，很难说任何人在其辩护词。有一段时间，似乎共产主义的失败意味着，特别是在其美国式的资本主义肯定的胜利。弗朗西斯福山竟然宣布“历史的终结，”界定为社会发展的最后阶段，市场资本主义的民主，并宣布全人类现在在这个方向前进。事实上，历史学家将迎来20年来自1989年以来作为美国必胜信念短的时间。随着大银行和金融间房屋倒塌，和随后的经济混乱，救援混乱的企图，这一时期已经结束。同样，要加强对“市场原教旨主义”的观念，不受约束的市场，完全靠自己，才能确保经济繁荣和增长的辩论。今天，只有迷惑会说，市场的自我纠正，或者我们可以就自我兴趣的市场参与者行为的依赖，以保证一切正常诚实和适当。
经济辩论是在发展中世界，特别是效力。虽然我们在西方往往忘记，190年前一个世界国内生产总值的三分之一是在中国。但是，相当突然，殖民主义剥削和不公平贸易协定，在欧美的技术革命相结合，离开了发展中国家的落后，到了这一地步，到1950年，中国的经济少于5世界GDP的百分之构成在19世纪中叶，英国和法国进行的战争，实际上开放中国对全球贸易。这是第二次鸦片战争，如此命名是因为西方曾与成瘾引起广泛的抵押品价值的影响不大出售给中国不是通过药物，它已被纳入中国市场倾销等。这是一个由西方早期试图纠正的国际收支平衡问题。
殖民主义留下了一个在发展中世界混合遗产，但有明确的结果可以说是那里的人，他们被残酷地剥削看法。在许多新兴的领导人，马克思主义理论提供了他们的经验的解释，它认为，开采事实上是基础的资本主义制度。政治独立，来到第二次世界大战后没有制止经济殖民主义结束殖民地的成绩。在诸如非洲，利用某些地区，自然资源的开采和环境的强奸，回报为微薄的工资全是显而易见的。这是在其他地方更加微妙。在许多世界各地，如国际货币基金组织和世界银行的全球性机构来作为文书后殖民控制上。这些机构推向市场原教旨主义（“新自由主义”，这是经常被称为），一个理想化的概念由美国人认为是“自由和不受约束的市场。”他们敦促金融部门放松管制，私有化和贸易自由化。
世界银行和I.M.F.说他们正在为发展中世界的利益这一切。他们支持由自由市场经济学家队后，从这个自由市场经济的许多教堂，美国芝加哥大学。最后，在“芝加哥男孩”的计划并没有带来所承诺的结果。收入停滞不前。哪里有增长，财富到顶部的。在个别国家的经济危机变得更加频繁，有100多个在过去30年里严重的多。
毫不奇怪，发展中国家的人民变得越来越相信，西方的帮助，是利他主义的动机。他们怀疑这是自由市场的说辞，“华盛顿共识”，因为它是已知的简写，只是对旧的商业利益覆盖。怀疑是加强了西方自己的虚伪。欧美不开放自己的市场向第三世界，这通常是所有这些贫困国家提供农产品。他们强迫发展中国家，以消除旨在创造新的产业补贴，即使他们提供了大量补贴本国农民。
自由市场理念被证明是一种新形式的剥削的借口。 “私有化”的意思，外国人可以购买发展中国家以低廉的价格矿山和油田。这意味着他们可以收获，例如在巨额利润的电信垄断和半垄断。 “自由化”，意味着他们能获得高回报的贷款和贷款时坏了，国际货币基金组织迫使损失社会化，这意味着螺钉对整个人口向银行支付回。 It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent.而资本流入自由，没有劳动，除非在最有才能的个人而言，谁发现，在全球市场的好工作。
这张图片，很明显，涂上过于广泛画笔。总是有在亚洲的谁抵制华盛顿共识。他们把对资本流动的限制。亚洲的巨人，中国和印度经济管理他们自己的方式，产生了前所未有的发展。但在其他地方，特别是在一些国家，世界银行和国际货币基金组织held sway, things did not go well.
到处，围绕思想争论仍在继续。即使在这方面做得很好的国家，其中有一个信念的教育和影响力，对游戏规则没有得到公平的。他们认为，尽管他们做了不公平的规则，他们也走软的在发展中世界谁也没有做，所有的朋友和同情。
在美国的批评风格的第三世界，认为美国已对当前经济危机的方式一直是资本主义的最后一根稻草。在东亚金融危机，仅在10年前，美国和国际货币基金组织要求受影响的国家削减开支的削减赤字，即使在泰国，这有助于在艾滋病流行的，或者即使重新抬头，在印度尼西亚，这意味着削减粮食补贴的挨饿。美国和I.M.F.迫使国家在某些情况下提高利率，超过百分之五十。 They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out.多么可怕的先例，这会成立，他们所说的，在瑞士的自由市场机制，可怕的时钟干预。
之间的东亚金融危机的处理危机和美国形成鲜明对比的努力没有白费。拉孔的美的，我们现在看到的开支和庞大赤字大量增加，尽管利率已下降至零。银行正跳伞左右。是谁在华盛顿与东亚金融危机处理一些相同的官员现在管理向美国危机的反应。因此，在第三世界人民的要求，是美国管理不同的药给自己？
许多发展中国家还是聪明的戏弄他们多年接受：他们应该采取美国的机构，按照我们的政策，进行放松管制，开放本国市场，美国的银行，使他们能够了解“好”的银行业务，以及（并非巧合）出售他们的公司和银行的美国人，尤其是在防火，在危机期间的价格出售。是的，华盛顿表示，这将是痛苦的，但最后你会因此而更美好。美国派出的财政部长（从双方）围绕地球的宣传。在眼中整个发展中世界的许多，旋转门，这使美国的金融领导人将无缝地从华尔街到华盛顿和华尔街回，给他们更有公信力，这些人似乎结合起来，权力和金钱权力政治。美国金融领导人正确地认为是好的东西对美国或世界金融市场是好的，但他们在不正确思想的交谈，那什么是对华尔街好是为美国和世界上的良好。
这与其说是幸灾乐祸的激励由美国的经济失败发展中国家的严格审查，因为它是一个真正的需要发现什么样的经济制度可以为他们工作的未来。事实上，这些国家都在美国看到一个快速复苏的兴趣。他们知道，自己不能做美国的所作所为，试图重振经济。他们知道，即使是这样的消费金额不工作非常快。他们知道，从美国的低迷尘已进入贫困在短短几年的时间内增加20000.0万人。他们越来越相信，任何可能支持美国经济的理想是理想的运行，而不是拥抱。
为什么我们要关心，世界已成为与美国的资本主义模式破灭？我们的思想，促进受损，但也许是一件好事，它可能无法修复受损。我们不能存活，甚至不一样好，如果不是每个人都遵守美国的方式？
可以肯定的是，我们的影响将会减少，因为我们不太可能举行的典范，但是这是在任何情况下发生的。美国经常玩一种在全球资本的关键作用，因为其他人认为，我们有一个风险管理和分配财政资源的特殊人才。没有人认为，现在，和亚洲在世界上发生的许多储蓄今天已经发展自己的金融中心。我们不再是资金的主要来源。全球最大的三家银行目前中。美国最大的银行是下跌了5号位。
美元一直是储备货币，美元的国家举行，为了备份自己的货币和政府的信心。但它已逐渐在世界各地曙光，美元未必是一个很好的价值储存在中央银行。它的价值一直起伏不定，并不断恶化。在美国的债务大幅增加，在当前的危机，美国联邦储备委员会的大量贷款相结合，增加了对美元未来的忧虑。在中国公开提出，将发明一些新的储备货币，取代它的想法。
与此同时，处理危机的成本挤占了其他方面的需要。我们从来没有在我们的慷慨援助贫穷国家。但是，事情越来越糟。近年来，中国在非洲的基础设施投资已超过世界银行和非洲开发银行，合并，而且美国相形见绌的。非洲国家正在运行的北京，在这场危机中的援助，而不是华盛顿。
但是，我这里关切的是思想领域更多。 I worry that, as they see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions.一些国家和美国本身也许，将吸取正确的教训。他们会认识到，什么是成功需要的是一个制度，市场和政府的作用是平衡的，并在一个强大的国家管理的有效管理。他们会认识到，特殊利益的权力必须受到限制。
但是，对于许多其他国家，其后果将是更加杂乱，和深刻的悲剧。前共产主义国家普遍转向，后其战后制度令人沮丧的失败，市场资本主义，取代米尔顿弗里德曼作为神卡尔马克思。新的宗教，不利于他们。许多国家可以得出结论不能简单地，毫无约束的资本主义，美国式的，但并没有对市场经济的概念已经失败了，而且确实是在任何情况下是不可行的。旧式共产主义不会回来，而是过度干预市场的各种形式的回报。而这些都将失败。穷人受的苦在市场原教旨主义，我们滴了经济学，而不是涓滴经济学。但是穷人却再次受到这些新的制度下，不会实现增长。没有发展就不可能有可持续的减贫。目前还没有成功的经济尚未大量依赖市场。贫困饲料不满。不可避免的衰退，难以管理在任何情况下，但带来的基础上对美国的愤怒式的资本主义上台的政府，尤其是这样，会导致更多的贫困。结果表明，Con？全球稳定序列和美国的安全是显而易见的。
过去有一间美国和美国的共同价值观教育世界各地的精英。经济危机已经削弱了这些精英的信誉。我们已给予批评谁反对美国对资本主义的放荡的形式大量弹药鼓吹更广泛的反市场哲学。我们不断给他们更多的弹药。虽然我们承诺在自己最近的G - 20会议不搞保护主义，我们把“买进到我们自己的经济刺激计划，美国”的规定。然后，软化，从我们的欧洲盟国的反对，我们修改这一规定，实际上只有对贫穷国家的歧视。全球化使我们更加相互依存的;什么世界一个地方发生的事会影响另一个那些事实作出的经济困难，传染明显。要解决全球性问题，必须有合作和信任，包括共同的价值感。这种信任是没有强有力的，是按小时削弱。
对民主的信仰是另一个受害者。在发展中世界，人们在华盛顿看，看到的政府系统，使华尔街写自我服务的规则，危及整个全球经济，然后，当清算的日子来了，转向华尔街管理经济复苏。他们认为，持续的财富重新分配的金字塔的顶端，透明的普通公民的代价。他们认为，在短，政治问责制美国的民主制度这个根本问题。当他们看到这一切，也只不过是一个短暂的步骤得出结论，认为事情是致命的错误，必然如此，与民主本身。
美国经济最终将复苏，又何尝不是如此，在某种程度上，在国外，我们的地位。美国是很长一段时间是世界上最受尊敬的国家，我们仍然是最富有的。无论喜欢与否，我们的行动受到分钟的考试。我们成功的榜样。但是，我们的失败被看成与蔑视。这使我回弗朗西斯福山。他错误地认为，自由民主和市场经济力量将必然胜利，并有可能不归路。但是，他不会错误地认为，民主和市场力量是必不可少的一个公正和繁荣的世界。 The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have.这也许是实情，世界正在走向历史的终结，但现在航行顶风上的，我们当然为自己规定的。
(约瑟夫斯蒂格利茨，诺贝尔经济学奖获得者，现为哥伦比亚大学教授)
斯蒂格利茨:美式资本主义的灭亡
刘志伟编译
每一场危机都会结束，虽然看起来前景黯淡，当前的金融危机终将过去。然而，没有一种危机能够消逝得无影无踪，不留下任何后遗症。而这一次的遗留，最引人注目的将是全球性的思想战争——哪一种经济模式最可能造福于大多数人。第三世界将会热衷于挑起这场战争，世界80%的人口都居住在亚洲、拉丁美洲和非洲的第三世界国家中，14亿人每天的生活费不足1.25美元。在世界的大多数地方，在资本主义和社会主义之间，或者说资本主义和美国人所标示的社会主义之间，斗争仍然激烈。虽然目前的金融危机没有赢家，但输家众多，其中最大的输家就是美国式的资本主义。今后我们不得不长期面对这一现实。
哪一种经济模式可能造福多数
1989年柏林墙倒塌，成了标志性的事件。一段时间内，共产主义的式微似乎意味着资本主义的胜利，尤其是美国式资本主义的胜利。法兰西斯•福山(Francis Fukuyama)甚至大声宣告“历史的终结”，认为民主的市场资本主义是社会发展的终极阶段。实际上，历史学家会把1989年后的20年标示为美国式繁荣的短暂时期，而随着大型银行和金融机构的崩塌，以及随之发生的经济混乱和慌乱的拯救措施不断出台，这个时代已然结束。于是，对于“市场原教旨主义”——不受约束的市场自己就能够确保经济的繁荣和增长——的争论也就此停住。如今，只有那些中毒至深的人才会坚信市场是自我修正的，或是我们可以依赖市场参与者的自利行为来确保一切都诚实正确地进行。
这场经济争论在发展中国家悄然兴起。西方人试图忘记，190年前，世界三分之一的GDP都是中国拥有的，而突然之间，殖民探索和不公平的贸易协定，伴随着欧洲和美国的科技革命，把发展中国家远远地甩在了后面。到1950年，中国经济占世界GDP的百分比只有不到5%。19世纪中期，英国和法国发动了打开中国贸易大门的战争，这是第二次鸦片战争。之所以得到这样的称谓，是因为除了毒品之外，西方世界没什么特别有价值的东西卖给中国。鸦片大量进入中国市场，间接导致了大范围的毒品上瘾。这是西方企图纠正国际收支问题的一个早期尝试。
殖民主义在发展中国家留下混杂的遗产——一个明显后果就是人们普遍认为他们受到了残酷剥削。马克思主义理论提供了相应解释：剥削是资本主义体系的基石。第二次世界大战后殖民地的独立，并没有结束经济殖民主义的延续。在一些地区，如非洲，剥削是显而易见的：对自然资源的攫取和环境的破坏，只得到了微薄的回报。其他的地方则很隐蔽。在世界的很多地方，世界性机构，如国际货币基金组织和世界银行被当作后殖民时代实施控制的利器。这些机构推动市场原教旨主义(它通常被称为“新自由主义”)，这是美国人为“自由和不受约束的市场”所定义的一个理想化概念。他们敦促金融部门放松管制，进行私有化和贸易自由化。
世界银行和国际货币基金组织说他们所做的一切都是为了发展中国家的利益。一大群鼓吹自由市场经济的经济学家支持它们，他们很多人都来自自由市场经济的圣殿——美国芝加哥大学。而最终，“芝加哥男孩”们的项目并没有带来他们承诺的结果。收入停滞不前，即便有增长，财富只是集中在上层人手中。经济危机在许多国家中日益频繁——过去30年中爆发过100多次严重的经济危机。
美国用不同药方医治自己
发展中国家的人民越来越不相信西方的帮助是出于利他主义。他们怀疑自由市场理论的花言巧语只是用来掩盖以往的商业利益。西方国家的伪善加强了这些怀疑。欧美并没有向第三世界开放其本国的农产品市场，而这往往是所有贫困国家所能提供的唯一商品。他们强迫发展中国家在开始新产业的时候取消农业补贴，而他们自己却提供大量补贴给本国的农场主。
自由市场理念被证明是一种新的剥削形式的伪装。“私有化”意味着外国人可以低价购买发展中国家的矿山和油田。这意味着他们能够获得大量的垄断和准垄断的利润，如电信业。“自由化”意味着，他们能获得高回报率的贷款，而在贷款无法回收时，国际货币基金组织将迫使他们损失社会化，这意味着所有人都要被迫来还债。这还意味着，外国公司能够毁灭新兴产业，抑制企业发展的才能。虽然资本自由流动，劳动力却不会——只有那些最有天赋的个人，才能在全球市场中找到好工作。
自由市场理念的前景，并不总是美妙。在亚洲总有些国家抵制“华盛顿共识”(自由市场理论的简便说法)。他们对资本流动进行限制。亚洲的巨人——中国和印度，有自己的经济管理方式，并且创造了前所未有的增长。但在其他地区，尤其是世界银行和国际货币基金组织插手的国家，事情发展并不顺利。
在第三世界对美国式资本主义的批评中，美国应对当前金融危机的方式成为最后一根压倒骆驼的稻草。10年前的东南亚金融危机中，美国和国际货币基金组织要求受影响的国家削减赤字和支出。在泰国，这导致艾滋病的重新泛滥；在印度尼西亚，这意味着削减挨饿的人民的粮食补贴。美国和国际货币基金组织迫使这些国家提高利率，在某些国家超过了50%。他们教导印度尼西亚要对银行强硬，要求政府不要救助他们。他们说，这会是一个可怕的先例，是对瑞士钟表般精确运行的自由市场可怕的干预。
东南亚金融危机和美国金融危机的处理方式之间的对比是如此强烈，人们并没打算忽视之。为了把美国拉出深渊，我们现在看到美国大量增加开支和大规模的赤字，即使利率已经降低到零；银行正在被拯救，通过各种各样的方式；一些处理过东南亚金融危机的华盛顿官员，现在正应对美国的金融危机。于是，人们不由得问道，为什么美国用不同药方医治自己？
许多发展中国家仍对多年来受到的胁迫感到愤怒：他们应该采取美国制度，放松管制，开放市场给美国银行，这将使他们能够了解“好”银行的做法，应该出售自己的公司和银行给美国人，特别是在危机期间用跳楼价卖出。华盛顿说，这将是痛苦的，但最终你们将收获更好的。美国派出了财政部部长(两党)环绕全球进行宣讲。在发展中世界的许多人看来，这扇旋转门，使美国金融领袖们从容穿梭于华尔街和华盛顿之间，这让他们更具有可信性；这些人似乎同时掌握着金钱和政治权力。美国金融领导人正确地认为对美国或世界有利的就是对金融市场有利的，但他们反过来的想法则是错误的，即对华尔街有利的就是对美国和世界有利的。
对发展中国家来说，对美国经济的失败所进行的激烈批判并不是幸灾乐祸激起的，因为他们需要发现什么样的经济制度可以真正为他们未来所采用。事实上，这些国家都希望看到美国迅速恢复。他们所知道的是，他们自己无法做到美国试图恢复其经济所采取的措施；他们知道，即使是这些巨额的开支也很难快速奏效；他们知道，来自美国衰退的冲击波已导致短短几年的跨度中又有两亿人陷入贫困。他们越来越多地相信，任何美国提出的经济理论都会付诸实施，而不仅仅只是热忱而已。
要管制，也要市场和民主
美国式资本主义已失去光环，可能无法修复，但这也许是好事。美国一直扮演着全球资本中枢的角色，因为其他人认为美国具有风险管理和分配财政资源的特殊能力。如今人们不这么想了。亚洲已经发展出自己的金融中心，世界大部分地区的储蓄如今都埋藏在这里。世界最大的三家银行目前都在中国。美国最大的银行已经下跌到第5位。
美元一直是储备货币，很多国家持有以增强本国货币和政府的信任度。但它在世界各国中央银行中的地位已逐渐下降——美元可能不是一个很好的价值储备。其价值动荡不定，且不断下降。在目前危机中，美国大规模增加债务，美国联邦储备委员会的大规模贷款，加深了对美元未来的忧虑。中国已公开想法，希望创立一种新的储备货币取代它。
处理危机的费用排挤了其他需求，美国从来没有慷慨援助过贫困国家。而近年来，中国在非洲的基础设施投资已远远超过了世界银行和非洲开发银行的总和，也超过了美国。在这场危机中，非洲国家正奔向北京寻求援助，而不是华盛顿。
有所担心的是，当更清楚地看到美国经济和社会制度的漏洞，许多发展中国家将得出错误结论。一些国家，也许包括美国自己，将得到正确教训。他们会认识到现在需要的是一个成功制度，即市场的作用和政府的平衡，一个强大国家要进行有效管制。他们会认识到，代表特殊利益的权力必须得到遏制。
但是，对于许多国家，其后果可能是混乱。战后体制失败后，一些前共产主义国家向市场资本主义转向，米尔顿•弗里德曼取代了马克思。然而，新的信仰并没让他们变得好过。许多国家可能得出结论：不只是美国式无干预的资本主义失败，而是市场经济已经失败，进而更加错误地认为市场经济在任何情况下都是行不通的。旧式共产主义也许不会回来，但各种形式的过度干预市场则会回来。而这些将会导致失败。穷人在市场原教旨主义下受苦，在这些新制度下穷人将会再次受苦，这将不会带来经济增长。没有经济增长就不可能有可持续的减贫。目前还没有不依赖于市场而成功的经济。而贫困将滋生不满，其影响对全球稳定及美国的安全是显而易见的。
民主信仰是另一个受害者。发展中国家的人们在华盛顿看到被允许自定规则的华尔街将风险带给了全球经济，而当算总账的那一天到来，政府却转身让华尔街自己来处理经济的复苏。他们看到了财富重新分配到金字塔的顶端，很明显牺牲了普通公民的利益。他们看到了美国民主体系政治问责的基本问题。当他们看到所有这一切，就可能给出这样的结论——民主本身存在无可避免的致命错误。
美国经济最终将恢复，并再次达到高点。美国在很长一段时间里都是世界各国中最受赞赏的，也是最富有的。无论喜欢还是不喜欢，它的行为都会受到仔细审视。它的成功将被仿效，而它的失败会被蔑视。这让我回想起福山，他错误地认为，自由民主和市场经济必然胜利，且不会倒转。但他说对了一点：民主和市场的力量对于公正和繁荣的世界是必不可少的。
(摘自《新世纪周刊》)
Wall Street’s Toxic Message
When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
July 2009 Vanity Fair
Every crisis comes to an end—and, bleak as things seem now, the current economic crisis too shall pass. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ideas—over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World, among the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1.4 billion of whom subsist on less than $1.25 a day. In America, calling someone a socialist may be nothing more than a cheap shot. In much of the world, however, the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.
The economic debate takes on particular potency in the developing world. Although we in the West tend to forget, 190 years ago one-third of the world’s gross domestic product was in China. But then, rather suddenly, colonial exploitation and unfair trade agreements, combined with a technological revolution in Europe and America, left the developing countries far behind, to the point where, by 1950, China’s economy constituted less than 5 percent of the world’s G.D.P. In the mid–19th century the United Kingdom and France actually waged a war to open China to global trade. This was the Second Opium War, so named because the West had little of value to sell to China other than drugs, which it had been dumping into Chinese markets, with the collateral effect of causing widespread addiction. It was an early attempt by the West to correct a balance-of-payments problem.
Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited. Among many emerging leaders, Marxist theory provided an interpretation of their experience; it suggested that exploitation was in fact the underpinning of the capitalist system. The political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions, such as Africa, the exploitation—the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment, all in return for a pittance—was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.
The World Bank and the I.M.F. said they were doing all this for the benefit of the developing world. They were backed up by teams of free-market economists, many from that cathedral of free-market economics, the University of Chicago. In the end, the programs of “the Chicago boys” didn’t bring the promised results. Incomes stagnated. Where there was growth, the wealth went to those at the top. Economic crises in individual countries became ever more frequent—there have been more than a hundred severe ones in the past 30 years alone.
Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric—“the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand—was just a cover for the old commercial interests. Suspicions were reinforced by the West’s own hypocrisy. Europe and America didn’t open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.
Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. “Privatization” meant that foreigners could buy mines and oil fields in developing countries at low prices. It meant they could reap large profits from monopolies and quasi-monopolies, such as in telecommunications. “Liberalization” meant that they could get high returns on their loans—and when loans went bad, the I.M.F. forced the socialization of the losses, meaning that the screws were put on entire populations to pay the banks back. It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent. While capital flowed freely, labor did not—except in the case of the most talented individuals, who found good jobs in a global marketplace.
This picture is, obviously, painted with too broad a brush. There were always those in Asia who resisted the Washington consensus. They put restrictions on capital flows. The giants of Asia—China and India—managed their economies their own way, producing unprecedented growth. But elsewhere, and especially in the countries where the World Bank and the I.M.F. held sway, things did not go well.
And everywhere, the debate over ideas continued. Even in countries that have done very well, there is a conviction among the educated and influential that the rules of the game have not been fair. They believe that they have done well despite the unfair rules, and they sympathize with their weaker friends in the developing world who have not done well at all.
Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.
It is not so much Schadenfreude that motivates the intense scrutiny by developing countries of America’s economic failure as it is a real need to discover what kind of economic system can work for them in the future. Indeed, these countries have every interest in seeing a quick American recovery. What they know is that they themselves cannot afford to do what America has done to attempt to revive its economy. They know that even this amount of spending isn’t working very fast. They know that the fallout from America’s downturn has moved 200 million additional people into poverty in the span of just a few years. And they are increasingly convinced that any economic ideals America may espouse are ideals to run from rather than embrace.
Why should we care that the world has become disillusioned with the American model of capitalism? The ideology that we promoted has been tarnished, but perhaps it is a good thing that it may be tarnished beyond repair. Can’t we survive—even do just as well—if not everyone adheres to the American way?
To be sure, our influence will diminish, as we are less likely to be held up as a role model, but that was happening in any case. America used to play a pivotal role in global capital, because others believed that we had a special talent for managing risk and allocating financial resources. No one thinks that now, and Asia—where much of the world’s saving occurs today—is already developing its own financial centers. We are no longer the chief source of capital. The world’s top three banks are now Chinese. America’s largest bank is down at the No. 5 spot.
The dollar has long been the reserve currency—countries held the dollar in order to back up confidence in their own currencies and governments. But it has gradually dawned on central banks around the world that the dollar may not be a good store of value. Its value has been volatile, and declining. The massive increase in America’s indebtedness during the current crisis, combined with the Federal Reserve Board’s massive lending, has heightened anxieties about the future of the dollar. The Chinese have openly floated the idea of inventing some new reserve currency to replace it.
Meanwhile, the cost of dealing with the crisis is crowding out other needs. We have never been generous in our assistance to poor countries. But matters are getting worse. In recent years, China’s infrastructure investment in Africa has been greater than that of the World Bank and the African Development Bank combined, and it dwarfs America’s. African countries are running to Beijing for assistance in this crisis, not to Washington.
But my concern here is more with the realm of ideas. I worry that, as they see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions. A few countries—and maybe America itself—will learn the right lessons. They will realize that what is required for success is a regime where the roles of market and government are in balance, and where a strong state administers effective regulations. They will realize that the power of special interests must be curbed.
But, for many other countries, the consequences will be messier, and profoundly tragic. The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy has failed, and is indeed unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism—we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But the poor will suffer again under these new regimes, which will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. Poverty feeds disaffection. The inevitable downturns, hard to manage in any case, but especially so by governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism, will lead to more poverty. The con?sequences for global stability and American security are obvious.
There used to be a sense of shared values between America and the American-educated elites around the world. The economic crisis has now undermined the credibility of those elites. We have given critics who opposed America’s licentious form of capitalism ample ammunition to preach a broader anti-market philosophy. And we keep giving them more and more ammunition. While we committed ourselves at a recent G-20 meeting not to engage in protectionism, we put a “buy American” provision into our own stimulus package. And then, to soften the opposition from our European allies, we modified that provision, in effect discriminating against only poor countries. Globalization has made us more interdependent; what happens in one part of the world affects those in another—a fact made manifest by the contagion of our economic difficulties. To solve global problems, there must be a sense of cooperation and trust, including a sense of shared values. That trust was never strong, and it is weakening by the hour.
Faith in democracy is another victim. In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy—and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the American system of democracy. After they have seen all this, it is but a short step to conclude that something is fatally wrong, and inevitably so, with democracy itself.
The American economy will eventually recover, and so, too, up to a point, will our standing abroad. America was for a long time the most admired country in the world, and we are still the richest. Like it or not, our actions are subject to minute examination. Our successes are emulated. But our failures are looked upon with scorn. Which brings me back to Francis Fukuyama. He was wrong to think that the forces of liberal democracy and the market economy would inevitably triumph, and that there could be no turning back. But he was not wrong to believe that democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world. The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. Perhaps it is true that the world is heading toward the end of history, but it is now sailing against the wind, on a course we set ourselves.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, is a professor at Columbia University.
每一场危机都会结束，虽然看起来前景黯淡，当前的金融危机终将过去。然而，没有一种危机能够消逝得无影无踪，不留下任何后遗症。而这一次的遗留，最引人注目的将是全球性的思想战争——哪一种经济模式最可能造福于大多数人。第三世界将会热衷于挑起这场战争，世界80%的人口都居住在亚洲、拉丁美洲和非洲的第三世界国家中，14亿人每天的生活费不足1.25美元。在世界的大多数地方，在资本主义和社会主义之间，或者说资本主义和美国人所标示的社会主义之间，斗争仍然激烈。虽然目前的金融危机没有赢家，但输家众多，其中最大的输家就是美国式的资本主义。今后我们不得不长期面对这一现实。
哪一种经济模式可能造福多数
1989年柏林墙倒塌，成了标志性的事件。一段时间内，共产主义的式微似乎意味着资本主义的胜利，尤其是美国式资本主义的胜利。法兰西斯•福山(Francis Fukuyama)甚至大声宣告“历史的终结”，认为民主的市场资本主义是社会发展的终极阶段。实际上，历史学家会把1989年后的20年标示为美国式繁荣的短暂时期，而随着大型银行和金融机构的崩塌，以及随之发生的经济混乱和慌乱的拯救措施不断出台，这个时代已然结束。于是，对于“市场原教旨主义”——不受约束的市场自己就能够确保经济的繁荣和增长——的争论也就此停住。如今，只有那些中毒至深的人才会坚信市场是自我修正的，或是我们可以依赖市场参与者的自利行为来确保一切都诚实正确地进行。
这场经济争论在发展中国家悄然兴起。西方人试图忘记，190年前，世界三分之一的GDP都是中国拥有的，而突然之间，殖民探索和不公平的贸易协定，伴随着欧洲和美国的科技革命，把发展中国家远远地甩在了后面。到1950年，中国经济占世界GDP的百分比只有不到5%。19世纪中期，英国和法国发动了打开中国贸易大门的战争，这是第二次鸦片战争。之所以得到这样的称谓，是因为除了毒品之外，西方世界没什么特别有价值的东西卖给中国。鸦片大量进入中国市场，间接导致了大范围的毒品上瘾。这是西方企图纠正国际收支问题的一个早期尝试。
殖民主义在发展中国家留下混杂的遗产——一个明显后果就是人们普遍认为他们受到了残酷剥削。马克思主义理论提供了相应解释：剥削是资本主义体系的基石。第二次世界大战后殖民地的独立，并没有结束经济殖民主义的延续。在一些地区，如非洲，剥削是显而易见的：对自然资源的攫取和环境的破坏，只得到了微薄的回报。其他的地方则很隐蔽。在世界的很多地方，世界性机构，如国际货币基金组织和世界银行被当作后殖民时代实施控制的利器。这些机构推动市场原教旨主义(它通常被称为“新自由主义”)，这是美国人为“自由和不受约束的市场”所定义的一个理想化概念。他们敦促金融部门放松管制，进行私有化和贸易自由化。
世界银行和国际货币基金组织说他们所做的一切都是为了发展中国家的利益。一大群鼓吹自由市场经济的经济学家支持它们，他们很多人都来自自由市场经济的圣殿——美国芝加哥大学。而最终，“芝加哥男孩”们的项目并没有带来他们承诺的结果。收入停滞不前，即便有增长，财富只是集中在上层人手中。经济危机在许多国家中日益频繁——过去30年中爆发过100多次严重的经济危机。
美国用不同药方医治自己
发展中国家的人民越来越不相信西方的帮助是出于利他主义。他们怀疑自由市场理论的花言巧语只是用来掩盖以往的商业利益。西方国家的伪善加强了这些怀疑。欧美并没有向第三世界开放其本国的农产品市场，而这往往是所有贫困国家所能提供的唯一商品。他们强迫发展中国家在开始新产业的时候取消农业补贴，而他们自己却提供大量补贴给本国的农场主。
自由市场理念被证明是一种新的剥削形式的伪装。“私有化”意味着外国人可以低价购买发展中国家的矿山和油田。这意味着他们能够获得大量的垄断和准垄断的利润，如电信业。“自由化”意味着，他们能获得高回报率的贷款，而在贷款无法回收时，国际货币基金组织将迫使他们损失社会化，这意味着所有人都要被迫来还债。这还意味着，外国公司能够毁灭新兴产业，抑制企业发展的才能。虽然资本自由流动，劳动力却不会——只有那些最有天赋的个人，才能在全球市场中找到好工作。
自由市场理念的前景，并不总是美妙。在亚洲总有些国家抵制“华盛顿共识”(自由市场理论的简便说法)。他们对资本流动进行限制。亚洲的巨人——中国和印度，有自己的经济管理方式，并且创造了前所未有的增长。但在其他地区，尤其是世界银行和国际货币基金组织插手的国家，事情发展并不顺利。
在第三世界对美国式资本主义的批评中，美国应对当前金融危机的方式成为最后一根压倒骆驼的稻草。10年前的东南亚金融危机中，美国和国际货币基金组织要求受影响的国家削减赤字和支出。在泰国，这导致艾滋病的重新泛滥；在印度尼西亚，这意味着削减挨饿的人民的粮食补贴。美国和国际货币基金组织迫使这些国家提高利率，在某些国家超过了50%。他们教导印度尼西亚要对银行强硬，要求政府不要救助他们。他们说，这会是一个可怕的先例，是对瑞士钟表般精确运行的自由市场可怕的干预。
东南亚金融危机和美国金融危机的处理方式之间的对比是如此强烈，人们并没打算忽视之。为了把美国拉出深渊，我们现在看到美国大量增加开支和大规模的赤字，即使利率已经降低到零；银行正在被拯救，通过各种各样的方式；一些处理过东南亚金融危机的华盛顿官员，现在正应对美国的金融危机。于是，人们不由得问道，为什么美国用不同药方医治自己？
许多发展中国家仍对多年来受到的胁迫感到愤怒：他们应该采取美国制度，放松管制，开放市场给美国银行，这将使他们能够了解“好”银行的做法，应该出售自己的公司和银行给美国人，特别是在危机期间用跳楼价卖出。华盛顿说，这将是痛苦的，但最终你们将收获更好的。美国派出了财政部部长(两党)环绕全球进行宣讲。在发展中世界的许多人看来，这扇旋转门，使美国金融领袖们从容穿梭于华尔街和华盛顿之间，这让他们更具有可信性；这些人似乎同时掌握着金钱和政治权力。美国金融领导人正确地认为对美国或世界有利的就是对金融市场有利的，但他们反过来的想法则是错误的，即对华尔街有利的就是对美国和世界有利的。
对发展中国家来说，对美国经济的失败所进行的激烈批判并不是幸灾乐祸激起的，因为他们需要发现什么样的经济制度可以真正为他们未来所采用。事实上，这些国家都希望看到美国迅速恢复。他们所知道的是，他们自己无法做到美国试图恢复其经济所采取的措施；他们知道，即使是这些巨额的开支也很难快速奏效；他们知道，来自美国衰退的冲击波已导致短短几年的跨度中又有两亿人陷入贫困。他们越来越多地相信，任何美国提出的经济理论都会付诸实施，而不仅仅只是热忱而已。
要管制，也要市场和民主
美国式资本主义已失去光环，可能无法修复，但这也许是好事。美国一直扮演着全球资本中枢的角色，因为其他人认为美国具有风险管理和分配财政资源的特殊能力。如今人们不这么想了。亚洲已经发展出自己的金融中心，世界大部分地区的储蓄如今都埋藏在这里。世界最大的三家银行目前都在中国。美国最大的银行已经下跌到第5位。
美元一直是储备货币，很多国家持有以增强本国货币和政府的信任度。但它在世界各国中央银行中的地位已逐渐下降——美元可能不是一个很好的价值储备。其价值动荡不定，且不断下降。在目前危机中，美国大规模增加债务，美国联邦储备委员会的大规模贷款，加深了对美元未来的忧虑。中国已公开想法，希望创立一种新的储备货币取代它。
处理危机的费用排挤了其他需求，美国从来没有慷慨援助过贫困国家。而近年来，中国在非洲的基础设施投资已远远超过了世界银行和非洲开发银行的总和，也超过了美国。在这场危机中，非洲国家正奔向北京寻求援助，而不是华盛顿。
有所担心的是，当更清楚地看到美国经济和社会制度的漏洞，许多发展中国家将得出错误结论。一些国家，也许包括美国自己，将得到正确教训。他们会认识到现在需要的是一个成功制度，即市场的作用和政府的平衡，一个强大国家要进行有效管制。他们会认识到，代表特殊利益的权力必须得到遏制。
但是，对于许多国家，其后果可能是混乱。战后体制失败后，一些前共产主义国家向市场资本主义转向，米尔顿•弗里德曼取代了马克思。然而，新的信仰并没让他们变得好过。许多国家可能得出结论：不只是美国式无干预的资本主义失败，而是市场经济已经失败，进而更加错误地认为市场经济在任何情况下都是行不通的。旧式共产主义也许不会回来，但各种形式的过度干预市场则会回来。而这些将会导致失败。穷人在市场原教旨主义下受苦，在这些新制度下穷人将会再次受苦，这将不会带来经济增长。没有经济增长就不可能有可持续的减贫。目前还没有不依赖于市场而成功的经济。而贫困将滋生不满，其影响对全球稳定及美国的安全是显而易见的。
民主信仰是另一个受害者。发展中国家的人们在华盛顿看到被允许自定规则的华尔街将风险带给了全球经济，而当算总账的那一天到来，政府却转身让华尔街自己来处理经济的复苏。他们看到了财富重新分配到金字塔的顶端，很明显牺牲了普通公民的利益。他们看到了美国民主体系政治问责的基本问题。当他们看到所有这一切，就可能给出这样的结论——民主本身存在无可避免的致命错误。
美国经济最终将恢复，并再次达到高点。美国在很长一段时间里都是世界各国中最受赞赏的，也是最富有的。无论喜欢还是不喜欢，它的行为都会受到仔细审视。它的成功将被仿效，而它的失败会被蔑视。这让我回想起福山，他错误地认为，自由民主和市场经济必然胜利，且不会倒转。但他说对了一点：民主和市场的力量对于公正和繁荣的世界是必不可少的。
(摘自《新世纪周刊》)
Wall Street’s Toxic Message
When the current crisis is over, the reputation of American-style capitalism will have taken a beating—not least because of the gap between what Washington practices and what it preaches. Disillusioned developing nations may well turn their backs on the free market, warns Nobel laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz, posing new threats to global stability and U.S. security.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz
July 2009 Vanity Fair
Every crisis comes to an end—and, bleak as things seem now, the current economic crisis too shall pass. But no crisis, especially one of this severity, recedes without leaving a legacy. And among this one’s legacies will be a worldwide battle over ideas—over what kind of economic system is likely to deliver the greatest benefit to the most people. Nowhere is that battle raging more hotly than in the Third World, among the 80 percent of the world’s population that lives in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, 1.4 billion of whom subsist on less than $1.25 a day. In America, calling someone a socialist may be nothing more than a cheap shot. In much of the world, however, the battle between capitalism and socialism—or at least something that many Americans would label as socialism—still rages. While there may be no winners in the current economic crisis, there are losers, and among the big losers is support for American-style capitalism. This has consequences we’ll be living with for a long time to come.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim “the end of history,” defining democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development, and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over “market fundamentalism,” the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves, can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that everything works honestly and properly.
The economic debate takes on particular potency in the developing world. Although we in the West tend to forget, 190 years ago one-third of the world’s gross domestic product was in China. But then, rather suddenly, colonial exploitation and unfair trade agreements, combined with a technological revolution in Europe and America, left the developing countries far behind, to the point where, by 1950, China’s economy constituted less than 5 percent of the world’s G.D.P. In the mid–19th century the United Kingdom and France actually waged a war to open China to global trade. This was the Second Opium War, so named because the West had little of value to sell to China other than drugs, which it had been dumping into Chinese markets, with the collateral effect of causing widespread addiction. It was an early attempt by the West to correct a balance-of-payments problem.
Colonialism left a mixed legacy in the developing world—but one clear result was the view among people there that they had been cruelly exploited. Among many emerging leaders, Marxist theory provided an interpretation of their experience; it suggested that exploitation was in fact the underpinning of the capitalist system. The political independence that came to scores of colonies after World War II did not put an end to economic colonialism. In some regions, such as Africa, the exploitation—the extraction of natural resources and the rape of the environment, all in return for a pittance—was obvious. Elsewhere it was more subtle. In many parts of the world, global institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank came to be seen as instruments of post-colonial control. These institutions pushed market fundamentalism (“neoliberalism,” it was often called), a notion idealized by Americans as “free and unfettered markets.” They pressed for financial-sector deregulation, privatization, and trade liberalization.
The World Bank and the I.M.F. said they were doing all this for the benefit of the developing world. They were backed up by teams of free-market economists, many from that cathedral of free-market economics, the University of Chicago. In the end, the programs of “the Chicago boys” didn’t bring the promised results. Incomes stagnated. Where there was growth, the wealth went to those at the top. Economic crises in individual countries became ever more frequent—there have been more than a hundred severe ones in the past 30 years alone.
Not surprisingly, people in developing countries became less and less convinced that Western help was motivated by altruism. They suspected that the free-market rhetoric—“the Washington consensus,” as it is known in shorthand—was just a cover for the old commercial interests. Suspicions were reinforced by the West’s own hypocrisy. Europe and America didn’t open up their own markets to the agricultural produce of the Third World, which was often all these poor countries had to offer. They forced developing countries to eliminate subsidies aimed at creating new industries, even as they provided massive subsidies to their own farmers.
Free-market ideology turned out to be an excuse for new forms of exploitation. “Privatization” meant that foreigners could buy mines and oil fields in developing countries at low prices. It meant they could reap large profits from monopolies and quasi-monopolies, such as in telecommunications. “Liberalization” meant that they could get high returns on their loans—and when loans went bad, the I.M.F. forced the socialization of the losses, meaning that the screws were put on entire populations to pay the banks back. It meant, too, that foreign firms could wipe out nascent industries, suppressing the development of entrepreneurial talent. While capital flowed freely, labor did not—except in the case of the most talented individuals, who found good jobs in a global marketplace.
This picture is, obviously, painted with too broad a brush. There were always those in Asia who resisted the Washington consensus. They put restrictions on capital flows. The giants of Asia—China and India—managed their economies their own way, producing unprecedented growth. But elsewhere, and especially in the countries where the World Bank and the I.M.F. held sway, things did not go well.
And everywhere, the debate over ideas continued. Even in countries that have done very well, there is a conviction among the educated and influential that the rules of the game have not been fair. They believe that they have done well despite the unfair rules, and they sympathize with their weaker friends in the developing world who have not done well at all.
Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.
The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?
Many in the developing world still smart from the hectoring they received for so many years: they should adopt American institutions, follow our policies, engage in deregulation, open up their markets to American banks so they could learn “good” banking practices, and (not coincidentally) sell their firms and banks to Americans, especially at fire-sale prices during crises. Yes, Washington said, it will be painful, but in the end you will be better for it. America sent its Treasury secretaries (from both parties) around the planet to spread the word. In the eyes of many throughout the developing world, the revolving door, which allows American financial leaders to move seamlessly from Wall Street to Washington and back to Wall Street, gave them even more credibility; these men seemed to combine the power of money and the power of politics. American financial leaders were correct in believing that what was good for America or the world was good for financial markets, but they were incorrect in thinking the converse, that what was good for Wall Street was good for America and the world.
It is not so much Schadenfreude that motivates the intense scrutiny by developing countries of America’s economic failure as it is a real need to discover what kind of economic system can work for them in the future. Indeed, these countries have every interest in seeing a quick American recovery. What they know is that they themselves cannot afford to do what America has done to attempt to revive its economy. They know that even this amount of spending isn’t working very fast. They know that the fallout from America’s downturn has moved 200 million additional people into poverty in the span of just a few years. And they are increasingly convinced that any economic ideals America may espouse are ideals to run from rather than embrace.
Why should we care that the world has become disillusioned with the American model of capitalism? The ideology that we promoted has been tarnished, but perhaps it is a good thing that it may be tarnished beyond repair. Can’t we survive—even do just as well—if not everyone adheres to the American way?
To be sure, our influence will diminish, as we are less likely to be held up as a role model, but that was happening in any case. America used to play a pivotal role in global capital, because others believed that we had a special talent for managing risk and allocating financial resources. No one thinks that now, and Asia—where much of the world’s saving occurs today—is already developing its own financial centers. We are no longer the chief source of capital. The world’s top three banks are now Chinese. America’s largest bank is down at the No. 5 spot.
The dollar has long been the reserve currency—countries held the dollar in order to back up confidence in their own currencies and governments. But it has gradually dawned on central banks around the world that the dollar may not be a good store of value. Its value has been volatile, and declining. The massive increase in America’s indebtedness during the current crisis, combined with the Federal Reserve Board’s massive lending, has heightened anxieties about the future of the dollar. The Chinese have openly floated the idea of inventing some new reserve currency to replace it.
Meanwhile, the cost of dealing with the crisis is crowding out other needs. We have never been generous in our assistance to poor countries. But matters are getting worse. In recent years, China’s infrastructure investment in Africa has been greater than that of the World Bank and the African Development Bank combined, and it dwarfs America’s. African countries are running to Beijing for assistance in this crisis, not to Washington.
But my concern here is more with the realm of ideas. I worry that, as they see more clearly the flaws in America’s economic and social system, many in the developing world will draw the wrong conclusions. A few countries—and maybe America itself—will learn the right lessons. They will realize that what is required for success is a regime where the roles of market and government are in balance, and where a strong state administers effective regulations. They will realize that the power of special interests must be curbed.
But, for many other countries, the consequences will be messier, and profoundly tragic. The former Communist countries generally turned, after the dismal failure of their postwar system, to market capitalism, replacing Karl Marx with Milton Friedman as their god. The new religion has not served them well. Many countries may conclude not simply that unfettered capitalism, American-style, has failed but that the very concept of a market economy has failed, and is indeed unworkable under any circumstances. Old-style Communism won’t be back, but a variety of forms of excessive market intervention will return. And these will fail. The poor suffered under market fundamentalism—we had trickle-up economics, not trickle-down economics. But the poor will suffer again under these new regimes, which will not deliver growth. Without growth there cannot be sustainable poverty reduction. There has been no successful economy that has not relied heavily on markets. Poverty feeds disaffection. The inevitable downturns, hard to manage in any case, but especially so by governments brought to power on the basis of rage against American-style capitalism, will lead to more poverty. The con?sequences for global stability and American security are obvious.
There used to be a sense of shared values between America and the American-educated elites around the world. The economic crisis has now undermined the credibility of those elites. We have given critics who opposed America’s licentious form of capitalism ample ammunition to preach a broader anti-market philosophy. And we keep giving them more and more ammunition. While we committed ourselves at a recent G-20 meeting not to engage in protectionism, we put a “buy American” provision into our own stimulus package. And then, to soften the opposition from our European allies, we modified that provision, in effect discriminating against only poor countries. Globalization has made us more interdependent; what happens in one part of the world affects those in another—a fact made manifest by the contagion of our economic difficulties. To solve global problems, there must be a sense of cooperation and trust, including a sense of shared values. That trust was never strong, and it is weakening by the hour.
Faith in democracy is another victim. In the developing world, people look at Washington and see a system of government that allowed Wall Street to write self-serving rules which put at risk the entire global economy—and then, when the day of reckoning came, turned to Wall Street to manage the recovery. They see continued re-distributions of wealth to the top of the pyramid, transparently at the expense of ordinary citizens. They see, in short, a fundamental problem of political accountability in the American system of democracy. After they have seen all this, it is but a short step to conclude that something is fatally wrong, and inevitably so, with democracy itself.
The American economy will eventually recover, and so, too, up to a point, will our standing abroad. America was for a long time the most admired country in the world, and we are still the richest. Like it or not, our actions are subject to minute examination. Our successes are emulated. But our failures are looked upon with scorn. Which brings me back to Francis Fukuyama. He was wrong to think that the forces of liberal democracy and the market economy would inevitably triumph, and that there could be no turning back. But he was not wrong to believe that democracy and market forces are essential to a just and prosperous world. The economic crisis, created largely by America’s behavior, has done more damage to these fundamental values than any totalitarian regime ever could have. Perhaps it is true that the world is heading toward the end of history, but it is now sailing against the wind, on a course we set ourselves.
Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, is a professor at Columbia University.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
危險的徵兆
老毛說﹕「凡是要推翻一個政權，總要先做意識形態方面的工作，革命的階級是這樣，反革命的階級也是這樣。」這是毛1962年針對一本關於劉志丹的回憶錄所說，老毛說是「利用小說反黨，是一大發明」。這一論點是否正確，是否符合歷史事實，是一回事。但如果以此分析毛左派的心理和動向，倒頗為有用。
最近網路上流傳的幾條消息值得注意﹕
一，中共四中全會召開之前，毛左派網站「烏有之鄉」高呼扭轉（鄧小平的）「走資錯誤路線」就在此舉；
二，毛左派贊美、歡呼薄熙來在重慶「唱紅歌打黑幫」；
三，中共召開四中全會，習近平未照常例擔任軍委副主席；
四，网路传闻老毛的孫子毛新宇高升少將，后证实是谣言；
五，網路傳言海軍某將領在四中全會上發難，反對習近平的任命，看来是谣言；
六，網路先傳言北京軍區司令兼国庆阅兵总司令房峰輝兵變，迫使四中全會改變日程；后来传言，房是胡锦涛从广州军区升调北京军区司令的亲信，受胡锦涛旨意对习发难；
七，網路小道消息﹕中國軍隊的60%將領和高官是高幹子弟或家庭有背景，平民出身的軍人最多只能升至團級。
老毛去世，老鄧上台，除了堅持一黨專制外，幾乎推翻老毛的所有政策。毛時代的大部分紅人或坐牢，或被撤職，或受冷遇，或墮入社會最低層。過去中共宣傳說﹕被推翻的反動統治階級不甘心退出歷史舞台，總是企圖復闢。用來形容這類人的心理，我看大致不差。
值得注意的是，還有些毛時代的紅人並未倒霉，相反繼續走紅，例如當年參軍（其中幹部子弟不少）、上大學（工農兵學員）的人，現在混在軍隊、外交界裡，有的甚至發跡當高官。他們中許多人對毛時代和文革懷有感情，至少不如毛時代挨整的人那麼恨。
互聯網為這些人的集結、串連、交流信息提供了方便，他們如果勾結起來，以軍事政變方式奪權，是完全可能性的。前蘇共總書記戈爾巴喬夫就是被軍方頑固派策畫的軍事政變搞下台的。當然最後是蘇聯軍方搬起石頭砸了自己的腳，把蘇共送入墳墓。
目前中國存在毛左派、保守派勾結發動軍事政變的可能性。一旦發生這種政變，也有變壞和變好的兩種可能。無論如何，會是好戲連場，讓我們密切關注，拭目以待！
最近網路上流傳的幾條消息值得注意﹕
一，中共四中全會召開之前，毛左派網站「烏有之鄉」高呼扭轉（鄧小平的）「走資錯誤路線」就在此舉；
二，毛左派贊美、歡呼薄熙來在重慶「唱紅歌打黑幫」；
三，中共召開四中全會，習近平未照常例擔任軍委副主席；
四，网路传闻老毛的孫子毛新宇高升少將，后证实是谣言；
五，網路傳言海軍某將領在四中全會上發難，反對習近平的任命，看来是谣言；
六，網路先傳言北京軍區司令兼国庆阅兵总司令房峰輝兵變，迫使四中全會改變日程；后来传言，房是胡锦涛从广州军区升调北京军区司令的亲信，受胡锦涛旨意对习发难；
七，網路小道消息﹕中國軍隊的60%將領和高官是高幹子弟或家庭有背景，平民出身的軍人最多只能升至團級。
老毛去世，老鄧上台，除了堅持一黨專制外，幾乎推翻老毛的所有政策。毛時代的大部分紅人或坐牢，或被撤職，或受冷遇，或墮入社會最低層。過去中共宣傳說﹕被推翻的反動統治階級不甘心退出歷史舞台，總是企圖復闢。用來形容這類人的心理，我看大致不差。
值得注意的是，還有些毛時代的紅人並未倒霉，相反繼續走紅，例如當年參軍（其中幹部子弟不少）、上大學（工農兵學員）的人，現在混在軍隊、外交界裡，有的甚至發跡當高官。他們中許多人對毛時代和文革懷有感情，至少不如毛時代挨整的人那麼恨。
互聯網為這些人的集結、串連、交流信息提供了方便，他們如果勾結起來，以軍事政變方式奪權，是完全可能性的。前蘇共總書記戈爾巴喬夫就是被軍方頑固派策畫的軍事政變搞下台的。當然最後是蘇聯軍方搬起石頭砸了自己的腳，把蘇共送入墳墓。
目前中國存在毛左派、保守派勾結發動軍事政變的可能性。一旦發生這種政變，也有變壞和變好的兩種可能。無論如何，會是好戲連場，讓我們密切關注，拭目以待！
Thursday, September 17, 2009
克鲁格曼：为什么经济学家如此不靠谱
市场经济崩溃了--为什么经济学家如此不靠谱
保罗-克鲁格曼
错误的乐观
不久前，经济学家还在为自己领域内取得的成就弹冠相庆，但现在看来这种行为让人难以置信。
鲜有经济学家预见到了经济危机，其实这不算什么大问题。真正的问题在于大家对市场经济中可能发生灾难性失灵这一事实视而不见。在黄金时代里，金融经济学家盲信市场的内在稳定性—他们坚信股票和其他资产的定价正确无误。各种流行的模型中，没有一个对去年发生的经济危机有任何暗示。
紧随经济危机，经济学界产生了前所未有的理论分歧。卢卡斯说奥巴马政府的经济刺激计划是基于“水货经济学”；他的同事，芝加哥大学约翰·柯克兰也说，经济刺激计划的理论基础是一个已被驳得体无完肤的“童话”。而加州大学伯克利分校的德隆教授对此的回应是芝加哥学派的理论已经“崩溃”，而我本人则写道“芝加哥学派的观点是宏观经济学的‘黑暗时代’的产物，我们辛苦学来的知识全被忘到脑后。”
经济学界怎么了？将向何处去？
在我看来，经济学界的迷失是因为经济学家常把披着精妙数学外衣的美丽误当作真理。直到大萧条之前，大多数经济学家还幻想着资本主义是一个完美或近乎完美制度的幻象。这一幻想在面对大规模失业之时变得支离破碎。但是，随着对大萧条的记忆日益淡漠，经济学家又重拾“经济行为是理性人在完美的市场里的互动”这一古老而理想的经济学视角，一切都重新穿起了精美方程式做的华丽衣裳。
无可否认，这一次对完美市场的旧爱重燃，部分是因为政治风向发生转变，部分是因为金钱激励。确实，大量的使用数学工具的动机部分是为了能在胡佛研究所或是在华尔街获得好的职位，但是经济学失败的根本原因是经济学家们苦苦追求一种包罗万象、思维优雅、并能给经济学家炫耀数学才能机会的研究思路。
很不幸，这种浪漫主义的或者理想主义的经济哲学观导致了大多数经济学家忽略了错误的可能。他们对很多市场的缺陷视而不见。例如，人类的有限理性常常会导致泡沫发生和破灭；机构会因失控而胡作非为；市场的不完善—特别是金融市场的不完善—可以导致经济的操作系统发生突然的、难以预料的崩溃；以及由于监管者本身对监管不信任所产生的种种危险。
在这种情况下，要讨论经济学的未来发展就变得更困难了。但可以肯定的是，经济学家们将不得不学会与无序共存。也就是说，他们将不得不承认无理性的不可预知的行为的重要性，不得不正视各种独特的市场不完善之处，并接受一个优雅的“万能经济理论”在现在还遥遥无期的事实。在实践方面，这种认识将变成更加谨慎的政策建议—不会再因相信市场万能而随意拆除各种经济保障。
凯恩斯的轮回
经济学作为一门学科的诞生，亚当斯密居功至伟。此后，经济理论体系得到了长足发展，其核心理论即对市场的充分信任。当然经济学家也承认，在某些不能预知的情形里市场可能会失效，其中最重要的则是一种被称为“外部性”的情形。所谓“外部性”，也就是一些人不为自身的行为付出任何代价却将费用强加在他人头上，比如交通堵塞或者是环境污染。但是作为“新古典主义”经济学的基本预设就是：我们应该对市场经济体系有信心。
不管你曾经听说了什么，凯恩斯并没有像谣传的那样企图让政府来掌控经济的运行。他认为自己所做的一切只是为了纠正资本主义存在的不良问题。但凯恩斯的确是在叫板“自由市场经济于无人照管的情况下仍能如常运行”的观念，表现出了他对自由市场经济的极度蔑视。在他看来，金融市场完全被短期投机行为所操控，连基本的经济规则也几乎被忽略。为了降低经济沉降期的失业率，凯恩斯呼吁政府对市场进行积极干预：加大货币发行量，必要时还应为公共基础设施做出更多投入。
凯恩斯精到深邃的言论无疑让当年那些年轻的经济学家由衷佩服，然而在过去的半个多世纪里，经济学史却发生了从凯恩斯主义到“新古典主义”的历史倒退。“新古典主义”经济学说的复兴最初由芝加哥大学的弗里德曼领导。
弗里德曼对凯恩斯主义观点的反击是从货币主义论开始的。力主货币主义的人们认为，只要政府对金融市场给予相应合理的干预，指示央行保持国家的货币供给，使之处在平稳增长的道路上，就足以防止经济的衰退。而弗里德曼和他的合作者施瓦茨则拿出他们的著名论调对此进行反驳：如果美联储足够恪尽职守，也许经济大萧条就不会发生了。据此，弗里德曼还预测，过度扩张的政策只会导致通货膨胀和高企不下的失业率的到来。这个预言后来为上世纪70年代发生的经济滞胀所证实，为反对凯恩斯主义运动赢得了更高的呼声。
最终，凯恩斯主义的反对者们甚至抛弃了立场相对温和的弗里德曼，宣扬起“有效市场论”。这自然让相当一部分的人选择相信，任何对抗经济衰退的行为都是弊大于利的。甚至即便是那些自我标榜为“新凯恩斯主义者”的人们也存在这样的观念—只要投资者和消费者足够理性，金融市场在一般情况下都能办好事情。
瞧，那些潘格罗斯
（潘格罗斯—伏尔泰讽刺作品《老实人》中的哲学家，一个不可救药的盲目乐观主义者）
上世纪30年代，由于一些显见的因素，金融市场并没有得到应有的重视。凯恩斯甚至把当时的金融市场比作“一些报纸上哗众取宠的竞赛”—参赛者须从一百张人物照中挑选出六张最漂亮的面孔，谁挑选出的脸孔与全体参赛者的选择趋势最接近，谁就能获胜。参赛者们都无可避免地走进了仅仅考虑其他选手喜好的误区而完全忽略了自身的真正需求。
凯恩斯还认为，投机者们花费了大量的时间用于紧张激烈的相互角逐与利益争夺，如果让如此混乱的市场参与重要商业决策的判断无疑是一个相当可怕的决定。“当国家的资本发展沦为赌场活动的副产品时，这简直是糟糕透了。”
可是到了1970年左右，金融市场这个研究领域似乎都被伏尔泰笔下的潘格罗斯博士占领了，此人坚称我们生活的这个世界就是所有可能性中最好的一个。对投资者非理性的讨论、对泡沫的讨论、对破坏性投机的讨论，几乎都从学术话语中消失。支配学术领域的是由芝加哥大学尤金·法玛提出的“有效市场假说”。该假说声称，在给定所有公开信息的条件下，金融市场中资产的定价正好等于该资产的内在价值。（例如，一家公司的股票价格，在给定所有可获得的诸如公司收益、企业前景等资料的条件下，始终准确地反映公司的价值。）到了上世纪80年代，金融经济学家们，特别是哈佛商学院的詹森争辩说，由于金融市场总是正确定价，公司头目可以做的最好的事情，不仅对其本人而言，也是为了整个经济，就是令股票价值最大化。换句话说，金融经济学家认为，我们应该把国家的资本发展，交让给被凯恩斯称为“赌场”的手中。
公平地说，金融理论家接受有效市场假说并非仅仅因为它既优雅、方便、易生财。他们也提出过许许多多的统计证据，起初似乎都强烈支持该假说。但是，这样的证据都带有一个奇怪的有限形式：金融经济学家只研究给定其他资产价格的前提下某资产价格是否合理的问题，但是很少研究给定现实世界的基本面比如说收益，某资产价格是否合理的问题。后一问题看似明显，其实不易回答。萨默斯，现为奥巴马政府头号经济顾问，曾经用一个“番茄酱经济学家”的比喻嘲讽过金融学教授—番茄酱经济学家“证明了两夸脱瓶装的番茄酱所卖价格刚好两倍于一夸脱瓶装的番茄酱”，因此得出结论说，番茄酱市场是完全有效市场。
但是，无论是如此辛辣的讽刺，还是耶鲁大学经济学教授希勒比较客气的批评，都没起什么大作用，金融理论家继续相信，他们的模型基本正确。许多进行现实经济决策的人士也这样相信，其中的强硬派尤以时任美联储主席的格林斯潘为首。他对于放松金融管制向来抱以支持态度。他之所以对人们要求控制次贷的呼声毫不理会，对人们要求他回应日益膨胀的房地产泡沫的声讨充耳不闻，其中很大部分原因在于他始终相信现代金融经济学已经可以掌控一切。2005年，在一个为表彰格林斯潘长期任职于美联储而举行的会议上，有一个令人难忘的时刻：一位出身芝加哥大学的勇敢的与会者当场出示一篇论文警告说，当前金融体系所担的风险水平已经具有潜在危险。这一举动无疑遭到了在场所有人的哂笑，其中当然包括美联储主席萨默斯，当时的他也将这个突如其来的警告当作是“被误导”的言论而拒绝考虑。
终于在去年10月，事情发生了戏剧性的变化。格林斯潘承认说，当金融海啸发生的时候，他正处于“极度震惊，甚至难以置信”的状态中，灾难的发生对他而言意味着“整个理智大厦”的崩溃。更可怕的是，理智大厦崩溃的同时也是真实世界里市场经济的崩溃，直接后果是不能想象的经济衰退。无论是从哪个层面考量，这都是自经济大萧条以来美国经历的最为严重的一次经济衰退。面对这样的窘境，决策者该怎么做？很不幸，宏观经济学爱莫能助，因为本应对经济衰退提供明确指导的宏观经济学本身已陷入一片混乱。
(作者系纽约时报专栏作家、2008年度诺贝尔经济学奖得主)
【原載2009年09月17日<时代周报>，译者﹕朱兀尘、关晓蕾、单丽霞】
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How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
(New York Times,9-7-2009)
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH
It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.
Last year, everything came apart.
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.
And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.
What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.
It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.
II. FROM SMITH TO KEYNES AND BACK
The birth of economics as a discipline is usually credited to Adam Smith, who published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. Over the next 160 years an extensive body of economic theory was developed, whose central message was: Trust the market. Yes, economists admitted that there were cases in which markets might fail, of which the most important was the case of “externalities” — costs that people impose on others without paying the price, like traffic congestion or pollution. But the basic presumption of “neoclassical” economics (named after the late-19th-century theorists who elaborated on the concepts of their “classical” predecessors) was that we should have faith in the market system.
This faith was, however, shattered by the Great Depression. Actually, even in the face of total collapse some economists insisted that whatever happens in a market economy must be right: “Depressions are not simply evils,” declared Joseph Schumpeter in 1934 — 1934! They are, he added, “forms of something which has to be done.” But many, and eventually most, economists turned to the insights of John Maynard Keynes for both an explanation of what had happened and a solution to future depressions.
Keynes did not, despite what you may have heard, want the government to run the economy. He described his analysis in his 1936 masterwork, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” as “moderately conservative in its implications.” He wanted to fix capitalism, not replace it. But he did challenge the notion that free-market economies can function without a minder, expressing particular contempt for financial markets, which he viewed as being dominated by short-term speculation with little regard for fundamentals. And he called for active government intervention — printing more money and, if necessary, spending heavily on public works — to fight unemployment during slumps.
