I am a capitalist, and after a 30-year career in capitalism spanning three dozen companies, generating tens of billions of dollars in market value, I'm not just in the top one percent, I'm in the top .01 percent of all earners. Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer. So the question is, how do we do it? How do we manage to grab an ever-increasing share of the economic pie every year? Is it that rich people are smarter than we were 30 years ago? Is it that we're working harder than we once did? Are we taller, better looking?
我是一个资本家, 我有30年资本主义生涯, 横跨三十多家公司, 创造了数百亿美元的市场价值, 我不只是在前百分之一, 我是所有收入者中收入最高的0.01%。 今天,我来分享我们成功的秘诀, 因为像我这样富有的资本家 从来没有这么富有过。 所以问题是,我们怎么做? 我们是如何获得了 每年都不断增长的市场份额? 是富人比30年前更聪明了吗? 是我们比以前工作的更勤奋了吗? 长得更高了,更漂亮了?
Sadly, no. It all comes down to just one thing: economics. Because, here's the dirty secret. There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest, but in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires, and that is creating a little bit of a problem. We could choose to enact economic policies that raise taxes on the rich, regulate powerful corporations or raise wages for workers. We have done it before. But neoliberal economists would warn that all of these policies would be a terrible mistake, because raising taxes always kills economic growth, and any form of government regulation is inefficient, and raising wages always kills jobs. Well, as a consequence of that thinking, over the last 30 years, in the USA alone, the top one percent has grown 21 trillion dollars richer while the bottom 50 percent have grown 900 billion dollars poorer, a pattern of widening inequality that has largely repeated itself across the world. And yet, as middle class families struggle to get by on wages that have not budged in about 40 years, neoliberal economists continue to warn that the only reasonable response to the painful dislocations of austerity and globalization is even more austerity and globalization.
可惜,不是。 归根结底是因为一件事: 经济。 因为,有这样一个肮脏的秘密。 有这样一段时间经济学专业 是为了大众利益而服务的, 但是在新自由主义时代, 今天, 他们只为了大公司集团工作, 以及亿万富翁, 这就产生了一些问题。 我们可以选择制定经济政策 对富人增税, 监管强大的企业或提高工人工资。 我们以前都做过。 但新自由主义经济学家会发出警告 所有这些政策都将是一个可怕的错误, 因为增税总是扼杀经济增长, 以及任何形式的政府监管 都是没有效率的, 而提高工资总会扼杀工作机会。 这样的思考结果便是, 过去30年间,光是美国, 最富有的1%人口已经比 以前多挣了21万亿美元 而底部的50%人比以前 少挣了9000亿美元, 一个扩大的不平等格局再次上演 遍及全球。 然而,在中等阶级家庭艰难获得 在过去40年里保持不变的工资, 新自由主义经济学家继续 警告对于财政紧缩 和全球化带来的痛苦混乱 的唯一正确的反应 是更加紧缩的财政以及全球化。
So, what is a society to do? Well, it's super clear to me what we need to do. We need a new economics. So, economics has been described as the dismal science, and for good reason, because as much as it is taught today, it isn't a science at all, in spite of all of the dazzling mathematics. In fact, a growing number of academics and practitioners have concluded that neoliberal economic theory is dangerously wrong and that today's growing crises of rising inequality and growing political instability are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory. What we now know is that the economics that made me so rich isn't just wrong, it's backwards, because it turns out it isn't capital that creates economic growth, it's people; and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good, it's reciprocity; and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity, it's cooperation. What we can now see is that an economics that is neither just nor inclusive can never sustain the high levels of social cooperation necessary to enable a modern society to thrive.
所以,社会该如何做? 我很清楚我们需要怎么做。 我们需要新型经济。 因此,经济学被描述为一门沉闷的科学, 有很好的理由, 因为尽管今天我们学了很多, 这根本不是一门科学, 尽管其中的数学令人眼花缭乱。 事实上,越来越多的学者和实践者 得出结论认为新自由主义经济理论 是危险的错误 并且今天日益加剧的不平等危机 和不断加剧的政治不稳定 是几十年来糟糕的经济理论 的直接结果。 我们现在所知道的是,让我如此 富有的经济学理论不仅是错的, 而且是后退的, 因为事实证明 不是资本创造了经济增长, 是群众; 促进公共利益的不是自身利益, 是互惠; 不是竞争造就了我们的繁荣, 而是合作。 我们现在看到的是一个 既不公正也不包容的经济体, 永远无法维持让现代社会繁荣 所必须的高水平的社会合作。
So where did we go wrong? Well, it turns out that it's become painfully obvious that the fundamental assumptions that undergird neoliberal economic theory are just objectively false, and so today first I want to take you through some of those mistaken assumptions and then after describe where the science suggests prosperity actually comes from.
