书评：《不平等的代价》
当今分裂的社会如何危及我们的未来。
作者：Joseph E. Stiglitz（W. W. Norton & Co.）
作者：克里斯托弗·考德威尔 2012 年秋季
吹毛求疵和吹毛求疵是流行经济学著作中的“Scylla”和“Charybdis”。 经济学教授要么用方程、定理和统计数据轰炸读者，要么认为他们会满足于关于竞争力和增长的空洞陈词滥调。 在美国，优秀的商业作家早已是多如牛毛。 深受广大读者喜爱的经济学作家的名单非常短。 其中包括欧文·费舍尔、约翰·肯尼思·加尔布雷思和保罗·克鲁格曼。 如今，其中最著名的是大学教授约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨（Joseph Stiglitz），他的新书《不平等的代价》在整个夏天都位居《纽约时报》畅销书排行榜上。
斯蒂格利茨不仅是一位具有说明性散文天赋的好老师。 他是一级学院派经济学家。 他获得了 2001 年诺贝尔经济学奖，据圣路易斯联邦储备银行统计，他被其他经济学家引用的次数比全世界除他三位同事之外的其他经济学家都要多。 虽然他的兴趣广泛，但他在信息经济学方面做出了开创性的工作，重点关注信息赋予那些拥有信息的人相对于没有信息的人所赋予的权力。 换句话说，他的作品常常带有政治色彩，而且他的政治观点是激进的。 尽管斯蒂格利茨在 20 世纪 90 年代中期担任比尔·克林顿经济顾问委员会主席，但他在新书中将克林顿时代描述为“看似繁荣的时代”。 他对克林顿时代的财政部长罗伯特·鲁宾 (Robert Rubin) 言辞严厉，并对其他官员提出含蓄的批评。 他与巴拉克·奥巴马(Barack Obama)的看法也不一致。 尽管斯蒂格利茨为 2009 年的刺激计划辩护，但他指责总统错误地衡量了他所继承的金融危机的严重性，而且在起诉银行家抵押贷款欺诈方面不如乔治·H·W·布什积极。 斯蒂格利茨对“占领华尔街”运动以及几年前还被称为“反全球化”运动的其他表现形式表示最深切的同情。 他首选的政策方案包括更多的集体谈判、更多的平权行动和更多的政府支出。 “我进入经济学领域，”他在诺贝尔奖演讲中说道，“希望它能让我为解决失业、贫困和歧视问题做点什么。”
然而，如果过于仔细地审视斯蒂格利茨的意识形态，就会发现他与福克斯新闻或微软全国广播公司 (MSNBC) 上的大多数嘉宾的共同点。 斯蒂格利茨值得一读的地方在于他敏锐的推理、快速抓住经济问题哲学要点的天赋，以及他对数据的灵活运用。
斯蒂格利茨只用了不到一章的篇幅就阐述了过去三十年来不平等是如何加剧的。 即使您熟悉衡量不平等的常用方法（五分位数和百分位数的收入份额、基尼系数的国际比较），他也会向您展示一些新方法。 例如，二战后的几十年里，生产率和工资始终密切相关，仅在 1980 年左右出现分歧。大约在同一时间，其他令人不安的迹象开始出现。 斯蒂格利茨指出，在此之前，经济衰退意味着劳动生产率下降。 为什么？ 因为在员工人数相同的情况下，公司做得更少。 老板们会囤积这些未充分利用的工人，直到经济好转为止。 这种情况不会再发生了。 在最近的经济衰退中，劳动生产率有所上升。 这意味着雇主一出现麻烦迹象就会解雇工人，并从绝望的留下来的工人身上榨取更多的工作。
许多经济学家（也许是大多数经济学家）相信，在全球化和技术快速变革的时代，这就是饼干破碎的方式。 斯蒂格利茨持不同意见。 他认为不平等在很大程度上是政治造成的。 这是精英“寻租”行为的结果。 寻租者不是制造物品或提供有用的服务，而是利用规则向整个社会收取费用。 他们可能会夺取负责监管他们的机构，或者利用关系来开发政府控制的资源，或者收买民选政客的服从。 斯蒂格利茨认为，对不平等负有最大责任的市场——金融、农业、制药——很难说是自由的。 事实上，他通过诉诸基本的自由市场原则证明了这一点。 “竞争法则，”他写道，“利润（超出正常的资本回报）应该被压为零。” 因为成功的企业会吸引模仿者，所以积累财富应该是一场西西弗斯游戏。 巨额且可持续的利润在公开市场上并不常见。
斯蒂格利茨有统计方面的天赋。 他将它们视为开始思考的契机，而不是像许多经济学家那样，视为停止思考的契机。 无论其原因是什么，日益严重的不平等打破了国内生产总值等经济指标与普通美国人的经历之间的联系。 例如，当马克·扎克伯格和他的投资者从 Facebook 股票首次公开募股中每人获得数十亿美元时，意味着收入增加，但美国人的中产阶级并不一定会感觉更好。 事实上，虽然经济学家经常看到收入平等和经济表现之间存在权衡，但斯蒂格利茨写道，“当今美国不平等的严重程度及其产生方式实际上会破坏增长并损害效率。” 金融行业的寻租行为吸引了越来越多的美国人来到资金所在的地方，导致“国家最宝贵的资源：人才的分配不当”。
即使斯蒂格利茨谈论平等和机会，他也从不感伤，也从不谈论做符合所有人利益的事情。 那是不可能的。 在斯蒂格利茨看来，经济学总是有赢家和输家。 它充满了戏剧性。 它孕育着历史后果。 “人们无法回避分配问题，”他写道，“即使涉及到组织经济中最简单的问题。” 大多数美国人都同意这一点，甚至包括那些不同意他关于分配应该是什么样子的观点的人。
Book Review: "The Price of Inequality"
How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future.
