↖  美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-15..

美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录——动荡年代：勇闯新世界-15

THE MAKING OF AN ECONOMIST 

Yet despite this enormous success, the industry was on the verge of disappearing. 

Those lightning-fast telegraph operators I'd idolized were already long gone. Teletypewriters had replaced the old single-key transmission equipment, and Western Union operators now were essentially typists who relayed your message in English, not Morse. Learning Morse code had literally become child's play. 

Now telephones were the new growth business—they would displace the telegraph as the best tool for remote communication. By the late 1950s at Townsend-Greenspan, Bill Townsend might send a telegram to an old client once in a while, but the telegraph no longer played any major role in the firm. We used phones to maintain contact with clients between visits: 

they were efficient, cost-effective, and therefore productive. I always felt wistful about the artistry lost when the new technology put the Morse code experts out of business. (Then again, it was they who had displaced the Pony Express.) 

I saw this pattern of progress and obsolescence repeat over and over. 

During my consulting days, I had a ringside seat at the demise of the tin can. The 1950s was the era of tuna casseroles and tinned soup; cooking dinner for your family from canned and packaged food was a hallmark of the suburban lifestyle, and a can opener was an essential tool in the modern kitchen. Food manufacturers loved the tin can: it offered a way to pack vegetables, meats, and beverages that allowed shipping over long distances and then stocking over long periods. The old-fashioned grocery store, where a clerk measured out the food a customer wanted to buy, never stood a chance. It was replaced by self-service supermarkets that were more efficient and offered lower prices. 

Those tin cans of the fifties weren't literally made of tin, but rather tin-plated steel, and the steelmakers I consulted for at Townsend-Greenspan sold a lot of it. In 1959, it accounted for five million tons, or about 8 percent of the steel industry's entire output. At that point, the industry was hurting. A bitter nationwide strike had brought production to a standstill for nearly four months, during which, for the first time, Big Steel found itself facing major competition from rivals in Germany and Japan. 

The aluminum industry was hurting too—the recession was squeezing the profits of the three big producers, Alcoa, Reynolds, and Kaiser. Five million 

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 tons a year was a lot of can sheet, and the market seemed too good an opportunity to pass up. Aluminum cans, which were just then being developed, were lighter and simpler in construction than steel cans—they required two pieces of metal rather than three. Aluminum was also easier to print on with colorful labeling. In the late 1950s it was already being used to make the ends of containers for frozen juice concentrate. Then Coors Brewing Company attracted a cult following by selling beer in seven-ounce aluminum cans, instead of conventional twelve-ounce steel cans. The smaller amount just seemed to add to the appeal, though the truth was that no one had yet figured out how to manufacture full-size aluminum beer cans. But by the early 1960s, the can makers had solved that puzzle. 

The innovation that had the biggest impact was the pop-top, introduced in 1963. It eliminated the need for "church key" can openers—and pop-tops could be made only of aluminum. The biggest aluminum producer, Alcoa, was my client; its CEO was looking for ways to diversify beyond basic aluminum into new and profitable areas, much as Reynolds had done by pioneering household aluminum foil. His executive vice president was a zealot for cans: "Beer cans are the future of Alcoa!" he would say. And when pop-tops came along, he and the CEO put their weight behind the idea. 

The first major brewery to sell beer in pop-top cans was Schlitz. Others quickly jumped on board and by the end of 1963, 40 percent of all U.S. beer cans had aluminum pop-tops. The soft drink giants came next: Coca-Cola and Pepsi both shifted to all-aluminum cans in 1967. The steel beverage can went the way of the telegraph key, and money followed the innovation. 

The shift to aluminum cans helped lift Alcoa's profits in the fall of 1966 to the highest level for any quarter in its seventy-eight-year history. And in the hot stock market of the late sixties, investors flocked to aluminum stocks. 

