《资本在21世纪》系列之一

《资本在21世纪》系列之一——马丁·沃尔夫的书评
本帖最后由 gangangwen 于 2014-5-17 19:27 编辑

‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’, by Thomas Piketty
评法国经济学家托马斯·皮凯蒂的《资本在21世纪》

An economic, social and political history of the evolution of income and wealth
一部有关收入和财富的经济的、社会的和政治的演化史

Review by Martin Wolf
《金融时报》首席财经评论员  马丁·沃尔夫


Yachts in the marina at Sag Harbor, New York

Capital in the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Harvard University Press RRP￡29.95/Belknap Press RRP$39.95, 696 pages

French economist Thomas Piketty has written an extraordinarily important book. Open-minded readers will surely find themselves unable to ignore the evidence and arguments he has brought to bear.

法国经济学家托马斯·皮凯蒂写出了一部非常重要的著作。开明的读者肯定会发现自己无法忽视他在书中提出的证据和论点。

Capital in the Twenty-First Century contains four remarkable achievements. First, in its scale and sweep it brings us back to the founders of political economy. Piketty himself sees economics “as a subdiscipline of the social sciences, alongside history, sociology, anthropology, and political science”. The result is a work of vast historical scope, grounded in exhaustive fact-based research, and suffused with literary references. It is both normative and political. Piketty rejects theorising ungrounded in data. He also insists that social scientists “must make choices and take stands in regard to specific institutions and policies, whether it be the social state, the tax system, or the public debt”.

《资本在21世纪》包括了四个令人瞩目的成就。首先，它把我们带回到了政治经济学奠基人的那种深度和广度。在皮凯蒂本人看来，“作为社会科学的一个分支”，经济学是“同历史学、社会学、人类学和政治学并称的一门科学”。由此使得这部作品既具有广阔的历史视角，又有详尽的基于事实的研究，其间还不时可见对文学作品的引用。它既规范又具有政治意义。皮凯蒂拒绝把没有根据的数据理论化。他坚称，社会科学家“必须在有关特定的制度和政策方面——不管其社会状态、税收体系或是公共债务如何，做出选择和站定立场。”

Second, the book is built on a 15-year programme of empirical research conducted in conjunction with other scholars. Its result is a transformation of what we know about the evolution of income and wealth (which he calls capital) over the past three centuries in leading high-income countries. That makes it an enthralling economic, social and political history.

第二，该书是以一项长达15年的与其他学者共同进行的实证性研究为基础的，其结果就是把我们对有关收入与财富（皮凯蒂称之为资本）在过去三个世纪中在主要的高收入国家中的演化过程，转化成了一段引人入胜的历史，并从经济、社会和政治等各个角度对其做出了解读。

Among the lessons is that there is no general tendency towards greater economic equality. Another is that the relatively high degree of equality seen after the second world war was partly a result of deliberate policy, especially progressive taxation, but even more a result of the destruction of inherited wealth, particularly within Europe, between 1914 and 1945. A further lesson is that we are slowly recreating the “patrimonial capitalism” – the world dominated by inherited wealth – of the late 19th century.

该书提出了以下三条经验教训：一，向着更大的经济平等的普遍趋势是不存在的；二，见诸于二战后的那种相对高度的平等，部分是审慎政策——尤其是累进税——的结果，然而更主要的还是发生在1914年至1945年间的、以欧洲为代表的、对于世袭财富的毁灭的结果；由此所引出第三条教训就是，我们正在缓慢地重建19世纪晚期的那种世界被世袭财富所主导的“世袭资本主义”。

Some argue that rising human capital will reduce the economic significance of other forms of wealth. But, notes Piketty, “?‘nonhuman capital’ seems almost as indispensable in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth or nineteenth”. Others argue that “class warfare” will give way to “generational warfare”. But inequality within generations remains vastly greater than among them. Yet others suggest that intragenerational mobility robs rising inequality of earnings of significance, particularly in the US. This, too, is false: the rise in inequality of earnings in the US over recent decades is the same however long the period over which earnings are traced. High-school dropouts rarely become chairman of GE.

