作者：艾森格林(Barry Eichengreen) 2010年11月9日 Project Syndicate
为分析这些前景，理解英国病的本质很重要。它并不单纯是1870年后美国和德国增长速度超过英国。毕竟后起国家发展迅速完全正常，就像今天的中国。问题是英国在19世纪末没能带领其经济到新的层次。
英国从第一次工业革命的旧工业向现代部门转换的动作迟缓，这阻碍了大规模生产方法的采用。它也没能采用依赖电能的精确机械，导致在组装打字机、收银机和汽车方面，不能用机器生产的零件。在其他新兴工业，比如合成化学品、燃料、电话通讯，也是如此，在这些领域英国都没能建立立足点。
低成本的新兴经济力量的崛起，使得纺织、钢铁和造船等旧工业的就业损失不可避免。但英国失败的特别之处是，它没能将这些19世纪旧工业转换成20世纪新工业。
美国会不会重蹈覆辙？要回答这个问题，就要理解英国缺乏技术进步性的原因。普遍接受的解释是，英国文化排斥勤勉和创新。在英国现代化的长河中，勤勉的人都被纳入统治集团。从19世纪中叶开始，最出色的人才都投身政治，而非商业。从商店中提拔上来的企业经理人，据说只是二流货。
如今我们大概能看到美国有类似的问题。用《纽约时报》大卫·布鲁克斯（ David Brooks）的话说：“在几十年的富足之后，美国偏离了这个国家一开始获取财富所依靠的冷静的实用主义……美国最聪明的人放弃了工业和技术行业，投身于更崇高但没有生产力的领域，比如法律、金融、咨询以及非营利性活动。”
实际上，这个所谓的英国衰落的解释，经不起时间的考验。并没有系统性的证据证明英国的经理人低人一等。
在今天的美国，也找不到所说问题的证据。硅谷的众公司并未抱怨缺乏有才华的经理。创业的，甚至是去汽车公司的MBA都不在少数。
对英国的衰落，第二普遍认可的解释是教育系统。牛津和剑桥始建于工业时代之前很久，造就了显赫的哲学家和历史学家，却没有多少科学家和工程师。但这一论断并不适用于美国，美国的大学仍然是世界领头羊，吸引着全世界的科学和工程研究生赴美——其中许多还留在了美国。
还有人将英国的衰落解释成金融系统的作用。英国的银行成长于19世纪初，当时工业的资本需求不大，主要是为外贸而非国内投资融资，这也使得需要资本的工业难以成长。
实际上，说英国青睐外贸甚于国内投资的实际证据也十分薄弱。无论如何，这段历史也与美国的现状无关，美国是处在外国投资的接收端，而非投放端。
对英国未能维持强盛的最后一种解释，归罪于经济政策。英国没能设立有效的竞争政策。为应对1929年的需求崩溃，它设立起关税壁垒。没有国外竞争，工业变得脑满肠肥。二战之后，工党和劳动党轮番执政，导致政策不断收放，增加了不确定性，产生了长期财政问题。
这就是英国衰退最令人信服的解释。针对上世纪30年代金融危机，英国没能建立连贯的政策。其政党并未共同努力解决经济问题，而是仍然互相掣肘。国家转为内斗。政治变得难以控制，政策反复无常，经济愈加不稳定。
简言之，英国的失败在于政治，而非经济。不幸的是，这段历史与美国的现状十分类似。
（作者系加州大学伯克利分校的经济和政治学教授。Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2010）
Is America Catching the “British Disease?”
BERKELEY – In the United States, the scent of decline is in the air. Imperial overreach, political polarization, and a costly financial crisis are weighing on the economy. Some pundits now worry that America is about to succumb to the “British disease.”
Doomed to slow growth, the US of today, like the exhausted Britain that emerged from World War II, will be forced to curtail its international commitments. This will create space for rising powers like China, but it will also expose the world to a period of heightened geopolitical uncertainty.
In thinking about these prospects, it is important to understand the nature of the British disease. It was not simply that America and Germany grew faster than Britain after 1870. After all, it is entirely natural for late-developing countries to grow rapidly, as is true of China today. The problem was Britain’s failure in the late nineteenth century to take its economy to the next level.
Britain was slow to move from the old industries of the first Industrial Revolution into modern sectors like electrical engineering, which impeded the adoption of mass-production methods. It also failed to adopt precision machinery that depended on electricity, which prevented it from producing machined components for use in assembling typewriters, cash registers, and motor vehicles. The same story can be told about other new industries like synthetic chemicals, dyestuffs, and telephony, in all of which Britain failed to establish a foothold.
The rise of new economic powers with lower costs made employment loss in old industries like textiles, iron and steel, and shipbuilding inevitable. But Britain’s signal failure was in not replacing these old nineteenth-century industries with new twentieth-century successors.
Is America doomed to the same fate? Answering this question requires understanding the reasons behind Britain’s lack of technological progressiveness. One popular explanation is a culture that denigrated industry and entrepreneurship. Over the long course of British modernization, the industrial classes were absorbed into the establishment. From the mid-nineteenth century, the best minds went into politics, not business. Enterprise managers promoted from the shop floor were, it is said, second rate.
Now we supposedly see a similar problem in the US. In the words of David Brooks of The New York Times: “After decades of affluence, the US has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place….America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting, and nonprofit activism.”
In fact, this supposed explanation for British decline has not stood the test of time. There is no systematic evidence that British managers were inferior. Indeed, expanding the pool of potential managers beyond the children of a firm’s founders had precisely the opposite effect. It allowed the cream to rise to the top.
In today’s America, too, it is hard to find evidence of this purported problem. Silicon Valley companies do not complain of a dearth of talented managers. There is no shortage of new MBAs establishing start-ups or even going to work for auto companies.
A second popular explanation for British decline focuses on the educational system. Oxford and Cambridge, established long before the industrial era, produced eminent philosophers and historians, but too few scientists and engineers. It is difficult, however, to see how this argument applies to the US, whose universities remain world leaders, attracting graduate students in science and engineering from around the world – many of whom remain in the country.
Still others explain British decline as a function of the financial system. British banks, having grown up in the early nineteenth century, when industry’s capital needs were modest, specialized in financing foreign trade rather than domestic investment, thereby starving industry of the capital needed to grow.
In fact, actual evidence of any such British bias in favor of foreign over domestic investment is weak. And, in any case, that history, too, is irrelevant to the US today, which is on the receiving, not the sending, end of foreign investment.
A final explanation for Britain’s failure to keep up makes economic policy the culprit. Britain failed to put in place an effective competition policy. In response to the collapse of demand in 1929, it erected high tariff walls. Sheltered from foreign competition, industry grew fat and lazy. After WWII, repeated shifts between Labour and Conservative governments led to stop-go policies that heightened uncertainty and created chronic financial problems.
Herein lies the most convincing explanation for British decline. The country failed to develop a coherent policy response to the financial crisis of the 1930’s. Its political parties, rather than working together to address pressing economic problems, remained at each other’s throats. The country turned inward. Its politics grew fractious, its policies erratic, and its finances increasingly unstable.
In short, Britain’s was a political, not an economic, failure. And that history, unfortunately, is all too pertinent to America’s fate.