For the steelmakers, losing the market for beer and soda cans was just one step in a harrowing long-term decline. Until then, the United States hadn't imported much steel, because the conventional wisdom was that foreign steel was not up to American quality standards. But as the 1959 strike stretched into its second and then its third month, automakers and other big customers had to search elsewhere. They discovered that some of the steel coming in from Europe and Japan was first-rate, and that much of 

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 it was cheaper. By the end of the 1960s, steel had lost its status as the icon of American business, and the glamour had shifted to high-growth companies like IBM. What Schumpeter called "the perennial gale of creative destruction" was starting to hit Big Steel. 

Though my work at Townsend-Greenspan was in demand, I was careful not to expand too fast. I focused instead on keeping our profit margin high—on the order of 40 percent—and never becoming so dependent on any single client or group that losing the account would jeopardize the business. Bill Townsend completely agreed with this approach. He continued to be the best partner I could imagine. Though I had him for only five years—he died of a heart attack in 1958—we grew extraordinarily close. 

He was like the ultimate benevolent dad. He insisted on dividing our profits equitably—by the end I was taking home a considerably greater share. 

There was never any feeling of jealousy or competitiveness. After his death, I bought out the stock from his children, but I asked their permission to keep his name on the door. That felt right to me. 

Ayn Rand became a stabilizing force in my life. It hadn't taken long for us to have a meeting of the minds—mostly my mind meeting hers— and in the fifties and early sixties I became a regular at the weekly gatherings at her apartment. She was a wholly original thinker, sharply analytical, strong-willed, highly principled, and very insistent on rationality as the highest value. In that regard, our values were congruent—we agreed on the importance of mathematics and intellectual rigor. 

But she had gone far beyond that, thinking more broadly than I had ever dared. She was a devoted Aristotelian—the central idea being that there exists an objective reality that is separate from consciousness and capable of being known. Thus she called her philosophy objectivism. And she applied key tenets of Aristotelian ethics—namely, that individuals have innate nobility and that the highest duty of every individual is to flourish by realizing that potential. Exploring ideas with her was a remarkable course in logic and epistemology. I was able to keep up with her most of the time. 

Rand's Collective became my first social circle outside the university and the economics profession. I engaged in the all-night debates and wrote 

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spirited commentary for her newsletter with the fervor of a young acolyte drawn to a whole new set of ideas. Like any new convert, I tended to frame the concepts in their starkest, simplest terms. Most everyone sees the simple outline of an idea before complexity and qualification set in. If we didn't, there would be nothing to qualify, nothing to learn. It was only as contradictions inherent in my new notions began to emerge that the fervor receded. 

One contradiction I found particularly enlightening. According to objectivist precepts, taxation was immoral because it allowed for government appropriation of private property by force. Yet if taxation was wrong, how could you reliably finance the essential functions of government, including 

the protection of individuals' rights through police power? The Randian answer, that those who rationally saw the need for government would contribute voluntarily, was inadequate. People have free will; suppose they refused? 

I still found the broader philosophy of unfettered market competition compelling, as I do to this day, but I reluctantly began to realize that if there were qualifications to my intellectual edifice, I couldn't argue that others should readily accept it. By the time I joined Richard Nixon's campaign for the presidency in 1968, I had long since decided to engage in efforts to advance free-market capitalism as an insider, rather than as a critical pamphleteer. 

When I agreed to accept the nomination as chairman of the president's Council of Economic Advisors, I knew I would have to pledge to uphold not only the Constitution but also the laws of the land, many of which I thought were wrong. The existence of a democratic society governed by the rule of law implies a lack of unanimity on almost every aspect of the public agenda. Compromise on public issues is the price of civilization, not an abrogation of principle. 

It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. 

Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I'm grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her. 

All of my work had been empirical and numbers-based, never values-oriented. 

I was a talented technician, but that was all. My logical positivism had discounted 

history and literature—if you'd asked me whether Chaucer was worth reading, I'd have said, "Don't bother." 

Rand persuaded me to look at human beings, their values, how they work, what they do and why they do it, and how they think and why they think. This broadened my horizons far beyond the models of economics I'd learned. I began to study how societies form and how cultures behave, and to realize that economics and forecasting depend on such knowledge—different cultures grow and create material 

wealth in profoundly different ways. All of this started for me with Ayn Rand. She introduced me to a vast realm from which I'd shut myself off. 

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(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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