Socialism VS Capitalism

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【每日必看】哈佛大學歷史學者精準解析陸經濟現狀! 經濟學大師書中"資本主義vs.社會主義" 提及中國這件事... 20240614

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3jMYA3y7XY&type=snipo

This is a time of uncertainty about capitalism and an apparent revival of its historic antithesis, socialism. And I thought what would be useful would be to connect our contemporary discussion to the work of this great man, Joseph Schumpeter.

Schumpeter was one of the more colorful economists of the 20th century. His private life was more like that of Mick Jagger than the average economist. He tried his hand at politics. I think a hundred years ago he was doing a rather bad job of being Austrian finance minister. He was a spectacularly unsuccessful businessman, which of course equipped him to be a professor of economics at Harvard.

And yet Schumpeter wrote one of the most influential texts on the subject that has ever been published. And it remains to this day almost as frequently cited as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which Dominic just referenced.

And I thought it would be useful to go back to Schumpeter's 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, and see what it could tell us about our own predicament a hundred years after Schumpeter was Austrian finance minister. It's a more readable book than other things Schumpeter wrote. But in fact, I was surprised at how readily I was able to reread it.

"Can capitalism survive?" Schumpeter asked. "No, I do not think it can."

"Can socialism work?" he asked later in the book. "Of course it can."

Now Schumpeter was not a fan of socialism. He was a political conservative and his views were not given with a light heart. If a doctor predicts that his patient will die presently, this doesn't mean that he desires it. One may hate socialism or at least look upon it with cool criticism and yet foresee its advent.

"Capitalism's strength," Schumpeter argued, "is creative destruction." And that I think is the phrase for which he's best known today. You'll often hear people use that phrase without realizing that Schumpeter first coined it.

But if it's disruptive and that disruption has a cost, it also tends, Schumpeter argued, and this is one of the most important insights in the book, towards monopoly and towards corporatism.

Capitalism, he argued, doesn't in fact thirst for unrestricted competition.

Moreover, Schumpeter argued, capitalism creates, educates, and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest, by which he meant intellectuals. This I think is one of the most shrewd observations in the book, that it's capitalist societies that seem to excel at producing socialist critics of capitalism, particularly in universities.

Finally, Schumpeter observes, socialism is politically irresistible to bureaucrats and to democratic politicians. Now this argument, it seems to me, resonates in a number of different ways today. And it's why it's worth rereading Schumpeter and reflecting on why he was a pessimist about capitalism back in 1942.

The idea that socialism would win persisted not only at Harvard but elsewhere, right the way through the Cold War. Some of you may have had Paul Samuelson's economics textbook inflicted on you at some point in your careers. It's a kind of holy text for American Keynesians. But what's extraordinary about this most influential of economics textbooks is what it says about the Soviet economy. And I quote, "The Soviet economy is proof that contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive." Samuelson incidentally was one of Schumpeter's Harvard pupils that Samuelson spent most of his career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. One Nobel Prize is regarded as an almost godlike figure in the history of American economics. And yet on this central question, he was completely wrong. And here's the chart that proves it. Because in edition after edition of the textbook from 1961 right the way down to the 1990s, Samuelson kept on predicting that the Soviet economy would overtake that of the United States in terms of gross national product. Look, here's the projection. Somewhere around about 1984 or maybe if things weren't less well the 1990s, the Soviet economy was going to be larger than that of the United States. Now, he adjusted these projections as they kept failing to come true. But he never abandoned the proposition that eventually the Soviet Union would catch up even if it wouldn't be until 2012.

Well, you now know with the benefit of hindsight in 2019 that this was massively, epically wrong. And so wrong that one wonders how on earth Samuelson's reputation has survived this massively bad call. But that's academic life, folks. Remember, you don't actually have to be right. You just have to be fashionable at the time.

