蘋論：貧富差距有解方嗎
貧富差距是全球化後許多國家的共同矛盾，不但貧者越貧、富者越富，且貧富世襲。艾倫狄波頓指出，歷史上對貧窮有3種頗具安慰效果的理路：1、貧窮錯不在自己，且窮人也是社會上最有用的人。2、地位低落不代表道德低落，反而是富人上天堂有如駱駝穿針孔。3、富人罪惡而腐敗，財富都由剝削窮人而來。中國還有一種窮人論述是西方沒有的，就是窮要窮得有骨氣，別像富人那樣軟骨沒尊嚴。
18世紀出現另外3種令人焦慮的理路：1、富人才有用，不是窮人。因富人的消費與投資為其他人提供工作機會，讓最弱勢的人得以生存。所以富人越是貪心，越能促進眾人的福祉。2、地位的高低確實帶有道德的指涉，認為世俗地位可反映個人價值，金錢因此帶有道德性質，財富足以代表品格的高尚程度。3、窮人罪惡而腐敗，其貧窮乃因愚蠢而來，是社會達爾文主義的核心觀點。
很顯然中國文化是反富人的，認為富人靠掠奪窮人和社會資源而致富，因此讚揚劫富濟貧的英雄和政策。英國則相反，鼓勵並保障富人的權益與機會，讓富人投資以促進整體的繁榮。
法國學者皮凱提的研究認為，政府應大幅提高富人稅，以分配給窮人，拉近貧富差距；為對付全球化富人資金外逃的現象，還主張各國簽約共同課徵富人稅，讓富人資金無處可逃。
18世紀出現另外3種令人焦慮的理路：1、富人才有用，不是窮人。因富人的消費與投資為其他人提供工作機會，讓最弱勢的人得以生存。所以富人越是貪心，越能促進眾人的福祉。2、地位的高低確實帶有道德的指涉，認為世俗地位可反映個人價值，金錢因此帶有道德性質，財富足以代表品格的高尚程度。3、窮人罪惡而腐敗，其貧窮乃因愚蠢而來，是社會達爾文主義的核心觀點。
很顯然中國文化是反富人的，認為富人靠掠奪窮人和社會資源而致富，因此讚揚劫富濟貧的英雄和政策。英國則相反，鼓勵並保障富人的權益與機會，讓富人投資以促進整體的繁榮。
法國學者皮凱提的研究認為，政府應大幅提高富人稅，以分配給窮人，拉近貧富差距；為對付全球化富人資金外逃的現象，還主張各國簽約共同課徵富人稅，讓富人資金無處可逃。
政府貪污吞噬稅負
為達到分配正義的目標，開徵富人稅並無不對，但有3項考慮須注意：1、政府不會比市場聰明。2、台灣政府通常沒有能力對財富做出有效的分配。3、台灣政府的浪費加上貪污，徵越多稅，浪費越多。對政府的沒信心是我們反對多課稅的原因。
Money is like muck - not good unless spread. (Francis Bacon, Essays XV, 1625) 論謀叛與變亂 Of Seditions and Troubles最要者，要妥籌良策，使國內的珍寶錢財物勿入於少數人之手，如不然者，一個國家可以有很大的財富而仍不免於饑餓也。金錢好似肥料，如不普及便無好處。要使它普及，主要就在禁止或嚴厲約束那些貪饞的生意，如高利貸、壟斷、廣大的牧場，以及類此的種種。
Above all things, good policy is to be used that the treasure and moneys in a state be not gathered into few hands. For otherwise a state may have a great stock, and yet starve. And money is like muck, not good except it be spread. This is done chiefly by suppressing or at least keeping a strait hand upon the devouring trades of usury, ingrossing 9 great pasturages, and the like.
