Value creation. Wealth creation. These are really powerful words. Maybe you think of finance, you think of innovation, you think of creativity. But who are the value creators? If we use that word, we must be implying that some people aren't creating value. Who are they? The couch potatoes? The value extractors? The value destroyers? To answer this question, we actually have to have a proper theory of value. And I'm here as an economist to break it to you that we've kind of lost our way on this question.
价值创造、 财富创造, 这些着实是非常强大的词语。 可能你会想到金融, 想到创新, 想到创造力。 但是谁是这些价值的创造者呢? 如果我们用这个词,我们必然 是在暗示有人没在创造价值。 他们是谁? 懒虫们? 价值抽取人? 价值摧毁者? 要回答这个问题,我们其实 需要一个恰当的价值理论。 作为经济学家,我来是想告诉你们 我们在这个问题上迷失了方向。
Now, don't look so surprised. What I mean by that is, we've stopped contesting it. We've stopped actually asking really tough questions about what is the difference between value creation and value extraction, productive and unproductive activities.
不要觉得惊讶。 我这么说的意思是 我们已经对此停止了争论。 我们实际上已经不再询问 这些棘手的问题, 比如价值创造和价值提取, 生产性活动和 非生产性活动的差异。
Now, let me just give you some context here. 2009 was just about a year and a half after one of the biggest financial crises of our time, second only to the 1929 Great Depression, and the CEO of Goldman Sachs said Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive in the world. Productivity and productiveness, for an economist, actually has a lot to do with value. You're producing stuff, you're producing it dynamically and efficiently. You're also producing things that the world needs, wants and buys. Now, how this could have been said just one year after the crisis, which actually had this bank as well as many other banks -- I'm just kind of picking on Goldman Sachs here -- at the center of the crisis, because they had actually produced some pretty problematic financial products mainly but not only related to mortgages, which saw many thousands of people actually lose their homes. In 2010, in just one month, September, 120,000 people lost their homes through the foreclosures of that crisis. Between 2007 and 2010, 8.8 million people lost their jobs. The bank also had to then be bailed out by the US taxpayer for the sum of 10 billion dollars. We didn't hear the taxpayers bragging that they were value creators, but obviously, having bailed out one of the biggest value-creating productive companies, perhaps they should have.
现在,让我给你一些背景。 2009 年,距离我们这个时代 最大的金融危机仅过去1年半时间, 这个危机仅次于1929年的大衰退。 高盛的 CEO 说, 高盛的员工是世界上 最具生产力的人。 生产力和生产率, 对经济学家来说, 其实和价值有着很大关系。 你在生产东西, 你在动态且高效地生产它。 你也是在生产世界所需, 所要,所买的东西。 现在,在危机发生仅 1 年后, 怎么能说出这样的话? 这个银行,以及很多其他的银行 ——我这里只是拿高盛举例—— 它们处于危机的中心, 因为他们其实制造并销售了 不仅限于房屋贷款的 好些有问题的金融产品, 这让成千上万的人失去住所。 就在 2010 年的一个月内, 9 月,12万人在这场危机中 丧失了房屋赎回权。 在2007至2010 年间, 880 万人失业。 此外,美国纳税人 还必须为这些银行 提供100亿美元的救助。 我们没听到那些纳税人 吹嘘自己是价值创造者, 但显然,帮助其中一个 最具价值创造的企业渡过难关, 可能是他们应该做的。
What I want to do next is kind of ask ourselves how we lost our way, how it could be, actually, that a statement like that could almost go unnoticed, because it wasn't an after-dinner joke; it was said very seriously.
我接下来想做的是扪心自问, 我们是如何迷失的, 为什么会这样, 这样的声明几乎无人注意, 毕竟它不是个饭后玩笑, 而是正儿八经说的。
So what I want to do is bring you back 300 years in economic thinking, when, actually, the term was contested. It doesn't mean that they were right or wrong, but you couldn't just call yourself a value creator, a wealth creator. There was a lot of debate within the economics profession. And what I want to argue is, we've kind of lost our way, and that has actually allowed this term, "wealth creation" and "value," to become quite weak and lazy and also easily captured.
