[转帖] [Obituary] [2006.11.23] Milton Friedman 米尔顿·弗里德曼

showcraft

http://www.ecocn.org/thread-2613-1-1.html
Special report

Milton Friedman
弗里德曼

A heavyweight champ, at five foot two
五尺二寸的重量级冠军
Nov 23rd 2006
From The Economist print edition

The legacy of Milton Friedman, a giant among economists
经济学家中的巨人，米尔顿·弗里德曼先生的遗产



IN 1946 two American economists published a pamphlet attacking rent controls. “It was”, recalled one of them many years later, “my first taste of public controversy.” In the American Economic Review, no less, a critic dismissed “Roofs or Ceilings” as “a political tract”. The same reviewer gave the pair a proper savaging in a newspaper: “Economists who sign their names to drivel of this sort do no service to the profession they represent.”

1946年, 两位美国经济学者发表了一本名为《屋顶还是天花板》学术文选，着力批评当时政府的"房租管制"政策。多年之后，其中一位学者回忆说:"那时，是我第一次狠狠地受到公众的非议"。当时的《美国经济评论》一篇评论批评他们那篇《屋顶还是天花板》的经济论文是一部"政治的文稿"，而且这个评论员还在报章上严厉的抨击他们说："写这种'絮絮叨叨'的小儿科文章的人对他们所代表的(经济学)专业将是毫无价值的！" （译注：美国政府40年代实施的旨在稳定房价、解决住房短缺问题的房租管制政策实施效果背离政策的初衷，使得住房问题恶化）


The reminiscing author was Milton Friedman, who died on November 16th, aged 94. In the wake of the Great Depression and the second world war, with the Keynesian revolution still young, championing the free market was deeply unfashionable, even (or especially) among economists. Mr Friedman and kindred spirits—such as Friedrich von Hayek, author of “The Road to Serfdom”—were seen as cranks. Surely the horrors of the Depression had shown that markets were not to be trusted? The state, it was plain, should be master of the market; and, equipped with John Maynard Keynes's “General Theory”, governments should spend and borrow to keep the economy topped up and unemployment at bay.

很不幸的是，这位追忆往事的学者，《屋顶还是天花板》的作者之一，经济学界的巨人，米尔顿·弗里德曼先生， 于06年11月16日，与世长辞了，享年94岁。在经济大萧条(恐慌)和二次世界大战之后，是凯恩斯主义刚刚大行其道的年代，在那时候，如果谁倡导自由市场经济，尤其在众多"主流的"经济学者中"班门弄斧"，都是不识时务的。弗里德曼和他的同道中人《通往奴役之路》的作者哈耶克（ 1974年诺贝尔经济学奖得主），在那个时代都被认为是异想天开的之流。大萧条(恐慌))时代的恐怖环境，让人无法相信自由的市场可以实现自我调节的。说白了，人们只认定政府应该充当自由市场的主宰，搬用凯恩斯（John Maynard Keynes）思想的"伟大理论"来解释，就是政府有权通过发债和投资，以确保经济的增长和控制失业率的攀升。


That economists and policymakers think differently now is to a great degree Mr Friedman's achievement. He was the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century (Keynes died in 1946), possibly of all of it. In 1998, in “Two Lucky People”, the memoir he wrote with his wife, Rose, he could claim to be “in the mainstream of thought, not, as we were 50 years ago, a derided minority”, and no one could dispute it.

不过现在，经济学家和政策制定者再不这么认为了，这巨大的改变主要归功于弗里德曼先生。自凯恩斯（1946年）死后，弗里德曼算得上是20世纪后50年最有影响力的经济学家。在1998年出版的弗里德曼夫妇《两个幸运的人》回忆录中，弗里德曼宣称自己的观点已经是主流的思想，这样的说法现在是无庸质疑的了，不像"50年前，曾是被主流的思想嘲弄的一小撮"

Perhaps Mr Friedman became not only a great economist but also an influential one because he had a love of argument. As a boy he liked to make himself heard. He claimed to have had few memories of a school which he attended in Rahway, the New Jersey town his family had moved to when Brooklyn-born Milton was 13 months old, but he remembered getting a nickname. “I tended to talk very loud, indeed shout”; so when someone mentioned the proverb “Still water runs deep”, he was dubbed “Shallow”.

