利维坦公司（Leviathan Inc）编辑本段回目录
LISTEN carefully, and you may detect a giant sucking sound across the rich world. In the 1990s this was the sound protectionists in the United States thought (wrongly) would accompany jobs disappearing to Mexico as a result of a free-trade deal. This time, too, there are big worries about jobs and growth, but the source of the noise is different, and real enough: it comes from the tentacles of the state, reaching into more and more areas of business in an effort to get the economy moving. It is the sound of Leviathan Inc.
侧耳聆听，你会听到从全世界的富裕国家传来了巨大吮吸声。上世纪九十年代，正是这种吮吸声让美国的贸易保护主义者们（错误的）认为，伴随着自由贸易的实施，美国人的工作机会将会随着这股声响溜到墨西哥去。一晃十多年过去了，虽然关于就业和发展的担忧依然存在，但是这一次不仅发声的源头变了，而且声响也更为真切：它来自于一个国家的庞大触手，为了获得经济发展，这些触手正在向越来越多的商业领域进行延伸。这些巨大的声响来自于巨兽公司（Leviathan Inc）。
Leviathan IncPoliticians are reviving the notion that intervening in individual industries and companies can drive growth and create jobs (see article). It is not just the usual suspects—although it is true that France, the land of Colbert, is busy taking stakes in toy manufacturers, video-sharing websites and fallen national champions. Elsewhere in Europe, from Berlin to Brussels, demand for industrial policy is back. Japan’s new government is responding to what it sees as the increasingly aggressive policies of foreign competitors by deepening the links between business and the state. In America Barack Obama, the effective owner of General Motors and a chunk of Wall Street, has turned his back on the laissez-faire approach of the past: a strategic-industries initiative is under way.
在政治家的推动下，关于对个别行业和公司实施干预会促进经济发展和改善就业环境的概念又再度流行起来。然而，概念已不仅仅是停留在纸面上的寻常猜测了，例如在孕育了柯尔贝尔（Colbert）重商主义的法兰西大地，政府就在忙于入股玩具制造业、视频分享网站以及摇摇欲坠的民族品牌。在欧洲的其他地区，从柏林到布鲁塞尔，对于产业政策的呼声又重新回归。日本的新政府也在通过深化商业与国家之间的联系对外国竞争者们作出回应，这些政策看起来似乎颇为激进。而在美国，巴拉克·奥巴马，这位通用汽车和华尔街财富的实质拥有者，亦被迫放弃了过去奉行的自由放任政策（laissez-faire），开始将战略性产业自主权牢牢握在手中。
Although an understandable panic over economic growth in the rich world explains much of the state’s new meddling in business, other forces are at work as well. After the finance and property bubbles some influential companies—such as EADS and Rolls-Royce in the aerospace industry—are pressing for policies that support manufacturing. Bail-outs and billions of stimulus spending, however justified at the time, got government back into the habit of intervention. The case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, America’s housing-finance giants, illustrates both the perils of state meddling (implicit state guarantees distorted the mortgage market with fatal consequences) and the difficulty of giving it up: having rescued the pair, the federal government lacks any plan to pull out.
发达国家对经济形势感到惊慌失措是可以理解的，这种情绪也解释了为什么国家要对商业实施新的干涉，但掺和在其中的并非只有政府一股势力。在金融和房地产泡沫化以后，一些有影响力的大企业——如航空和航天工业领域的欧洲宇航防务集团（EADS）和罗·罗公司（Rolls-Royce）——正在敦促政府出台相关政策，对制造业进行扶持。应急措施和数十亿美元的刺激方案尽管在当时被证实是合理的，但却把政府拖回到干涉的老路子上去了。美国房地产金融巨头房利美和房地美（Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac）的案例就活生生的证明了国家干涉（盲从式的国家干涉会扭曲抵押市场，并导致灾难性的后果）不仅具有危险性，而且像毒瘾一般难以戒除。在解救完两房以后，联邦政府对如何脱身也是一筹莫展。
And Western politicians cannot fail to be influenced by the success of emerging countries like Brazil, India and China, where a big role for the state in business seems to be working wonders. Nine of the world’s 30 largest listed firms are emerging-market companies that count the state as their dominant shareholder. In the 1980s, the last time industrial policy was in fashion, the West was in awe of Japan and its inexorable rise; now it is in awe of China and its state capitalism.
