新自由主义者的时代已经到来，民主需要新的、进步的资本主义。
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/stiglitz-captialism-economics-democracy-book/
作者：约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨 2024 年 5 月 13 日
（华盛顿邮报的克里斯·加什）
约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨是哥伦比亚大学经济学教授，2001年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者。 他的最新著作是《自由之路：经济学与美好社会》。
在另一个选举季节，我们通过单一政治视角辩论美国民主的冲动是可以理解的。 但我们也最好考虑一下第二个密切相关的问题：哪种经济体系为最多的人服务？
经济辩论的一方面是那些相信基本上不受约束的市场的人，在这个市场中，公司可以聚集市场力量或污染或剥削。 他们认为，公司应该最大限度地提高股东价值，尽其所能，因为更大的利润服务于共同利益。
这种低税收/低监管、以股东为中心的经济（通常被称为新自由主义）在 20 世纪最著名的支持者是米尔顿·弗里德曼（Milton Friedman）和弗里德里希·哈耶克（Friedrich Hayek）。 这些获得诺贝尔奖的经济学家将这一想法超越了经济范畴，声称这种经济体系对于实现政治自由是必要的。
他们担心大萧条后政府的发展，当时在约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯的影响下，国家承担起了稳定经济的新责任。 弗里德曼在《资本主义与自由》中指出，“自由市场”对于确保政治自由是不可或缺的。 用哈耶克的话说，政府的过度干预将导致我们走上“通往奴役之路”。
从罗纳德·里根和玛格丽特·撒切尔开始，我们现在已经进行了四十年的新自由主义“实验”。 结果很明显。 新自由主义扩大了企业和亿万富翁为所欲为并积累巨额财富的自由，但它也付出了高昂的代价：社会其他人的福祉和自由。
新自由主义者的政治分析甚至比他们的经济分析更糟糕，甚至可能带来更严重的后果。 弗里德曼和他的追随者未能理解自由的一个基本特征：自由有两种，积极的和消极的； 做事的自由和免受伤害的自由。 “自由市场”本身无法提供经济稳定或安全，以应对其造成的经济变幻莫测，更不用说让大部分人口发挥其潜力。 政府需要同时提供这两方面的服务。 在此过程中，政府以多种方式扩大自由。
通向威权主义的道路不是政府做得太多，而是政府做得太少。
对民粹主义，尤其是丑陋的民族主义的支持激增，有很多原因。 如果仅仅将其归咎于经济学，那就过于简单化了。 尽管如此，民粹主义民族主义在以色列、菲律宾和美国等国家所构成的威胁比在瑞典、挪威和丹麦更为严重，这并非巧合，因为在这些国家，高质量的免费公共教育、丰厚的失业救济金和健全的公共医疗保健都是免费的。 他们的公民摆脱了美国人对如何支付孩子的教育或医疗费用的普遍焦虑。
在面临未解决的经济压力的地方，不满情绪不断蔓延，人们感到失去了对自己命运的控制； 在解决失业、经济不安全和不平等问题上做得太少。 这为民粹主义煽动者提供了肥沃的土壤——他们在任何地方都有充足的供应。 在美国，这给我们带来了唐纳德·特朗普。
我们关心免于饥饿、失业和贫困的自由——正如罗斯福强调的那样，我们关心免于恐惧的自由。 那些勉强糊口的人并没有自由——他们为了生存而不得不做一些事情。 我们需要专注于让更多的人能够自由地发挥自己的潜力、蓬勃发展和发挥创造力。 如果议程会增加贫困儿童的数量，或者增加担心如何支付医疗费用的父母的数量——这是最基本的自由，即生活的自由所必需的——就不是自由议程。
此外，新自由主义秩序的拥护者常常无法认识到一个人的自由就是另一个人的不自由——或者，正如以赛亚·柏林所说，狼的自由往往意味着羊的死亡。 携带枪支的自由可能意味着那些在美国几乎每天都会发生的大规模杀戮中被枪杀的人的死亡。 不接种疫苗或不戴口罩的自由可能意味着其他人失去生活的自由。
权衡是存在的，而权衡是经济学的基础。 气候危机表明我们在治理污染方面做得还不够； 给予企业更多的污染自由会减少我们其他人过健康生活的自由——对于那些患有哮喘的人来说，甚至会减少生活的自由。 将银行家从他们的困境中解放出来
据称过于繁重的监管措施使我们其他人面临经济衰退的风险，其严重程度可能与 2008 年银行体系崩溃时的 1930 年代大萧条一样。这迫使社会向银行提供了数千亿美元的有史以来最大规模的救助 。 社会其他人在很多方面都面临着自由的减少——包括免于失去房子、工作以及健康保险的恐惧。
有时，如何进行这些权衡是显而易见的：我们应该限制企业剥削工人、消费者和社区的自由。 有时，权衡更为复杂； 如何评估它们是比较困难的。 但仅仅因为它们很困难，就没有理由回避解决它们，假装它们不存在。
某些不自由的情况可以使整个社会受益，扩大所有或至少大多数公民的自由。 停车灯——它限制了我穿过路口的自由——就是一个很好的例子。 没有他们，就会出现僵局。 他们对我的自由的侵犯增强了我们所有人的自由——从根本上讲，甚至是我的自由。
这一推理具有广泛的适用性。 俄罗斯对乌克兰的入侵提醒我们，如果我们要摆脱对外部伤害的恐惧，我们就需要防御，而这必须付出代价。 我们还需要资金为 21 世纪经济进行必要的社会投资——基础研究和技术、基础设施、教育和健康。 （这个国家的成功很大程度上源于我们大学所做的初步研究，这些大学要么是国家支持的，要么是非营利组织。）这一切都需要税收。 正如我们所知，税收需要强制措施，以防止某些人搭便车搭其他人的捐款。