Here's the real chart. Here's as best as Angus Madison could work it out, the best way of comparing United States and Soviet Union GDP from the late 1940s down to 1991 when the Soviet Union went out of business, if indeed business is the right word. The Soviet economy was never more than 44% of the US economy, even on a generous purchasing power parity adjusted basis. By the end, the Soviets' GDP was less than a third that of the United States.

Lord Griffiths and I were Thatcherites. He was an important figure in the Thatcherite era. I was a sort of spear-carrying young journalist, one of the very small number of academics at Oxford and Cambridge in those days who supported the Thatcher government. And we thought that we had won. 1989 seemed like the Annus Mirabilis when all the criticisms that we had made of socialism as a doctrine and the Soviet Union as an evil empire were vindicated by the disintegration of the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe. And that proved to be the overture to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself in 1991.

If you do a Google Ngram of the frequency with which the words capitalism and socialism appear in all the publications that Google has been able to scan from the libraries that made them available, you will see the collapse of socialism very clearly in the data after the 1980s. And you'll notice that socialism falls pretty much off a cliff in the period after the election of Margaret Thatcher and almost ceases to be a topic of discussion after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 to '91.

(If you can get one of these things to work, you're a better man than me. I always love the fact that it's 2019 and we talk endlessly about the extraordinary technological disruption that we've lived through and these things still get handed to me and still don't work. Now that is a criticism of capitalism, okay?)

In the period after 1979, there was a massive shift in policy, not only in countries that openly embraced market economics, but really across the board, even in countries that continued outwardly to be run by social democrats. You can see the decline in top marginal personal income tax rates there from the 1970s to 2008. You can see a comparable downward trend in the top marginal corporate income tax rate. This was the high tide of free market economics. This was the ebb of socialism.

And then in 2008, 2009 came the global financial crisis. And one might have thought that that would be the moment for socialism to make its comeback. After all, if there's one thing that socialists have long hoped for, it's a crisis of capitalism. It's the central observation of Marx that there will be escalating crises of capitalism. What happened? Actually, socialists did not do especially well in the wake of the financial crisis. It was the populists of the right, by and large, who made the political running in the period after the financial crisis. Relatively few far-left political movements benefited from the crisis. The Syriza party in Greece is almost the only exception to that rule.

It's only quite recently that socialism has come back into vogue. And I want to try to identify how exactly and where exactly it's come back into vogue. This is a talk that will focus mainly on the United States, which is where I live. You can tell by how scruffily I'm dressed that I now live in California. Actually, I lost my suit on the way here. I was planning to look just as smart as Lord Griffiths. So apologies if I've let the side down. Still, isn't it wonderful that St. Gallen is the only place in the world where the professors can be scruffier than the students?

There's a lot of interesting polling, which when you look at it first seems to suggest that Americans remain quite allergic to socialism. I've just given some brief summary data here. This, for example, is a Hill TV poll from last year. 76% of Americans say they wouldn't vote for a socialist political candidate. 64% of Democratic respondents said they wouldn't vote for a socialist. May of this year, 57% of Americans said socialism isn't compatible with American values. But if you start looking more closely at the polling data, a few things leap out. Gallup did a poll last year that had 47% of Democrats saying they viewed capitalism positively, down from 56% a couple of years before. 57% of Democrats said they viewed socialism positively. 71% of Republicans were positive about capitalism, only 16% positive about socialism.

So as you would expect, the socialism revival is essentially a feature on the Democratic end of the spectrum.

But here's where it gets interesting, particularly for a student-organized event like this. Those aged 18 to 29 in the Gallup survey were 51% positive about socialism and only 45% positive about capitalism. By contrast, only 28% of the over 65s were positive about socialism. It seems as if the socialist revival that one keeps hearing about is a phenomenon amongst younger voters.

Let's look a bit more closely. Now, it's always painful for me to talk about American generational politics because technically I belong to the baby boomer generation. Annoyingly, that's defined as ending in 1964, the year I was born. So that sadly for me, I'm a boomer. But the generations that we're really interested in here are the millennials born between '81 and '96, so aged 23 to 38, and the new new generation to which some of you belong, Generation Z, or Z as Americans say, born 1996 or later, or rather born 1997 or later, aged 22 and younger. That's an interesting combination because if you add millennials and Generation Z together, you're looking at around 37% of the electorate at next year's presidential election. By 2028, they will be more than half of American voters.