同时，西方的政客们也无法做到对巴西、印度和中国这样新兴国家的成功无动于衷，在这些国家中，政府在商业领域中所扮演的重要角色似乎正在不断创造奇迹。目前，世界上30个最大的上市公司中有9个是政府控股型的新兴国家公司。上一次产业政策风靡一时的上世纪八十年代，让西方国家感到敬畏的是不断崛起的日本；而现在，取代日本的则变成了中国和它推行的国家资本主义。
Déjà voodoo
似曾相识
Yet the overwhelming reason for China’s miracle is that the state released its stifling grip and opened the country to private enterprise and to the world. The likes of Li Shufu, who runs Geely, the car firm that has just bought Volvo (see article), are entrepreneurs, not bureaucrats. India’s wildly successful software and business-process-outsourcing industries blossomed not because of help from the government, but precisely because its Licence Raj did not understand these nascent fields well enough to choke them off. In Brazil, where it is often said that an activist industrial policy helps to explain why the economy has been thriving, a surging state-owned development bank, BNDES, is probably crowding out other sources of finance (see article). The likes of Petrobras (oil), Vale (mining) and Embraer (planes) were indeed created by the government. But they have all flourished because they were privatised, to a degree, and forced to compete with foreign firms in the 1990s. Part-privatisation and competition created in a short time what decades of industrial policy had failed to do.
中国经济之所以呈现奇迹般的发展，其最主要原因在于政府松开了原先令人窒息的禁锢，对私人企业和世界实行开放政策，但完全从国家政策方面解读似乎并不妥当，以刚刚收购沃尔沃的吉利为例，它的总裁李书福就是一位企业家，而并非是位官僚。而印度欣欣向荣的软件业和蓬勃发展的业务流程外包业也并非得益于政府的扶持，恰恰是因为所谓的牌照制度（Licence Raj）对这些新兴产业的不够了解，因而没有将它们扼杀在摇篮里。我们再将目光转到巴西，虽说激进的产业政策可以用来解释巴西经济的繁荣发展，但政府拥有的巴西开发银行（BNDES）很可能在排挤金融业的其他竞争对手。另外，一些大型企业如巴西石油（Petrobras）、淡水河谷（Vale）和巴西航空工业公司（Embraer）的确是政府创建的，从某种程度上看，这些公司的兴旺要得益于上世纪90年代的私有化改造，以及与外国公司之间的被迫竞争。部分私有化进程和竞争压力在短时间内实现了产业政策几十年都完成不了的跨越式发展。
In the rich world, meanwhile, the record shows, again and again, that industrial policy doesn’t work. The hall of infamy is filled with costly failures like Minitel (a dead-end French national communications network long since overtaken by the internet) and British Leyland (a nationalised car company). However many new justifications are invented for the government to pick winners, and coddle losers, it will remain a bad old idea. Thanks to globalisation and the rise of the information economy, new ideas move to market faster than ever before. No bureaucrat could have predicted the success of Nestlé’s Nespresso coffee-capsule system—just as none foresaw that utility vehicles, vacuum cleaners and tufted carpets (to cite examples noted by Charles Schultze, an American opponent of state planning) would have been some of America’s fastest-growing industries in the 1970s. Officials ignore the potential for innovation in consumer products or services and get seduced by the hype of voguish high-tech sectors.
同时，发达国家的发展记录一次又一次的显示，产业政策起不到什么实际效果，最臭名昭著且代价高昂的失败案例莫过于迷你网（Minitel：很早以前的法国国家通讯网络，最终被互联网取代）和英国利兰汽车公司（British Leyland）。尽管现在出现了很多新的辩护理由，如国家扶持强势产业保护弱势产业等，但这些观点并没有一点新意。多亏了全球化进程和资讯经济的快速发展，使得市场接受新观点的速度比以前快得多。官僚主义者根本无法预测到雀巢咖啡速溶胶囊系统（Nestlé’s Nespresso coffee-capsule system）的大获成功，就像上世纪70年代他们无法预测到多用途汽车、真空吸尘器和簇绒地毯的兴起一样。官僚们通常都会忽略消费品或服务业的潜在革新，却被时髦高科技产业的大肆宣传迷得神魂颠倒。
The universal race to create green jobs is the latest example. Led by China and America, support for green tech is rapidly becoming one of the biggest industrial-policy efforts ever. Spain, blinded by visions of a solar future, subsidised the industry so lavishly that in 2008 the country accounted for two-fifths of the world’s new solar-power installations by wattage. This week it slashed its subsidies, but still has a bill of billions.
