German success is surprisingly recent
德国的就业奇迹其实很晚才出现

作者: Scott Sumner @ 2014­-4-­22
译者:bear     校对：小册子
来源:Economics Liberty, http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2014/04/german_success.html

Many people assume that Germany has long been an economic success story. It was certainly successful back in the 1950s and 1960s. But as recently as 2004 it was widely viewed as the “sick man of Europe” despite all those sleek BMWs and Mercedes they churn out each year.

许多人认为德国经济长期以来都很成功。在上世纪五十年代和六十年代，它的确是成功的。但近至2004年，德国还被广泛认为是“欧洲病人”，尽管它每年都大量产出豪华的宝马和奔驰。

The normally reliable Matt Yglesias falls into the trap of (implicitly) assuming long term German success in a piece on youth unemployment. Yglesias tries to explain the low rate of youth unemployment by pointing to their system of technical training for students that are not college bound. That certainly seems like a fine system, but it’s been around for decades, and thus can hardly explain the amazing post-2004 German jobs miracle. Why do I use the term ‘miracle’? Consider:

1. Germany was hit roughly as hard by the 2008-09 recession as the US.
2. Unlike the US, the German working age population is not growing.

连通常比较靠谱的Matthew Yglesias【译注：著名博客作家，擅长写经济和政治话题】也掉进了这个圈套，他在一篇描写年轻人失业问题的文章里（隐含地）预设了德国长期成功这一前提。Yglesias试图将（德国）年轻人的低失业率归功于不以升读大学为目标的学生技术培训系统。这个系统看上去当然很好，但它已经运作了几十年了，因此很难用它来解释2004年以后德国令人惊讶的就业奇迹。为什么我用“奇迹”这词？

试想：

1. 德国在2008-09年的经济衰退中受到的沉重打击和美国大致相当。
2. 不同于美国，德国就业适龄人口并没有增长。

Put those two together and you’d expect very little German job creation in recent years. And yet German employment has risen by 6% over the past 6 years, whereas American employment has declined, despite a RGDP recovery that is far more brisk than the eurozone, indeed faster than in Germany. That’s pretty amazing.

考虑到这两点，你会预期近年来德国的新增职位会很少。但德国的雇佣人数在过去六年已经提升了6%，而美国的雇佣数则在下降，尽管美国实际GDP的复苏比欧元区快得多——确实比德国快。这是非常令人惊奇的。

I sometimes wonder how progressive readers would filter Yglesias’s message. The type that thinks that if a program works in Sweden it would certainly work over here. The ones that Paul Krugman insists are “reality based” in their thinking. German job training seems good, and Obama has recommended some programs for America. The highly inegalitarian German high school system might make American progressives squirm, but Yglesias reassures them that this approach would be hard to implement in a country that lacks the tight cooperation between companies, unions and local governments.

我有时会怀疑进步主义读者是怎样看待Yglesias的看法的。这类人认为如果一套方案在瑞典奏效，那它在别处也会，Paul Krugman坚定地认为这些人是“基于事实”来思考的。德国的职业培训看上去做得不错，奥巴马也已经建议在美国施行一些类似的方案。德国那种高度分化、区别对待的高中教育系统可能会让美国进步主义者不舒服，但Yglesias向他们担保，德国的做法在公司、工会和地方政府缺乏紧密合作的国家很难实施。

Of course none of this has anything to do with explaining how Germany went from being the sick man of Europe to its shining star, all in a period of 10 years. Here’s the German unemployment rate since 1960. Notice that Germany had 8% unemployment as far back as the mid-1980s, during the Reagan boom in America. Things had been getting worse for decades, and the 1980s figures suggest that the problem wasn’t just German reunification.