所以我想把你们带回到 300 年前的经济思考, 那时,这个词是有争议的。 这并不是说他们是对或错, 但你不能自称是 价值创造者,财富创造者。 在经济学界,曾有着无数辩论。 我想要争论的是, 我们已经有些迷失了, 也因此使得这些词, “财富创造”和“价值” 变得越发脆弱、慵懒, 以及容易标榜。
OK? So let's start -- I hate to break it to you -- 300 years ago. Now, what was interesting 300 years ago is the society was still an agricultural type of society. So it's not surprising that the economists of the time, who were called the Physiocrats, actually put the center of their attention to farm labor. When they said, "Where does value come from?" they looked at farming. And they produced what I think was probably the world's first spreadsheet, called the "Tableau Economique," and this was done by François Quesnay, one of the leaders of this movement. And it was very interesting, because they didn't just say, "Farming is the source of value."
好了,让我们开始—— 我不喜欢给你剖析—— 300 年前。 300 年前有趣的是 当时的社会仍然是农业社会。 所以那时的经济学家, 也被称为重农主义者, 他们实际上把注意力 放在了农业劳动上。 当他们问,“这些价值从哪里来的?” 他们看向农场。 他们制作了我认为的 世界上第一个表格, 名为“经济试算表”, 这是弗朗索瓦·魁奈制作的, 他是这场运动的领导者之一。 这很有趣, 因为他们不是只说: “农场经营是价值的源泉”。
They then really worried about what was happening to that value when it was produced. What the Tableau Economique does -- and I've tried to make it a bit simpler here for you -- is it broke down the classes in society into three. The farmers, creating value, were called the "productive class." Then others who were just moving some of this value around but it was useful, it was necessary, these were the merchants; they were called the "proprietors." And then there was another class that was simply charging the farmers a fee for an existing asset, the land, and they called them the "sterile class." Now, this is a really heavy-hitting word if you think what it means: that if too much of the resources are going to the landlords, you're actually putting the reproduction potential of the system at risk. And so all these little arrows there were their way of simulating -- again, spreadsheets and simulators, these guys were really using big data -- they were simulating what would actually happen under different scenarios if the wealth actually wasn't reinvested back into production to make that land more productive and was actually being siphoned out in different ways, or even if the proprietors were getting too much.
他们然后真的很操心 价值创造出来后 发生的事情。 经济表所做的—— 我已试图过把这个 简化下说给你们—— 是将社会分为 3 个阶级。 农民,创造价值,被称为“生产阶级”。 然后其他那些仅仅是流通这些价值的, 但是有用且不可少的, 他们些是商人; 被称为“经营者”。 之后还有一个阶级, 根据现有资产和土地向农民 单纯征收费用的, 他们称其为 “不结果实阶级”(不生产阶级)。 如果你想想这个的意思, 你就会发现很沉重: 如果过多的资源流向地主, 你实际上把系统的再生产潜能 置于危险之地。 这里所有的小箭头 是他们的模拟方式—— 再次,表格和模拟程序, 他们真的在用大数据—— 他们在模拟不同情景下 可能会发生什么, 如果财富不被重新投资于生产 让土地更具生产力 并实际上被以不同的方式吸走, 或甚至,经营者获取过多。
And what later happened in the 1800s, and this was no longer the Agricultural Revolution but the Industrial Revolution, is that the classical economists, and these were Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, the revolutionary, also asked the question "What is value?" But it's not surprising that because they were actually living through an industrial era with the rise of machines and factories, they said it was industrial labor. So they had a labor theory of value. But again, their focus was reproduction, this real worry of what was happening to the value that was created if it was getting siphoned out.
