双语阅读｜缺乏信任让美国经济低迷
AMERICA is a grumpy and confused place. For an overarching explanation of what has gone wrong, a decline in trust is a good place to start. Trust can be defined as the expectation that other people, or organisations, will act in ways that are fair to you. In the White House and beyond there is precious little of it about. People increasingly view institutions as corrupt, strangers as suspicious, rivals as illegitimate and facts as negotiable.
美国是一个暴躁乖张却又让人困惑不解的国家。要想弄清现实出现问题的根本原因，就要从信任的减退开始谈起。信任的定义是：期待他人或组织会用公平的方式对待自己。然而，在白宫和美国其他地方，信任却少之又少。人们愈加认为制度是腐败的，陌生人是可疑的，竞争对手是非法的，真实真相是可以讨价还价的。
The share of Americans who say “most people can be trusted” fell from 44% in 1976 to 32% in 2016, according to a survey from the University of Chicago. In a new book, “The Retreat of Western Liberalism”, Edward Luce, a commentator for the Financial Times in Washington, argues that distrust will contribute to America’s decline and eventually, even, to autocracy. Lack of faith is chewed over in boardrooms, too. In his latest letter to shareholders, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase’s boss, describes trust as America’s “secret sauce” and worries that the bottle is running dry.
根据芝加哥大学的一项调查，认为“多数人可以被信任“的美国人比例从1976年时的44%下滑至2016年时的32%。来自华盛顿的《金融时报》评论员爱德华·露丝在其新书《西方自由主义的倒退》（The Retreat of Western Libralism）指出，不信任感会是美国的衰落的一部分，甚至会是最终导致独裁冒头的原因之一。缺乏信任的问题也引起了各家企业高管的深思。在摩根大通董事长杰米·德蒙近期致股东的信中，他将信任形容为美国的“秘制调料”，担忧这瓶调料快要消耗殆尽了。
The tricky bit is reconciling this distrust with the rosy business outlook. The S&P 500 index is near an all-time high, even though many economists say that distrust is toxic for prosperity because transactions become dearer and riskier. An OECD study of 30 economies shows that those with low levels of trust, such as Turkey and Mexico, are far poorer. Three scholars, Luigi Guiso, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales, have shown that pairs of countries (such as Britain and France) whose populations say they distrust each other, have less bilateral trade and investment.
这个棘手之处在于调和不信任与乐观的商业前景。即使许多经济学家表示不信任将会使交易更加昂贵和高风险，对经济繁荣不利，然而，目前标普500指数仍接近历史最高位。经济合作与发展组织在研究30个经济体后表明，那些尚处于低度信任的经济体（如土耳其和墨西哥）会更加贫困。刘吉·圭索、波拉·萨品泽和刘吉·森格勒斯等三位学者表明，人民互相不信任的国家（如英国和法国）的双边贸易与投资也会更少。
America’s mistrust outbreak can be split into two parts: what consumers think, and what firms think. The share of folk who have “little or no confidence” in big business has risen from 26% in 1976 to 39% in June, according to Gallup. For banks it has risen from 10% in 1979 to 28% today. Over decades big firms have broken implicit promises to their employees, such as providing a job for life and paying generous pensions. That has probably soured the public’s view. And the financial crisis of 2007-08 blew a giant hole in the reputation of big business and finance.
美国爆发信任危机可分为两个不同原因：消费者的想法和公司的想法。盖洛普民意调查显示，美国人民中对大公司“拥有一点或毫无信任”的比例从1976年时的26%上升到今年六月调查时的39%。对银行的不信任度也从1979年时10%跃升到如今的28%。过去几十年来，大公司打破了与员工们心照不宣的承诺，如提供终生的铁饭碗和优厚的退休金，这可能引起了人们的不满。2007-2008年的金融危机更是令大企业和金融业的声誉带来了巨大打击。
Yet despite their customers’ distaste, big firms mint huge profits. One explanation is declining competition over the past 20 years. If markets are working, firms that are perceived to behave badly lose market share. In concentrated industries this discipline is lacking. Two recent scandals in oligopolistic bits of the economy illustrate the point. Wells Fargo, a bank, created millions of fake accounts, yet in the three months to June its year-on-year profits rose by 5%. In April a United Airlines passenger was assaulted, causing an outcry. Its underlying profits later rose by 5%, too. In such industries Americans are inured to mistreatment.
尽管大企业们招致了消费者的厌恶，大企业们还是赚取了巨额的利润。原因之一是在过去的二十年间竞争的减少。如果市场机制正常运转，表现不佳的公司就会丢失市场份额。然而，这一市场规律并不适用寡头垄断的行业。最近在寡头经济里出现的两桩丑闻恰好说明了这一点。富国银行伪造了数以百万计的虚假账户，可是，截至六月的前三个月中，其年收益率同比依然上升了5%。在四月，一名乘客在乘坐美联航时遭到袭击，此事曾引起一片哗然。然而，此事件后美联航的营业利润依然上升了5%。在寡头的行业中，美国人习惯了受迫害。
Trust between firms, and between firms and investors, is more resilient, but there is evidence of greater wariness. Banks charge corporate borrowers a spread of 2.6 percentage points above the federal-funds rate, compared with 2.0 points in the 20 years before the crisis. The equity-risk premium, or the annual excess return that investors demand to hold shares rather than bonds, is 5.03 points, against a pre-crisis average of 3.45 points, notes Aswath Damodaran of the Stern School of Business at NYU.
