法国是怎么恨上资本主义的

    随着政府资产负债规模和国家债务逐年增长，有人开始担心政府行动主义（government activism）正在全球范围内扼杀资本主义。但进一步观察就会发现，情况刚好相反。

    法国经济学家托马斯•皮凯蒂的论述涵盖了大量有关发达国家收入和财富不均的公开讨论，他的开创性研究著作《21世纪的资本》（Capital in the 21st Century）英文译本将在下个月面市。

    也许大家从题目中可以看出，皮凯蒂的研究重点是资本以及随着时间的推移资本的集中发生了怎样的变化。我们已经习惯于听到大量有关收入的经济新闻。就国家而言，它的收入就是国内生产总值（GDP）。皮凯蒂的这本书一个引人入胜的地方就是，它通过详尽的全球资本存量数据让我们对世界经济有了更完整的认识。

    从资本这个角度出发，我们会了解到目前资本主义在富裕国家的健康情况和状态，这和只看GDP所得到的结论会有很大不同。大多数美国保守派人士都表示，通过提高政府开支占GDP的百分比，美国政府正在加强对国内经济的控制。下图由统计学家、作家内特•希尔提供，它展示的就是这个百分比的长期走势（其中蓝色为权益性项目支出、红色为国防支出、绿色为基础设施和服务支出、橙色为利息支出）：

    As government balance sheets and national debt grow each year, some are fretting that government activism is stifling global capitalism. But look closer and you see that it's quite the opposite.

    Thomas Piketty, the French economist whose work informs much of the public debate over income and wealth inequality in the developed world, will release the English translation of his groundbreaking study, Capital in the 21st Century next month.

    As you can probably glean from the title, Piketty is mostly concerned with the study of capital and how its concentration has changed over time. In the economic press, we're used to hearing a lot about income, which, on a national scale, is gross domestic product (GDP). One of the fascinating things about Piketty's book, however, is that it supplements our understanding of the global economy with exhaustive data about the world's stock of capital, too.

    By looking at capital, we can get a much different picture of the health and well being of capitalism in the rich world today than we do by simply looking at GDP. Most American conservatives claim that the government is gaining more control of the U.S. economy by pointing to the growing share of government spending as a percentage of GDP. Here's a chart from Nate Silver that shows this statistic for the U.S. over time:

    在英国和法国这样的国家，政府支出占GDP的比重要高得多，分别为48.5%和56.1%。

    但皮凯蒂的资本数据所描绘的情况和上图大相径庭，特别是就法国等经济体而言。如果按私有资本总量占GDP的百分比计算，大家就会发现，在过去的50-60年里，私人资本的价值经历了大幅度增长。

    In countries like Britain and France, the share of GDP made up of government spending is much higher, at 48.5% and 56.1% of GDP, respectively.

    But Piketty's capital data paints a much different picture, especially of economies like France's. If you look at the value of total privately owned capital relative to GDP, you see a country in which the value of private capital has increased significantly over the past two generations: