每天一篇经济学人 | Corporate jet, Rorschach t...

Corporate jets: emblem of greed or a boon to business?

公司专机：是贪婪的象征还是商业的福利?

The original Rorschach test involves showing a series of ten inkblots to someone, and asking them what images they see. Although the test’s psychological validity is debatable, no one can dispute its wild success as a metaphor: a single object can mean very different things to different people. In business a prime example of Rorschachiness is the corporate jet. Depending on your perspective, it can signal untrammelled greed, rational decision-making, post-pandemic work habits or the fight against climate change.

【1】untrammelled 不受限制的；自由自在的

最初的罗夏测试包括向某人展示一系列的10个墨迹，并询问他们看到了什么图像。尽管这项测试的有效性存在争议，但没有人能否认它作为一个隐喻的巨大成功：一个单一的物体对不同的人来说可能意味着完全不同的东西。在商业中，公务机就是罗夏测试的一个典型例子。根据你的观点，它可能标志着不受约束的贪婪、理性的决策、疫情后的工作习惯或对抗气候变化。

Those who see excess regard the company jet as the worst in a pile of gold-plated perks for overpaid executives. While minions reacquaint themselves with airport queues and the curse of six hours next to the chatty stranger in 24A, bosses skip the lines and travel in luxury. It is difficult to remain grounded in these circumstances. ey, a global accounting firm, reportedly calls its plane “ey One”; on touchdown, auditors doubtless fantasise about radioing that “the eygle has landed”. If jets were used only for work trips, that would be bad enough. But more than half of the ceos of a 500-strong group of companies monitored by Equilar, an analytics outfit, made use of their firm’s jet for personal purposes in 2020.

那些认为(专机)是无节制的人认为，公司的专机是为薪酬过高的高管提供的一堆镀金福利中最糟糕的一个。当下属们再次在机场排队等候，在24A(座位)上忍受与健谈的陌生人在一起的6个小时，而老板们则不需要排队，享受奢华的旅行。在这种情况下很难保持脚踏实地。据报道，全球会计公司安永将其飞机命名为“ey One”；着陆时，审计师无疑会幻想通过无线电说“EY飞机着陆了”。如果飞机只用于工作旅行，这已经够糟了。但在分析机构Equilar监测的500强企业中，超过半数的首席执行官在2020年将公司的专机用于个人目的。

This view equates the company plane with entitlement and waste. The bosses of America’s big carmakers were excoriated for using their jets to travel to Washington, dc, to ask for a bail-out during the financial crisis in 2008. Disquiet about his use of Credit Suisse’s private jet was one reason why António Horta-Osório resigned as chairman of the Swiss bank earlier in the year. When Jeff Immelt, a former chief executive of ge, travelled on the firm’s private plane, a second one would sometimes follow him around the world as backup. Mr Immelt’s successor, John Flannery, made a point of putting ge’s jets up for sale when he took over in 2017. A research study from 2012 found that cost-conscious private-equity firms reduced corporate-jet fleets at firms they had acquired.

这种观点把公司的专机等同于权利和浪费。2008年金融危机期间，美国大型汽车制造商的老板们因为乘坐飞机前往华盛顿特区寻求救助而受到严厉批评。今年早些时候，安东尼奥·奥尔塔-奥索里奥辞去瑞信董事长职务，原因之一是对他使用瑞信专机感到担忧。当通用电气前首席执行官杰夫•伊梅尔特乘坐公司的私人飞机旅行时，另一架飞机有时会作为备用机跟着他周游世界。伊梅尔特的继任者约翰•弗兰纳里在2017年接手通用电气时，曾强调要出售通用飞机。2012年的一项研究发现，注重成本的私募股权公司减少了收购公司的专机数量。

If the corporate-jet inkblot spells excess to some, to others it represents hard-headed pragmatism. The personal safety of top executives is one consideration: private aircraft are a big part of Meta’s outsized spending ($27m in 2021) on the security of Mark Zuckerberg, its chief executive. So is privacy: it is really hard to finalise a secret takeover when there is a stranger spilling pretzels on you. (Both of these arguments are slightly weakened by the scraping of air-traffic data that lets people track specific aircraft; a paper published last year described a machine-learning algorithm designed to predict where a corporate jet is going to land while it is still in the air.)

