陈平：中国为什么也要重视皮克提

【法国经济学家托马斯·皮克提的著作《二十一世纪资本论》在世界引起轩然大波的同时，也引发了学界的激烈讨论。本文为知名经济学家陈平教授对该书进行系列评论的第一篇。原文由观察者网供稿，刊载于6月30日美国《赫芬顿邮报》旗下的《世界邮报》（World Post）。以下为中文译文。】

自金融危机席卷全球经济至今，已过去了六年。2014年，法国经济学家托马斯·皮克提的畅销作品《21世纪资本论》，给在大衰退中陷于停滞的西方世界带去了新一轮骚动，引发了一场“皮克提恐慌”。

皮克提的书揭露了资本主义三百年来的总趋势——贫富差距的扩大——犹如《共产党宣言》的开头“一个幽灵在西方游荡”。不过这次的幽灵，不是共产主义，而是对空想资本主义弊病的深刻反思。

皮克提关注的问题与中国息息相关：从西方资本主义国家舶来的新自由主义经济模式已使中国国内不平等现象有加重趋势。

本文英文发表于《赫芬顿邮报》旗下的《世界邮报》

皮克提批评西方媒体把严肃的经济科学研究政治化，已经不是第一次了。本文愿意从经济学和历史观察的角度，来分析皮克提的新资本论。因为该书讨论的议题也涉及中国的不平等增长。

皮克提批评的新古典经济学理论，例如库茨涅茨（Kuznets）收入不平等的钟形曲线，和索罗（Solow）的外生增长论，正是中国新自由主义经济学家鼓吹经济自由化，攻击中国独立自主的产业政策，主张放弃中国经济模式，转向英美模式的主要理论依据。所以，皮克提对西方主流经济学的反思，触及中国国内关于坚持中国道路还是仿效英美模式的敏感争论，关乎中国下一阶段的“结构性改革”的方向。

中国应重视皮克提的三大原因

中国国内许多经济学者追随美国主流的“教科书经济学”。这次，法国非主流经济学家教训英美主流经济学派，可谓“登泰山而小天下”。中国应该重视皮克提的观点，原因有三：

第一，皮克提认为要研究西方发达资本主义经济体不平等现象的历史趋势，应以法国、而非英美为参照系。1688年的英国光荣革命并不彻底，至今贵族精英的地位仍然稳固。缺少彻底资本主义革命的洗牌，英国原始财富的继承并未中断，所以不具有代表性。美国作为一个个例则更为特殊。美国独立前夕，全国人口只有300万，国土面积仅80万平方公里——如今美国已成为一个拥有3亿人口、900多万平方公里国土的洲级大国。自然，随着人口与领土的巨幅扩张，美国的贫富差距已在某种程度上被中和了。

法国1789年大革命时人口约3000万，300年后只增长了一倍，增长幅度类似欧洲大部分国家。至关重要的是，法国大革命废除了一切特权的继承，“法律面前人人平等”。

如果趋势表明，连法国的贫富差距也在不断增长，那么其经济学含义就更为深刻：即使法律平等，也不能保证资本主义社会的经济平等。这是皮克提经验观察的革命性发现，它对在世界经济研究中以英美模式为规范的做法提出了严肃的挑战。

第二，亚当·斯密的《国富论》没有对国家财富给出测量方法。皮克提分析不平等的趋势，没有采用含义不明的基尼系数，而是把马克思收入分配的资本与劳动的两分法数据化，他揭示出一个怵目惊心真相：在整个资本主义历史中，资本收益一直远超劳动收益。这个结论粉碎了新古典经济学的“市场经济自动达到一般均衡”和“最优分配”的神话。在当代资本结构分析中，皮克提排除了政府债务，因为国内居民购买的政府公债，其资产净值为零。皮克提把国家资本明确定义为四项资本之和：农地，房产，其他国内产业资本，和外国资本的净值。然后分别考察其价值的历史演变。

奇怪的是，中国的新自由主义经济学者们似乎并未汲取金融危机的教训。他们不顾美国虚拟经济挤出实体经济的事实，否认西方缺乏严格监管的金融市场是制造贫富分化的罪魁祸首，还在用华尔街过去的致富童话来为金融投机辩护，在全球金融灾难面前继续宣扬自由市场如何“藏富于民”。

与这些新自由主义经济学者的逻辑相反，皮克提发现：即使有完备的法制体系，西方发达国家的大部分财富依然集中于最富的1%人口之手；而只讲私有产权，没有累进所得税和财产税的印度和俄国，更是将国家财富集中于少数大家族和寡头手中。