也许是弗里德曼一生爱好辩论，所以使他不仅成为最伟大的经济学家，而且是极富有影响力的人物。他幼年时候，就是很好斗(辩论)出名，说话总是很大声。 弗里德曼出生在布鲁克林，13个月大的时候,全家搬到纽泽西州的罗威市（Rahway）。据弗里德曼说，对在罗威市上学时光记不得多少了，但在那里得了个绰号的记忆却是很深刻的，他说"因为我总是说话很大声，象大喊大叫一样"。这和人们说的谚语"静水池深"相反，所以被人叫做"肤浅"了。

His classmates could scarcely have chosen a less apt moniker. Directly or indirectly, Mr Friedman brought about profound changes in the way his profession, politicians and the public thought of economic questions, in at least three enormously important and connected areas. In all of them his thinking was widely regarded at the outset as eccentric or worse.

他的同学当然不会随便给人取个不相称的绰号。直接或间接的说，弗里德曼至少给经济学，政治学和对经济的公众思想等相关的领域带来了深远的变化。几乎在这些涉及的领域，起初他的想法都被看作古怪的或说是糟糕的思想。

The first of those areas is summed up by “Capitalism and Freedom”, the title of a book published in 1962 (see our review). To Mr Friedman, the two were inextricably intertwined: without economic freedom—capitalism—there could be no political freedom. Governments, he argued, should do little more than enforce contracts, promote competition, “provide a monetary framework” (of which more below) and protect the “irresponsible, whether madman or child”.

1962年弗里德曼的《资本主义和自由》一书出版，这本书第一次把这几个领域归并在一起讨论，对弗里德曼来说，政治经济两者交织在一起，是密不可分开，没有自由的市场，或者说没有自由的资本主义，就没有政治自由，他提出政府尽量少干预经济，除了那些必要的措施，例如对商业合约运作的保护，促进自由竞争，提供货币供应准则（参照标准），保护无责任能力的，不管是小孩还是疯子。



Freedom fighter
捍卫自由的战士

To show where Mr Friedman thought the limit of the state should lie, the book lists 14 activities, then undertaken by government in America, “that cannot...validly be justified” by the principles it lays out. These include price supports for farming; tariffs and import quotas; rent control; minimum wages; “detailed regulation of industries”, including banks; forcing pensioners to buy annuities; military conscription in time of peace; national parks; and the ban on carrying mail for profit.

想要知道政府那些措施是应该限制的，你可以看弗里德曼的书《资本主义和自由》，书中列出了那时候美国政府采用的14项政策。书中列出的基本原理证明了"那些行为是不合理也不合法的"。这些政府措施包括补贴农产品，附加关税和进口配额，实行房租管制，保障最低工资，对包括银行在内的企业设置具体的管制条例，强制领退休金的人买年金保险，在和平时代实行兵役制，建设大型国家工程如国家公园，禁止邮递行业牟利等等。

Although the state still does a lot of this, it does less than it did; and little if any goes unquestioned. For the abolition of the draft, in particular, Mr Friedman could claim some credit: a surprise, perhaps, to those who saw him as a right-wing ideologue. Conscription—“an army of slaves”, as he put it to William Westmoreland, the army chief of staff—was illiberal: in peacetime, there was no justification for not hiring volunteers at a market wage.

尽管政府现在还在做类似事情，但比起那时候可少多了，而且大多遭到民众的质疑。就如废除美军兵役制的主张，弗里德曼在其中扮演了重要角色。这让那些视弗里德曼为右翼思想的人大吃一惊。征兵意味着"募集作战的奴隶"，他指威廉·威斯特摩兰特（William Westmoreland 军队人事总长）思想过于狭隘：在和平时期，用市场价格来雇佣自愿军人没有什么不合理的。

Soon after becoming president, Richard Nixon set up a commission, on which Mr Friedman sat, to examine the argument for abolishing the draft. (Nixon had already been persuaded that it should go.) Conscription was ended in 1973, by which time the Vietnam war had anyway turned public opinion against it. Mr Friedman wrote, “No public-policy activity that I have ever engaged in has given me as much satisfaction as the All-Volunteer Commission.”