http://www.bartleby.com/3/1/15.html
培根團說文集，水天同譯，北京：商務，2003
2014年12月23日 07:54 AM
房價上漲是不平等的一大來源
近日，我描述了計算現代經濟體資本的兩種方式：我們可以估算實物資產的價值，或者我們可以統計家庭財富的總值。兩種方式得到的總值應該大致相當，但不會完全一樣。托馬斯•皮凱蒂(Thomas Piketty)被廣泛引用的著作主要是談實物資產的價值。
即使是在現代，實物資產價值的可用數據也不是很精準。我們非常清楚對各類資產的當前投資狀況，包括廠房和機器、車輛、辦公室、商店和倉庫、道路和線網，但我們不瞭解這些資產的當前價值。
國民賬戶中這些資產的數據主要是通過“永續盤存法”來估算的。採用這種方法需要扣除每年的折舊，並將新的投資加入到現有的總數中。計算出來的結果就作為下一年計算的初始值。可以類比西班牙釀酒商採用的“索雷拉”制酒法，也就是從酒桶中抽出一部分成熟的雪莉酒，然後以當年的新酒替換。
這種計算方法對有關折舊的假設和資本品的價格十分敏感。更重要的是，如果有人問“倫敦地鐵(London Underground)的價值是多少？”，我們永遠也無法確定他到底想衡量什麽的價值。
但是，即使有這些需要註意的問題，我們依然可以估算英法等國實物資產在長期內的發展，就像皮凱蒂教授所做的那樣。因為這些國家有記錄詳實的經濟史。
兩個世紀以前，農業地產是資本的主要組成部分，而對這類地產的繼承所有制是決定財富（及其不平等）的首要因素。但是，現在農業在總產出中占的比例小得多，而英法兩國農場的價值因為在北美和世界其他地方開闢的新領地而下降。豪華古宅現在是負債，而非資產，擁有這些古宅的當代“公爵”們靠給參觀者供應茶水來維持收支平衡。
但是，即使有這些需要註意的問題，我們依然可以估算英法等國實物資產在長期內的發展，就像皮凱蒂教授所做的那樣。因為這些國家有記錄詳實的經濟史。
兩個世紀以前，農業地產是資本的主要組成部分，而對這類地產的繼承所有制是決定財富（及其不平等）的首要因素。但是，現在農業在總產出中占的比例小得多，而英法兩國農場的價值因為在北美和世界其他地方開闢的新領地而下降。豪華古宅現在是負債，而非資產，擁有這些古宅的當代“公爵”們靠給參觀者供應茶水來維持收支平衡。
這些參觀者是資本的新主人。在英國和法國，實物資產超過一半的價值來自住宅地產。
大約60%到70%的房屋由房主自住，以價值計，這類房屋的占比更高。就算扣除了約占房產價值三分之一的未償付抵押貸款，房主自住的房屋也是個人財富中最大的組成部分。
因此，“資本又回來了”現象背後的主要因素是城市土地的增值。這種解釋和皮凱蒂教授的主張大相徑庭。他認為，資本的增長及其分配的不平等，背後的驅動因素是無可避免的歷史趨勢，即資本回報率超過基本經濟增長率（這導致最富有的人能無限地積累資本）。
房產財富有兩種形式：居住自有房屋產生的回報，以及穩定攀升的房產價值。房主自住房屋的回報無法積累，而是以居住房屋的形式每年發生消耗。然而，房價上升對財富分配有顯著影響，尤其反映在代際傳遞不平等方面。
今天的年輕人從未來房價上漲中獲益的能力，很大程度上取決於他們的父母是否能將過去房價上漲的收益傳遞給他們。但與“占領華爾街”(Occupy Wall Street)的人們，或者購買皮凱蒂著作的讀者擔憂的不平等相比，這種不公平在性質和成因上存在差異。
房屋凈值和養老金權益的增值，在對財富進行更廣泛的分配方面發揮了很大作用，但它們在減少不平等方面的效果就不敢恭維了。
譯者/許雯佳
3 Business Best-Sellers Show Inequality Is Now The Hot Topic
Best-selling business books typically tell you how to get rich — either by becoming a better worker or investor, or perhaps by learning the secrets of successful entrepreneurs.
And in 2014, readers could find plenty of books promoting pluck and hard work, such as MONEY Master the Game and The Innovators.
But three books broke the pattern, generating headlines and big sales by focusing on unfair aspects of wealth creation.
A decade ago, unfairness "was an underground topic; no one cared about it," says Branko Milanovic, a leading scholar on income inequality at City University of New York.
But since the 2008 financial crisis, "that has definitely been changing," he says. Writers now want to explore income inequality and economic unfairness. "It is such a big wave; it's not going away," he says.
These books rode that wave:
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
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Hardcover, 685 pages
This magnum opus, chosen by the Financial Times as the best business book of the year, documents growing concentrations of wealth over time.Filling nearly 700 pages, Piketty uses both quantitative economic history and literature to track and illustrate the accumulation of capital over time.Armed with centuries' worth of data drawn from 20 countries, Piketty says returns on capital will always exceed rates of overall growth. The result is that wealthy investors get disproportionately richer than the average workers whose efforts create goods, foods and services.Only government policies, such as heavy taxation of wealth, can help redistribute income in ways that allow for a fairer sharing of the economy's overall growth and rewards, he argues.
