百度文库 - 让每个人平等地提升自我
TEXT 66
A natural choice 天生我才必有效（陈继龙 编译）
Oct 12th 2006
From The Economist print edition
BORN in the trough[1] of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who this week won the Nobel prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated[2] by the monetary authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. （1）Mr Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure.
本周取得诺贝尔经济学奖的哥伦比亚大学教授埃德
蒙·菲尔普斯生于经济大萧条谷底时期。作为一名学者，他几乎全身心地投入在了一种不同类型的经济萧条的研究当中。昔时，由于金融主管当局对货币供给控制过严，致使经济大萧条每况愈下，菲尔普斯的父母也因此双双失业。菲尔普斯感兴趣的恰恰就是连出手大方的中央银行家们都无法解决的失业问题。
Most scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. But Mr Phelps won his laurels[3] in part for kicking the feet from under his intellectual forerunners. In 1958 William Phillips, of the London School of Economics, showed that for much of the previous hundred years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. Economists were quick—too quick—to conclude that policymakers therefore faced a grand, macroeconomic trade-off, embodied in the so-called “Phillips curve”. （2）They could settle for unemployment of, say, 6% and an inflation rate of 1%—as prevailed in America at the start of the 1960s—or they could quicken the economy, cutting unemployment by a couple of percentage points at the expense of inflation of 3% or so—which is roughly how things stood in America when Mr Phelps published his first paper
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on the subject in 1967.
大多数学者都站在巨人的肩膀之上，而菲尔普斯之所以能够取得此项殊荣，一部份却是因为他勇于冲破先辈们在学术上的桎梏。1958年，伦敦经济学院的威廉·菲利普斯指出，此前一百年中大多数时候，英国的失业与工资提高引发的通货膨胀呈反相关的关系。于是，经济学家们就匆匆判定，决策者因此将面临重要的宏观经济平衡问题，所谓的“菲利普斯曲线”就是这种平衡的具体表现形式。例如说，6％的失业率加上1％的通货膨胀率对于决策者而言是能够同意的，20世纪60年代初期的美国就普遍维持在那个水平。又譬如说，决策者以通货膨胀上升到3%左右为代价，可使失业率降低2％，从而加速经济进展。1967年的美国情形也大致如此。同年，菲尔普斯发表了第一篇关于这一问题的论文。
In such a tight labour market, companies appease workers by offering higher wages. They then pass on the cost in the form of dearer prices, cheating workers of a higher real wage. Thus policymakers can engineer lower unemployment only through deception. But “man is a thinking, expectant being,” as Mr Phelps has put it. Eventually workers will cotton on[4], demanding still higher wages to offset the rising cost of living. （3）They can be duped[5] for as long as inflation stays one step ahead of their rising expectations of what it will be.
在劳动力市场十分紧缩的情形下，各公司稳固劳动者队伍的方式就是提高工资水平，然后再以举高物价的方式转移这一本钱，并对劳动者隐瞒了其实能够更高的工资。如此的话，决策者只需要采取欺骗手腕就可以够实现较低的失业水平。不过正如菲尔普斯所说，“人是有思维的并有所期望的。”总有一天劳动者会茅塞顿开，而且会索取更高的工资来弥补日趋增加的生活费用。只有通货膨胀水平始终高于他们对其不断上升的期望值，他们才可能被骗被骗。
The stable trade-off depicted by the Phillips curve is thus a dangerous mirage. The economy will recover its equilibrium only when workers' expectations are fulfilled, prices turn out as anticipated, and they no longer sell their labour under false pretences. But equilibrium does not, sadly, imply full employment. Mr Phelps argued that inflation will not settle until unemployment rises to its “natural rate”, leaving some workers mouldering[6] on the shelf. （4）Given economists' almost theological commitment to the notion that markets clear, the presence of unemployment in the world requires a theodicy[7] to explain it. Mr Phelps is willing to entertain several. But in much of his work he
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contends that unemployment is necessary to cow workers, ensuring their loyalty to the company and their diligence on the job, at a wage the company can afford to pay.
如此一来，菲尔普斯曲线所描画的稳固的平衡关系就成了一种危险的空想。除非劳动者的期望得以知足，物价合情合理，而且他们不会再在受到蒙蔽的情形下出卖自己的劳动力，经济才会恢复平衡。不过可惜的是，平衡并非意味着充分就业。菲尔普斯以为，在失业达到“自然率”、出现闲置劳动力之前，通货膨胀问题是得不到解决的。经济学家几乎犹如信奉神灵一般地信奉如此一种观点，即市场终究是要出清的。有鉴于此，全世界的失业现状就需要一种神学理论来加以解释了。菲尔普斯很愿意酝酿出几个如此的理论，不过他在其多数论著中仍是坚持以为，失业必然会引发劳动者的恐惧，使得他们不能不对公司忠心耿耿，对工作兢兢业业，薪水要求也不会超过公司的经受能力。
“Natural” does not mean optimal. Nor, Mr Phelps has written, does it mean “a pristine element of nature not susceptible to intervention by man.” Natural simply means impervious to central bankers' efforts to change it, however much money they print.
“自然”并非意味着最佳。菲尔普斯撰文称，“自然”一样也不意味着“本真的自然元素不易受人的干与”。“自然”只不过意味着中央银行家企图改变它的一切尽力都是徒劳，哪怕印再多的钞票也都无济于事。
（5）Economists, including some of his own students, commonly take this natural rate to be slow-moving, if not constant, and devote a great deal of effort to estimating it. Mr Phelps, by contrast, has been more anxious to explain its fluctuations, and to recommend measures to lower it. His book “Structural Slumps”, published in 1994, is an ambitious attempt to provide a general theory of how the natural rate of unemployment evolves. Some of the factors that he considered important—unemployment benefits or payroll taxes, for example—are widely accepted parts of the story. Others are more idiosyncratic[8]. He and his French collaborator, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, have, for example, blamed Europe's mounting unemployment in the 1980s in part on Ronald Reagan's budget deficits, which were expansionary at home, but squeezed employment in the rest of the world.
包括菲尔普斯的一些学生在内的经济学家们普遍以为这种自然失业率变更缓慢或维持不变，并投入了相当大的精力对其进行估测。相较之下，菲尔普斯则更热衷于分析它的波动情形，从而提出使之降低的方式。他在自己1994年出版的《结构性萧条》一书中就尝试提
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066经济学家读译参考之六十六天生我才必有效宏观经济学之父获诺奖
