专访杰弗里·萨克斯：非洲的中国模式——国际货币基金组织模式的失败
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87VVFjQs4O8&ab_channel=席勒研究所
杰弗里·萨克斯专访：非洲的中国模式——国际货币基金组织模式的失败
迈克·比林顿：我今天早上看了你的采访。 它很有意思。 你关注的是西方的傲慢和傲慢，以及“落伍”。 您这样提到英国：“它仍然认为自己是一个早已不复存在的帝国。” 我很欣赏这些情绪。 但你也说，没有什么可以阻止美国和欧洲改变，与金砖四国和南半球国家一起发展，而不是针对它们的威胁和战争政策。 我认为具有巨大讽刺意义的是，中国人实际上在非常现实的意义上使用了美国的经济学体系方法，即亚历山大·汉密尔顿的政策，该政策侧重于政府引导信贷用于基础设施和一般福利，而 美国完全放弃了美国体系，转而采用英国的霍布斯模式，反对一切不受监管的自由市场无政府状态。 您关注的“一带一路”基础设施——您表示“一带一路”的三个方面是：基础设施； 活力; 和数字化，而且中国实际上在这三个领域都处于领先地位。 您是否同意中国正在使用这种汉密尔顿主义的经济学方法，这种方法可能来自深受汉密尔顿影响的孙中山？
杰弗里·萨克斯教授：我将中国简单地称为混合经济，这意味着它部分是国家主导的，部分是市场主导的。 我认为所有成功的经济体都是混合经济体，而美国，即使使用自由市场的言论，政府也发挥着很大的作用，不一定是准确的作用，但政府在经济中发挥着很大的作用。 不同国家在如何划分公共、私营和民间社会部门的相对权重和责任方面有不同的看法。 确实，英国和美国的做法相对更偏于自由放任。 我想说的是相对更多，税收较低（当然占国民收入的一部分），社会支出也低得多。 英国比美国更先进，尽管它从 19 世纪开始实行自由放任，但英国在第二次世界大战后采用了国家医疗服务体系。 美国从来没有这样做过。
中国是一个非常务实、经济治理良好的国家，在过去 40 年里给人留下了深刻的印象，因为他们拥有以国家财政为主要作用的计划模式，加上非常有活力和竞争性的市场部门，以及在许多领域极具创业精神的领先地位。 部门也是如此。 我刚刚在中国，注意到电动汽车的巨大崛起，现在有数百家电动汽车公司和初创公司。 预计这一数字将很快减少到大约 5 到 10 家此类公司，但目前它已跻身数百家生产电动汽车的公司之列，而且中国国内的市场竞争非常激烈。
现在，说到国际方面，中国只是做了很多美国在二战后一段时间内做过的事情，就是帮助国外基础设施融资，实际上是为我们跨国公司铺路。 而中国现在正在这样做。 除了战争之外，美国在国际上没有做太多事情，但它也不进行和平的经济发展活动。 你可以从美国领导人、政客的言论中看到，他们对中国敢于帮助其他国家建设基础设施的不满。 “一带一路”倡议是中国与150多个国家的一项非常有效、非常有益的双赢计划，顺便说一句，美国每天都在唱衰，主要是出于怨恨和嫉妒，因为 美国没有这种与其他国家建立联系的精神。 中国正在进行大规模投资，并与其他国家合作，帮助他们发展电网、基础可再生能源、高铁、5G技术、铺设道路和高速公路以及许多其他国家真正需要的东西。 现在拜登正在谈论从印度到中东的公路项目，他对这条公路感到非常自豪。 它不存在。 它没有融资。 这也许是个好主意，但说实话，这有点可悲，因为中国在全世界有几十个这样的项目。 美国已经从字面上考虑过这一点。 我猜他们采取了“一带一路”的想法，但他们采取了一条路，一条！ 而中国正在实施数十个这样的项目。 所以美国正在观望。
迈克·比林顿：我认为这个 IMEC 计划（从印度到中东和欧洲的道路）随着现在加沙的战争而消亡。
Jeffrey Sachs 教授：是的，我认为这是对的。 我们如此瘫痪，如此无能，对一切都如此瘫痪，如此受战争驱使，以至于一条道路的想法变成了我们能做的最好的事情，但也许永远不会建造一条道路。
迈克·比林顿：我会回到中国。 但我也知道你在俄罗斯的瓦尔代讨论俱乐部。 我昨天采访的理查德·萨夸 (Richard Sakwa) 告诉我，他也在瓦尔代发表了讲话，他告诉我，你正在那里就讨论新货币和新国际贸易机制的问题发表讲话。 在金砖国家内的地位。 我想你知道谢尔盖·格拉济耶夫（Sergei Glazyev），他是制定这些想法过程中的关键经济学家，他与中国和其他金砖国家合作，现在还与整个南半球国家合作，致力于将这种想法整合在一起。 你可能知道，格拉济耶夫曾公开赞扬林登·拉鲁什的经济思想，尤其是他在 2000 年写的文章，题为《迈向一篮子硬商品——没有货币的贸易》。 所以也许你可以谈谈你认为整个计划目前的情况。
杰弗里·萨克斯教授：基本上，我注意到，在世界上拥有一种主导货币，即第二次世界大战后的美元和一战前的英镑，它具有一定的优势，因为金钱只是一种手段 实体经济、非货币经济的交易结算。 因此，拥有单一货币可以是高效的。 但美国通过将美元武器化而炸毁了它。 美国有优势，因为其他国家和国际企业都使用美元，这确实给美国带来了好处，即所谓的铸币税好处和其他好处，本质上是在国外借款的便利性和本国货币的高流动性。 但美国开始将美元武器化，这意味着美国不只是让它用于交易目的，而是利用这种特殊情况，让交易通过美元银行系统，最终通过美国中央银行美联储 ，开始没收美国在外交政策上不同意的其他国家的美元。
顺便说一句，这确实是令人讨厌的行为，因为金钱的概念再次是作为交易媒介，而不是外交政策的人质。 而且因为美元如此占主导地位，即使在美国没收了伊朗或朝鲜的储备之后，然后是委内瑞拉，现在是俄罗斯，现在很多国家都使用美元，但他们不喜欢使用美元，因为他们有点害怕 说出一句传到美国的话，然后看到美国政府对他们采取严厉措施，甚至冻结他们的钱。 在我看来，这是非常糟糕的行为，但基本上是非常不明智的，因为金砖国家现在——它从最初的五个国家开始，包括巴西、俄罗斯、印度、中国和南非——但现在它将包括新的六个国家，其中 就是阿根廷、埃及、埃塞俄比亚、沙特阿拉伯、阿联酋和伊朗，是一个很大的国家集团。 他们说我们不想使用美元，因为坦率地说，我们不希望我们的钱被没收。 因此他们将开发一种替代支付系统。 他们会在这方面取得成功，因为以其他方式支付并不困难，用人民币、卢布、卢比或 R-5 货币进行支付，所谓 R-5 货币是因为最初的金砖五国都有 R 货币：里亚尔 、卢布、卢比、人民币和兰特。 所以他们称之为 R-5。 他们可能只是使用这五种货币作为面值来制作一个篮子，甚至用于以一篮子货币计价的债券的借贷。
所以我希望能从中产生一些有趣和好的东西。 再说一次，在某种程度上，这有点遗憾。 如果有单一的交换媒介，它甚至不必是一个国家。 凯恩斯的想法是，它将成为国际货币基金组织的货币——他在一篇著名著作中称之为“银行”，会有一定的便利性，但如果它被垄断地用于军事化、外交政策或地缘政治目的，它不会持续太久，因为 在贸易和金融结算方面总有解决办法。 这就是金砖国家现在正在做的事情。 他们将采取解决方法。
