新自由主义阴影下的全球选举
约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨 2024 年 5 月 1 日
虽然丑闻、文化战争和民主威胁占据头条新闻，但这个超级选举年最大的问题最终还是经济政策。 毕竟，反民主民粹主义威权主义的兴起本身就是错误的经济意识形态的遗产。
纽约 — — 在世界各地，民粹主义民族主义正在兴起，常常为独裁领导人提供权力。 然而，大约 40 年前在西方盛行的新自由主义正统观念——政府缩编、减税、放松管制——本应加强而不是削弱民主。 什么地方出了错？
中国的裙带资本主义繁荣有多特殊？
Yuen Yuen Ang 解释了腐败如何既推动了国家的 GDP 增长，又为当前的经济问题埋下了种子。
在不确定的经济中应对重大转型
ohamed A. El-Erian 解释了如何在面对另一次预测失败时重新调整预期。
部分答案是经济上的：新自由主义根本没有兑现它的承诺。 在美国和其他接受这一政策的发达经济体中，从 1980 年到 COVID-19 大流行期间，人均实际（经通胀调整后）收入增长比之前 30 年低了 40%。 更糟糕的是，底层和中间层的收入基本停滞，而顶层的收入则有所增加，而社会保护的故意削弱造成了更大的金融和经济不安全感。
年轻人正确地担心气候变化会危及他们的未来，他们可以看到受新自由主义影响的国家一直未能制定强有力的污染法规（或者在美国，未能解决阿片类药物危机和儿童糖尿病的流行）。 可悲的是，这些失败并不令人意外。 新自由主义的基础是这样的信念：不受约束的市场是实现最佳结果的最有效手段。 然而，即使在新自由主义崛起的早期，经济学家就已经确定，不受监管的市场既不高效也不稳定，更不用说有利于产生社会可接受的收入分配。
新自由主义的支持者似乎从未认识到扩大企业自由会限制社会其他部分的自由。 随意污染意味着健康恶化（对于患有哮喘的人来说甚至死亡）、更极端的天气和不适宜居住的土地。 当然，总会有一些权衡。 但任何理性的社会都会得出这样的结论：生存权比虚假的污染权更重要。
税收同样是新自由主义的憎恶，新自由主义将其视为对个人自由的侮辱：一个人有权保留自己所赚取的一切，无论一个人如何赚取它。 但即使他们诚实地计算自己的收入，这种观点的倡导者也未能认识到他们的收入是通过政府对基础设施、技术、教育和公共卫生的投资而实现的。 他们很少停下来考虑，如果他们出生在许多没有法治的国家之一，他们会拥有什么（或者如果美国政府没有进行导致 COVID-19 的投资，他们的生活会是什么样子） 疫苗）。
具有讽刺意味的是，那些对政府负有最大责任的人往往是最先忘记政府为他们所做的事情的人。 如果没有 2010 年巴拉克·奥巴马 (Barack Obama) 总统能源部提供的近 5 亿美元的生命线，埃隆·马斯克 (Elon Musk) 和特斯拉会在哪里？ “税收是我们为文明社会支付的费用，”最高法院法官奥利弗·温德尔·霍姆斯（Oliver Wendell Holmes）有句名言。 这一点并没有改变：税收是建立法治或提供二十一世纪社会运转所需的任何其他公共产品所需要的。
在这里，我们超越了单纯的权衡，因为每个人——包括富人——都因此类商品的充足供应而变得更好。 从这个意义上说，强制可以带来解放。 人们普遍同意这样的原则：如果我们要拥有必需品，我们就必须为它们付费，而这需要税收。
当然，小政府的支持者会说应该削减许多支出，包括政府管理的养老金和公共提供的医疗保健。 但是，如果大多数人在老年时被迫忍受没有可靠的医疗保健或足够的收入的不安全感，社会就会变得不那么自由：至少，他们缺乏自由，无法摆脱对未来可能遭受的创伤的恐惧。 即使如果亿万富翁被要求多缴纳一点税款来资助儿童税收抵免，他们的福祉会受到一定程度的影响，但请考虑一下这会给一个没有足够食物的孩子的生活带来多大的变化 ，或者父母无力承担看病费用。 想想看，如果营养不良或患病的年轻人越来越少，这对整个国家的未来意味着什么。
所有这些问题都应该
在今年的许多选举中占据中心舞台。 在美国，即将举行的总统选举不仅在混乱和有序的政府之间做出了严峻的选择，而且在经济理念和政策之间做出了严峻的选择。 现任总统乔·拜登致力于利用政府的权力来提高所有公民的福祉，特别是底层99%的人的福祉，而唐纳德·特朗普更感兴趣的是最大化最顶层1%的人的福利。 特朗普在豪华高尔夫度假村举行法庭诉讼（当他本人不在法庭时），他已成为世界各地裙带资本家和独裁领导人的拥护者。
对于我们应该努力创建的社会类型，特朗普和拜登有着截然不同的愿景。 在一种情况下，不诚实、破坏社会的暴利和寻租行为将盛行，公众信任将继续崩溃，物质主义和贪婪将获胜； 另一方面，民选官员和公务员将真诚地努力建设一个建立在信任和诚实基础上、更具创造力、健康、以知识为基础的社会。
当然，政治从来都不像这种描述所暗示的那么纯粹。 但没有人可以否认，两位候选人对自由和美好社会的构成有着根本不同的看法。 我们的经济体系反映并塑造了我们是谁以及我们能成为什么。 如果我们公开支持自私、厌恶女性的骗子——或者将这些特征视为小瑕疵——我们的年轻人就会吸收这一信息，最终我们的办公室里将会有更多的恶棍和机会主义者。 我们将成为一个没有信任的社会，因此也没有一个运转良好的经济。
最近的民意调查显示，特朗普离开白宫仅仅三年后，公众就幸福地忘记了他的政府的混乱、无能和对法治的攻击。 但只要看看候选人在这些问题上的具体立场，我们就会认识到，如果我们想生活在一个重视所有公民并努力为他们创造充实和满意生活的社会，那么选择是显而易见的。
Global Elections in the Shadow of Neoliberalism
While scandals, culture wars, and threats to democracy dominate the headlines, the biggest issues in this super election year ultimately concern economic policies. After all, the rise of anti-democratic populist authoritarianism is itself the legacy of a misbegotten economic ideology.
