Michael Spence: Technology and the Employment Challenge

MILAN – New technologies of various kinds, together with globalization, are powerfully affecting the range of employment options for individuals in advanced and developing countries alike – and at various levels of education. Technological innovations are not only reducing the number of routine jobs, but also causing changes in global supply chains and networks that result in the relocation of routine jobs – and, increasingly, non-routine jobs at multiple skill levels – in the tradable sector of many economies.

How, then, should policymakers confront the new and difficult challenges for employment (and, in turn, for the distribution of income and wealth), especially in developed economies? From recent research, we have learned a number of interesting things about how the evolution of economic structure affects employment.

The tradable side of advanced economies has not generated any real net increases in employment for at least two decades, while the jobs that it has created are concentrated in the upper-income and upper-education ranges, with employment declining in the middle and lower range of income and education. Growth in high-end services employment is matched by contraction in high-employment components of manufacturing supply chains.

Until the crisis of 2008, middle- and lower-income job growth occurred entirely in the non-tradable sector of the economy, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of advanced countries’ output and employment. Here, incomes and value added per employee remained largely flat. Jobs could be eliminated by technology, but not by global competition; and, unsustainable, debt-fueled domestic-demand growth helped to delay the current employment deficits.

As a result, the advanced economies have been shedding routine jobs at a rapid rate, while adding non-routine jobs (for example, those that cannot yet be replaced or reduced by machines and networked computers). This has fueled a dramatic rise in the return on education and high-level skills, with the share of total income received by owners of capital and high-end employees increasing in advanced countries for more than two decades.

Growth and employment are thus diverging in advanced countries. The key force driving this trend – technology – is playing multiple roles. The replacement of routine manual jobs by machines and robots is a powerful, continuing, and perhaps accelerating trend in manufacturing and logistics, while networks of computers are replacing routine white-collar jobs in information processing.

Part of this is pure automation. Another important part is disintermediation – the elimination of intermediaries in banking, online retail, and a host of government services, to name just a few affected areas.

But technology’s impact does not stop there. The same class of information technologies that automate, disintermediate, and reduce the costs of remoteness are also enabling the construction of increasingly complex and geographically diverse global supply chains and networks.

Global supply chains – constantly in flux, owing to rising developing-country incomes and shifting comparative advantage – locate productive activities where human and other resources make those activities competitive. Links in these chains include not only intermediate products and assembly, but also a growing range of services – research and development, design, maintenance and support, customer service, business processes, and more – as transaction, coordination, and communication costs fall.

The result is what is sometimes called the “atomization” of global supply chains: increasingly fine subdivisions are feasible, more efficient, and locatable almost anywhere. Proximity still matters in terms of transport and logistics costs. But, with the developing world accounting for the largest new markets and most of the growth in global demand, the logic driving atomization should become even more compelling.

The efficient ongoing decomposition of global supply chains, networks, and services has two related consequences. First, the tradable part of the global economy – where competition for economic activity and jobs is direct – is becoming a larger share of the whole; the same is true of individual economies. Second, parts of global supply chains that were not competitive are no longer protected by being adjacent to parts that were. Adjacency is no longer a requirement.

These dynamics and related challenges are not confined to advanced countries. Over the next decade, for example, China will replace much of its labor-intensive assembly employment with higher-value-added employment in manufacturing and services, not only in the tradable sector, but also – even more noticeably – in the rapidly growing non-tradable part of its economy. The expanding scope and diminishing costs of automation and additive manufacturing may affect labor-intensive functions globally, including in earlier-stage developing countries.

A key factor in adapting to these forces is investment. For individuals, businesses, educational institutions, and governments in advanced countries, broad-based, elevated, and efficient investment in education and skills is critical. Closing wide information gaps in the market for skills would also increase the efficiency of these investments.
Across-the-board upgrading of human capital will improve income distribution both directly and indirectly (by reducing the supply of lower-skill workers relative to demand). It will also (partly) mitigate the concentration of wealth that results from a highly skewed income distribution.

On the tradable side, competitiveness depends not only on human capital, but also on a host of other factors: infrastructure, tax systems, regulatory efficiency, policy-induced uncertainty, and energy and health-care costs.

There is no guarantee that taking the right steps in these areas would entirely overcome the employment challenges that individuals and countries face, though doing so would help. In fact, it is possible that we are entering a period in which major adaptations in employment models, work weeks, contract labor, minimum wages, and the delivery of essential public services will be needed in order to maintain social cohesion and uphold the core values of equity and intergenerational mobility.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong. He was the chairman of the independent Commission on Growth and Development, an international body that from 2006-2010 analyzed opportunities for global economic growth.

Michael Spence & David Brady: Why Are Governments Paralyzed?