Mike Billington：我在访问此链接之前向您发送了 Glazyev 今天就该问题发表的一篇文章，其中他强调，虽然一篮子货币和 R5 肯定已经以各种形式实施，但 最终提出了一种单独货币的想法，也许是 R5，但某种单独的货币，它也将与一篮子商品挂钩，而不仅仅是货币，以便在某种意义上将其与实际生产成本挂钩。
他认为这是一件很容易完成的事情，他希望明年俄罗斯担任金砖国家领导人并在喀山举行金砖国家会议时就能完成，我相信。 我对你对他的文章的回应感兴趣。
Jeffrey Sachs 教授：我还没读过。 我只想说，我们的讨论涉及几个不同的问题。 一是美国拥有托管国际货币的特权。 我已经解释了为什么美国滥用了这一特权，以及为什么它现在将失去大量以美元结算的业务。 但第二个是支付系统的机制，第三个是货币政策的管理。 这些都是不同的问题。 在支付机制上，我们可以做一些以前做不到的事情，那就是数字结算。 因此，我们现在甚至不需要银行系统，也不需要流通中的现金或金条或金币以及其他作为结算机制的机制，因为现在以数字方式，每笔交易都可以跟踪。 我们知道有不同的方法可以做到这一点。 区块链是其中之一，但还有许多其他可能更有效的方法，例如通过央行清算。 这意味着即使是支付方式，我认为也可能是数字化的，并且很可能在未来成为央行数字货币。
那么第三个问题就是货币政策的管理，这是一个长期争论的问题。 约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯 (John Maynard Keynes) 在 20 世纪 20 年代和 1930 年代对此有精彩的论述。 一种货币，无论是数字货币还是实物货币，是否应该可以兑换成其他东西，例如黄金或某种商品篮子？ 或者它应该是经济学家所说的法定货币，即它仅由中央银行或银行的政策支持，该货币及其价值取决于对这些政策的预期。 我们对此已经争论了 100 多年。 将货币与商品篮子挂钩的优点是它不能出于政治目的而发行，尤其是为没有税收收入流支持的政府付款提供资金。 因此，有支持的货币不会出现恶性通货膨胀。 这被认为是一种优势，因为它是一种紧身衣，专注于实体经济，限制了信贷发行的能力。 但另一方面，它在其他情况下被证明是非常不利的。 当世界实行金本位制或金汇兑本位制时。 如果在很长一段时间内没有发现主要金矿，那么平均而言，就会给世界价格趋势带来通货紧缩的影响，并且这被认为会产生不太理想的分配和实体经济影响，尽管它也 也取得了一些理想的效果。 这也使得央行更难成为金融恐慌中的最后贷款人。 大萧条是一个非常复杂、令人着迷且重要的主题，需要了解中央银行业务以及金本位是否是大萧条持续存在的一个因素。 好吧，我不想让我们对货币理论进行长篇大论，只是想说现在有几个问题摆在桌面上。 首先，谁的货币？ 二是结算技术。 第三，货币政策的组织。 他们都很有趣。 我花了几十年的时间研究它们，我认为这里没有理想的系统，这就是为什么我们几十年来继续进行这些讨论。
迈克·比林顿：好吧，回到中国，我确实听了你在北京、那里的联合国总部、国际大使和中国官员的演讲。 您确实关注了中国奇迹，中国在短短40年间的转变，从历史上最贫穷的国家之一到最富有的国家之一，以及消除贫困等等。 我真正感兴趣的是您对中国模式将是应对非洲发展的正确方法这一想法的讨论，当然，这也是中国“一带一路”政策的重要组成部分。 特别是，您将这一点直接与国际货币基金组织的政策进行了对比，我想我应该请您在这里详细说明这一点，因为这是一种非常有趣的方式，表明国际货币基金组织未能在非洲或任何其他国家实现真正的发展。 发展中部门的其他部分。
Jeffrey Sachs教授：非常直接地说，中国经济快速增长，按照传统衡量标准，从1980年到2020年，国内经济每年持续增长10%左右。因此，增长幅度更大。 如果中国经济规模的积累，超过30倍是通过投资实现的。 投资是什么意思？ 投资意味着建立一个国家的资本存量。 什么是股
投资意味着建立一个国家的资本存量。 什么是股本？ 资本存量是指经济体的生产性资产。 那些又是什么？ 这是三个主要类别。 首先，我们的身体和大脑中所携带的东西，即所谓的人力资本。 这就是人们的教育、技能和健康。 第二个是实体基础设施，即道路、电网、光纤网络、供水和污水处理系统以及快速铁路、高速公路，以及经济所依赖的所有网络。 第三个是商业部门，制造业，农业等等。
如果你看看 1980 年至 2020 年中国的增长，就会发现投资率非常高。 投资率本质上是指每年投资于新资本的国民收入的份额。 在美国，总投资率，即我们进行的投资额，如果没有意识到其中一些投资只是为了抵消折旧，总投资约为国民收入的 15% 至 20%。 但在中国，这一比例通常为国民收入的 40% 至 50%。 所以投资率非常高。 在我们眼前，中国修建了数千公里的高铁、数千公里的高速公路系统、数千公里的配电系统，等等。 真是令人印象深刻。 这就是中国的动力。 再加上对教育和技能的巨额投资。 中国一开始根本没有太多基础设施。 它始于非常低的教育水平。 到了 20 世纪 70 年代末，因为中国在过去的 150 年里经历了如此多的动乱。 但从 1978 年开始，中国终于说，好吧，我们会努力的。 邓小平上台。 他也许是现代史上最成功的经济改革家。 他为中国指明了正确的方向，说要追求增长，开放经济，实行市场经济，实行混合经济，建设基础设施，投资于人民。 你瞧，极高的投资率带来了 40 年的快速增长。
现在，国际货币基金组织面临的问题是，国际货币基金组织并没有考虑到这一愿景。 国际货币基金组织对穷国财政部长的愿景是“不要用你的问题来打扰我们。 不要陷入过多的债务。 不要陷入金融危机，也不要因为你的贫困而困扰我们，非常感谢。” 因此，没有人认真思考这些国家摆脱贫困的方法。 但方式就像中国一样，是大量投资。
接下来的问题是如何为这些投资提供资金。 中国早年部分借贷，但国内储蓄率也极高。 因此，随着收入的增加，中国并没有将其用于大量家庭消费支出。 中国家庭将不断增加的收入大量储蓄起来。 中国企业将大量利润进行再投资。 政府在当前交易等方面并没有出现巨额赤字。 所有这些都意味着非常高的储蓄率可以转化为高投资率。 现在，非洲的储蓄率非常非常低。 因为人们很穷，他们无法储蓄更多。 他们必须生存。 因此，他们现在需要一些国际融资的帮助，比如来自非洲开发银行或“一带一路”计划的融资，其中中国可以提供一些融资来建设非洲的基础设施。
