2023-04-27 , 8618 , 104 , 127
美联储主席艾伦格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代:勇闯新世界-the age of turbulence-7
Economists cannot avoid being students of human nature, particularly
of exuberance and fear. Exuberance is a celebration of life. We have to perceive
life as enjoyable to seek to sustain it. Regrettably, a surge of exuberance
sometimes also causes people to reach beyond the possible; when
reality strikes home, exuberance turns to fear. Fear is an automatic response
in all of us to threats to our deepest of all inbred propensities, our will to
live. It is also the basis of many of our economic responses, the risk aversion
that limits our willingness to invest and to trade, especially far from home,
and that, in the extreme, induces us to disengage from markets, precipitating
a severe falloff of economic activity.
A major aspect of human nature—the level of human intelligence—
has a great deal to do with how successful we are in gaining the sustenance
needed for survival. As I point out at the end of this book, in economies
with cutting-edge technologies, people, on average, seem unable to increase
their output per hour at better than 3 percent a year over a protracted period.
That is apparently the maximum rate at which human innovation can
move standards of living forward. We are apparently not smart enough to
do better.
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The new world in which we now live is giving many citizens much to
fear, including the uprooting of many previously stable sources of identity
and security. Where change is most rapid, widening disparities in the distribution
of income are a key concern. It is indeed an age of turbulence, and
it would be imprudent and immoral to minimize the human cost of its disruptions.
In the face of the increasing integration of the global economy,
the world's citizens face a profound choice: to embrace the worldwide
benefits of open markets and open societies that pull people out of poverty
and up the ladder of skills to better, more meaningful lives, while bearing
in mind fundamental issues of justice; or to reject that opportunity and
embrace nativism, tribalism, populism, indeed all of the "isms" into which
communities retreat when their identities are under siege and they cannot
perceive better options. There are enormous obstacles facing us in the decades
ahead, and whether we surmount them is up to us. For Americans,
opening our borders to the world's skilled workforce and education reform
must be high on the policy agenda. So too must be finding a solution to our
looming Medicare crisis. These are subjects to which I will return at the
book's end. I conclude in the last chapter that despite the many shortcomings
of human beings, it is no accident that we persevere and advance in
the face of adversity. It is in our nature—a fact that has, over the decades,
buoyed my optimism about our future.
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ONE
CITY KID
If you go to the West Side of Manhattan and take the subway north, past
Times Square, Central Park, and Harlem, you come to the neighborhood
where I grew up. Washington Heights is almost at the opposite
end of the island from Wall Street—and not far from the meadow where
Peter Minuit is said to have bought Manhattan from the Indians for $24
(there's a commemorative rock there today).
The neighborhood was mostly low-rise brick apartment buildings filled
with families of Jewish immigrants who had streamed in before the First
World War, as well as some of Irish and German origin. Both sides of my
family, the Greenspans and the Goldsmiths, arrived at the turn of the century, the Greenspans from Romania and the Goldsmiths from Hungary. Most
families in the neighborhood, including ours, were lower middle class—
unlike the utterly poverty-stricken Jews of the Lower East Side. Even during the worst years of the Depression, when I was in grade school, we had enough to eat; if any of our relatives experienced hardship I never knew it.
I even got an allowance: 25 cents a week.
I was an only child, born in 1926, and my parents were soon divorced.
They split up before I can remember. My father, Herbert, moved back to
Brooklyn, where he'd grown up. He lived with his parents until eventually
he remarried. I remained with my mother, Rose, who raised me. Though she
was only twenty-six and was very attractive, she took back her maiden name
and never married again. She found a job as a saleslady at the Ludwig-Baumann
UfqiLong
furniture store in the Bronx and was able to hold it through the Depression.
She was the one who made ends meet.
She was the youngest of five brothers and sisters, so we were part of a
larger family. My cousins and uncles and aunts were always in and out of
our lives, which made up somewhat for not having a father around, or siblings.
For a time my mother and I lived with my grandparents, Nathan and
Anna. The Goldsmiths were a lively, musical bunch. My uncle Murray was
a pianist who could sight-read the most famously complex masterpieces.
Changing his name to Mario Silva, he went into show business and cowrote
a Broadway musical, Song of Love, about the composer Robert Schumann.
Eventually he headed to Hollywood, where Song of Love was made into a
movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Paul Henreid. At family gatherings
every few months, my uncle would play and my mother would sing—she
had a soulful contralto voice and liked to imitate Helen Morgan, a torch
singer and Broadway actress famous for popularizing songs like "Can't Help
Lovin' Dat Man." Otherwise my mother lived a quiet, family-centered life.
She was optimistic and even-tempered, and not intellectual in the least. Her
reading consisted of the Daily News, a tabloid; instead of bookshelves, our
living room featured a piano, a baby grand.
My cousin Wesley, who is four years older than I, was the nearest I had
to a brother. During the summer months of the early 1930s, his family
would rent a house not far from the ocean in a neighborhood called Edge-
mere, way down in the southern reaches of Queens. Wesley and I would
scour the beaches looking for coins. We were very successful at it. Even
though it was the depths of the Great Depression, people could still be relied
upon to take coins to the beach and lose them in the sand. The only
obvious legacy of our hobby is my habit of walking with my head down; if
anyone asks, I tell them, "I'm looking for money."
But not having a dad left a big hole in my life. Every month or so I'd
take the subway and go visit him in Brooklyn. He worked on Wall Street as
a broker, or in those days what they called a customer's man, for small firms
you've never heard of.
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(未完待续, To be contd)
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