中财网狗死后投胎转世案例:【一课经济学】 抨击储蓄
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【一课经济学】 抨击储蓄
一课经济学
抨击储蓄
远古先哲就在诵赞储蓄是一种美德，而警告挥霍浪费带来的种种恶果。这个古老的智慧，反映了我们常识性的道德判断，以及人类未雨绸缪的明智抉择。但是这个世界上总有许多挥霍成性的人，也总有许多理论家，为挥霍行为寻找合理化的借口。
正统经济学家勇于驳斥他们那个时代的种种谬论，证明了符合个人最佳利益的储蓄政策，也符合国家的最佳利益。他们指出，懂得长远打算的理性储蓄者，对整个社会不会有害，反而有益。但当今社会，古老的节俭美德连同正统经济学家的证明再次受到了抨击，许多人搬出反对节俭的新理由，提倡支出的论调蔚然成风。
为了把这个基本的问题尽可能讲清楚，我想我们最好从经济学家巴斯夏所用的经典例子开始着手进行说明。假设有两兄弟各继承了一笔财富，因此每年都能各得50 000美元的收入，但是其中一人挥金如土，另一人谨慎节俭。我们在这里忽略掉所得税、以及两兄弟是否应该去工作赚钱，是否该把大部分钱捐给慈善机构，因为这些问题和我们接下来要谈的主题无关。
哥哥阿尔文是个挥霍者，他不仅有挥霍的性情，而且有挥霍的信念。他是卡尔?洛贝图斯（Karl Rodbertus）（我想不用再往前回溯得更远了）的忠实信徒。在19世纪中叶，洛贝图斯宣称资本家“必须将他们的最后一便士收入都花在享乐和奢靡上”，因为如果他们“决定储蓄，……那么商品将积压，部分工人将失业”。{脚注: 洛贝图斯，《生产过剩与恐慌》Karl Rodbertus, Overproduction and Crises (1850), p. 51.}阿尔文常出入夜总会；小费出手十分大方；他拥有一处豪宅，养了很多仆从；他有两三个私家司机，车子买了一辆又一辆；他有一个赛马场；他喜欢架游艇出航；喜欢去各地观光；他给太太买钻石项链和皮裘大衣；送朋友贵重却派不上用场的礼物。
要做所有这一切，他只好动用老本。可这对他又算得了什么呢？如果储蓄是一种罪过，不储蓄当然就是一种美德；而且，无论如何，他这么做不过是为了补偿吝啬鬼弟弟本杰明由于储蓄给社会带来的种种损害。
不用说，阿尔文对于迎宾、侍者、餐厅老板、皮货商、珠宝商、各类奢侈品店家来说都是最受欢迎的人。他被视为众人的财神爷。大家都看得很清楚，正是他四处挥洒钞票，人们才有那么多工作可做。
与他相比，弟弟本杰明可就远不如他受人欢迎。他很少光顾珠宝店、皮货店和夜总会，也不会亲昵地直呼那些领班侍者的名字。与阿尔文年年花光岁入的50 000元不够还吃老本不同，本杰明要节俭得多。他一年的花销在25 000美元左右。在那些目光短浅的人看来，他提供的工作机会显然不到阿尔文的一半，另外25 000美元则丝毫没有派上用场，就跟那笔钱不存在一样。
但我们不妨看一看，本杰明实际上将这其余的25 000美元做了些什么事。平均言之，他每年必以5 000美元用于慈善事业，其中包括对于友人之接济。受他资助的人家，复以其所得款项用于杂货铺、布店、及日用品商店。是以这笔资金之利于工商业，实与本杰明自己去支用它无异。所不同者，因获此资助而解决生活问题者人数较多，并使基本物资的生产教奢侈品的生产为多。
这最后一点，是本杰明所时时关于心者。他的良心上有时甚至对于他所支用的25 000美元，亦惴惴不安。他想，哥哥阿尔文一掷千金之慨及挥金如土之风，凡图俭约度日犹觉困难之人视之，不徒因以发生不满及嫉妒，抑且实际上将因以增加困难。依照本杰明看来，在任何时间内，国家的实际生产力都是有限的。其中经抽用于生产奢侈品者愈多，则剩下以供生产生活必需品，以应一般国民之需要者即愈少{脚注：参看哈特利?威瑟斯《贫穷与浪费》}。个人从全国现有的财富总量抽取以供自己用的分量愈少，则其留以供他人之需的分量便愈多。他觉得，谨慎用途，撙节开支，则因财富与进益之不平等而生的诸问题，当可不致发生。他认识得，节用的习惯有时会失之过当；但他觉得，凡其进益实际上超于一般水准之上的每个人士，都应保持相当的节约之风的。
现在我们姑将本杰明的观念搁置一旁，来看一看他既未支用、亦未以之接济他人的那20 000美元的情形怎样。那笔钱，他并没有放在钱袋子、书桌抽屉和保险箱里面。他把钱存到银行，或者拿去投资。如果他是存到商业银行或储蓄银行，银行会贷给企业用作周转金，或用于购买证券。换句话说，本杰明的钱用于直接或间接投资。而一旦这笔钱以一种资本投资的形式出现时，人们就会把它用来购买或是生产资本类产品——房屋、写字楼、工厂、店铺、卡车、机器。通过这些项目，货币同样被投入了流通领域，而且它们也提供了同样多的就业机会。促进就业这种作用与把钱直接用来消费的结果是一样的。
总之，现代世界中的“储蓄”，只是支出的另一种形式。通常的区别在于，货币被转交给了其他的人，并被他们用于扩大生产。就提供就业机会来说，本杰明的“储蓄”加上他的消费带来的效果，与阿尔文单纯消费的效果一样，他们投入流通的资金也一样多。关键区别就在于，阿尔文花钱提供的就业机会，每个人都看得到；而要认清本杰明储蓄的钱所起到的同样的作用，则需要我们做进一步的观察和思考。
12年后，阿尔文破产了。在夜总会和时尚精品店里再也没有了他的身影；那些曾奉他为财神爷的人如今谈起他时，嘲笑他是傻蛋一个。他不得不向本杰明写信恳求接济。与此相反，本杰明的支出与储蓄比率还是和以前一样，由于投资收益不断增长，通过他的投资创造的就业机会数量更多了。他的实产也增加了。再者，因了他的投资，国家的财富与进益也增加了；工厂及生产量也从而增加了。
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近年来，关于储蓄的谬论层出不穷。要回答这些问题，仅靠我们“两个兄弟”的传统例子恐怕就远远不够了，我们有必要多花一些篇幅对此加以分析。许多谬论连最基本的概念都搞混，到了令人匪夷所思的地步，尤其当类似的错误出现在一些备受尊敬的著名经济学家的著作中时。例如，储蓄一词有时被用来单指蓄藏（hoarding）金钱，有时被用去指投资，甚至用来用去不加区分。
如果仅仅是缺乏理智、莫名其妙地大量蓄藏金钱，在大多数经济状况中都是有害无益的。但是这种蓄藏金钱的情形极为罕见。有些舍不得花钱的情形看上去与之有些类似，但那是理性抉择的结果，与其有着本质区别。例如，经济衰退时期，消费和投资萎缩。消费者买东西都很俭省，部分原因是担心工作不保，想留点钱以备不时之需。也就是说，他们紧缩消费，不是因为吝啬守财，而是对前景担忧，万一真的失去工作，让家里能够多维持一段时间的花销。
消费者紧缩消费还有另一个原因。物价可能正在回落，但是消费者预期还会继续降价。如果他们推后再消费，用同样多的钱就能够买到更多的东西。他们不希望拿钱去买正在缩水贬值的商品，而是愿意持有他们期望（相对而言）可以升值的货币。
同样的预期心理使人么紧缩投资。他们对企业的赢利能力已经失去信心。再者，他们愿意再等几个月，届时或许可以买到更便宜的股票或债券。换句话说，他们不愿持有可能贬值的商品，或是为了某种程度的升值而持有货币本身。
同样，把这种紧缩消费与紧缩投资的行为归入到“储蓄”名下，是不恰当的。它的动机与一般的储蓄有所不同。将这种“储蓄”说成是经济衰退的起因，更是大错特错。恰恰相反，它是经济衰退的后果。
确实，这种紧缩支出行为可能加深和延长一场衰退。有些时候，政府对企业的干预反复无常，企业不知道政府政策下一步又变成什么样子，企业对未来做出预期的不确定性就会增加。于是，企业和个人不愿冒险将利润进行再投资，他们的银行存款余额因此越积越高。他们宁可保有更多的准备金，以防万一。这种现金储备行为似乎成了随之而出现的经济发展速度放慢的原因之一。然而，衰退的真正原因，是政府政策所带来的一种不确定性。企业和个人保有更多的现金，只不过是这种不确定性所导致的一连串后果中的一个环节而已。把经济不景气怪罪到“过度储蓄”上，就像苹果价格下跌，不去怪苹果丰收，却怪人们不肯出更高的价格买苹果一样。
然而，一旦有人存心要贬低某种做法或机制的时候，任何帮腔的言论，不论多么不合逻辑，他么都会为之叫好。有人帮腔说，各种消费品工业，是预期有某种需求存在而建立起来的，如果人们只知道把钱存起来，这种预期就会落空，并且导致一场衰退。这一论断主要是以我们已经分析过的错误为出发点的，即忘记了我们在消费品支出上所减少的部分是被用在资本品上了，而“储蓄”并不一定意味着总支出的缩减。他们惟一说对的一点是：任何突然的变化都可能是引起混乱，就象消费者突然把他们的需求从一种商品转向另一种商品时所表现出的混乱一样，而倘若原来的储蓄者将他们对资本品的需求一下子转向了对消费品的需求，那么由此而来的经济生活的混乱则会更为严重。
反对储蓄的另一种论点，说起来也实在是荒唐透顶。他们嘲讽19世纪人们被反复灌输着储蓄的观念，说结果是，蛋糕越做越大，却没人去吃。这样的描述显得幼稚无知。戳穿这种不实之说的最好办法，是用贴近现实的写照，把实际情况呈现出来。
那么，让我们自己想象一下。假设国家每年的储蓄占国民生产总值的20%左右。{脚注:历史上，20%近似地表示国民生产总值每年投入资本形成（不包括消费资料）的总值。但是如果扣除资本消耗，则每年的净储蓄接近12%。参照：特伯格，《经济成熟的歪理》George Terborgh, The Bogey of Economic Maturity (1945)。1977年官方估计的私人国内投资总额，占国民生产总值的16%。}这个数字已远远超过美国历年来的净储蓄水平，我们取个偏大的整数，一来便于计算，二来好让那些指责“储蓄过度”的人服气。
现在，由于这样的年储蓄和投资水平，该国每年的总产出水平将逐年增加。（为了单独讨论这个问题，我们忽略影响增长不均衡的所有因素。）假设生产每年增加2.5个百分点（为了简化计算，我们用百分点，不用百分增长率）。这样，我们可以用下列指数数字来表示我们所要考察的11年间的大致情况。如下表所 示：
年份
总产量
消费品产量
资本品产量
第1年
100
80
20[?]