但这是非洲应该得到的建议。 投资，大力投资，大量投资，需要借钱的地方借钱。 让您的孩子上学、推动经济电气化、修建道路、修建高铁等等。 我认为中国可以在这方面提供一些非常好的建议。 中国表明你可以保持 40 年的高速增长。 这正是非洲所需要的。
Mike Billington：40 年，我同意。 您还在孔子的出生地曲阜发表了讲话，我相信曲阜现在是一座圣地和一座博物馆。 没错，一个主要网站。
Jeffrey Sachs教授：那个庙宇，文庙，已经存在了2000多年了，每个皇帝都来了，加了一块石头，加了一个碑文，加了一个书法。 因为孔子基本上2500年来一直是中国的知识英雄和路标。 所以，能参加孔子生日聚会真是令人印象深刻，我也参加了，因为这基本上可以追溯到 2500 年前。 这里有一个巨大的建筑群，因为一个又一个的皇帝在其中添加了自己的建筑。 这样你就能真正感受到中国悠久而非凡的历史。
迈克·比林顿：对。 你关注的是这样一个想法，即我们通过研究每种文化的伟大哲学家和思想家来找到我们共同的人性。 你看看孔子、佛陀和亚里士多德。 我想我会在亚里士多德问题上与你意见不同，并且会关注柏拉图而不是亚里士多德。 但这是另一次讨论的事了。 无论如何，这种看待伟大文化和历史、伟大文化的最佳时刻的想法与所谓的地缘政治完全相反，而地缘政治正是当今西方领导人的指导思想，源自哈尔福德·麦金德等思想家。 大英帝国的理论家。 他们的观点是，进步的唯一方法就是贬低对方——这与对方的利益相反。 这当然导致了制裁政策。 当你谈到储备金被盗时，你没有提到制裁。 但据我了解，即使是制裁政策，也是基于人们必须在贸易中使用美元这一事实，因此美国认为他们有权对其他国家实施这些制裁。 当然，中国无意压制任何人。 对中国、俄罗斯和许多其他国家的大规模制裁表明，人们对伟大文化以及文化对未来可以做什么的思考是失败的。 那么，我们如何才能在西方恢复追寻古代伟大思想的进程呢？
杰弗里·萨克斯教授：我认为有两个哲学点是我们真正需要关注的，它们非常有趣、非常深刻。 一是人性问题。 我提到的哲学家——我个人喜欢亚里士多德，但我也喜欢亚里士多德、佛陀和孔子让我们谈论哲学的基础知识。 因此，回到核心 ABC，ABC、亚里士多德佛陀和孔子所认为的人性是潜在的善，这意味着通过适当的培养、适当的教育、适当的指导、生活在一个体面的社区中，人们 可以学会和谐。 人们可以学会变得更加公平。 值得信赖的人可以学会互惠。 所以这有时被称为“美德伦理”。 人能正派的想法，挺好的。
现在还有另一种哲学倾向，非常悲观。 基督教历史上的奥古斯丁就是这方面的典范。 人是堕落的，所以人是一个罪人，除了神的恩典之外，没有出路。 但罪恶却无法洗去。 历史上的悲观主义者也相信这一点。 另一位对我产生巨大影响的悲观主义者是我的第二个维度，即人们的行为方式或国家如何互动。 霍布斯在某种程度上是奥古斯丁的追随者。 当然，霍布斯是在 1600 年代写作的，而奥古斯丁则比 1600 年代早了一千多年。 但霍布斯是一位典型的英国哲学家，他说，人是贪婪的。 他们很贪婪。 他们很咄咄逼人。 他们很暴力。 你能期望的最好的结果就是有人控制他们不互相残杀。 因此，他呼吁为此目的建立一个非常严格的中央集权国家。 但基本上，霍布斯主义的观点是，在自然状态下，除了保护自己不被别人杀死之外，你不能做任何事情。 奇怪的是，尽管英国思想家承认会有一个国家政府来阻止英国境内的人们互相残杀，但他们认为在国际上这是一场所有人对抗所有人的霍布斯战争，只是国家之间互相争斗。 这就是当前国际关系思想中被称为“现实主义学派”的观点。 美国领先的现实主义思想家是芝加哥大学的约翰·米尔斯海默。 他是一个很棒的人，一个伟大的绅士和一个伟大的学者。 但他认为，国家之间，尤其是大国之间，不可避免地会互相争斗。 不幸的是，有大量经验证据表明这种情况经常发生。 但约翰·米尔斯海默表示，这意味着世界是悲剧的。 他最著名的书叫做《大国政治的悲剧》，因为他说大国之间的冲突几乎是不可避免的，因为没有人互相信任，你不能互相信任。 这是一场所有人对抗所有人的战争。 这是吃或被吃的杀手，杀或被杀。 所以，是的，生活是悲剧的。 我和他辩论。 我们再次成为朋友，我非常钦佩他。 我想说清楚，但我说：“约翰，我们不能接受悲剧作为我们的命运。 我们必须做得更好。” 所以我回到哲学家和哲学家的教导，你知道，你可以拥有和谐。 这就是孔子的主要信息：做人其实是可能的。 我们可以观察到孔子和我们西方文化中著名的黄金法则：
“己所不欲，勿施于人。” 如果你是霍布斯主义者，你会说：“哦，萨克斯说教了，但世界不是这样的。 我会对其他人做我能做的事情，因为否则他们会对我做一些可怕的事情，而我会先到达那里。”
迈克·比林顿：因为这是人性。 这就是他们的观点。
Jeffrey Sachs 教授：因为这就是人性的深处。 这是不可避免的。 但我不相信。 我们当然不会总是互相交战。 我们可以做得更好。 但顺便说一句，中国绝对有不同的历史和不同的心态。 这也是一个令人着迷的地方。 这不仅仅是孔子与霍布斯的较量，这实际上是历史，是2000年的治国之道。 我们学到了什么？ 那么，在中国，2000年的大部分时间里，都是一个中央集权的国家。 这个非常重要。 两千多年的大部分时间里，有汉朝，有唐朝，有宋朝，有元朝，有明朝，有清朝，还有今天的中华人民共和国。 在那2000年的大部分时间里，都是一个国家，虽然有叛乱，也有很多来自北方的入侵，主要来自旱地草原草原地区的游牧民族，但只有一个国家，人口众多。
公元476年之后的欧洲，当罗马帝国在西方灭亡时，西欧再也没有一个统治力量。 于是战争不断。 以英国和法国为例。 在过去的1000年里，他们打仗了多少年？ 整个海峡的数量令人难以置信。 现在将其与中国和日本进行比较。 中国和日本之间交战了多少年，你可以把它追溯到公元1000年之前，但可以说是从公元1000年到。 1890年。答案是两年。 如果我没记错的话，我认为是 1274 和 1281。 事实上，第三年就发生了一次入侵。 现在，其中有两次是在蒙古人统治中国的时候，他们试图入侵日本，但两次都失败了。 曾经有一位日本将军，荒唐地试图入侵中国，结果在朝鲜半岛遭到惨败。
但我的观点并非如此。 我的观点是他们一千年都没有打仗。 勉强算一场小冲突。 顺便说一下，日本是什么时候实现工业化的，而且是亚洲第一个工业化国家。 日本遵循现实主义的做法，可悲的是，日本说，“好吧，现在我们是帝国俱乐部的一部分了。 现在我们要去入侵中国。” 中国外交官说：“你们在做什么？ 我们是亚洲人。” 日本说：“不，不，不。 现在我们是西方俱乐部的一部分。” 这要追溯到 1890 年代。 所以说，日本在一段时期内成为帝国主义列强，确实表现得很糟糕。 但中国从来没有这样做过。 如果我们理解不同的哲学根源，这是至关重要的。 如果我们了解欧洲和中国的不同经历，我们就能认识到西方的心态，即“一直都是战争”。 所以中国是敌人，所以我们最好采取行动”，这与中国的想法完全不同。 当我再次对约翰·米尔斯海默说时，我想强调一位朋友，你知道，还有一位杰出的学者，当我说所有这些针对中国的战争贩子将创造一个自我实现的战争预言时。 他说：“是的。” 我说：“约翰，自我实现。 我们不需要那场战争。” 他说：“是的，但事情就是这样。” 我说：“不，我们不需要这样。 我们可以做得更好。” 这就是争论。