NEW YORK – Around the world, populist nationalism is on the rise, often shepherding to power authoritarian leaders. And yet the neoliberal orthodoxy – government downsizing, tax cuts, deregulation – that took hold some 40 years ago in the West was supposed to strengthen democracy, not weaken it. What went wrong?
How Exceptional Is China's Crony-Capitalist Boom?
Yuen Yuen Ang explains how corruption both drove the country's GDP growth and sowed the seeds for its current economic problems.
Navigating Major Transitions in an Uncertain Economy
ohamed A. El-Erian explains how to recalibrate expectations in the face of yet another forecasting failure.
Part of the answer is economic: neoliberalism simply did not deliver what it promised. In the United States and other advanced economies that embraced it, per capita real (inflation-adjusted) income growth between 1980 and the COVID-19 pandemic was 40% lower than in the preceding 30 years. Worse, incomes at the bottom and in the middle largely stagnated while those at the very top increased, and the deliberate weakening of social protections has produced greater financial and economic insecurity.
Rightly worried that climate change jeopardizes their future, young people can see that countries under the sway of neoliberalism have consistently failed to enact strong regulations against pollution (or, in the US, to address the opioid crisis and the epidemic of child diabetes). Sadly, these failures come as no surprise. Neoliberalism was predicated on the belief that unfettered markets are the most efficient means of achieving optimal outcomes. Yet even in the early days of neoliberalism’s ascendancy, economists had already established that unregulated markets are neither efficient nor stable, let alone conducive to generating a socially acceptable distribution of income.
Neoliberalism’s proponents never seemed to recognize that expanding the freedom of corporations curtails freedom across the rest of society. The freedom to pollute means worsening health (or even death, for those with asthma), more extreme weather, and uninhabitable land. There are always tradeoffs, of course; but any reasonable society would conclude that the right to live is more important than the spurious right to pollute.
Taxation is equally anathema to neoliberalism, which frames it as an affront to individual liberty: one has the right to keep whatever one earns, regardless of how one earns it. But even when they come by their income honestly, advocates of this view fail to recognize that what they earn was made possible by government investment in infrastructure, technology, education, and public health. Rarely do they pause to consider what they would have if they had been born in one of the many countries without the rule of law (or what their lives would look like if the US government had not made the investments that led to the COVID-19 vaccine).
Ironically, those most indebted to government are often the first to forget what government did for them. Where would Elon Musk and Tesla be if not for the near-half-billion-dollar lifeline they received from President Barack Obama’s Department of Energy in 2010? “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society,” the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously observed. That hasn’t changed: taxes are what it takes to establish the rule of law or provide any of the other public goods that a twenty-first-century society needs to function.
Here, we go beyond mere tradeoffs, because everyone – including the rich – is made better off by an adequate supply of such goods. Coercion, in this sense, can be emancipatory. There is a broad consensus on the principle that if we are going to have essential goods, we have to pay for them, and that requires taxes.
Of course, advocates of smaller government would say that many expenditures should be cut, including government-managed pensions and publicly provided health care. But, again, if most people are forced to endure the insecurity of not having reliable health care or adequate incomes in old age, society has become less free: at a minimum, they lack freedom from the fear of how traumatic their future might be. Even if multibillionaires’ well-being would be crimped somewhat if each were asked to pay a little more in taxes to fund a child tax credit, consider what a difference it would make in the life of a child who doesn’t have enough to eat, or whose parents cannot afford a doctor’s visit. Consider what it would mean for the whole country’s future if fewer of its young people grew up malnourished or sick.
All these issues should take center stage in this year’s many elections. In the US, the upcoming presidential election offers a stark choice not only between chaos and orderly government, but also between economic philosophies and policies. The incumbent, Joe Biden, is committed to using the power of government to enhance the well-being of all citizens, especially those in the bottom 99%, whereas Donald Trump is more interested in maximizing the welfare of the top 1%. Trump, who holds court from a luxury golf resort (when he is not in court himself), has become the champion of crony capitalists and authoritarian leaders around the world.
Trump and Biden have vastly different visions of the kind of society we should be working to create. In one scenario, dishonesty, socially destructive profiteering, and rent-seeking will prevail, public trust will continue to crumble, and materialism and greed will triumph; in the other, elected officials and public servants will work in good faith toward a more creative, healthy, knowledge-based society built on trust and honesty.
Of course, politics is never as pure as this description suggests. But no one can deny that the two candidates hold fundamentally different views on freedom and the makings of a good society. Our economic system reflects and shapes who we are and what we can become. If we publicly endorse a selfish, misogynistic grifter – or dismiss these attributes as minor blemishes – our young people will absorb that message, and we will end up with even more scoundrels and opportunists in office. We will become a society without trust, and thus without a well-functioning economy.
Recent polls show that barely three years after Trump left the White House, the public has blissfully forgotten his administration’s chaos, incompetence, and attacks on the rule of law. But one need only look at the candidates’ concrete positions on the issues to recognize that if we want to live in a society that values all citizens and strives to create ways for them to live full and satisfying lives, the choice is clear.