第2年
102.5
82
20.5
第3年
105
84
21
第4年
107.5
86
21.5
第5年
110
88
22
第6年
112.5
90
22.5
第7年
115
92
23
第8年
117.5
94
23.5
第9年
120
96
24
第10年
122.5
98
24.5
第11年
125
100
25
（图表）{脚注:我们在此假设这11年中储蓄与投资之间的比率保持不变。}
关于这张表格，我们需要首先注意的是，总产量每年的增长是由于储蓄所引起的，没有储蓄就没有总产量的增长。（你也可以想象，不花什么钱，单靠改良和新发明去提高生产力的情况，但是这方面的增幅非常小；并且，真要靠新工艺新设备，还得要有足够的投资才行。）这种储蓄年复一年被用于增加现有机器的数量和改进其品质，从而提高全国的产品产量。不错，“蛋糕”会越做越大（很奇怪，这也成其为反对的理由）；每一年做出来的蛋糕，的确不会全部吃掉。然而，这里并不存在什么不合理的或是累加的限制。其实，每年吃掉的蛋糕越来越多；到了第11年底，该年单单消费者吃掉的蛋糕，就等于第一年消费者吃掉的蛋糕和生产者吃掉的蛋糕的总合。而且，资本设备和生产产品的能力本身与第一年相比也已增加了 25%。
让我们看看其它方面。每年有20%的国民收入用于储蓄，一点都没有扰乱消费品工业的运行。如果它们在第一年生产的产品只卖出80个点（假设没有未获满足的需求使价格上涨），它们在拟定第二年生产计划的时候，当然不会笨到设想能够卖出100个点。换句话说，消费品工业已经习惯假设过去的储蓄率会持续下 去。只有储蓄出于预料突然大增，才会扰乱它们的运行，使它们的产品卖不出去。
但是，正如我们已经注意到的，假如储蓄额突然锐减，那么它将同样导致资本品工业的混乱。要是存在银行的钱，全部被取出来购买消费品，就业不会增加，只会使消费品的价格升高，同时降低资本品的价格。其总体影响首先会迫使就业发生移转，短期内会使资本品工业中的就业缩减。长期的影响将是使整个社会的生产低于本来可以达到的水平。
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抨击储蓄的对手们并没有就此认输。他们起初对“储蓄”和“投资”加以区别，这确实是很恰当的。但是，在作出这种区别之后，他们又把储蓄和投资看作成了两个完全独立的变量，好象这两个变量能够彼此相等纯属偶然。这些经济作者勾勒出一幅奇特的画面。一方面，储蓄者会自动、无缘无故、愚蠢地闷头存钱；另一方面，可以吸收这些储蓄的“投资机会”却非常有限。至于结果，唉——，自然是经济迟滞不前。他们宣称，惟一的解决方法，是由政府出面征用这些愚蠢和有害的储蓄，投资到公共工程上，哪怕拿去搞些毫无用处的沟渠或者金字塔，总之要将钱花掉以扩大就业。
以上观点及其“解决方案”包含太多的错误，这里我们只能选其主要错误加以指正。储蓄大于投资的部分，只相当于被真正蓄藏的现金。{脚注:经济学家就这个问题的分歧，只是定义不同所致。你也可以对储蓄和投资给出相同的定义，那么二者肯定相等。在这里，我选择从货币的角度定义储蓄、从商品的角度定义投资。这个定义与人们对其字面意义的大体相同，但并不完全一致。}但在当今现代化的工业社会中，极少人会把硬币和钞票藏在袜子里面或床垫底下。就算这种可能性极小事情真的发生，它也已经反映在企业的生产计划和价格水平上。它甚至不具备通常的累积效果——行为古怪的隐居者生 前蓄藏的现金被人找到，拿出来花光用光，可能就跟新出现的蓄藏现金额度相当。事实上，这方面的总金额都可能对经营活动的影响微不足道。
倘若象我们所看到的那样，人们把钱存入储蓄银行或商业银行，银行会急着把钱借出去或者拿去投资。银行付不起让资金闲置的代价。惟有当人们担心产品的价格下跌、当银行担心投资风险太大时，人们才会增加持有现金，银行让资金闲置。但这种迹象表明经济衰退已经显现，才造成蓄藏现金的行为，而不是蓄藏现金的行为引发经济衰退。
撇开这种可以忽略的现金蓄藏不考虑（即使是这种例外情形，也可以视为直接“投资”于货币本身），储蓄和投资会趋于彼此均衡，就像任何商品的供给和需 求会趋于均衡那样。我们可以认为储蓄和投资分别构成了新资本的供给和需求。其它任何商品的供给和需求，在价格的作用下会达成均衡，资本的供应和需求也一样，在利率的作用下会达成均衡。利率只是资本借贷价格的特殊名称，它与其它价格没有两样。
这整个主题，在近年来被复杂的诡辩、被糟烂的政府政策如此过分愚蠢地混淆在一起，让人对人们是不是能够重拾常识和理性感到失望。人们病态地害怕利率 “过高”。人们认为如果利率太高，产业界借钱来投资新厂房和机器，会赚不到钱。这种观点极具影响力，近几十年来各国政府都以人为的力量，实施“廉价资金”政策。但是相关的论调只注意了提高资本需求，却忽视这些政策对资本供给的影响。事实上，这不过是顾及了政策对于某一集团的影响而忽略了其它后果这种错误的又一个例子而已。
如果相对于风险，利率被刻意压得太低，储蓄和借贷都会减少。廉价资金政策的支持者相信，不管利率是高是低，储蓄都会自动进行，因为，富人家的余钱也只有存银行。但他们并没有说清楚，一个人在什么样的收入水平下才有可能固定地存储一笔小量资金，而不考虑当时的利息率水平或者贷款的风险如何。
尽管富豪的储蓄额受利率的影响要比一般富裕的人小得多，但事实上每个人的储蓄额都会受到某种程度的影响。试图证明在一种极端的情况下实质储蓄额不会 因为利率大幅下降而减少，这就好比是在说，糖的总产量，不会因为价格大幅下跌而减少，理由是高效率、低成本的生产者会继续生产。这种观点忽略了边际储蓄者，甚至忽略了绝大部分的储蓄者。
将利率人为压低所造成的影响，其实与把商品价格压低到自然市场水平以下所产生的影响相同：需求会增加，供应会减少。压低利率会导致资本的需求增加，而实质资本的供给减少。它会造成经济扭曲。毫无疑问，人为压低利率，就鼓励借贷。而实际上，这倾向于鼓励了高投机风险的经济活动，这种经济活动除非在类似人为造就的低利率条件下是无法存在的。从供给面来说，人为压低利率，会抑制正常的节约与储蓄。总之，它将促成资本的相对匮乏。
的确可以人为压低资金利率，但只有靠持续不断注入新资金、不断扩张银行信贷，以替代实质储蓄。这么做会制造资本供给增加的假象，就象多掺点水，会让人觉得牛奶更多了一样。但这是一种持续的通货膨胀政策。显然这是一个累积危险的过程。倘若通货膨胀得到了逆转，或者仅仅是被控制住，甚至只是膨胀速度放慢的话，资金利率就会上涨，并爆发经济危机。总之，廉价资金政策最终必将造成巨大的经济动荡，这比起它们原本希望纠正 或者避免的问题要来得剧烈得多。
假如我们并不准备采取通货膨胀性的政府政策去干扰资金利率，那么，当储蓄额增长时，利息率会自然降低，从而以一种自然的方式为增加了的储蓄创造需求。也就是说，更多的储蓄供给要寻求投资机会，就会迫使储蓄者接受较低的利率。同时，较低的利率水平意味着更多的企业贷得起款。因为，贷款购置新机器或厂房带来的的预期利润，更有可能超过必须支付的贷款利息。
4
现在来看一下我准备讨论的有关储蓄的最后一种谬论。经常有人认为，在吸收新的资本上，存在着一个确切的数量极限。他们甚至假设说，我们已经达到了这个资本扩张的极限。这样的观点能够在那些无知的人们中流行开来已经够让人吃惊了，而训练有素的经济学家居然也能接受它，简直令人匪夷所思。现代社会几乎全部的财富、几乎每一件区别于是17世纪前工业化时代的东西，都是由累积的资本构成的。
这种资本一部分是由许多称之为耐用消费品的东西组成，例如汽车、冰箱、家具、学校、学院、教堂、图书馆、医院，以及比它们都更重要的私人住宅。在世界历史上，人类从来没有对这些东西感到满足过。就算住宅的数量够多，但除了那些最好的房屋外，对于居住品质上的改善总是可能的，也是需要的。这种要求从来没有什么限度。
资本的第二部分就是我们所谓严格意义上的资本。它由生产工具组成，包括从最原始的斧头、刀，或者耕犁，到最精密的机床、最大的发电机或粒子回旋加速器，或者设备最先进的工厂。在这方面，可以扩增和想要扩增的数量，尤其是品质，也同样没有上限。在可预见的未来不会有“过剩”的资本，除非最落后国家的技 术装备赶上最先进国家；除非美国效率最差的工厂赶上设备最新、最好的工厂；除非最现代化的生产工具，已经达到人类智力的极限，再也无法改进。只要以上任何一种条件尚不具备，经济中就必然有更多资本的用武之地。
然而，如何才能“吸纳”新增资本呢？如何实现其“偿付”呢？如果能将资本储蓄起来，它会自行吸纳和自行偿付。生产者会投资于新的资本财货（也就是购买更好、更精巧的新工具），因为这些工具能够降低生产成本；这些工具做得出纯靠手工根本做不出来的产品（包括我们身边的大部分用品，例如书籍、打字机、汽车、火车机车、悬索桥）；或者，这些工具能够大幅提高产量；或者（换种方式来说），这些工具能够降低单位生产成本。而且，就像单位生产成本可以降低到什么程度并没有极限（除非每样东西都是零成本生产），可以吸纳的新资本数量，也没有极限。
由于新增资本使得单位生产成本稳定下降，它可以在两个方面单独或者一起发挥作用：即减低消费者购买商品的成本，或者提高使用新设备获得增产能力的劳工领得的工资。因此，新机器对直接使用它们的人，以及广大的消费者，都有好处。对消费者来说，同样的钱，能买到更多、更好的产品。或者说这些东西提高了他们的实质收入。对使用新机器的劳工来说，除了货币工资增加，实质工资也增加了。汽车业是个典型的例子。美国的汽车工业的工资是全世界同行中最高的，甚至在美国的各行各业中也排在工薪族之最。然而，美国的汽车制造商仍能以比世界其它各国更低的价格出售其产品，因为其单位成本更低。其秘诀在于美国生产汽车时，每位劳工和每辆汽车所使用的资本量比其它国家都多得多。
不过，仍有一些人认为我们已经走到了这一资本累进进程的尽头，{脚注:对这个谬论统计意义上的反驳，参看特伯格《经济成熟的歪理》。}也还有另外一些人认为，即使我们目前还没有走到头，但这样继续储蓄和不断增加资本积累无论如何也是愚蠢的。
在作了这些分析之后，应该不难辨别那种做法才是愚蠢的。
EIOL The Assault on Saving
Economics in One LessonThe assault on saving
From time immemorial proverbial wisdom has taught the virtues of saving, and warned against the consequences of prodigality and waste. This proverbial wisdom has reflected the common ethical as well as the merely prudential judgments of mankind. But there have always been squanderers, and there have apparently always been theorists to rationalize their squandering.
The classical economists, refuting the fallacies of their own day, showed that the saving policy that was in the best interests of the individual was also in the best interests of the nation. They showed that the rational saver, in making provision for his own future, was not hurting, but helping, the whole community. But today the ancient virtue of thrift, as well as its defense by the classical economists, is once more under attack, for allegedly new reasons, while the opposite doctrine of spending is in fashion.
In order to make the fundamental issue as clear as possible, we cannot do better, I think, than to start with the classic example used by Bastiat. Let us imagine two brothers, then, one a spendthrift and the other a prudent man, each of whom has inherited a sum to yield him an income of $50,000 a year. We shall disregard the in- come tax, and the question whether both brothers really ought to work for a living, because such questions are irrelevant to our present purpose.
Alvin, then, the first brother, is a lavish spender. He spends not only by temperament, but on principle. He is a disciple (to go no further back) of Rodbertus, who declared in the middle of the nineteenth century that capitalists "must expend their income to the last penny in comforts and luxuries," for if they "determine to save . . . goods accumulate, and part of the workmen will have no work.”* Alvin is always seen at the night clubs; he tips handsomely; he maintains a pretentious establishment, with plenty of servants; he has a couple of chauffeurs and doesn't stint himself in the number of cars he owns; he keeps a racing stable; he runs a yacht; he travels; he loads his wife down with diamond bracelets and fur coats; he gives expensive and useless presents to his friends.
To do all this he has to dig into his capital. But what of it? If saving is a sin, dissaving must he a virtue; and in any case he is simply making up for the harm being done by the saving of his pinchpenny brother Benjamin.
It need hardly be said that Alvin is a great favorite with the hat check girls, the waiters, the restaurateurs, the furriers, the jewelers, the luxury establishments of all kinds. They regard him as a public benefactor. Certainly it is obvious to everyone that he is giving employment and spreading his money around.
Compared with him brother Benjamin is much less popular. He is seldom seen at the jewelers, the furriers or the night clubs, and he does not call the head waiters by their first names. Whereas Alvin spends not only the full $50,000 income each year hut is digging into capital besides, Benjamin lives much more modestly and spends only about $25,000. Obviously, think the people who see only what hits them in the eye, he is providing less than.) half as much employment as Alvin , and the other $25,000 is as useless as if it did not exist.
But let us see what Benjamin actually does with this other $25,000. On the average he gives $5,000 of it to charitable causes, including help to friends in need. The families who are helped by these funds in turn spend them on groceries or clothing or living quarters. So the funds create as much employment as if Benjamin had spent them directly on himself. The difference is that more people are made happy as consumers, and that production is going more into essential goods and less into luxuries and superfluities.
This last point is one that often gives Benjamin concern. His conscience sometimes troubles him even about the $25,000 he spends. The kind of vulgar display and reckless spending that Alvin indulges in, he thinks, not only helps to breed dissatisfaction and envy in those who find it hard to make a decent living, but actually increases their difficulties. At any given moment, as Benjamin sees it, the actual producing power of the nation is limited. The more of it that is diverted to producing frivolities and luxuries, the less there is left for producing the essentials of life for those who are in need of them.* The less he withdraws from the existing stock of wealth for his own use, the more he leaves for others. Prudence in consumptive spending, he feels, mitigates the problems raised by the inequalities of wealth and income. He realizes that this consumptive restraint can he carried too far; but there ought to be some of it, he feels, in every- one whose income is substantially above the average.
Now let us see, apart from Benjamin's ideas, what hap- pens to the $20,000 that he neither spends nor gives away. He does not let it pile up in his pocketbook, his bureau drawers, or in his safe. He either deposits it in a bank or he invests it. If he puts it either into a commercial or a savings bank, the bank either lends it to going businesses on short term for working capital, or uses it to buy securities. In other words, Benjamin invests his money either directly or indirectly. But when money is invested it is used to buy capital goods-houses or office buildings or factories or ships or motor trucks or machines. Any one of these projects puts as much money into circulation and gives as much employment as the same amount of money spent directly on consumption.
"Saving," in short, in the modern world, is only an- other form of spending. The usual difference is that the money is turned over to someone else to spend on means to increase production. So far as giving employment is concerned, Benjamin's "saving" and spending combined give as much as Alvin's spending alone, and put as much money in circulation. The chief difference is that the employment provided by Alvin 's spending can be seen by anyone with one eye; but it is necessary to look a little more carefully, and to think a moment, to recognize that every dollar of Benjamin's saving gives as much employment as every dollar that Alvin throws around.
A dozen years roll by. Alvin is broke. He is no longer seen in the night clubs and at the fashionable shops; and those whom he formerly patronized, when they speak of him, refer to him as something of a fool. He writes begging letters to Benjamin. And Benjamin, who continues about the same ratio of spending to saving, provides more jobs than ever, because his income, through investment, has grown. His capital wealth is greater also. More- over, because of his investments, the national wealth and income are greater; there are more factories and more production.
So many fallacies have grown up about saving in recent years that they cannot all be answered by our example of the two brothers. It is necessary to devote some further space to them. Many stem from confusions so elementary as to seem incredible, particularly when found in economic writers of wide repute. The word "saving," for example, is used sometimes to mean mere hoarding of money, and sometimes to mean investment, with no clear distinction, consistently maintained, between the two uses.
Mere hoarding of hand-to-hand money, if it takes place irrationally, causelessly, and on a large scale, is in most economic situations harmful. But this sort of hoarding is extremely rare. Something that looks like this, but should be carefully distinguished from it, often occurs after a downturn in business has got under way. Consumptive spending and investment are then both contracted. Consumers reduce their buying. They do this partly, indeed, because they fear they may lose their jobs, and they wish to conserve their resources: they have contracted their buying not because they wish to consume less, but because they wish to make sure that their power to consume will he extended over a longer period if they do lose their jobs.
But consumers reduce their buying for another reason. Prices of goods have probably fallen, and they fear a further fall. If they defer spending, they believe they will get more for their money. They do not wish to have their resources in goods that are falling in value, but in money which they expect (relatively) to rise in value.
The same expectation prevents them from investing They have lost their confidence in the profitability of business; or at least they believe that if they wait a few months they can buy stocks or bonds cheaper. We may think of them either as refusing to hold goods that may fall in value on their hands, or as holding money itself for a rise.
It is a misnomer to call this temporary refusal to buy "saving." It does not spring from the same motives as normal saving. And it is a still more serious error to say that this sort of "saving" is the cause of depressions. It is, on the contrary, the consequence of depressions.
It is true that this refusal to buy may intensify and prolong a depression once begun. But it does not itself originate the depression. At times when there is capricious government intervention in business, and when business does not know what the government is going to do next, uncertainty is created. Profits are not reinvested. Firms and individuals allow cash balances to accumulate in their banks. They keep larger reserves against contingencies. This hoarding of cash may seem like the cause of a subsequent slowdown in business activity. The real cause, however, is the uncertainty brought about by the government policies. The larger cash balances of firms and individuals are merely one link in the chain of consequences from that uncertainty. To blame "excessive saving" for the business decline would be like blaming a fall in the price of apples not on a bumper crop but on the people who refuse to pay more for apples.
But when once people have decided to deride a practice or an institution, any argument against it, no matter how illogical, is considered good enough. I t is said that the various consumers' goods industries are built on the expectation of a certain demand, and that if people take to saving they will disappoint this expectation and start a depression. This assertion rests primarily on the error we have already examined-that of forgetting that what is saved on consumers' goods is spent on capital goods, and that "saving" does not necessarily mean even a dollar's contraction in total spending. The only element of truth in the contention is that any change that is sudden may be unsettling. It would be just as unsettling if consumers suddenly switched their demand from one consumers' goods to another. It would he even more unsettling if former savers suddenly switched their demand from capital goods to consumers' goods.
Still another objection is made against saving. It is said to be just downright silly. The Nineteenth Century is derided for its supposed inculcation of the doctrine that mankind through saving should go on making itself a larger and larger cake without ever eating the cake. This picture of the process is itself naive and childish. It can best be disposed of, perhaps, by putting before ourselves a somewhat more realistic picture of what actually takes place.
Let us picture to ourselves, then, a nation that collectively saves every year about 20 percent of all it produces in that year. This figure greatly overstates the amount of net saving that has occurred historically in the United States * but it is a round figure that is easily handled, and it gives the benefit of every doubt to those who believe that we have been "oversaving."