然后是1800 年代发生的—— 不再是农业革命, 而是工业革命—— 是古典经济学家, 如亚当·斯密,大卫·李嘉图, 卡尔·马克思,这些革命者们, 也在问着同样的问题: “什么是价值?” 毫不令人惊讶的是 由于他们生活在 工业时代下,见证了 机器和工厂的崛起, 他们说价值是工业劳动力。 于是他有了劳动价值论。 但再次,他们的关注点是再生产, 这种对价值创造的担忧, 假如价值被吸走。
And in "The Wealth of Nations," Adam Smith had this really great example of the pin factory where he said if you only have one person making every bit of the pin, at most you can make one pin a day. But if you actually invest in factory production and the division of labor, new thinking -- today, we would use the word "organizational innovation" -- then you could increase the productivity and the growth and the wealth of nations. So he showed that 10 specialized workers who had been invested in, in their human capital, could produce 4,800 pins a day, as opposed to just one by an unspecialized worker. And he and his fellow classical economists also broke down activities into productive and unproductive ones.
在《国富论》中, 亚当·斯密有一个关于 大头针工厂极佳例子, 他说如果只有一个人负责 大头针生产的所有工序, 一天你最多只能 制造 1 个大头针。 但倘若你能投资工厂生产 以及做劳动力分工, 新想法—— 现在,我们会用“组织创新” 这个词来形容—— 之后你就能提高生产效率、 推动经济增长以及国家财富。 于是他展示了经由 人力资本投资的 10 个专业化分工的工人, 每天能生产 4,800 个大头针, 相比 1 个非专业分工的工人 每天只生产 1 个大头针。 他和他的古典经济学家伙伴 也把经济活动分为 生产型和非生产型两类。
(Laughter)
(笑声)
And the unproductive ones weren't -- I think you're laughing because most of you are on that list, aren't you?
非生产型不是—— 我想你们笑的原因是在座 大部分人都在这个列表上,对吧?
(Laughter)
(笑声)
Lawyers! I think he was right about the lawyers. Definitely not the professors, the letters of all kind people. So lawyers, professors, shopkeepers, musicians. He obviously hated the opera. He must have seen the worst performance of his life the night before writing this book. There's at least three professions up there that have to do with the opera.
律师!我认为他对律师 的观点是对的。 绝对不是教授,等纸上的各类人物。 所以律师、教授, 小商品店主和音乐人。 他很显然讨厌歌剧。 他一定在写这本书的前夜 看了一场最糟糕的演出。 这上面,至少有 3 个职业 是和歌剧相关的。
But this wasn't an exercise of saying, "Don't do these things." It was just, "What's going to happen if we actually end up allowing some parts of the economy to get too large without really thinking about how to increase the productivity of the source of the value that they thought was key, which was industrial labor.
但这并不是说 “不要做这些事情”。 这只是“如果这些经济部门占比过高, 尤其当我们让这些 经济部门变得太大 而不去真正思考如何 提高价值创造的源泉, 即工业劳动力时, 会发生什么。
And again, don't ask yourself is this right or is this wrong, it was just very contested. By making these lists, it actually forced them also to ask interesting questions. And their focus, as the focus of the Physiocrats, was, in fact, on these objective conditions of production. They also looked, for example, at the class struggle. Their understanding of wages had to do with the objective, if you want, power relationships, the bargaining power of capital and labor. But again, factories, machines, division of labor, agricultural land and what was happening to it.
再次,不要问自己 这是对或错, 这个话题只是争辩不断。 写出这些清单, 其实也在强迫他们 提出有趣的问题。 而且他们的关注点, 和重农主义的关注点一样, 实际上是建立在这些 生产的客观条件上。 他们也关注,例如阶级斗争。 他们对于工资的理解 与目标有关,如果你愿意, 权力关系, 资本和劳动力的议价能力。 但再次,工厂、机器、劳动力分工、 农业用地以及什么发生在其上?
So the big revolution that then happened -- and this, by the way, is not often taught in economics classes -- the big revolution that happened with the current system of economic thinking that we have, which is called "neoclassical economics," was that the logic completely changed. It changed in two ways. It changed from this focus on objective conditions to subjective ones.
于是,随后发生的重大革新—— 顺便说一句,这个在经济课上 不常教授—— 当前经济思想体系发生 的重大革新, 被称为“新古典经济学”。 逻辑完全改变了。 它在两方面发生了改变。 它从对客观条件的关注转变 为对主观条件的关注。
Let me explain what I mean by that. Objective, in the way I just said. Subjective, in the sense that all the attention went to how individuals of different sorts make their decisions. OK, so workers are maximizing their choices of leisure versus work. Consumers are maximizing their so-called utility, which is a proxy for happiness, and firms are maximizing their profits. And the idea behind this was that then we can aggregate this up, and we see what that turns into, which are these nice, fancy supply-and-demand curves which produce a price, an equilibrium price. It's an equilibrium price, because we also added to it a lot of Newtonian physics equations where centers of gravity are very much part of the organizing principle. But the second point here is that that equilibrium price, or prices, reveal value.
让我来解释一下这是什么意思。 客观,就是我之前说的方式。 主观,意味着 所有的关注点都聚焦在 不同个体如何做出自己的决定。 好吧,于是工人们最大化 自己休闲的选择而非工作。 顾客最大化他们所谓的效用, 即幸福感的代名词, 而公司最大化自身利润。 这背后的想法是我们 可以加总这些 我们看看它能变成什么, 这些美妙的供求曲线 形成了价格, 即均衡价格。 这是一个均衡价格, 因为我们也向其中添加了 许多牛顿物理方程: 重心是组织原则的 重要组成部分。 但这里的第二点是 均衡价格,或价格, 揭示了价值。
So the revolution here is a change from objective to subjective, but also the logic is no longer one of what is value, how is it being determined, what is the reproductive potential of the economy, which then leads to a theory of price but rather the reverse: a theory of price and exchange which reveals value.
所以这里的革新是 从客观到主观的改变, 但与此同时逻辑也不再是 以前的什么是价值, 它是如何被决定的, 经济再生产潜力是什么, 这就引出了价格理论, 但恰恰相反: 揭示价值的价格理论 和交换理论。
Now, this is a huge change. And it's not just an academic exercise, as fascinating as that might be. It affects how we measure growth. It affects how we steer economies to produce more of some activities, less of others, how we also remunerate some activities more than others. And it also just kind of makes you think, you know, are you happy to get out of bed if you're a value creator or not, and how is the price system itself if you aren't determining that?
这是一个巨大的改变。 这也不仅仅是一个学术活动, 它可能很吸引人。 它影响着我们如何衡量增长。 这影响着我们如何引导经济 去生产更多这种活动, 减少那种活动, 这影响我们某些活动的 报酬比其他活动高。 这也多少让你思考, 假如你是否是个价值创造者, 你会开心地起床吗, 以及如果你无法决定价格, 那价格系统自身如何决定价格?
I mentioned it affects how we think about output. If we only include, for example, in GDP, those activities that have prices, all sorts of really weird things happen. Feminist economists and environmental economists have actually written about this quite a bit. Let me give you some examples. If you marry your babysitter, GDP will go down, so do not do it. Do not be tempted to do this, OK? Because an activity that perhaps was before being paid for is still being done but is no longer paid.
我说过,这影响我们 如何思考“产出”。 如果我们只是包括,例如 GDP , 那些有价格标签的活动, 所有奇怪的事情都会发生。 女权主义经济学家和环境经济学家 实际上已经写了很多 关乎于此的文章。 让我给你举几个例子。 如果你娶了照看孩子的保姆, GDP 就会下降,所以不要这么做。 别被诱惑这么做,好吗? 因为一项原本可被支付的活动 尽管会照常进行, 但结了婚,就没有“付钱”的环节了。
(Laughter)
(笑声)
If you pollute, GDP goes up. Still don't do it, but if you do it, you'll help the economy. Why? Because we have to actually pay someone to clean it.
如果你污染环境, GDP 会上升。 但仍旧别那么做, 可如果要做,你会促进经济。 为什么?因为我们要支付某人来清洁。
Now, what's also really interesting is what happened to finance in the financial sector in GDP. This also, by the way, is something I'm always surprised that many economists don't know. Up until 1970, most of the financial sector was not even included in GDP. It was kind of indirectly, perhaps not knowingly, still being seen through the eyes of the Physiocrats as just kind of moving stuff around, not actually producing anything new. So only those activities that had an explicit price were included. For example, if you went to get a mortgage, you were charged a fee. That went into GDP and the national income and product accounting. But, for example, net interest payments didn't, the difference between what banks were earning in interest if they gave you a loan and what they were paying out for a deposit. That wasn't being included.
现在,还有一个真正有趣的, 是金融部门的财务 在 GDP 中发生的情况。 顺便,这也是我经常感到意外 但很多经济学家不知道的一件事。 直到 1970 年, 大多金融部门甚至不 被囊括在 GDP 中。 它是间接的,也许不是故意的, 仍然被重商主义者视为 只是把东西搬来搬去, 并没有产生新东西的部门。 所以只有那些明确的价格活动 才被包含进去。 例如,如果你要获取贷款, 你会被收取费用。 这笔费用会被算入 GDP 、 国民收入以及产品核算。 但比如,净利息支付不算。 也就是银行赚取贷款利息收入 和支付存款利息的差额。 这曾经不算在 GDP 中的。
And so the people doing the accounting started to look at some data, which started to show that the size of finance and these net interest payments were actually growing substantially. And they called this the "banking problem." These were some people working inside, actually, the United Nations in a group called the Systems of National [Accounts], SNA. They called it the "banking problem," like, "Oh my God, this thing is huge, and we're not even including it." So instead of stopping and actually making that Tableau Economique or asking some of these fundamental questions that also the classicals were asking about what is actually happening, the division of labor between different types of activities in the economy, they simply gave these net interest payments a name. So the commercial banks, they called this "financial intermediation." That went into the NIPA accounts. And the investment banks were called the "risk-taking activities," and that went in. In case I haven't explained this properly, that red line is showing how much quicker financial intermediation as a whole was growing compared to the rest of the economy, the blue line, industry.
于是会计从业者 开始研究一些数据, 这些数据逐渐显示出了 金融业运转资金 以及这些净利息支付的 高速增长。 他们称其为“银行业问题”。 这些人实际上是联合国组织 国民账户体系(SNA)小组的 工作人员。 他们称之为“银行业问题”, 好比“我的天,这个东西体量那么大, 然而我们甚至没有把它包括进来”。 所以,相较于停下脚步, 专注于制作那张经济试算表 或是问一些那些古典经济学家 询问发生了什么, 经济中不同类型活动之间的劳动分工, 他们只是简单给了 这些净利息支付一个名字。 所以商业银行们,被称为“金融媒介”。 这算入国民收入和生产帐户(NIPA)。 之后投行们全都被叫做 “风险承担活动”, 也被算入 NIPA 。 为了避免我没把这解释清楚, 那条红线展示了金融媒介作为整体 相比其他行业经济的蓝线 的增速要快不少。
And so this was quite extraordinary, because what actually happened, and what we know today, and there's different people writing about this, this data here is from the Bank of England, is that lots of what finance was actually doing from the 1970s and '80s on was basically financing itself: finance financing finance. And what I mean by that is finance, insurance and real estate. In fact, in the UK, something like between 10 and 20 percent of finance finds its way into the real economy, into industry, say, into the energy sector, into pharmaceuticals, into the IT sector, but most of it goes back into that acronym, FIRE: finance, insurance and real estate. It's very conveniently called FIRE.
而且这很不寻常, 因为实际在发生的,以及我们今天所知的, 有不同的人写了这些, 这是英格兰银行的数据, 数据显示从 1970 年代开始 和 80 年代后 银行业实际一直在做的事情 基本上就是给自己融资: 金融融资资金。 我的意思是金融,保险和房地产。 事实上,在英国 大概 10% - 20% 的融资 能够最终流向实体经济, 流向行业, 比如能源部门,制药行业, IT 部门, 但其中的大部分最终会流回 FIRE, 即金融、保险和房地产。 简称为 FIRE 非常方便。
Now, this is interesting because, in fact, it's not to say that finance is good or bad, but the degree to which, by just having to give it a name, because it actually had an income that was being generated, as opposed to pausing and asking, "What is it actually doing?" -- that was a missed opportunity.
这件事很有趣,因为实际上, 并非说金融的好坏, 而且是其程度, 只要给它一个名字, 因为它实际上是有收入的, 而不是停下来问, “它到底在做什么?” -- 那是一个错失的机会。
Similarly, in the real economy, in industry itself, what was happening? And this real focus on prices and also share prices has created a huge problem of reinvestment, again, this real attention that both the Physiocrats and the classicals had to the degree to which the value that was being generated in the economy was in fact being reinvested back in. And so what we have today is an ultrafinancialized industrial sector where, increasingly, a share of the profits and the net income are not actually going back into production, into human capital training, into research and development but just being siphoned out in terms of buying back your own shares, which boosts stock options, which is, in fact, the way that many executives are getting paid. And, you know, some share buybacks is absolutely fine, but this system is completely out of whack. These numbers that I'm showing you here show that in the last 10 years, 466 of the S and P 500 companies have spent over four trillion on just buying back their shares. And what you see then if you aggregate this up at the macroeconomic level, so if we look at aggregate business investment, which is a percentage of GDP, you also see this falling level of business investment. And this is a problem.
同样,在实体经济中, 行业自身,正在发生什么? 这种对价格以及股票价格 的真正关注 造成了再投资的巨大问题, 再次,重农主义者和 古典主义者都非常关注 经济中产生的价值在多大程度上 被重新投资。 所以我们今天拥有的是 过度金融化的行业部门, 它们越来越多的利润和净收入 并没有再次投入生产, 没有流回人力资本培训, 或产品研发, 而只是把这些资金用于 回购你自己的股票, 这提高了股票期权的价值,事实上, 这也是许多高管获得报酬的方法。 你知道,股票回购绝对没问题, 但这样的一个系统完全不正常。 我这里给你显示的这些数字 表明在过去 10 年, 500 家 S&P 公司中的 466 家 已经花了不止 4 万亿美元 在回购他们的股票上。 如果你在宏观经济层面 加总这些数字, 如果我们看商业投资的总额, 也就是所占 GDP 的百分比, 你也会看到商业投资水平 呈现如此的下降趋势。 这是一个问题。
This, by the way, is a huge problem for skills and job creation. You might have heard there's lots of attention these days to, "Are the robots taking our jobs?" Well, mechanization has for centuries, actually, taken jobs, but as long as profits were being reinvested back into production, then it didn't matter: new jobs appeared. But this lack of reinvestment is, in fact, very dangerous.
顺便说一下,这对技能和创造就业 来说是个大问题。 你可能听到近来很多关于 “机器人会抢走我们的工作吗?” 这样的话题。 然而机械化在过去的几个世纪 已经取代了一些工作, 但只要利润持续重新投入生产, 这个趋势丝毫不重要: 新的工作机会会出现。 但是再投资的缺乏, 实际上,真的很危险。
Similarly, in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, how prices are set, it's quite interesting how it doesn't look at these objective conditions of the collective way in which value is created in the economy. So in the sector where you have lots of different actors -- public, private, of course, but also third-sector organizations -- creating value, the way we actually measure value in this sector is through the price system itself. Prices reveal value. So when, recently, the price of an antibiotic went up by 400 percent overnight, and the CEO was asked, "How can you do this? People actually need that antibiotic. That's unfair." He said, "Well, we have a moral imperative to allow prices to go what the market will bear," completely dismissing the fact that in the US, for example, the National Institutes of Health spent over 30 billion a year on the medical research that actually leads to these drugs. So, again, a lack of attention to those objective conditions and just allowing the price system itself to reveal the value.
同样,在制药行业,其定价方式, 很有趣的是,它没有考虑这些客观条件 即集体创造价值的方式。 所以在这个行业有着很多参与者—— 公共的、私人的,当然, 还有第三部门组织—— 创造价值, 我们衡量这些部门价值的方法 是通过价格体系本身。 价格揭示价值。 所以最近当一个抗生素的价格 一夜间上涨了 400%, 人们问这家企业的 CEO , “你这么能这么做? 人们需要这些抗生素。 这不公平。” 他回答说:“我们有道德义务 让价格遵循市场走向”。 这完全无视美国的情况,例如, 国立卫生研究院每年在医学研究上 花费的300 多亿美元 其实推动了这些药物的开发。 所以,再次, 缺乏对这些客观条件的关注, 只是让价格体系来揭示价值。
Now, this is not just an academic exercise, as interesting as it may be. All this really matters [for] how we measure output, to how we steer the economy, to whether you feel that you're productive, to which sectors we end up helping, supporting and also making people feel proud to be part of. In fact, going back to that quote, it's not surprising that Blankfein could say that. He was right. In the way that we actually measure production, productivity and value in the economy, of course Goldman Sachs workers are the most productive. They are in fact earning the most. The price of their labor is revealing their value. But this becomes tautological, of course.
这也不仅是一个学术实践, 它可能如此有趣。 所有这些都对我们如何 衡量产出至关重要, 对我们如何掌舵经济, 对你能否感到自己有生产效率, 对我们最终帮助和支持哪个行业 并让人们因为其工作而感到自豪 至关重要。 实际上,回到那个引言, 贝兰克梵(高盛 CEO )这样说并不奇怪。 他是对的。 我们实际在衡量生产,生产力 和经济价值的方式, 当然,高盛的员工是最具生产力的。 他们实际上也是赚得最多的。 他们的劳动力价格 揭示了他们的价值。 但这也变得同义反复,当然。
And so there's a real need to rethink. We need to rethink how we're measuring output, and in fact there's some amazing experiments worldwide. In New Zealand, for example, they now have a gross national happiness indicator. In Bhutan, also, they're thinking about happiness and well-being indicators. But the problem is that we can't just be adding things in. We do have to pause, and I think this should be a moment for pause, given that we see so little has actually changed since the financial crisis, to make sure that we are not also confusing value extraction with value creation, so looking at what's included, not just adding more, to make sure that we're not, for example, confusing rents with profits. Rents for the classicals was about unearned income. Today, rents, when they're talked about in economics, is just an imperfection towards a competitive price that could be competed away if you take away some asymmetries.
我们真的需要重新思考。 我们需要重新思考计算 产出的方式, 而且实际上,世界范围内 有一些很棒的实验, 比如在新西兰,他们现在 有国民幸福指标。 在不丹,同样,他们在思考 幸福感和健康的指标。 但问题在于我们不能只是 一贯往里加东西, 我们需要停下脚步, 我认为我们现在应该暂停一下, 考虑到自金融危机以来 我们看到的改变如此之少, 以确保我们没有混淆 价值提取和价值创造, 所以看一下包括了什么, 而不是增加更多, 以确保我们不会混淆租金和利润。 古典主义认为租金是非劳动收入, 而今天,经济界探讨的租金 只是一个竞争价格的缺陷, 如果你消除一些不对称因素就会消失。
Second, we of course can steer activities into what the classicals called the "production boundary." This should not be an us-versus-them, big, bad finance versus good, other sectors. We could reform finance. There was a real lost opportunity in some ways after the crisis. We could have had the financial transaction tax, which would have rewarded long-termism over short-termism, but we didn't decide to do that globally. We can. We can change our minds. We can also set up new types of institutions. There's different types of, for example, public financial institutions worldwide that are actually providing that patient, long-term, committed finance that helps small firms grow, that help infrastructure and innovation happen.
第二,我们当然可以引导活动 进入古典主义者 所说的“生产边界”。 这不应该是“我们 vs. 他们”, 也不应该是“不好的庞大金融 vs. 好的其它部门”。 我们可以改革金融业。 危机过后,在某些方面 我们确实错失机会。 我们本可以征收金融交易税, 来回报长期主义更多, 而非短期主义。 但我们并没有在全球范围内 决定做这件事。 我们可以。我们可以 改变我们的想法。 我们也可以建立新机构。 全球有很多不同的机构, 比如公共金融机构, 能够给病人提供长期 且稳定的资金, 能够帮助小微企业成长, 确保基建和创新的可能。
But this shouldn't just be about output. This shouldn't just be about the rate of output. We should also as a society pause and ask: What value are we even creating? And I just want to end with the fact that this week we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing. This required the public sector, the private sector, to invest and innovate in all sorts of ways, not just around aeronautics. It included investment in areas like nutrition and materials. There were lots of actual mistakes that were done along the way. In fact, what government did was it used its full power of procurement, for example, to fuel those bottom-up solutions, of which some failed. But are failures part of value creation? Or are they just mistakes? Or how do we actually also nurture the experimentation, the trial and error and error and error?
但这不应该只是关于产出。 这不应该只是关于产出率。 我们也应该做一个社会暂停并问: 我们到底在创造什么价值? 我想以这周我们正在 庆祝登月50周年的事 来结束这个演讲。 登月这事儿需要 公共部门以及私有部门 来投资和创新各种东西, 不仅是航空相关的, 也包括对诸如营养和 材料等领域的投资。 这条路走来,我们犯了不少错。 实际上,政府所做的就是 充分利用它的采购权力 比如,推动那些自下而上 的解决方案, 其中有些会失败。 但是失败是价值创造的一部分吗? 还是它们仅仅是错误? 还是我们应该如何培养实验, 试错,再错,再错?
Bell Labs, which was the R and D laboratory of AT and T, actually came from an era where government was quite courageous. It actually asked AT and T that in order to maintain its monopoly status, it had to reinvest its profits back into the real economy, innovation and innovation beyond telecoms. That was the history, the early history of Bell Labs. So how we can get these new conditions around reinvestment to collectively invest in new types of value directed at some of the biggest challenges of our time, like climate change? This is a key question.
贝尔实验室, 即 AT&T 公司的研发实验室, 实际上来自一个政府 非常勇敢的时代。 它实际上要求AT和T这样做 是为了保持它的垄断地位, 它必须将利润重新投资于实体经济, 创新, 超出电信领域外的创新。 这是历史, 这是贝尔实验室的早期历史。 因此,我们如何才能使这些 围绕再投资的新条件 共同投资于针对 我们这个时代一些最大挑战 的新型价值 例如气候变化呢? 这是个重要问题。
But we should also ask ourselves, had there been a net present value calculation or a cost-benefit analysis done about whether or not to even try to go to the Moon and back again in a generation, we probably wouldn't have started. So thank God, because I'm an economist, and I can tell you, value is not just price.
但是我们也应该自问: 是否有过净现值计算 或成本效益分析来决定 是否要在我们可能不会开始的 一代人的时间里 尝试去月球再回来。 所以感谢上帝, 因为我是一个经济学家, 所以我可以告诉你 价值不仅等同于价格。
Thank you.
谢谢。
(Applause)
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