It’s important to understand that Keynes did much more than make bold assertions. “The General Theory” is a work of profound, deep analysis — analysis that persuaded the best young economists of the day. Yet the story of economics over the past half century is, to a large degree, the story of a retreat from Keynesianism and a return to neoclassicism. The neoclassical revival was initially led by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, who asserted as early as 1953 that neoclassical economics works well enough as a description of the way the economy actually functions to be “both extremely fruitful and deserving of much confidence.” But what about depressions?
Friedman’s counterattack against Keynes began with the doctrine known as monetarism. Monetarists didn’t disagree in principle with the idea that a market economy needs deliberate stabilization. “We are all Keynesians now,” Friedman once said, although he later claimed he was quoted out of context. Monetarists asserted, however, that a very limited, circumscribed form of government intervention — namely, instructing central banks to keep the nation’s money supply, the sum of cash in circulation and bank deposits, growing on a steady path — is all that’s required to prevent depressions. Famously, Friedman and his collaborator, Anna Schwartz, argued that if the Federal Reserve had done its job properly, the Great Depression would not have happened. Later, Friedman made a compelling case against any deliberate effort by government to push unemployment below its “natural” level (currently thought to be about 4.8 percent in the United States): excessively expansionary policies, he predicted, would lead to a combination of inflation and high unemployment — a prediction that was borne out by the stagflation of the 1970s, which greatly advanced the credibility of the anti-Keynesian movement.
Eventually, however, the anti-Keynesian counterrevolution went far beyond Friedman’s position, which came to seem relatively moderate compared with what his successors were saying. Among financial economists, Keynes’s disparaging vision of financial markets as a “casino” was replaced by “efficient market” theory, which asserted that financial markets always get asset prices right given the available information. Meanwhile, many macroeconomists completely rejected Keynes’s framework for understanding economic slumps. Some returned to the view of Schumpeter and other apologists for the Great Depression, viewing recessions as a good thing, part of the economy’s adjustment to change. And even those not willing to go that far argued that any attempt to fight an economic slump would do more harm than good.
Not all macroeconomists were willing to go down this road: many became self-described New Keynesians, who continued to believe in an active role for the government. Yet even they mostly accepted the notion that investors and consumers are rational and that markets generally get it right.
Of course, there were exceptions to these trends: a few economists challenged the assumption of rational behavior, questioned the belief that financial markets can be trusted and pointed to the long history of financial crises that had devastating economic consequences. But they were swimming against the tide, unable to make much headway against a pervasive and, in retrospect, foolish complacency.
III. PANGLOSSIAN FINANCE
In the 1930s, financial markets, for obvious reasons, didn’t get much respect. Keynes compared them to “those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.”
And Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
By 1970 or so, however, the study of financial markets seemed to have been taken over by Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse. The field was dominated by the “efficient-market hypothesis,” promulgated by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, which claims that financial markets price assets precisely at their intrinsic worth given all publicly available information. (The price of a company’s stock, for example, always accurately reflects the company’s value given the information available on the company’s earnings, its business prospects and so on.) And by the 1980s, finance economists, notably Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School, were arguing that because financial markets always get prices right, the best thing corporate chieftains can do, not just for themselves but for the sake of the economy, is to maximize their stock prices. In other words, finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a “casino.”
It’s hard to argue that this transformation in the profession was driven by events. True, the memory of 1929 was gradually receding, but there continued to be bull markets, with widespread tales of speculative excess, followed by bear markets. In 1973-4, for example, stocks lost 48 percent of their value. And the 1987 stock crash, in which the Dow plunged nearly 23 percent in a day for no clear reason, should have raised at least a few doubts about market rationality.
These events, however, which Keynes would have considered evidence of the unreliability of markets, did little to blunt the force of a beautiful idea. The theoretical model that finance economists developed by assuming that every investor rationally balances risk against reward — the so-called Capital Asset Pricing Model, or CAPM (pronounced cap-em) — is wonderfully elegant. And if you accept its premises it’s also extremely useful. CAPM not only tells you how to choose your portfolio — even more important from the financial industry’s point of view, it tells you how to put a price on financial derivatives, claims on claims. The elegance and apparent usefulness of the new theory led to a string of Nobel prizes for its creators, and many of the theory’s adepts also received more mundane rewards: Armed with their new models and formidable math skills — the more arcane uses of CAPM require physicist-level computations — mild-mannered business-school professors could and did become Wall Street rocket scientists, earning Wall Street paychecks.
To be fair, finance theorists didn’t accept the efficient-market hypothesis merely because it was elegant, convenient and lucrative. They also produced a great deal of statistical evidence, which at first seemed strongly supportive. But this evidence was of an oddly limited form. Finance economists rarely asked the seemingly obvious (though not easily answered) question of whether asset prices made sense given real-world fundamentals like earnings. Instead, they asked only whether asset prices made sense given other asset prices. Larry Summers, now the top economic adviser in the Obama administration, once mocked finance professors with a parable about “ketchup economists” who “have shown that two-quart bottles of ketchup invariably sell for exactly twice as much as one-quart bottles of ketchup,” and conclude from this that the ketchup market is perfectly efficient.
But neither this mockery nor more polite critiques from economists like Robert Shiller of Yale had much effect. Finance theorists continued to believe that their models were essentially right, and so did many people making real-world decisions. Not least among these was Alan Greenspan, who was then the Fed chairman and a long-time supporter of financial deregulation whose rejection of calls to rein in subprime lending or address the ever-inflating housing bubble rested in large part on the belief that modern financial economics had everything under control. There was a telling moment in 2005, at a conference held to honor Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed. One brave attendee, Raghuram Rajan (of the University of Chicago, surprisingly), presented a paper warning that the financial system was taking on potentially dangerous levels of risk. He was mocked by almost all present — including, by the way, Larry Summers, who dismissed his warnings as “misguided.”
By October of last year, however, Greenspan was admitting that he was in a state of “shocked disbelief,” because “the whole intellectual edifice” had “collapsed.” Since this collapse of the intellectual edifice was also a collapse of real-world markets, the result was a severe recession — the worst, by many measures, since the Great Depression. What should policy makers do? Unfortunately, macroeconomics, which should have been providing clear guidance about how to address the slumping economy, was in its own state of disarray.
IV. THE TROUBLE WITH MACRO
“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” in which he tried to explain the catastrophe then overtaking the world. And the world’s possibilities of wealth did indeed run to waste for a long time; it took World War II to bring the Great Depression to a definitive end.
Why was Keynes’s diagnosis of the Great Depression as a “colossal muddle” so compelling at first? And why did economics, circa 1975, divide into opposing camps over the value of Keynes’s views?
I like to explain the essence of Keynesian economics with a true story that also serves as a parable, a small-scale version of the messes that can afflict entire economies. Consider the travails of the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op.
This co-op, whose problems were recounted in a 1977 article in The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, was an association of about 150 young couples who agreed to help one another by baby-sitting for one another’s children when parents wanted a night out. To ensure that every couple did its fair share of baby-sitting, the co-op introduced a form of scrip: coupons made out of heavy pieces of paper, each entitling the bearer to one half-hour of sitting time. Initially, members received 20 coupons on joining and were required to return the same amount on departing the group.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the co-op’s members, on average, wanted to hold a reserve of more than 20 coupons, perhaps, in case they should want to go out several times in a row. As a result, relatively few people wanted to spend their scrip and go out, while many wanted to baby-sit so they could add to their hoard. But since baby-sitting opportunities arise only when someone goes out for the night, this meant that baby-sitting jobs were hard to find, which made members of the co-op even more reluctant to go out, making baby-sitting jobs even scarcer. . . .
In short, the co-op fell into a recession.
O.K., what do you think of this story? Don’t dismiss it as silly and trivial: economists have used small-scale examples to shed light on big questions ever since Adam Smith saw the roots of economic progress in a pin factory, and they’re right to do so. The question is whether this particular example, in which a recession is a problem of inadequate demand — there isn’t enough demand for baby-sitting to provide jobs for everyone who wants one — gets at the essence of what happens in a recession.
Forty years ago most economists would have agreed with this interpretation. But since then macroeconomics has divided into two great factions: “saltwater” economists (mainly in coastal U.S. universities), who have a more or less Keynesian vision of what recessions are all about; and “freshwater” economists (mainly at inland schools), who consider that vision nonsense.
Freshwater economists are, essentially, neoclassical purists. They believe that all worthwhile economic analysis starts from the premise that people are rational and markets work, a premise violated by the story of the baby-sitting co-op. As they see it, a general lack of sufficient demand isn’t possible, because prices always move to match supply with demand. If people want more baby-sitting coupons, the value of those coupons will rise, so that they’re worth, say, 40 minutes of baby-sitting rather than half an hour — or, equivalently, the cost of an hours’ baby-sitting would fall from 2 coupons to 1.5. And that would solve the problem: the purchasing power of the coupons in circulation would have risen, so that people would feel no need to hoard more, and there would be no recession.
But don’t recessions look like periods in which there just isn’t enough demand to employ everyone willing to work? Appearances can be deceiving, say the freshwater theorists. Sound economics, in their view, says that overall failures of demand can’t happen — and that means that they don’t. Keynesian economics has been “proved false,” Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, says.
Yet recessions do happen. Why? In the 1970s the leading freshwater macroeconomist, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, argued that recessions were caused by temporary confusion: workers and companies had trouble distinguishing overall changes in the level of prices because of inflation or deflation from changes in their own particular business situation. And Lucas warned that any attempt to fight the business cycle would be counterproductive: activist policies, he argued, would just add to the confusion.
By the 1980s, however, even this severely limited acceptance of the idea that recessions are bad things had been rejected by many freshwater economists. Instead, the new leaders of the movement, especially Edward Prescott, who was then at the University of Minnesota (you can see where the freshwater moniker comes from), argued that price fluctuations and changes in demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle. Rather, the business cycle reflects fluctuations in the rate of technological progress, which are amplified by the rational response of workers, who voluntarily work more when the environment is favorable and less when it’s unfavorable. Unemployment is a deliberate decision by workers to take time off.
Put baldly like that, this theory sounds foolish — was the Great Depression really the Great Vacation? And to be honest, I think it really is silly. But the basic premise of Prescott’s “real business cycle” theory was embedded in ingeniously constructed mathematical models, which were mapped onto real data using sophisticated statistical techniques, and the theory came to dominate the teaching of macroeconomics in many university departments. In 2004, reflecting the theory’s influence, Prescott shared a Nobel with Finn Kydland of Carnegie Mellon University.
Meanwhile, saltwater economists balked. Where the freshwater economists were purists, saltwater economists were pragmatists. While economists like N. Gregory Mankiw at Harvard, Olivier Blanchard at M.I.T. and David Romer at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that it was hard to reconcile a Keynesian demand-side view of recessions with neoclassical theory, they found the evidence that recessions are, in fact, demand-driven too compelling to reject. So they were willing to deviate from the assumption of perfect markets or perfect rationality, or both, adding enough imperfections to accommodate a more or less Keynesian view of recessions. And in the saltwater view, active policy to fight recessions remained desirable.
But the self-described New Keynesian economists weren’t immune to the charms of rational individuals and perfect markets. They tried to keep their deviations from neoclassical orthodoxy as limited as possible. This meant that there was no room in the prevailing models for such things as bubbles and banking-system collapse. The fact that such things continued to happen in the real world — there was a terrible financial and macroeconomic crisis in much of Asia in 1997-8 and a depression-level slump in Argentina in 2002 — wasn’t reflected in the mainstream of New Keynesian thinking.
Even so, you might have thought that the differing worldviews of freshwater and saltwater economists would have put them constantly at loggerheads over economic policy. Somewhat surprisingly, however, between around 1985 and 2007 the disputes between freshwater and saltwater economists were mainly about theory, not action. The reason, I believe, is that New Keynesians, unlike the original Keynesians, didn’t think fiscal policy — changes in government spending or taxes — was needed to fight recessions. They believed that monetary policy, administered by the technocrats at the Fed, could provide whatever remedies the economy needed. At a 90th birthday celebration for Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, formerly a more or less New Keynesian professor at Princeton, and by then a member of the Fed’s governing board, declared of the Great Depression: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, it won’t happen again.” The clear message was that all you need to avoid depressions is a smarter Fed.
And as long as macroeconomic policy was left in the hands of the maestro Greenspan, without Keynesian-type stimulus programs, freshwater economists found little to complain about. (They didn’t believe that monetary policy did any good, but they didn’t believe it did any harm, either.)
It would take a crisis to reveal both how little common ground there was and how Panglossian even New Keynesian economics had become.
V. NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED . . .
In recent, rueful economics discussions, an all-purpose punch line has become “nobody could have predicted. . . .” It’s what you say with regard to disasters that could have been predicted, should have been predicted and actually were predicted by a few economists who were scoffed at for their pains.
Take, for example, the precipitous rise and fall of housing prices. Some economists, notably Robert Shiller, did identify the bubble and warn of painful consequences if it were to burst. Yet key policy makers failed to see the obvious. In 2004, Alan Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: “a national severe price distortion,” he declared, was “most unlikely.” Home-price increases, Ben Bernanke said in 2005, “largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.”
How did they miss the bubble? To be fair, interest rates were unusually low, possibly explaining part of the price rise. It may be that Greenspan and Bernanke also wanted to celebrate the Fed’s success in pulling the economy out of the 2001 recession; conceding that much of that success rested on the creation of a monstrous bubble would have placed a damper on the festivities.
But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don’t happen. What’s striking, when you reread Greenspan’s assurances, is that they weren’t based on evidence — they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can’t be a bubble in housing. And the finance theorists were even more adamant on this point. In a 2007 interview, Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, declared that “the word ‘bubble’ drives me nuts,” and went on to explain why we can trust the housing market: “Housing markets are less liquid, but people are very careful when they buy houses. It’s typically the biggest investment they’re going to make, so they look around very carefully and they compare prices. The bidding process is very detailed.”
Indeed, home buyers generally do carefully compare prices — that is, they compare the price of their potential purchase with the prices of other houses. But this says nothing about whether the overall price of houses is justified. It’s ketchup economics, again: because a two-quart bottle of ketchup costs twice as much as a one-quart bottle, finance theorists declare that the price of ketchup must be right.
In short, the belief in efficient financial markets blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history. And efficient-market theory also played a significant role in inflating that bubble in the first place.
Now that the undiagnosed bubble has burst, the true riskiness of supposedly safe assets has been revealed and the financial system has demonstrated its fragility. U.S. households have seen $13 trillion in wealth evaporate. More than six million jobs have been lost, and the unemployment rate appears headed for its highest level since 1940. So what guidance does modern economics have to offer in our current predicament? And should we trust it?
VI. THE STIMULUS SQUABBLE
Between 1985 and 2007 a false peace settled over the field of macroeconomics. There hadn’t been any real convergence of views between the saltwater and freshwater factions. But these were the years of the Great Moderation — an extended period during which inflation was subdued and recessions were relatively mild. Saltwater economists believed that the Federal Reserve had everything under control. Freshwater economists didn’t think the Fed’s actions were actually beneficial, but they were willing to let matters lie.
But the crisis ended the phony peace. Suddenly the narrow, technocratic policies both sides were willing to accept were no longer sufficient — and the need for a broader policy response brought the old conflicts out into the open, fiercer than ever.
Why weren’t those narrow, technocratic policies sufficient? The answer, in a word, is zero.
During a normal recession, the Fed responds by buying Treasury bills — short-term government debt — from banks. This drives interest rates on government debt down; investors seeking a higher rate of return move into other assets, driving other interest rates down as well; and normally these lower interest rates eventually lead to an economic bounceback. The Fed dealt with the recession that began in 1990 by driving short-term interest rates from 9 percent down to 3 percent. It dealt with the recession that began in 2001 by driving rates from 6.5 percent to 1 percent. And it tried to deal with the current recession by driving rates down from 5.25 percent to zero.
But zero, it turned out, isn’t low enough to end this recession. And the Fed can’t push rates below zero, since at near-zero rates investors simply hoard cash rather than lending it out. So by late 2008, with interest rates basically at what macroeconomists call the “zero lower bound” even as the recession continued to deepen, conventional monetary policy had lost all traction.
Now what? This is the second time America has been up against the zero lower bound, the previous occasion being the Great Depression. And it was precisely the observation that there’s a lower bound to interest rates that led Keynes to advocate higher government spending: when monetary policy is ineffective and the private sector can’t be persuaded to spend more, the public sector must take its place in supporting the economy. Fiscal stimulus is the Keynesian answer to the kind of depression-type economic situation we’re currently in.