Now as a result of this annual saving and investment, the total annual production of the country will increase each year. (To isolate the problem we are ignoring for 3. Historically 20 per cent would represent approximately the have been closer to 12 per rent.' the moment booms, slumps, or other fluctuations.) Let us say that this annual increase in production is 2 1/2 percentage points. (Percentage points are taken instead of a compounded percentage merely to simplify the arithmetic.) The picture that we get for an eleven-year period, say, would then run something like this in terms of index numbers:
Total Consumers' Capital
Year Production Goods Produced Goods Produced
First 100.0 80n 20*
Second 102.5 82 20.5
Third 105 84 21
Fourth 107.5 86 21.5
Fifth 110 88 22
Sixth 112.5 90 22.5
Seventh 115 92 23
Eighth 117.5 94 23.5
Ninth 120 96 24
Tenth 122.5 98 24.5
Eleventh 125 100 25
* This of course assumes the process of saving and investment to have been already under way at the same ram.
The first thing to be noticed about this table is that total production increases each year because of the sawing, and would not have increased without it. (It is possible no doubt to imagine that improvements and new inventions merely in replaced machinery and other capital goods of a value no greater than the old would increase the national productivity; but this increase would amount to very little, and the argument in any case assumes enough prior investment to have made the existing machinery possible.) The saving has been used year after year to increase the quantity or improve the quality of existing machinery, and so to increase the nation's out- put of goods. There is, it is true (if that for some strange reason is considered an objection), a larger and larger "cake" each year. Each year, it is true, not all of the currently produced "cake" is consumed. But there is no irrational or cumulative consumer restraint. For each year a larger and larger cake is in fact consumed; until, at the end of eleven years (in our illustration), the annual consumers' cake alone is equal to the combined consumers' and producers' cakes of the first year. More- over, the capital equipment, the ability to produce goods, is itself 25 per cent greater than in the first year. Let us observe a few other points. The fact that 20 per cent of the national income goes each year for saving does not upset the consumers' goods industries in the least. If they sold only the 80 units they produced in the first year (and there were no rise in prices caused by unsatisfied demand) they would certainly not be foolish enough to build their production plans on the assumption that they were going to sell 100 units in the second year. Tire consumers' goods industries, in other words, are already geared to the assumption that the past situation in regard to the rate of savings will continue. Only an unexpected sudden and substantial increase in savings would unsettle them and leave them with unsold goods.
But the same unsettlement, as we have already ob- served, would be caused in the capital goads industries by a sudden and substantial decrease in savings. If money that would previously have been used for savings were thrown into the purchase of consumers' goods, it would not increase employment but merely lead to an increase in the price of consumption goods and to a decrease in the price of capital goods. Its first effect on net balance would be to force shifts in employment and temporarily to decrease employment by its effect on the capital goods industries. And its long-run effect would he to reduce production below the level that would otherwise have been achieved.
The enemies of saving are not through. They begin by drawing a distinction, which is proper enough, between "savings" and "investment." But then they start to talk as if the two were independent variables and as if it were merely an accident that they should ever equal each other. These writers paint a portentous picture. On the one side are savers automatically, pointlessly, stupidly continuing to save; on the other side are limited "investment opportunities" that cannot absorb this saving. The result, alas, is stagnation. The only solution, they declare, is for the government to expropriate these stupid and harmful savings and to invent its own projects, even if these are only useless ditches or pyramids, to use up the money and provide employment.
There is so much that is false in this picture and "solution" that we can here point only to some of the main fallacies. "Savings" can exceed "investment" only by the amounts that are actually hoarded in cash.* Few people nowadays, in a modern industrial community like the United States , hoard coins and bills in stockings or under mattresses. To the small extent that this may occur, it has already been reflected in the production plans of business and in the price level. It is not ordinarily even cumulative: dishoarding, as eccentric recluses die and their hoards are discovered and dissipated, probably offsets new hoarding. In fact, the whole amount involved is probably insignificant in its effect on business activity.
If money is kept either in savings banks or commercial hanks, as we have already seen, the banks are eager to lend and invest it. They cannot afford to have idle funds. The only thing that will cause people generally to in- crease their holdings of cash, or that will cause banks to hold funds idle and lose the interest on them, is, a s we have seen, either fear that prices of goods are going to fall or the fear of banks that they will be taking too great a risk with their principal. But this means that signs of a depression have already appeared, and have caused the hoarding, rather than that the hoarding has started the depression.
Apart from this negligible hoarding of cash, then (and even this exception might he thought of as a direct "in- vestment" in money itself) "savings" and "investment" are brought into equilibrium with each other in the same way that the supply of and demand for any commodity are brought into equilibrium. For we may define "savings" and "investment" as constituting respectively the supply of and demand for new capital. And just as the supply of and demand for any other commodity are equalized by price, so the supply of and demand for capital are equalized by interest rates. The interest rate is merely the special name for the price of loaned capital. I t is a price like any other.
This whole subject has been so appallingly confused in recent years by complicated sophistries and disastrous governmental policies based upon them that one almost despairs of getting back to common sense and sanity about it. There is a psychopathic fear of "excessive" interest rates. It is argued that if interest rates are too high it will not be profitable for industry to borrow and invest in new plants and machines. This argument has been so effective that governments everywhere in recent decades have pursued artificial "cheap money" policies. But the argument, in its concern with increasing the demand for capital, overlooks the effect of these policies on the sup- ply of capital. It is one more example of the fallacy of looking at the effects of a policy only on one group and forgetting the effects on another.
If interest rates are artificially kept too low in relation to risks, funds will neither be saved nor lent. The cheap- money proponents believe that saving goes on automatically, regardless of the interest rate, because the sated rich have nothing else that they can do with their money. They do not stop to tell us at precisely what personal in- come level a man saves a fixed minimum amount regard- less of the rate of interest or the risk at which he can lend it.
The fact is that, though the volume of saving of the very rich is doubtless affected much less proportionately than that of the moderately well-off by changes in the interest rate, practically everyone's saving is affected in some degree. To argue, on the basis of an extreme ex- ample, that the volume of real savings would not be reduced by a substantial reduction in the interest rate, is like arguing that the total production of sugar would not be reduced by a substantial fall of its price because the efficient, low-cost producers would still raise as much as before. The argument overlooks the marginal saver, and even, indeed, the great majority of savers.
The effect of keeping interest rates artificially low, in fact, is eventually the same as that of keeping any other price below the natural market. It increases demand and reduces supply. It increases the demand for capital and reduces the supply of real capital. It brings about a scarcity. It creates economic distortions. It is true, no doubt, that an artificial reduction in the interest rate encourages increased borrowing. I t tends, in fact, to en- courage highly speculative ventures that cannot continue except under the artificial conditions that gave them birth. On the supply side, the artificial reduction of interest rates discourages normal thrift and saving. It brings about a comparative shortage of real capital. The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger.
The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.
If no effort is made to tamper with money rates through inflationary governmental policies, increased savings create their own demand by lowering interest rates in a natural manner. The greater supply of savings seeking investment forces savers to accept lower rates. But lower rates also mean that more enterprises can afford to borrow because their prospective profit on the new machines or plants they buy with the proceeds seems likely to exceed what they have to pay for the borrowed funds.
We come now to the last fallacy about saving with which I intend to deal. This is the frequent assumption that there is a fixed limit to the amount of new capital that can he absorbed, or even that the limit of capital expansion has already been reached. It is incredible that such a view could prevail even among the ignorant, let alone that it could be held by any trained economist. Almost the whole wealth of the modern world, nearly every- thing that distinguishes it from the pre-industrial world of the seventeenth century, consists of its accumulated capital.
This capital is made up in part of many things that might better be called consumers' durable goods-auto- mobiles, refrigerators, furniture, schools, colleges, churches, libraries, hospitals and above all private homes. Never in the history of the world has there been enough of these. There is still, with the postponed building and outright destruction of World War II, a desperate shortage of them. But even if there were enough homes from a purely numerical point of view, qualitative improvements are possible and desirable without definite limit in all but the very best houses.
The second part of capital is what we may call capital proper. It consists of the tools of production, including everything from the crudest axe, knife or plow to the finest machine tool, the greatest electric generator or cyclotron, or the most wonderfully equipped factory. Here, too, quantitatively and especially qualitatively, there is no limit to the expansion that is possible and desirable. There will not be a "surplus" of capital until the most backward country is as well equipped technologically as the most advanced, until the most inefficient factory in America is brought abreast of the factory with the latest and most elaborate equipment, and until the most modern tools of production have reached a point where human ingenuity is at a dead end, and can improve them no further. As long as any of these conditions remain unfulfilled, there will be indefinite room for more capital.