当然这些都无法解释德国是怎样在十年间从欧洲病人转变成璀璨明星的。下图显示的是德国自1960年以来的失业率。在里根振兴美国的八十年代中期，德国的失业率为8%。数十年来每况愈下，而八十年代的数据说明，这个问题并非仅仅是两德统一导致的。

So what’s the real explanation for the German success? That’s pretty obvious; the Hartz reforms of 2003 sharply reduced the incentive to not work, and sharply increased the incentive to take low wage jobs. As a result, today Germany has lots of very low wage jobs of the type that would be illegal in France or California. (Germany has no minimum wage.) Here is the Guardian:

那德国成功的真正原因是什么呢？显然是因为：2003年的哈茨改革方案急剧减低了鼓励人们不工作的诱因，同时急剧增加了接受低薪工作的激励。【译注：哈茨方案是德国政府于2002-2005年逐步推行的，针对失业人口调整救济内容、培训和促进再就业的社会改革方案，共有哈茨一号到哈茨四号四个方案。其中哈茨四号凶残地削减了失业者的福利。】结果今天德国有大量非常低薪的工作，低到在法国或加州会被视为违法的程度（德国没有最低工资法）。下面是《卫报》的报道：

Exactly 10 years ago today, Germany’s labour market was subjected to the first of the so-called Hartz IV reforms. Brought about by the smooth centre-left chancellor Gerhard Schröder, it was a watershed moment that changed the way the German government deals with poverty.

正好是十年前的今天，德国的劳动市场施行了所谓哈茨四段改革的第一阶段。改革由作风温和、中间偏左的德国总理施罗德推行，这是德国政府处理贫困问题的政策分水岭。

The changes were riddled with the kind of Anglicisms that German officialdom likes to deploy for any modernisation. In the past decade, unemployed Germans have been bewildered with a kaleidoscope of new “Denglish” terms, from “Jobcenter” to “Personal Service Agentur” to “Mini-Job” to “BridgeSystem”. But the measures recommended by the Hartz commission – named after its chairman, former Volkswagen executive Peter Hartz – boiled to down to this: the bundling of unemployment benefits and social welfare benefits into one neat package.

这些变化充满了英国范儿——德国官僚总喜欢为现代化搞点花样。在过去十年里，德国的失业者们被五花八门的新德式英语名词搞得晕头转向，从“就业中心”（”Jobcenter”）到“个人服务中介”（”Personal Service Agentur”）到“迷你工作”（”Mini-Job”）到“桥接系统”（”BridgeSystem”）。但这些由哈茨委员会推荐的措施——以该委员会主席、前大众汽车公司执行官Peter Hartz命名——可归结为：把失业津贴和社会福利捆绑到一个简洁的方案中。

The immediate effect was to leave those living on benefits worse off (as of 2013, the standard rate for a single person is €382 a month, plus the cost of “adequate housing” and healthcare). But the new element that brought the most profound change was the contract, drawn up between the “jobseeker” and the “Jobcenter”, which defined what each party promised to do to get the jobseeker back on somebody’s payroll. This was coupled with “sanctions” – in other words, benefit cuts – if the jobseeker failed to keep up his or her side of the bargain. With those two measures, Germany came to accept the modern interpretation of the word “incentive” in the job market: the doctrine that poor people will only work if they are they are not given money.

该措施的直接效果是令那些靠社会保障过活的人生活水平恶化（到2013年，个人的标准社会保障是每月382欧元，再加上“适宜居所”和医保的补贴）。但带来最深远影响的是待业者和“就业中心”之间的合同，这份合同订明了为让当事人能回到工作岗位上，双方承诺履行的义务。当一个待业者没有履行承诺的时候是有惩罚措施的——也就是减少福利。凭着这两项措施，德国开始接受“激励”在劳动市场上的现代解释：穷人拿不到钱才会去工作的学说。

There are myriad debates about the net results or benefits of the Hartz reforms. Unemployment, both long-term and short-term, has certainly dropped considerably in Germany since 1 January 2003, but critics say that’s only because most jobless people are forced to accept the next job they can find – and often they end up in one so low-paid and part-time that they were still dependent on some sort of state welfare anyway. Then again, the flexibility that allows employers – especially major industrial companies – to take on and lay off part-time shift workers depending on the state of the export market has certainly helped Germany to ride out the global economic crisis in the past three years.

