Schumpeter
熊彼得

Taking flight
小熊彼得的初啼

Sep 17th 2009
From The Economist print edition

This week we launch a new column on business and management. Why call it Schumpeter?

本周，我们开辟了一个探讨商业管理的新专栏——“熊彼得”。为什么是“熊彼得”？

THERE is something about business that prevents most people from seeing straight. The rise of modern business provoked relentless criticism. Anthony Trollope featured a fraudulent railway company in “The Way We Live Now” (1875). Upton Sinclair dwelt on “the inferno of exploitation” in Chicago’s meat packing industry in “The Jungle” (1906). Muckraking journalists denounced the titans of American business as “robber barons”.

许多人都对商业持有偏见，现代商业的兴起便招来了人们无休止的诟病。安东尼·特罗洛普在其小说《如今世道》(1875) 中刻画了一个行骗欺诈的铁路公司。厄普顿· 辛克莱的小说《森林》(1906) 通篇都在揭露芝加哥肉类加工业“地狱般的剥削”。八卦记者曾将美国商业巨头贬斥为“披着强盗外衣的大佬”。

A striking number of business people accepted this hostile assessment. Friedrich Engels used some of the profits of his successful textile business to support Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed gravedigger of capitalism. Henry Frick’s last message to his fellow steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, was “Tell him I’ll see him in hell, where we both are going.” Many of the greatest business people threw themselves into philanthropy to try to win back the souls that they had lost in making money. Anti-business sentiment is still widespread today. For many environmentalists, business is responsible for despoiling the planet. For many apostles of corporate social responsibility, business people are fallen angels who can only redeem themselves by doing good works.

对于此种恶评，竟有相当数量的商人是认同的。比如，弗里德里希·恩格斯就曾资助自诩为“资本主义掘墓人”的卡尔·马克思，而恩格斯的钱是他在其获利颇丰的纺织厂赚来的。亨利·弗里克曾叫人捎信儿给同为钢铁大亨的安德鲁·卡内基，扔给后者一句诀别话：“告诉他，我们地狱见！我们都会下地狱的。” 此外，很多商业巨头都投身慈善业，试图洗清身上的铜臭。但时至今日，对商业的抵触情绪依然普遍。很多环保人士都认为，造成地球资源日渐枯竭的罪魁祸首就是商业。在许多鼓吹“企业要承担社会责任”的人眼中，商人就是一群“堕落天使”，获得救赎的唯一办法就是做好事行善。

But anti-business sentiment is not as pervasive as it once was, thanks to the Thatcher-Reagan revolution and the collapse of communism. Instead there is new irritation to contend with—the blandification of business. Companies are at pains to present themselves as warm-and-fuzzy global citizens. Politicians praise businessmen as job creators. The United Nations and the World Bank celebrate businesses as all-purpose problem-solvers. Nicolas Sarkozy makes a distinction between business people (who create things) and financial speculators (who wreak havoc).

这种“反商业”情绪如今却黯淡了下去（“撒切尔-里根革命”以及“共产主义的溃败”功不可没），取而代之的是社会对于商业的过分美化与夸大，这同样令商人们感到苦恼；各个企业要煞费苦心地将自己打造成一个讨好的形象，一个有责任感的“世界公民”。政府官员称赞商人为社会创造了许多就业机会。联合国和世界银行颂扬企业是“万能纾困者”（比如，IBM曾与世界银行进行过一次货币交换，帮助后者解脱困境。——译者）。尼古拉斯·萨科奇把商人（创造创新）和投机者（制造灾难）区分开来。

Joseph Schumpeter was one of the few intellectuals who saw business straight. He regarded business people as unsung heroes: men and women who create new enterprises through the sheer force of their wills and imaginations, and, in so doing, are responsible for the most benign development in human history, the spread of mass affluence. “Queen Elizabeth [I] owned silk stockings,” he once observed. “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort…The capitalist process, not by coincidence but by virtue of its mechanism, progressively raises the standard of life of the masses.” But Schumpeter knew far too much about the history of business to be a cheerleader. He recognised that business people are often ruthless monomaniacs, obsessed by their dreams of building “private kingdoms” and willing to do anything to crush their rivals.

约瑟夫·熊彼得是少数能以客观眼光看待商业的知识分子。一方面，他认为商人是无名英雄；英雄之处表现在这些人（男或女）纯粹凭借意志和远见创造了新的企业，并由此为人类历史的良性发展贡献力量，为增进全民福祉添砖加瓦。他曾用“长筒袜”来作例证：“伊丽莎白一世有许多长筒袜。但是，资本主义的功德其实不在于让女王拥有了更多的长筒袜，而在于工厂女孩凭借劳动也能得到长筒袜，且获得长筒袜所付出的劳动是日渐变少的…… 资本主义的进程一步步地提高了人民生活水平，这靠的不是偶然，而是其运行机制使然。” 另一方面，熊彼得对于商业的一路走来了解得太透彻了；他看到的商业发展史是一幅竞赛比争的画卷——商人通常都是冷酷的偏执狂，痴迷于建造自己的“私人王国”，可以不惜一切手段将打压对手。

Schumpeter’s ability to see business straight would be reason enough to name our new business column after him. But this ability rested on a broader philosophy of capitalism. He argued that innovation is at the heart of economic progress. It gives new businesses a chance to replace old ones, but it also dooms those new businesses to fail unless they can keep on innovating (or find a powerful government patron). In his most famous phrase he likened capitalism to a “perennial gale of creative destruction”.

