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本帖最后由 rhapsody 于 2009-3-18 00:36 编辑
【来源地址】http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8f2829fa-0daf-11de-8ea3-0000779fd2ac.html
【登载媒体】英国《金融时报》
【原文标题】Adam Smith’s market never stood alone
【原文作者】Amartya Sen （阿玛蒂亚·森，印度人，1998年诺贝尔经济学奖得主）
【译文说明】由于森在另一杂志还有一篇相关的更长的文章，因而本文只作简单翻译，另一篇文译完后估计发在外媒版。
Published: March 10 2009 20:15 | Last updated: March 10 2009 20:15
Exactly 90 years ago, in March 1919, faced with another economic crisis, Vladimir Lenin discussed the dire straits of contemporary capitalism. He was, however, unwilling to write an epitaph: “To believe that there is no way out of the present crisis for capitalism is an error.” That particular expectation of Lenin’s, unlike some he held, proved to be correct enough. Even though American and European markets got into further problems in the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, in the long haul after the end of the second world war, the market economy has been exceptionally dynamic, generating unprecedented expansion of the global economy over the past 60 years. Not any more, at least not right now. The global economic crisis began suddenly in the American autumn and is gathering speed at a frightening rate, and government attempts to stop it have had very little success despite unprecedented commitments of public funds.
正好是90年前的1919年3月，面对着另一场经济危机，弗拉基米尔·列宁论述了当代资本主义遭遇的窘境。然而，他却不情愿地写下了这句结语：“那种认为资本主义无法摆脱当前危机的想法是错误的。”列宁的这个预期不同于他所持的某些观点，但事实证明他是相当正确的。尽管美国和欧洲市场在上世纪20年代遇到了更多问题，随后30年代又陷入了大萧条，但在二战结束后的漫长历程中，市场经济迸发出异乎寻常的活力，令全球经济在过去60年出现了史无前例的扩张。但已好景不再，至少眼下是这样。去年秋季在美国突然爆发的全球经济危机，正在以惊人的速度不断加剧，尽管政府承诺动用前所未有的巨额公共资金，其阻止危机的努力却几乎未见成效。
The question that arises most forcefully now is not so much about the end of capitalism as about the nature of capitalism and the need for change. The invoking of old and new capitalism played an energising part in the animated discussions that took place in the symposium on “New World, New Capitalism” led by Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, in January in Paris.
目前产生的最强烈疑问，与其说是资本主义的终结，不如说是资本主义的本质和变革的必要性。在今年一月巴黎举行的，法国总统尼古拉·萨科齐、英国前首相托尼·布莱尔和德国总理安格拉·默克尔主导的“新世界、新资本主义”研讨会上，“新（与老）资本主义”概念的横空出世给会场的激烈讨论起到了推波助澜的作用。
The crisis, no matter how unbeatable it looks today, will eventually pass, but questions about future economic systems will remain. Do we really need a “new capitalism”, carrying, in some significant way, the capitalist banner, rather than a non-monolithic economic system that draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically and values that we can defend with reason? Should we search for a new capitalism or for a “new world” – to use the other term on offer at the Paris meeting – that need not take a specialised capitalist form? This is not only the question we face today, but I would argue it is also the question that the founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, in effect asked in the 18th century, even as he presented his pioneering analysis of the working of the market economy.
这场危机无论如今看起来有多么难以战胜，也终有一天会成为过去，但对于未来经济体系的疑问仍将继续。我们真的需要一个打着鲜明的资本主义旗号的“新资本主义”，而不是一个脱胎于务实选择的各种体制和可据理力争的各种价值观的并非铁板一块的经济制度吗？我们是该寻找一个新资本主义，还是一个“新世界”——借用巴黎会议提供的另一个词——而无需引入特殊的资本主义形式？这不仅是我们今天所面临的问题，事实上也是现代经济学奠基人亚当·斯密在18世纪提出的问题，在他开创性地提出市场经济运行机制分析的时候。
Smith never used the term capitalism (at least, so far as I have been able to trace), and it would also be hard to carve out from his works any theory of the sufficiency of the market economy, or of the need to accept the dominance of capital. He talked about the important role of broader values for the choice of behaviour, as well as the importance of institutions, in The Wealth of Nations ; but it was in his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published exactly 250 years ago, that he extensively investigated the powerful role of non-profit values. While stating that “prudence” was “of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual”, Smith went on to argue that “humanity, justice, generosity, and public spirit, are the qualities most useful to others”.