有人认为，日益增长的人力资本会降低其他形式的财富的经济重要性。但是，皮凯蒂不这么看。他指出：“‘非人力资本’在21世纪的不可或缺性，看上去几乎同其在18世纪和19世纪那样”。有人认为，“社会阶层间的斗争”将会让位于“代与代之间的斗争”。但是，几代人之内的不平等仍会远远大于一代人之间的不平等。然而，有人以美国为例指出，代际间的流动能消弱日益严重的收入不平等的重要性。但是，这种观点也是错误的：在美国，不管追溯多长时间，在最近几十年间所发生的收入不平等的加剧都是同之前一样的。高中辍学者是几乎不可能成为通用电气公司的董事长的。

An important finding is that the ratio of wealth to income in Europe has climbed back above US levels, notably in France and the UK. Another is the notably big recent rise in the income shares of the top 1 per cent in English-speaking countries (above all, the US) since 1980. Perhaps the most extraordinary statistic is that “the richest 1 percent appropriated 60 percent of the increase in US national income between 1977 and 2007.” Technology and globalisation can hardly explain this, since both were at work in all high-income countries. In all, the two most striking conclusions are the rise of the “supermanager” in the US and the return of patrimonial capitalism in Europe.

该书有两个重要的发现。一是以英国和法国的这些欧洲国家为代表的，财富/收入之比已经回升到高于美国的水平了。二是，在以美国为代表的英语国家中，自1980年以来，占[总人口]1%的顶层的收入份额出现了大幅的提高。其中最为突出的统计数据是，“在美国，最富有的1%已把国民收入在1977年至2007年间所实现的增长的60%据为己有。”这不是能用技术和全球化来解释的，因为技术和全球化对所有的高收入国家都有影响。总之，最令人震惊的两个结论是：“超级管理人”在美国的崛起和世袭资本主义在欧洲的卷土重来。

Third, Piketty uses simple economic models to explain what is going on. He notes, for example, that the huge rise in labour earnings at the top of US income distribution is overwhelmingly explained not by sports stars or entertainers but by increases in remuneration of managers. He argues that this is the result of the falls in marginal taxation, which have increased the incentive to bargain for higher pay, reinforced by changes in social norms. The alternative view – that the marginal productivity of top managers has exploded – is, he asserts, unpersuasive, partly because the marginal product of a manager is unmeasurable and partly because overall economic performance has not improved since the 1960s.

第三，皮凯蒂在解释当前的情况时，使用的是简单的经济模型。比如说，他指出，位据美国收入分配顶端的劳动力所得之巨大增长是不能用体育或娱乐明星的收入的巨大增长来解释的，而是应该用管理层薪水的巨大增长来解释。他说，这是边际税税率降低的结果，而边际税税率的降低又使管理层为获取更高的薪水而讨价还价增添了动力，并且使这种社会规范的变化得到了强化。皮凯蒂所坚持的另一种观点——顶层管理人的边际生产力一直在呈现爆发式的增长——也是没有说服力的，其原因一部分在于管理人员的边际生产力是无法衡量的，另一部分是因为自上世纪60年代以来，经济的总体表现一直没有改善。

More interesting is Piketty's theory of capitalist accumulation. He argues that the ratio of capital to income will rise without limit so long as the rate of return is significantly higher than the economy's rate of growth. This, he holds, has normally been the case. The only exceptions from the past few centuries are when a sizeable part of the return on wealth is expropriated or destroyed, or when an economy has opportunities for exceptionally fast growth, as in postwar Europe or the emerging economies today.

更令人感兴趣的是皮凯蒂有关资本主义积累的理论。他指出，只要资本的收益率显著地高于经济体的增长率，收入/资本之比的增长就会没有界限。他坚持认为，这种情况已经常态化了。过去几个世纪中的唯一例外发生在财富收益的大部分被没收或是遭到毁灭之时，或是经济体存在着如战后的欧洲和当今的新兴经济体那样的异常快速增长的机会之时。

This theory is built on two pieces of evidence. One is that the rate of return is only modestly affected by the ratio of capital to income. In the language of economists, the “elasticity of substitution” between capital and labour is far greater than one. In the long run, this seems plausible. Indeed, an age of robotics might further raise the elasticity.

构成这一理论基础的是两项证据。其一，收益率仅受到收入/资本之比温和的影响。用经济学家的话来说，就是资本和劳动力之间的“替代弹性”远远大于1。从长期来看，这似乎还说得过去。实际上，机器人时代可能会进一步提高这种弹性。

The other is that, at least in normal times, capitalists save a sufficiently large share of their returns to ensure that their capital will grow at least as fast as the economy. This is especially likely to be true of the seriously wealthy, who are also likely to enjoy the highest returns. Small fortunes are eaten; big ones are not. The tendency for capital to grow faster than the economy is also more likely when the growth of the economy is relatively slow, either because of demographics or because technical progress is weak. Capital-dominated societies also have low-growth economies.