因此，新自由主义资本主义就其自身的经济而言是失败的：它没有带来增长，更不用说共享繁荣了。 但它也未能兑现让我们走上一条通往民主和自由的安全道路的承诺，反而让我们走上了一条民粹主义路线，增加了 21 世纪法西斯主义的前景。 这些潜在的独裁民粹主义者减少了我们的自由，同时又未能兑现他们的承诺，正如特朗普提供的裙带资本主义形式所表明的那样。 取消奥巴马医改或通过对我们其他人增税来部分资助亿万富翁和企业减税，将会降低普通美国人的安全、福祉和自由。 特朗普的第一届政府让人们对第二届政府可能会是什么样子有了一丝了解。
还有一个替代方案。 21 世纪的经济只能通过权力下放来管理，需要建立一系列丰富的机构——从营利性公司到合作社、工会、积极参与的民间社会、非营利组织和公共机构。 我将这套新的经济安排称为“进步资本主义”。 核心是政府法规和公共投资，由税收资助。 进步资本主义是一种经济体系，不仅会带来更高的生产力、繁荣和平等，而且有助于让我们所有人走上更大自由的道路。
Time is up for neoliberals，Democracy requires a new, progressive capitalism.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/13/stiglitz-captialism-economics-democracy-book/
(Chris Gash for The Washington Post)
Amid another election season, our impulse to debate American democracy through a single political lens is understandable. But we’d be better served considering a second closely related question too: Which economic system serves the most people?
The most famous 20th-century proponents of this low-tax/low-regulation shareholder-centric economy, often referred to as neoliberalism, are Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. These Nobel Prize-winning economists took the idea beyond the economy, claiming this kind of economic system was necessary to achieve political freedom.
They worried about the growth of government in the aftermath of the Great Depression, when under the influence of John Maynard Keynes, the state was taking on new responsibilities to stabilize the economy. In “Capitalism and Freedom,” Friedman argued that “free markets” were indispensable to ensure political freedom. In Hayek’s words, government overreach would lead us down “The Road to Serfdom.”
We’ve now had four decades of the neoliberal “experiment,” beginning with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The results are clear. Neoliberalism expanded the freedom of corporations and billionaires to do as they will and amass huge fortunes, but it also exacted a steep price: the well-being and freedom of the rest of society.
Neoliberals’ political analysis was even worse than their economics, with perhaps even graver consequences. Friedman and his acolytes failed to understand an essential feature of freedom: that there are two kinds, positive and negative; freedom to do and freedom from harm. “Free markets” alone fail to provide economic stability or security against the economic vagaries they create, let alone allow large fractions of the population to live up to their potential. Government is needed to deliver both. In doing so, government expands freedom in multiple ways.
