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美联储主席格林斯潘回忆录--动荡年代:勇闯新世界-134:The Delphic Future-14

财产权的增加和法治更普遍地导致物质福祉水平的提高的证据非常有说服力。
正式的统计证据因难以定量地衡量法治的微妙变化而受到抑制。
但定性证据很难否认。

大部分国家控制机构的广泛拆除并以市场为基础的机构取而代之，似乎总是会改善经济表现。
在过去的六十年里，中国、印度、俄罗斯、西德和东欧的这种进步是惊人的，仅举几个主要例子。
事实上，自由市场、产权和法治的扩张无助于经济福祉的例子，以及加强中央计划促进经济福祉的例子，都很少。

尽管如此，法治只是持续繁荣的必要条件，而非充分条件。文化、教育和地理都可能发挥着至关重要的作用。

为什么法治与物质福祉之间的关系看似如此不可改变？
根据我的经验，它植根于人性的一个关键方面。
在生活中，除非我们采取行动，否则我们就会灭亡。

但行动可能会带来不可预见的后果。
人们愿意承担风险的程度取决于他们认为可能获得的回报。
有效的财产和个人权利总体上减少了不确定性，并为冒险和能够产生物质福祉的行动提供了更广泛的范围。
不作为就不会产生任何结果。

----

The last decade of unprecedented economic growth in much of both the developed and the developing world is the ultimate proof of the dysfunction of a more than seventy-year-long economic experiment. 

The Soviet bloc's stunning collapse led to or accelerated the abandonment of central planning throughout the world, with China and India in the vanguard. 

The evidence of increasing property rights, and the rule of law more generally leading to increasing levels of material well-being is extraordinarily persuasive. 

Formal statistical proof is inhibited by the difficulty of measuring quantitatively subtle changes in the rule of law. 

But the qualitative evidence is hard to deny.

The widespread dismantling of much of the apparatus of state control and its replacement with market-based institutions appears invariably to improve economic performance. 

Over the past six decades, such improvement has been striking in China, India, Russia, West Germany, and Eastern Europe, to name only the major examples. 

In fact, the instances in which expansion of free markets, property rights, and the rule of law didn't contribute to economic well-being, and instances where increased central planning enhanced economic well-being, are few. 

Nonetheless, the rule of law is only a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for sustained prosperity. 

Culture, education, and geography each may play a crucial role.

Why is this relationship between the rule of law and material well-being seemingly so immutable? 

In my experience, it is rooted in a key aspect of human nature. 

In life, unless we take action, we perish. 

But action risks unforeseen consequences. 

The extent to which people are willing to take risks depends on the rewards they think they may gain. 

Effective property and individual rights in general decrease uncertainty and open a wider scope for risk taking and the actions that can produce material well-being.
Inaction produces nothing.

Rational risk taking is indispensable to material progress. 

When it is impaired or nonexistent, only the most necessary actions are taken. Economic output is minimal, driven not by the calculated willingness to take risks but
often as a result of state coercion. 

The evidence of human history strongly suggests that positive incentives are far more effective than fear and force.

The alternative to individual property rights is collective ownership, which has failed time and time again to produce a civil and prosperous society. 

It did not work for Robert Owen's optimistically named New Harmony in 1826, or for Lenin and Stalin's communism, or for Mao's Cultural Revolution.
It is not working today in North Korea or Cuba.

503


THE AGE OF TURBULENCE


The evidence, as best I can read it, suggests that for any given culture and level of education, the greater the freedom to compete and the stronger the rule of law, the greater the material wealth produced.*

But, regrettably, the greater the degree of competition—and, consequently, the more
rapid the onset of obsolescence of existing capital facilities and the skills of the workers who staff them—the greater the degree of stress and anxiety experienced by market participants. 

Many successful companies in Silicon Valley, arguably the poster child of induced obsolescence, have had to reinvent large segments of their businesses every couple of years.

Confronted with the angst of the baneful side of creative destruction,
virtually all of the developed world and an ever-increasing part of the developing
world have elected to accept a lesser degree of material well-being in exchange for a reduction of competitive stress.

In the United States, Republicans and Democrats have long shared a general consensus in support of Social Security, Medicare, and other programs that emerged from Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, even though there is much disagreement about the details. 

Virtually all aspects of our existing social safety net would be reauthorized by large majorities of Congress, were they subject to renewal. 

I do not doubt that, with time and changing economic circumstances, the consensus will evolve, but probably within relatively narrow bounds.

Social safety nets exist virtually everywhere, to a greater or lesser extent.
By their nature, they inhibit the full exercise of laissez-faire, mainly through labor laws and income redistribution programs. 

But it has become evident that in a globally competitive world, there are limits to the size and nature of social safety nets that markets can tolerate without severely negative economic consequences. 

Continental Europe, for example, is currently struggling to find an acceptable way to scale back retirement benefits and worker protections against job loss.

*I am also coming around to the conclusion that the success of five- and ten-year economic forecasts is as much dependent on a forecast of the degree of the rule of law as on our most sophisticated econometrics.

504

President George W. Bush presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Alan Greenspan, on November 9, 2005, in the East Room of the White House.


THE DELPHIC FUTURE


As awesomely productive as market capitalism has proved to be, 

its Achilles' heel is a growing perception that its rewards, increasingly skewed to the skilled, are not distributed justly. 

Market capitalism on a global scale continues to require ever-greater skills as one new technology builds on another.
Given that raw human intelligence is probably no greater today than in ancient Greece, our advancement will depend on additions to the vast heritage of human knowledge accumulated over the generations.

A dysfunctional U.S. elementary and secondary education system has failed to prepare our students sufficiently rapidly to prevent a shortage of skilled workers and a surfeit of lesser-skilled ones, expanding the pay gap between the two groups. 

Unless America's education system can raise skill levels as quickly as technology requires, skilled workers will continue to earn greater wage increases, leading to ever more disturbing extremes of income concentration. 

As I've noted, education reform will take years, and we need to address increasing income inequality now. 

Increasing taxes on the rich, a seemingly simple remedy, is likely to prove counterproductive to economic growth. 

We can immediately both damp skilled-worker income and enhance the skill level of our workforce by opening our borders to large numbers of immigrants with the vital skills our economy needs. 

On the success of these seemingly quite doable reforms involving education and immigration will likely rest popular acceptance of capitalist practice in the United
States for years to come.

It is not an accident that human beings persevere and advance in the face of adversity. 

Adaptation is in our nature, a fact that leads me to be deeply optimistic about our future. 

Seers from the oracle of Delphi to today's Wall Street futurists have sought to ride this long-term positive trend that human nature directs. 

The Enlightenment's legacy of individual rights and economic freedom has  unleashed billions of people to pursue the imperatives of their nature—to work toward better lives for themselves and their families. 

Progress is not automatic, however; it will demand future adaptations as yet unimaginable. 

But the frontier of hope that we all innately pursue will never close.

505

（published September 17, 2007）

(未完待续, To be contd)
 

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