But how can the additional capital be "absorbed"? How can it be "paid for"? If it is set aside and saved, it will absorb itself and pay for itself. For producers invest in new capital goods-that is, they buy new and better and more ingenious tools-because these tools reduce cost of production. They either bring into existence goods that completely unaided hand labor could not bring into existence at all (and this now includes most of the goods around us-books, typewriters, automobiles, locomotives, suspension bridges) ; or they increase enormously the quantities in which these can be produced; or (and this is merely saying these things in a different way) they reduce unit costs of production. And as there is no assign. able limit to the extent to which unit costs of production can be reduced-until everything can be produced at no cost at all-there is no assignable limit to the amount of new capital that can be absorbed.
The steady reduction of unit costs of production by the addition of new capital does either one of two things, or both. It reduces the costs of goods to consumers, and it increases the wages of the labor that uses the new machines because it increases the productive power of that labor. Thus a new machine benefits both the people who work on it directly and the great body of consumers. In the case of consumers we may say either that it supplies them with more and better goods for the same money, or, what is the same thing, that it increases their real incomes. In the case of the workers who use the new machines it increases their real wages in a double way by increasing their money wages as well. A typical illustration is the automobile business. The American auto- mobile industry pays the highest wages in the world, and among the very highest even in America . Yet American motor car makers can undersell the rest of the world, because their unit cost is lower. And the secretis that the capital used in making American automobiles is greater per worker and per car than anywhere else in the world.
And yet there are people who think we have reached the end of this process,* and still others who think that even if we haven't, the world is foolish to go on saving and adding to its stock of capital.
It should not be difficult to decide, after our analysis, with whom the real folly lies.
【一课经济学】 抨击储蓄
一课经济学
抨击储蓄
远古先哲就在诵赞储蓄是一种美德，而警告挥霍浪费带来的种种恶果。这个古老的智慧，反映了我们常识性的道德判断，以及人类未雨绸缪的明智抉择。但是这个世界上总有许多挥霍成性的人，也总有许多理论家，为挥霍行为寻找合理化的借口。
正统经济学家勇于驳斥他们那个时代的种种谬论，证明了符合个人最佳利益的储蓄政策，也符合国家的最佳利益。他们指出，懂得长远打算的理性储蓄者，对整个社会不会有害，反而有益。但当今社会，古老的节俭美德连同正统经济学家的证明再次受到了抨击，许多人搬出反对节俭的新理由，提倡支出的论调蔚然成风。
为了把这个基本的问题尽可能讲清楚，我想我们最好从经济学家巴斯夏所用的经典例子开始着手进行说明。假设有两兄弟各继承了一笔财富，因此每年都能各得50 000美元的收入，但是其中一人挥金如土，另一人谨慎节俭。我们在这里忽略掉所得税、以及两兄弟是否应该去工作赚钱，是否该把大部分钱捐给慈善机构，因为这些问题和我们接下来要谈的主题无关。
哥哥阿尔文是个挥霍者，他不仅有挥霍的性情，而且有挥霍的信念。他是卡尔?洛贝图斯（Karl Rodbertus）（我想不用再往前回溯得更远了）的忠实信徒。在19世纪中叶，洛贝图斯宣称资本家“必须将他们的最后一便士收入都花在享乐和奢靡上”，因为如果他们“决定储蓄，……那么商品将积压，部分工人将失业”。{脚注: 洛贝图斯，《生产过剩与恐慌》Karl Rodbertus, Overproduction and Crises (1850), p. 51.}阿尔文常出入夜总会；小费出手十分大方；他拥有一处豪宅，养了很多仆从；他有两三个私家司机，车子买了一辆又一辆；他有一个赛马场；他喜欢架游艇出航；喜欢去各地观光；他给太太买钻石项链和皮裘大衣；送朋友贵重却派不上用场的礼物。
要做所有这一切，他只好动用老本。可这对他又算得了什么呢？如果储蓄是一种罪过，不储蓄当然就是一种美德；而且，无论如何，他这么做不过是为了补偿吝啬鬼弟弟本杰明由于储蓄给社会带来的种种损害。
不用说，阿尔文对于迎宾、侍者、餐厅老板、皮货商、珠宝商、各类奢侈品店家来说都是最受欢迎的人。他被视为众人的财神爷。大家都看得很清楚，正是他四处挥洒钞票，人们才有那么多工作可做。
与他相比，弟弟本杰明可就远不如他受人欢迎。他很少光顾珠宝店、皮货店和夜总会，也不会亲昵地直呼那些领班侍者的名字。与阿尔文年年花光岁入的50 000元不够还吃老本不同，本杰明要节俭得多。他一年的花销在25 000美元左右。在那些目光短浅的人看来，他提供的工作机会显然不到阿尔文的一半，另外25 000美元则丝毫没有派上用场，就跟那笔钱不存在一样。
但我们不妨看一看，本杰明实际上将这其余的25 000美元做了些什么事。平均言之，他每年必以5 000美元用于慈善事业，其中包括对于友人之接济。受他资助的人家，复以其所得款项用于杂货铺、布店、及日用品商店。是以这笔资金之利于工商业，实与本杰明自己去支用它无异。所不同者，因获此资助而解决生活问题者人数较多，并使基本物资的生产教奢侈品的生产为多。
这最后一点，是本杰明所时时关于心者。他的良心上有时甚至对于他所支用的25 000美元，亦惴惴不安。他想，哥哥阿尔文一掷千金之慨及挥金如土之风，凡图俭约度日犹觉困难之人视之，不徒因以发生不满及嫉妒，抑且实际上将因以增加困难。依照本杰明看来，在任何时间内，国家的实际生产力都是有限的。其中经抽用于生产奢侈品者愈多，则剩下以供生产生活必需品，以应一般国民之需要者即愈少{脚注：参看哈特利?威瑟斯《贫穷与浪费》}。个人从全国现有的财富总量抽取以供自己用的分量愈少，则其留以供他人之需的分量便愈多。他觉得，谨慎用途，撙节开支，则因财富与进益之不平等而生的诸问题，当可不致发生。他认识得，节用的习惯有时会失之过当；但他觉得，凡其进益实际上超于一般水准之上的每个人士，都应保持相当的节约之风的。
现在我们姑将本杰明的观念搁置一旁，来看一看他既未支用、亦未以之接济他人的那20 000美元的情形怎样。那笔钱，他并没有放在钱袋子、书桌抽屉和保险箱里面。他把钱存到银行，或者拿去投资。如果他是存到商业银行或储蓄银行，银行会贷给企业用作周转金，或用于购买证券。换句话说，本杰明的钱用于直接或间接投资。而一旦这笔钱以一种资本投资的形式出现时，人们就会把它用来购买或是生产资本类产品——房屋、写字楼、工厂、店铺、卡车、机器。通过这些项目，货币同样被投入了流通领域，而且它们也提供了同样多的就业机会。促进就业这种作用与把钱直接用来消费的结果是一样的。
总之，现代世界中的“储蓄”，只是支出的另一种形式。通常的区别在于，货币被转交给了其他的人，并被他们用于扩大生产。就提供就业机会来说，本杰明的“储蓄”加上他的消费带来的效果，与阿尔文单纯消费的效果一样，他们投入流通的资金也一样多。关键区别就在于，阿尔文花钱提供的就业机会，每个人都看得到；而要认清本杰明储蓄的钱所起到的同样的作用，则需要我们做进一步的观察和思考。
12年后，阿尔文破产了。在夜总会和时尚精品店里再也没有了他的身影；那些曾奉他为财神爷的人如今谈起他时，嘲笑他是傻蛋一个。他不得不向本杰明写信恳求接济。与此相反，本杰明的支出与储蓄比率还是和以前一样，由于投资收益不断增长，通过他的投资创造的就业机会数量更多了。他的实产也增加了。再者，因了他的投资，国家的财富与进益也增加了；工厂及生产量也从而增加了。
2
近年来，关于储蓄的谬论层出不穷。要回答这些问题，仅靠我们“两个兄弟”的传统例子恐怕就远远不够了，我们有必要多花一些篇幅对此加以分析。许多谬论连最基本的概念都搞混，到了令人匪夷所思的地步，尤其当类似的错误出现在一些备受尊敬的著名经济学家的著作中时。例如，储蓄一词有时被用来单指蓄藏（hoarding）金钱，有时被用去指投资，甚至用来用去不加区分。
如果仅仅是缺乏理智、莫名其妙地大量蓄藏金钱，在大多数经济状况中都是有害无益的。但是这种蓄藏金钱的情形极为罕见。有些舍不得花钱的情形看上去与之有些类似，但那是理性抉择的结果，与其有着本质区别。例如，经济衰退时期，消费和投资萎缩。消费者买东西都很俭省，部分原因是担心工作不保，想留点钱以备不时之需。也就是说，他们紧缩消费，不是因为吝啬守财，而是对前景担忧，万一真的失去工作，让家里能够多维持一段时间的花销。
消费者紧缩消费还有另一个原因。物价可能正在回落，但是消费者预期还会继续降价。如果他们推后再消费，用同样多的钱就能够买到更多的东西。他们不希望拿钱去买正在缩水贬值的商品，而是愿意持有他们期望（相对而言）可以升值的货币。
同样的预期心理使人么紧缩投资。他们对企业的赢利能力已经失去信心。再者，他们愿意再等几个月，届时或许可以买到更便宜的股票或债券。换句话说，他们不愿持有可能贬值的商品，或是为了某种程度的升值而持有货币本身。
同样，把这种紧缩消费与紧缩投资的行为归入到“储蓄”名下，是不恰当的。它的动机与一般的储蓄有所不同。将这种“储蓄”说成是经济衰退的起因，更是大错特错。恰恰相反，它是经济衰退的后果。
确实，这种紧缩支出行为可能加深和延长一场衰退。有些时候，政府对企业的干预反复无常，企业不知道政府政策下一步又变成什么样子，企业对未来做出预期的不确定性就会增加。于是，企业和个人不愿冒险将利润进行再投资，他们的银行存款余额因此越积越高。他们宁可保有更多的准备金，以防万一。这种现金储备行为似乎成了随之而出现的经济发展速度放慢的原因之一。然而，衰退的真正原因，是政府政策所带来的一种不确定性。企业和个人保有更多的现金，只不过是这种不确定性所导致的一连串后果中的一个环节而已。把经济不景气怪罪到“过度储蓄”上，就像苹果价格下跌，不去怪苹果丰收，却怪人们不肯出更高的价格买苹果一样。
然而，一旦有人存心要贬低某种做法或机制的时候，任何帮腔的言论，不论多么不合逻辑，他么都会为之叫好。有人帮腔说，各种消费品工业，是预期有某种需求存在而建立起来的，如果人们只知道把钱存起来，这种预期就会落空，并且导致一场衰退。这一论断主要是以我们已经分析过的错误为出发点的，即忘记了我们在消费品支出上所减少的部分是被用在资本品上了，而“储蓄”并不一定意味着总支出的缩减。他们惟一说对的一点是：任何突然的变化都可能是引起混乱，就象消费者突然把他们的需求从一种商品转向另一种商品时所表现出的混乱一样，而倘若原来的储蓄者将他们对资本品的需求一下子转向了对消费品的需求，那么由此而来的经济生活的混乱则会更为严重。
反对储蓄的另一种论点，说起来也实在是荒唐透顶。他们嘲讽19世纪人们被反复灌输着储蓄的观念，说结果是，蛋糕越做越大，却没人去吃。这样的描述显得幼稚无知。戳穿这种不实之说的最好办法，是用贴近现实的写照，把实际情况呈现出来。
那么，让我们自己想象一下。假设国家每年的储蓄占国民生产总值的20%左右。{脚注:历史上，20%近似地表示国民生产总值每年投入资本形成（不包括消费资料）的总值。但是如果扣除资本消耗，则每年的净储蓄接近12%。参照：特伯格，《经济成熟的歪理》George Terborgh, The Bogey of Economic Maturity (1945)。1977年官方估计的私人国内投资总额，占国民生产总值的16%。}这个数字已远远超过美国历年来的净储蓄水平，我们取个偏大的整数，一来便于计算，二来好让那些指责“储蓄过度”的人服气。
现在，由于这样的年储蓄和投资水平，该国每年的总产出水平将逐年增加。（为了单独讨论这个问题，我们忽略影响增长不均衡的所有因素。）假设生产每年增加2.5个百分点（为了简化计算，我们用百分点，不用百分增长率）。这样，我们可以用下列指数数字来表示我们所要考察的11年间的大致情况。如下表所 示：
年份
总产量
消费品产量
资本品产量
第1年
100
80
20[?]
第2年
102.5
82
20.5
第3年
105
84
21
第4年
107.5
86
21.5
第5年
110
88
22
第6年
112.5
90
22.5
第7年
115
92
23
第8年
117.5
94
23.5
第9年
120
96
24
第10年
122.5
98
24.5
第11年
125
100
25
（图表）{脚注:我们在此假设这11年中储蓄与投资之间的比率保持不变。}
关于这张表格，我们需要首先注意的是，总产量每年的增长是由于储蓄所引起的，没有储蓄就没有总产量的增长。（你也可以想象，不花什么钱，单靠改良和新发明去提高生产力的情况，但是这方面的增幅非常小；并且，真要靠新工艺新设备，还得要有足够的投资才行。）这种储蓄年复一年被用于增加现有机器的数量和改进其品质，从而提高全国的产品产量。不错，“蛋糕”会越做越大（很奇怪，这也成其为反对的理由）；每一年做出来的蛋糕，的确不会全部吃掉。然而，这里并不存在什么不合理的或是累加的限制。其实，每年吃掉的蛋糕越来越多；到了第11年底，该年单单消费者吃掉的蛋糕，就等于第一年消费者吃掉的蛋糕和生产者吃掉的蛋糕的总合。而且，资本设备和生产产品的能力本身与第一年相比也已增加了 25%。
让我们看看其它方面。每年有20%的国民收入用于储蓄，一点都没有扰乱消费品工业的运行。如果它们在第一年生产的产品只卖出80个点（假设没有未获满足的需求使价格上涨），它们在拟定第二年生产计划的时候，当然不会笨到设想能够卖出100个点。换句话说，消费品工业已经习惯假设过去的储蓄率会持续下 去。只有储蓄出于预料突然大增，才会扰乱它们的运行，使它们的产品卖不出去。
但是，正如我们已经注意到的，假如储蓄额突然锐减，那么它将同样导致资本品工业的混乱。要是存在银行的钱，全部被取出来购买消费品，就业不会增加，只会使消费品的价格升高，同时降低资本品的价格。其总体影响首先会迫使就业发生移转，短期内会使资本品工业中的就业缩减。长期的影响将是使整个社会的生产低于本来可以达到的水平。
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抨击储蓄的对手们并没有就此认输。他们起初对“储蓄”和“投资”加以区别，这确实是很恰当的。但是，在作出这种区别之后，他们又把储蓄和投资看作成了两个完全独立的变量，好象这两个变量能够彼此相等纯属偶然。这些经济作者勾勒出一幅奇特的画面。一方面，储蓄者会自动、无缘无故、愚蠢地闷头存钱；另一方面，可以吸收这些储蓄的“投资机会”却非常有限。至于结果，唉——，自然是经济迟滞不前。他们宣称，惟一的解决方法，是由政府出面征用这些愚蠢和有害的储蓄，投资到公共工程上，哪怕拿去搞些毫无用处的沟渠或者金字塔，总之要将钱花掉以扩大就业。
以上观点及其“解决方案”包含太多的错误，这里我们只能选其主要错误加以指正。储蓄大于投资的部分，只相当于被真正蓄藏的现金。{脚注:经济学家就这个问题的分歧，只是定义不同所致。你也可以对储蓄和投资给出相同的定义，那么二者肯定相等。在这里，我选择从货币的角度定义储蓄、从商品的角度定义投资。这个定义与人们对其字面意义的大体相同，但并不完全一致。}但在当今现代化的工业社会中，极少人会把硬币和钞票藏在袜子里面或床垫底下。就算这种可能性极小事情真的发生，它也已经反映在企业的生产计划和价格水平上。它甚至不具备通常的累积效果——行为古怪的隐居者生 前蓄藏的现金被人找到，拿出来花光用光，可能就跟新出现的蓄藏现金额度相当。事实上，这方面的总金额都可能对经营活动的影响微不足道。
倘若象我们所看到的那样，人们把钱存入储蓄银行或商业银行，银行会急着把钱借出去或者拿去投资。银行付不起让资金闲置的代价。惟有当人们担心产品的价格下跌、当银行担心投资风险太大时，人们才会增加持有现金，银行让资金闲置。但这种迹象表明经济衰退已经显现，才造成蓄藏现金的行为，而不是蓄藏现金的行为引发经济衰退。
撇开这种可以忽略的现金蓄藏不考虑（即使是这种例外情形，也可以视为直接“投资”于货币本身），储蓄和投资会趋于彼此均衡，就像任何商品的供给和需 求会趋于均衡那样。我们可以认为储蓄和投资分别构成了新资本的供给和需求。其它任何商品的供给和需求，在价格的作用下会达成均衡，资本的供应和需求也一样，在利率的作用下会达成均衡。利率只是资本借贷价格的特殊名称，它与其它价格没有两样。
这整个主题，在近年来被复杂的诡辩、被糟烂的政府政策如此过分愚蠢地混淆在一起，让人对人们是不是能够重拾常识和理性感到失望。人们病态地害怕利率 “过高”。人们认为如果利率太高，产业界借钱来投资新厂房和机器，会赚不到钱。这种观点极具影响力，近几十年来各国政府都以人为的力量，实施“廉价资金”政策。但是相关的论调只注意了提高资本需求，却忽视这些政策对资本供给的影响。事实上，这不过是顾及了政策对于某一集团的影响而忽略了其它后果这种错误的又一个例子而已。
如果相对于风险，利率被刻意压得太低，储蓄和借贷都会减少。廉价资金政策的支持者相信，不管利率是高是低，储蓄都会自动进行，因为，富人家的余钱也只有存银行。但他们并没有说清楚，一个人在什么样的收入水平下才有可能固定地存储一笔小量资金，而不考虑当时的利息率水平或者贷款的风险如何。
尽管富豪的储蓄额受利率的影响要比一般富裕的人小得多，但事实上每个人的储蓄额都会受到某种程度的影响。试图证明在一种极端的情况下实质储蓄额不会 因为利率大幅下降而减少，这就好比是在说，糖的总产量，不会因为价格大幅下跌而减少，理由是高效率、低成本的生产者会继续生产。这种观点忽略了边际储蓄者，甚至忽略了绝大部分的储蓄者。
将利率人为压低所造成的影响，其实与把商品价格压低到自然市场水平以下所产生的影响相同：需求会增加，供应会减少。压低利率会导致资本的需求增加，而实质资本的供给减少。它会造成经济扭曲。毫无疑问，人为压低利率，就鼓励借贷。而实际上，这倾向于鼓励了高投机风险的经济活动，这种经济活动除非在类似人为造就的低利率条件下是无法存在的。从供给面来说，人为压低利率，会抑制正常的节约与储蓄。总之，它将促成资本的相对匮乏。
的确可以人为压低资金利率，但只有靠持续不断注入新资金、不断扩张银行信贷，以替代实质储蓄。这么做会制造资本供给增加的假象，就象多掺点水，会让人觉得牛奶更多了一样。但这是一种持续的通货膨胀政策。显然这是一个累积危险的过程。倘若通货膨胀得到了逆转，或者仅仅是被控制住，甚至只是膨胀速度放慢的话，资金利率就会上涨，并爆发经济危机。总之，廉价资金政策最终必将造成巨大的经济动荡，这比起它们原本希望纠正 或者避免的问题要来得剧烈得多。
假如我们并不准备采取通货膨胀性的政府政策去干扰资金利率，那么，当储蓄额增长时，利息率会自然降低，从而以一种自然的方式为增加了的储蓄创造需求。也就是说，更多的储蓄供给要寻求投资机会，就会迫使储蓄者接受较低的利率。同时，较低的利率水平意味着更多的企业贷得起款。因为，贷款购置新机器或厂房带来的的预期利润，更有可能超过必须支付的贷款利息。
4
现在来看一下我准备讨论的有关储蓄的最后一种谬论。经常有人认为，在吸收新的资本上，存在着一个确切的数量极限。他们甚至假设说，我们已经达到了这个资本扩张的极限。这样的观点能够在那些无知的人们中流行开来已经够让人吃惊了，而训练有素的经济学家居然也能接受它，简直令人匪夷所思。现代社会几乎全部的财富、几乎每一件区别于是17世纪前工业化时代的东西，都是由累积的资本构成的。
这种资本一部分是由许多称之为耐用消费品的东西组成，例如汽车、冰箱、家具、学校、学院、教堂、图书馆、医院，以及比它们都更重要的私人住宅。在世界历史上，人类从来没有对这些东西感到满足过。就算住宅的数量够多，但除了那些最好的房屋外，对于居住品质上的改善总是可能的，也是需要的。这种要求从来没有什么限度。
资本的第二部分就是我们所谓严格意义上的资本。它由生产工具组成，包括从最原始的斧头、刀，或者耕犁，到最精密的机床、最大的发电机或粒子回旋加速器，或者设备最先进的工厂。在这方面，可以扩增和想要扩增的数量，尤其是品质，也同样没有上限。在可预见的未来不会有“过剩”的资本，除非最落后国家的技 术装备赶上最先进国家；除非美国效率最差的工厂赶上设备最新、最好的工厂；除非最现代化的生产工具，已经达到人类智力的极限，再也无法改进。只要以上任何一种条件尚不具备，经济中就必然有更多资本的用武之地。
然而，如何才能“吸纳”新增资本呢？如何实现其“偿付”呢？如果能将资本储蓄起来，它会自行吸纳和自行偿付。生产者会投资于新的资本财货（也就是购买更好、更精巧的新工具），因为这些工具能够降低生产成本；这些工具做得出纯靠手工根本做不出来的产品（包括我们身边的大部分用品，例如书籍、打字机、汽车、火车机车、悬索桥）；或者，这些工具能够大幅提高产量；或者（换种方式来说），这些工具能够降低单位生产成本。而且，就像单位生产成本可以降低到什么程度并没有极限（除非每样东西都是零成本生产），可以吸纳的新资本数量，也没有极限。
由于新增资本使得单位生产成本稳定下降，它可以在两个方面单独或者一起发挥作用：即减低消费者购买商品的成本，或者提高使用新设备获得增产能力的劳工领得的工资。因此，新机器对直接使用它们的人，以及广大的消费者，都有好处。对消费者来说，同样的钱，能买到更多、更好的产品。或者说这些东西提高了他们的实质收入。对使用新机器的劳工来说，除了货币工资增加，实质工资也增加了。汽车业是个典型的例子。美国的汽车工业的工资是全世界同行中最高的，甚至在美国的各行各业中也排在工薪族之最。然而，美国的汽车制造商仍能以比世界其它各国更低的价格出售其产品，因为其单位成本更低。其秘诀在于美国生产汽车时，每位劳工和每辆汽车所使用的资本量比其它国家都多得多。
不过，仍有一些人认为我们已经走到了这一资本累进进程的尽头，{脚注:对这个谬论统计意义上的反驳，参看特伯格《经济成熟的歪理》。}也还有另外一些人认为，即使我们目前还没有走到头，但这样继续储蓄和不断增加资本积累无论如何也是愚蠢的。
在作了这些分析之后，应该不难辨别那种做法才是愚蠢的。
EIOL The Assault on Saving
Economics in One LessonThe assault on saving
From time immemorial proverbial wisdom has taught the virtues of saving, and warned against the consequences of prodigality and waste. This proverbial wisdom has reflected the common ethical as well as the merely prudential judgments of mankind. But there have always been squanderers, and there have apparently always been theorists to rationalize their squandering.