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
•
Hardcover, 498 pages
Baptist's book narrows the focus from global wealth creation to America's rapid economic rise in the late 18th and 19th centuries.A stinging indictment of slavery, The Half Has Never Been Told argues that U.S. capitalism flourished in the 19th century largely because Southern enslavers and Northern bankers were able to turn stolen labor into massive profits.Many Americans believe capitalism flourished on U.S. soil because of positive factors, such as technological innovation, high literacy rates, natural resources, strong contract law and so forth. But Baptist says the fundamental advantage was that Southern slave labor camps, known as plantations, were highly productive and profitable.Enslavers used improvements in transportation and the opening of new markets to produce and sell more cotton, and thereby get richer from the labor they stole. That in turn allowed Northern bankers, manufacturers and merchants to further profit from the cotton industry.His book shows American economic "exceptionalism" in a very different light: Tales of Yankee ingenuity and all-American gumption may sound good, but it was the crack of whips and clank of chains that accompanied U.S. growth.
Flash Boys
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Hardcover, 274 pages
Lewis makes a case that the stock market was rigged to allow firms using hyper-speedy advantages to jump in front of "mom-and-pop" investors.In Flash Boys, he explores the ways Wall Street trading has changed from the days when an investor could "bid" on a stock to buy it, and a shareholder could "ask" for a price to sell. These traditional transactions would help companies raise money to expand their operations and hire workers.But then the game changed, becoming an unfair race among high-frequency traders using algorithms and new technologies to get milliseconds ahead of each other. Lewis argues this ferocious push to gain speedy advantages helped enrich a few on Wall Street, but did nothing for Main Street companies seeking long-term investors.
Each book sets out to reframe debates about how rich people get ahead. Each argues that a fundamental lack of fairness generated wealth inequality.
Alexander Field, a Santa Clara University economics professor who studies inequality, says that in the wake of the Great Recession, legions of academics and authors have started exploring questions about unfairness of process and inequality of outcomes.
"Tremendous wealth has been created for individuals, but has it contributed to a social gain?" Field says is the question being pondered.
He says the United States enjoyed "a golden age" of rising income equality in the decades following World War II — an era when good factory jobs and corporate expansions allowed average Americans to advance quickly. But in more recent years, factors such as increasing automation and globalization have given rise to more inequality, he says.
"That change creates fertile ground for Piketty and others who want to explore inequality," Field says.
Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist and scholar on inequality, agrees that readers can expect to see far more books on inequality in coming years.
Traditionally, "Americans were less interested in these issues than other people" in Europe and elsewhere, he says. But Deaton says that since 2008, he has seen "a huge surge of interest" in understanding why so many people are falling behind.
"A lot of people, including me, are worried that inequality will lead to bad things."
Best-selling business books typically tell you how to get rich — either by becoming a better worker or investor, or perhaps by learning the secrets of successful entrepreneurs. But in 2014, three books broke the pattern, generating headlines and big sales by focusing on unfair aspects of wealth creation.
3 Business Best-Sellers Show Inequality Is Now The Hot Topic
Many business books try to help you get rich quick. But three of 2014's biggest sellers focused on unfairness and inequality. Economists say expect more:...
NPR.ORG
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‘We need permanent revolution’: how Thomas Piketty became 2014’s most influential thinker
The French economist, whose book on inequality became a bestseller, tells Owen Jones about his extraordinary year – including his sudden rise to stardom and his battles to defends his ideas
Owen Jones
The Guardian, Monday 22 December 2014 17.01 GMT
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‘I’m still a little star’ … Thomas Piketty. Photograph: Agence VU/Camera Press/Franck FervilleFor a man with the unlikely description of “rock-star economist”, there is nothing rock’n’roll about Thomas Piketty’s cramped, book-lined office in a nondescript Parisian office block. By his feet are scattered various foreign translations of his publishing sensation, Capital in the Twenty-First Century: Greek, German, Japanese, and so on. There are 20 foreign editions already published, he tells me with evident pride, and another 37 to come. It must be rather surreal, I suggest: one doesn’t normally expect a French economist to become a global superstar. “Is there something particular with being French, or economists in general?” he jokes in a thick Parisian accent, effecting a faux wounded Gallic pride.
Piketty’s book is surely the most influential published by an economist in a generation, infuriating the right as much as it delighted an intellectually starved left. Using a mass of data, the book sought to expose why modern capitalism is an engine of exploding inequality: the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate at which the economy grows, he argues, and wealth is becoming ever more concentrated at the top of society.
More explosively, he proposes a global wealth tax as a check on this process, even though he has conceded this is “utopian”. He has been feted by political leaders across the western world – Ed Miliband among them – and beyond. I ask the boyish 43-year-old if his life has been thrown upside down. “Not so much. Sure, it was much more successful than I could expect – it was a gradual process, I had time to get accustomed ... it’s not like a huge shock from complete anonymity to complete stardom. I’m still a little star!”
Piketty has been engaged in his research for 15 years. At the height of the global financial crisis in 2009, newly elected US president Barack Obama used the graphs of the economist and his team, upsetting Republican thinktanks, which complained that “these French economists were influencing the politics in the US”.
Still, it is quite an ascent for a man from relatively humble origins in a north Paris suburb. His mother, from a strongly working-class background, became a primary school teacher; his father, a technician at a research institute, was from a rich “bourgeois” family, “but decided to leave his family, in many ways”. Both were fleetingly involved in French Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière, but “they left very quickly because in Lutte Ouvrière you can’t really have a life”.
It is a source of deep satisfaction that his mother completed reading his book, and proof for him that he has achieved the accessibility he clearly craves. “She never reads big academic books, but she read it, and I think she understood everything ... I think it shows that it’s not true that issues of income and wealth and inequality and capital are too complicated. I think economists try to pretend it’s too complicated, and use very complicated mathematical models just to look scientific and try to impress other people.”Thomas Piketty’s bestseller
Piketty’s 696-page book may be a bestseller, but are many people reading all of it? This is a sensitive question to put to any author, but I refer to analysis in the Wall Street Journal that – based on the fact that the five most highlighted passages on the book’s Kindle version are in the first 26 pages – an average of 2.4% of the book has been read. “It was a stupid statistic,” he says. “I think the people who have done that, they should read more books. I think it’s useful to read books, rather than doing this stupid statistic – this is really ridiculous. All that says is the introduction of my book is very good so people like it a lot and so they scribbled a lot on the introduction, but it doesn’t say anything about the fact that people have read it ... I think it’s really a readable book, it takes time to read, but I think it’s useful to read books – there’s nothing I can do for people who don’t read books, that’s beyond my power.”
The book came under ferocious fire from Financial Times journalist Chris Giles (although that critique was itself strongly criticised), who accused Piketty of errors. Did it ever make him nervous? “Not really, everything is online, everything has been online for ever, and I’m very happy they checked it,” he says, carefully sticking to a diplomatic line he has maintained since Giles’s opening salvo. But he can’t resist mocking the FT’s mixed messages. “People at the FT seem to be very confused. First, they say it’s full of mistakes and then they give me the best book of the year ... I responded to every point online. I think everyone who has looked at this has concluded that they made a lot of noise out of nothing at all. If it was full of mistakes, why did they give me their best book of the year?”
Piketty joined the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris in September 1989, soon after which two big events had a profound impact on his political development. The Berlin Wall fell, leading him to travel to Romania and across eastern Europe. “I was born too late to have any temptation with communism, or at least Soviet-type communism,” he explains. “Travelling in eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union, you clearly don’t want to defend a system that would have empty shops and a totalitarian regime and internal passports.” The end of the cold war, for him, had two key intellectual consequences. “It’s easier for my generation to reopen the issue of inequality dynamics under capitalism, because I take for granted that private property is part of the solution,” he suggests. But although he believes the fall of Stalinism was “very positive”, it resulted in “very big power to capital, and a sort of faith in property rights, and the idea that free-market competition is going to get us to the ideal world, that there’s no need for redistribution, there’s no need for public regulation”. In other words, Piketty is part of an intellectual backlash to the rampant free-market triumphalism that was unleashed after the fall of the Soviet bloc.
The other influence is perhaps more surprising: the first Gulf war that followed Ba’athist Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, which shocked him and his colleagues at the école. “It was a very strong event, because sometimes we say that governments cannot do much against tax havens, they’re too powerful. And suddenly we’re able to send 1 million troops 1,000km away from home to give back the oil to the emir of Kuwait. I was not sure this was the right redistribution of wealth.”
The west’s general relationship with the Middle East – “the most unequal region in the world”, he says – is one that troubles him, not least because it exposes grotesque inequalities. “Take Egypt: the total budget for education for 100 million people is 100 times less than the oil revenue for a few dozen people in Qatar. And then in London and in Paris we are happy to have these people buying football clubs and buying apartments, and then we are surprised that the youths in the Middle East don’t take very seriously our democracy and social justice.”