Mike Billington：Helga Zepp-LaRouche 发布了她所说的“全球安全与发展架构的十项原则”。 其中大多数都是不言而喻的，你需要教育，你需要文化培训，你需要健康，等等。 但第十条原则就是你刚才提到的，人性本善，这是人最难接受、最难理解的。 但这是最基本的。 这确实是一个问题，因为我认为你正确地定位了这一点，这就是致力于全球发展而不是全球战争这一理念的区别所在。 当然，正如你所说，儒家的和谐理念和重教确实是中国过去40年发展的核心，而现在正通过这种方式传播到世界其他地方。 一带一路。 如你所知，我们刚刚在北京举行了有150个国家参加的第三届“一带一路”高峰论坛，这无疑表明西方在世界上孤立中国、让各国与中国“脱钩”的想法上遭遇了惨败。 中国刚刚迫使大多数国家说：“你疯了。 这就是发展，而不是战争和制裁。”
本周我们 EIR 的标题将是习近平通过“一带一路”提供 1000 亿美元的新投资。 与此同时，拜登提出对战争进行 1000 亿美元的投资，其中特别提到了俄罗斯，即乌克兰、以色列、对巴勒斯坦人和中国进行的种族灭绝。 他们将台湾列为这 1000 亿美元的去向之一。 所以很明显他们正在谈论一场全球战争。 唯一的问题是，如何才能阻止和扭转这种疯狂？
杰弗里·萨克斯教授：嗯，美国的外交政策是令人无法接受的，我希望人们能够理解，美国在过去 30 年来一再表现出的傲慢和军事化， 并没有给美国带来安全。 它已经超出了预算。 我们在这些可怕的战争上花费了数万亿美元，除了暴力、破坏和不断增加的债务之外，没有取得任何成果。 他们根本没有让美国变得更安全。 越来越多的战争反映了这种傲慢，因为这种傲慢意味着美国，美国的决策者，认为“我们可以做我们想做的事，我们不必与任何人谈论这件事。 我们不需要外交。 我们只需要我们的军队。” 军队无法解决政治问题。 我们一次又一次地发现，军事手段并不能解决人类更深层次的问题。 并且无法解决政治问题。 为此，你需要政治。 你需要外交，我指的是积极意义上的政治，即聚集在一起制定安排，让人们和平共处。 所以我认为美国外交政策的失败已经充分暴露出来。 还有对此的无知，因为我要引用我们的国家安全顾问杰克·沙利文的声明，大约一周前，以色列和加沙的暴力事件爆发，哈马斯袭击，现在又轰炸加沙，杰克·沙利文说：“中东是 这是二十年来最安静的一次。”这表明他们除了自己的想象力之外什么都不知道，他们不了解世界各地正在发生的事情，而世界各地正在发生的事情是人们想要一种不同的方法 。 他们想要发展。 他们想要社会正义。 他们希望有机会过上体面的生活。 他们不想要军事化的方法。
Interview with Jeffrey Sachs: China Model For Africa — IMF Model’s Failure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87VVFjQs4O8&ab_channel=SchillerInstitute
INTERVIEW WITH JEFFREY SACHS: CHINA MODEL FOR AFRICA — IMF MODEL’S FAILURE
Mike Billington: I watched an interview with you this morning. It was very interesting. You focused on the arrogance and hubris of the West, of being “out of date.” You referred to the UK this way: “It still thinks it is an empire which is long since gone.” I appreciated those sentiments. But you also said that there’s nothing stopping the US and Europe from changing, from joining with the BRICs and the Global South in development instead of the threats and war policies against them. I think there’s a huge irony in the fact that the Chinese are actually, in a very real sense, using the American system approach of economics, the policy of Alexander Hamilton, which focused on government directed credit for basic infrastructure and the general welfare, while the US has given up on the American System altogether in favor of adopting the British model of Hobbesian one against all and unregulated free market anarchy. The Belt and Road infrastructure you focused on — you indicated that the three aspects of the Belt and Road are: infrastructure; energy; and digital, and that China actually leads in all three of those areas. Would you agree that China is using this Hamiltonian approach to economics, perhaps coming from Sun Yat Sen, who was highly influenced by Hamilton?
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: China has what I would simply call a mixed economy, which means it’s partly state directed, partly market directed. I think all successful economies are mixed economies and the US, even when it uses free market rhetoric, has a large role of the government, not necessarily an accurate role, but a large role of government in the economy. Different countries come down differently on how they carve up the relative weights and responsibilities of public, private and civil society sectors. It’s true that the UK and US approach is relatively more on the laissez faire side. I’d say relatively more, with lower taxes, certainly as a share of national income, and much lower social outlays. The UK more than the United States, even though it started with laissez faire in the 19th century, the UK adopted a National Health Service, of course, after World War Two. The United States never did that.
China’s a very pragmatic and economically well-governed country, very impressive during the past 40 years, because they’ve had a planning model with a major role of state finance, combined with a very dynamic and competitive market sector and very entrepreneurial lead in many sectors as well. I was just in China and noted a huge rise of electric vehicles, and there are hundreds of electric vehicle companies right now, start ups. It’s expected that the number will whittle down quickly to perhaps between 5 and 10 such companies, but right now it’s named to be in the hundreds of companies producing electric vehicles, and it’s a fiercely competitive market inside China.
Now, when it comes to the international side, China’s just doing a lot of things that the United States did for a while after World War II, which was to help finance infrastructure abroad, make the way for us multinational companies, in fact. And China right now is doing that. The United States doesn’t do much internationally at all other than war, but it doesn’t do peaceful economic development activities. You could see in the rhetoric of American leaders, politicians, their resentment that China dares to help other countries to build infrastructure. The Belt and Road Initiative, which is a very valid and quite beneficial win-win program of China, together with more than 150 other countries, by the way, is badmouthed every day by the United States, mainly out of resentment and jealousy because the US doesn’t have that kind of spirit to make connections with other countries. China is making massive investments and working with other countries to help them with developing an electric power grid, basic renewable energy sources, fast rail, 5G technologies, paved roads and highways, and many other desirable things that those counterpart countries really need. Now Biden is talking about a road project from India to the Mideast, and he’s so proud of this one road. It doesn’t exist. It’s not financed. It may may be a good idea, but it’s a little pathetic, actually, to to tell you the truth, because China has dozens of projects like this all over the world. The United States has thought about one literally. I guess they took the the “One Belt, One Road” idea, but they took One Road, one! Whereas China is doing dozens of these projects. So the US is kind of looking on.
Mike Billington: I think this IMEC program [the road from India to the Mideast and to Europe] is dead with the war now in Gaza.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Yes, I think that’s right. And we’re so paralyzed, so ineffective, so paralyzed with everything, so war driven that an idea of a road becomes about the best that we can do and a road that perhaps never will be built..
Mike Billington: I’ll come back to China. But I also knew that you were at the Valdai Discussion Club in Russia. I was told by Richard Sakwa, whom I interviewed yesterday, whom, you know and who was also speaking at Valdai, he told me that you were speaking there on the question of the discussion for a new currency and a new international trade mechanism that’s taking place within the BRICS. I think you know that Sergei Glazyev, who has been a key economist in this process of formulating these ideas, working with China and with the other BRICS countries, and now really the whole Global South, working on putting together this kind of idea. And you probably know that Glazyev has openly praised Lyndon LaRouche’s economic ideas and especially the article he wrote in the year 2000, which was called “Toward a Basket of Hard Commodities — Trade Without Currency.” So perhaps you can say a bit about where you think that whole plan stands today..
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Basically, I noted that having one dominant currency in the world, which has been the US dollar after World War two, and which was the pound sterling before World War One, it has certain advantages because money is just a means of settling transactions for the real economy, for the non-monetary economy. So having a single currency can be efficient. But the US has blown it up by weaponizing the dollar. The US had an advantage because other countries and international businesses use the dollar, and that does give benefits to the US, a so-called seigniorage benefits and other benefits, essentially the ease of borrowing abroad and very high liquidity of your own national currency. But the US started to weaponize the dollar, meaning rather than letting it be used just for transactions purposes, the United States used this special situation of having transactions pass through the dollar banking system and ultimately through the central Bank of the US, the Federal Reserve, to start confiscating the dollars of other countries that the US disagreed with in foreign policy.
This is really obnoxious behavior, by the way, because the idea of money is, again, as a transactions medium, not as a hostage to foreign policy. And because the dollar was so dominant, even after the US confiscated the reserves of Iran or North Korea, then Venezuela, now Russia, now many countries use the dollar, but they don’t like to use it because they’re a little afraid of saying a word that’s crossed to the US and then seeing the US government come down on them, even freezing their money. It’s pretty bad behavior in my view, but basically very ill advised because the BRICS countries now — it started with the original five, with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — but now it’s going to include the the new six, which is Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Iran, is a big group of countries. And they’re saying we don’t want to use the dollar because frankly, we don’t want our money confiscated. And so they’re going to develop an alternative payments system. They will be successful at that because it’s not so hard to make payments in other ways, in renminbi or in rubles or in rupees or in an R-5 currency, so-called because the original BRICS five all have an R currency: the rial, the ruble, the rupee, the renminbi and the rand. So they call it the R-5. And they may just make a basket using those five currencies for denomination, and even for lending and borrowing in a bond denominated in a basket of currencies.
So I expect something interesting and good to come out of this. Again, it’s a little bit regrettable in a way. If having a single medium of exchange, it wouldn’t even have to be one country. Keynes had the idea that it would be the IMF’s currency — the bankcor he called it in a famous writing, would have certain convenience, but if it’s then used monopolistically for militarized or foreign policy or geopolitical purposes, it’s not going to last long, because there are always workarounds when it comes to trade and to financial settlements. And that’s what the BRICS are doing right now. They’re going to do a workaround.