The classical economists, refuting the fallacies of their own day, showed that the saving policy that was in the best interests of the individual was also in the best interests of the nation. They showed that the rational saver, in making provision for his own future, was not hurting, but helping, the whole community. But today the ancient virtue of thrift, as well as its defense by the classical economists, is once more under attack, for allegedly new reasons, while the opposite doctrine of spending is in fashion.
In order to make the fundamental issue as clear as possible, we cannot do better, I think, than to start with the classic example used by Bastiat. Let us imagine two brothers, then, one a spendthrift and the other a prudent man, each of whom has inherited a sum to yield him an income of $50,000 a year. We shall disregard the in- come tax, and the question whether both brothers really ought to work for a living, because such questions are irrelevant to our present purpose.
Alvin, then, the first brother, is a lavish spender. He spends not only by temperament, but on principle. He is a disciple (to go no further back) of Rodbertus, who declared in the middle of the nineteenth century that capitalists "must expend their income to the last penny in comforts and luxuries," for if they "determine to save . . . goods accumulate, and part of the workmen will have no work.”* Alvin is always seen at the night clubs; he tips handsomely; he maintains a pretentious establishment, with plenty of servants; he has a couple of chauffeurs and doesn't stint himself in the number of cars he owns; he keeps a racing stable; he runs a yacht; he travels; he loads his wife down with diamond bracelets and fur coats; he gives expensive and useless presents to his friends.
To do all this he has to dig into his capital. But what of it? If saving is a sin, dissaving must he a virtue; and in any case he is simply making up for the harm being done by the saving of his pinchpenny brother Benjamin.
It need hardly be said that Alvin is a great favorite with the hat check girls, the waiters, the restaurateurs, the furriers, the jewelers, the luxury establishments of all kinds. They regard him as a public benefactor. Certainly it is obvious to everyone that he is giving employment and spreading his money around.
Compared with him brother Benjamin is much less popular. He is seldom seen at the jewelers, the furriers or the night clubs, and he does not call the head waiters by their first names. Whereas Alvin spends not only the full $50,000 income each year hut is digging into capital besides, Benjamin lives much more modestly and spends only about $25,000. Obviously, think the people who see only what hits them in the eye, he is providing less than.) half as much employment as Alvin , and the other $25,000 is as useless as if it did not exist.
But let us see what Benjamin actually does with this other $25,000. On the average he gives $5,000 of it to charitable causes, including help to friends in need. The families who are helped by these funds in turn spend them on groceries or clothing or living quarters. So the funds create as much employment as if Benjamin had spent them directly on himself. The difference is that more people are made happy as consumers, and that production is going more into essential goods and less into luxuries and superfluities.
This last point is one that often gives Benjamin concern. His conscience sometimes troubles him even about the $25,000 he spends. The kind of vulgar display and reckless spending that Alvin indulges in, he thinks, not only helps to breed dissatisfaction and envy in those who find it hard to make a decent living, but actually increases their difficulties. At any given moment, as Benjamin sees it, the actual producing power of the nation is limited. The more of it that is diverted to producing frivolities and luxuries, the less there is left for producing the essentials of life for those who are in need of them.* The less he withdraws from the existing stock of wealth for his own use, the more he leaves for others. Prudence in consumptive spending, he feels, mitigates the problems raised by the inequalities of wealth and income. He realizes that this consumptive restraint can he carried too far; but there ought to be some of it, he feels, in every- one whose income is substantially above the average.
Now let us see, apart from Benjamin's ideas, what hap- pens to the $20,000 that he neither spends nor gives away. He does not let it pile up in his pocketbook, his bureau drawers, or in his safe. He either deposits it in a bank or he invests it. If he puts it either into a commercial or a savings bank, the bank either lends it to going businesses on short term for working capital, or uses it to buy securities. In other words, Benjamin invests his money either directly or indirectly. But when money is invested it is used to buy capital goods-houses or office buildings or factories or ships or motor trucks or machines. Any one of these projects puts as much money into circulation and gives as much employment as the same amount of money spent directly on consumption.
"Saving," in short, in the modern world, is only an- other form of spending. The usual difference is that the money is turned over to someone else to spend on means to increase production. So far as giving employment is concerned, Benjamin's "saving" and spending combined give as much as Alvin's spending alone, and put as much money in circulation. The chief difference is that the employment provided by Alvin 's spending can be seen by anyone with one eye; but it is necessary to look a little more carefully, and to think a moment, to recognize that every dollar of Benjamin's saving gives as much employment as every dollar that Alvin throws around.
A dozen years roll by. Alvin is broke. He is no longer seen in the night clubs and at the fashionable shops; and those whom he formerly patronized, when they speak of him, refer to him as something of a fool. He writes begging letters to Benjamin. And Benjamin, who continues about the same ratio of spending to saving, provides more jobs than ever, because his income, through investment, has grown. His capital wealth is greater also. More- over, because of his investments, the national wealth and income are greater; there are more factories and more production.
So many fallacies have grown up about saving in recent years that they cannot all be answered by our example of the two brothers. It is necessary to devote some further space to them. Many stem from confusions so elementary as to seem incredible, particularly when found in economic writers of wide repute. The word "saving," for example, is used sometimes to mean mere hoarding of money, and sometimes to mean investment, with no clear distinction, consistently maintained, between the two uses.
Mere hoarding of hand-to-hand money, if it takes place irrationally, causelessly, and on a large scale, is in most economic situations harmful. But this sort of hoarding is extremely rare. Something that looks like this, but should be carefully distinguished from it, often occurs after a downturn in business has got under way. Consumptive spending and investment are then both contracted. Consumers reduce their buying. They do this partly, indeed, because they fear they may lose their jobs, and they wish to conserve their resources: they have contracted their buying not because they wish to consume less, but because they wish to make sure that their power to consume will he extended over a longer period if they do lose their jobs.
But consumers reduce their buying for another reason. Prices of goods have probably fallen, and they fear a further fall. If they defer spending, they believe they will get more for their money. They do not wish to have their resources in goods that are falling in value, but in money which they expect (relatively) to rise in value.
The same expectation prevents them from investing They have lost their confidence in the profitability of business; or at least they believe that if they wait a few months they can buy stocks or bonds cheaper. We may think of them either as refusing to hold goods that may fall in value on their hands, or as holding money itself for a rise.
It is a misnomer to call this temporary refusal to buy "saving." It does not spring from the same motives as normal saving. And it is a still more serious error to say that this sort of "saving" is the cause of depressions. It is, on the contrary, the consequence of depressions.
It is true that this refusal to buy may intensify and prolong a depression once begun. But it does not itself originate the depression. At times when there is capricious government intervention in business, and when business does not know what the government is going to do next, uncertainty is created. Profits are not reinvested. Firms and individuals allow cash balances to accumulate in their banks. They keep larger reserves against contingencies. This hoarding of cash may seem like the cause of a subsequent slowdown in business activity. The real cause, however, is the uncertainty brought about by the government policies. The larger cash balances of firms and individuals are merely one link in the chain of consequences from that uncertainty. To blame "excessive saving" for the business decline would be like blaming a fall in the price of apples not on a bumper crop but on the people who refuse to pay more for apples.
But when once people have decided to deride a practice or an institution, any argument against it, no matter how illogical, is considered good enough. I t is said that the various consumers' goods industries are built on the expectation of a certain demand, and that if people take to saving they will disappoint this expectation and start a depression. This assertion rests primarily on the error we have already examined-that of forgetting that what is saved on consumers' goods is spent on capital goods, and that "saving" does not necessarily mean even a dollar's contraction in total spending. The only element of truth in the contention is that any change that is sudden may be unsettling. It would be just as unsettling if consumers suddenly switched their demand from one consumers' goods to another. It would he even more unsettling if former savers suddenly switched their demand from capital goods to consumers' goods.
Still another objection is made against saving. It is said to be just downright silly. The Nineteenth Century is derided for its supposed inculcation of the doctrine that mankind through saving should go on making itself a larger and larger cake without ever eating the cake. This picture of the process is itself naive and childish. It can best be disposed of, perhaps, by putting before ourselves a somewhat more realistic picture of what actually takes place.
Let us picture to ourselves, then, a nation that collectively saves every year about 20 percent of all it produces in that year. This figure greatly overstates the amount of net saving that has occurred historically in the United States * but it is a round figure that is easily handled, and it gives the benefit of every doubt to those who believe that we have been "oversaving."
Now as a result of this annual saving and investment, the total annual production of the country will increase each year. (To isolate the problem we are ignoring for 3. Historically 20 per cent would represent approximately the have been closer to 12 per rent.' the moment booms, slumps, or other fluctuations.) Let us say that this annual increase in production is 2 1/2 percentage points. (Percentage points are taken instead of a compounded percentage merely to simplify the arithmetic.) The picture that we get for an eleven-year period, say, would then run something like this in terms of index numbers:
Total Consumers' Capital
Year Production Goods Produced Goods Produced
First 100.0 80n 20*
Second 102.5 82 20.5
Third 105 84 21
Fourth 107.5 86 21.5
Fifth 110 88 22
Sixth 112.5 90 22.5
Seventh 115 92 23
Eighth 117.5 94 23.5
Ninth 120 96 24
Tenth 122.5 98 24.5
Eleventh 125 100 25
* This of course assumes the process of saving and investment to have been already under way at the same ram.
The first thing to be noticed about this table is that total production increases each year because of the sawing, and would not have increased without it. (It is possible no doubt to imagine that improvements and new inventions merely in replaced machinery and other capital goods of a value no greater than the old would increase the national productivity; but this increase would amount to very little, and the argument in any case assumes enough prior investment to have made the existing machinery possible.) The saving has been used year after year to increase the quantity or improve the quality of existing machinery, and so to increase the nation's out- put of goods. There is, it is true (if that for some strange reason is considered an objection), a larger and larger "cake" each year. Each year, it is true, not all of the currently produced "cake" is consumed. But there is no irrational or cumulative consumer restraint. For each year a larger and larger cake is in fact consumed; until, at the end of eleven years (in our illustration), the annual consumers' cake alone is equal to the combined consumers' and producers' cakes of the first year. More- over, the capital equipment, the ability to produce goods, is itself 25 per cent greater than in the first year. Let us observe a few other points. The fact that 20 per cent of the national income goes each year for saving does not upset the consumers' goods industries in the least. If they sold only the 80 units they produced in the first year (and there were no rise in prices caused by unsatisfied demand) they would certainly not be foolish enough to build their production plans on the assumption that they were going to sell 100 units in the second year. Tire consumers' goods industries, in other words, are already geared to the assumption that the past situation in regard to the rate of savings will continue. Only an unexpected sudden and substantial increase in savings would unsettle them and leave them with unsold goods.
But the same unsettlement, as we have already ob- served, would be caused in the capital goads industries by a sudden and substantial decrease in savings. If money that would previously have been used for savings were thrown into the purchase of consumers' goods, it would not increase employment but merely lead to an increase in the price of consumption goods and to a decrease in the price of capital goods. Its first effect on net balance would be to force shifts in employment and temporarily to decrease employment by its effect on the capital goods industries. And its long-run effect would he to reduce production below the level that would otherwise have been achieved.
The enemies of saving are not through. They begin by drawing a distinction, which is proper enough, between "savings" and "investment." But then they start to talk as if the two were independent variables and as if it were merely an accident that they should ever equal each other. These writers paint a portentous picture. On the one side are savers automatically, pointlessly, stupidly continuing to save; on the other side are limited "investment opportunities" that cannot absorb this saving. The result, alas, is stagnation. The only solution, they declare, is for the government to expropriate these stupid and harmful savings and to invent its own projects, even if these are only useless ditches or pyramids, to use up the money and provide employment.
There is so much that is false in this picture and "solution" that we can here point only to some of the main fallacies. "Savings" can exceed "investment" only by the amounts that are actually hoarded in cash.* Few people nowadays, in a modern industrial community like the United States , hoard coins and bills in stockings or under mattresses. To the small extent that this may occur, it has already been reflected in the production plans of business and in the price level. It is not ordinarily even cumulative: dishoarding, as eccentric recluses die and their hoards are discovered and dissipated, probably offsets new hoarding. In fact, the whole amount involved is probably insignificant in its effect on business activity.
If money is kept either in savings banks or commercial hanks, as we have already seen, the banks are eager to lend and invest it. They cannot afford to have idle funds. The only thing that will cause people generally to in- crease their holdings of cash, or that will cause banks to hold funds idle and lose the interest on them, is, a s we have seen, either fear that prices of goods are going to fall or the fear of banks that they will be taking too great a risk with their principal. But this means that signs of a depression have already appeared, and have caused the hoarding, rather than that the hoarding has started the depression.
Apart from this negligible hoarding of cash, then (and even this exception might he thought of as a direct "in- vestment" in money itself) "savings" and "investment" are brought into equilibrium with each other in the same way that the supply of and demand for any commodity are brought into equilibrium. For we may define "savings" and "investment" as constituting respectively the supply of and demand for new capital. And just as the supply of and demand for any other commodity are equalized by price, so the supply of and demand for capital are equalized by interest rates. The interest rate is merely the special name for the price of loaned capital. I t is a price like any other.
This whole subject has been so appallingly confused in recent years by complicated sophistries and disastrous governmental policies based upon them that one almost despairs of getting back to common sense and sanity about it. There is a psychopathic fear of "excessive" interest rates. It is argued that if interest rates are too high it will not be profitable for industry to borrow and invest in new plants and machines. This argument has been so effective that governments everywhere in recent decades have pursued artificial "cheap money" policies. But the argument, in its concern with increasing the demand for capital, overlooks the effect of these policies on the sup- ply of capital. It is one more example of the fallacy of looking at the effects of a policy only on one group and forgetting the effects on another.