Now, look at the way in which they respond to the words socialism and capitalism. If you look at the age range 18 to 24, you find that actually 61% are positive about socialism and only 58% are positive about capitalism. In marked contrast to where seniors and boomers are, they really are quite hostile to socialism and positive about capitalism.

Ike Freiman and I have an article just out in the Atlantic which goes into more detail on the new generational politics that we think is going to drive American politics for the rest of our lives.

Social media turn out to be amplifying the politics of the far left just as much as they amplified the politics of the far right after the financial crisis. If you haven't heard of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, then I don't know which rock you've been living under, but come on out. She is now one of the most influential political figures in the United States despite only just having been elected to Congress last year. Bernie Sanders has been around for a whole lot longer. But what's extraordinary about Bernie, notice he has twice as many Twitter followers as AOC, is that he is as attractive to young Americans as AOC. And this is something that I think most Western European commentary is missing out on.

Now, as I argued in a book, The Square and the Tower, that was published last year in the United States, one can't understand the phenomenon of American socialism without realizing the role that social media play in polarizing American political life. This is one of my favorite charts from the research I've been doing on networks in politics. And what it shows is that on Twitter, where political subjects are concerned, there are two opposing clusters. These are essentially graphs of retweet activity on political topics. And what's fascinating here is that essentially conservatives retweet conservatives and liberals retweet liberals. And there's very little retweeting across the political divide except to say, have you ever seen anything as dumb as this dude? Which is the standard way in which conservatives retweet liberals. Notice, if you happen to be a Twitter user, that for every emotive or amoral word you use in your tweet, your tweet is 20% more likely to be retweeted. It's not just fake news that works well on social media. It's extreme views.

So when we look at measures of political success in the United States, we look not just at popularity, not just at polling data, we look at fundraising data. Because American politics is the most expensive political game in the world and you have to pay to play. Bernie Sanders is well ahead of most of his competitors for the Democratic nomination on the basis of the first quarter of 2019 fundraising. Now, Joe Biden, who entered the race relatively late, may have started strongly and may, who knows, end up overtaking Sanders. But at the moment, Joe Biden has Sanders to beat above all else if he's to make it to the Democratic nomination at the third attempt. And it's the fact that Biden has failed twice before that leads me to think he'll likely fail again. And you should probably increase the probability of Bernie Sanders being the nominee. Most Europeans and a great many American commentators are underestimating Bernie's chances of success right now. If he does get the nomination this time, an avowed Democratic socialist will be running for the presidency of the United States against one of the most unpopular Republican presidents in history.

The revival of socialism, the prospects of a Sanders presidency, is not surprisingly generating some anxiety within the financial elite. Last week, I was at Michael Milken's conference in Los Angeles and it was fascinating to hear the conversation there. On one side, you have Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world's largest hedge fund, declaring that everything must evolve or die. This is now true for capitalism. Capitalism is now not working for the majority of Americans. And on the other side, Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, saying that soaking the rich doesn't work and socialism's record historically has been one of complete failure. I was in Chicago recently with a business group and I asked them what they were most worried about. I expected them to say the trade war or maybe the Fed. But it turned out that they were most worried about socialism. So this is an extraordinary state of affairs. In 1989, 30 years ago, we thought socialism was dead and buried. We thought it was over and we thought we had won. Who would have predicted that socialism would make a comeback and that by 2019 it would be the number one talking point in the American business community?

Of course, it depends what you mean by these terms. Depends what you mean by capitalism. When you poll Americans in a little bit more detail and ask them what they think of small business, of entrepreneurs, of free enterprise, it turns out that they view those things a lot more positively than capitalism. And who can blame them? Remember, capitalism was first used as a term in the 19th century by critics of the free market economy. It's a pejorative term. It's much more used by the left than by the right. But when you ask people about free enterprise, when you talk about entrepreneurs, when you talk about small business, all of which are, of course, integral components of capitalism, Americans are far more sympathetic.

