【中英双语】美国经济的问题出在哪儿？
Why Economies Become Less Dynamic as They Age
沃尔特·弗里克（Walter Frick）| 文
In April 2020, the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen published a widely read essay titled “It's Time to Build.” For all its supposed dynamism, the U.S. economy appeared slow and inflexible in the face of a once-in-a-generation crisis. Masks and ventilators were in short supply, but this inability to rapidly adjust wasn't specific to Covid-19: America had long struggled to build housing, high-speed rail, and zero-emission sources of power, too. Andreessen's critique crystallized something numerous scholars and commentators had been saying, and it had fans across the political spectrum.
2020年4月，风险资本家马克·安德里森(Marc Andreessen)发表了一篇广为阅读的文章，题为“是该建设的时候了”。尽管美国经济在人们心目中充满活力，但它在面对一代人一遇的危机时显得迟缓、僵化。口罩和呼吸器供不应求，但这种迅速调整能力的缺乏并非新冠疫情所特有：美国长期以来在建设住房、高速铁路和零排放能源方面也力不从心。安德里森的批评让许多学者和评论家一直在说的东西变得明确具体，而且在政界各派中拥有粉丝。
There was much less agreement on how we'd gotten here, however. Was it cultural malaise? Broken political institutions? Too much regulation? People seemed to agree that the U.S. had lost some essential dynamism, but couldn't agree why.
然而，对于我们是如何走到这一步的，达成的共识要少得多。这是因为文化的痼疾？残破的政治制度？还是过多的监管？人们似乎认同，美国已经失去了部分基本的活力，但却无法就其原因达成一致意见。
This week, Yale University Press is republishing an old book that claims to have the answer. Mancur Olson's 1982 The Rise and Decline of Nations is a canonical account of how economies become less flexible and dynamic as they age. In Rise and Decline, Olson argues that the older an economy gets, the more collusion and lobbying it will have, and over time this accumulation of interest groups will corrode an economy by capturing the political process and slowing everything down. The reissue is testament to a rediscovery of Olson's work by experts in economics and political science, who are contending with many of the same issues Olson grappled with.
最近，耶鲁大学出版社将要重新出版一本声称拥有答案的旧著。曼库尔·奥尔森(Mancur Olson)1982年的《国家的兴衰》(The Rise and Decline of Nations)是一本对各经济体如何在老化的过程中失去灵活性和活力的经典论述。在《兴衰》中，奥尔森指出，一个经济体越高龄，勾结和游说就越多。随着时间的推移，利益集团的这种积累会以控制政治进程和放缓一切步伐的方式来腐蚀经济体。此次再版证明经济学和政治学专家对奥尔森的著作有了重新发现，他们正在对付的许多问题正是奥尔森努力解决的问题。
In his introduction to the new edition, Harvard economist Edward Glaeser recalls his own long journey back to Rise and Decline. Glaeser first read the book as a graduate student in 1993 and lightly dismissed it. While he found Olson's logic sound, the writer's preoccupation with the “stagflation” of the 1970s simply didn't feel relevant to the boom times of post-Reagan America.
哈佛大学经济学家爱德华·格莱泽(Edward Glaeser)在其撰写的新版导言中回顾了他自己读《兴衰》的漫长历程。格莱泽1993年首次读到这本书的时候是一名研究生，而且淡然地对其不屑一顾。虽然他发现奥尔森的逻辑合乎情理，但是作者一心对20世纪70年代“滞胀”的关注与后里根时代的美国繁荣时期根本没有关系。
But as he studied the economics of cities, Olson's ideas started to come back to him. Glaeser's research showed that the most vibrant, productive parts of the U.S. — cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco — were refusing to build new housing. That drove up the cost of living and prevented new people from moving there. Opposition to new construction was strangling the entire country's growth, and the book Glaeser had dismissed in graduate school purported to explain why: Maybe America was struggling to build because a vast array of interest groups were inserting themselves in the process, slowing down decision making and using public policy to defend their interests at the expense of the common good.
