|
 
- 帖子
- 157
- 精华
- 3
- 积分
- 116
- 译作
- 22 篇
- 钻石
- 188 克拉
- 阅读权限
- 200
- 在线时间
- 270 小时
- 注册时间
- 2009-3-28
|
[2009.04.12][Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy][索迪先生的生态经济]
Op-Ed Contributor
Mr. Soddy’s Ecological Economy
索迪先生的生态经济
April 12, 2009
By ERIC ZENCEY
Montpelier, Vt.
INNOVATIVE and opaque instruments of debt; greedy bankers; lenders’ eagerness to take on risky loans; a lack of regulation; a shortage of bank liquidity: all have been nominated as the underlying cause of the largest economic downturn since the Great Depression. But a more perceptive, and more troubling, diagnosis is suggested by the work of a little-regarded British chemist-turned-economist who wrote before and during the Great Depression.
提起这场大萧条以来最严重的经济衰退的罪魁祸首，坊间可谓众说纷纭。无论是新奇而难以捉摸的债务工具，还是贪得无厌的银行经理，甚或信贷机构对高风险资产的趋之若鹜，以及监管的缺位和银行流动性的枯竭，都难比一位被忽视了的、由化学半路出家的英国经济学者所提出的诊断来得更富洞见，且令人更加不安。他的工作见证 了整个大萧条的酝酿与经过。
Frederick Soddy, born in 1877, was an individualist who bowed to few conventions, and who is described by one biographer as a difficult, obstinate man. A 1921 Nobel laureate in chemistry for his work on radioactive decay, he foresaw the energy potential of atomic fission as early as 1909. But his disquiet about that power’s potential wartime use, combined with his revulsion at his discipline’s complicity in the mass deaths of World War I, led him to set aside chemistry for the study of political economy — the world into which scientific progress introduces its gifts. In four books written from 1921 to 1934, Soddy carried on a quixotic campaign for a radical restructuring of global monetary relationships. He was roundly dismissed as a crank.
这便是出生于1877年的弗雷德里克•索迪（Frederick Soddy）[2]，一个蔑视传统的自我主义者。某传记作家曾将其描述为一个顽固而难以相处的人。因为在放射性衰变上的工作，索迪于1921年赢得了诺贝尔化学奖。早在1909年他就预见了原子裂变的潜在能量。然而对该能量战时应用潜力的不安，加之他对化学本身在一次世界大战的大规模杀伤中所扮演角色的厌恶，促使他放弃化学转而研究起了政治经济学——一个受益于科学进步的世界。在其于1921至1934年间所撰写的4本书中，索迪为彻底重塑全球金融关系而进行了一场唐吉坷德式的战斗。而他则被认为是个怪人而遭到了全面的排斥。
He offered a perspective on economics rooted in physics — the laws of thermodynamics, in particular. An economy is often likened to a machine, though few economists follow the parallel to its logical conclusion: like any machine the economy must draw energy from outside itself. The first and second laws of thermodynamics forbid perpetual motion, schemes in which machines create energy out of nothing or recycle it forever. Soddy criticized the prevailing belief of the economy as a perpetual motion machine, capable of generating infinite wealth — a criticism echoed by his intellectual heirs in the now emergent field of ecological economics.
索迪为经济学提供了一个植根于物理学——尤其是热力学定律——的新视角。在此，一个经济体经常被比作一台机器，其逻辑结论在于：如同任何一台机器，经济总要从其外部摄取能量。然而接受这一理论的经济学家却是寥寥可数。热力学第一及第二定律否定了恒动现象——即机器可以创造无源的能量或者可以对其进行永无止境的循环利用。索迪对此类把经济看作有能力创造无穷财富的永动机的主流信念进行了批判。而这一批判终于在当下新兴的生态经济学中的得到了其学术继承人的回应。
A more apt analogy, said Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (a Romanian-born economist whose work in the 1970s began to define this new approach), is to model the economy as a living system. Like all life, it draws from its environment valuable (or “low entropy”) matter and energy — for animate life, food; for an economy, energy, ores, the raw materials provided by plants and animals. And like all life, an economy emits a high-entropy wake — it spews degraded matter and energy: waste heat, waste gases, toxic byproducts, apple cores, the molecules of iron lost to rust and abrasion. Low entropy emissions include trash and pollution in all their forms, including yesterday’s newspaper, last year’s sneakers, last decade’s rusted automobile.
一位罗马尼亚籍经济学家尼古拉斯•乔治斯库•洛根（Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen）则提出了一个更恰当的类比方法，即把经济比作一个活着的系统（该方法的界定始于洛根在20世纪70年代的研究工作）。像所有生命一样，它从其周身环境中摄取有用的（或者低熵值的）物质与能量——对动物来说就是食物；对一个经济体而言，则是能源，矿物以及由动植物所提供了原材料。亦同所有生命一样，一个经济体也会释放一个高熵值的遗留物——及消耗过的物质与能量：废热、废气、有毒的副产品、苹果核以及流失于生锈和磨损的铁分子。低熵值的排放物包括任何形式的垃圾与污染，比如昨天的报纸、去年的运动鞋还有十年前报废的汽车。
Matter taken up into the economy can be recycled, using energy; but energy, used once, is forever unavailable to us at that level again. The law of entropy commands a one-way flow downward from more to less useful forms. An animal can’t live perpetually on its own excreta. Neither can you fill the tank of your car by pushing it backwards. Thus, Georgescu-Roegen, paraphrasing the economist Alfred Marshall, said: “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca.”
利用能源，人们可以将摄入经济活动的物质进行循环利用；而能源本身，一经使用便永不可能恢复到原来的利用水平。熵定律所支配的是一种单向的由高效形式向低效形式转变的下行运动。一个动物无法永远依赖其自身的排泄物存活下去。你也不能将用过的燃料重新给汽车加油。因此，乔治斯库•洛根对经济学家阿尔弗莱德•马歇尔（Alfred Marshall）做了新的诠释，他说道：“生物学，而非机械力学，才是我们的圣城麦加”
Following Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen and other ecological economists argue that wealth is real and physical. It’s the stock of cars and computers and clothing, of furniture and French fries, that we buy with our dollars. The dollars aren’t real wealth, but only symbols that represent the bearer’s claim on an economy’s ability to generate wealth. Debt, for its part, is a claim on the economy’s ability to generate wealth in the future. “The ruling passion of the age,” Soddy said, “is to convert wealth into debt” — to exchange a thing with present-day real value (a thing that could be stolen, or broken, or rust or rot before you can manage to use it) for something immutable and unchanging, a claim on wealth that has yet to be made. Money facilitates the exchange; it is, he said, “the nothing you get for something before you can get anything.”
追随索迪的思想，乔治斯库•洛根及其他一些生态经济学家论证认为，财富应该是真实且物质存在的。它是我们用钱买来的汽车、电脑、服装、家具甚至炸薯条。货币并非真正的财富，它只是一个符号，代表着持有人对某经济的财富创造力的索取权。而债务，就其本身而言，不过是对该经济未来财富创造力的一个求偿凭证而已。索迪曾说“这个时代的主要志趣就是将财富转变成债务”—— 用一个带有现实价值的东西去换取一个永久而不可变的玩艺儿，一个对尚待创造的财富的求取权。货币方便了这种交换；而一个只拥有货币的人——正如其所言——“在他能以其获取某物之前其实一文不名”。
Problems arise when wealth and debt are not kept in proper relation. The amount of wealth that an economy can create is limited by the amount of low-entropy energy that it can sustainably suck from its environment — and by the amount of high-entropy effluent from an economy that the environment can sustainably absorb. Debt, being imaginary, has no such natural limit. It can grow infinitely, compounding at any rate we decide.
而问题则出现在当财富与债务未能维持适当关系的时候。一个经济所能创造的财富总量受限于它能从其环境中不断摄取低熵能量的总水平，以及该环境对经济所释放的高熵值废物的持续吸收能力。而债务，诚如所想，并没有此类自然局限。它可以无限膨胀，混合的比例任由你我决定。
Whenever an economy allows debt to grow faster than wealth can be created, that economy has a need for debt repudiation. Inflation can do the job, decreasing debt gradually by eroding the purchasing power, the claim on future wealth, that each of your saved dollars represents. But when there is no inflation, an economy with overgrown claims on future wealth will experience regular crises of debt repudiation — stock market crashes, bankruptcies and foreclosures, defaults on bonds or loans or pension promises, the disappearance of paper assets.
每当一个经济体令其债务增长的速度超过了其自身财富创造的速度，它就不得不对债务进行抵赖。通货膨胀可以胜任此事：通过蚕食购买力——即你攒下的每一分钱所代表的对未来财富的索取权——而逐渐减轻债务负担。而如果没有通货膨胀，一个携有过量未来财富求偿权的经济便会经历一些常见的赖债危机——股市崩盘，破产清算，债券、贷款或者养老金支付的违约。一句话，纸面财富的消失。
It’s like musical chairs — in the wake of some shock (say, the run-up of the price of gas to $4 a gallon), holders of abstract debt suddenly want to hold money or real wealth instead. But not all of them can. One person’s loss causes another’s, and the whole system cascades into crisis. Each and every one of the crises that has beset the American economy in recent years has been, at heart, a crisis of debt repudiation. And we are unlikely to avoid more of them until we stop allowing claims on income to grow faster than income.
就像击鼓传花一样——紧跟着某种冲击（比如说，汽油价格骤升至每加仑4美元），抽象债务的持有人会突然转而希望拥有货币或者真实财富。然而并非人人都能做到这一点。一个人的损失牵连到其他人，然后整个系统都被扯进危机之中。就其本质而言，近些年来困扰美国的经济危机没有一个不是赖债的危机。只要对收入索取权的增长依旧快于收入本身，我们就不太可能避免此类危机的再度发生。
Soddy would not have been surprised at our current state of affairs. The problem isn’t simply greed, isn’t simply ignorance, isn’t a failure of regulatory diligence, but a systemic flaw in how our economy finances itself. As long as growth in claims on wealth outstrips the economy’s capacity to increase its wealth, market capitalism creates a niche for entrepreneurs who are all too willing to invent instruments of debt that will someday be repudiated. There will always be a Bernard Madoff or a subprime mortgage repackager willing to set us up for catastrophe. To stop them, we must balance claims on future wealth with the economy’s power to produce that wealth. How can that be done?
索迪估计不会对我们今天的窘境感到丝毫惊讶。问题远不止贪婪或者无知那么简单；问题也不在监管的失职，而在于这是我们这个经济自身融资机制上的缺陷。只要财富索求权的增长超越了经济创造财富的能力，那些热衷于发明债务工具的创业家便会在市场资本主义中找到自己的合适位置，而这些债务早晚会被赖掉。总会有一个伯纳•麦多夫或者一个什么次按包装商来为我们设计灾难的陷阱。要阻止他们，我们必须平衡经济中财富的索求权与创造力。那么，究竟如何做到这一点呢？
Soddy distilled his eccentric vision into five policy prescriptions, each of which was taken at the time as evidence that his theories were unworkable: The first four were to abandon the gold standard, let international exchange rates float, use federal surpluses and deficits as macroeconomic policy tools that could counter cyclical trends, and establish bureaus of economic statistics (including a consumer price index) in order to facilitate this effort. All of these are now conventional practice.
索迪将其有别主流的看法精炼为5条政策药方，而每一条都是在迹象表明其理论行不通的时候提出来的。前4条建议分别是放弃金本位制度，允许国际汇率自由浮动，利用政府的预算盈余跟赤字作为抗周期波动的宏观政策工具，以及设立经济统计局（包括消费者物价指数）以方便政策实施。所有这些都成了今天的常见举措。
Soddy’s fifth proposal, the only one that remains outside the bounds of conventional wisdom, was to stop banks from creating money (and debt) out of nothing. Banks do this by lending out most of their depositors’ money at interest — making loans that the borrower soon puts in a demand deposit (checking) account, where it will soon be lent out again to create more debt and demand deposits, and so on, almost ad infinitum.
索迪的第五项建议，唯一仍被排斥在主流思想之外的，是阻止银行凭空创造货币（及债务）。银行通过贷出其大部分存款赚取利息，而借款人很快又将这些贷款存入活期（或者支票）帐户，接着银行继续将其贷出以创造更多的债务和活期存款，以此类推，几至无穷无尽。
One way to stop this cycle, suggests Herman Daly, an ecological economist, would be to gradually institute a 100-percent reserve requirement on demand deposits. This would begin to shrink what Professor Daly calls “the enormous pyramid of debt that is precariously balanced atop the real economy, threatening to crash.”
