Joseph Stiglitz 自由之路 进步资本主义的愿景似乎太少、太晚

自由之路，评论——进步资本主义的愿景似乎太少、太晚
 
作者：约瑟夫·E·斯蒂格利茨

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/12/the-road-to-freedom-economics-and-the-good-society-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-review-an- 热心但有缺陷的进步资本主义防御#:~:text=

这位诺贝尔奖得主美国经济学家热衷于支持政府干预以消除新自由主义的过度行为，但缺乏说服力

斯图尔特·杰弗里斯 斯图尔特·杰弗里斯 周日 2024 年 5 月 12 日
2009年，美国政府向埃隆·马斯克的特斯拉公司提供了近5亿美元贷款，以加速电动汽车技术的发展。 它认为自己在玩什么？ 它不记得罗纳德·里根说过的话吗？ “英语中最可怕的词是：‘我来自政府，我来这里是为了提供帮助，’”这位已故总统在 1986 年的新闻发布会上说道。

对于里根和他的新自由主义傀儡背后的大脑来说，政府的作用是让路，让自私自利的新自由主义经济生活不受约束的狂欢按照自然的意图表现出来。 税收是盗窃，干预主义的产业政策始终是一个错误，除非它涉及救助破产的银行以奖励经济的重挫。

诺贝尔经济学奖获得者、比尔·克林顿前助手约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨对此表示反对。 相反，他提出了他所谓的进步资本主义。 我们需要更多的政府，而不是更少。 斯蒂格利茨甚至写了一句话，可能会促使所有装备齐全的玛伽爱好者向痰盂里吐痰，并用霰弹枪射击。 “我们需要环境法规、交通法规、分区法规、金融法规，我们需要对经济的所有组成部分进行监管，”他写道。

新自由主义必须宣告死亡并被埋葬。 接下来去哪里？ 约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨

更重要的是，我们需要对玛格丽特·撒切尔在政府财政和家庭主妇平衡的每周预算之间进行的亲切类比提出问题。 斯蒂格利茨表示，大多数公司都是通过负债来实现增长的，但没有人会只关注公司资产负债表的负债部分。 “如果我们把钱花在基础设施、教育或技术上，那么我们的经济就会更有生产力，”他写道。 “当一家公司投资良好时，资产价值的增长超过负债，公司的净资产也会增加。 对于国家来说也是如此。” 这是基础经济学，尽管不是我和其他许多人在 20 世纪 80 年代初在大学里学到的那种经济学，当时关于个人经济理性、完全竞争以及自由企业精神如何不受限制地漫游的可笑神话被呈现为不可否认的事实 。

但能否相信政府能够实现电动汽车等社会理想的目标？ 想想 HS2 高速铁路的崩溃，或者，如果你能忍受的话，想想米歇尔·莫恩 (Michelle Mone) 对公众对政府信任的影响。 斯蒂格利茨建议，或者考虑一下美国政府在起草与特斯拉的合同时所犯的错误。 “它犯了一个错误。 它未能坚持分享上涨潜力……例如坚持接受股票。 如果是的话，政府（和美国纳税人）将足以弥补其他技术和投资造成的损失。”

换句话说，政府并不擅长商业。 “总会犯错误，”斯蒂格利茨说。 “但发现错误并不是......放弃政策的理由。” 他指出，美国前所未有地采取了干预主义产业政策，以纠正运作不良的市场，特别是自 2008 年银行业灾难以来，因此开发了新冠疫苗并承认对外国制造的微芯片的过度依赖。 也就是说，美国政府的治理已经超出了新自由主义正统观念所允许的范围。

斯蒂格利茨认为撒切尔夫人最喜欢的货币主义思想家应对人类希望的荒漠化负责

斯蒂格利茨的书的死对头弗里德里希·哈耶克和米尔顿·弗里德曼提出了极简政府的主张。 前者是一位维也纳经济学家，其 1944 年出版的著作《通往奴役之路》受到撒切尔夫人的高度评价，她在内阁会议上分发了该书。他坚称，政府对经济计划的控制将导致暴政。 这位经济学家对大政府的蔑视体现在他的言论中：“如果让联邦政府负责撒哈拉沙漠，五年之内就会出现沙子短缺。”