If interest rates are artificially kept too low in relation to risks, funds will neither be saved nor lent. The cheap- money proponents believe that saving goes on automatically, regardless of the interest rate, because the sated rich have nothing else that they can do with their money. They do not stop to tell us at precisely what personal in- come level a man saves a fixed minimum amount regard- less of the rate of interest or the risk at which he can lend it.
The fact is that, though the volume of saving of the very rich is doubtless affected much less proportionately than that of the moderately well-off by changes in the interest rate, practically everyone's saving is affected in some degree. To argue, on the basis of an extreme ex- ample, that the volume of real savings would not be reduced by a substantial reduction in the interest rate, is like arguing that the total production of sugar would not be reduced by a substantial fall of its price because the efficient, low-cost producers would still raise as much as before. The argument overlooks the marginal saver, and even, indeed, the great majority of savers.
The effect of keeping interest rates artificially low, in fact, is eventually the same as that of keeping any other price below the natural market. It increases demand and reduces supply. It increases the demand for capital and reduces the supply of real capital. It brings about a scarcity. It creates economic distortions. It is true, no doubt, that an artificial reduction in the interest rate encourages increased borrowing. I t tends, in fact, to en- courage highly speculative ventures that cannot continue except under the artificial conditions that gave them birth. On the supply side, the artificial reduction of interest rates discourages normal thrift and saving. It brings about a comparative shortage of real capital. The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger.
The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.
If no effort is made to tamper with money rates through inflationary governmental policies, increased savings create their own demand by lowering interest rates in a natural manner. The greater supply of savings seeking investment forces savers to accept lower rates. But lower rates also mean that more enterprises can afford to borrow because their prospective profit on the new machines or plants they buy with the proceeds seems likely to exceed what they have to pay for the borrowed funds.
We come now to the last fallacy about saving with which I intend to deal. This is the frequent assumption that there is a fixed limit to the amount of new capital that can he absorbed, or even that the limit of capital expansion has already been reached. It is incredible that such a view could prevail even among the ignorant, let alone that it could be held by any trained economist. Almost the whole wealth of the modern world, nearly every- thing that distinguishes it from the pre-industrial world of the seventeenth century, consists of its accumulated capital.
This capital is made up in part of many things that might better be called consumers' durable goods-auto- mobiles, refrigerators, furniture, schools, colleges, churches, libraries, hospitals and above all private homes. Never in the history of the world has there been enough of these. There is still, with the postponed building and outright destruction of World War II, a desperate shortage of them. But even if there were enough homes from a purely numerical point of view, qualitative improvements are possible and desirable without definite limit in all but the very best houses.
The second part of capital is what we may call capital proper. It consists of the tools of production, including everything from the crudest axe, knife or plow to the finest machine tool, the greatest electric generator or cyclotron, or the most wonderfully equipped factory. Here, too, quantitatively and especially qualitatively, there is no limit to the expansion that is possible and desirable. There will not be a "surplus" of capital until the most backward country is as well equipped technologically as the most advanced, until the most inefficient factory in America is brought abreast of the factory with the latest and most elaborate equipment, and until the most modern tools of production have reached a point where human ingenuity is at a dead end, and can improve them no further. As long as any of these conditions remain unfulfilled, there will be indefinite room for more capital.
But how can the additional capital be "absorbed"? How can it be "paid for"? If it is set aside and saved, it will absorb itself and pay for itself. For producers invest in new capital goods-that is, they buy new and better and more ingenious tools-because these tools reduce cost of production. They either bring into existence goods that completely unaided hand labor could not bring into existence at all (and this now includes most of the goods around us-books, typewriters, automobiles, locomotives, suspension bridges) ; or they increase enormously the quantities in which these can be produced; or (and this is merely saying these things in a different way) they reduce unit costs of production. And as there is no assign. able limit to the extent to which unit costs of production can be reduced-until everything can be produced at no cost at all-there is no assignable limit to the amount of new capital that can be absorbed.
The steady reduction of unit costs of production by the addition of new capital does either one of two things, or both. It reduces the costs of goods to consumers, and it increases the wages of the labor that uses the new machines because it increases the productive power of that labor. Thus a new machine benefits both the people who work on it directly and the great body of consumers. In the case of consumers we may say either that it supplies them with more and better goods for the same money, or, what is the same thing, that it increases their real incomes. In the case of the workers who use the new machines it increases their real wages in a double way by increasing their money wages as well. A typical illustration is the automobile business. The American auto- mobile industry pays the highest wages in the world, and among the very highest even in America . Yet American motor car makers can undersell the rest of the world, because their unit cost is lower. And the secretis that the capital used in making American automobiles is greater per worker and per car than anywhere else in the world.
And yet there are people who think we have reached the end of this process,* and still others who think that even if we haven't, the world is foolish to go on saving and adding to its stock of capital.
It should not be difficult to decide, after our analysis, with whom the real folly lies.
【一课经济学】 抨击储蓄
一课经济学
抨击储蓄
远古先哲就在诵赞储蓄是一种美德，而警告挥霍浪费带来的种种恶果。这个古老的智慧，反映了我们常识性的道德判断，以及人类未雨绸缪的明智抉择。但是这个世界上总有许多挥霍成性的人，也总有许多理论家，为挥霍行为寻找合理化的借口。
正统经济学家勇于驳斥他们那个时代的种种谬论，证明了符合个人最佳利益的储蓄政策，也符合国家的最佳利益。他们指出，懂得长远打算的理性储蓄者，对整个社会不会有害，反而有益。但当今社会，古老的节俭美德连同正统经济学家的证明再次受到了抨击，许多人搬出反对节俭的新理由，提倡支出的论调蔚然成风。
为了把这个基本的问题尽可能讲清楚，我想我们最好从经济学家巴斯夏所用的经典例子开始着手进行说明。假设有两兄弟各继承了一笔财富，因此每年都能各得50 000美元的收入，但是其中一人挥金如土，另一人谨慎节俭。我们在这里忽略掉所得税、以及两兄弟是否应该去工作赚钱，是否该把大部分钱捐给慈善机构，因为这些问题和我们接下来要谈的主题无关。
哥哥阿尔文是个挥霍者，他不仅有挥霍的性情，而且有挥霍的信念。他是卡尔?洛贝图斯（Karl Rodbertus）（我想不用再往前回溯得更远了）的忠实信徒。在19世纪中叶，洛贝图斯宣称资本家“必须将他们的最后一便士收入都花在享乐和奢靡上”，因为如果他们“决定储蓄，……那么商品将积压，部分工人将失业”。{脚注: 洛贝图斯，《生产过剩与恐慌》Karl Rodbertus, Overproduction and Crises (1850), p. 51.}阿尔文常出入夜总会；小费出手十分大方；他拥有一处豪宅，养了很多仆从；他有两三个私家司机，车子买了一辆又一辆；他有一个赛马场；他喜欢架游艇出航；喜欢去各地观光；他给太太买钻石项链和皮裘大衣；送朋友贵重却派不上用场的礼物。
要做所有这一切，他只好动用老本。可这对他又算得了什么呢？如果储蓄是一种罪过，不储蓄当然就是一种美德；而且，无论如何，他这么做不过是为了补偿吝啬鬼弟弟本杰明由于储蓄给社会带来的种种损害。
不用说，阿尔文对于迎宾、侍者、餐厅老板、皮货商、珠宝商、各类奢侈品店家来说都是最受欢迎的人。他被视为众人的财神爷。大家都看得很清楚，正是他四处挥洒钞票，人们才有那么多工作可做。
与他相比，弟弟本杰明可就远不如他受人欢迎。他很少光顾珠宝店、皮货店和夜总会，也不会亲昵地直呼那些领班侍者的名字。与阿尔文年年花光岁入的50 000元不够还吃老本不同，本杰明要节俭得多。他一年的花销在25 000美元左右。在那些目光短浅的人看来，他提供的工作机会显然不到阿尔文的一半，另外25 000美元则丝毫没有派上用场，就跟那笔钱不存在一样。
但我们不妨看一看，本杰明实际上将这其余的25 000美元做了些什么事。平均言之，他每年必以5 000美元用于慈善事业，其中包括对于友人之接济。受他资助的人家，复以其所得款项用于杂货铺、布店、及日用品商店。是以这笔资金之利于工商业，实与本杰明自己去支用它无异。所不同者，因获此资助而解决生活问题者人数较多，并使基本物资的生产教奢侈品的生产为多。
这最后一点，是本杰明所时时关于心者。他的良心上有时甚至对于他所支用的25 000美元，亦惴惴不安。他想，哥哥阿尔文一掷千金之慨及挥金如土之风，凡图俭约度日犹觉困难之人视之，不徒因以发生不满及嫉妒，抑且实际上将因以增加困难。依照本杰明看来，在任何时间内，国家的实际生产力都是有限的。其中经抽用于生产奢侈品者愈多，则剩下以供生产生活必需品，以应一般国民之需要者即愈少{脚注：参看哈特利?威瑟斯《贫穷与浪费》}。个人从全国现有的财富总量抽取以供自己用的分量愈少，则其留以供他人之需的分量便愈多。他觉得，谨慎用途，撙节开支，则因财富与进益之不平等而生的诸问题，当可不致发生。他认识得，节用的习惯有时会失之过当；但他觉得，凡其进益实际上超于一般水准之上的每个人士，都应保持相当的节约之风的。
现在我们姑将本杰明的观念搁置一旁，来看一看他既未支用、亦未以之接济他人的那20 000美元的情形怎样。那笔钱，他并没有放在钱袋子、书桌抽屉和保险箱里面。他把钱存到银行，或者拿去投资。如果他是存到商业银行或储蓄银行，银行会贷给企业用作周转金，或用于购买证券。换句话说，本杰明的钱用于直接或间接投资。而一旦这笔钱以一种资本投资的形式出现时，人们就会把它用来购买或是生产资本类产品——房屋、写字楼、工厂、店铺、卡车、机器。通过这些项目，货币同样被投入了流通领域，而且它们也提供了同样多的就业机会。促进就业这种作用与把钱直接用来消费的结果是一样的。
总之，现代世界中的“储蓄”，只是支出的另一种形式。通常的区别在于，货币被转交给了其他的人，并被他们用于扩大生产。就提供就业机会来说，本杰明的“储蓄”加上他的消费带来的效果，与阿尔文单纯消费的效果一样，他们投入流通的资金也一样多。关键区别就在于，阿尔文花钱提供的就业机会，每个人都看得到；而要认清本杰明储蓄的钱所起到的同样的作用，则需要我们做进一步的观察和思考。
12年后，阿尔文破产了。在夜总会和时尚精品店里再也没有了他的身影；那些曾奉他为财神爷的人如今谈起他时，嘲笑他是傻蛋一个。他不得不向本杰明写信恳求接济。与此相反，本杰明的支出与储蓄比率还是和以前一样，由于投资收益不断增长，通过他的投资创造的就业机会数量更多了。他的实产也增加了。再者，因了他的投资，国家的财富与进益也增加了；工厂及生产量也从而增加了。
2
近年来，关于储蓄的谬论层出不穷。要回答这些问题，仅靠我们“两个兄弟”的传统例子恐怕就远远不够了，我们有必要多花一些篇幅对此加以分析。许多谬论连最基本的概念都搞混，到了令人匪夷所思的地步，尤其当类似的错误出现在一些备受尊敬的著名经济学家的著作中时。例如，储蓄一词有时被用来单指蓄藏（hoarding）金钱，有时被用去指投资，甚至用来用去不加区分。
如果仅仅是缺乏理智、莫名其妙地大量蓄藏金钱，在大多数经济状况中都是有害无益的。但是这种蓄藏金钱的情形极为罕见。有些舍不得花钱的情形看上去与之有些类似，但那是理性抉择的结果，与其有着本质区别。例如，经济衰退时期，消费和投资萎缩。消费者买东西都很俭省，部分原因是担心工作不保，想留点钱以备不时之需。也就是说，他们紧缩消费，不是因为吝啬守财，而是对前景担忧，万一真的失去工作，让家里能够多维持一段时间的花销。
消费者紧缩消费还有另一个原因。物价可能正在回落，但是消费者预期还会继续降价。如果他们推后再消费，用同样多的钱就能够买到更多的东西。他们不希望拿钱去买正在缩水贬值的商品，而是愿意持有他们期望（相对而言）可以升值的货币。
同样的预期心理使人么紧缩投资。他们对企业的赢利能力已经失去信心。再者，他们愿意再等几个月，届时或许可以买到更便宜的股票或债券。换句话说，他们不愿持有可能贬值的商品，或是为了某种程度的升值而持有货币本身。
同样，把这种紧缩消费与紧缩投资的行为归入到“储蓄”名下，是不恰当的。它的动机与一般的储蓄有所不同。将这种“储蓄”说成是经济衰退的起因，更是大错特错。恰恰相反，它是经济衰退的后果。
确实，这种紧缩支出行为可能加深和延长一场衰退。有些时候，政府对企业的干预反复无常，企业不知道政府政策下一步又变成什么样子，企业对未来做出预期的不确定性就会增加。于是，企业和个人不愿冒险将利润进行再投资，他们的银行存款余额因此越积越高。他们宁可保有更多的准备金，以防万一。这种现金储备行为似乎成了随之而出现的经济发展速度放慢的原因之一。然而，衰退的真正原因，是政府政策所带来的一种不确定性。企业和个人保有更多的现金，只不过是这种不确定性所导致的一连串后果中的一个环节而已。把经济不景气怪罪到“过度储蓄”上，就像苹果价格下跌，不去怪苹果丰收，却怪人们不肯出更高的价格买苹果一样。
然而，一旦有人存心要贬低某种做法或机制的时候，任何帮腔的言论，不论多么不合逻辑，他么都会为之叫好。有人帮腔说，各种消费品工业，是预期有某种需求存在而建立起来的，如果人们只知道把钱存起来，这种预期就会落空，并且导致一场衰退。这一论断主要是以我们已经分析过的错误为出发点的，即忘记了我们在消费品支出上所减少的部分是被用在资本品上了，而“储蓄”并不一定意味着总支出的缩减。他们惟一说对的一点是：任何突然的变化都可能是引起混乱，就象消费者突然把他们的需求从一种商品转向另一种商品时所表现出的混乱一样，而倘若原来的储蓄者将他们对资本品的需求一下子转向了对消费品的需求，那么由此而来的经济生活的混乱则会更为严重。
反对储蓄的另一种论点，说起来也实在是荒唐透顶。他们嘲讽19世纪人们被反复灌输着储蓄的观念，说结果是，蛋糕越做越大，却没人去吃。这样的描述显得幼稚无知。戳穿这种不实之说的最好办法，是用贴近现实的写照，把实际情况呈现出来。
那么，让我们自己想象一下。假设国家每年的储蓄占国民生产总值的20%左右。{脚注:历史上，20%近似地表示国民生产总值每年投入资本形成（不包括消费资料）的总值。但是如果扣除资本消耗，则每年的净储蓄接近12%。参照：特伯格，《经济成熟的歪理》George Terborgh, The Bogey of Economic Maturity (1945)。1977年官方估计的私人国内投资总额，占国民生产总值的16%。}这个数字已远远超过美国历年来的净储蓄水平，我们取个偏大的整数，一来便于计算，二来好让那些指责“储蓄过度”的人服气。
现在，由于这样的年储蓄和投资水平，该国每年的总产出水平将逐年增加。（为了单独讨论这个问题，我们忽略影响增长不均衡的所有因素。）假设生产每年增加2.5个百分点（为了简化计算，我们用百分点，不用百分增长率）。这样，我们可以用下列指数数字来表示我们所要考察的11年间的大致情况。如下表所 示：
年份
总产量
消费品产量
资本品产量
第1年
100
80
20[?]