所以我们哪里做错了? 其实,这是显而易见的 那就是支撑新自由主义经济理论 的基本假设 在客观上就是错误的, 所以今天我想先带你们 看看这些错误的假设 然后讲讲科学表明繁荣的真正来源。
So, neoliberal economic assumption number one is that the market is an efficient equilibrium system, which basically means that if one thing in the economy, like wages, goes up, another thing in the economy, like jobs, must go down. So for example, in Seattle, where I live, when in 2014 we passed our nation's first 15 dollar minimum wage, the neoliberals freaked out over their precious equilibrium. "If you raise the price of labor," they warned, "businesses will purchase less of it. Thousands of low-wage workers will lose their jobs. The restaurants will close." Except ... they didn't. The unemployment rate fell dramatically. The restaurant business in Seattle boomed. Why? Because there is no equilibrium. Because raising wages doesn't kill jobs, it creates them; because, for instance, when restaurant owners are suddenly required to pay restaurant workers enough so that now even they can afford to eat in restaurants, it doesn't shrink the restaurant business, it grows it, obviously.
所以,新自由主义经济学 的第一个假设是 市场是一个有效的均衡系统, 也就是说,如果经济中有一样东西, 比如工资上涨, 经济中的另一件事, 比如就业,必须下降。 例如,在我居住的西雅图, 2014年,我们通过了国家首个 15美元的最低工资标准, 新自由主义者为他们宝贵 的平衡而惊慌失措。 “如果你提高劳动力价格,”他们警告说, “企业将减少购买。 成千上万的低收入工人将失去工作。 餐馆将会关门。” 但是...... 这都没有发生。 失业率急剧下降。 西雅图的餐饮业蓬勃发展。 为什么? 因为市场不是一个均衡系统。 因为提高工资不会扼杀就业机会, 而是创造就业机会; 例如,因为, 当餐馆老板突然被要求付给 餐馆员工足够的工资时, 所以现在即便他们也可以在餐馆吃饭, 它不会缩减餐饮业, 反而呢,它增长生意。
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Thank you.
谢谢。
The second assumption is that the price of something is always equal to its value, which basically means that if you earn 50,000 dollars a year and I earn 50 million dollars a year, that's because I produce a thousand times as much value as you. Now, it will not surprise you to learn that this is a very comforting assumption if you're a CEO paying yourself 50 million dollars a year but paying your workers poverty wages. But please, take it from somebody who has run dozens of businesses: this is nonsense. People are not paid what they are worth. They are paid what they have the power to negotiate, and wages' falling share of GDP is not because workers have become less productive but because employers have become more powerful. And --
第二个假设是 某物的价格总是等于它的价值, 也就是说如果你一年赚5万美元, 我每年赚5000万美元, 那是因为我创造的价值是你的一千倍。 现在, 这不会让你太惊讶 就是这是一个不错的假设, 如果你是一个企业的CEO每年赚五千万 并且你付给你的员工很低的工资的话。 但是,请相信一位经营过 几十家企业的人: 这是无稽之谈。 人们的工资与他们的价值无关。 他们得到的报酬是他们有权协商的, 工资占GDP的比例在下降 不是因为工人的生产力下降了, 而是因为雇主的权力变大了。 而且
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And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor doesn't exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially a protection racket for the rich.
而且通过假装资本和劳动力之间 巨大的力量不平衡 根本不存在, 新自由主义经济理论在根本上 就是富人的保护伞。
The third assumption, and by far the most pernicious, is a behavioral model that describes human beings as something called "homo economicus," which basically means that we are all perfectly selfish, perfectly rational and relentlessly self-maximizing. But just ask yourselves, is it plausible that every single time for your entire life, when you did something nice for somebody else, all you were doing was maximizing your own utility? Is it plausible that when a soldier jumps on a grenade to defend fellow soldiers, they're just promoting their narrow self-interest? If you think that's nuts, contrary to any reasonable moral intuition, that's because it is and, according to the latest science, not true. But it is this behavioral model which is at the cold, cruel heart of neoliberal economics, and it is as morally corrosive as it is scientifically wrong because, if we accept at face value that humans are fundamentally selfish, and then we look around the world at all of the unambiguous prosperity in it, then it follows logically, then it must be true by definition, that billions of individual acts of selfishness magically transubstantiate into prosperity and the common good. If we humans are merely selfish maximizers, then selfishness is the cause of our prosperity. Under this economic logic, greed is good, widening inequality is efficient, and the only purpose of the corporation can be to enrich shareholders, because to do otherwise would be to slow economic growth and harm the economy overall. And it is this gospel of selfishness which forms the ideological cornerstone of neoliberal economics, a way of thinking which has produced economic policies which have enabled me and my rich buddies in the top one percent to grab virtually all of the benefits of growth over the last 40 years.
第三种假设,也是迄今为止最有害的假设, 是一个行为模型, 那就是将人类描述为“经济人”, 这基本意思是我们都非常自私, 完全的理性,并且不断地自我最大化。 但问问你自己, 你觉得在你一生中 当你有助于他人时 都只是为了最大化你自己的效用, 这种说法是可信的吗? 你觉得一个士兵舍身掩盖住手榴弹 去保护他的战友时, 他们只是在促进他们的一己私利, 这种说法可信吗? 如果你觉得这太荒唐了了, 与任何合理的道德直觉相反, 因为它的确是如此, 根据最新的科学研究, 假的。 但恰恰就是这个行为模型, 这个以残忍为核心的新自由主义经济, 它在道德上的腐败 就如同它在科学上是如此错误一样, 因为,如果我们接受了错误的想法—— 人类在本质上是自私的, 那么我们看着这个世界里 所有清晰的繁荣景象, 那么根据逻辑, 根据定义它一定是正确的, 数十亿个人的自私行为 奇迹般地转化为繁荣和共同利益。 如果我们人类仅仅是自私的放大化者, 那么自私就是我们财富的来源。 在这个经济逻辑下, 贪婪是好的, 扩大不平等是有效的, 公司的唯一目的, 是让股东变得更加富有, 因为如果不这样做, 经济增长就会放缓, 损害整体经济。 就是这种自私的福音 形成了新自由主义经济学 的意识形态基石, 这种产生经济政策思维方式 让我和我那些富有的朋友们进入了前1%, 从过去40年的经济增长中获益。
But, if instead we accept the latest empirical research, real science, which correctly describes human beings as highly cooperative, reciprocal and intuitively moral creatures, then it follows logically that it must be cooperation and not selfishness that is the cause of our prosperity, and it isn't our self-interest but rather our inherent reciprocity that is humanity's economic superpower.
但, 如果相反, 我们接受最新的实证研究, 真正的科学,即正确地描述了人类 是会高度合作, 互惠的 直觉上道德的生物, 那么必然是 合作 而不是自私 成就了我们的繁荣, 并不仅仅是我们自身的利益 而是我们整体的互惠 才是人类经济的超力量。
So at the heart of this new economics is a story about ourselves that grants us permission to be our best selves, and, unlike the old economics, this is a story that is virtuous and also has the virtue of being true.
所以,这个新经济的核心 是一个关于我们自己的故事, 允许我们做最好的自己, 并且,与旧的经济学不同, 这是一个善良的故事 也有真实的美德。
Now, I want to emphasize that this new economics is not something I have personally imagined or invented. Its theories and models are being developed and refined in universities around the world building on some of the best new research in economics, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, psychology, anthropology and other disciplines. And although this new economics does not yet have its own textbook or even a commonly agreed upon name, in broad strokes its explanation of where prosperity comes from goes something like this.
现在, 我想强调的是这种新的经济学 不是我个人想象或发明的。 它的理论和模型正在发展和完善 在世界各地的大学里 基于一些最好的经济学新研究, 复杂性理论,进化论, 心理学、人类学等学科。 尽管这种新的经济学 还没有自己的教科书 甚至一个大家都同意的名字, 大体来说 它对繁荣从何而来的解释是这样的。
So, market capitalism is an evolutionary system in which prosperity emerges through a positive feedback loop between increasing amounts of innovation and increasing amounts of consumer demand. Innovation is the process by which we solve human problems, consumer demand is the mechanism through which the market selects for useful innovations, and as we solve more problems, we become more prosperous. But as we become more prosperous, our problems and solutions become more complex, and this increasing technical complexity requires ever higher levels of social and economic cooperation in order to produce the more highly specialized products that define a modern economy.
所以,市场资本主义是一个进化系统, 在其中财富的涌现是 通过在不断增长的创新和 不断增长的消费需求之间 的正反馈循环而获得的。 创新是我们解决人类问题的过程, 消费者需求是市场选择 有用创新的机制, 随着我们解决更多的问题, 我们变得更加繁荣。 但随着我们变得更加繁荣, 我们的问题和解决方案 变得更加复杂, 技术的复杂性也在增加 需要更高水平的社会和经济合作 以生产更加专业化的产品 以定义现代经济。
Now, the old economics is correct, of course, that competition plays a crucial role in how markets work, but what it fails to see is that it is largely a competition between highly cooperative groups -- competition between firms, competition between networks of firms, competition between nations -- and anyone who has ever run a successful business knows that building a cooperative team by including the talents of everyone is almost always a better strategy than just a bunch of selfish jerks.