自从 20 世纪 60 年代弗里德曼在芝加哥大学发生冲突以来，斯蒂格利茨就与弗里德曼发生了争执。斯蒂格利茨认为，撒切尔最喜欢的货币主义思想家因对股东资本主义的准宗教信仰而对人类希望荒漠化负有责任。 公司管理者的目标是股东价值最大化。 斯蒂格利茨坚称，弗里德曼让一代戈登·盖科斯凭借“贪婪是好事”的哲学，走上了经济强国的道路。 更糟糕的是，追求共享

古老的贪婪鼓励公司管理者忽视经济学家所说的外部性——例如水务组织向英国河流注入排泄物、制药公司通过使美国人沉迷于阿片类药物而杀害美国人或为了私人利益而掠夺地球。

约瑟夫·E·斯蒂格利茨：更多的政府，而不是更少。 摄影：雅克

斯蒂格利茨案件的大部分繁重工作是由美国政治哲学家约翰·罗尔斯完成的，他在 1971 年出版的著作《正义论》中提出了一项至今仍引起共鸣的思想实验。 想象一下，我们每个人都暂时处于无知的面纱后面，对自己的才能、收入和财富，甚至核心价值观一无所知。 在这种“原始状态”下，我们将制定哪些正义原则来确保我们生活的社会是一个良好的社会？ 斯蒂格利茨认为，今天在美国和英国等国家盛行的做法并非如此。 相反，他认为这将产生他在书中所捍卫的进步资本主义原则——包括更多的政府干预和改革新自由主义的过度行为，这些都体现在以赛亚·柏林的一句令人振奋的真理中：“狼的自由往往意味着羊的死亡。”

我不确定。 他对进步资本主义的愿景似乎太少、太迟了——在新自由主义数十年之后，它不足以创建平等主义社会； 为避免气候灾难为时已晚。 我希望斯蒂格利茨能够借鉴罗尔斯思想的另一个要素——就像英国哲学家丹尼尔·钱德勒去年在一本同样旨在放松新自由主义束缚的书中所做的那样。 他的原则断言，社会中的任何不平等只有在使最弱势群体受益的情况下才是合理的。 但我怀疑，对于这位诺贝尔奖获得者来说，这带有太多的社会主义色彩。 斯蒂格利茨的信念——虽然表达得热烈，但大多不令人信服——是资本主义让我们陷入了困境，也能让我们摆脱困境。

  约瑟夫·E·斯蒂格利茨的《自由之路：经济学与美好社会》由艾伦·莱恩出版（25英镑）。 为了支持《卫报》和《观察家报》，请在 Guardianbookshop.com 上订购您的副本。 可能需要支付运费

The Road to Freedom, review – a vision of progressive capitalism seems too little, too late

by Joseph E Stiglitz 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/12/the-road-to-freedom-economics-and-the-good-society-by-joseph-e-stiglitz-review-an-ardent-but-flawed-defence-of-progressive-capitalism#:~:text= 

The Nobel-winning US economist’s championing of government intervention to nullify neoliberal excesses is ardently expressed but unconvincing

 Stuart Jeffries Sun 12 May 2024 

In 2009, the American government loaned almost half a billion dollars to Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation to hasten the development of electric car technology. What did it think it was playing at? Didn’t it remember what Ronald Reagan said? “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” the late president told a 1986 press conference.

For Reagan and the brains behind his neoliberal puppet, the role of government is to get out of the way and let the unfettered orgy of self-interested neoliberal economic life express itself as nature intended. Taxation is theft and interventionist industrial policy always a mistake, except when it involves bailing out failing banks in reward for tanking the economy.

Nobel-winning economist and former Bill Clinton aide Joseph Stiglitz demurs. He proposes, instead, what he calls progressive capitalism. We need more government, not less. Stiglitz even writes a sentence that may induce any tooled-up Maga enthusiasts to expectorate into their spittoons and pump their shotguns. “We need environmental regulations, traffic regulations, zoning regulation, financial regulations, we need regulations in all the constituents of our economy,” he writes.