第三，皮克提用西方发达国家，主要是法国和英国，18世纪工业革命以来（1700-2012），收入、资本、人口、增长率等历史数据，加上德国、美国、加拿大、日本和其他发达国家，加上中国、印度等发展中国家的经验数据。皮克提分析收入结构中劳动和资本的分成比例，发现了“不平等的结构”。作者对21世纪不平等的全球演化的原因，也做了细致的分析，包括英法的公债，欧洲的财产税，中国的资本扩张，美国的移民改革，多国贸易保护，债务管理，社会资本积累，和自然资本恶化等等。他的实证研究全面否定了英美主导的新古典经济学的收入分配理论。各国数据明确显示，市场经济发展的结果是增加而非减少贫富差距。

皮克提的研究证明，美国诺奖经济学家库茨涅茨依据美国历史数据发现的钟形曲线（也称为倒U 形曲线，声称美国技术进步的过程中，贫富差距会先增加后减少，所以政府可以容忍一时的不平等扩大，而无需政治干预），不是世界各国的普遍规律！换言之，他驳斥了通过市场完善（或称“完美市场”）解决收入分配公平问题的概念。

皮克提具体分析了索罗的外生增长论为何没有导致世界增长率的趋同和贫富差距的缩小；还指出内生增长论者所鼓吹的“人力资本”积累使教育成为巩固特权的工具，而非摆脱贫困的阶梯。

皮克提对中国的意义

皮克提对库茨涅茨和索罗理论的批评，对中国当前的经济转型具有重大的理论意义。批评中国经济是“粗放增长”的经济学家，轻浮地将东亚经济奇迹完全归结为高储蓄高投资的结果，忽略掉所有因国家干预政策而产生的实质性技术进步。

遵循索罗的内生增长论，一些声名显赫的中国经济学者们主张中国经济结构调整的方向是劳动力和土地等“要素市场”的自由化、去监管化，绝对遵循市场供需原则。

我曾经向一位笃信完美市场的经济学家请教：在西方发达国家，有什么要素市场没有被“扭曲”？显而易见，并不存在这样的国家。在西方，工作许可和移民限制扭曲劳动力市场，最低工资法扭曲劳动力价格，土地用途分区扭曲土地市场，基准利率和税收政策扭曲资本市场，放任美国金融寡头扭曲大宗商品市场，军事行动和海洋霸权扭曲汇率市场和资本流向，如此等等。

在这个全球竞争和地区性竞争日趋激烈的时代，哪有空想资本主义理想中的完美市场？然而，罔顾现实的西方经济学教科书勾画出一幅完美的幻景，中国经济学者们还如饥似渴地期望从中吸收养分。

在大国博弈中，他们不问如何利用市场规则和策略来维护中国的利益，而建议打造一个去监管化的公平擂台，以为这就是市场化，并期待市场会自动选优汰劣，实现人类共同繁荣。

可惜，这种空想资本主义的美梦，在西方殖民史和经济史上从来都不存在。笔者的朋友，诺奖经济学家斯蒂格利茨常常告诫我：“照美国做的做，别照美国说的做”——这才是西方高人的肺腑之言。

自由市场将把发展带往何方？

正如笔者在《经济复杂性和均衡幻梦》一书所批评的 ，索罗把技术进步描写为随机冲击的积累，而非小波模式的新陈代谢，预言世界各国的经济发展会趋同，完全违背历史的事实。

受新自由主义意识形态的束缚，索罗的外生增长理论根植于增长要素的市场化，他忽略了干预型产业政策和技术政策起到的作用。而历史事实告诉我们，国家政策而非自由市场，对技术进步和奠定经济增长基础起到了关键作用。

在事实面前，新自由主义的说辞显然站不住脚。

美国的航天工程、互联网、GPS卫星和导航系统、全球海军基地和信息监视网络，是私人产权和和自由市场随机创造的吗？它们都是美国政府资助的结果。

离开中国前三十年建立的独立自主的科技和工业体系，中国后三十年产业的迅速升级能成功吗？

为什么二战后早就建立私有产权和议会民主制的亚洲大国印度、土耳其、和菲律宾，没有一个有能力发展航天、卫星、高铁、计算机等现代化工业，摆脱对西方的依赖？

第四，皮克提观察到历史上只有两个时期收入不平等有所下降。一是19世纪70年代之后，二是从二战之后，直到20世纪70年代。从20世纪70年代开始，不平等的程度再度恶化。总的历史趋势是资本收益率为经济增长率的几倍。

这对我们有何启示？收入分配改善的原因不是经济的内生机制，而是政治的外来干预，包括战争、革命、和发展中国家的独立运动，导致发达国家资产的大幅缩水；政府经济干预包括房租管制、国有化、证券交易和资本流动的监管等等，都会影响市场的资产价格。

新古典经济学资产定价理论描写的自由经济和有效市场，完全是数理经济学的乌托邦，和真实资本主义没有关系。皮克提的发现对中国经济学界和媒体上泛滥的新自由主义思潮，是一个严重的打击。

中国如不留意皮克提的非主流经济学，可能在前进的道路上遭遇严重挫折。只有坚持产业技术独立自主、坚持混合型经济模式，中国才能在走向繁荣的道路上取得更大程度上的、具有社会主义特色的平等。

（观察者网杨晗轶 / 译  请翻页查看英文原文）

Reading Piketty in Peking: The Case Against Capitalist Inequality in Communist China

By:Ping Chen

It has been six years since the financial crisis engulfed the global economy. In 2014, a bestselling book -- French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century -- brings yet another round of agitation to the stagnant West that some have called the “Piketty panic.”