But what do they mean by socialism? This is when it gets interesting. When you actually ask young Americans about specific policies, you realize that socialism for them is not the ownership by the state of the means of production. What it means is that the government should provide universal health care. Millennials and Generation Z are much more convinced of that than the average voter. The government should provide tuition-free college. They're much more persuaded by that proposition, two-thirds of them are, than the average American. They support abolishing the immigration authorities significantly more than the average American.

So when one drills down, socialism in fact means a specific set of policies that are by no means clearly socialist, at least if socialism is to be defined in the way that it originally was in the 19th century as a radical intervention in the private ownership of capital. The central proposition of 19th-century socialism was that the private ownership of the means of production produced such inequitable outcomes that it had to be replaced by state ownership. If you're not committed to state ownership, then I don't think you're really a socialist. You're more likely a social democrat.

Here's some more evidence that young Americans are essentially gravitating towards social democracy rather than socialism proper. They strongly support single-payer health care. They strongly support tuition-free college. They'd like a federal jobs guarantee. They support the labor movement. All of these things differentiate young Americans from older Americans. I don't think it makes them socialists. Let me try and show you more evidence for this.

Generation Z and millennials think way more than older Americans that government should do more to solve problems, that government has a responsibility to guarantee health care to all. But when one thinks about what that implies, it's not at all clear that it implies socialism as I've defined it. It's much closer to social democracy as it evolved in Europe after World War II and I would say to Christian democracy too. Because remember, on issues such as health care and education, there wasn't a massive difference between social democrats and Christian democrats in the post-World War II world. Often the policies that young Americans equate with socialism were adopted by Christian democrats, by conservatives as much as by social democrats.

What Americans mean by socialism is therefore not quite what most of us who've studied the history of socialism understand by the term.

Here's some more data to illustrate the points I've just made. Asked by Gallup to define socialism, a quarter of both democrats and republicans said it just meant equality. 13% of democrats saw it as government services like free health care. 13% - only 13% - believed that it implied government ownership. And here's my favorite. I told you there was going to be some humor. 6% believed that socialism means being social, including being on Facebook. The revolution comrades.

In an interview that she did with Anderson Cooper, AOC said, and I quote, "What we have in mind and what my policies most closely resemble are what we see in the UK, in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden." Ah, so that's what you mean by socialism. But that raises a very important question. Just how socialist are these countries? How socialist is Sweden, for example? Well, not very socialist. If you ask the World Economic Forum, which ranks Sweden 10th in terms of global competitiveness, you can see the chart from the latest WEF rankings. It's 12th in the World Bank's league table for ease of doing business and 19th in Heritage's Economic Freedom league table. If Heritage puts you in the top 20 for economic freedom, chances are you're not a socialist country. And this seems to me to go to the heart of the matter. Young Americans have never been to Sweden. They have never studied its history, nor indeed the history of socialism. So they have no way of knowing that these Scandinavian economies that they say they admire are not really that socialist at all. In fact, in many ways, they're exemplary cases of capitalist innovative societies where entrepreneurship flourishes. This is a really important confusion that we have to clear up before they lead the United States in a completely wrong direction.

Breaking news, patch me through to AOC. I need to tell her first. Social democracy is on the wane in Europe. If there is one really striking feature of European politics right now, it's the decline of social democracy, the very political movement that gave rise to universal single-payer health care systems, that gave rise to free university tuition. That movement's in decline. So this is deeply paradoxical. Americans want to become European social democrats exactly at the moment the Europeans are giving up on social democracy.

Ladies and gentlemen, the issue is not socialism. We are not discussing socialism. We're discussing degrees of fiscal redistribution. And it's a continuum. You choose. You choose through the political process how much you want to reduce the Gini coefficient, which is the simplest measure of inequality or equality that social science has come up with. And this rather nice chart shows you the range of options that exist in OECD and other countries. You can have a quite unequal society and do very little about it. That's Chile. Or you can have a quite unequal society and do a lot about it. That's Ireland.