Neoliberalism must be pronounced dead and buried. Where next? Joseph Stiglitz

We need, what’s more, to problematise Margaret Thatcher’s homey analogy between government finance and a housewife’s balanced weekly budgeting. Stiglitz says most companies grow by incurring debts, but no one would just look at the liability side of a firm’s balance sheet. “If we spend the money on infrastructure, education or technology, then we have a more productive economy,” he writes. “When a firm invests well, the value of the assets increases more than the liabilities, and the firm’s net worth is enhanced. The same for countries.” This is basic economics, though not of the kind that I and many others were taught at university in the early 1980s, when laughable myths about individual economic rationality, perfect competition and how the spirit of free enterprise needed to roam unchecked were presented as undeniable facts.

But can governments be trusted to deliver socially desirable goals such as electric cars? Consider the HS2 high-speed railway debacle or, if you can bear to, Michelle Mone’s impact on public trust in government. Or consider, Stiglitz suggests, the errors that the US government made in drawing up its contract with Tesla. “It made a mistake. It failed to insist on a share of the upside potential … by insisting on receiving shares, for instance. If it had, the government (and American taxpayers) would have more than made up for the losses incurred in other technology and investments.”

To put it another way, governments aren’t very good at business. “Mistakes will be made,” says Stiglitz. “But the discovery of a mistake is no … reason to abandon a policy.” He notes that the US has embraced interventionist industrial policies as never before to provide correctives to badly functioning markets, especially since the 2008 banking disaster – hence the development of Covid vaccines and recognition of excessive dependence on foreign-made microchips. The US government, that is to say, is already doing more governing than neoliberal orthodoxy allows.

Stiglitz thinks Thatcher’s favourite monetarist thinker is responsible for a desertification of human hope

The case for minimal government was made by the nemeses of Stiglitz’s book, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The former, a Viennese economist whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom was so prized by Thatcher she handed out copies at cabinet meetings, insisted that tyranny would result from government control of economic planning. The latter economist’s scorn for big government was typified by his remark: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Stiglitz, who has had beef with Friedman ever since the pair clashed at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, thinks Thatcher’s favourite monetarist thinker is responsible for a desertification of human hope thanks to his quasi-religious faith in shareholder capitalism, in which the only goal for managers of companies is to maximise shareholder value. Friedman, Stiglitz insists, unleashed a generation of Gordon Gekkos to slime their way to economic power with their “greed is good” philosophy. Worse, the pursuit of shareholder greed encouraged company managers to ignore what economists call externalities – such as water organisations filling British rivers with excrement, drug companies killing Americans by addicting them to opioids or the rape of the Earth for private gain.

Joseph E Stiglitz: more government, not less. Photograph: Jacques 

Much heavy lifting for Stiglitz’s case is done by the American political philosopher John Rawls, whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice proposed a still resonant thought experiment. Imagine that each of us is temporarily behind a veil of ignorance knowing nothing of our talents, income and wealth, or indeed core values. In this “original position”, what principles of justice would we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a good one? Not, suggests Stiglitz, those that prevail today in countries such as the US and UK. Instead, he thinks it would yield the principles of progressive capitalism he spends the book defending – involving more government intervention and reforming neoliberalism’s excesses captured in the bracing truth of Isaiah Berlin’s remark “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

I’m not so sure. His vision of progressive capitalism seems too little, too late – too little to create egalitarian societies after decades of neoliberalism; too late to stave off climate disaster. I wish Stiglitz had drawn – as the British philosopher Daniel Chandler did last year in a book similarly aimed at loosening neoliberalism’s chokehold – on another element of Rawls’s thinking. His principle asserts that any inequality in society can be justified only to the extent that it benefits the worst off. But that, I suspect, smacks too much of socialism for the Nobel laureate. Stiglitz’s conviction – ardently expressed, mostly unconvincing – is that capitalism got us into this mess and can get us out of it too.

 The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society by Joseph E Stiglitz is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply