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  • 新镀金时代

    2007-12-30

    [2007.12.19]The new (improved) Gilded Age 新镀金时代

    Economics focus

    The new (improved) Gilded Age 新镀金时代
    Dec 19th 2007
    From The Economist print edition

    The very rich are not that different from you and me; or less different, perhaps, than they used to be 其实特别富有的人和你我的没有太大的差别，或者说也许差别比1904年时小了



    IN 1904 Willie Vanderbilt hit a thrilling 92.3 mph (147.7 kph) in his new German motorcar, smashing the land-speed record. His older brother's sprawling North Carolina manse, Biltmore, could accommodate up to 500 pounds of meat in its electrical refrigerators. In miserable contrast, the below-average Gilded Age American had to make do with a pair of shoes and a melting block of ice. If he could somehow save enough for an icebox, a day's wage would not have bought a pound of meat to put in it.
    那一年，范德比尔特开着他崭新的德国车，以92.3英里每小时（147.7千米每小时）的速度打破了陆地驾驶的最高纪录。他的哥哥在北卡罗来纳州建起了一座豪宅，他的电冰箱可以装下500磅的肉。可怜的是，与他们形成鲜明对比的下层镀金时代的美国人则只能一年四季穿一双鞋子，而用来储存食物的也只是不断融化大冰块，就算他好不容易攒够了买冰箱的钱，一天的工资也不够买一磅肉放进冰箱里。

    Paul Krugman, of Princeton University, has recently argued that contemporary America's widening income gap is ushering in a new age of invidious inequalities. But a peek at the numbers behind the numbers suggests that Mr Krugman has been misled: far from a new Gilded Age, America is experiencing a period of unprecedented material equality.
    普林斯顿大学的保罗.克鲁曼最近声称，美国当代日益扩大的收入差距宣告了恶性不公平的新时代的开始。但是看一看数字后面所隐藏的内容你就会发现，克鲁曼错了：美国正在经历前所未有的物质平等时代，而绝不是新的镀金时代。

    This is not to deny that income inequality is rising: it is. But measures of income inequality are misleading because an individual's income is, at best, a rough proxy for his or her real economic wellbeing. Because
    we can save, draw down savings, or run up debt, our income may tell us little about how we're faring.
    这并不否定收入不公正在增加：这是不争的事实。但是衡量够收入不公的方法却有失偏颇，因为一个人的收入应该从他的真实经济条件来看。因为我们可以存钱，也可以把存款全部花光，甚至还可以入不敷出一直到负债累累，我们的收入不能真正反应我们生活状况。

    Consumption surveys, which track what people actually spend, sketch a more lifelike portrait of the material quality of life. According to one 2006 study, by Dirk Krueger of the University of Pennsylvania and Fabrizio Perri of New York University, consumption inequality has barely budged for several decades, despite a sharp upswing in income inequality.
    纪录人们真正消费情况的消费调查才能比较生动真实地反映人们的物质生活质量。根据宾夕法尼亚大学的德克.克鲁格和纽约大学的法比吉奥.皮埃尔于2006年的一份调查显示，几十年来，尽管收入不公平迅速增长，人们的消费不公平并没有多大变化。

    But consumption numbers, too, conceal as much as they illuminate. They can record only that we have spent, but not the value—the pleasure or health—gained in the spending. A stable trend in nominal consumption inequality can mask a narrowing of real or“utility-adjusted” consumption inequality.
    但是消费数量虽然反映一些情况，也容易掩盖一些问题。他只能纪录我们消费的数额，但并不能反映我们在消费中所获得的愉悦，比如说健康所带来的愉悦。一直以来名义消费不公平掩盖了实际消费（效用调整后的消费）不公平。

    Indeed, according to happiness researchers, inequality in self-reported “life satisfaction” has been shrinking in wealthy market democracies, America included, suggesting that the quality of lives across the income scale are becoming more similar, not less.
    的确，根据幸福度调查员的报告，自评的“生活满意程度”在民主的，富裕的国家，（包括美国）的不平等状况显示，在一定收入范围内，生活质量越来越趋同。

    You can see this levelling at work in markets for transport and appliances. You no longer need be a Vanderbilt to own a refrigerator or a car. Refrigerators are now all but universal in America, even though refrigerator inequality continues to grow.
    我们发现，交通和家电市场状况也差不多。不用富有的像范德比尔特一样，你也能拥有电冰箱或者汽车。冰箱在美国几乎已经普及了，虽然高级的和普通的冰箱差距越来越大。

    The Sub-Zero PRO 48, which the manufacturer calls “a monument to food preservation”, costs about $11,000, compared with a paltry $350 for the IKEA Energisk B18 W. The lived difference, however, is rather smaller than that between having fresh meat and milk and having none. Similarly, more than 70% of Americans under the official poverty line own at least one car.
    Sub-Zero PRO 48型号冰箱的制造商把这款冰箱称为“食物储藏技术的里程碑”这款冰箱价值11000美元，而宜家所售的Energisk B18 W型冰箱仅仅需要350美元。现在的差距，比起从前有人又肉吃，有牛奶喝，有的人根本买不起的时候，算是缩小太多了。美国官方贫困线以下的人，有70%多拥有至少一辆车。

    And the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck. The vast spread of prices Illustration by Jac often distracts from a narrowing range of experience.
    和开车与徒步相比，开一辆二手现代伊兰特和一辆新美洲豹XJ的差距几乎难以察觉。价格上的巨大差异往往使人们忽略了其使用价值上是差不多的。

    Save money. Live better
    存的越多，国的越好

    This compression is not a thing of the past. To take one recent example, Jerry Hausman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ephraim Leibtag of the United States Department of Agriculture, show† that Wal-Mart's move into the grocery business has lowered food prices. Because the poorest spend the largest part of their budget on food, lower prices have benefited them most. The official statistics do not capture these gains.
    这个道理过去现在都适用。举一个最近的例子，马萨诸州技术学院的杰瑞.豪斯曼和美国农业部的以法莲.雷塔格调查显示，沃尔玛进军食品零售业后，食品价格在其带动下有所下降。因为最穷的人大部分钱都花在食品上，所以，他们是食品价格降低最大的受益者。但官方数据并没有把他们的受益计算在内。

    As a rule, when the prices of food, clothing and basic modern conveniences drop relative to the price of luxury goods, real consumption inequality drops. But the point is not that in America the relatively poor suffer no painful indignities, which would be absurd. It is that, over time, the everyday experience of consumption among the less fortunate has become in many ways more similar to that of their wealthier compatriots. A widescreen plasma television is lovely, but you do not need one to laugh at “Shrek”.
    通常说来，当食品，衣服以及现代生活用品价格相对于奢侈品价格下降时，实际消费不均程度也随之下降。问题是美国相对贫穷的人并没有在尊严上受到什么侮辱，实际上，他们的消费在很多方面和有钱人没什么两样。宽银幕等离子电视确实很气派，但是用来看动画片好像就没什么必要了。

    This compression is the predictable consequence of innovations in production and distribution that have improved the quality of goods at the lower range of prices faster than at the top. New technologies and
    knock-off fashions now spread down the price scale too fast to distinguish the rich from the aspiring forlong.
    这种差距的缩小很显然是产品创新的结果，也由于低价商品的质量提高的速度比高价商品快。新科技和时尚产品大幅度降价，速度之快让人难以分清哪些是有钱人，那些只是赶时髦的假贵族。

    This increasing equality in real consumption mirrors a dramatic narrowing of other inequalities between rich and poor, such as the inequalities in height, life expectancy and leisure. William Robert Fogel, a Nobel prize-winning economic historian, argues  that nominal measures of economic well-being often miss such huge changes in the conditions of life. “In every measure that we have bearing on the standard of living...the gains of the lower classes have been far greater than those experienced by the population as a whole,” Mr Fogel observes.
    实际消费的日益平均反映了穷人也富人之间其他方面差距的缩小，比如身高，寿命和休闲时间。历史经济学家，诺贝尔获得者威廉.罗伯特.福格尔认为，名义经济生活状况的衡量方法实际上忽略了生命中很多重要方面的变化。他说“用任何标准衡量生活质量，下层阶级的所受到的优待都比社会整体水平高很多。

    Some worrying inequalities, such as the access to a good education, may indeed be widening, arresting economic mobility for the least fortunate and exacerbating income-inequality trends. Yet even if you care about those aspects of income inequality, the idea can send misleading signals about the underlying trends in real consumption and the real quality of life. Contrary to Mr Krugman's implications, today's Gilded Age income gaps do not imply Gilded Age lifestyle gaps. On the contrary, those intrepid souls who make vast fortunes turning out ever higher-quality goods at ever lower prices widen the income gap while reducing the differences that matter most.
    有人担心有些不均（例如接受良好教育的机会）会影响最底层人群的经济流动性，加剧收入不均的趋势。就算你担心这些方面，这种想法还是会掩盖潜在的实际消费和实际生活质量状况。与克鲁曼所说的刚好相反，就算今天的收入差距可以算是又一个镀金时代，也不意味着人们的生活方式上的差距进入了又一个镀金时代。刚好相反，那些创造了巨大财富的企业大亨们无一不在以越来越低的价格生产越来越高品质的产品，虽然收入差距在扩大，但是生活中最重要的东西的差距，由于这些大老板的存在，却在逐渐缩小。

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    继续更新 2008-05-07

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