This isn't about socialism. It is about the degree to which the fiscal system of taxation and transfers will reduce the inequality that a market economy will produce. It confuses everybody to present a binary choice between capitalism and socialism. That's not the world we live in. These are all capitalist countries offering varying degrees of redistribution. And the political system we call democracy decides how much redistribution we get.

Let me try to draw this to a conclusion by setting it in a geopolitical context.

What makes the discussion of socialism so troubling to me is that it takes place at a time when one economy that is still controlled by a communist party, the economy of the People's Republic of China, is rapidly gaining on that of the United States. This is the prediction that Samuelson should have made, that there was in fact an economy that would catch up with the United States, but it was China, not the Soviet Union. A fundamental question that goes to the heart of trade negotiations that are ongoing at this moment is this. Is China a market economy? Should we admire what China has achieved in terms of its extraordinary economic growth since the reforms of 1978-79 began? A substantial part of China's economy is indeed a private sector capitalist economy. 50 to 90 percent of tax revenues come from non-state companies. 60 percent of GDP, 80 percent of urban employment, two-thirds of growth, eight-tenths of all new jobs. The estimates vary slightly, but the message is basically the same.

China's economy is, however, controlled by the state in a way that no true market economy is. There's a dynamic private sector wrapped around a powerful controlling state sector. And you can tell how great the control is by showing the ways in which credit, particularly since Xi Jinping came to power, has disproportionately gone to state enterprises and has been declining to the private sector.

There are many other respects in which China remains a state-controlled economy, despite its coexistence with a vibrant private sector. But it would, I think, be misleading to regard China as a capitalist or market economy. The market has produced extraordinary achievements. Only China, not Europe, has been able to produce internet companies that can compete with the giants of Silicon Valley. But when representatives of the Communist Party arrived in Jack Ma's office and said it's time to step down, he had no choice. That is what state control means. That is a reality of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

The key issue, ladies and gentlemen, is not the degree of state involvement in the economy. That can vary according to political preferences in any democracy. The issue is whether the rule of law exists. And in China, the rule of law does not exist as any measure of the rule of law, here are some World Justice Project scores, makes clear. Because it is lawless, true socialism, which subordinates the market to the power of the state and limits free economic and political activity, leads down a primrose path to hell. If you want to know what socialism really looks like, take a trip to Venezuela. Those of us who visited Venezuela, as I did in the time of Hugo Chavez, knew it would end badly. I don't think we imagined just how badly it would end with hyperinflation, starvation, mass exodus, and the repression of protesters being run over here by armored cars in the service of the Chavista regime. Because of the lack of rule of law, China too is no example for the West to follow. These are aerial photographs of what are believed to be the re-education camps established for Uighurs in Western China. These photographs show you prisoners in those camps where the Muslim minority is very clearly being treated in ways that we have seen minorities treated by communist regimes in the past.

This is a race that we can't afford to lose. This chart, which shows you two different measures of China's GDP as a percentage of US GDP, tells you that by one measure, the purchasing power parity adjusted measure, China has already overtaken the United States. It did it in 2014. On a dollar basis, it may very well overtake the United States by the end of the 2020s.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, under these circumstances, when the nightmare vision of Paul Samuelson's textbook turns out to be coming true in the case of China, we cannot afford to be confused about the difference between socialism and capitalism.

By all means, let's have a debate about how to improve the equality of opportunity that Dominic Barton talked about earlier.

By all means, let's have a debate about how much to adjust the unequal outcomes of a market economy. Let the democratic process decide how high the taxes should be on individuals and corporations.

But let's not confuse that legitimate debate with a debate about socialism versus capitalism. We made the right choice about that in the 20th century. We shouldn't have to relitigate those debates again.