MILAN – It is no secret that the global economy is struggling. Europe is in the midst of a crisis whose root cause is a structurally flawed monetary and economic union. The United States, emerging slowly from a financial crisis and widespread deleveraging, is experiencing a growth slowdown, a persistent employment problem, an adverse shift in income distribution, and structural challenges, with little effective or decisive policy action.

Meanwhile, among the major emerging economies, China’s reform process is on hold, pending a leadership transition this fall that will clarify various internal interests’ goals and power relationships. India, which has lost reform momentum, is experiencing an economic slowdown and a potential loss of investor confidence.

The negative effects of these problems are now interacting, feeding back on themselves, and spreading to the rest of the global economy. And yet, despite a palpable sense of concern that something is very wrong, the prognosis for significant change is bleak – and deteriorating.

What accounts for the apparent lack of effective policy action across a broad range of countries and regions?

One line of thinking blames a “leadership vacuum” – a common diagnosis in Europe. Elsewhere – especially in the US – polarization and ugly zero-sum politics are thought to discourage potentially capable political leadership.

But, absent further analysis, the leadership vacuum becomes a catchall explanation. What we need to know is why new political leadership in democracies like France, Britain, Japan, and the US has produced so little change.

A second explanation addresses that question: While bold action is required, the complexity of economic conditions, and disagreement about the right policy responses, implies a risk of serious error. For professional politicians and policymakers in such circumstances, less may be more. On this view, risk aversion both reflects and reinforces a divergence between individual incentives (the desire to be reelected, reappointed, or promoted) and collective needs (fixing problems).

A third answer is that policy instruments are simply ineffective in today’s conditions. There is some merit to this claim. Economic deleveraging takes time. The restoration of sustainable patterns of growth requires years, not months. Expectations may be out of line with the underlying reality. But the absence of a quick solution does not mean that nothing can be done to improve the speed and quality of recovery.

Vested interests may also play a role. Technological innovation and global market forces have produced a decisive shift in income toward capital and the upper 20% of the income distribution, often at the expense of middle-income groups, the unemployed, and the young. The beneficiaries of these trends may have accumulated enough political influence to maintain the status quo, highlighting distributional issues that have generally received too little attention in understanding policy responses or their absence.

There are structural explanations for policy inaction as well. Governance systems and constitutional structures differ in the extent to which they require broad consensus for official action, or to change policy direction in response to shocks or shifting conditions.

Some argue that the more constraining political systems work well in stable times, but perform poorly under volatile conditions like those prevailing today. Others support constrained government on the grounds that it protects everyone from waste, rent-seeking, and interference with freedom of choice, and that, when needed, inspired leadership can build the required consensus to address changing circumstances. High hurdles to major shifts in policy direction force officials to make a convincing case.

That is an inherently difficult task at a time when rapid change in the global economy has left many still trying to understand what is happening and what it all means for growth, stability, the distribution of income, and employment. In the face of such complexity, it is not surprising that genuine policy disagreements lead to extended debate and relatively little action.

Moreover, the technocratic elements of government must often be balanced against democratic accountability. In every society, individuals with special training and expertise are appointed to perform technically complex functions. Their freedom of action is constrained by time limits and reappointment procedures that determine the nature and degree of their accountability to elected officials and the public. There can be too little freedom of action (populism) or too little accountability (autocracy).

The necessary balance may vary according to local conditions. For example, many China observers believe that accountability there needs to increase at this stage of the country’s economic, social, and political evolution. Others argue that Western democracies have the opposite problem: a surfeit of narrow, politically assertive interests leads to underinvestment and poor tradeoffs between present and future opportunities and performance.

This brings us to a crucial obstacle: Government, business, financial, and academic elites are not trusted. Lack of trust in elites is probably healthy at some level, but numerous polls indicate that it is in rapid decline, which surely increases citizens’ reluctance to delegate authority to navigate an uncertain global economic environment.

Loss of trust probably has multiple causes, including analytical failure: central banks, regulators, market participants, rating agencies, and economists almost all failed to detect rising systemic risk in the years preceding the current crisis, much less to take appropriate corrective action. But a more important cause is a suspicion that elites are placing their own interests above shared social values.

Claims that our leadership, institutions, analyses, or policy instruments are inadequate to the task at hand surely contain a kernel of truth. But the deeper problem is a breakdown in precisely such values and goals – that is, a weakening of social cohesion. Restoring it will require analysts, policymakers, business leaders, and civil-society groups to clarify causes, share blame for mistakes, pursue flexible solutions in which costs are shared equitably, and, most important, explain that hard problems cannot be solved overnight.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is currently Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, an international body charged with charting opportunities for global economic growth. He is also Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong. He was previously Dean of Stanford’s School of Business and Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

David Brady is Deputy Director and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.