Mike Billington: I sent you just before we got on this link, an article that was published by Glazyev today on this issue, in which he emphasizes that while the basket of currencies and the R5 are definitely being implemented already in various forms, but that eventually the idea of a separate currency, maybe the R5, but some separate currency, which would be also tied to a basket of commodities rather than just currencies, in order to, in a certain sense, tie it to the actual cost of production in the real economy. He thinks this is something that it can be simple to finish completing it, that he’s hopeful that it can be done by next year when Russia is head of the of BRICS and will be holding the BRICS conference in Kazan, I believe. I’d be interested in your response to his his article.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: I haven’t read it yet. Let me just say that there are several different issues involved in our discussion. One is the privilege of the US to host the international currency. And I’ve explained why the US has misused that privilege and why it’s now going to lose a lot of the business from the settlements in dollars. But a second is the mechanics of the payment systems, and the third is the management of monetary policy. These are all distinct issues. On the payments mechanisms, we can do something that could never have been done before, and that is digital settlements. So we don’t even need a banking system now, and we don’t need cash in circulation or gold bars or gold coins and other mechanisms that were mechanisms of settlement, because now digitally, every transaction can be tracked. We know there are different ways to do it. Blockchain is one, but there are many others, probably more efficient ways to do it with central bank clearing, for example. And that means that even the method of payments, I think will likely be digital and could well be a central bank digital currency in the future.
Then the third question is the management of monetary policy, and this is a long debate. John Maynard Keynes wrote brilliantly about it in the 1920s and the 1930s. Should a currency, whether digital or physical, be convertible into something else, for example, gold or into some commodity basket? Or should it be what economists call a fiat currency, which is that it is only backed by the policies of the central bank or banks, that currency and its value depends on expectations about those policies. We’ve had more than 100 years of debate about that. The advantage of linking a currency to a commodity basket is it can’t be issued for political purposes, especially to finance government payments not backed by a flow of tax revenues, for example. So you can’t get a hyperinflation in a backed currency. And that’s been deemed to be the advantage, that it is a kind of straitjacket and focuses on the real economy, limiting the capacity to issue credit. But on the other hand, it proved to be highly disadvantageous in other circumstances. When the world was on a gold standard or a gold exchange standard. If there were long periods in which major gold deposits were not discovered, that gave, on average, a deflationary weight to the world price trends, and that was deemed to have a distributional and real economy effects that were not highly desirable, although it also had some desirable effects as well. It also made it harder for central banks to be lenders of last resort in financial panics. The Great Depression is a very complicated, fascinating and important subject to understand about central banking, and whether the gold standard was a contributor to the persistence of the Great Depression. Well, I don’t want us to get into long excurses about monetary theory, except to say that there are several questions on the table right now. First, whose currency? Second, the technology of settlement. And third, the organization of monetary policy. They’re all very interesting. I spent many decades studying them, and I think there’s no ideal systems here, which is why we continue to have these discussions decade after decade after decade.
Mike Billington: Well, getting back to China, I did listen to your presentation in Beijing, to the UN headquarters there, to international ambassadors and Chinese officials. You really focused on the Chinese miracle, the transformation of China over a mere 40 years, from one of the poorest to one of the richest in history, and the elimination of poverty and so forth. What I really found interesting was your discussion of the idea that the Chinese model would be the proper approach for dealing with the development of Africa, which of course, is also very much part of China’s policy with the Belt and Road. In particular, you contrasted that directly to the policies of the IMF, which I thought I’d ask you to elaborate on here, because it was a very interesting way of showing the failure of the IMF to bring about real development in Africa or any other part of the developing sector.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: To put it very straightforwardly, the rapid economic growth of China, which was, by traditional measures, around 10% per year growth of the domestic economy persistently between 1980 and nearly the year 2020. So an increase that was more than 30 fold if you accumulate in the size of the Chinese economy, came about by investment. What does investment mean? Investment means building the capital stock of a country. What is a capital stock? A capital stock means the productive assets of an economy. What are those as well? Those are three main categories. First, what we carry in our own bodies and brains, the so-called human capital. That’s the education and the skills and the health of the population. The second is the physical infrastructure, which is the roads, the power grid, the fiber optics grid, the water and sewerage systems and fast rail, highways, all of the networking that the economy depends on. And the third is the business sector, the manufacturing industries, agriculture and so forth.
Well, if you look at China’s growth during 1980 to 2020, the rates of investment were extraordinary. The rate of investment means essentially the share of the national income that is invested each year in new capital. And in the United States, the gross investment rate, which means the amount of investment that we undertake, not recognizing that some of it’s just offsetting depreciation, the gross investment is something on the order of 15 to 20% of the national income. But in China, it was typically 40 to 50% of the national income. So a super charged investment rate. Before our eyes, China built thousands of kilometers of fast rail, thousands of kilometers of a highway system, thousands of kilometers of an electricity distribution system, and on and on and on. Really impressive. And that’s what powered China. That plus the huge investments in education and skills. China started without much infrastructure at all. It started with very poor education levels. By the late 1970s, because China had had so much turmoil over the preceding 150 years. But then China finally, starting in 1978, said, okay, we’re going for it. Deng Xiaoping came to power. He was perhaps a modern history’s single most successful economic reformer. He pointed China in the right direction, said go for growth, open the economy, make a market economy, make a mixed economy, build infrastructure, invest in the people. And lo and behold, that extraordinarily high investment rate led to 40 years of rapid growth.
Now, the problem when it comes to the IMF is that the IMF does not have that vision in mind. The IMF’s vision to a finance minister of a poor country is “don’t bother us with your problems. Don’t get into excessive debt. Don’t get into a financial crisis and don’t bother us about your poverty, Thank you very much.” So nobody thinks very hard about the way for these countries to get out of poverty. But the way is just like China did, which is massive investments.
And then comes the question how to finance those investments. China partly borrowed in the early years, but also had a massively high saving rate internally. So as the income was rising, China wasn’t consuming it in a lot of household consumer spending. Chinese households were saving a lot of their rising income. Chinese businesses were reinvesting a lot of their profits. The government wasn’t running huge deficits on its current transactions and so forth. All of this meant a very high saving rate that could be turned into a high investment rate. Now, Africa right now has a very, very low saving rate. Because people are impoverished, they can’t save more. They have to survive. So they need some help with the financing right now by essentially some international financing, say from the African Development Bank or from the Belt and Road Program, in which China can provide some of the financing to build that infrastructure in Africa.
But that’s the advice that Africa should be getting. Invest, invest strongly, invest heavily, borrow where you need to borrow. Get your kids in school, electrify the economy, build the roads, build the fast rail, and so forth. And I think China can help to give some very good advice in that direction. China shows you can have 40 years of supercharged growth. And that’s what Africa needs.
Mike Billington: 40 years, I agree. You also spoke at Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, which now is a shrine and a museum, I believe. Right, a major site.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: That temple, the Confucian temple, has been there for more than 2000 years, and each emperor has come and added a stone, added an inscription, added calligraphy. Because Confucius has been an intellectual hero and guidepost for China basically for 2500 years. So it’s really impressive to be there at a Confucius birthday party, which I was, because this goes back essentially 2500 years. There’s a large, large complex of buildings because Emperor after Emperor added their own building to it. So you really get the feel of China’s very long, remarkable history.