第2年
102.5
82
20.5
第3年
105
84
21
第4年
107.5
86
21.5
第5年
110
88
22
第6年
112.5
90
22.5
第7年
115
92
23
第8年
117.5
94
23.5
第9年
120
96
24
第10年
122.5
98
24.5
第11年
125
100
25
（图表）{脚注:我们在此假设这11年中储蓄与投资之间的比率保持不变。}
关于这张表格，我们需要首先注意的是，总产量每年的增长是由于储蓄所引起的，没有储蓄就没有总产量的增长。（你也可以想象，不花什么钱，单靠改良和新发明去提高生产力的情况，但是这方面的增幅非常小；并且，真要靠新工艺新设备，还得要有足够的投资才行。）这种储蓄年复一年被用于增加现有机器的数量和改进其品质，从而提高全国的产品产量。不错，“蛋糕”会越做越大（很奇怪，这也成其为反对的理由）；每一年做出来的蛋糕，的确不会全部吃掉。然而，这里并不存在什么不合理的或是累加的限制。其实，每年吃掉的蛋糕越来越多；到了第11年底，该年单单消费者吃掉的蛋糕，就等于第一年消费者吃掉的蛋糕和生产者吃掉的蛋糕的总合。而且，资本设备和生产产品的能力本身与第一年相比也已增加了 25%。
让我们看看其它方面。每年有20%的国民收入用于储蓄，一点都没有扰乱消费品工业的运行。如果它们在第一年生产的产品只卖出80个点（假设没有未获满足的需求使价格上涨），它们在拟定第二年生产计划的时候，当然不会笨到设想能够卖出100个点。换句话说，消费品工业已经习惯假设过去的储蓄率会持续下 去。只有储蓄出于预料突然大增，才会扰乱它们的运行，使它们的产品卖不出去。
但是，正如我们已经注意到的，假如储蓄额突然锐减，那么它将同样导致资本品工业的混乱。要是存在银行的钱，全部被取出来购买消费品，就业不会增加，只会使消费品的价格升高，同时降低资本品的价格。其总体影响首先会迫使就业发生移转，短期内会使资本品工业中的就业缩减。长期的影响将是使整个社会的生产低于本来可以达到的水平。
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抨击储蓄的对手们并没有就此认输。他们起初对“储蓄”和“投资”加以区别，这确实是很恰当的。但是，在作出这种区别之后，他们又把储蓄和投资看作成了两个完全独立的变量，好象这两个变量能够彼此相等纯属偶然。这些经济作者勾勒出一幅奇特的画面。一方面，储蓄者会自动、无缘无故、愚蠢地闷头存钱；另一方面，可以吸收这些储蓄的“投资机会”却非常有限。至于结果，唉——，自然是经济迟滞不前。他们宣称，惟一的解决方法，是由政府出面征用这些愚蠢和有害的储蓄，投资到公共工程上，哪怕拿去搞些毫无用处的沟渠或者金字塔，总之要将钱花掉以扩大就业。
以上观点及其“解决方案”包含太多的错误，这里我们只能选其主要错误加以指正。储蓄大于投资的部分，只相当于被真正蓄藏的现金。{脚注:经济学家就这个问题的分歧，只是定义不同所致。你也可以对储蓄和投资给出相同的定义，那么二者肯定相等。在这里，我选择从货币的角度定义储蓄、从商品的角度定义投资。这个定义与人们对其字面意义的大体相同，但并不完全一致。}但在当今现代化的工业社会中，极少人会把硬币和钞票藏在袜子里面或床垫底下。就算这种可能性极小事情真的发生，它也已经反映在企业的生产计划和价格水平上。它甚至不具备通常的累积效果——行为古怪的隐居者生 前蓄藏的现金被人找到，拿出来花光用光，可能就跟新出现的蓄藏现金额度相当。事实上，这方面的总金额都可能对经营活动的影响微不足道。
倘若象我们所看到的那样，人们把钱存入储蓄银行或商业银行，银行会急着把钱借出去或者拿去投资。银行付不起让资金闲置的代价。惟有当人们担心产品的价格下跌、当银行担心投资风险太大时，人们才会增加持有现金，银行让资金闲置。但这种迹象表明经济衰退已经显现，才造成蓄藏现金的行为，而不是蓄藏现金的行为引发经济衰退。
撇开这种可以忽略的现金蓄藏不考虑（即使是这种例外情形，也可以视为直接“投资”于货币本身），储蓄和投资会趋于彼此均衡，就像任何商品的供给和需 求会趋于均衡那样。我们可以认为储蓄和投资分别构成了新资本的供给和需求。其它任何商品的供给和需求，在价格的作用下会达成均衡，资本的供应和需求也一样，在利率的作用下会达成均衡。利率只是资本借贷价格的特殊名称，它与其它价格没有两样。
这整个主题，在近年来被复杂的诡辩、被糟烂的政府政策如此过分愚蠢地混淆在一起，让人对人们是不是能够重拾常识和理性感到失望。人们病态地害怕利率 “过高”。人们认为如果利率太高，产业界借钱来投资新厂房和机器，会赚不到钱。这种观点极具影响力，近几十年来各国政府都以人为的力量，实施“廉价资金”政策。但是相关的论调只注意了提高资本需求，却忽视这些政策对资本供给的影响。事实上，这不过是顾及了政策对于某一集团的影响而忽略了其它后果这种错误的又一个例子而已。
如果相对于风险，利率被刻意压得太低，储蓄和借贷都会减少。廉价资金政策的支持者相信，不管利率是高是低，储蓄都会自动进行，因为，富人家的余钱也只有存银行。但他们并没有说清楚，一个人在什么样的收入水平下才有可能固定地存储一笔小量资金，而不考虑当时的利息率水平或者贷款的风险如何。
尽管富豪的储蓄额受利率的影响要比一般富裕的人小得多，但事实上每个人的储蓄额都会受到某种程度的影响。试图证明在一种极端的情况下实质储蓄额不会 因为利率大幅下降而减少，这就好比是在说，糖的总产量，不会因为价格大幅下跌而减少，理由是高效率、低成本的生产者会继续生产。这种观点忽略了边际储蓄者，甚至忽略了绝大部分的储蓄者。
将利率人为压低所造成的影响，其实与把商品价格压低到自然市场水平以下所产生的影响相同：需求会增加，供应会减少。压低利率会导致资本的需求增加，而实质资本的供给减少。它会造成经济扭曲。毫无疑问，人为压低利率，就鼓励借贷。而实际上，这倾向于鼓励了高投机风险的经济活动，这种经济活动除非在类似人为造就的低利率条件下是无法存在的。从供给面来说，人为压低利率，会抑制正常的节约与储蓄。总之，它将促成资本的相对匮乏。
的确可以人为压低资金利率，但只有靠持续不断注入新资金、不断扩张银行信贷，以替代实质储蓄。这么做会制造资本供给增加的假象，就象多掺点水，会让人觉得牛奶更多了一样。但这是一种持续的通货膨胀政策。显然这是一个累积危险的过程。倘若通货膨胀得到了逆转，或者仅仅是被控制住，甚至只是膨胀速度放慢的话，资金利率就会上涨，并爆发经济危机。总之，廉价资金政策最终必将造成巨大的经济动荡，这比起它们原本希望纠正 或者避免的问题要来得剧烈得多。
假如我们并不准备采取通货膨胀性的政府政策去干扰资金利率，那么，当储蓄额增长时，利息率会自然降低，从而以一种自然的方式为增加了的储蓄创造需求。也就是说，更多的储蓄供给要寻求投资机会，就会迫使储蓄者接受较低的利率。同时，较低的利率水平意味着更多的企业贷得起款。因为，贷款购置新机器或厂房带来的的预期利润，更有可能超过必须支付的贷款利息。
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现在来看一下我准备讨论的有关储蓄的最后一种谬论。经常有人认为，在吸收新的资本上，存在着一个确切的数量极限。他们甚至假设说，我们已经达到了这个资本扩张的极限。这样的观点能够在那些无知的人们中流行开来已经够让人吃惊了，而训练有素的经济学家居然也能接受它，简直令人匪夷所思。现代社会几乎全部的财富、几乎每一件区别于是17世纪前工业化时代的东西，都是由累积的资本构成的。
这种资本一部分是由许多称之为耐用消费品的东西组成，例如汽车、冰箱、家具、学校、学院、教堂、图书馆、医院，以及比它们都更重要的私人住宅。在世界历史上，人类从来没有对这些东西感到满足过。就算住宅的数量够多，但除了那些最好的房屋外，对于居住品质上的改善总是可能的，也是需要的。这种要求从来没有什么限度。
资本的第二部分就是我们所谓严格意义上的资本。它由生产工具组成，包括从最原始的斧头、刀，或者耕犁，到最精密的机床、最大的发电机或粒子回旋加速器，或者设备最先进的工厂。在这方面，可以扩增和想要扩增的数量，尤其是品质，也同样没有上限。在可预见的未来不会有“过剩”的资本，除非最落后国家的技 术装备赶上最先进国家；除非美国效率最差的工厂赶上设备最新、最好的工厂；除非最现代化的生产工具，已经达到人类智力的极限，再也无法改进。只要以上任何一种条件尚不具备，经济中就必然有更多资本的用武之地。
然而，如何才能“吸纳”新增资本呢？如何实现其“偿付”呢？如果能将资本储蓄起来，它会自行吸纳和自行偿付。生产者会投资于新的资本财货（也就是购买更好、更精巧的新工具），因为这些工具能够降低生产成本；这些工具做得出纯靠手工根本做不出来的产品（包括我们身边的大部分用品，例如书籍、打字机、汽车、火车机车、悬索桥）；或者，这些工具能够大幅提高产量；或者（换种方式来说），这些工具能够降低单位生产成本。而且，就像单位生产成本可以降低到什么程度并没有极限（除非每样东西都是零成本生产），可以吸纳的新资本数量，也没有极限。
由于新增资本使得单位生产成本稳定下降，它可以在两个方面单独或者一起发挥作用：即减低消费者购买商品的成本，或者提高使用新设备获得增产能力的劳工领得的工资。因此，新机器对直接使用它们的人，以及广大的消费者，都有好处。对消费者来说，同样的钱，能买到更多、更好的产品。或者说这些东西提高了他们的实质收入。对使用新机器的劳工来说，除了货币工资增加，实质工资也增加了。汽车业是个典型的例子。美国的汽车工业的工资是全世界同行中最高的，甚至在美国的各行各业中也排在工薪族之最。然而，美国的汽车制造商仍能以比世界其它各国更低的价格出售其产品，因为其单位成本更低。其秘诀在于美国生产汽车时，每位劳工和每辆汽车所使用的资本量比其它国家都多得多。
不过，仍有一些人认为我们已经走到了这一资本累进进程的尽头，{脚注:对这个谬论统计意义上的反驳，参看特伯格《经济成熟的歪理》。}也还有另外一些人认为，即使我们目前还没有走到头，但这样继续储蓄和不断增加资本积累无论如何也是愚蠢的。
在作了这些分析之后，应该不难辨别那种做法才是愚蠢的。
EIOL The Assault on Saving
Economics in One LessonThe assault on saving
From time immemorial proverbial wisdom has taught the virtues of saving, and warned against the consequences of prodigality and waste. This proverbial wisdom has reflected the common ethical as well as the merely prudential judgments of mankind. But there have always been squanderers, and there have apparently always been theorists to rationalize their squandering.
The classical economists, refuting the fallacies of their own day, showed that the saving policy that was in the best interests of the individual was also in the best interests of the nation. They showed that the rational saver, in making provision for his own future, was not hurting, but helping, the whole community. But today the ancient virtue of thrift, as well as its defense by the classical economists, is once more under attack, for allegedly new reasons, while the opposite doctrine of spending is in fashion.
In order to make the fundamental issue as clear as possible, we cannot do better, I think, than to start with the classic example used by Bastiat. Let us imagine two brothers, then, one a spendthrift and the other a prudent man, each of whom has inherited a sum to yield him an income of $50,000 a year. We shall disregard the in- come tax, and the question whether both brothers really ought to work for a living, because such questions are irrelevant to our present purpose.
Alvin, then, the first brother, is a lavish spender. He spends not only by temperament, but on principle. He is a disciple (to go no further back) of Rodbertus, who declared in the middle of the nineteenth century that capitalists "must expend their income to the last penny in comforts and luxuries," for if they "determine to save . . . goods accumulate, and part of the workmen will have no work.”* Alvin is always seen at the night clubs; he tips handsomely; he maintains a pretentious establishment, with plenty of servants; he has a couple of chauffeurs and doesn't stint himself in the number of cars he owns; he keeps a racing stable; he runs a yacht; he travels; he loads his wife down with diamond bracelets and fur coats; he gives expensive and useless presents to his friends.
To do all this he has to dig into his capital. But what of it? If saving is a sin, dissaving must he a virtue; and in any case he is simply making up for the harm being done by the saving of his pinchpenny brother Benjamin.
It need hardly be said that Alvin is a great favorite with the hat check girls, the waiters, the restaurateurs, the furriers, the jewelers, the luxury establishments of all kinds. They regard him as a public benefactor. Certainly it is obvious to everyone that he is giving employment and spreading his money around.
Compared with him brother Benjamin is much less popular. He is seldom seen at the jewelers, the furriers or the night clubs, and he does not call the head waiters by their first names. Whereas Alvin spends not only the full $50,000 income each year hut is digging into capital besides, Benjamin lives much more modestly and spends only about $25,000. Obviously, think the people who see only what hits them in the eye, he is providing less than.) half as much employment as Alvin , and the other $25,000 is as useless as if it did not exist.
But let us see what Benjamin actually does with this other $25,000. On the average he gives $5,000 of it to charitable causes, including help to friends in need. The families who are helped by these funds in turn spend them on groceries or clothing or living quarters. So the funds create as much employment as if Benjamin had spent them directly on himself. The difference is that more people are made happy as consumers, and that production is going more into essential goods and less into luxuries and superfluities.
This last point is one that often gives Benjamin concern. His conscience sometimes troubles him even about the $25,000 he spends. The kind of vulgar display and reckless spending that Alvin indulges in, he thinks, not only helps to breed dissatisfaction and envy in those who find it hard to make a decent living, but actually increases their difficulties. At any given moment, as Benjamin sees it, the actual producing power of the nation is limited. The more of it that is diverted to producing frivolities and luxuries, the less there is left for producing the essentials of life for those who are in need of them.* The less he withdraws from the existing stock of wealth for his own use, the more he leaves for others. Prudence in consumptive spending, he feels, mitigates the problems raised by the inequalities of wealth and income. He realizes that this consumptive restraint can he carried too far; but there ought to be some of it, he feels, in every- one whose income is substantially above the average.