The road to authoritarianism is not paved by government doing too much but too little.
The surge in support for populism, especially of the ugly nationalist variety, has many causes. It would be overly simplistic to ascribe it just to economics. Still, it is no coincidence that populist nationalism is a graver threat in countries such as Israel, the Philippines and the United States than in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, where high-quality free public education, strong unemployment benefits and robust public health care free their citizens from the common American anxieties over how to pay for their children’s education or their medical bills.
Discontent festers in places facing unaddressed economic stresses, where people feel a loss of control over their destinies; where too little is done to address unemployment, economic insecurity and inequality. This provides a fertile field for populist demagogues — who are in ample supply everywhere. In the United States, this has given us Donald Trump.
We care about freedom from hunger, unemployment and poverty — and, as FDR emphasized, freedom from fear. People with just enough to get by don’t have freedom — they do what they must to survive. And we need to focus on giving more people the freedom to live up to their potential, to flourish and to be creative. An agenda that would increase the number of children growing up in poverty or parents worrying about how they are going to pay for health care — necessary for the most basic freedom, the freedom to live — is not a freedom agenda.
Champions of the neoliberal order, moreover, too often fail to recognize that one person’s freedom is another’s unfreedom — or, as Isaiah Berlin put it, freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep. Freedom to carry a gun may mean death to those who are gunned down in the mass killings that have become an almost daily occurrence in the United States. Freedom not to be vaccinated or wear masks may mean others lose the freedom to live.
There are trade-offs, and trade-offs are the bread and butter of economics. The climate crisis shows that we have not gone far enough in regulating pollution; giving more freedom to corporations to pollute reduces the freedom of the rest of us to live a healthy life — and in the case of those with asthma, even the freedom to live. Freeing bankers from what they claimed to be excessively burdensome regulations put the rest of us at risk of a downturn potentially as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s when the banking system imploded in 2008. This forced society to provide banks hundreds of billions of dollars in the largest bailout ever. The rest of society faced a reduction in their freedoms in so many ways — including the freedom from the fear of losing one’s house, one’s job and, with that, one’s health insurance.
Sometimes, how these trade-offs should be made is obvious: We should curtail corporations’ freedom to exploit workers, consumers and communities. Sometimes the trade-offs are more complex; how to assess them is more difficult. But just because they’re difficult is no reason to shirk addressing them, to pretend that they don’t exist.
Some cases of unfreedom can benefit a society as a whole, expanding the freedom of all, or at least most, citizens. Stop lights — which curtail my freedom to cross the intersection — provide a good example. Without them, there would be gridlock. Their intrusion on my freedom enhances that of all of us — in a fundamental sense, even my freedom.
This reasoning applies broadly. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that if we are to be free from the fear of harm coming from outside, we need defense, and that has to be paid for. We also need money to make the necessary social investments for a 21st-century economy — in basic research and technology, in infrastructure, in education, and in health. (Much of the country’s success evolves from initial research done at our universities, all either state-supported or nonprofits.) This all requires tax revenue. And taxation, as we know, requires compulsion to prevent the free-riding by some on the contributions of others.
Neoliberal capitalism has thus failed in its own economic terms: It has not delivered growth, let alone shared prosperity. But it has also failed in its promise of putting us on a secure road to democracy and freedom, and it has instead set us on a populist route raising the prospects of a 21st-century fascism. These would-be authoritarian populists reduce our freedom while failing to deliver on their promises, as the form of crony capitalism offered by Trump illustrates. The elimination of Obamacare or a tax cut for billionaires and corporations funded in part by a tax increase for the rest of us would decrease the security, well-being and freedom of ordinary Americans. Trump’s first administration gives a glimmer of what a second might look like.
There is an alternative. A 21st-century economy can only be managed through decentralization, entailing a rich set of institutions — from profit-making firms to cooperatives, unions, an engaged civil society, nonprofits and public institutions. I call this new set of economic arrangements “progressive capitalism.” Central are government regulations and public investments, financed by taxation. Progressive capitalism is an economic system that will not only lead to greater productivity, prosperity and equality but also help set all of us on a road to greater freedoms.