然而，当他研究城市经济学时，奥尔森的观点开始重返他的脑海。格莱泽的研究表明，美国最具活力、最具生产力的地区——纽约、波士顿和旧金山等城市——开始拒绝建造新住宅。这推高了生活成本，妨碍了人们新迁到这些地方。反对新建工程开始扼杀整个国家的发展，而格莱泽在研究生院时小瞧的那本书声称可以解释原因：也许美国难以搞建设的原因是因为大量的利益集团介入了这一过程，减缓了决策的速度，并利用公共政策来保护他们的利益，牺牲的是共同利益。
Olson was obsessed with the logic of interest groups. The main barrier to a group of people joining together to advance a common interest, he thought, was the free rider problem: Each member would prefer the group to exist but prefers not to personally invest time and money getting it started. Without some enforcement mechanism — like mandatory dues in a union — no one steps up because it'll cost them a lot and they'll gain just a little.
奥尔森对利益集团的逻辑非常着迷。他认为，一群人联合起来推进共同利益的主要障碍是搭便车问题：每个成员都希望这个团体存在，但却不愿意个人投入时间和金钱来启动它。如果没有某种强制机制——比如工会的强制性会费——没有人会站出来，因为这会让他们付出很多，得到很少。
Smaller groups have an easier time overcoming this issue, he argued. If there are only five big tractor makers, each one gets a fifth of the total benefit of forming a tractor lobby, which is often enough to cooperate. By contrast, organizing consumers is harder, because each individual can expect to gain only a tiny fraction of the payoffs for their effort.
他认为，较小的团体更容易克服这个问题。如果只有五家大的拖拉机制造商，每家都能从组建拖拉机游说团体的总收益中获得五分之一，这通常足以让他们合作。相比之下，组织消费者的难度更大，因为每个人预计只能从自己的努力中获得很小一部分回报。
Olson also argued that interest groups have an incentive to try and get more of the existing economic pie for themselves rather than to grow it. In Rise and Decline, he wrote that “The familiar image of slicing the social pie does not really capture the essence of the situation; it is perhaps better to think of wrestlers struggling over the contents of a china shop.”
奥尔森还认为，利益集团有动机试图分得更多现有的经济蛋糕，而不是将蛋糕做大。他在《兴衰》中写道：“切社会蛋糕的熟悉形象并没有真正抓住情况的本质；也许我们更应该想象摔跤手在争抢瓷器店的东西。”
So small, homogenous groups would organize. Large, diverse groups would struggle to organize. And the small, organized groups would then lobby to get the rules of the economy tilted in their favor — at everyone else's expense. (These ideas were the focus of his earlier book, The Logic of Collective Action.)
因此，小型、同质化的群体会组织起来。大型、多样化的群体难以组织起来。然后，小型的、有组织的群体会进行游说，让经济规则向有利于他们的方向倾斜——以其他所有人的利益为代价。这些想法是他早期著作《集体行动的逻辑》(The Logic of Collective Action)的重点。
In Rise and Decline, Olson added one more provocative premise: The longer a society is stable and prosperous, the more time there is for special interests to overcome the barriers to organizing. And as the number of organized lobbies grows, they collectively “slow down a society's capacity to adopt new technologies and to reallocate resources in response to changing conditions and thereby reduce the rate of economic growth.” Olson's renewed relevance stems from the fact that his diagnosis matches Andreessen's critique: The U.S. economy is inflexible and stagnant because so many special interest groups have had time to form and amass power.
在《兴衰》中，奥尔森增加了一个更具启发性的前提：一个社会稳定和繁荣的时间越长，特殊利益集团就越有时间克服组织起来的障碍。而随着有组织的游说团体数量越来越多，它们会共同“减缓一个社会采用新技术以及根据不断变化的条件重新分配资源的能力，从而降低了经济增长的速度”。奥尔森新的相关性源于这样一个事实，即他的诊断与安德里森的批评相吻合：美国经济之所以缺乏灵活性并停滞不前，是因为许多特殊利益集团有时间形成和积聚力量。
Olson believed his theory helped explain why the U.S. and the UK were struggling at the time he was writing, while Japan and Germany were growing rapidly. World War II hadn't just ended lives and destroyed factories and machinery; it had swept away the organized lobbies that build up over time in any economy and throttle its growth. The losers of the Second World War were starting over economically, and so weren't held back by collusion and lobbying. In the U.S., the theory helped explain why New York City nearly went bankrupt in 1975 while the economies of the Western states soared. Growth happened in places where interest groups hadn't yet had a chance to form.