关于哈茨改革方案的最终结果或效益有着无数争论。自从2003年1月1日以来，德国的长期和短期失业率肯定都显著下降了，但批评者说这仅仅是因为失业者被迫接受他们所能找到的下一份工作，这往往是一份低薪的兼职工作，因此他们多少还是要靠政府救济。但是需要再次强调的是，这使得雇主——尤其是大型的实业公司——可以根据出口市场的状况灵活地雇佣或解雇兼职轮班职工。这肯定对德国安然度过过去三年的经济危机有帮助。

But what is hard to overlook is that the Hartz reforms have had two social effects. First, they have helped to accelerate inequality in Germany. According to an April 2012 OECD report, “Germany is the only [EU] country that has seen an increase in labour earnings inequality from the mid 1990s to the end 2000s driven by increasing inequality in the bottom half of the distribution.” The report goes on to point to “a set of reforms in 2003 meant to increase the flexibility of the labour market” which help to explain the “wage moderation”.

但是哈茨方案的两个社会影响也很难被忽视。首先，方案加速了德国的收入不均。根据一份经合组织（OECD）在2012年4月发布的报告，“从1990年代中期到2000年代末，德国是欧洲唯一一个劳动收入不均在扩大的国家，这是由社会下半层的收入不均等加剧导致的。”这份报告继续指出，“2003年的一系列改革旨在令劳动市场的灵活性增加”，这部分解释了“工资停滞”。

So the one major success story among developed countries has achieved its success by doing essentially the exact opposite of what progressives want. Germany has no minimum wage, reduced its incentives to live off welfare, and has a level of wage inequality that is increasing even faster than in the US. It’s no wonder that progressives prefer to focus on things like “vocational training programs,” which were just as common during the 30-year period of steadily rising German unemployment.

所以，这一发达国家中最重大的成功故事之一，恰恰是通过和进步主义的愿望完全相反的方式做到的。德国没有最低工资法，降低了靠福利过活的激励，而且工资不均等的扩大比美国还快。进步主义者倾向于关注“职业培训计划”这类事一点也不让人奇怪，尽管这个计划在德国失业率稳定上升的30年间也一样存在。

And yet Paul Krugman can say the following without blushing:

然而，Paul Krugman还是可以脸不红心不跳地说这样的话：

Just to be clear: Yes, you can find examples where *some* liberals got off on a hobbyhorse of one kind or another, or where the liberal conventional wisdom turned out wrong. But you don’t see the kind of lockstep rejection of evidence that we see over and over again on the right. Where is the liberal equivalent of the near-uniform conservative rejection of climate science, or the refusal to admit that Obamacare is in fact reaching a lot of previously uninsured Americans?

要说清楚的是：是的，你可以找到一些自由派这样那样老调重弹的例子，或是自由派的传统看法被证明是错误的例子。但你不会看到我们全体一致地否定右派不断强调的那些证据。哪里有自由派做过保守派那样几乎统一地反对气象科学的这种事，或是他们拒绝承认奥巴马医改事实上帮助了很多原本没有医保的美国人的这种事？

Here’s an example for Krugman. Much of the progressive movement seems entranced by a pied piper from France who thinks inequality can be reduced almost costlessly, and that even France needs to be much more socialist. Meanwhile they almost totally ignore a highly successful social market economy. The biggest economy in Europe. What would Al Gore call German labor market policy success? An inconvenient truth?

现在我就给了Krugman一个这样的例子。似乎很多进步主义运动都是受来自法国的彩衣魔笛手 (Pied Piper)【译注：彩衣魔笛手源自于一个德国民间故事，他的笛声带有魔力，可以诱使孩子们跟着他走。】鼓动，认为不均等的改善几乎没有成本，认为连法国都需要变得更加社会主义。与此同时，他们几乎完全无视一个政府积极干预的社会市场经济的高度成功案例。那可是欧洲最大的经济体。Al Gore会怎么看待德国劳动市场政策的成功呢？一个讨厌的真相？

（编辑：@whigzhou）

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——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

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