By Joseph E. Stiglitz (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Nitpicking and bloviation are the Scylla and Charybdis of popular writing about economics. Economics professors tend either to bombard their readers with equations, theorems, and statistics, or to assume they will be content with airy clichés about competitiveness and growth. Good business writers have long been a dime a dozen in the United States. The list of economics writers who have made themselves beloved of a wide reading public is a very short one. It has included Irving Fisher, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Paul Krugman. Today, it includes, preeminently, University Professor Joseph Stiglitz, whose new book, The Price of Inequality, spent much of the summer on the New York Times extended bestseller list.
Stiglitz is not just a good teacher with a gift for expository prose. He is an academic economist of the first rank. He won the Nobel Prize in economics for 2001, and he is cited by other economists more often than all but three of his colleagues worldwide, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, which charts such things. While his interests are broad, he has done groundbreaking work in the economics of information, focusing on the power it confers on those who have it over those who do not. In other words, his work often has a political edge to it, and his politics are of a radical kind. Although Stiglitz served as the chair of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the mid-1990s, in his new book he describes the Clinton era as “one of seeming prosperity.” He has harsh words for Clinton-era treasury secretary Robert Rubin and makes veiled criticisms of other officials. Nor does he see eye to eye with Barack Obama. Although Stiglitz defends the 2009 stimulus, he faults the president for mismeasuring the severity of the financial crisis he inherited and of being less aggressive than George H. W. Bush in prosecuting bankers for mortgage fraud. Stiglitz’s profoundest sympathies are with Occupy Wall Street and other expressions of what until a few years ago was called the “anti-globalization” movement. His preferred policy prescriptions include more collective bargaining, more affirmative action, and more government spending. “I entered economics,” he said in his Nobel lecture, “with the hope that it might enable me to do something about unemployment, poverty, and discrimination.”
To look too closely at Stiglitz’s ideology, though, is to focus on what he has in common with a majority of the guests you’ll see on Fox News or MSNBC. What makes Stiglitz worth reading is his acute reasoning, his gift for getting quickly to the philosophical gist of an economic problem, and his agile deployment of data.
It takes Stiglitz less than a chapter to lay out how inequality has increased in the past thirty years. Even if you are familiar with the usual ways of measuring inequality — income shares of quintiles and percentiles, international comparisons of Gini coefficients — he will show you some new ones. For decades after World War II, for instance, productivity and wages were always closely correlated, diverging only around 1980. Other troubling signs began to appear at about the same time. Before then, Stiglitz notes, a recession meant that labor productivity went down. Why? Because firms were doing less with the same number of workers. Bosses would hoard these underutilized workers until good times returned. That doesn’t happen anymore. In recent recessions, labor productivity has gone up. That means employers are ditching workers at the first sign of trouble, and wringing more work out of the desperate ones who remain.
A lot of economists — perhaps most of them — believe that in an age of globalization and rapid technological change, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. Stiglitz dissents. He sees inequality as for the most part politically created. It is the outcome of “rent seeking” behavior by elites. Instead of manufacturing things or performing useful services, rent seekers take advantage of the rules to collect payments from society at large. They may capture the agencies meant to regulate them, or use connections to exploit government-controlled resources, or buy the obedience of elected politicians. Stiglitz argues that the markets most culpable for inequality — finance, agriculture, pharmaceuticals — are hardly free. In fact, he proves it, by resorting to basic free-market principles. “The laws of competition,” he writes, “say that profits (beyond the normal return to capital) are supposed to be driven to zero.” Because successful businesses attract imitators, building a fortune ought to be a Sisyphean game. Huge and sustainable profits are not something one tends to see in open markets.
Stiglitz has a knack for statistics. He takes them as an occasion to start thinking, not, as many economists do, as an occasion to stop. Whatever its cause, growing inequality breaks the link between such economic measures as gross domestic product and the experience of the average American. When, for instance, Mark Zuckerberg and his investors get billions apiece from an initial public offering of Facebook stock, mean incomes rise, but the median American does not necessarily feel better off. Indeed, whereas economists frequently see a tradeoff between income equality and economic performance, Stiglitz writes that “the magnitude of America’s inequality today and the way it is generated actually undermine growth and impair efficiency.” Rent seeking in the finance industry has drawn more and more Americans to where the money is, leading to a “misallocation of the country’s most valuable resource: its talent.”
Even when Stiglitz talks about equality and opportunity, he never does so sentimentally, and he never talks about doing things that are in the interest of all. That is an impossibility. Economics, in Stiglitz’s view, always has winners and losers. It is fraught with drama. It is pregnant with historical consequence. “One cannot escape issues of distribution,” he writes, “even when it comes to the simplest problems in organizing an economy.” Most Americans have come to agree, even those who don’t share his opinion on what that distribution ought to look like.
