Mancur Olson曼瑟·奥尔森
Mar 5th 1998
From The Economist print edition
Mancur Lloyd Olson, scourge of special interests, died on February 19th, aged 66
曼瑟·奥尔森——特殊利益集团的鞭笞者，于2月19日逝世，享年66岁
IN THE early 1950s, when travelling in Europe, Mancur Olson was puzzled why West Germany was blossoming economically, while Britain was floundering. Germany had lost the second world war, while Britain was a victor. The two countries were similar in many important ways. Why, then, the difference in performance?
50年代早期，当曼瑟·奥尔森在欧洲游历途中，他对德国经济迅猛发展而英国经济却举步维艰感到困惑不解。德国是二战的战败国，而英国是战胜国，这两个国家在许多重要方面均十分相似。那么，为何两者经济绩效的落差竟会如此悬殊？
A decade later, in 1965, Mr Olson took his first step towards an answer. In “The Logic of Collective Action”, the book that has come to be regarded as his most important contribution to economics, he examined the incentives that lead people to band together and collude for advantage. Five motor-car companies could be induced to form a cartel or a lobbying group fairly easily, since each would reap a fifth of any gains from price increases or government subsidies. But organising 5m drivers to fight back was a hard task, because each driver could hope for a free ride on the efforts of the others, and none had much to gain personally by joining the group.
十年之后的1965年，奥尔森向寻求答案迈出了第一步。其著作《集体行动的逻辑》被公认为他对经济学最重大的贡献，书中他分析了促使人们团结在一起并共谋利益的诱因。五家汽车制造商因为受到利益的激励，很容易就能组成卡特尔或者游说团体，因为每家企业都能从价格的上扬或政府补贴中获取1/5的利益。但要组织五百万的司机对此进行抗议却并非易事，因为每个人都希望他人出力而自己则“搭便车”，坐享其成，而且任何人加入集体后能给他自身带来的利益是微乎其微的。(也就是奥尔森所言的小集团比大集团更有可能实现集体行动的关键所在)
The conclusion was striking. Narrow, self-serving groups had an inherent, though not insuperable, advantage over broad ones that worry about the well-being of society as a whole. How might that insight explain the fate of nations? In 1982, in “The Rise and Decline of Nations”, he offered an answer.
其结论有些振聋发聩。范围狭窄的自利性集团比起那些关心整个社会福祉的广泛性集团有着得天独厚的优势，尽管这种“非自利不能行”的弊端并不是不能克服的。那么依奥氏之见，应该如何解释国家的命运呢？1982年，奥尔森在其另一部著作《国家的兴衰》（或译《国家兴衰探源》）中对此问题作出了解答。
In any human society, he said, parochial cartels and lobbies tend to accumulate over time, until they begin to sap a country’s economic vitality. A war or some other catastrophe sweeps away the choking undergrowth of pressure groups. This had happened in Germany and Japan, but not in Britain, which, although physically damaged in the war, had retained many of its old institutions. Surely there was some less cataclysmic route to renewal? Yes, said Mr Olson, a nation’s people could beat back the armies of parochialism, but only if the danger were recognised and reforms embraced. Make these points to a student of economics or politics today and he or she will say, “Of course.” But the ideas were obvious only after Mr Olson made them so.
在书中他称，任何人类社会中，随着时间的流逝，小型卡特尔和游说集团有积聚增多的趋势，直到它们开始使一国的经济活力丧失殆尽为止。战争或其他一些灾难如摧枯拉朽般将发育不良、苟延残喘的压力集团一扫而光。在德国和日本出现了以上这种情况，但反观英国，尽管她被战争摧残得满目疮痍，却仍然保留了其许多旧体制。那是否存在一条只需较少激烈变革就能实现复兴的道路呢？奥尔森答曰：是的。一个国家的人民可以击退狭隘这个敌人，但这只能在危机得到承认、改革赢得支持的前提下进行。将这些概念讲述给如今那些修经济学或政治学的莘莘学子们听，他们会认为这是理所当然的，但只有在奥尔森进行分析论证后，这些概念才变得显而易见。
From the prairies
出身农家
Mancur Olson was born in the farming state of North Dakota. His father, who seems to have been an intellectual but without much formal education, grew the hard red spring wheat of the northern prairies. Mancur (pronounced with a soft “c”) is a local name of uncertain origin. Mr Olson guessed it came from mansour, an Arabic word for “victorious”, although how it arrived in the Red River Valley where he lived is a puzzle he never solved. He went to a local secondary school of 49 pupils, then via the state university to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, a Harvard doctorate and eventually to Maryland University, where he spent most of his career. He considered at one time going into politics (and he spent two years in Washington working for the government), but it was the theoretical lattices of economics that claimed him.