为创造绿色就业机会而展开的全球性竞争就是最新的例证。在中国和美国的领导下，对于绿色科技的支持迅速成为规模空前的产业政策努力。被太阳能产业的未来前景照花了眼睛的西班牙，则使出了浑身解数对该产业进行补贴，以至于2008年全球新增太阳能的发电功率中，有2/5是西班牙人贡献的。本周，西班牙削减了它对太阳能行业的补贴规模，但剩下的补贴规模仍高达数十亿美元。
How to keep the beast at bay
困兽之术
Not all such money is wasted, of course. The internet and the microwave oven came out of government-led research; the stranger stuff that governments do can prove surprisingly successful. A few governments, such as America’s and Israel’s, have contributed usefully to the early development of venture-capital networks. Some advocates of industrial policy argue that the government, like a pharmaceutical company or a seed-capital firm, should simply increase the number of its bets in order to raise its hit rate. But that is a cavalier way to behave with taxpayers’ money. And the public funds have an odd habit of flowing towards politically connected projects.
当然，也不是所有的政府投资都付诸东流了。互联网和微波炉就是在政府主导下的研究成果；而政府一些奇奇怪怪的行为也可能会出人意料的大获成功。某些国家的政府，如美国和以色列，在风险投资网络的早期发展中就作出了不少贡献。一些产业政策的支持者们认为，政府应该向制药企业或种子资本（seed-capital ）公司学习，为了增加扶持成功率，只需要简单的加大赌注便可以了，但他们或许忘了，政府这种看似无畏的行为实际上是以纳税人的金钱来作为赌本。公共资金有一种奇怪的本能，即流向与政治关联的投资项目。
Fortunately, there are now some powerful constraints on governments’ ability to meddle. In an age of austerity they can ill afford to lavish money on extravagant industrial projects. And the European Union’s competition rules place some limits on the ability to do special favours for particular firms.
幸运的是，现在有了一些强有力的手段对政府的干预能力进行限制。在这样的经济紧缩时期，政府无力向一些造价昂贵的工业项目慷慨解囊；欧盟制定的竞争规则也使得政府对某些特殊公司的偏爱行为受到了一定限制。
That points to the first of three ideas that should guide a more sensible approach to securing the jobs of the future. Straightforward steps to improve the environment for business—less red tape, more flexible labour markets, simpler tax and bankruptcy regimes—will be more effective than handouts to favoured firms or sectors. Europeans ought to be seeking to strengthen the rules of their single market rather than pushing to dilute them; a long-overdue single European patent process would be a good start. Competition will do far more for jobs than coddling.
为了保障未来的就业机会，有三点需要注意的指导意见。第一条意见即上文所提到的，采取一些直接了当的措施去改善商业环境，如简化繁琐行政手续，塑造更为灵活的劳动力市场，税收和银行破产制度简单化，这些手段比对一些特权企业或部分进行施舍要管用得多。欧洲人现在应该做的就是去尽量强化单一市场规则，而不是去削弱；姗姗来迟的欧洲一体化专利过程就是一个很好的开始。对于提供就业机会来说，竞争的贡献可比溺爱要大得多。
Second, governments should invest in the infrastructure that supports innovation, from modernised electricity grids (a smarter way to help green energy) to basic research and university education. The current fashion for raising barriers to the inflows of talented researchers and entrepreneurs hardly helps. Third, rather than the failed policy of picking winners, governments should encourage winners to emerge by themselves, for example through the sort of incentive prizes that are growing increasingly popular (see article).
其次，政府应当对基础设施进行投资以支持创新，如电网的现代化改造（要实现绿色能源，这是更聪明的做法）和对基础研究和高等教育的重视，都是行之有效的投资方式。对富有才华的研究者和企业家的流入实施各种限制，这种时下兴起的做法对促进经济发展毫无用处。第三，对政府来说，与其去实施一些优胜劣汰的失败政策，还不如通过一些激励机制鼓励赢家们自主现身，而且这种做法也越来越流行。
None of this excites politicians as much as donning hard hats and handing out cash in front of the cameras. But the rich world has a clear choice: learn from the mistakes of the past, or else watch Leviathan Inc grow into a true monster.
比起以上列举的这些方法，假模假样的戴着安全帽在摄像机前分发现金似乎更能让政客们兴奋起来。但发达国家眼前只有华山一条路可选了：要么从过去的错误中吸取教训，要么眼睁睁的看着传说中的恶魔成长为一头真正的怪兽。
http://bbs.ecocn.org/viewthread.php?tid=39239
