A natural choice
天生我才必有用

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.

本周获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之中。当年，由于金融主管当局对货币供应控制过严，导致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 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获得此项殊荣，一部分却是因为他敢于突破前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起的通货膨胀呈反相关的关系。于是，经济学家们就匆匆断定，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。比方说，6％的失业率加上1％的通货膨胀率对于决策者而言是可以接受的，20世纪60年代初期的美国就普遍维持在这个水平。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％，从而加快经济发展。1967年的美国情况也大致如此。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况下，各公司稳定劳动者队伍的方法就是提高工资水平，然后再以抬高物价的方式转移这一成本，并对劳动者隐瞒了其实可以更高的工资。这样的话，决策者只需要采取欺骗手段就可以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。”总有一天劳动者会恍然大悟，并且会索取更高的工资来弥补日益增长的生活费用。只有通货膨胀水平始终高于他们对其不断上升的期望值，他们才可能上当受骗。

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 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，菲尔普斯曲线所描绘的稳定的平衡关系就成了一种危险的幻想。除非劳动者的期望得以满足，物价合情合理，而且他们不会再在受到蒙蔽的情况下出卖自己的劳动力，经济才会恢复平衡。不过可惜的是，平衡并不意味着充分就业。菲尔普斯认为，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。经济学家几乎如同信奉神灵一般地信奉这样一种观点，即市场终究是要出清的。有鉴于此，全球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这样的理论，不过他在其多数论著中还是坚持认为，失业必然会引起劳动者的恐惧，使得他们不得不对公司忠心耿耿，对工作兢兢业业，薪水要求也不会超过公司的承受能力。

“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”并不意味着最佳。菲尔普斯撰文称，“自然”同样也不意味着“本真的自然元素不易受人的干预”。“自然”只不过意味着中央银行家企图改变它的一切努力都是徒劳，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认为这种自然失业率变动缓慢或者保持不变，并投入了相当大的精力对其进行估测。相比之下，菲尔普斯则更热衷于分析它的波动情况，从而提出使之降低的方法。他在自己1994年出版的《结构性萧条》一书中就尝试提出过关于自然失业发展方式的一般性理论。书中包含的一些在他看来非常重要的因素，比如失业补助或工资所得税，如今都得到了广泛认可。其它因素则要特殊一些。例如，他和合著者法国人让－保罗·菲图西均认为，20世纪80年代欧洲居高不下的失业率部分应归咎于罗纳德·里根的预算赤字，后者虽仅是在美国国内不断扩大，却限制了世界其它地区的就业。

A few years ago David Warsh, an economic journalist, lamented that the glare of the Nobel prize left other equally deserving economists, such as Mr Phelps, languishing “in the half-lit penumbra[9] of the shortlist”. （6）This week, after an unaccountably long lag, professional acclaim for this bold, purposeful theorist finally converged on its natural rate.

几年前，经济新闻记者大卫·沃什悲叹诺贝尔奖的光环让其他一些同样应该获奖的经济学家如菲尔普斯“在候选人名单若明若暗的光影中渐渐黯淡了”。莫名奇妙地一拖再拖之后，经济学界对这位无畏且坚定的理论家所有的溢美之词终于汇集到他所提出的自然失业率之上。

[NOTES]1. trough n. 凹槽，波谷

2. exacerbate v. 恶化，加剧

3. laurel n. 桂冠，殊荣；月桂树

4. cotton on开始理解

5. dupe v. 欺骗，愚弄

6. moulder v.(molder)崩溃，腐朽，分裂

7. theodicy n. 神学论

8. idiosyncratic adj.特殊物质的，异质的

9. penumbra n. （日、月食）半影

责编:huangling  纠错