建言特朗普：如何把工作机会带回美国

唐纳德·特朗普的目光开始越过他的重大胜利。在周一晚上发布的一段YouTube短视频中，这位当选总统概述了自己的执政议程。特朗普表示，他的首要行政重点是启动增长，改善网络和边境安全，撤出《跨太平洋伙伴关系协议》(TPP)，改善政治操守，以及“恢复我们的法律，并带回属于我们的工作机会。”

从Twitter移师YouTube是一个良好的开端。接下来，他需要提供详细信息，对人们不安全感的源头进行更细致的分析，并阐述周密的政策和立法议程来推动其执政议程。

这是一个历史性时刻；其利害关系不可能更高。栖居在象牙塔内，依靠自身貌似精心，自我加强的民调引领议事日程的领导方式，现已寿终正寝。现在，经由一种热烈且即时的反馈循环，社交媒体让所有人，公民和流氓都成为“影响者”。如果症状被误诊，处方无效，一种重大风险就很可能涌现：到下一次总统选举，我们可能面临的不仅仅是直言不讳，而是一种真正具有破坏性的不确定性、不安全感、焦虑感，乃至社会动荡。可以肯定地说，未来几个星期的决定或许将给后代带来严重后果。

让我们关注经济。无需赘言，美国的经济状况并不理想。就连华府领导阶层也应该深知这一点——当他们看到大学毕业的子女仍然住在家里的时候。尽管失业率低于美联储的总体目标（5%），但真实失业率仍接近10%。

政府的基建支出将创造新的就业机会，但社保体系和国家安全预算方面的需要也非常紧迫。我们不可能样样俱得。鉴于特朗普将他的基础设施倡议集中在刺激私人投资上，他似乎承认这一点。

虽然税收和监管改革可能会起到微弱的帮助作用，但这些举措仍然没有抓住我们的工作所面临的长期挑战。正如特朗普毫无疑问意识到的那样，把美国的失业问题归咎于中国、墨西哥和其他贸易伙伴亦是如此。几十年前，这些工作从美国流向中国和墨西哥；这种伤害已然造成。我们没有必要争辩自由贸易相对于重商主义的好处；甚至在工作开始迁移到海外之前，那场战争就已经打响了。

这种问题是结构性的。工作不是被其他地方的廉价劳动力取代，而是被微芯片和智能软件吞噬了——这些微芯片和智能软件能够执行更复杂的任务，而无需人为干预。它不只是蓝领机器人：最新的“深度学习”人工智能软件能够充分预期和执行复杂的任务，比如驾驶、大学作业分级、自主飞行无人机、调试新的微处理器，甚至能够从云端运行整个电信网络。从工厂到博士实验室，应用人工智能软件拥有同等的机会来毁灭各行各业、各种能力等级的工作。

工作吞噬者没有国界。就在上周，苹果宣布，该公司可能会将其高度自动化的iPhone生产线从中国迁回美国。（苹果仅有区区10万名员工，其人均利润额已经高达200万美元。）对于中国的机器人监工来说，这是最后一个破坏阶段，但不要指望此举会给美国工人带来多大好处：使用技术来减少劳动力和其他成本对于企业利润、股东和那些穿着连帽衫的年轻创新者有利，但对于数百人即将被替代的工人来说，这并不是好消息。

人类工作的虚拟化一直是“大衰退”以来经济不景气的真正原因；它与更容易的靶子—— “贪婪的华尔街投机者”——没有联系。金融科技的迅速发展也在破坏工作机会。技术创造的效率确实有麻醉通胀的好处。但即使美元购买力增强，那些没有工作，特别是没有储蓄，负责任的消费者也不会把钱花在非必需品上。低消费意味着低增速，进而转动这个周期，而新增的虚拟化财富总是令少数人受益。