当然,旧的经济学是对的, 竞争在市场运作中起着至关重要的作用, 但它却忽视了 在很大程度上这是高度合作 的群体之间的竞争—— 公司之间的竞争,公司网络之间的竞争, 国与国之间的竞争—— 任何经营过成功企业的人都知道 通过吸收每个人的才能 来建立一个合作的团队 这几乎总是比一群自私 的混蛋好得多的策略。
So how do we leave neoliberalism behind and build a more sustainable, more prosperous and more equitable society? The new economics suggests just five rules of thumb.
那么,我们如何将新自由主义抛诸脑后 去建设一个更可持续、更繁荣的社会 和一个更公平的社会呢? 新经济学提出了五条经验法则。
First is that successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens, which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented for solving human problems, but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve. Climate change, the great financial crisis of 2008 are two easy examples.
首先,成功的经济体不是丛林,而是花园, 也就是说市场, 就像花园,必须有人照料, 市场是有史以来解决人类的问题的 最伟大的社会技术, 但不受社会规范或民主监管的约束, 市场不可避免地会产生比它们 解决的问题更多的问题。 气候变化, 2008年的经济危机 是两个很简单的例子。
The second rule is that inclusion creates economic growth. So the neoliberal idea that inclusion is this fancy luxury to be afforded if and when we have growth is both wrong and backwards. The economy is people. Including more people in more ways is what causes economic growth in market economies.
第二点是, 包容创造了经济增长。 所以这种新自由主义思想是 如果我们的经济增长是 错误的,而且是倒退的, 那么这种包容就是我们 能够负担得起的奢侈。 经济是人民的。 包括更多人以更多不同的方式 在市场经济中导致了经济的增长。
The third principle is the purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders. The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike.
第三点是 公司的目的不只是为了使股东富裕。 当代经济生活中最大的骗局 是新自由主义想法里 公司的唯一目的, 执行主管的唯一责任是 让他们自己和股东变得更富。 新经济必须并且坚持 企业的目的 是提升所有人利益: 顾客,工人, 集体和股东一样。
Rule four: greed is not good. Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath.
第四: 贪婪是错误的。 贪婪并不能让你成为资本家, 会让你成为一个变态。
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And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society.
在一个像我们这样依赖 大规模合作的经济体中, 社会病态对企业和社会都是有害的。
And fifth and finally, unlike the laws of physics, the laws of economics are a choice. Now, neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics.
第五,也是最后一点, 不像物理定律, 经济学定律是一种选择。 新自由主义经济理论 把自己当作不变的自然法则说服你, 事实上,这种社会规范和构建的说法 基于伪科学。 如果我们真的想要一个更公平的, 更加繁荣和可持续的经济, 如果我们想要高功能的民主 和民主社会, 我们必须有新经济。
And here's the good news: if we want a new economics, all we have to do is choose to have it.
好消息是: 如果我们想要拥有新经济, 我们所需要做的只是选择去拥有它。
Thank you.
谢谢。
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Moderator: So Nick, I'm sure you get this question a lot. If you're so unhappy with the economic system, why not just give all your money away and join the 99 percent?
主持人:所以尼克, 我相信你经常会碰到这个问题。 如果你对经济体系如此不满, 为什么不捐出你所有的钱, 加入那99%的人呢?
Nick Hanauer: Yeah, no, yes, right. You get that a lot. You get that a lot. "If you care so much about taxes, why don't you pay more, and if you care so much about wages, why don't you pay more?" And I could do that. The problem is, it doesn't make that much difference, and I have discovered a strategy that works literally a hundred thousand times better --
尼克:是的,不,是的,没错。 经常有人这么问我。 “如果你这么在意税收, 为什么不多付一些呢? 如果你那么在意工资, 为什么不多付一点呢?” 我可以那么做。 问题是, 那不会改变什么, 我发现策略 比那有用无数倍。
Moderator: OK.
主持人:好的。
NH: which is to use my money to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better.
NH:那就是用我的钱来 建立叙事并通过法律, 这将会要求所有其他富人 为他们的工人支付更好的税收。
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And so, for example, the 15-dollar minimum wage that we cooked up has now affected 30 million workers. So that works better.
所以,比如, 我们制造的的15美元的最低收入 现在已经影响了3000万工人。 这更有用。
Moderator: That's great. If you change your mind, we'll find some takers for you.
主持人:太好了。 如果你改变主意,我们会为你找到一些人选。
NH: OK. Thank you. Moderator: Thank you very much.
NH:好的。谢谢你! 主持人:非常感谢。