斯密从未使用过资本主义一词（至少就笔者能追踪到的资料而言），从他的著作中也很难挖掘出任何市场经济充分性或接受资本主导必要性的理论。在《国富论》一书中，斯密谈到了更广泛的各种价值观对行为选择的重要作用，以及各种制度的重要性；而正好在250年前出版的斯密首部著作《道德情操论》中，他对非营利性价值观的强有力作用进行了广泛的探讨。虽然斯密宣称“谨慎”是“所有美德中对个人最有益的”，但他接着写道：“人道、正义、慷慨和公共精神，是对他人最有帮助的品质。”
What exactly is capitalism? The standard definition seems to take reliance on markets for economic transactions as a necessary qualification for an economy to be seen as capitalist. In a similar way, dependence on the profit motive, and on individual entitlements based on private ownership, are seen as archetypal features of capitalism. However, if these are necessary requirements, are the economic systems we currently have, for example, in Europe and America, genuinely capitalist? All the affluent countries in the world – those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and others – have depended for some time on transactions that occur largely outside the markets, such as unemployment benefits, public pensions and other features of social security, and the public provision of school education and healthcare. The creditable performance of the allegedly capitalist systems in the days when there were real achievements drew on a combination of institutions that went much beyond relying only on a profit-maximising market economy.
究竟什么是资本主义？标准的定义似乎把经济活动对市场的依赖作为将经济体视为资本主义的必要条件。同理，对利润动机和对基于私有制的个人权利的依赖，也被视为资本主义的典型特征。但是，如果这些是资本主义的必要条件，那么我们当前所拥有的经济制度——例如在欧洲和美国——是真正的资本主义吗？全球所有的富裕国家和地区——欧洲诸国，以及美国、加拿大、日本、新加坡、韩国、台湾、澳大利亚和其它地区——都在一段时间内依赖主要发生在市场之外的活动，例如失业救济、公共养老金和其它社会保障功能，以及由公共部门的学校教育和医疗。所谓的资本主义制度在经济取得真正成就的岁月里那些值得称道的表现，是源于多种体制的结合，这些体制远不限于仅仅依赖利润最大化的市场经济。
It is often overlooked that Smith did not take the pure market mechanism to be a free-standing performer of excellence, nor did he take the profit motive to be all that is needed. Perhaps the biggest mistake lies in interpreting Smith’s limited discussion of why people seek trade as an exhaustive analysis of all the behavioural norms and institutions that he thought necessary for a market economy to work well. People seek trade because of self-interest – nothing more is needed, as Smith discussed in a statement that has been quoted again and again explaining why bakers, brewers, butchers and consumers seek trade. However an economy needs other values and commitments such as mutual trust and confidence to work efficiently. For example, Smith argued: “When the people of any particular country has such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.”
经常被忽视的一点是，斯密没有认为纯市场机制可以独立实现出色的运作，也没有将利润动机视为一切的要件。或许最大的错误在于，将斯密对交易原因的有限论述，解读为对他所认为的市场经济运转良好所必需的所有行为准则和体制的详尽分析。人们进行交易是出于私利——仅此而已，正如斯密在一句名言中所论述的那样。人们反复引述的那句话解释了为什么屠夫、酿酒者、面包师和消费者要进行交易。然而，一个经济体的有效运转还需要互信和信心等其它价值观与承诺。例如，斯密认为：“一国人民若相信某银行家资产雄厚、行为诚实、处事谨慎，换言之，相信他有随时对其本票支付现金的能力；那银行家发行的本票便可在社会上通用，无异于流通的金币和银币，因为人们深信用它们可以随时兑换金银货币。”
Smith explained why this kind of trust does not always exist. Even though the champions of the baker-brewer-butcher reading of Smith enshrined in many economics books may be at a loss to understand the present crisis (people still have very good reason to seek more trade, only less opportunity), the far-reaching consequences of mistrust and lack of confidence in others, which have contributed to generating this crisis and are making a recovery so very difficult, would not have puzzled him.