Such Keynesian thinking underlies the Obama administration’s economic policies — and the freshwater economists are furious. For 25 or so years they tolerated the Fed’s efforts to manage the economy, but a full-blown Keynesian resurgence was something entirely different. Back in 1980, Lucas, of the University of Chicago, wrote that Keynesian economics was so ludicrous that “at research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.” Admitting that Keynes was largely right, after all, would be too humiliating a comedown.
And so Chicago’s Cochrane, outraged at the idea that government spending could mitigate the latest recession, declared: “It’s not part of what anybody has taught graduate students since the 1960s. They [Keynesian ideas] are fairy tales that have been proved false. It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn’t make them less false.” (It’s a mark of how deep the division between saltwater and freshwater runs that Cochrane doesn’t believe that “anybody” teaches ideas that are, in fact, taught in places like Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.)
Meanwhile, saltwater economists, who had comforted themselves with the belief that the great divide in macroeconomics was narrowing, were shocked to realize that freshwater economists hadn’t been listening at all. Freshwater economists who inveighed against the stimulus didn’t sound like scholars who had weighed Keynesian arguments and found them wanting. Rather, they sounded like people who had no idea what Keynesian economics was about, who were resurrecting pre-1930 fallacies in the belief that they were saying something new and profound.
And it wasn’t just Keynes whose ideas seemed to have been forgotten. As Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out in his laments about the Chicago school’s “intellectual collapse,” the school’s current stance amounts to a wholesale rejection of Milton Friedman’s ideas, as well. Friedman believed that Fed policy rather than changes in government spending should be used to stabilize the economy, but he never asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment. In fact, rereading Friedman’s 1970 summary of his ideas, “A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis,” what’s striking is how Keynesian it seems.
And Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments. Thus Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: “Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work . . . decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).” Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”
Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.
Yet if the crisis has pushed freshwater economists into absurdity, it has also created a lot of soul-searching among saltwater economists. Their framework, unlike that of the Chicago School, both allows for the possibility of involuntary unemployment and considers it a bad thing. But the New Keynesian models that have come to dominate teaching and research assume that people are perfectly rational and financial markets are perfectly efficient. To get anything like the current slump into their models, New Keynesians are forced to introduce some kind of fudge factor that for reasons unspecified temporarily depresses private spending. (I’ve done exactly that in some of my own work.) And if the analysis of where we are now rests on this fudge factor, how much confidence can we have in the models’ predictions about where we are going?
The state of macro, in short, is not good. So where does the profession go from here?
VII. FLAWS AND FRICTIONS
Economics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system. If the profession is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Even during the heyday of perfect-market economics, there was a lot of work done on the ways in which the real economy deviated from the theoretical ideal. What’s probably going to happen now — in fact, it’s already happening — is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center.
There’s already a fairly well developed example of the kind of economics I have in mind: the school of thought known as behavioral finance. Practitioners of this approach emphasize two things. First, many real-world investors bear little resemblance to the cool calculators of efficient-market theory: they’re all too subject to herd behavior, to bouts of irrational exuberance and unwarranted panic. Second, even those who try to base their decisions on cool calculation often find that they can’t, that problems of trust, credibility and limited collateral force them to run with the herd.
On the first point: even during the heyday of the efficient-market hypothesis, it seemed obvious that many real-world investors aren’t as rational as the prevailing models assumed. Larry Summers once began a paper on finance by declaring: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.” But what kind of idiots (the preferred term in the academic literature, actually, is “noise traders”) are we talking about? Behavioral finance, drawing on the broader movement known as behavioral economics, tries to answer that question by relating the apparent irrationality of investors to known biases in human cognition, like the tendency to care more about small losses than small gains or the tendency to extrapolate too readily from small samples (e.g., assuming that because home prices rose in the past few years, they’ll keep on rising).
Until the crisis, efficient-market advocates like Eugene Fama dismissed the evidence produced on behalf of behavioral finance as a collection of “curiosity items” of no real importance. That’s a much harder position to maintain now that the collapse of a vast bubble — a bubble correctly diagnosed by behavioral economists like Robert Shiller of Yale, who related it to past episodes of “irrational exuberance” — has brought the world economy to its knees.
On the second point: suppose that there are, indeed, idiots. How much do they matter? Not much, argued Milton Friedman in an influential 1953 paper: smart investors will make money by buying when the idiots sell and selling when they buy and will stabilize markets in the process. But the second strand of behavioral finance says that Friedman was wrong, that financial markets are sometimes highly unstable, and right now that view seems hard to reject.
Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” As they pointed out, arbitrageurs — the people who are supposed to buy low and sell high — need capital to do their jobs. And a severe plunge in asset prices, even if it makes no sense in terms of fundamentals, tends to deplete that capital. As a result, the smart money is forced out of the market, and prices may go into a downward spiral.
The spread of the current financial crisis seemed almost like an object lesson in the perils of financial instability. And the general ideas underlying models of financial instability have proved highly relevant to economic policy: a focus on the depleted capital of financial institutions helped guide policy actions taken after the fall of Lehman, and it looks (cross your fingers) as if these actions successfully headed off an even bigger financial collapse.
Meanwhile, what about macroeconomics? Recent events have pretty decisively refuted the idea that recessions are an optimal response to fluctuations in the rate of technological progress; a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town. Yet standard New Keynesian models left no room for a crisis like the one we’re having, because those models generally accepted the efficient-market view of the financial sector.
There were some exceptions. One line of work, pioneered by none other than Ben Bernanke working with Mark Gertler of New York University, emphasized the way the lack of sufficient collateral can hinder the ability of businesses to raise funds and pursue investment opportunities. A related line of work, largely established by my Princeton colleague Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore of the London School of Economics, argued that prices of assets such as real estate can suffer self-reinforcing plunges that in turn depress the economy as a whole. But until now the impact of dysfunctional finance hasn’t been at the core even of Keynesian economics. Clearly, that has to change.
VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES
So here’s what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.
Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”
When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.
Paul Krugman is a Times Op-Ed columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. His latest book is “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 6, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Page 36 this weekend about the failure of economists to anticipate the latest recession misquotes the economist John Maynard Keynes, who compared the financial markets of the 1930s to newspaper beauty contests in which readers tried to correctly pick all six eventual winners. Keynes noted that a competitor did not have to pick “those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.” He did not say, “nor even those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of other competitors.”
保罗-克鲁格曼
错误的乐观
不久前，经济学家还在为自己领域内取得的成就弹冠相庆，但现在看来这种行为让人难以置信。
鲜有经济学家预见到了经济危机，其实这不算什么大问题。真正的问题在于大家对市场经济中可能发生灾难性失灵这一事实视而不见。在黄金时代里，金融经济学家盲信市场的内在稳定性—他们坚信股票和其他资产的定价正确无误。各种流行的模型中，没有一个对去年发生的经济危机有任何暗示。
紧随经济危机，经济学界产生了前所未有的理论分歧。卢卡斯说奥巴马政府的经济刺激计划是基于“水货经济学”；他的同事，芝加哥大学约翰·柯克兰也说，经济刺激计划的理论基础是一个已被驳得体无完肤的“童话”。而加州大学伯克利分校的德隆教授对此的回应是芝加哥学派的理论已经“崩溃”，而我本人则写道“芝加哥学派的观点是宏观经济学的‘黑暗时代’的产物，我们辛苦学来的知识全被忘到脑后。”
经济学界怎么了？将向何处去？
在我看来，经济学界的迷失是因为经济学家常把披着精妙数学外衣的美丽误当作真理。直到大萧条之前，大多数经济学家还幻想着资本主义是一个完美或近乎完美制度的幻象。这一幻想在面对大规模失业之时变得支离破碎。但是，随着对大萧条的记忆日益淡漠，经济学家又重拾“经济行为是理性人在完美的市场里的互动”这一古老而理想的经济学视角，一切都重新穿起了精美方程式做的华丽衣裳。
无可否认，这一次对完美市场的旧爱重燃，部分是因为政治风向发生转变，部分是因为金钱激励。确实，大量的使用数学工具的动机部分是为了能在胡佛研究所或是在华尔街获得好的职位，但是经济学失败的根本原因是经济学家们苦苦追求一种包罗万象、思维优雅、并能给经济学家炫耀数学才能机会的研究思路。
很不幸，这种浪漫主义的或者理想主义的经济哲学观导致了大多数经济学家忽略了错误的可能。他们对很多市场的缺陷视而不见。例如，人类的有限理性常常会导致泡沫发生和破灭；机构会因失控而胡作非为；市场的不完善—特别是金融市场的不完善—可以导致经济的操作系统发生突然的、难以预料的崩溃；以及由于监管者本身对监管不信任所产生的种种危险。
在这种情况下，要讨论经济学的未来发展就变得更困难了。但可以肯定的是，经济学家们将不得不学会与无序共存。也就是说，他们将不得不承认无理性的不可预知的行为的重要性，不得不正视各种独特的市场不完善之处，并接受一个优雅的“万能经济理论”在现在还遥遥无期的事实。在实践方面，这种认识将变成更加谨慎的政策建议—不会再因相信市场万能而随意拆除各种经济保障。
凯恩斯的轮回
经济学作为一门学科的诞生，亚当斯密居功至伟。此后，经济理论体系得到了长足发展，其核心理论即对市场的充分信任。当然经济学家也承认，在某些不能预知的情形里市场可能会失效，其中最重要的则是一种被称为“外部性”的情形。所谓“外部性”，也就是一些人不为自身的行为付出任何代价却将费用强加在他人头上，比如交通堵塞或者是环境污染。但是作为“新古典主义”经济学的基本预设就是：我们应该对市场经济体系有信心。
不管你曾经听说了什么，凯恩斯并没有像谣传的那样企图让政府来掌控经济的运行。他认为自己所做的一切只是为了纠正资本主义存在的不良问题。但凯恩斯的确是在叫板“自由市场经济于无人照管的情况下仍能如常运行”的观念，表现出了他对自由市场经济的极度蔑视。在他看来，金融市场完全被短期投机行为所操控，连基本的经济规则也几乎被忽略。为了降低经济沉降期的失业率，凯恩斯呼吁政府对市场进行积极干预：加大货币发行量，必要时还应为公共基础设施做出更多投入。
凯恩斯精到深邃的言论无疑让当年那些年轻的经济学家由衷佩服，然而在过去的半个多世纪里，经济学史却发生了从凯恩斯主义到“新古典主义”的历史倒退。“新古典主义”经济学说的复兴最初由芝加哥大学的弗里德曼领导。
弗里德曼对凯恩斯主义观点的反击是从货币主义论开始的。力主货币主义的人们认为，只要政府对金融市场给予相应合理的干预，指示央行保持国家的货币供给，使之处在平稳增长的道路上，就足以防止经济的衰退。而弗里德曼和他的合作者施瓦茨则拿出他们的著名论调对此进行反驳：如果美联储足够恪尽职守，也许经济大萧条就不会发生了。据此，弗里德曼还预测，过度扩张的政策只会导致通货膨胀和高企不下的失业率的到来。这个预言后来为上世纪70年代发生的经济滞胀所证实，为反对凯恩斯主义运动赢得了更高的呼声。
最终，凯恩斯主义的反对者们甚至抛弃了立场相对温和的弗里德曼，宣扬起“有效市场论”。这自然让相当一部分的人选择相信，任何对抗经济衰退的行为都是弊大于利的。甚至即便是那些自我标榜为“新凯恩斯主义者”的人们也存在这样的观念—只要投资者和消费者足够理性，金融市场在一般情况下都能办好事情。
瞧，那些潘格罗斯
（潘格罗斯—伏尔泰讽刺作品《老实人》中的哲学家，一个不可救药的盲目乐观主义者）
上世纪30年代，由于一些显见的因素，金融市场并没有得到应有的重视。凯恩斯甚至把当时的金融市场比作“一些报纸上哗众取宠的竞赛”—参赛者须从一百张人物照中挑选出六张最漂亮的面孔，谁挑选出的脸孔与全体参赛者的选择趋势最接近，谁就能获胜。参赛者们都无可避免地走进了仅仅考虑其他选手喜好的误区而完全忽略了自身的真正需求。
凯恩斯还认为，投机者们花费了大量的时间用于紧张激烈的相互角逐与利益争夺，如果让如此混乱的市场参与重要商业决策的判断无疑是一个相当可怕的决定。“当国家的资本发展沦为赌场活动的副产品时，这简直是糟糕透了。”
可是到了1970年左右，金融市场这个研究领域似乎都被伏尔泰笔下的潘格罗斯博士占领了，此人坚称我们生活的这个世界就是所有可能性中最好的一个。对投资者非理性的讨论、对泡沫的讨论、对破坏性投机的讨论，几乎都从学术话语中消失。支配学术领域的是由芝加哥大学尤金·法玛提出的“有效市场假说”。该假说声称，在给定所有公开信息的条件下，金融市场中资产的定价正好等于该资产的内在价值。（例如，一家公司的股票价格，在给定所有可获得的诸如公司收益、企业前景等资料的条件下，始终准确地反映公司的价值。）到了上世纪80年代，金融经济学家们，特别是哈佛商学院的詹森争辩说，由于金融市场总是正确定价，公司头目可以做的最好的事情，不仅对其本人而言，也是为了整个经济，就是令股票价值最大化。换句话说，金融经济学家认为，我们应该把国家的资本发展，交让给被凯恩斯称为“赌场”的手中。
公平地说，金融理论家接受有效市场假说并非仅仅因为它既优雅、方便、易生财。他们也提出过许许多多的统计证据，起初似乎都强烈支持该假说。但是，这样的证据都带有一个奇怪的有限形式：金融经济学家只研究给定其他资产价格的前提下某资产价格是否合理的问题，但是很少研究给定现实世界的基本面比如说收益，某资产价格是否合理的问题。后一问题看似明显，其实不易回答。萨默斯，现为奥巴马政府头号经济顾问，曾经用一个“番茄酱经济学家”的比喻嘲讽过金融学教授—番茄酱经济学家“证明了两夸脱瓶装的番茄酱所卖价格刚好两倍于一夸脱瓶装的番茄酱”，因此得出结论说，番茄酱市场是完全有效市场。
但是，无论是如此辛辣的讽刺，还是耶鲁大学经济学教授希勒比较客气的批评，都没起什么大作用，金融理论家继续相信，他们的模型基本正确。许多进行现实经济决策的人士也这样相信，其中的强硬派尤以时任美联储主席的格林斯潘为首。他对于放松金融管制向来抱以支持态度。他之所以对人们要求控制次贷的呼声毫不理会，对人们要求他回应日益膨胀的房地产泡沫的声讨充耳不闻，其中很大部分原因在于他始终相信现代金融经济学已经可以掌控一切。2005年，在一个为表彰格林斯潘长期任职于美联储而举行的会议上，有一个令人难忘的时刻：一位出身芝加哥大学的勇敢的与会者当场出示一篇论文警告说，当前金融体系所担的风险水平已经具有潜在危险。这一举动无疑遭到了在场所有人的哂笑，其中当然包括美联储主席萨默斯，当时的他也将这个突如其来的警告当作是“被误导”的言论而拒绝考虑。
终于在去年10月，事情发生了戏剧性的变化。格林斯潘承认说，当金融海啸发生的时候，他正处于“极度震惊，甚至难以置信”的状态中，灾难的发生对他而言意味着“整个理智大厦”的崩溃。更可怕的是，理智大厦崩溃的同时也是真实世界里市场经济的崩溃，直接后果是不能想象的经济衰退。无论是从哪个层面考量，这都是自经济大萧条以来美国经历的最为严重的一次经济衰退。面对这样的窘境，决策者该怎么做？很不幸，宏观经济学爱莫能助，因为本应对经济衰退提供明确指导的宏观经济学本身已陷入一片混乱。
(作者系纽约时报专栏作家、2008年度诺贝尔经济学奖得主)
【原載2009年09月17日<时代周报>，译者﹕朱兀尘、关晓蕾、单丽霞】
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How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?