如果说专机的墨迹对一些人来说意味着无节制，那么对另一些人来说，它代表着务实的实用主义。高管的人身安全是一个考虑因素：私人飞机是Meta在首席执行官马克•扎克伯格人身安全上的巨额支出(2021年为2700万美元)的很大一部分。隐私也是一个考虑因素：当一个陌生人把椒盐卷饼洒在你身上时，你真的很难敲定一桩秘密收购案。(这两个观点都因人们可以跟踪特定飞机的空中交通数据而略有减弱；去年发表的一篇论文描述了一种机器学习算法，该算法设计用于预测在空中的公司专机将要降落的位置。)

Above all, chief executives are busy people. If boards would rather they spent more time working and less time watching someone repack their suitcase at the security gates, that’s their call. And because private jets can land on more airfields than commercial airliners can, they are often the only way for executives to travel directly from headquarters to factories and subsidiaries in less accessible locations. A paper published in 2018 by academics at Boston College and Drexel University found that business-related flights of this kind improved firms’ operational performance.

最重要的是，首席执行官们都是大忙人。如果董事会希望他们花更多的时间工作，而不是看着有人在安检口重新打包行李，私人飞机就派上用场了。因为私人飞机可以降落在比商用飞机更多的机场上，它们往往是高管们从总部直接前往交通不便地区的工厂和子公司的唯一途径。波士顿学院和德雷克塞尔大学学者2018年发表的一篇论文发现，这类与商业相关的航班改善了公司的运营业绩。

Some look at corporate jets and primarily see an enemy in the fight against climate change. Because of the small number of passengers on board, private planes emit much more carbon per passenger mile than commercial flights do. Elon Musk, a clean-tech tycoon who is fast becoming a Rorschach test in his own right, was pilloried recently when his jet took a nine-minute flight from San Jose to San Francisco. Mr Musk is also an outspoken critic of remote work, which is another thing that private jets bring to mind. The argument for using them rests heavily on the importance of in-person communication, something that has become a lot more contentious in the post-pandemic workplace.

一些人将商务机视为对抗气候变化的敌人。由于乘坐私人飞机的乘客数量较少，每名乘客每英里的碳排放量远高于商业航班。“清洁技术”大亨埃隆·马斯克正凭借自己的能力迅速成为罗夏墨迹测试的代表。近日，他的飞机从圣何塞飞往旧金山，总共飞行了9分钟，这让他备受抨击。马斯克还直言不讳地批评远程工作，这是私人飞机(墨迹)让人想起的另一件事。使用它们的理由在很大程度上取决于面对面交流的重要性，在疫情后的工作场所，面对面交流变得更具争议性。

The point of the Rorschach test is that it has no single right answer. Corporate jets look unjustifiable to some and sensible to others. They can improve productivity or be a sign of an out-of-control ceo; the paper from 2018 found that planes made more flights to resorts when a firm’s boss had been in place for longer and when it had dual-class shares. They raise questions of fairness among critics and spell efficiency to defenders. They have become a useful shortcut for testing someone’s gut instincts on management, as well as for beating the queues.

罗夏测试的关键在于它没有唯一的正确答案。公司专机在一些人看来是不合理的，在另一些人看来是明智的。它们可以提高生产力，或者是失控的CEO的标志；2018年的一篇论文发现，当一家公司的老板在位时间更长，并且公司拥有双重股权时，飞机会更多地飞往度假胜地。它们在批评者之间引发了公平性的问题，而在辩护者看来则意味着效率。它们已经成为一种有用的捷径，既可以测试某人在管理方面的直觉，也可以用来解决排队问题。