GDP真的不值得关注吗？

    如果把全世界的财富和收入平均分配，同时全球经济维持如今的效率不变，那么每个人每年的收入将为约1万美元，个人财富为3.45万美元。如果按美国政府对“贫困”的定义，世界上的每个人都将生活在贫困线以下。

    这是个很简单的数学问题，任何一个人在勾勒全球经济革命时，或许都应该算算这笔帐。可惜，经济史学家德克•菲利普森在新作《重大的小数据：GDP是怎样统治世界以及我们该如何应对》中，并没有算过这道题。对整部作品及其读者来说，这一疏忽的后果很严重。

    菲利普森承认，从“创造的财富与自由”这个角度衡量，“历史上没有哪种（经济）系统”能和资本主义体系媲美。但他主张，现在应该开始放弃资本主义，或者大刀阔斧地改造它，让它彻底改头换面。

    菲利普森反对当前经济体制的观点似曾相识。他认为，全球经济一心追求增长，富裕经济体的民众工作过重、压力过大，一味看重物质获取和职场晋升这些并不会真的让人幸福的事。而在贫困经济体，即便世界上“可供分配的物资已经绰绰有余”，那里的人们每天还在为满足基本生存所需而奋斗。这一论断并未引入实据。

    菲利普森在书中指出，也许最让人担心的是，虽然经济不断增长，却无法实现环境可持续性发展。要不了多久，当今模式下的经济增长将导致巨大的资源匮乏，人类的子孙后代会比今天变得更穷。

    以上观点尽管并非菲利普森独创，但值得我们所有人重视。即便不认同菲利普森对资本主义诸多缺陷严重性开出的诊断，资本主义者如果希望其经济体系有光明的未来，都必须努力应对系统的许多不足并着手解决问题。但是菲利普森的书也有个无可救药的缺点：在批评资本主义体系时，他将其与一个我们用来理解资本主义系统的统计数据——GDP联系在一起。他在书中这样写道：

    “我们现如今最重要的经济表现指标（GDP）完全无法显示生活质量是否得到改善，经济活动是否切实可行。GDP数据只能告诉我们生产了多少东西，有多少资金交易。因此，世界各国在大力推进的实质上都是欠缺考虑的盲目增长，是越来越危险的增长。而且各国如此选择多是出于主观愿望。”

    这种分析正好本末倒置。现代经济增长是因为人们碰巧对此一致认同，而不是因为70年前西蒙•库兹涅茨等经济学家创立了一个量化经济增长的方式。而多数人认同的原因在于，经济增长良好绝对是好消息。我们都听说过一句俗语：天下没有免费的午餐。从现实主义角度出发，这话听上去没错，但也不总是如此。事实上，生产率增长创造了数不胜数的免费午餐。用物理学的概念解释，增长就像一部机器，可以用同样的努力获得更多的成果。

    当然，资本主义有时也会成为有害的力量。经济增长有时并非创新就能产生，还需要以环境恶化或者榨取劳动者价值为代价。可是，解决这些问题不能依靠停止测算经济增长，而应该推出对症下药的经济激励措施，比如征收碳排放税，或者制定法律禁用童工。

    If you divided up all the wealth and income in the world evenly and, somehow in the process, the global economy remained as efficient as it is today, each person would earn about $10,000 per year and have $34,500 in wealth. In other words, everyone in the world would be in poverty, at least by the U.S. government’s definition of the term.

    This is the sort of basic math you would hope someone would do if he were imagining a global economic revolution. It’s the sort of basic math Dirk Philipsen, economic historian author of the new volume, “The Little Big Number: How GDP Came to Rule the World and What to Do about It,” doesn’t do. And the book–and its readers–suffer greatly for this omission.

    Though Philipsen admits that “no system in history” can compete with capitalism in terms of “the amount of wealth and freedom created,” he argues it’s time to leave capitalism behind, or at least transform it so radically so as to leave it unrecognizable.

    Philipsen’s argument against our current economic system is a familiar one. He argues that the global economy’s obsession with growth has left people in the rich world overworked and overstressed, focused on material acquisition and career advancement that doesn’t actually make us happy. The poor, meanwhile, spend each day fighting for basic survival, despite the fact that the world “has more than enough material goods to go around.” This claim goes unsubstantiated.

    Perhaps most worryingly of all, the author argues, constant economic growth simply isn’t environmentally sustainable. Before long, all this growth is going to lead to so much resource depletion that it will leave future generations much poorer than we are today.

    The above points, while not original, are important for all of us to take seriously. Any capitalist who hopes to see his economic system continue into the future must grapple with the system’s many flaws and help to fix them, even if he doesn’t agree with Philipsen’s diagnoses of the magnitude of capitalism’s defects. The irredeemable flaw of Philipsen’s book is that he conflates his criticism of the capitalist system with one statistic–GDP– that we use to understand the system. He writes:

    Our most important performance measure [GDP] says nothing about whether quality of life is improving, or even if our activities are viable. It only tells us about how much stuff was produced, and how much money has exchanged hands. As a result, cultures around the world promote, quite literally, blind and mindless growth–and increasingly dangerous growth. And they do so largely of what they subjectively want.

    This analysis gets it exactly backwards. Modern economies growth because it happens to be the thing we (mostly) all agree on, not because economists like Simon Kuznets helped invent a way to measure it 70 years ago. That’s because when growth goes well, it is an unalloyed good. We’ve all heard the aphorism, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” While this saying sounds true in its hard-headed realism, it’s actually often not. In fact, productivity growth has created more free lunches than can be counted.It is like a simple machine in physics, a force that enables us to create more with the same amount of effort.

    Capitalism, of course, can sometimes be a pernicious force. Economic growth can sometimes come at the cost of environmental degridation or human exploitation rather than innovation. But the solution to these problems is not to stop measuring economic growth, but to create economic incentives, like carbon taxes or laws against child labor, that can address these problems.