(New York Times,9-7-2009)
By PAUL KRUGMAN
I. MISTAKING BEAUTY FOR TRUTH
It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field. Those successes — or so they believed — were both theoretical and practical, leading to a golden era for the profession. On the theoretical side, they thought that they had resolved their internal disputes. Thus, in a 2008 paper titled “The State of Macro” (that is, macroeconomics, the study of big-picture issues like recessions), Olivier Blanchard of M.I.T., now the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, declared that “the state of macro is good.” The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control: the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved,” declared Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago in his 2003 presidential address to the American Economic Association. In 2004, Ben Bernanke, a former Princeton professor who is now the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, celebrated the Great Moderation in economic performance over the previous two decades, which he attributed in part to improved economic policy making.
Last year, everything came apart.
Few economists saw our current crisis coming, but this predictive failure was the least of the field’s problems. More important was the profession’s blindness to the very possibility of catastrophic failures in a market economy. During the golden years, financial economists came to believe that markets were inherently stable — indeed, that stocks and other assets were always priced just right. There was nothing in the prevailing models suggesting the possibility of the kind of collapse that happened last year. Meanwhile, macroeconomists were divided in their views. But the main division was between those who insisted that free-market economies never go astray and those who believed that economies may stray now and then but that any major deviations from the path of prosperity could and would be corrected by the all-powerful Fed. Neither side was prepared to cope with an economy that went off the rails despite the Fed’s best efforts.
And in the wake of the crisis, the fault lines in the economics profession have yawned wider than ever. Lucas says the Obama administration’s stimulus plans are “schlock economics,” and his Chicago colleague John Cochrane says they’re based on discredited “fairy tales.” In response, Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, writes of the “intellectual collapse” of the Chicago School, and I myself have written that comments from Chicago economists are the product of a Dark Age of macroeconomics in which hard-won knowledge has been forgotten.
What happened to the economics profession? And where does it go from here?
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn’t sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression faded, economists fell back in love with the old, idealized vision of an economy in which rational individuals interact in perfect markets, this time gussied up with fancy equations. The renewed romance with the idealized market was, to be sure, partly a response to shifting political winds, partly a response to financial incentives. But while sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution and job opportunities on Wall Street are nothing to sneeze at, the central cause of the profession’s failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.
Unfortunately, this romanticized and sanitized vision of the economy led most economists to ignore all the things that can go wrong. They turned a blind eye to the limitations of human rationality that often lead to bubbles and busts; to the problems of institutions that run amok; to the imperfections of markets — especially financial markets — that can cause the economy’s operating system to undergo sudden, unpredictable crashes; and to the dangers created when regulators don’t believe in regulation.
It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.
II. FROM SMITH TO KEYNES AND BACK
The birth of economics as a discipline is usually credited to Adam Smith, who published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. Over the next 160 years an extensive body of economic theory was developed, whose central message was: Trust the market. Yes, economists admitted that there were cases in which markets might fail, of which the most important was the case of “externalities” — costs that people impose on others without paying the price, like traffic congestion or pollution. But the basic presumption of “neoclassical” economics (named after the late-19th-century theorists who elaborated on the concepts of their “classical” predecessors) was that we should have faith in the market system.
This faith was, however, shattered by the Great Depression. Actually, even in the face of total collapse some economists insisted that whatever happens in a market economy must be right: “Depressions are not simply evils,” declared Joseph Schumpeter in 1934 — 1934! They are, he added, “forms of something which has to be done.” But many, and eventually most, economists turned to the insights of John Maynard Keynes for both an explanation of what had happened and a solution to future depressions.
Keynes did not, despite what you may have heard, want the government to run the economy. He described his analysis in his 1936 masterwork, “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” as “moderately conservative in its implications.” He wanted to fix capitalism, not replace it. But he did challenge the notion that free-market economies can function without a minder, expressing particular contempt for financial markets, which he viewed as being dominated by short-term speculation with little regard for fundamentals. And he called for active government intervention — printing more money and, if necessary, spending heavily on public works — to fight unemployment during slumps.
It’s important to understand that Keynes did much more than make bold assertions. “The General Theory” is a work of profound, deep analysis — analysis that persuaded the best young economists of the day. Yet the story of economics over the past half century is, to a large degree, the story of a retreat from Keynesianism and a return to neoclassicism. The neoclassical revival was initially led by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, who asserted as early as 1953 that neoclassical economics works well enough as a description of the way the economy actually functions to be “both extremely fruitful and deserving of much confidence.” But what about depressions?
Friedman’s counterattack against Keynes began with the doctrine known as monetarism. Monetarists didn’t disagree in principle with the idea that a market economy needs deliberate stabilization. “We are all Keynesians now,” Friedman once said, although he later claimed he was quoted out of context. Monetarists asserted, however, that a very limited, circumscribed form of government intervention — namely, instructing central banks to keep the nation’s money supply, the sum of cash in circulation and bank deposits, growing on a steady path — is all that’s required to prevent depressions. Famously, Friedman and his collaborator, Anna Schwartz, argued that if the Federal Reserve had done its job properly, the Great Depression would not have happened. Later, Friedman made a compelling case against any deliberate effort by government to push unemployment below its “natural” level (currently thought to be about 4.8 percent in the United States): excessively expansionary policies, he predicted, would lead to a combination of inflation and high unemployment — a prediction that was borne out by the stagflation of the 1970s, which greatly advanced the credibility of the anti-Keynesian movement.
Eventually, however, the anti-Keynesian counterrevolution went far beyond Friedman’s position, which came to seem relatively moderate compared with what his successors were saying. Among financial economists, Keynes’s disparaging vision of financial markets as a “casino” was replaced by “efficient market” theory, which asserted that financial markets always get asset prices right given the available information. Meanwhile, many macroeconomists completely rejected Keynes’s framework for understanding economic slumps. Some returned to the view of Schumpeter and other apologists for the Great Depression, viewing recessions as a good thing, part of the economy’s adjustment to change. And even those not willing to go that far argued that any attempt to fight an economic slump would do more harm than good.
Not all macroeconomists were willing to go down this road: many became self-described New Keynesians, who continued to believe in an active role for the government. Yet even they mostly accepted the notion that investors and consumers are rational and that markets generally get it right.
Of course, there were exceptions to these trends: a few economists challenged the assumption of rational behavior, questioned the belief that financial markets can be trusted and pointed to the long history of financial crises that had devastating economic consequences. But they were swimming against the tide, unable to make much headway against a pervasive and, in retrospect, foolish complacency.
III. PANGLOSSIAN FINANCE
In the 1930s, financial markets, for obvious reasons, didn’t get much respect. Keynes compared them to “those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.”
And Keynes considered it a very bad idea to let such markets, in which speculators spent their time chasing one another’s tails, dictate important business decisions: “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.”
By 1970 or so, however, the study of financial markets seemed to have been taken over by Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, who insisted that we live in the best of all possible worlds. Discussion of investor irrationality, of bubbles, of destructive speculation had virtually disappeared from academic discourse. The field was dominated by the “efficient-market hypothesis,” promulgated by Eugene Fama of the University of Chicago, which claims that financial markets price assets precisely at their intrinsic worth given all publicly available information. (The price of a company’s stock, for example, always accurately reflects the company’s value given the information available on the company’s earnings, its business prospects and so on.) And by the 1980s, finance economists, notably Michael Jensen of the Harvard Business School, were arguing that because financial markets always get prices right, the best thing corporate chieftains can do, not just for themselves but for the sake of the economy, is to maximize their stock prices. In other words, finance economists believed that we should put the capital development of the nation in the hands of what Keynes had called a “casino.”
It’s hard to argue that this transformation in the profession was driven by events. True, the memory of 1929 was gradually receding, but there continued to be bull markets, with widespread tales of speculative excess, followed by bear markets. In 1973-4, for example, stocks lost 48 percent of their value. And the 1987 stock crash, in which the Dow plunged nearly 23 percent in a day for no clear reason, should have raised at least a few doubts about market rationality.
These events, however, which Keynes would have considered evidence of the unreliability of markets, did little to blunt the force of a beautiful idea. The theoretical model that finance economists developed by assuming that every investor rationally balances risk against reward — the so-called Capital Asset Pricing Model, or CAPM (pronounced cap-em) — is wonderfully elegant. And if you accept its premises it’s also extremely useful. CAPM not only tells you how to choose your portfolio — even more important from the financial industry’s point of view, it tells you how to put a price on financial derivatives, claims on claims. The elegance and apparent usefulness of the new theory led to a string of Nobel prizes for its creators, and many of the theory’s adepts also received more mundane rewards: Armed with their new models and formidable math skills — the more arcane uses of CAPM require physicist-level computations — mild-mannered business-school professors could and did become Wall Street rocket scientists, earning Wall Street paychecks.
To be fair, finance theorists didn’t accept the efficient-market hypothesis merely because it was elegant, convenient and lucrative. They also produced a great deal of statistical evidence, which at first seemed strongly supportive. But this evidence was of an oddly limited form. Finance economists rarely asked the seemingly obvious (though not easily answered) question of whether asset prices made sense given real-world fundamentals like earnings. Instead, they asked only whether asset prices made sense given other asset prices. Larry Summers, now the top economic adviser in the Obama administration, once mocked finance professors with a parable about “ketchup economists” who “have shown that two-quart bottles of ketchup invariably sell for exactly twice as much as one-quart bottles of ketchup,” and conclude from this that the ketchup market is perfectly efficient.
But neither this mockery nor more polite critiques from economists like Robert Shiller of Yale had much effect. Finance theorists continued to believe that their models were essentially right, and so did many people making real-world decisions. Not least among these was Alan Greenspan, who was then the Fed chairman and a long-time supporter of financial deregulation whose rejection of calls to rein in subprime lending or address the ever-inflating housing bubble rested in large part on the belief that modern financial economics had everything under control. There was a telling moment in 2005, at a conference held to honor Greenspan’s tenure at the Fed. One brave attendee, Raghuram Rajan (of the University of Chicago, surprisingly), presented a paper warning that the financial system was taking on potentially dangerous levels of risk. He was mocked by almost all present — including, by the way, Larry Summers, who dismissed his warnings as “misguided.”
By October of last year, however, Greenspan was admitting that he was in a state of “shocked disbelief,” because “the whole intellectual edifice” had “collapsed.” Since this collapse of the intellectual edifice was also a collapse of real-world markets, the result was a severe recession — the worst, by many measures, since the Great Depression. What should policy makers do? Unfortunately, macroeconomics, which should have been providing clear guidance about how to address the slumping economy, was in its own state of disarray.
IV. THE TROUBLE WITH MACRO
“We have involved ourselves in a colossal muddle, having blundered in the control of a delicate machine, the working of which we do not understand. The result is that our possibilities of wealth may run to waste for a time — perhaps for a long time.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes in an essay titled “The Great Slump of 1930,” in which he tried to explain the catastrophe then overtaking the world. And the world’s possibilities of wealth did indeed run to waste for a long time; it took World War II to bring the Great Depression to a definitive end.
Why was Keynes’s diagnosis of the Great Depression as a “colossal muddle” so compelling at first? And why did economics, circa 1975, divide into opposing camps over the value of Keynes’s views?
I like to explain the essence of Keynesian economics with a true story that also serves as a parable, a small-scale version of the messes that can afflict entire economies. Consider the travails of the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op.
This co-op, whose problems were recounted in a 1977 article in The Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, was an association of about 150 young couples who agreed to help one another by baby-sitting for one another’s children when parents wanted a night out. To ensure that every couple did its fair share of baby-sitting, the co-op introduced a form of scrip: coupons made out of heavy pieces of paper, each entitling the bearer to one half-hour of sitting time. Initially, members received 20 coupons on joining and were required to return the same amount on departing the group.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the co-op’s members, on average, wanted to hold a reserve of more than 20 coupons, perhaps, in case they should want to go out several times in a row. As a result, relatively few people wanted to spend their scrip and go out, while many wanted to baby-sit so they could add to their hoard. But since baby-sitting opportunities arise only when someone goes out for the night, this meant that baby-sitting jobs were hard to find, which made members of the co-op even more reluctant to go out, making baby-sitting jobs even scarcer. . . .
In short, the co-op fell into a recession.
O.K., what do you think of this story? Don’t dismiss it as silly and trivial: economists have used small-scale examples to shed light on big questions ever since Adam Smith saw the roots of economic progress in a pin factory, and they’re right to do so. The question is whether this particular example, in which a recession is a problem of inadequate demand — there isn’t enough demand for baby-sitting to provide jobs for everyone who wants one — gets at the essence of what happens in a recession.
Forty years ago most economists would have agreed with this interpretation. But since then macroeconomics has divided into two great factions: “saltwater” economists (mainly in coastal U.S. universities), who have a more or less Keynesian vision of what recessions are all about; and “freshwater” economists (mainly at inland schools), who consider that vision nonsense.
Freshwater economists are, essentially, neoclassical purists. They believe that all worthwhile economic analysis starts from the premise that people are rational and markets work, a premise violated by the story of the baby-sitting co-op. As they see it, a general lack of sufficient demand isn’t possible, because prices always move to match supply with demand. If people want more baby-sitting coupons, the value of those coupons will rise, so that they’re worth, say, 40 minutes of baby-sitting rather than half an hour — or, equivalently, the cost of an hours’ baby-sitting would fall from 2 coupons to 1.5. And that would solve the problem: the purchasing power of the coupons in circulation would have risen, so that people would feel no need to hoard more, and there would be no recession.
But don’t recessions look like periods in which there just isn’t enough demand to employ everyone willing to work? Appearances can be deceiving, say the freshwater theorists. Sound economics, in their view, says that overall failures of demand can’t happen — and that means that they don’t. Keynesian economics has been “proved false,” Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, says.
Yet recessions do happen. Why? In the 1970s the leading freshwater macroeconomist, the Nobel laureate Robert Lucas, argued that recessions were caused by temporary confusion: workers and companies had trouble distinguishing overall changes in the level of prices because of inflation or deflation from changes in their own particular business situation. And Lucas warned that any attempt to fight the business cycle would be counterproductive: activist policies, he argued, would just add to the confusion.
By the 1980s, however, even this severely limited acceptance of the idea that recessions are bad things had been rejected by many freshwater economists. Instead, the new leaders of the movement, especially Edward Prescott, who was then at the University of Minnesota (you can see where the freshwater moniker comes from), argued that price fluctuations and changes in demand actually had nothing to do with the business cycle. Rather, the business cycle reflects fluctuations in the rate of technological progress, which are amplified by the rational response of workers, who voluntarily work more when the environment is favorable and less when it’s unfavorable. Unemployment is a deliberate decision by workers to take time off.
Put baldly like that, this theory sounds foolish — was the Great Depression really the Great Vacation? And to be honest, I think it really is silly. But the basic premise of Prescott’s “real business cycle” theory was embedded in ingeniously constructed mathematical models, which were mapped onto real data using sophisticated statistical techniques, and the theory came to dominate the teaching of macroeconomics in many university departments. In 2004, reflecting the theory’s influence, Prescott shared a Nobel with Finn Kydland of Carnegie Mellon University.
Meanwhile, saltwater economists balked. Where the freshwater economists were purists, saltwater economists were pragmatists. While economists like N. Gregory Mankiw at Harvard, Olivier Blanchard at M.I.T. and David Romer at the University of California, Berkeley, acknowledged that it was hard to reconcile a Keynesian demand-side view of recessions with neoclassical theory, they found the evidence that recessions are, in fact, demand-driven too compelling to reject. So they were willing to deviate from the assumption of perfect markets or perfect rationality, or both, adding enough imperfections to accommodate a more or less Keynesian view of recessions. And in the saltwater view, active policy to fight recessions remained desirable.
But the self-described New Keynesian economists weren’t immune to the charms of rational individuals and perfect markets. They tried to keep their deviations from neoclassical orthodoxy as limited as possible. This meant that there was no room in the prevailing models for such things as bubbles and banking-system collapse. The fact that such things continued to happen in the real world — there was a terrible financial and macroeconomic crisis in much of Asia in 1997-8 and a depression-level slump in Argentina in 2002 — wasn’t reflected in the mainstream of New Keynesian thinking.
