从列宁到雷曼兄弟：谎言的代价

Two anniversaries we mark this year — the centenary of the Russian Revolution and the decade since the start of the global financial crisis — have more in common than is apparent at first sight.

今年我们庆祝的两个纪念日——十月革命100周年、全球金融危机爆发10周年——比乍看上去有更多共同点。

Both events are self-evidently momentous. The October Revolution ushered in a dictatorship that would loom over the 20th century as one contestant for hegemony against fascism (in the first half) and democratic market liberalism (throughout). The global financial crisis, meanwhile, shook to its foundations the model that had emerged victorious from the cold war.

两大事件的重要性都不言而喻。十月革命催生了一个独裁政权，这个独裁政权是贯穿整个20世纪的主角之一——与法西斯主义(上半叶)和民主市场自由主义(整个20世纪)争夺霸权。而全球金融危机动摇了从冷战中胜出的自由主义模式的根基。

The stultifying communism that the Soviet bloc had evolved to by the 1980s collapsed under the weight of its own economic and political contradictions. The political turmoil of the last year demonstrates that we are now watching to see whether open market economies will suffer the same fate.

到上世纪80年代，苏联演化出的僵化迟钝的共产主义，在其自身重重经济、政治矛盾的重压下崩溃。去年上演的政治乱象证明，如今我们正在见证开放市场经济是否将遭遇同样的命运。

But the similarities run deeper than merely the historic scale of the two events. The content, too, of the current threat to democratic market liberalism is the same as that which felled its rival.

但两起事件的相似性不止于同样深远的历史意义。民主市场自由主义眼下面临的威胁，也与当年击倒其对手的威胁一样严峻。

Communism failed because it committed two types of lies. The first was to betray the dream that had originally attracted so many millions to it: a society of equality, solidarity and self-realisation through collective purpose. Belief in this dream lived on longer than could be justified even in communism’s heartland — and longer still in the west. It was eventually ground down by reality.

共产主义之所以失败，是因为它撒了两个谎。第一个谎是背叛了最初吸引无数人投身共产主义的梦想：一个建立在共同目标基础上，平等、团结、自我成就的社会。在共产主义的大本营，人们对这一梦想的信心即便在失去依据后还继续存在了一段时间，在西方则继续存在了更长时间。这种信心最终被现实碾碎。

The second lie was an economic system based on deceit and self-delusion. It is mostly forgotten, but a real debate raged for a good part of the 20th century over whether central planning or decentralised markets would secure the most efficient allocation of resources. The case for state control of the means of production was that only planning could overcome the clear waste of resources involved in capitalism’s mass unemployment and recurrent demand deficiencies causing recessions.

第二个谎是一种基于欺骗和自欺的经济制度。人们大多都不记得了，但20世纪很大一部分时间，围绕到底是中央计划还是自由市场可以实现最高效的资源配置，展开过一场激烈的辩论。主张国家控制生产资料的理由是，只有计划才能克服资本主义大规模失业和导致经济衰退的周期性需求不足带来的资源浪费。

In practice, of course, actual central planning has been awful at producing and allocating the goods its citizens wanted. But instead of correcting itself, the planned economy would turn the plan into the great lie around which everyone’s public beliefs had to align, even as they privately knew better. “You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” was a joke from Rostock to Vladivostok, but also a statement of reality.

在实践中，当然，实行中央计划在生产和分配公民所需的商品方面表现非常糟糕。但计划经济非但不纠正自身问题，反而将这种计划变成了一个弥天大谎，每个人公开的看法都必须配合这个谎言——即便他们心里明白得很。“你们假装给我们支付报酬，我们假装工作”是一个从罗斯托克到符拉迪沃斯托克都在讲的笑话，但也是现实的写照。

Only late in the day did the intellectual consensus endorse Friedrich von Hayek’s insight that flexible market prices contain more information than any planning mechanism can hope to gather centrally; and that dispersed decision-making therefore acts more efficiently than state authorities can do.

知识界很晚才达成共识，同意弗雷德里希•冯•哈耶克(Friedrich von Hayek)的如下深刻见解是正确的：灵活的市场价格包含的信息比任何计划机制有可能统一收集的都多;因此，分散决策可以比政府部门更高效地发挥作用。

This insight goes a long way towards explaining the growing prosperity gap between the capitalist and the communist world towards the end of the cold war. Yet it had a rude awakening in the global financial crisis, which undermined any claim of western financial capitalism to being the best way to organise an economy.

这一深刻见解很好地解释了，为什么冷战期间资本主义与共产主义世界之间的繁荣程度差距不断扩大。然而，全球金融危机粗暴地向资本主义世界泼了一盆冷水，它让如下说法变得不那么站得住脚：西方金融资本主义是组织经济的最佳方式。

The Hayekian epiphany about the price mechanism is not wrong, but incomplete. Market prices of goods and services are indeed a more powerful informational device than any central plan. But the crisis showed the same cannot be said for the prices of assets.

哈耶克在价格机制方面的顿悟没有错，但并不全面。商品和服务的市场价格的确是一种比任何中央计划都强大的信息工具。但全球金融危机显示出，资产的市场价格却并非如此。

If the five-year plan was the Soviet bloc’s grand lie, here is that of capitalism: that the market values of financial and other assets accurately reflect the economic value they represent.

如果五年计划曾经是苏联的弥天大谎，那么资本主义的弥天大谎则是：金融及其他资产的市场价值准确反映它们代表的经济价值。

What happened 10 years ago this month was the horrifying realisation that financial claims accumulated over the previous boom years did not add up, that the future economic production which they were claims on was insufficient for them all to be honoured in full.

十年前那个8月发生的事情，让人们惊恐地意识到，此前繁荣年代积累起来的金融所有权数目有问题，这些所有权的主张对象是未来的经济产出，而未来的经济产出不足以让所有的所有权得到全额兑现。

In brief, the wealth that people thought they possessed did not in fact exist. When enough people saw that their perception of their wealth was untrue, the system unravelled. The disorientation and distrust that have followed in both markets and politics was just what one would expect when millions realise they have been living a lie.

总之，人们认为自己拥有的财富实际上并不存在。当足够多的人看出，自己对自己拥有多少财富的看法是不符合实际的，这个系统就瓦解了。当数以百万计的人们认识到自己生活在谎言之中时，市场和政治体制随后出现混乱和怀疑就不足为怪了。

One lie spawned another, as market liberalism, in its turn, betrayed the dream it had promised. Western economies are today far poorer than the trend before the crash predicted. The crisis and its aftermath have left the young, in particular, with little reason to hope for the same opportunities to prosper as their parents and grandparents.

当市场自由主义也背叛了其描绘的梦想，前一个谎言就滋生出一个新的谎言。如今，西方经济体的表现比危机前的趋势预测要糟糕得多。全球金融危机及其后果，尤其使年轻人几乎毫无希望得到与自己的父母和祖父母当年相同的获得成功的机会。

Those who want liberal democratic capitalism to thrive again must heed two lessons from this comparison.

那些希望自由民主资本主义再次兴盛起来的人士，必须从这种对比中汲取两个教训。

First, a social system can survive disillusion for a long time. Communism showed this; as indeed does capitalism, whose promise was broken decades before the crisis for some groups. But when people can no longer count on their livelihoods, support snaps. Even so, the most resilient societies are those that know the truth about themselves. Deceit makes for brittleness. Market liberalism is in peril because its financial system allowed us to tell ourselves lies; and did not reckon decisively with the losses once they were undeniable.

首先，一种社会制度可以在梦想幻灭后苟延残喘很长时间。共产主义证明了这一点;资本主义也是如此，因为在部分群体看来，资本主义早在危机爆发前几十年就已经丧失了前途。但当人们的生计不再有保障时，他们就不再支持这个社会制度了。即便如此，最具弹性的社会是那些了解自身真实情况的社会。欺骗导致脆弱。市场自由主义之所以正处于危险之中，是因为其金融体系容许我们自欺欺人，而不果断地承认已经无可争辩的损失。

Left and right populists traffic in nostalgia for the heyday of the mixed economy. They are right that the contest between planning and laissez-faire must be resolved by a mix of the two. The biggest lesson from that contest is any social and economic system must be kept honest — not just fair, but truthful. And that’s a radicalism the populists are singularly unqualified to provide.

左翼和右翼民粹义者都贩卖一种对混合经济全盛时期的怀念。他们的主张没错，计划经济与自由放任主义之间的竞争的确必须通过混合两者来解决。这场竞争带来的最大教训就是，任何社会和经济制度都必须保持诚实——不只是公平，而且要真实。而这正是民粹主义者唯一无法提供的一种激进主义。