Now let us see, apart from Benjamin's ideas, what hap- pens to the $20,000 that he neither spends nor gives away. He does not let it pile up in his pocketbook, his bureau drawers, or in his safe. He either deposits it in a bank or he invests it. If he puts it either into a commercial or a savings bank, the bank either lends it to going businesses on short term for working capital, or uses it to buy securities. In other words, Benjamin invests his money either directly or indirectly. But when money is invested it is used to buy capital goods-houses or office buildings or factories or ships or motor trucks or machines. Any one of these projects puts as much money into circulation and gives as much employment as the same amount of money spent directly on consumption.
"Saving," in short, in the modern world, is only an- other form of spending. The usual difference is that the money is turned over to someone else to spend on means to increase production. So far as giving employment is concerned, Benjamin's "saving" and spending combined give as much as Alvin's spending alone, and put as much money in circulation. The chief difference is that the employment provided by Alvin 's spending can be seen by anyone with one eye; but it is necessary to look a little more carefully, and to think a moment, to recognize that every dollar of Benjamin's saving gives as much employment as every dollar that Alvin throws around.
A dozen years roll by. Alvin is broke. He is no longer seen in the night clubs and at the fashionable shops; and those whom he formerly patronized, when they speak of him, refer to him as something of a fool. He writes begging letters to Benjamin. And Benjamin, who continues about the same ratio of spending to saving, provides more jobs than ever, because his income, through investment, has grown. His capital wealth is greater also. More- over, because of his investments, the national wealth and income are greater; there are more factories and more production.
So many fallacies have grown up about saving in recent years that they cannot all be answered by our example of the two brothers. It is necessary to devote some further space to them. Many stem from confusions so elementary as to seem incredible, particularly when found in economic writers of wide repute. The word "saving," for example, is used sometimes to mean mere hoarding of money, and sometimes to mean investment, with no clear distinction, consistently maintained, between the two uses.
Mere hoarding of hand-to-hand money, if it takes place irrationally, causelessly, and on a large scale, is in most economic situations harmful. But this sort of hoarding is extremely rare. Something that looks like this, but should be carefully distinguished from it, often occurs after a downturn in business has got under way. Consumptive spending and investment are then both contracted. Consumers reduce their buying. They do this partly, indeed, because they fear they may lose their jobs, and they wish to conserve their resources: they have contracted their buying not because they wish to consume less, but because they wish to make sure that their power to consume will he extended over a longer period if they do lose their jobs.
But consumers reduce their buying for another reason. Prices of goods have probably fallen, and they fear a further fall. If they defer spending, they believe they will get more for their money. They do not wish to have their resources in goods that are falling in value, but in money which they expect (relatively) to rise in value.
The same expectation prevents them from investing They have lost their confidence in the profitability of business; or at least they believe that if they wait a few months they can buy stocks or bonds cheaper. We may think of them either as refusing to hold goods that may fall in value on their hands, or as holding money itself for a rise.
It is a misnomer to call this temporary refusal to buy "saving." It does not spring from the same motives as normal saving. And it is a still more serious error to say that this sort of "saving" is the cause of depressions. It is, on the contrary, the consequence of depressions.
It is true that this refusal to buy may intensify and prolong a depression once begun. But it does not itself originate the depression. At times when there is capricious government intervention in business, and when business does not know what the government is going to do next, uncertainty is created. Profits are not reinvested. Firms and individuals allow cash balances to accumulate in their banks. They keep larger reserves against contingencies. This hoarding of cash may seem like the cause of a subsequent slowdown in business activity. The real cause, however, is the uncertainty brought about by the government policies. The larger cash balances of firms and individuals are merely one link in the chain of consequences from that uncertainty. To blame "excessive saving" for the business decline would be like blaming a fall in the price of apples not on a bumper crop but on the people who refuse to pay more for apples.
But when once people have decided to deride a practice or an institution, any argument against it, no matter how illogical, is considered good enough. I t is said that the various consumers' goods industries are built on the expectation of a certain demand, and that if people take to saving they will disappoint this expectation and start a depression. This assertion rests primarily on the error we have already examined-that of forgetting that what is saved on consumers' goods is spent on capital goods, and that "saving" does not necessarily mean even a dollar's contraction in total spending. The only element of truth in the contention is that any change that is sudden may be unsettling. It would be just as unsettling if consumers suddenly switched their demand from one consumers' goods to another. It would he even more unsettling if former savers suddenly switched their demand from capital goods to consumers' goods.
Still another objection is made against saving. It is said to be just downright silly. The Nineteenth Century is derided for its supposed inculcation of the doctrine that mankind through saving should go on making itself a larger and larger cake without ever eating the cake. This picture of the process is itself naive and childish. It can best be disposed of, perhaps, by putting before ourselves a somewhat more realistic picture of what actually takes place.
Let us picture to ourselves, then, a nation that collectively saves every year about 20 percent of all it produces in that year. This figure greatly overstates the amount of net saving that has occurred historically in the United States * but it is a round figure that is easily handled, and it gives the benefit of every doubt to those who believe that we have been "oversaving."
Now as a result of this annual saving and investment, the total annual production of the country will increase each year. (To isolate the problem we are ignoring for 3. Historically 20 per cent would represent approximately the have been closer to 12 per rent.' the moment booms, slumps, or other fluctuations.) Let us say that this annual increase in production is 2 1/2 percentage points. (Percentage points are taken instead of a compounded percentage merely to simplify the arithmetic.) The picture that we get for an eleven-year period, say, would then run something like this in terms of index numbers:
Total Consumers' Capital
Year Production Goods Produced Goods Produced
First 100.0 80n 20*
Second 102.5 82 20.5
Third 105 84 21
Fourth 107.5 86 21.5
Fifth 110 88 22
Sixth 112.5 90 22.5
Seventh 115 92 23
Eighth 117.5 94 23.5
Ninth 120 96 24
Tenth 122.5 98 24.5
Eleventh 125 100 25
* This of course assumes the process of saving and investment to have been already under way at the same ram.
The first thing to be noticed about this table is that total production increases each year because of the sawing, and would not have increased without it. (It is possible no doubt to imagine that improvements and new inventions merely in replaced machinery and other capital goods of a value no greater than the old would increase the national productivity; but this increase would amount to very little, and the argument in any case assumes enough prior investment to have made the existing machinery possible.) The saving has been used year after year to increase the quantity or improve the quality of existing machinery, and so to increase the nation's out- put of goods. There is, it is true (if that for some strange reason is considered an objection), a larger and larger "cake" each year. Each year, it is true, not all of the currently produced "cake" is consumed. But there is no irrational or cumulative consumer restraint. For each year a larger and larger cake is in fact consumed; until, at the end of eleven years (in our illustration), the annual consumers' cake alone is equal to the combined consumers' and producers' cakes of the first year. More- over, the capital equipment, the ability to produce goods, is itself 25 per cent greater than in the first year. Let us observe a few other points. The fact that 20 per cent of the national income goes each year for saving does not upset the consumers' goods industries in the least. If they sold only the 80 units they produced in the first year (and there were no rise in prices caused by unsatisfied demand) they would certainly not be foolish enough to build their production plans on the assumption that they were going to sell 100 units in the second year. Tire consumers' goods industries, in other words, are already geared to the assumption that the past situation in regard to the rate of savings will continue. Only an unexpected sudden and substantial increase in savings would unsettle them and leave them with unsold goods.
But the same unsettlement, as we have already ob- served, would be caused in the capital goads industries by a sudden and substantial decrease in savings. If money that would previously have been used for savings were thrown into the purchase of consumers' goods, it would not increase employment but merely lead to an increase in the price of consumption goods and to a decrease in the price of capital goods. Its first effect on net balance would be to force shifts in employment and temporarily to decrease employment by its effect on the capital goods industries. And its long-run effect would he to reduce production below the level that would otherwise have been achieved.
The enemies of saving are not through. They begin by drawing a distinction, which is proper enough, between "savings" and "investment." But then they start to talk as if the two were independent variables and as if it were merely an accident that they should ever equal each other. These writers paint a portentous picture. On the one side are savers automatically, pointlessly, stupidly continuing to save; on the other side are limited "investment opportunities" that cannot absorb this saving. The result, alas, is stagnation. The only solution, they declare, is for the government to expropriate these stupid and harmful savings and to invent its own projects, even if these are only useless ditches or pyramids, to use up the money and provide employment.
There is so much that is false in this picture and "solution" that we can here point only to some of the main fallacies. "Savings" can exceed "investment" only by the amounts that are actually hoarded in cash.* Few people nowadays, in a modern industrial community like the United States , hoard coins and bills in stockings or under mattresses. To the small extent that this may occur, it has already been reflected in the production plans of business and in the price level. It is not ordinarily even cumulative: dishoarding, as eccentric recluses die and their hoards are discovered and dissipated, probably offsets new hoarding. In fact, the whole amount involved is probably insignificant in its effect on business activity.
If money is kept either in savings banks or commercial hanks, as we have already seen, the banks are eager to lend and invest it. They cannot afford to have idle funds. The only thing that will cause people generally to in- crease their holdings of cash, or that will cause banks to hold funds idle and lose the interest on them, is, a s we have seen, either fear that prices of goods are going to fall or the fear of banks that they will be taking too great a risk with their principal. But this means that signs of a depression have already appeared, and have caused the hoarding, rather than that the hoarding has started the depression.
Apart from this negligible hoarding of cash, then (and even this exception might he thought of as a direct "in- vestment" in money itself) "savings" and "investment" are brought into equilibrium with each other in the same way that the supply of and demand for any commodity are brought into equilibrium. For we may define "savings" and "investment" as constituting respectively the supply of and demand for new capital. And just as the supply of and demand for any other commodity are equalized by price, so the supply of and demand for capital are equalized by interest rates. The interest rate is merely the special name for the price of loaned capital. I t is a price like any other.
This whole subject has been so appallingly confused in recent years by complicated sophistries and disastrous governmental policies based upon them that one almost despairs of getting back to common sense and sanity about it. There is a psychopathic fear of "excessive" interest rates. It is argued that if interest rates are too high it will not be profitable for industry to borrow and invest in new plants and machines. This argument has been so effective that governments everywhere in recent decades have pursued artificial "cheap money" policies. But the argument, in its concern with increasing the demand for capital, overlooks the effect of these policies on the sup- ply of capital. It is one more example of the fallacy of looking at the effects of a policy only on one group and forgetting the effects on another.
If interest rates are artificially kept too low in relation to risks, funds will neither be saved nor lent. The cheap- money proponents believe that saving goes on automatically, regardless of the interest rate, because the sated rich have nothing else that they can do with their money. They do not stop to tell us at precisely what personal in- come level a man saves a fixed minimum amount regard- less of the rate of interest or the risk at which he can lend it.
The fact is that, though the volume of saving of the very rich is doubtless affected much less proportionately than that of the moderately well-off by changes in the interest rate, practically everyone's saving is affected in some degree. To argue, on the basis of an extreme ex- ample, that the volume of real savings would not be reduced by a substantial reduction in the interest rate, is like arguing that the total production of sugar would not be reduced by a substantial fall of its price because the efficient, low-cost producers would still raise as much as before. The argument overlooks the marginal saver, and even, indeed, the great majority of savers.
The effect of keeping interest rates artificially low, in fact, is eventually the same as that of keeping any other price below the natural market. It increases demand and reduces supply. It increases the demand for capital and reduces the supply of real capital. It brings about a scarcity. It creates economic distortions. It is true, no doubt, that an artificial reduction in the interest rate encourages increased borrowing. I t tends, in fact, to en- courage highly speculative ventures that cannot continue except under the artificial conditions that gave them birth. On the supply side, the artificial reduction of interest rates discourages normal thrift and saving. It brings about a comparative shortage of real capital. The money rate can, indeed, be kept artificially low only by continuous new injections of currency or bank credit in place of real savings. This can create the illusion of more capital just as the addition of water can create the illusion of more milk. But it is a policy of continuous inflation. It is obviously a process involving cumulative danger.
The money rate will rise and a crisis will develop if the inflation is reversed, or merely brought to a halt, or even continued at a diminished rate. Cheap money policies, in short, eventually bring about far more violent oscillations in business than those they are designed to remedy or prevent.
If no effort is made to tamper with money rates through inflationary governmental policies, increased savings create their own demand by lowering interest rates in a natural manner. The greater supply of savings seeking investment forces savers to accept lower rates. But lower rates also mean that more enterprises can afford to borrow because their prospective profit on the new machines or plants they buy with the proceeds seems likely to exceed what they have to pay for the borrowed funds.
We come now to the last fallacy about saving with which I intend to deal. This is the frequent assumption that there is a fixed limit to the amount of new capital that can he absorbed, or even that the limit of capital expansion has already been reached. It is incredible that such a view could prevail even among the ignorant, let alone that it could be held by any trained economist. Almost the whole wealth of the modern world, nearly every- thing that distinguishes it from the pre-industrial world of the seventeenth century, consists of its accumulated capital.
This capital is made up in part of many things that might better be called consumers' durable goods-auto- mobiles, refrigerators, furniture, schools, colleges, churches, libraries, hospitals and above all private homes. Never in the history of the world has there been enough of these. There is still, with the postponed building and outright destruction of World War II, a desperate shortage of them. But even if there were enough homes from a purely numerical point of view, qualitative improvements are possible and desirable without definite limit in all but the very best houses.
The second part of capital is what we may call capital proper. It consists of the tools of production, including everything from the crudest axe, knife or plow to the finest machine tool, the greatest electric generator or cyclotron, or the most wonderfully equipped factory. Here, too, quantitatively and especially qualitatively, there is no limit to the expansion that is possible and desirable. There will not be a "surplus" of capital until the most backward country is as well equipped technologically as the most advanced, until the most inefficient factory in America is brought abreast of the factory with the latest and most elaborate equipment, and until the most modern tools of production have reached a point where human ingenuity is at a dead end, and can improve them no further. As long as any of these conditions remain unfulfilled, there will be indefinite room for more capital.
But how can the additional capital be "absorbed"? How can it be "paid for"? If it is set aside and saved, it will absorb itself and pay for itself. For producers invest in new capital goods-that is, they buy new and better and more ingenious tools-because these tools reduce cost of production. They either bring into existence goods that completely unaided hand labor could not bring into existence at all (and this now includes most of the goods around us-books, typewriters, automobiles, locomotives, suspension bridges) ; or they increase enormously the quantities in which these can be produced; or (and this is merely saying these things in a different way) they reduce unit costs of production. And as there is no assign. able limit to the extent to which unit costs of production can be reduced-until everything can be produced at no cost at all-there is no assignable limit to the amount of new capital that can be absorbed.
The steady reduction of unit costs of production by the addition of new capital does either one of two things, or both. It reduces the costs of goods to consumers, and it increases the wages of the labor that uses the new machines because it increases the productive power of that labor. Thus a new machine benefits both the people who work on it directly and the great body of consumers. In the case of consumers we may say either that it supplies them with more and better goods for the same money, or, what is the same thing, that it increases their real incomes. In the case of the workers who use the new machines it increases their real wages in a double way by increasing their money wages as well. A typical illustration is the automobile business. The American auto- mobile industry pays the highest wages in the world, and among the very highest even in America . Yet American motor car makers can undersell the rest of the world, because their unit cost is lower. And the secretis that the capital used in making American automobiles is greater per worker and per car than anywhere else in the world.
And yet there are people who think we have reached the end of this process,* and still others who think that even if we haven't, the world is foolish to go on saving and adding to its stock of capital.
It should not be difficult to decide, after our analysis, with whom the real folly lies.