曼瑟·奥尔森出生于农业州的北达科他，他的父亲貌似曾是一名知识分子，但并非出自正规科班，只能靠在北方的农场里种植硬红春麦为生。曼瑟（名字中c的发音为软音）（事实上国内另外两本奥尔森的著作《集体行动的逻辑》和《国家的兴衰》对奥尔森名字的翻译都是错误的，均将其翻译成曼库，译者的老师苏长和先生参与了奥尔森遗作《权力与繁荣》的翻译工作，将作者名字译为曼瑟，这才是正确的）这个名字在当地很普遍，其起源不详。奥尔森本人猜测这个词大概源自于阿拉伯语中mansour，意思是“胜利的”，然而该词是如何传播到他曾居住过的红河谷地区，这个迷底他从来没有解开。奥尔森的中学是在当地一所学校读的，学校里总共只有49个学生，之后他经由州立大学的推荐，领取了罗氏奖学金，有幸到牛津大学深造，并在哈佛大学获得了博士学位，最后他辗转至马里兰大学，在那里度过了职业生涯的大半岁月。奥尔森曾一度考虑从政（他在华盛顿的政府机构中供职过两年），但真正使他功成名就的是其在经济学领域的理论建树。
In his 1982 book, he brought politics and economics together. As parochial lobbies form, he said, each gains, then fiercely defends, some benefit for its members, usually with government help. Subsidies, trade protections and other economic distortions accumulate, and resources increasingly flow to a specialised class of lawyers, bureaucrats and lobbyists who know how to work the system. Redistributive struggles displace productive ones. The result, if medicine is not taken, is a pattern of economic decline.
在其1982年的著作《国家的兴衰》中，他将政治学和经济学的知识结合了起来。他认为，随着小型游说团体得以组建，其中的每个人都将获益，而之后所有人就会竭尽全力地维护自己的既得利益，其中一些在通常得到政府帮助的情况下，因为其成员众多而获益。补贴、贸易保护以及其他扭曲经济发展的弊端日积月累，资源则不断流向由律师、官僚和说客组成的特殊利益阶层，他们深谙体制运行的玄机。届时要求重新分配利益的斗争将取代生产上的竞争。如果不采取措施，其结果就会导致经济衰退。
In his later years, it was to “medicine” that Mr Olson turned. He emphasised the importance of sound institutions and sensible policies in improving the lot of poorer nations, many of which rotted from the entrenched depredations of a self-serving governing class. Safe property rights, secure contracts and sensible economic policies make all the difference between wealth and poverty, he said. Indeed, they go much further than capital stock, natural resources, education, or the other usual suspects of textbook economics, towards explaining why a worker’s productivity rises so astonishingly when he merely crosses the political boundary between Mexico and the United States. Mr Olson’s passion on this point led him to establish, in 1990, a centre devoted to helping post-communist and developing economies find their way. Word of his death first reached this newspaper by way of an e-mail from Armenia.
在其学术生涯后期，奥尔森转向了对解决措施的求索。他强调健全制度和理性政策在改观落后国家状况中的重要性，这些国家中，有许多是因为国内有一批自私自利的统治阶级，他们对社会有根深蒂固的掠夺、搜刮欲望，因而国家的经济状况极端腐化落后。奥尔森认为：保障产权，保护契约和理性经济政策是决定贫富差异的关键所在（奥尔森所言的“市场加强型”政府——market-augmenting government，正是实现以上这三种目的的利维坦）。的确，在解释一个工人仅仅是跨越了美墨的政治边境，而其生产力水平却有让人惊叹的飞跃这个问题时，奥尔森提出的这些变量比起股本、自然资源、教育或者经济学教科书上提出的其他可能要素来得更加深入。奥尔森在这个问题上的执着和热情驱使他在1990年的时候建立了一个研究中心，专门帮助后共产主义国家和发展中国家探寻他们通向繁荣的道路。本报最先得知他死讯的渠道，是通过一封来自亚美尼亚的电子邮件。
Had he lived, his theory of collective action might well have won him a Nobel prize in economics, though not a wholly uncontroversial one. Some economists viewed him as a one-idea thinker—and worse, they whispered, his idea had reverberated less loudly within economics than outside of it; for example, in political science. The charge would not have troubled Mr Olson for a moment. He was as disdainful of parochialism in the life of the mind as in the life of a nation. “Look for a problem that is interesting and important—never mind how it is classified—and tackle it,” he once said, in the prairie-flat cadences that stayed with him all his life. “That is my advice to Mancur Olson, and that is my advice to everyone else.”
如果奥尔森依然健在，那么他的集体行动理论，尽管不是完全没有争议，却很可能把他送上诺贝尔经济学奖的领奖台。一些经济学家认为他思维过于单一——更有甚者窃窃私语，认为他的观点在经济学领域内激起的反响远不及在该学科外所获得的赞誉；比如说在政治学。这种指责丝毫不会使奥尔森不悦，无论是对于学术思想中的偏颇还是对国家生活中的狭隘，奥尔森都加以一视同仁的批判。“寻找那些有趣的和重要的问题——永远不要介意其学科分野——并解决它。”奥尔森曾以他始终如一的平止而又不乏韵律的音调娓娓道来。“这是我对自己的建议，也是我对所有其他人的忠告。”
Mancur Olson是我接触TE的Obituary版块以来,所遇到的级别最高,声名最显赫的逝者之一,加上自己是学社会科学的,对奥尔森的理论也相当认可和钦佩,由此便翻译了这篇距今可谓相当久远了的文章,以示对奥氏的追忆和缅怀.下面附上奥尔森最重要的三部作品的封面图片,以供参考.
《集体行动的逻辑》
《国家兴衰探源》（又译《国家的兴衰》）
《权力与繁荣》