斯密解释了为什么这种信任不会总是存在。对斯密的“屠夫-酿酒者-面包师”式解读已被许多经济学书籍奉若圣经；尽管这类解读的拥护者们可能无法理解当前这场危机（人们仍然有充分的理由寻求更多交易，只是机会减少了），但不信任和对他人丧失信心所造成的深远影响（已促成这场危机发生并使复苏变得举步维艰），并不会让斯密觉得困惑。
There were, in fact, very good reasons for mistrust and the breakdown of assurance that contributed to the crisis today. The obligations and responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments. This occurred at a time when the plentiful availability of credit, partly driven by the huge trading surpluses of some economies, most prominently China, magnified the scale of brash operations. A subprime lender who misled a borrower into taking unwise risks could pass off the financial instruments to other parties remote from the original transaction. The need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger over recent years. And yet the supervisory role of the government in the US in particular has been, over the same period, sharply curtailed, fed by an increasing belief in the self-regulatory nature of the market economy. Precisely as the need for state surveillance has grown, the provision of the needed supervision has shrunk.
事实上，造成今日危机的不信任与信心崩溃是有充分理由的。近些年来，由于涉及衍生物和其它金融工具的二级市场快速发展，与交易相关的义务与责任变得愈加难以追溯。与此同时，一些经济体（特别是中国）的巨额贸易顺差在一定程度上造成了大量的信贷可供量，放大了草率交易的规模。次贷发放机构一边误导贷款者承担不明智的风险，另一边就可以将这种金融工具转嫁给与最初交易毫不相干的其他各方。对监督与监管的需求在近些年已经变得更为迫切。然而在此期间，随着对市场经济自我监管特性的信仰日益增强，美国政府的监管角色却极为严重地遭到了削弱。恰恰就在政府监督的必要性上升的时侯，所需监管的供给却出现了萎缩。
This institutional vulnerability has implications not only for sharp practices, but also for a tendency towards over-speculation that, as Smith argued, tends to grip many human beings in their breathless search for profits. Smith called these promoters of excessive risk in search of profits “prodigals and projectors” – which, by the way, is quite a good description of the entrepreneurs of subprime mortgages over the recent past. The implicit faith in the wisdom of the stand-alone market economy, which is largely responsible for the removal of the established regulations in the US, tended to assume away the activities of prodigals and projectors in a way that would have shocked the pioneering exponent of the rationale of the market economy.
这一体制弱点不仅引发市场不当行为，还引发了过度投机的倾向；而正如斯密所说，这种倾向往往会牢牢抓住许多拼命追逐利润的人。斯密将这些在追逐利润过程中促成过高风险的人称作“浪费者和投机家”——顺便说一句，这倒是对前不久那些次级抵押贷款企业家们的完美写照。对独立自足市场经济学问的盲目信任，不仅在相当大程度上使美国已有监管机制出现了消褪，还往往完全忽视了浪费者和投机家的行为，其熟视无睹的程度甚至会让市场经济基本原理的创始者都感到震惊。
Despite all Smith did to explain and defend the constructive role of the market, he was deeply concerned about the incidence of poverty, illiteracy and relative deprivation that might remain despite a well-functioning market economy. He wanted institutional diversity and motivational variety, not monolithic markets and singular dominance of the profit motive. Smith was not only a defender of the role of the state in doing things that the market might fail to do, such as universal education and poverty relief (he also wanted greater freedom for the state-supported indigent than the Poor Laws of his day provided); he argued, in general, for institutional choices to fit the problems that arise rather than anchoring institutions to some fixed formula, such as leaving things to the market.
虽然斯密对市场的建设性作用进行了解释和辩护，但对于在市场经济运行良好的情况下仍可能存在的贫穷、文盲和相对的权利缺失等问题，他还是感到深深地忧虑。他希望看到体制和动机的多样性，而不是单一的市场或是利润动机占据惟一主导地位。斯密不仅支持政府完成市场可能无法完成的任务，例如普及教育和减少贫困（他还希望受政府救助的穷人拥有比当时济贫法所能提供的更多的自由）；总的来说，他还主张通过多种体制的选择来解决出现的问题，而不是把体制绑定在某种固定的程式上，例如把一切事情都交给市场处理。
The economic difficulties of today do not, I would argue, call for some “new capitalism”, but they do demand an open-minded understanding of older ideas about the reach and limits of the market economy. What is needed above all is a clear-headed appreciation of how different institutions work, along with an understanding of how a variety of organisations – from the market to the institutions of state – can together contribute to producing a more decent economic world.
今天的经济困境并不需要某种“新资本主义”，而是需要不存先入之见地来理解市场经济能力范围和局限性的一众旧观念。首先需要清醒地认识到不同体制是如何运作的，同时还要了解各种组织——从市场到国家机构——如何能够齐心协力，以创造一个更美好的经济世界。 |
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