尼克松上任总统后不久，安设一个专门讨论有关废除兵役制度的立委会，让弗里德曼先生坐镇，尼克松也被劝服为废兵役开道放行。在1973年，兵役制就被废止了，好在是美国反越战舆论矛头指向兵役制之前。弗里德曼说"我参与的政策中，没有哪项活动比这个"纯志愿All-Volunteer"委员会的工作让我觉得骄傲了。"。

Second, Mr Friedman revolutionised how economists and policymakers treated money and inflation. Until he showed otherwise, post-war governments seemed able to trade off unemployment and inflation: a long-term statistical link between the two, known as the Phillips curve after the New Zealander who noted it, appeared to prove as much. By loosening monetary policy, governments could apparently buy a reduction in unemployment at the price of a little more inflation.

弗里德曼第二个贡献，就是革命性的改变了经济学家和政策制定者对货币供应和通货膨胀的态度。在他提出不同看法之前，战后的政府似乎可以让失业率和通胀率互相抑制："菲利普斯曲线"（新西兰学者提出的）建议，从长线看失业率和通胀率之间有统计上的联系，这在当时好像得到了证明。靠放松货币供应，政府显然能够以稍微增加通胀率为代价来降低失业率。

This, said Mr Friedman, addressing the American Economic Association as its president in 1967, was an illusion. Pumping up demand pushed down unemployment only by fooling workers into thinking that wages had risen relative to prices, making them more willing to offer their labour. Once the truth dawned and they demanded more pay, unemployment would rise back to its “natural” rate. If governments tried to push unemployment below this rate, in the long run they would succeed only in pushing inflation ever higher. Edmund Phelps, winner of this year's Nobel Prize in economics, made a similar observation at around the same time.

对此，1967年，弗里德曼在其主导的美国经济联合会上发言说，"这样做其实只是错觉而已"。政府投资扩大需求来降低失业率的做法，不过是欺骗工人认为工资比物价相对上涨的快，使他们愿意来付出劳动。一旦真相明了，他们要求更高的工资，失业率又会回升到自然比率。如果政府企图降低失业率，长期的来说只会使得通胀水平越来越高，在当时，埃德蒙·菲尔普斯(Edmund Phelps 注2)(06年诺贝尔经济学奖获得者)也得出相同结论.

Mr Friedman's work was embellished by others, who modelled firms' and workers' expectations in a more sophisticated way. What really counted, though, was that he had spotted a flaw in economic orthodoxy before it was made obvious by events. In the 1970s rich economies suffered rising inflation and higher, not lower, unemployment, despite governments' efforts to inflate their way out of trouble. Mr Friedman said this was futile: governments simply had to adopt a stable monetary framework. By this he meant setting a target for the growth of the money supply, a rule known as monetarism.

在弗里德曼的研究成果的基础上，一些人用更细致的方法为企业和雇员预期作模型。而真正有厉害的是，后来美国经济的表现，都证明了弗里德曼指出的"正统（凯恩斯）的经济学"那些错误。在1970年，繁荣的经济出现了通货膨胀上升同时失业率也上升的状况，尽管尽管政府大举介入试图解决问题（ 物价低幅上涨来获得失业率的降低）。但弗里德曼说这些做法根本是没用的，"政府必须采用稳健货币政策，意思是政府必须为增长的货币供应量设定相应的目标限制，这种规则就是货币主义"。

His diagnosis of monetary ills and prescriptions for monetary policy long predated that presidential address. In 1963, with Anna Schwartz, he published “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960”, a monumental labour. The book traced a causal relationship between the rate of monetary growth and the price level. Most eye-catching was its analysis of the Great Depression—or, as the authors called it, the Great Contraction.