Even so, you might have thought that the differing worldviews of freshwater and saltwater economists would have put them constantly at loggerheads over economic policy. Somewhat surprisingly, however, between around 1985 and 2007 the disputes between freshwater and saltwater economists were mainly about theory, not action. The reason, I believe, is that New Keynesians, unlike the original Keynesians, didn’t think fiscal policy — changes in government spending or taxes — was needed to fight recessions. They believed that monetary policy, administered by the technocrats at the Fed, could provide whatever remedies the economy needed. At a 90th birthday celebration for Milton Friedman, Ben Bernanke, formerly a more or less New Keynesian professor at Princeton, and by then a member of the Fed’s governing board, declared of the Great Depression: “You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, it won’t happen again.” The clear message was that all you need to avoid depressions is a smarter Fed.
And as long as macroeconomic policy was left in the hands of the maestro Greenspan, without Keynesian-type stimulus programs, freshwater economists found little to complain about. (They didn’t believe that monetary policy did any good, but they didn’t believe it did any harm, either.)
It would take a crisis to reveal both how little common ground there was and how Panglossian even New Keynesian economics had become.
V. NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED . . .
In recent, rueful economics discussions, an all-purpose punch line has become “nobody could have predicted. . . .” It’s what you say with regard to disasters that could have been predicted, should have been predicted and actually were predicted by a few economists who were scoffed at for their pains.
Take, for example, the precipitous rise and fall of housing prices. Some economists, notably Robert Shiller, did identify the bubble and warn of painful consequences if it were to burst. Yet key policy makers failed to see the obvious. In 2004, Alan Greenspan dismissed talk of a housing bubble: “a national severe price distortion,” he declared, was “most unlikely.” Home-price increases, Ben Bernanke said in 2005, “largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.”
How did they miss the bubble? To be fair, interest rates were unusually low, possibly explaining part of the price rise. It may be that Greenspan and Bernanke also wanted to celebrate the Fed’s success in pulling the economy out of the 2001 recession; conceding that much of that success rested on the creation of a monstrous bubble would have placed a damper on the festivities.
But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don’t happen. What’s striking, when you reread Greenspan’s assurances, is that they weren’t based on evidence — they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can’t be a bubble in housing. And the finance theorists were even more adamant on this point. In a 2007 interview, Eugene Fama, the father of the efficient-market hypothesis, declared that “the word ‘bubble’ drives me nuts,” and went on to explain why we can trust the housing market: “Housing markets are less liquid, but people are very careful when they buy houses. It’s typically the biggest investment they’re going to make, so they look around very carefully and they compare prices. The bidding process is very detailed.”
Indeed, home buyers generally do carefully compare prices — that is, they compare the price of their potential purchase with the prices of other houses. But this says nothing about whether the overall price of houses is justified. It’s ketchup economics, again: because a two-quart bottle of ketchup costs twice as much as a one-quart bottle, finance theorists declare that the price of ketchup must be right.
In short, the belief in efficient financial markets blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history. And efficient-market theory also played a significant role in inflating that bubble in the first place.
Now that the undiagnosed bubble has burst, the true riskiness of supposedly safe assets has been revealed and the financial system has demonstrated its fragility. U.S. households have seen $13 trillion in wealth evaporate. More than six million jobs have been lost, and the unemployment rate appears headed for its highest level since 1940. So what guidance does modern economics have to offer in our current predicament? And should we trust it?
VI. THE STIMULUS SQUABBLE
Between 1985 and 2007 a false peace settled over the field of macroeconomics. There hadn’t been any real convergence of views between the saltwater and freshwater factions. But these were the years of the Great Moderation — an extended period during which inflation was subdued and recessions were relatively mild. Saltwater economists believed that the Federal Reserve had everything under control. Freshwater economists didn’t think the Fed’s actions were actually beneficial, but they were willing to let matters lie.
But the crisis ended the phony peace. Suddenly the narrow, technocratic policies both sides were willing to accept were no longer sufficient — and the need for a broader policy response brought the old conflicts out into the open, fiercer than ever.
Why weren’t those narrow, technocratic policies sufficient? The answer, in a word, is zero.
During a normal recession, the Fed responds by buying Treasury bills — short-term government debt — from banks. This drives interest rates on government debt down; investors seeking a higher rate of return move into other assets, driving other interest rates down as well; and normally these lower interest rates eventually lead to an economic bounceback. The Fed dealt with the recession that began in 1990 by driving short-term interest rates from 9 percent down to 3 percent. It dealt with the recession that began in 2001 by driving rates from 6.5 percent to 1 percent. And it tried to deal with the current recession by driving rates down from 5.25 percent to zero.
But zero, it turned out, isn’t low enough to end this recession. And the Fed can’t push rates below zero, since at near-zero rates investors simply hoard cash rather than lending it out. So by late 2008, with interest rates basically at what macroeconomists call the “zero lower bound” even as the recession continued to deepen, conventional monetary policy had lost all traction.
Now what? This is the second time America has been up against the zero lower bound, the previous occasion being the Great Depression. And it was precisely the observation that there’s a lower bound to interest rates that led Keynes to advocate higher government spending: when monetary policy is ineffective and the private sector can’t be persuaded to spend more, the public sector must take its place in supporting the economy. Fiscal stimulus is the Keynesian answer to the kind of depression-type economic situation we’re currently in.
Such Keynesian thinking underlies the Obama administration’s economic policies — and the freshwater economists are furious. For 25 or so years they tolerated the Fed’s efforts to manage the economy, but a full-blown Keynesian resurgence was something entirely different. Back in 1980, Lucas, of the University of Chicago, wrote that Keynesian economics was so ludicrous that “at research seminars, people don’t take Keynesian theorizing seriously anymore; the audience starts to whisper and giggle to one another.” Admitting that Keynes was largely right, after all, would be too humiliating a comedown.
And so Chicago’s Cochrane, outraged at the idea that government spending could mitigate the latest recession, declared: “It’s not part of what anybody has taught graduate students since the 1960s. They [Keynesian ideas] are fairy tales that have been proved false. It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn’t make them less false.” (It’s a mark of how deep the division between saltwater and freshwater runs that Cochrane doesn’t believe that “anybody” teaches ideas that are, in fact, taught in places like Princeton, M.I.T. and Harvard.)
Meanwhile, saltwater economists, who had comforted themselves with the belief that the great divide in macroeconomics was narrowing, were shocked to realize that freshwater economists hadn’t been listening at all. Freshwater economists who inveighed against the stimulus didn’t sound like scholars who had weighed Keynesian arguments and found them wanting. Rather, they sounded like people who had no idea what Keynesian economics was about, who were resurrecting pre-1930 fallacies in the belief that they were saying something new and profound.
And it wasn’t just Keynes whose ideas seemed to have been forgotten. As Brad DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out in his laments about the Chicago school’s “intellectual collapse,” the school’s current stance amounts to a wholesale rejection of Milton Friedman’s ideas, as well. Friedman believed that Fed policy rather than changes in government spending should be used to stabilize the economy, but he never asserted that an increase in government spending cannot, under any circumstances, increase employment. In fact, rereading Friedman’s 1970 summary of his ideas, “A Theoretical Framework for Monetary Analysis,” what’s striking is how Keynesian it seems.
And Friedman certainly never bought into the idea that mass unemployment represents a voluntary reduction in work effort or the idea that recessions are actually good for the economy. Yet the current generation of freshwater economists has been making both arguments. Thus Chicago’s Casey Mulligan suggests that unemployment is so high because many workers are choosing not to take jobs: “Employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work . . . decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire).” Mulligan has suggested, in particular, that workers are choosing to remain unemployed because that improves their odds of receiving mortgage relief. And Cochrane declares that high unemployment is actually good: “We should have a recession. People who spend their lives pounding nails in Nevada need something else to do.”
Personally, I think this is crazy. Why should it take mass unemployment across the whole nation to get carpenters to move out of Nevada? Can anyone seriously claim that we’ve lost 6.7 million jobs because fewer Americans want to work? But it was inevitable that freshwater economists would find themselves trapped in this cul-de-sac: if you start from the assumption that people are perfectly rational and markets are perfectly efficient, you have to conclude that unemployment is voluntary and recessions are desirable.
Yet if the crisis has pushed freshwater economists into absurdity, it has also created a lot of soul-searching among saltwater economists. Their framework, unlike that of the Chicago School, both allows for the possibility of involuntary unemployment and considers it a bad thing. But the New Keynesian models that have come to dominate teaching and research assume that people are perfectly rational and financial markets are perfectly efficient. To get anything like the current slump into their models, New Keynesians are forced to introduce some kind of fudge factor that for reasons unspecified temporarily depresses private spending. (I’ve done exactly that in some of my own work.) And if the analysis of where we are now rests on this fudge factor, how much confidence can we have in the models’ predictions about where we are going?
The state of macro, in short, is not good. So where does the profession go from here?
VII. FLAWS AND FRICTIONS
Economics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system. If the profession is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Even during the heyday of perfect-market economics, there was a lot of work done on the ways in which the real economy deviated from the theoretical ideal. What’s probably going to happen now — in fact, it’s already happening — is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center.
There’s already a fairly well developed example of the kind of economics I have in mind: the school of thought known as behavioral finance. Practitioners of this approach emphasize two things. First, many real-world investors bear little resemblance to the cool calculators of efficient-market theory: they’re all too subject to herd behavior, to bouts of irrational exuberance and unwarranted panic. Second, even those who try to base their decisions on cool calculation often find that they can’t, that problems of trust, credibility and limited collateral force them to run with the herd.
On the first point: even during the heyday of the efficient-market hypothesis, it seemed obvious that many real-world investors aren’t as rational as the prevailing models assumed. Larry Summers once began a paper on finance by declaring: “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around.” But what kind of idiots (the preferred term in the academic literature, actually, is “noise traders”) are we talking about? Behavioral finance, drawing on the broader movement known as behavioral economics, tries to answer that question by relating the apparent irrationality of investors to known biases in human cognition, like the tendency to care more about small losses than small gains or the tendency to extrapolate too readily from small samples (e.g., assuming that because home prices rose in the past few years, they’ll keep on rising).
Until the crisis, efficient-market advocates like Eugene Fama dismissed the evidence produced on behalf of behavioral finance as a collection of “curiosity items” of no real importance. That’s a much harder position to maintain now that the collapse of a vast bubble — a bubble correctly diagnosed by behavioral economists like Robert Shiller of Yale, who related it to past episodes of “irrational exuberance” — has brought the world economy to its knees.
On the second point: suppose that there are, indeed, idiots. How much do they matter? Not much, argued Milton Friedman in an influential 1953 paper: smart investors will make money by buying when the idiots sell and selling when they buy and will stabilize markets in the process. But the second strand of behavioral finance says that Friedman was wrong, that financial markets are sometimes highly unstable, and right now that view seems hard to reject.
Probably the most influential paper in this vein was a 1997 publication by Andrei Shleifer of Harvard and Robert Vishny of Chicago, which amounted to a formalization of the old line that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” As they pointed out, arbitrageurs — the people who are supposed to buy low and sell high — need capital to do their jobs. And a severe plunge in asset prices, even if it makes no sense in terms of fundamentals, tends to deplete that capital. As a result, the smart money is forced out of the market, and prices may go into a downward spiral.
The spread of the current financial crisis seemed almost like an object lesson in the perils of financial instability. And the general ideas underlying models of financial instability have proved highly relevant to economic policy: a focus on the depleted capital of financial institutions helped guide policy actions taken after the fall of Lehman, and it looks (cross your fingers) as if these actions successfully headed off an even bigger financial collapse.
Meanwhile, what about macroeconomics? Recent events have pretty decisively refuted the idea that recessions are an optimal response to fluctuations in the rate of technological progress; a more or less Keynesian view is the only plausible game in town. Yet standard New Keynesian models left no room for a crisis like the one we’re having, because those models generally accepted the efficient-market view of the financial sector.
There were some exceptions. One line of work, pioneered by none other than Ben Bernanke working with Mark Gertler of New York University, emphasized the way the lack of sufficient collateral can hinder the ability of businesses to raise funds and pursue investment opportunities. A related line of work, largely established by my Princeton colleague Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John Moore of the London School of Economics, argued that prices of assets such as real estate can suffer self-reinforcing plunges that in turn depress the economy as a whole. But until now the impact of dysfunctional finance hasn’t been at the core even of Keynesian economics. Clearly, that has to change.
VIII. RE-EMBRACING KEYNES
So here’s what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.
Many economists will find these changes deeply disturbing. It will be a long time, if ever, before the new, more realistic approaches to finance and macroeconomics offer the same kind of clarity, completeness and sheer beauty that characterizes the full neoclassical approach. To some economists that will be a reason to cling to neoclassicism, despite its utter failure to make sense of the greatest economic crisis in three generations. This seems, however, like a good time to recall the words of H. L. Mencken: “There is always an easy solution to every human problem — neat, plausible and wrong.”
When it comes to the all-too-human problem of recessions and depressions, economists need to abandon the neat but wrong solution of assuming that everyone is rational and markets work perfectly. The vision that emerges as the profession rethinks its foundations may not be all that clear; it certainly won’t be neat; but we can hope that it will have the virtue of being at least partly right.
Paul Krugman is a Times Op-Ed columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. His latest book is “The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: September 6, 2009
Because of an editing error, an article on Page 36 this weekend about the failure of economists to anticipate the latest recession misquotes the economist John Maynard Keynes, who compared the financial markets of the 1930s to newspaper beauty contests in which readers tried to correctly pick all six eventual winners. Keynes noted that a competitor did not have to pick “those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors.” He did not say, “nor even those that he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of other competitors.”
Monday, September 14, 2009
康正果“我的反动自叙”读后
这是一本值得阅读的有趣的书。
书中简要记叙作者从1949年记事，至来美国耶鲁大学教书的历史。
作者父亲是西安解放后留用的工程师，祖父是虔诚的佛教徒和佛学家，其家庭解放后的经济、文化条件当然有所下降，但比一般城市平民要好，例如比我的家庭好许多，作者为何走上“反动”道路？
从作者自身看，这可能与两个原因有关。作者幼小从祖父藏书中积累了中国传统文化的深厚底蕴，因此自幼就与中共的灌输性教育制度格格不入。另外，作者性格刚强，敢于反叛和反抗，天生一副反骨，中学阶段就敢于反抗校方，并为此付出惨重代价－－被大学校方开除、劳教、判刑坐牢、下农村当农民等。
从外部因素方面看，老毛统治下的中国社会，是一个压制、打击、折磨、埋没、甚至从肉体上消灭有才干者和独立思考者的社会，是哈巴狗飞黄腾达、说假话者得势、说真话者倒霉的社会。
老毛和中共执政后犯下的一个重大错误，就是有意制造了一大批敌人。例如黑五类子女、家庭出身“有问题”者。其实，只要中共对他们稍微宽松一点，让他们与其他人一样，享有同等的升学、就业机会，我相信其中绝大多数人会对中共感激涕零、感恩戴德、忠心耿耿的，至少不会走上反共之路。
此书的另一看点是作者与妻子的没有恋爱过程的婚姻历程，令人下泪。
书中简要记叙作者从1949年记事，至来美国耶鲁大学教书的历史。
作者父亲是西安解放后留用的工程师，祖父是虔诚的佛教徒和佛学家，其家庭解放后的经济、文化条件当然有所下降，但比一般城市平民要好，例如比我的家庭好许多，作者为何走上“反动”道路？
从作者自身看，这可能与两个原因有关。作者幼小从祖父藏书中积累了中国传统文化的深厚底蕴，因此自幼就与中共的灌输性教育制度格格不入。另外，作者性格刚强，敢于反叛和反抗，天生一副反骨，中学阶段就敢于反抗校方，并为此付出惨重代价－－被大学校方开除、劳教、判刑坐牢、下农村当农民等。
从外部因素方面看，老毛统治下的中国社会，是一个压制、打击、折磨、埋没、甚至从肉体上消灭有才干者和独立思考者的社会，是哈巴狗飞黄腾达、说假话者得势、说真话者倒霉的社会。
老毛和中共执政后犯下的一个重大错误，就是有意制造了一大批敌人。例如黑五类子女、家庭出身“有问题”者。其实，只要中共对他们稍微宽松一点，让他们与其他人一样，享有同等的升学、就业机会，我相信其中绝大多数人会对中共感激涕零、感恩戴德、忠心耿耿的，至少不会走上反共之路。
此书的另一看点是作者与妻子的没有恋爱过程的婚姻历程，令人下泪。
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