Mike Billington: Right. And you focus there on, on the idea that we find our common humanity by studying the great philosophers and thinkers of of every culture in particular. You looked at Confucius and Buddha and Aristotle. I think I would differ with you on Aristotle and would would have focused on Plato rather than Aristotle. But that’s that’s a discussion for another time. In any case, this idea of looking at the great cultures and the history, the best moments of the great cultures is the exact opposite of so-called geopolitics, which is what guides the Western leaders today, deriving from ideologues like Halford Mackinder and other ideologues of the British Empire. Their view is that the only way to advance is by putting down the other guy — the opposite of the interest of the other. This, of course, leads to the sanctions policy. You didn’t mention the sanctions when you talked about the theft of reserves. But even the sanctions policy, as I understand it, is based on the fact that people have to use the dollar in trade and that therefore the US thinks they have a right to impose these sanctions on countries. China, of course, is not looking to suppress anybody else. And the massive sanctions against China and Russia and many other countries, indicates a failure of thinking in terms of the great cultures and what can be done with a culture for the future. So how do we restore that process in the West, of looking to the great minds of antiquity?
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: I think that there are two philosophical points that we really need to pay attention to that are quite fascinating, quite deep. One is the question of human nature. The philosophers that I referred to — I like Aristotle personally, but also I like the fact that Aristotle, Buddha and Confucius allow us to talk about the ABCs of philosophy. So it’s getting back to the core ABCs and what the ABCs, Aristotle Buddha and Confucius, had in mind about human nature is that it is potentially good, meaning that with proper cultivation, proper education, proper mentoring, living in a decent community, people can learn to be harmonious. People can learn to be fairer. Trustworthy people can learn reciprocity. So this is sometimes called “virtue ethics.” The idea that people can be decent, pretty good.
Now there’s another philosophical strain, which is deeply pessimistic. Augustine in Christian history is the exemplar of that. Man is fallen, and so man is a sinner and there’s no way out except perhaps by God’s grace. But the sinfulness can’t be washed away. And pessimists in history have believed that. And another pessimist like that, that had a huge influence is my second dimension, which is how people behave or how states interact. And Hobbes, in a way, is a follower of Augustine. Hobbes, of course, wrote in the 1600s, whereas Augustine was more than a millennium earlier than that. But Hobbes was a the quintessential British philosopher who said, people are rapacious. They are greedy. They are pushy. They are violent. And the best you can hope for is that someone controls them from killing each other. So he called for a very tight, centralized state for that purpose. But basically, the Hobbesian idea is that you can’t do anything in a state of nature, other than to defend yourself from being killed by someone else. And strangely enough, while British thinkers accepted that there would be a national government that would stop people from killing each other inside Britain, they took the view that internationally it is a Hobbesian war of all against all, that just countries fight with each other. And this is in the current thinking of international relations known as the the “realist school.” And our leading realist thinker in the United States is John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago. He’s a wonderful person and a tremendous gentleman and a great scholar. But he thinks that countries, and especially great powers, are inevitably at each other’s throats. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of empirical evidence that this is often the case. But John Mearsheimer says the implication of this is that the world is tragic. His most famous book is called “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” because he says conflict is just about inevitable between major powers, because nobody trusts each other, you can’t trust each other. It’s a war of all against all. It’s eat or be eaten killer, kill or be killed. And so, yes, life’s tragic. And I debate him. Again we’re friends and I admire him a lot. I want to be clear, but I say, “John, we can’t accept tragedy as our fate. We have to do better than that.” And so I go back to the philosophers and the philosophers taught, you know, you can have harmony. That was Confucius’s main message, which is it’s possible actually to be decent. It’s possible to observe what was famous for Confucius and in similar terms, for us in the Western culture, as the Golden Rule: “do not do to others what you would not have them do to you.” If you’re a Hobbesian, you say, “oh, there goes Sachs moralizing, but that’s not how the world is. I’m going to do what I can to the others, because otherwise they’re going to do something terrible to me, and I’m going to get there first.”
Mike Billington: Because that’s human nature. That’s what they argue.
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Because that’s the deep human nature. That’s inevitable. But I don’t believe it. It’s certainly not the case that we’re always at war against each other. We can be better than that. But by the way, China absolutely has a different history and a different mindset. This is also a fascinating point. It’s not just Confucius versus Hobbes, it’s actually history, 2000 years of statecraft. What have we learned? Well, in China, for most of the 2000 years, there was a centralized state. This is very important. For most of the 2000 years, there was the Han dynasty, or the Tang dynasty, or the Song dynasty, or the Yuan dynasty, or the Ming dynasty, or the Qing dynasty, or today the People’s Republic of China. And for most of that 2000 years there was one country, and while there were rebellions and there were a lot of invasions from the north, mainly from the nomadic peoples in the dryland grassland steppe regions, there was one country, big, big population.
Now in Europe after 476 AD, when the Roman Empire fell in the West, there never again was one dominant power of Western Europe. So there was war nonstop. Think of Britain and France, for example. How many years were they at war during the past 1000 years? An incredible amount across the channel. Now compare that with China and Japan. How many years were China and Japan at war between, you could take it back before 1000 AD, but say from 1000 AD to. 1890. The answer is two years. I think it’s 1274 and 1281, if I remember correctly. And there was actually one incursion a third year. Now, two of those were when the Mongols ruled China, and they tried to invade Japan and failed on two occasions. Once was when a shogun, military commander of Japan, ridiculously tried to tried to invade China and was terribly defeated in the Korean Peninsula.
But my point is not that. My point is they didn’t fight for a thousand years. Barely a skirmish. By the way, when Japan industrialized, and was the first industrializing nation of Asia. Japan followed the realist approach, sadly, Japan said, “okay, now we’re part of the Imperial Club. Now we’re going to go invade China.” And the Chinese diplomats said, “what are you doing? We’re Asians.” And Japan said, “no, no, no. Now we’re part of the Western club.” This was back in the 1890s. So Japan really behaved badly by becoming an imperialist power for some period. But China never did in that way. And if we understand the different philosophical roots, this is crucial. If we understand the different experience of Europe and China, we can come to appreciate that our mindset in the West that, well, “it’s war all the time. So China is an enemy, so we better go at it,” is nothing like the way that China thinks. And when I said to John Mearsheimer, again, I want to stress a friend and, you know, and a brilliant scholar, when I said all this war mongering against China is going to create a self-fulfilling prophecy of war. He said “yes.” I said, “John, self-fulfilling. We don’t need to have that war.” He said “yes, but that’s how it is.” And I said, “no, we don’t need to have it that way. We can do better than that.” So that’s the debate.