其实在那次作为执委主席发言之前，他就观察到货币政策的缺陷和也提出的相应金融政策的处方。1963年，在经济史论家安娜·施瓦茨（Anna Schwartz）的协助下，发表影响深的《美国货币史》（1867-1960）"，这一历史纪念碑一般的巨作。这本书细致地描绘了货币供应变化和通胀的水平因果关系。最引人注目的是他重新认定所谓"大萧条，Great Depression"，且用了一个特别的名词来称呼它为"经济大紧缩"。

The American economy shrank so much between 1929 and 1933, they argued, not because Wall Street crashed, because governments put up trade barriers or because under capitalism slumps are inevitable. No: trouble was turned into catastrophe by the Federal Reserve, which botched monetary policy, tightening when it should have loosened, thus depriving banks of liquidity when it should have been pumping money in.

他们认为在1929年到1933年的美国经济的大紧缩，不是因为华尔街股市崩盘，不是因为政府贸易壁垒，或者是在资本主义经济衰退不可避免。都不是这些：而是因为联邦储备系统的修正的金融政策把经济搞砸了，例如，政策上需要银根放松，它却收紧，因而当市场需要货币供应时，银行却没有流动的资金。

Hence Mr Friedman's mistrust of independent central banks: “To paraphrase Clemenceau, money is too important to be left to the Central Bankers.” He thought they should limit inflation by targeting the rate of growth of the money supply. Aiming for inflation directly, he thought, was a mistake, because central banks could control money more easily than prices.

弗里德曼并不信任独立的央行（美联储）"参照乔治·克列孟梭原理的释义,货币供应太重要，以至于不能只听任中央银行家们"。他主张在通货膨胀与货币供给之间有着一个紧密而稳定的连结关系，亦即限制通胀应该是以联邦储备银行对全国经济提供的货币数量为增量基准，单单看通货膨胀水平，他认为是错的，因为对美联储来说，货币供应量比物价更容易控制。

Brilliant as his monetary diagnoses were, on the details of the remedy he came out on the wrong side. Controlling the money supply proved far harder in practice than in theory (notably in Britain in the 1980s: Mr Friedman grumbled that the British authorities were going about it in the wrong way). These days many central banks are not only independent of government but also have inflation targets—to which, by and large, they get pretty close. The Federal Reserve has even stopped publishing M3, a broad measure of the money supply. Writing in the Wall Street Journal when Alan Greenspan stood down as Fed chairman in January this year, Mr Friedman did admit that he had underestimated central bankers' abilities—or Mr Greenspan's, anyway.

如果说这种货币政策很明智，那么真正具体修正起来却又是一回事了。控制货币供应在实施上证明远比理论要难得多(例如在80年代的英国实施的情况: 弗里德曼抱怨说是因为英国当局具体操作上有问题)。现在，央行不仅是独立的政府部门，而且也设定了通胀的基准，--大体上，他们已经和弗里德曼说的很接近了。美联储也已一改多年惯例，不再向外界公布M3的变化数据。 （广义量化货币供应(M3=M0+M1+M2)）2006年1月，格林斯潘卸任时（美联储主席位置）, 弗里德曼在华尔街报撰文承认他低估了美联储或者说格林斯潘的能力。


Third, Mr Friedman laid the foundation of modern theories of consumption. Keynes had posited that as income rose, so would the proportion that was saved. Economic data bore this out only up to a point: though the rich had higher saving rates than the poor, aggregate saving rates did not rise as countries became richer.

第三，消费学分析方面，弗里德曼奠定了的现代经济学方法论的基础。凯恩斯认为随着收入增加，存款比例也会增加，可经济学研究的数据证明："尽管富人比穷人有更高的存款率，但是当国家由穷转变到富有，国民的总存款率并没有上升"。弗里德曼在1957年提出的恒常所得假说（消费决定于终身财富,而非当期所得）来解释这个悖论（paradox）。

Mr Friedman resolved this apparent paradox with a theory known as the permanent income hypothesis, set forth in 1957. People, he suggested, did not spend on the basis of what their income happened to be that year, but according to their “permanent income”—what they expected to have year in and year out. In a bad year, therefore, they might dip into their savings; when they had a windfall, they would not spend the lot. He called the hypothesis “embarrassingly obvious”; but in hindsight, many of the best ideas are. It was good enough, with his work on monetary analysis and stabilisation policy, to win him a Nobel Prize in 1976.