奥尔森认为，他的理论有助于解释为何在他写作的时候，美国和英国正在挣扎，而日本和德国却在快速增长。二战不仅终结了生命，摧毁了工厂和机器；它还扫除了有组织的游说团体，这些团体在任何经济体中随着时间的流逝壮大起来，扼杀了其增长。二战的战败国在经济上重新开始，因此没有受勾结和游说所抑制。在美国，这一理论有助于解释为何纽约市在1975年几近破产，而西部各州的经济却在飙升。增长发生在利益集团还没有机会形成的地方。
Today, as the U.S. limps from crisis to crisis, amid slow productivity growth, high inequality, and increasing political dysfunction, Olson's critique feels urgently relevant. “Thirty years later Olson seems prescient, and I seem naive,” Glaeser writes in his introduction. “America (and most of the wealthy world) has evolved in exactly the manner that Olson predicted. Interest groups, such as homeowners who block new construction and retirees who oppose any cost-saving reform of Medicare, have become ever more entrenched. Regulations that protect insiders, such as occupational licensing requirements for interior decorators and florists, have proliferated. New business formation plummeted between the 1980s and the 2010s.”
今天，当美国在生产力增长缓慢、不平等严重和政治功能日益失调的情况下，在一个接一个的危机中举步维艰时，奥尔森的批判让人感到正好切中要害。
“30年后，奥尔森看起来有先见之明，而我似乎很幼稚，”格莱泽在他的导言中写道，“美国（以及富裕世界的大多数国家）的发展恰如奥尔森所预测的那样。利益集团，比如阻止新建工程的房主和反对任何节省成本的医疗保险改革的退休人员，已经变得更加根深蒂固。室内装潢师和花艺师执业许可要求等保护业内人士的法规激增。在20世纪80年代和21世纪10年代之间，新成立的企业骤减。”
Olson has adherents across the political spectrum. Last year, the libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok used Rise and Decline to explain the policy failures of liberal U.S. cities. In 2019, the left-leaning political scientist Henry Farrell cited the book to explain Elizabeth Warren's worldview:
奥尔森在各个政治派别中都有拥趸。2021年，自由主义经济学家亚历克斯·塔巴罗克(Alex Tabarrok)用《兴衰》来解释美国自由主义城市的政策失败。2019年，左倾政治学家亨利·法雷尔(Henry Farrell)引用该书来解释伊丽莎白·沃伦(Elizabeth Warren)的世界观：
What Elizabeth Warren is pursuing is very much an Olsonian view of how markets work: that drag and dross and corruption builds up and that in order to allow markets to achieve their full potential, you basically need to cleanse them at a certain point.
伊丽莎白·沃伦所追求的，在极大程度上是一种奥尔森式的市场运作观点：累赘、糟粕和腐败会越积越多，为了让市场实现其全部潜力，你基本上需要在某个时候对它们进行清理。
(And swinging back to the right, it's hard not to think of “Drain the swamp” reading that diagnosis.)
（再回到右翼，读到这个诊断的时候，很难不让人想到“排干沼泽”。）
But was Olson actually right? As intriguing as his thesis is, it has both methodological and empirical weaknesses.
可是，奥尔森事实上是对的吗？尽管他的论文很吸引人，但它在方法论上和实证性上都存在弱点。
Olson was ahead of his time in his use of game theory, which models the strategic interactions of rational individuals. But since then, economics has become more empirical and behavioral, too — and as a result it is appropriately more humble about drawing sweeping conclusions from presumptions of rationality.
奥尔森在博弈论的运用方面领先于他的时代，博弈论为理性个体的战略互动提供了模型。可是，自那以后，经济学也变得更加实证化和行为化——因此，它恰当地不再轻易从理性的假设中得出过于笼统的结论。
For example, in 2009 the political economist Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for documenting the ways people deviated from narrow conceptions of rationality to cooperate with one another. She found that when groups could communicate and could form and assess each other's reputations, they were able overcome coordination challenges very similar to the ones Olson was writing about. It turns out that the logic Olson laid out for when groups do or don't organize only holds under certain circumstances.
比如，2009年，政治经济学家埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆(Elinor Ostrom)因记录了人们如何偏离狭隘的理性概念而相互合作，获得诺贝尔奖。她发现，当群体可以沟通，可以影响和评估彼此的声誉时，他们就能够克服那些非常类似奥尔森所写的协调困难。事实证明，奥尔森针对团体何时组织起来或何时不组织的逻辑只在某些情况下成立。
Then there's the fact that the single biggest geopolitical event of the last 40 years seems to directly cut against Olson's theory. The fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 is exactly the sort of shock to stability, prosperity, and political boundaries that Olson saw as wiping away interest groups. But the result was not economic dynamism — it was the rapid rise of one of the world's most notorious oligarchies. Either factions aren't so easily swept away, even in severe crises, or time is not as crucial for forming interest groups; either way Olson's theory doesn't seem to fit. (Olson gave an account of the post-Soviet economies' struggles here.)
还有一个事实是，过去40年中最大的地缘政治事件似乎直接与奥尔森的理论相悖。1991年苏联的解体正是奥尔森眼中那种对稳定、繁荣和政治边界的冲击，这种冲击抹去了利益集团。不过，结果不是经济活力——而是世界上最臭名昭著的寡头政治之一的迅速崛起。要么是政治派别不那么轻易被扫除（即使在严重的危机中），要么是时间对于形成利益集团并不那么关键；无论哪种情形，奥尔森的理论似乎都不适合。（奥尔森在此对后苏联经济体的挣扎进行了叙述）。
For these reasons, Rise and Decline is best read not as a precise account of the problems facing the U.S. economy but as a hypothesis or even a provocation. Many other good books have documented the corrupting power of organized interest groups — especially those representing businesses — and how they corrode an economy. Returning to Olson means returning to the question of how and why these groups form in the first place. And it raises the idea, however speculative, that these interest groups exact an even greater toll on an economy as it grows older. If nothing else, it's well worth reading to see one of the greatest political economists of the past 50 years try to think through many of the very problems now making headlines.
由于这些原因，我们最好不要将《兴衰》当作是对美国经济所面临问题的精确叙述来阅读，而是将其作为一种假设，甚至是一种刺激。许多其他的好书都记录了有组织的利益集团——特别是那些代表企业的利益集团——的腐败力量，以及它们如何腐蚀经济。重读奥尔森，意味着回到这些团体首先是如何以及为何形成的问题上。它引发了一个想法（无论这种想法多么具有推测性），即，随着某一经济体的老化，这些利益集团会对经济体造成更大的损失。就算没有别的目的，这本书也很值得一读，人们可以看看过去50年中最伟大的政治经济学家之中有一位试图思考的许多问题现在都成为了头条新闻。
For his part, Olson was open about the limits to his analysis. His theory was sweeping, but he knew it didn't explain everything. And he was well aware that people didn't always hew to the maxims of game theory. He writes in Rise and Decline that “zealots” and “fanatics” will be willing to organize because they aren't concerned about the ROI. That means, effectively, that in Olson's world the most influential players in economic policy will be the selfishly rational and the fanatically irrational. That doesn't sound too far off.
就他本人而言，奥尔森对其分析的局限性持开放态度。他的理论全面广泛，但他知道它并不能解释一切。而且他很清楚，人们并不总是遵守博弈论的准则。他在《兴衰》中写道，“偏激分子”和“狂热分子”会有组织起来的意愿，因为他们并不关心投资回报率。这实际上意味着，在奥尔森的世界里，对经济政策最有影响力的参与者将是自私的理性者和狂热的非理性者。这话听起来并不久远。
沃尔特·弗里克是《哈佛商业评论》的特约编辑，他曾在此担任HBR.org的高级编辑和副编辑。他曾是Quartz的执行编辑，以及哈佛大学尼曼新闻基金会(Nieman Foundation for Journalism)的奈特访问学者(Knight Visiting Fellow)和哈佛大学伯克曼·克莱因互联网与社会中心(Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society)的会员。他还为《大西洋》《麻省理工科技评论》《波士顿环球报》和BBC等出版物撰稿。
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