赫尔曼•戴利（Herman Daly）[3]，一位生态经济学家，提出了一个阻止该循环的办法，即采取渐进的方式为活期存款制定一个100%的法定准备金比率。由此，戴利教授所称的“这个位于实体经济顶端、缺乏足够平衡而面临坍塌威胁的巨型债务金字塔”便可得以收缩。
Banks would support themselves by charging fees for safekeeping, check clearing and all the other legitimate financial services they provide. They would still make loans and still be able to lend at interest “the real money of real depositors,” in Professor Daly’s phrase, people who forgo consumption today by taking money out of their checking accounts and putting it in time deposits — CDs, passbook savings, 401(k)’s. In return, these savers receive a slightly larger claim on the real wealth of the community in the future.
通过提供诸如保管、支票清算以及所有其他合法金融服务所赚取的费用，银行足以养活自己。他们依旧可以发放贷款，贷出这些“真实储户的真实货币”（戴利教授的说法）以赚取利息。而这些所谓的“真实储户”是那些放弃了当前消费的人，他们将钱提出活期帐户并存入诸如CDs、存折或者401k一类的定期帐户。反过来，这些储蓄者对未来社会财富的要求权也会有所提高。
In such a system, every increase in spending by borrowers would have to be matched by an act of saving or abstinence on the part of a depositor. This would re-establish a one-to-one correspondence between the real wealth of the community and the claims on that real wealth. (Of course, it would not solve the problem completely, not unless financial institutions were also forbidden to create subprime mortgage derivatives and other instruments of leveraged debt.)
在这样的一个体系中，借款人每一单位的支出增长都必须与一个相应的储蓄行为或者某储户在相同单位上的消费节制相对应。这将为社会的真实财富与对其要求权之间重建一种一一对应的关系。（当然，问题不会由此得到彻底解决，除非同样禁止金融机构创造次按衍生品及其他信用杠杆工具）
If such a major structural renovation of our economy sounds hopelessly unrealistic, consider that so too did the abolition of the gold standard and the introduction of floating exchange rates back in the 1920s. If the laws of thermodynamics are sturdy, and if Soddy’s analysis of their relevance to economic life is correct, we’d better expand the realm of what we think is realistic.
倘若你觉得此类经济结构的重大调整听起来不切实际到令人绝望，那么不妨考虑一下上世纪20年代废除金本位制以及引入浮动汇率的想法同样如此。如果熵定律确实可靠，而索迪对其与经济生活关联的研究亦符合事实，那就应该扩大一下我们考虑现实的逻辑范围了。
Eric Zencey, a professor of historical and political studies at Empire State College, is the author of “Virgin Forest: Meditations on History, Ecology and Culture” and a novel, “Panama.”
==================================
译注
[1] 生态经济学(ecological economics) ，是研究生态系统和经济系统的复合系统的结构、功能及其运动规律的学科，即生态经济系统的结构及其矛盾运动发展规律的学科，是生态学和经济学相结合而形成的一门边缘学科。其基本方程式很有意思：
NSW = NNP +（B— GC）— AL
式中 NSW = 净社会福利；
NNP = 净国民生产增值；
B = 未被认识的经济发展的非市场性有利条件（如知识的积累、保健的改善等）；
GC = 为经济发展（包括信息、管理等）、减少污染所付出的劳力和费用；
AL = 环境恩惠损失（如噪声增加、烟雾增多、风景区的商业化改变等）。
[2] 弗雷德里克·索迪（Frederick Soddy，1877年9月2日－1956年9月22日），生于英国伊斯特本，化学家，1921年获诺贝尔化学奖，在英国布赖顿去世。由于认识到原子能的潜在巨大能量在现今经济思想和制度条件下可能被用于世界战争，于是自20世纪20年代开始，弗雷德里克·索迪转向研究[经济学]，以期改变人类经济系统，不致使将要被获得的原子能毁灭人类生态系统。《财富、虚拟财富和债务》是他的主要经济学著作。他猛烈批评了银行体系和货币制度，被称为“怪人”而遭到主流经济学家的嘲笑。著名的美国生态经济学家赫尔曼·E·戴利(Herman E·Daly)把弗雷德里克·索迪称为可持续发展经济学的先驱之一。
[3] 关于戴利对当下经济体系的生态经济学批判可参见附件文章。 |
|