Mr. Piketty’s book reveals a 300-year-old macro trend of capitalism -- the widening gap of inequality -- that reminds one of the first line of The Communist Manifesto about a spectre haunting the West. This time the spectre may not be communism per se, but nonetheless a deep appreciation of the flaws of utopian capitalism.

Piketty’s concerns are also relevant to the growing inequality in China that has resulted from adopting the neo-liberal capitalist model from the West.

Piketty criticizes neoclassical economic theories, such as Simon Kuznets’ inverted U curve of income inequality and Robert Solow’s exogenous growth theory, which are the very foundation of the campaign by Chinese neoliberal economists against China’s independent industrial policies and a Chinese economic model in favor of the Anglo-Saxon model. Hence, Piketty’s reflection on mainstream Western economics indirectly treads a delicate ground in China. It fits right into the current raging debate over which path China’s reformers should take in the next stage of “structural reform.”

THREE REASONS CHINA SHOULD LISTEN

Many Chinese economists follow the mainstream doctrines of textbook economics from the United States. This time, ironically, a non-mainstream French economist lectures mainstream Anglo-Saxons. There are three reasons China should listen.

First, Piketty suggests that in order to study the historical trend of inequality in advanced Western economies, France instead of Britain or the United States, is a more appropriate benchmark country. English aristocracy has remained intact since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The absence of a thorough capitalist revolution and the unbroken lineage of wealth thus make England an unrepresentative case in the study of inequality.

The U.S. case is one of a kind. By the eve of its independence, the U.S. only had a population of 3 million and an area of 800 thousand square kilometers. Now the U.S. population is near 300 million -- a continent of 9 million square kilometers. Naturally, as the country expanded massively in population and territory, the effects of inequality were to some extent neutralized.

In 1789, the French population was around 30 million; 300 years later, the figure had only doubled -- a growth pattern commonly observed in many other European nations. Most crucially, the French Revolution had brought all inherited prerogatives to nought, and established the principle of égalité devant la loi(equality before the law).

If even here the trend shows the French wealth gap continuously widening, the implication for economics are profound: even equality before the law could not safeguard economic equality in capitalist societies. This is the revolutionary finding of Piketty’s empirical analysis, and it poses a great challenge to the Anglo-Saxon model as the normative model in assessing world economies.

Secondly, Adam Smith did not specify any means to measure national wealth in The Wealth of Nations. In Piketty’s analysis of the inequality trend, instead of employing the dubious Gini coefficient, he quantifies the Marxian dichotomy between capital and labor in income distribution, and thereby reveals a shocking truth: throughout the history of capitalism, capital gains has always exceeded by far labor gains. This shatters the myth of “market general equilibrium” and “optimal income distribution” theory of neoclassical economics.

Piketty excludes governmental debts from the capital structure, because treasury bills purchased domestically have zero net value. He defines the composition of national capital as the sum of farmland, housing, other domestic capital, and net foreign capital; and then he looks into the historical evolution of their values respectively.

Oddly, Chinese neoliberal economists did not learn from the financial crash. Turning a blind eye to the American real sector squeezed out by the financial sector, they are still in denial that the poorly regulated financial market has been the main culprit in creating an ever larger wealth gap. They continue to defend speculation with old fairy tales from the Wall Street, and advocate the idea that a free market could still “leave wealth with the people” in the face of the global financial calamity.

In direct opposition to their logic, Piketty finds that even with the proper rule of law in place, the most affluent 1 percent in the West still gets the lion’s share of wealth; and in countries without progressive income tax and property tax, such as India and Russia, national wealth is highly concentrated within a small circle of clans and business magnates.

Thirdly, Piketty employs an impressive range of historical data such as income, capital, population and growth rate, etc. that date back to the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. He also investigates the causes of global evolution of inequality in the 21st century, including public debts in France and Britain, property tax in Europe, capital expansion in China, immigration reform in the U.S., multinational trade protection, debt management, social capital accumulation and the degeneration of natural capital.