如此长时间以来，我们任由这些压力不断累积。

处方？到目前为止，美国的顶级经济学家或多或少地忽略了这种吞噬工作的病毒，只是假设新的工作岗位会像过去几轮“科技驱动的经济转型”（从农场到工厂，从生产到服务）那样不断涌现。果真如此吗？有足够多的服务类工作吗？整整5年前，在堪萨斯州奥萨瓦提市一场思虑周祥的演讲中，奥巴马总统谈到这个巨大的问题。但我们并未看到任何跟进措施。对奥巴马犹如教授般精彩的分析进行回应，是他留给新总司令的一项遗产。

于唐纳德·特朗普而言，这是一次划时代的经济机会：制定政策以重新配置智能系统，使它们从危及人们福祉的病毒转换为赋能者，帮助人们从不那么有趣的工作中解放出来，从而为他们的家庭和社区做出更有目的性的贡献。这也很可能成为新总统面临的主要经济挑战。原因是，尽管一些人正在失去工作，但其他人，特别是创造效率的创新者及其客户和投资者，正在赢得收益丰厚的机会，对于建制派来说，最直接、最懒惰的修复路径可能是罗宾汉式的“杀富济贫”。

没有这么快。美国文化与其他文化的区别在于，我们钦佩成功，希望自己也获得成功的机会，而不是从其他人的口袋掏钱。在某种程度上，选民似乎很欣赏特朗普自我吹嘘的成功和胆识，许多人想成为他那样的成功者。他们也希望他“抽干沼泽”(drain the swamp)，清除那些自私自利的建制派政客为他们的机会设置的种种障碍。此处正是STEM学科（即科学、技术、工程和数学）和创业教育、为小企业减税，以及对基层倡议实施税收减免，可以大显身手的地方。

对新总统“百日新政”的另一个建议是，委任一个公共/私人工作组研究就业的未来，它不是那种常见的纸面研究，而是一种非正式的创新思想孵化器，并且能够包容广泛的思想家群体。新总统应该授权工作组提供一些具体的答案，途径有二：其一，充分研究建制派经济学家假设将在虚拟化经济中浮现的新型工作；其二，为人们从事有目的性的工作，以及把钱放在他们的口袋开发适当的选项——没有不公平的政府再分配。一些可能举措包括对破坏性技术征税，依靠增值税资助的普遍基本收入，或者在主流经济学讨论之外提出的类似措施。

如今恰逢人类历史上一个极其不确定的时刻。这位新当选总统肩负的责任甚至可能比他本人所意识到的还要大。在一个如此重要，利害关系不可能更大的历史阶段，特朗普有机会成为几代人中最伟大的“交易撮合者”。现在，让我们忘却他身上的标签吧，一起祝福他获得成功——为我们自己的繁荣和安全。（财富中文网）

译者：Kevin

本文作者是一位投资人和政府分析师，投资公司Xerion Investments首席执行官，No Labels公司联合创始人。

Donald Trump started looking past his big win and outlining his governing agenda in a short YouTube video released Monday night. He stated that his first executive priorities are to kick-start growth, improve cyber and border security, pull out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, improve government ethics, and “restore our laws and bring back our jobs.”

Moving from Twitter to YouTube is a good start. Next he’ll need to provide details, with a more nuanced analysis of what’s causing people’s insecurity, and a thoughtful policy and legislative agenda to move the needle.

This is a historic moment; the stakes couldn’t be higher. Ivory tower leadership, navigated by its own meticulously self-reinforcing polls, is done. Social media enfranchises everyone, citizens and rogues, as “influencers” now, with an intense and immediate feedback loop. If the symptoms are misdiagnosed and prescriptions ineffective, there’s a material risk that by the next presidential election, we may be facing a lot more than blunt talk—a truly disruptive strain of uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety, and possibly social unrest. Safe to say, the decisions of the next few weeks might have consequences for generations to come.

Let’s focus on the economy: It’s not in good shape. Even the Beltway leadership class should know better when they see their own college-educated kids still living at home. While the unemployment rate is below the Fed’s 5% headline target, real unemployment is still nearly 10%.

Government spending on infrastructure would create new jobs, but there are also pressing social safety net and national security budgetary needs—and we can’t have it all. Trump seems to acknowledge this by focusing his infrastructure initiative on stimulating private investment.

While tax and regulatory reform would also help at the margins, they still miss what’s chronically challenging our jobs. So does blaming American job losses on China, Mexico, and other trading partners, as Trump no doubt realizes. The jobs left America for China and Mexico decades ago; that damage is done. And there’s no need to debate the benefits of free trade versus mercantilism; that war was fought even before jobs started migrating abroad.

The problem is structural. Jobs aren’t being replaced by cheaper ones somewhere else; they’re being eaten by microchips and smart software executing ever more sophisticated tasks without human intervention. And it’s not just blue collar robots: The latest “deep learning” artificial intelligence software fully anticipates and executes complex tasks, like driving, grading college assignments, autonomously flying drones, debugging new microprocessors, and even running entire telecommunications networks from the cloud. Applied artificial intelligence software is an equal opportunity consumer of jobs, across the spectrum of industries and abilities, from the factory floor to PhD labs.

The job-eater knows no borders. Just last week, Apple (already earning $2 million for every one of its mere 100,000 employees) announced that it may be about to relocate its highly automated iPhone production from China back home to the U.S. It’s the last stage of disruption for China’s robot supervisors, but don’t expect it to do much good for American workers: Using technology to reduce labor and other costs is great for corporate profits, shareholders, and hoodie-wearing young innovators, but not so much for millions of workers on the road to displacement.

Virtualization of human jobs has been the real cause of economic malaise since the Great Recession; it has no connection with the easier target: “greedy Wall Street speculators.” They’re being disrupted too, by the rapid advance of FinTech. Tech-created efficiencies do have the benefit of anesthetizing inflation. But even if a consumer dollar buys more, responsible people without jobs, and especially those without savings, don’t spend on nonessentials. Lower consumption means lower growth and thus turns the cycle, while the new real wealth of virtualization by definition benefits fewer people all the time. These pressures can be left to build for only so long.

The prescription? So far, our nation’s leading economists have more or less ignored the job-eating virus, just assuming that new jobs will simply appear, as they actually did in the last “technology-driven economic transitions,” from farms-to-factories and production-to-services. Really? Will there be enough service jobs to go around? President Obama talked about this huge question in a thoughtful speech at Osawatomie, Kansas five full years ago. Nothing much was done, though; responding to the professor-president’s brilliant analysis is a legacy left to our new commander-in-chief.

This is Donald Trump’s epochal economic opportunity: developing policies that reconfigure smart systems from viruses that threaten people’s well-being to enablers that liberate them from less interesting work routines to make more purposeful contributions to their families and communities. This is also likely to constitute the new president’s defining economic challenge, because while some people are losing, others (the efficiency-creating innovators and their clients and investors) are winning big, and the straightest, laziest establishment path for fixing that would probably have been Robin Hood’s—just take from the rich to help the poor.

Not so fast. What distinguishes America’s culture from pretty much everyone else’s is that we admire success and want the chance to get there ourselves, instead of taking it from someone else’s pocket. Voters seemed at some level to even embrace Trump’s boastful success and chutzpah, bluntness and all; many want to be like him. They also want him to “drain the swamp” of the barriers that a selfish political establishment has placed in front of their opportunities. Here’s where science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and entrepreneurship education, tax relief for small businesses, and tax breaks for grassroots initiatives can make a big difference.

Another idea for the new president’s first hundred days would be to commission a public/private task force on the future of employment—not the usual paper and study–fest, but an informal incubator of innovative ideas that includes a broad range of thinkers. He should give it a mandate to come up with some concrete answers, either by thinking through exactly what new types of jobs establishment economists assume will materialize in the virtualized economy or by developing appropriate options for keeping people purposefully occupied and putting money in their pockets—without unfair government redistribution. Some of the possibilities might include taxes narrowly targeting disruptive technologies, a VAT-funded universal basic income, or similar measures that have been raised at the edges of mainstream economic discussions.

The new president-elect has earned perhaps a larger responsibility at a more precarious moment in human history than even he might have realized. Donald Trump has the chance to be greatest dealmaker, on the most important stage, with the highest stakes, in generations. Let’s forget the hashtags now, and hope for his success—and our own prosperity and security.