And if you're wondering how to reform democratic capitalism, my books are full of ideas on that subject, but for the sake of brevity, I'll spare you.

讲者认为，社会主义本质上是指国家对生产资料的所有权和控制，而资本主义则是以私有制和自由市场经济为基础的系统。在社会主义中，政府直接干预经济，以实现更平等的财富分配。而在资本主义中，个人和企业拥有和控制生产资料，通过市场机制进行资源配置，虽然会产生不平等的结果，但可以通过税收和转移支付等手段进行调整。讲者认为，真正的社会主义意味着国家对经济的全面控制，而现代一些美国年轻人所理解的“社会主义”实际上更接近于社会民主主义，即通过政府干预提供公共服务和保障，但并不涉及完全的公有制。

我同意这一点，现代的美国年轻人对社会主义的理解浮于表面且有一定的误解。

但这个讲者没有说的是，美国现在的所谓资本主义，也并非严格意义上的资本主义，而是新自由主义。新自由主义是一种经济理论，主张市场自由化、私有化和减少政府干预。新自由主义认为市场机制才是最有效的资源分配手段。但是，新自由主义基本必然导致显著的收入不均和贫富差距的加剧，并且希望通过税收和转移支付等手段（所谓的滴灌效应）来调整市场经济所导致的不平等，尽管并没有显著效果。虽然大家认为新自由主义是资本主义的一种形式，但实际上它与传统的资本主义有显著区别，因为传统资本主义更注重通过市场和政府的平衡来实现资源的有效分配和社会的公平。

新自由主义的追随者相信，通过减少政府在经济中的角色（政府是必须的恶），可以提高经济效率和增长。他们主张放松管制（尤其是对资本的管制）、削减公共开支（将公共事业私有化，比如教育和水电气网）和私有化国有企业，以刺激自由市场的活力（这也几乎是IMF给经济危机中的各国政府开出的药方）。然而，这种方法带来的一个主要问题是，它可能导致社会的不平等加剧。那些拥有资本和资源的人得以从市场自由化中获益并积累大量财富，而那些依赖公共服务和社会福利的人则可能面临更大的经济压力。

相反，传统资本主义并不完全排斥政府的作用。在传统的资本主义体系中，政府的角色是确保市场的公平运作，并通过税收和再分配机制来缓解市场带来的不平等问题。政府可以通过提供公共服务、建立社会保障体系和实施反垄断法等手段，来调节市场失灵和保护社会弱势群体。

这个讲者还没讲，美国经济发展最迅猛的罗斯福新政时期，美国实行的经济政策更接近社会主义。罗斯福新政通过大规模的政府干预和公共工程项目，创造了大量就业机会，促进了经济复苏。新政还包括社会保障体系的建立、银行业改革以及对农业和工业的监管，这些政策都体现了政府在经济中的积极角色，明显有别于市场自由化的新自由主义。

因此，这个讲者在论述题目的时候，只揭露了现代美国年轻人对社会主义的误解，却没有揭露美国资本主义的堕落和变形，实在是有失公允和全面。

讲者还提到了新疆的劳改集中营，这是无中生有的宣传谎言。事实上，新疆的所谓“劳改集中营”并不存在，这种说法完全是一些西方媒体和政客出于政治目的而制造的谣言。他们试图通过这种虚假信息来抹黑中国，制造国际舆论压力，以达到他们的政治和经济目的。可笑的是，西方的媒体和政客在抹黑中国的时候，想象力十分匮乏，只能通过自身的影子去揣测中国，“我对少数族裔（比如北美的印第安人和澳洲的土著人）是赶尽杀绝的，中国人总不能比我还文明吧！”他们抹黑中国的事一定是他们曾经做过的事，或者正在做的事。

新疆的实际情况是，中国政府在当地实施了一系列反恐和去极端化措施，包括职业技能教育培训中心，旨在帮助那些受到极端思想影响的人重新融入社会。这些措施在很大程度上维护了新疆的稳定和安全，得到了当地各族人民的广泛支持和认可。