Piketty’s empirical study negates the income distribution theory of neoclassical economics dominated by the Anglo-Saxon school and shows that the development of the market economy has exacerbated -- instead of reduced -- inequality.

This refutes Simon Kuznets’ bell curve, also known as Kuznets’ inverted U curve, which claims to show that as technology progresses, the income inequality gap will first widen but eventually narrow -- and thus government should wait for inequality to run its course without intervening. In other words, Piketty’s study undermines the idea that a “perfect market” will ensure fairness in income distribution.

Piketty also looks into why Robert Solow’s exogenous growth theory has failed to lead the world’s economic growth to convergence and narrow the gap between rich and poor. He also shows how “human capital,” the favorite term of endogenous, or internal growth, theorists has turned education into a tool to entrench privileges instead of a ladder out of poverty.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR CHINA

Piketty’s criticism of Kuznets and Solow bears significance for China’s present economic transition. Those who dismiss China’s growth as “extensive” frivolously attribute the economic success of East Asia solely to high rates of savings and investments, ignoring substantive advancement in technology due to state interventionist policies.

Following Solow, some prominent Chinese economists advocate structural reform in the direction of liberalizing the “factor markets “such as labor and land to free them from any regulation and subject them only to the unfettered law of supply and demand. This will supposedly lead greater prosperity and equality because lack of state controls will let the market create wealth unhindered.

I once consulted a strong believer in perfect market son the existence (if any) of an undistorted factor market in advanced Western economies. It could not be more obvious that such a thing doesn’t exist. In the West, work permits and immigration rules distort the labor market; minimum wage laws distort the price of labor land-use zoning distorts the land market; benchmark interest rate and tax policies distort the capital market. America’s laissez-faire policy on financial oligarchs distorts the commodities market. Military actions, including dominance of the seas, by Western powers distort foreign exchange markets and capital flows. One could go on.

In an era characterized by intense global and regional competition, where can one possibly find this perfect market idealized by utopian capitalism? Yet, Western economics textbooks enthusiastically digested by mainstream Chinese economists paint just such a rosy picture despite the reality.

Instead of asking how to utilize market rules and strategies to defend China’s interests in the game of big powers, they recommend building a deregulated arena for “fair market competition” hoping that the invisible hand will do the rest of the job and eventually achieve prosperity.

Sadly, throughout the colonial history of the West and even the entire history of economics, this utopian capitalist fantasy never had any semblance to the real world. My friend, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, often advises me “do what Americans do, don’t do what Americans say”-- a sincere remark from one of the greatest Western economists.

WHERE DID A FREE MARKET EVER LEAD TO DEVELOPMENT?

As I have commented in my book, Solow depicted technological advancement as a cumulative process of random shocks, instead of a metabolic process with a wavelet pattern, and predicted that all nations would move along a convergent path in which disparity in development would eventually disappear.

Because of its neoliberal ideology, Solow’s exogenous growth theory rooted in the idea of marketizing factors of growth, ignored the role of interventionist industrial and technological policies. Yet, reality shows that state policies, not free markets, have been critical to unleashing technological advance and building the foundations for growth.

This reality raises a number of doubts about neoliberal claims.

Does private ownership and free market have anything to do with America’s aeronautical projects, Internet, GPS system, global presence of the U.S. Navy, and the extensive information-monitoring network? All were initially funded by the state.

Without its independent scientific and industrial systems -- a solid foundation laid in the first three decades (1949-1978) of the People’s Republic -- could China’s rapid industrial upgrading have taken place at all?

Why have emerging powers such as India, Turkey, and the Philippines -- all countries that established private ownership and parliamentary governments -- not been able to cut their economic dependence on the West and develop their own modern industries, build their own spacecraft, satellites, high-speed rail and information systems?

Fourthly, according to Piketty’s observation, there were but two periods in history during which inequality in income distribution had improved. The first time in the 1870s, and the second period was from the end of World War II to 1970s -- soon afterwards inequality had worsened again. The overall historical trend is that the rate of return on capital has almost always been several times the rate of economic growth.

What is the lesson here? It is that no market mechanism has ever substantively improved income distribution; the adjusting force came from political intervention in the form of war, revolution or independence movements which shrunk the size of total assets in developed countries. Income distribution also only occurred as a result of economic interventions such as rent control, state ownership, regulations on securities exchange and capital flow measures that impact asset prices in the market.

The free economy and efficient market hypothesized in neoclassical economics are nothing more than a hypothetical utopia of mathematical economics; they have nothing to do with real world capitalism. Piketty’s discovery delivers a heavy blow to China’s neoliberal camp in academia and media.

It would be a big mistake for China not to heed Piketty’s skewering of mainstream Western economics as it charts its own path forward. Only a hybrid model that mixes the state and the market along with technological independence will enable China not only to prosper but also to build the socialist aspect of greater equality.