其二，资本家至少会在正常的年份中把他们收益的很大一部分储存起来，以确保他们的资本起码能同经济的增长保持一致。这种情况最有可能发生在同样喜欢享受最收益的真正的富人身上。被吃掉的财富只占一小部分；没被吃掉的财富则占大部分。资本增长快于经济增长的趋势同样有可能发生在经济增长因人口因素或是技术进步微弱而相对放缓之时。被资本主宰的社会也有低增长的经济体。

Fourth, Piketty makes bold and obviously “unrealistic” policy recommendations. In particular, he calls for a return to far higher marginal tax rates on top incomes and a progressive global wealth tax. The case for the latter is that the reported incomes of the richest are far smaller than their true economic incomes (the amount they can consume without reducing their wealth). The rich may even take themselves outside any fiscal jurisdiction, so enjoying the fiscal position of aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France. This fact blunts one of the criticisms of the book's reliance on pre-tax data: over time, the ability of individual countries to redistribute resources towards the middle and bottom of national income distributions might dwindle away to nothing.

第四，皮凯蒂提出的政策建议虽然大胆但明显的“不切实际”，尤其是他呼吁的向对顶层的收入征收远高于现在的边际税和在全球范围内对财富征税的政策建议更是如此。至于为何要在全球范围内对财富征税，他提出的理由是：最富有之人的申报收入远远少于他们真正的经济收入（指的是他们可以用于消费却不会减少他们财富那部分收入）。富人甚至还有可能将自己置于任何财政管辖之外，因而他们正在享受着法国大革命前夕的贵族曾经享受的财政地位。这一事实让批评该书过于依赖前税收时代的数据的一种论调变得哑口无言。这种论调认为，个别国家向处于国民收入分配的中间阶层和最低层再次分配资源的能力，有可能会随着时间的推移渐渐减弱，以致完全丧失。

Yet the book also has clear weaknesses. The most important is that it does not deal with why soaring inequality – while more than adequately demonstrated – matters. Essentially, Piketty simply assumes that it does.

然而，该书也存在着一些明显的弱点。最重要的是，在给与更多的适当的说明的同时，它没有涉及“为什么说日益严重的不平等那么重要”这个问题。皮凯蒂只是简单地假设这个问题是重要的。

One argument for inequality is that it is a spur to (or product of) innovation. The contrary evidence is clear: contemporary inequality and, above all, inherited wealth are unnecessary for this purpose. Another argument is that the product of just processes must be just. Yet even if the processes driving inequality were themselves just (which is doubtful), this is not the only principle of distributive justice. Another – to me more plausible – argument against Piketty's is that inequality is less important in an economy that is now 20 times as productive as those of two centuries ago: even the poor enjoy goods and services unavailable to the richest a few decades ago.

支持不平等的一种观点认为，不平等是创新之源（或是之物）。相反的证据是明显的：当代的不平等和继承而来的财富对于这种目的来说是不必要的。另一种观点认为，公平过程的产物必须是公平的。然而，即便是导致不平等的过程自身是公平的（这还有待商榷 ），这也不是分配公平的唯一原则。另一种反对皮凯蒂的观点——我认为这种观点比较合理——认为，在一个生产力水平已高出两个世纪之前20倍的经济体中，不平等的重要性已经降低了：甚至就连穷人也能享受最富有之人在几十年前都无法获得的商品和服务。

For me the most convincing argument against the ongoing rise in economic inequality is that it is incompatible with true equality as citizens. If, as the ancient Athenians believed, participation in public life is a fundamental aspect of human self-realisation, huge inequalities cannot but destroy it. In a society dominated by wealth, money will buy power. Inequality cannot be eliminated. It is inevitable and to a degree even desirable. But, as the Greeks argued, there needs to be moderation in all things. We are not seeing moderate rises in inequality. We should take notice.

在我看来，最具说服力的反对正在变得日益严重的经济不平等的论点是：经济不平等是同作为公民应该享受的真正的平等相矛盾的。如果像古雅典人所相信的那样，参与公共生活是人类自我实现的一个基本方面，巨大的不平等是根本无法摧毁它的。但是，在一个由财富主宰的社会中，金钱能够买到权力。因而，不平等是无法被消除的。它是不可避免的，甚至从某种程度上来说，是想要得到的。但是，正如希腊人所指出的那样，对于“适度”的需要存在于所有事情当中。我们没有在不平等加剧这个问题上看到这种适度，这才是应该注意的。

Martin Wolf is the FT’s chief economics commentator