Not as radical as he is portrayed? 7. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
Although some on the right have assailed him as a dangerous red, I put it to him that he is not as radical as he is portrayed. He has written that he was “vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism”; he opposed the introduction of a 35-hour week in France, and the Wall Street Journal even called him “a neoliberal economist who sees many virtues in market forces but favours government redistribution to smooth out some of the market’s excesses.” He looks bemused. “I don’t live in the cold war. Some people maybe still live in the cold war, but this is their problem, not mine.” He unashamedly believes in “market forces”, arguing there is no “war of religion” between left and right in the modern era. But he defends his radicalism, arguing that a global wealth tax makes “property temporary, rather than permanent”, which he describes as “a permanent revolution, a very substantial change to the traditional capitalist system”.
Though Piketty supported François Hollande’s presidential bid in 2012, he is contemptuous of the French president. “He’s been a disaster,” is his unequivocal response, clarifying that he was “more against Sarkozy than [he] was for Hollande”. He assails the likes of France and Germany for their “selfish” attitude to austerity-ravaged southern Europe, and calls for the creation of a eurozone parliament based on majority decision-making – abolishing any veto – as the way forward. That would put a stop to beggar-thy-neighbour-type policies by countries such as Luxembourg that try to “steal the tax base of their neighbours”. That said, he rebukes what he describes as “the new extreme left movements” in Europe, specificallyPodemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece.
Culture looms large among influences. The 19th-century French authorHonoré de Balzac is among them. Piketty speaks of Vautrin, a “very cynical character” in one of Balzac’s novels, who asks an ambitious Parisian law student named Rastignac whether “he can get rich just by being a good student or whether he should marry someone with high wealth”. Another book that impressed him was Destiny and Desire, by the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, which was full of insights into the “transmission of wealth in Mexico”. Both fed Piketty’s passionate interest in the “relative importance of wealth and labour in life”. He goes to the cinema up to four times a week, and his favourite movie of the year wasSnowpiercer, a dystopian Korean film about a world destroyed by a botched attempt to curb global warming that leaves the remnants of humanity trapped on a train with the poor consigned to the very back, the very rich at the front.
There is an uncomfortable topic that I have to raise. Earlier this year, allegations surfaced that Piketty had perpetrated domestic violence against his former partner, who made a legal complaint in 2009. Piketty has spoken out before to confirm he was arrested but that no charges or prosecution followed. His response, however, at this interview, is perturbing. When I ask about the allegations, he clams up and begins to mumble. “I’ve not seen that, you’re the first person to tell me about it.” It has been in several newspapers, I say (he denied doing anything wrong at the time). “I’ve not seen it.” The claims are just all nonsense, then? “I have not seen it. I am sorry. You probably don’t read the same papers as I do!” A nervous laugh follows.
I move on, although the atmosphere has gone rather stale. Does he find his rock-star intellectual reputation demeaning or has he embraced it? “Well, if it gets more people to read my book, then I have no problem with the publicity,” is the curt reply. His aim is to allow people to make up their own minds. Explaining his success, he argues that “what I’m really contributing to in this book is a democratisation of economic knowledge”. His aim is not to “have breakfast or lunch with politicians” – though he does out of politeness, he says, with Ed Miliband or Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet – but to try to win over public opinion, which he thinks is a more effective means of pressuring the political elite. His book has already prompted governments to release more of their fiscal files to help further studies into the distribution of wealth.
Piketty fears the far right, including the surging National Front in France, which he describes as “very frightening”. “I am afraid that if you don’t find peaceful domestic solutions to our inequality and social problems, then it’s always tempting to find other people responsible for our problems.” The social contract is threatened by middle-class and poor people resenting paying more tax than multinational companies, which sometimes pay nothing. But he has optimism, too. He believes public opinion in Europe remains “strongly attached to certain forms of social models”. The continent remains more egalitarian than the US, and politics not quite as hijacked by Big Money.
But for Piketty, revolution is not the solution. “I think one problem in the past is that people put more energy into thinking about the day of the revolution itself than what they’d do in power,” he says. More historical shocks – like war and revolution – will undoubtedly come, he believes. “But at the same time, if I have chosen to write books rather than to be a guerrilla or something like that, it’s because I believe democratic discussion and drawing from history can get us to do better next time. A peaceful solution.”
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