人们其实并不依据他的当年收入来决定开支，而是按照"恒常所得"（他们期望年复一年的收入）来花销，在收入很低的时候，他们常常可能会花光存款，即使有飞来横富的收入时候，他们并不愿意多花钱。他称这种假设为"尴尬的明显"，现在回过头看，许多好想法都是经过这样的过程。他的先见之明在当时是了不起的，他在消费分析、货币供应理论及历史、和稳定政策复杂性等范畴的贡献，使得他获得了 1976年度的诺贝尔经济类学术奖励。




Spreading the word
四处宣扬自由理论

Getting fellow economists to accept your ideas is one thing; transmitting them to the laity in plain English is another. He was a gifted communicator, like many prominent economists from Keynes to Paul Krugman. For 18 years he had a column in Newsweek. He and Mrs Friedman wrote a bestselling book, “Free to Choose”, published in 1980, based on a television series of the same name. Mrs Friedman, whom he met when they were graduate students in Chicago, was a fine economist too and a sharp editor of her husband's work. She survives him after 68 years of marriage.

其实说服几个经济学同仁接受你的观点是一回事情，但是若要把你的理论变成最浅显的文字加以说明开来又是另外一件事情。就像那些杰出的经济学家，比如凯恩斯，保罗·克如曼，他们同时也是公关的天才。弗里德曼为《新闻周刊》撰写了18年的专栏。 1988年和自己的太太，鲁斯·弗里德曼，出版畅销书《选择的自由》，书中记录了当时由他主持同名电视系列节目《选择的自由》的主要内容。他太太是他在芝加哥大学的硕士同学。她同样是个很好的经济学家，也是弗里德曼巨著的编者，婚后，她陪伴了弗里德曼整整 68年。

Politicians were keen to listen—most obviously Ronald Reagan. Although Mr Friedman met Margaret Thatcher and her government's policies bore a monetarist mark, she was probably influenced more directly by Hayek than by him. Mr Friedman was heartened by Reagan's willingness to support the Fed's tight monetary policy in the early 1980s and by his pro-market, small-government instincts, borne out in less regulation and the tax reform of 1986. He was disappointed by developments after Reagan left office. He would have preferred Donald Rumsfeld, not George Bush senior, as Reagan's vice-president and successor. An appraisal of the Rumsfeld presidency must be left to counterfactual historians.



政治家善于兼听和纳谏，罗纳德·里根就是这样，对弗里德曼的理论的推崇不已，尽管当时保守派的撒切尔夫人和他的管理层的政策也是货币主义开道的标杆，但是她直接受到哈耶克的影响多过于弗里德曼。弗里德曼对罗纳德·里根当然十分满意，因为80年代早期，罗纳德·里根愿意支持联储的银根收紧的货币政策和支持自由经济，小政府政策，减少对市场的管制条例和在1986年实行了税务改革。弗里德曼也推崇拉姆斯菲尔德（前国防部长），希望他成为罗纳德·里根的副手，进而参选总统，但是老布什成为下界的总统，里根卸任之后，这些的变化，让他极为失望。拉姆斯菲尔德是不是总统的材料，那要看今后的反现实历史学家的评价了。

His most controversial listener was neither Reagan nor Lady Thatcher, but Augusto Pinochet. The Chilean dictator combined ruthless repression with a taste for free markets and monetarism. In the latter, he was advised by the “Chicago boys”, economists educated at the university where Mr Friedman was the leading light. He thought they had the economics right, but insisted that his own connection with Chile was much exaggerated by those who took him to task at demonstrations and in print. In 1975 he spent six days there, met General Pinochet once and wrote to him afterwards with his economic prescription—a conclusion, he believed, that the Chicago boys had already reached.

他的最有争议的理论的跟随者倒不是里根也不是撒切尔夫人，而是最让人争议的智利总统奥古斯托·皮诺切特。这个智利军事的独裁者，他在政治压制自由而在经济上实施货币主义和市场经济。皮诺切特起用"芝加哥小子"（一群年轻人，在弗里德曼领航的芝加哥大学接受过的货币主义和自由市场思想的熏陶）来贯彻他的自由主义经济的政策。弗里德曼认为"芝加哥小子"们做得很不错，但是说到和独裁者皮诺切特的关系，他坚持认为这是被媒体和示威的民众"抬举"了，因为他和皮诺切特交往是很有限的。1975年，他在智利只呆了六天，遇见过皮诺切特一次，随后开给他一个有关智利经济问题的处方，但在他断定在经济方面的成就这些"芝加哥小子"们已经取得了。


If Mr Friedman had a favourite economy, it was Hong Kong. Its astonishing economic success convinced him that although economic freedom was necessary for political freedom, the converse was not true: political liberty, though desirable, was not needed for economies to be free. Why, he asked, had Hong Kong thrived when Britain, which controlled it until 1997, was so statist by comparison? He greatly admired Sir John Cowperthwaite, the colony's financial secretary in the 1960s, “a Scotsman...a disciple of Adam Smith, his ancient countryman”. And how much more, Mr Friedman wondered, might America have thrived had it kept its government as small, relative to its economy, as the island entrepot had done?

弗里德曼最羡慕香港的经济模式，它的惊人的经济成功证明，尽管市场自由对于政治自由非常必要，但是反之不尽然，政治自由令人渴望，但不是经济自由的必要条件。为什么？因为香港是在英国殖民后繁荣的，而且英国治理香港直到1997年。与香港的经济模式相比，香港的宗主国英国是不是更计划？（注：1）他很欣赏英国人郭伯伟John Cowperthwaite(在1961-71年期间出任香港的财政司长,实行的放任自由的资本主义经济政策)称他是"苏格兰人，亚当史密的老乡，得到亚当史密的忠实"嫡传""。弗里德曼多么想知道，如果美国政府能变成像香港这个贸易中心一样，相对经济的是个很小的政府，美国会兴旺成什么样子？


                       University of Chicago


That lament showed that Mr Friedman, brilliant and influential though he was, did not win all the fights he picked. Far from it. Education vouchers, which he and Mrs Friedman pushed for many years, have gained intellectual respectability but made limited headway in practice. Government spending, as a share of GDP, did not budge much even under Reagan and is much as it was when he left office. Only last month, Mr Friedman worried in the Wall Street Journal that greater state intervention in Hong Kong would mean that the place “would no longer be such a shining example of economic freedom.”

不过，令人惋惜的是，弗里德曼虽然绝顶聪明，但并不是每个他倡导的理念得到了实施，甚至可以说是离成功还是差很远。例如，学券制（教育券），他和他的夫人推了多年，虽然得到一些学者的支持，但是在实践中进展有限；在雷根任期内，政府开支相对GDP(全民所得)的比例没有降低，以后的几届也是如此。上个月，弗里德曼在《华尔街日报》撰文，说如果大政府的政策干预香港的经济，那么香港不会再是经济自由的象征了。1946年对房租管制批评，这类"絮絮叨叨"的意见，现在还在一遍一遍的辩论，而且不光在纽约。


Rent control, the subject of that “drivel” in 1946, is still being argued over, not least in New York City. Should you be curious about Mr Friedman's co-author, look at the photograph above. Towering next to Mr Friedman is George Stigler, the Nobel economics laureate in 1982: friends and colleagues, they stroll on the Chicago campus, no doubt discussing how to make the world a freer and happier place.

你一定奇怪为什么我不提这篇文稿（《屋顶还是天花板》）的另外一个作者？你看下面的这张照片，挨着弗里德曼的那位高个子，就是另外一个作者，他是1982年诺贝尔经济学奖得主乔治·施蒂格勒（George Stigler），他们是同事又是好朋友，看得出他俩正漫步芝加哥校园，不用问，当然在讨论如何把世界变成更加自由和快乐地方。


                                                                                                                            鲁克翻译



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弗里德曼百年诞辰，再顶下。