熊彼得能够以客观的角度看待商业，这一点足以有理由让我们用他的名字来命名该专栏。然而，其思想并非无源之水，而是基于更为宏观的资本主义哲学（马克思·韦伯对熊彼得的影响很大。——译者）。他认为经济进步的核心就是创新，创新让新企业有机会取代老企业，同时也给予新企业以创新的动力，因为如果不能将创新进行到底，迎接你的就是失败（除非你能得到强有力的政府）。他曾将资本主义比作“具有创造性破坏力的永恒风暴”，这也是他最常被人引用的话。

For Schumpeter the people who kept this gale blowing were entrepreneurs. He was responsible for popularising the word itself, and for identifying the entrepreneur’s central function: of moving resources, however painfully, to areas where they can be used more productively. But he also recognised that big businesses can be as innovative as small ones, and that entrepreneurs can arise from middle management as well as college dorm-rooms.

在熊彼得看来，“风暴”之所以能够持续不断，是因为其背后力量的推动。这个“背后力量”就是企业家。熊彼得不但推广了“企业家”这一概念，还定义了企业家的核心作用：无论怎样困难，总会将资源转移到能够发挥其最大效力的地方。他还认为大公司的创新精神不会逊于小公司，并且企业家既可能出自中层管理人员，也可能来自大学宿舍。

Schumpeter was born in 1883, a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire. During the 18 years he spent at Harvard he never learned to drive and took the subway that links Cambridge to Boston only once. Obsessed by the idea of being a gentleman, he spent an hour every morning dressing himself. Yet his writing has an astonishingly contemporary ring; indeed, he seems to have felt the future in his bones. The gale of creative destruction blew ever harder after his death in 1950, particularly after the stagflation of the 1970s. Corporate raiders and financial engineers tore apart underperforming companies. Governments relaxed their hold on the economy. The venture-capital industry exploded, the computer industry boomed and corporate lifespans shortened dramatically. In 1956-81 an average of 24 firms dropped out of the Fortune 500 list every year. In 1982-2006 that number jumped to 40. Larry Summers, Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, argues that Schumpeter may prove to be the most important economist of the 21st century.

熊彼得于1883年出生在当时的奥匈帝国。在哈佛的18年间，他从没学过开车，地铁也只坐过一次（从剑桥到波士顿）。他每天要花一个小时打理自己的外表，因为他痴迷于作一个古典绅士。但是，他的文章却极具现代气息；你甚至能从他的字里行间里，看到这个人对未来趋势的感知。他描述的那场“具有创造性破坏力的永恒风暴”在他1950年去世之后越刮越大，在1970年代的“滞涨”（停滞型通货膨胀）之后尤为猛烈。“企业掠夺者”（他们通常的作法是先恶意收购，然后套现。——译者）和金融工程师拆分搞垮了那些表现不佳的公司。政府放松了经济上的管制；风险投资得以伴随计算机产业的急速发展而一飞冲天，企业的生命周期从而急剧缩短。1956~1981年间，每年平均有24家公司跌出“世界500强”榜单。接下来的1982~2006年期间，这一数字增至40。奥巴马的首席经济顾问拉里·萨默斯认为，熊彼得可以称得上是21世纪最重要的经济学家。

A prophet and a role model

预言大师+学习的楷模

The prophet of capitalism’s creative powers also understood the precariousness of the capitalist achievement. He pointed out that successful firms depend upon a complex ecology that has been created over centuries. He wrote extensively about the development of the joint-stock company and the rise of stockmarkets. He also understood that capitalism might be destroyed by its own success. He worried that a “new class” of bureaucrats and intellectuals were determined to tame capitalism’s animal spirits. And he warned that successful business people were always trying to conspire with politicians to preserve the status quo.

熊彼得既成功预言了资本主义的创造力，也同时看到了资本主义浮华背后的漏洞。他指出，一个企业的成功要依赖一个已创建了几世纪、错综复杂的“生态系统”。他写了大量文章关于股份公司以及蓬勃上升的股票市场，但同时也明白资本主义可能会盛极转衰，自溃于鼎盛期。他担心“新一代”的官僚和知识分子会固执于驯服资本主义的“动物性”（“animal spirits”在这里译为“动物性”更合理，而通常译为“动物精神”，详见： http://blog.caihuanet.com/html/12/2612-18223.html ——译者）。他还叫人们注意官与商的勾结——当商人把企业做到一定程度，为了维持现有利益，总会与官员串通。

Naming this column after Schumpeter does not imply that we endorse everything he said. His ideas about long business cycles have not withstood the test of time. He was too sceptical about the case for using government spending to avert depressions. He underestimated the self-correcting power of democracy. Moreover, this will be a column about business and management, rather than finance and economics. But the champion of innovation and entrepreneurship surely got as close as anybody to identifying what a column on modern business should be about.

将该专栏命名为“熊彼得”并不表示我们同意他说过的一切。他的长经济周期理论（熊彼得的经济周期理论分为长、中、短三种，分别是康德拉季耶夫周期、朱格拉周期和基钦周期，时间大致分别为60年、10年和40个月。——译者）并没有经得住时间的考验。他对于“通过政府支出来防止经济危机”的情形太过不屑。他低估了民主的“自我校正”能力。再者，这个专栏将要讨论的是商业管理，而非金融财经。但是这位提倡创新和“企业家精神”的先驱一定很清楚我们这个（关于现代商业的）专栏是写什么的。