公司之间、公司和投资者之间的信任更有弹性，但有证据表明他们更谨慎。银行向企业借款人收取的费用比联邦基金利率高出2.6个百分点，而危机前的20年则为2.0个百分点。纽约大学斯特恩商学院的Aswath Damodaran指出，股票风险溢价，即投资者要求持有股票而非债券的年回报率，是5.03点，而危机前的平均水平为3.45点。
The median firm in the S&P 500 holds 62 cents of cash on its balance-sheet per dollar of gross operating profit, up from 45 cents in 2006 (this yardstick excludes America’s giant technology companies, which hoard money). In a sign that more corporate deals end in tears, litigation costs are rising. The revenues of legal firms rose by 103% in 1997-2012, according to the Census Bureau, more quickly than nominal GDP growth, of 85%. And spending on corporate lobbying, a signal that firms think politicians are corruptible(bribe), has risen faster than GDP, too.
标普指数500的中位企业每营利一美元，其账面上持有62美分的现金，在2006年时，这一数字为45美分（该衡量标准不适用于积聚钱财的美国技术公司巨头)。有迹象表明，越来越多交易以失败收场，诉讼费用也在增加。根据人口普查局的数据，从1997年至2012年，合法公司的税收增加了103%，快于名义国内生产总值的85%增速。同时，企业游说的增速也超过了国内生产总值——这表明了企业认为政客们容易接受贿赂。
In the long term it is possible that firms could become as mistrustful as consumers. Though individual companies can gain from cronyism, overall confidence will fall if there is sustained political meddling in the courts and regulatory system. And companies as well as people can be trapped into doing business with monopolies that are inept or shifty. In 2016 Facebook said that for the past two years it had overstated how long its users watched videos for, but advertisers have little choice but to stick with the social-media firm. Its profits rose by 71% in the latest quarter.
长远来看，企业有可能变得与消费者一样多疑。尽管个别企业能从裙带主义中获益；如果在法庭和监管体系中存在持续的政治干预，信心在总体上将会下降。企业也和普通人一样，在与垄断企业做生意时会陷入他们的陷阱，无论下套人是愚蠢还是诡诈。在2016年，Facebook表示，在过去的两年里夸大了用户观看视频的时长，但是，广告商除了继续与这爱社交媒体公司合作外别无选择。在上个季度，Facebook的盈利增长了71%。
If the bleak predictions of observers such as Mr Luce come true, how might America Inc adjust? One guide is the work of Ronald Coase, an economist who theorised that the boundary of a firm is set according to whether an activity is best done in-house or can be outsourced to the market. If counterparties are less reliable, and contracts expensive to enforce, firms will become “vertically integrated”, bringing their supply chain in-house.
如果像卢斯的观察者们的黯淡预言成真的话，美国的上市公司要如何适应呢？经济学家罗纳德·科斯创建的理论指出了一条出路：确立一家企业的界限，即一项措施想 48 31354 48 15288 0 0 1740 0 0:00:18 0:00:08 0:00:10 3138 48 31354 48 15288 0 0 1556 0 0:00:20 0:00:09 0:00:11 3156到最优的执行是在公司内部还是外包给市场来实现的。如果合作双方缺乏信任，则执行合约成本高昂，企业就会选择“纵向一体化”，即回到公司内部发展供应链。
If there is deeper decay of America’s legal system and greater political corruption, then firms would go further and spread “horizontally” too, expanding into new industries where their political contacts, and access to favours and capital can be used. This is how business works in much of the emerging world.
如果美国的法律系统和政治进一步腐朽，企业便会“横向地”走得更远，向他们的政治寻租、优惠和资本能够得到发挥的新行业扩张。这就是商业在新兴世界的生存之道。
Gotta have faith
要有信心
America is nowhere near such an outcome, at least not yet. Still, a concerted effort to shore up trust between consumers and firms, and between firms, would be healthy. If you subscribe to Silicon Valley’s Utopianism, technology can fill the gap, manufacturing mutual faith where none existed before. Uber’s system of scoring drivers and passengers allows strangers to have confidence in each other. E-commerce sites such as eBay and Alibaba work by creating networks of trust between merchants and customers. In the end, however, government has a vital role. By enforcing competition rules, it can ensure that poor conduct is punished. And by observing the independence of courts and regulators, it can demonstrate that contracts are sacred and that firms operate on a level playing-field. Suspicion is not about to bring American capitalism to its knees. But the country’s vast stock of trust, built up over a century or more, is being depleted quickly.
美国还没有变成这样的情况，至少目前还没有。在消费者和企业之间，以及企业之间，齐心协力的努力有助于健康的发展。如果你相信硅谷的乌托邦主义，会发现技术可以弥补这种不信任，能产生出前所未有的共同信任感。优步对司机和乘客的评分系统能让陌生人建立信任。eBay和阿里巴巴这样的电商网站是通过建立商家和客户之间的信任网络来运营的。然而，最终还是要政府扮演重要角色：通过实施竞争规定，确保不良行为受到惩罚。通过监督法院和监管机构的独立性，证明合同是神圣的，公司在平等无差别的市场环境下运作。怀疑并不是要否定美国的资本主义，但是，这个国家在一个世纪里苦苦建立的庞大信任，就快耗尽了。
编译：包扬
审校：Alice小蒙哒
编辑：翻吧君
来源：经济学人