Mike Billington: Helga Zepp-LaRouche issued what she calls the ten principles of for an architecture of security and development for the world as a whole. And most of them are sort of self-evident, that you need education, you need cultural training, you need health, so forth. But the 10th principle is exactly what you just brought up, that the nature of man is good, and this is the one that’s most difficult for people to accept or understand. But it’s the fundamental one. It’s really the issue as as I think you correctly just located this is what distinguishes the idea of being committed to global development rather than global war. And of course, as you said, also the Confucian concept of harmony and the concentration on education is really the center of the Chinese development of their own country over the last 40 years, and what’s now being taken out to the rest of the world through the Belt and Road. As you know, we just had the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing with 150 countries represented, which certainly demonstrates that the West has failed miserably in the isolation of China in the world, the idea that they could get countries to “decouple” from China has just forced most countries to say, “you’re crazy. This is where development is, rather than war and sanctions.”
The headline of our EIR this week is going to be on the fact that Xi Jinping offered $100 billion in new investments through the Belt and Road. At the same time that Mr. Biden was offering a $100 billion investment in wars, naming specifically Russia, meaning Ukraine, Israel, the genocide being carried out against the Palestinians and China. They included Taiwan as one of the places where this $100 billion is going. So it’s pretty clear that they’re talking about a global war. And the only question is, how can this madness be stopped and reversed?
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs: Well, it is so unacceptable, American foreign policy, and what I hope people are coming to understand is that the arrogance and the militarization of the United States that has been demonstrated time and again now over the past 30 years, is not bringing security to the US. It has busted the budget. We’ve spent trillions of dollars on these horrible wars that have accomplished nothing except violence and destruction and rising debt. And they’re not making America safer at all. They’re more and more wars that are a reflection of this arrogance, because the arrogance has meant that America, American policy makers, have thought “we can do what we want, and we don’t have to talk with anybody about it. We don’t need diplomacy. We just need our military.” And the military can’t solve political problems. We’re finding out again and again that the military approach doesn’t work to solve the deeper problems of humanity. And can’t settle political issues. For that, you need politics. You need diplomacy, and I mean politics in the positive sense of getting together to work out arrangements for people to live peacefully together. So I think the failures of American foreign policy are on full display. Also the ignorance of it, because I would cite our National Security Advisor statement, Jake Sullivan, about a week before the violence blew up in Israel and Gaza with the Hamas attack and now the bombing of Gaza, Jake Sullivan said “the Middle East is the quietest that it’s been in two decades,” It shows they don’t know anything except what their own imagination is, and they don’t understand what’s happening around the world, and what’s happening around the world is that people want a different approach. They want development. They want social justice. They want the chance for decent lives. They don’t want the militarized approach.
杰弗里·萨克斯：中国的非洲模式——国际货币基金组织模式的失败
席勒研究所 2023年10月25日
Interview with Jeffrey Sachs: China Model For Africa — IMF Model’s Failure
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87VVFjQs4O8&ab_channel=SchillerInstitute
迈克·比林顿：我今天早上看了你的采访。 它很有意思。 你关注的是西方的傲慢和傲慢，以及“落伍”。 您这样提到英国：“它仍然认为自己是一个早已不复存在的帝国。” 我很欣赏这些情绪。 但你也说，没有什么可以阻止美国和欧洲改变，与金砖四国和南半球国家一起发展，而不是针对它们的威胁和战争政策。 我认为具有巨大讽刺意义的是，中国人实际上在非常现实的意义上使用了美国的经济学体系方法，即亚历山大·汉密尔顿的政策，该政策侧重于政府引导信贷用于基础设施和一般福利，而 美国完全放弃了美国体系，转而采用英国的霍布斯模式，反对一切不受监管的自由市场无政府状态。 您关注的“一带一路”基础设施——您表示“一带一路”的三个方面是：基础设施； 活力; 和数字化，而且中国实际上在这三个领域都处于领先地位。 您是否同意中国正在使用这种汉密尔顿主义的经济学方法，这种方法可能来自深受汉密尔顿影响的孙中山？
杰弗里·萨克斯教授：我将中国简单地称为混合经济，这意味着它部分是国家主导的，部分是市场主导的。 我认为所有成功的经济体都是混合经济体，而美国，即使使用自由市场的言论，政府也发挥着很大的作用，不一定是准确的作用，但政府在经济中发挥着很大的作用。 不同国家在如何划分公共、私营和民间社会部门的相对权重和责任方面有不同的看法。 确实，英国和美国的做法相对更偏于自由放任。 我想说的是相对更多，税收较低（当然占国民收入的一部分），社会支出也低得多。 英国比美国更先进，尽管它从 19 世纪开始实行自由放任，但英国在第二次世界大战后采用了国家医疗服务体系。 美国从来没有这样做过。
中国是一个非常务实、经济治理良好的国家，在过去 40 年里给人留下了深刻的印象，因为他们拥有以国家财政为主要作用的计划模式，加上非常有活力和竞争性的市场部门，以及在许多领域极具创业精神的领先地位。 部门也是如此。 我刚刚在中国，注意到电动汽车的巨大崛起，现在有数百家电动汽车公司和初创公司。 预计这一数字将很快减少到大约 5 到 10 家此类公司，但目前它已跻身数百家生产电动汽车的公司之列，而且中国国内的市场竞争非常激烈。
现在，说到国际方面，中国只是做了很多美国在二战后一段时间内做过的事情，就是帮助国外基础设施融资，实际上是为我们跨国公司铺路。 而中国现在正在这样做。 除了战争之外，美国在国际上没有做太多事情，但它也不进行和平的经济发展活动。 你可以从美国领导人、政客的言论中看到，他们对中国敢于帮助其他国家建设基础设施的不满。 “一带一路”倡议是中国与150多个国家的一项非常有效、非常有益的双赢计划，顺便说一句，美国每天都在唱衰，主要是出于怨恨和嫉妒，因为 美国没有这种与其他国家建立联系的精神。 中国正在进行大规模投资，并与其他国家合作，帮助他们发展电网、基础可再生能源、高铁、5G技术、铺设道路和高速公路以及许多其他国家真正需要的东西。 现在拜登正在谈论从印度到中东的公路项目，他对这条公路感到非常自豪。 它不存在。 它没有融资。 这也许是个好主意，但说实话，这有点可悲，因为中国在全世界有几十个这样的项目。 美国已经从字面上考虑过这一点。 我猜他们采取了“一带一路”的想法，但他们采取了一条路，一条！ 而中国正在实施数十个这样的项目。 所以美国正在观望。