Michael Spence: Tradable Prosperity

MILAN – The global economy is experiencing a major growth challenge. Many advanced countries are attempting to revive sustainable growth in the face of a decelerating global economy. But the challenges across countries are not the same. In particular, the tradable and non-tradable parts of a range of economies differ in important ways.

In the non-tradable sector (60-70% of the economy in advanced countries), the main growth inhibitors are weak demand, as in the United States following the financial crisis, and structural and competitive impediments to productivity, as in Japan. In the tradable sector, growth depends on a country’s productivity relative to incomes and competitiveness. At the global level, there can also be a shortage of aggregate demand on the tradable side.

The Nobel laureate economist Robert Solow has shown that growth comes from three sources: the working population, capital investment, and technological progress. A growing young population helps to maintain fiscal balance and ensure intergenerational equity, but it does not by itself increase incomes. On the other hand, economic growth below the sum of growth in the working population and the labor-saving part of technological change fuels unemployment.

Developing countries, once they enter rapid-growth mode, generate growth from capital deepening via investment, in a sense making up for past underinvestment. And it is possible for advanced countries to fall behind by under-investing, particularly in the public sector, relying instead on less sustainable debt-fueled means of generating demand. So a legitimate part of a strategy to restore growth is investment.

But, as Solow noted, investment has its limits, owing to diminishing marginal returns. Often, these limits are not binding, but, once capital deepening is exhausted, technological progress, which makes inputs more productive in creating final value, is the long-run driver of growth.
The challenge is to apply these insights in a world characterized by global economic interdependence, major imbalances, and a worsening growth and employment problem. It is a world in which economies are connected directly in the tradable sector of the global economy, and indirectly through the demand and employment linkages between the tradable and non-tradable sectors of individual economies.

In the short run, the non-tradable sector is, by definition, subject to domestic-demand constraints. A shortfall in non-tradable demand inevitably limits growth on that side of the economy.

Government can, of course, bridge the gap via deficit spending (preferably focused on employment-generating investment that enhances future growth). But the advanced countries are, to varying degrees, fiscally constrained by relatively high and rising public debt, largely owing to fiscal imbalances that were hidden from view until defective growth models broke down in the crisis of 2008.

Just how fiscally constrained these countries are remains subject to debate. Italy and Spain are clearly constrained by the absence of private capital in their respective sovereign-debt markets, with rising yields threatening their fiscal stability and reform programs. They need the eurozone core and the International Monetary Fund as temporary lenders of last resort until they restore policy credibility and regain investors’ confidence.

The US sovereign-debt market shows no similar evidence of having reached a limit yet. But bond markets do not issue many early warning signals: witness the sudden run-up of yields in Italy and Spain a year ago.

The more complex growth issues have to do with the tradable part of the global economy, where global aggregate demand – and the derived demand that lands in various places in global supply or value-added chains – is the target of competition. Total demand and its growth do matter, but so does market share. Given the growth patterns across advanced and developing countries prior to the crisis, and then the large negative shock, it is likely that there is a shortfall of tradable global aggregate demand, impeding an important component of global growth.

But, for individual economies, relative productivity versus income levels determines the share of global tradable aggregate demand that is accessible. Unlike the non-tradable side of the economy, the domestic component of global tradable demand is not an absolute constraint on growth; nor is the rate of growth of global tradable demand an absolute constraint, given the possibility of increasing share.

Of course, not everyone can gain share at the same time. Fortunately, if countries increase productivity with the aim of boosting relative productivity and growth potential on the tradable side, this will increase incomes and accelerate the growth of global aggregate demand. It may look like a zero-sum game, but it is not.

When incomes get significantly out of line with productivity levels (as they have recently), reviving growth requires resetting the terms of trade, which can be done with exchange rates, whether managed or set by markets. In the eurozone, where countries with competitiveness problems do not have the exchange-rate adjustment mechanism, restrained income growth and productivity-boosting reforms are probably needed, as was the case in Germany between 2000 and 2006, and now in several southern European countries.

What is true for countries on the tradable side is also true for workers, who are differentially affected by the evolution of global supply chains. The efficient integration of global supply chains has created employment opportunities in developing countries and in the higher value-added sectors of advanced countries. But it has also reduced employment options for a subset of middle-income people in the tradable sectors of advanced economies.

Many countries are struggling to adapt their growth patterns to the new challenges they face in a slowing global economy. To be effective and properly targeted, policies need to include an accurate diagnosis of growth potential and impediments in both the tradable and non-tradable parts of the economy. Focusing on one (say, the competitiveness problem in the tradable sector) to the exclusion of the other (perhaps a serious non-tradable demand shortfall or stagnant absolute productivity) will not be enough.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is currently Chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development, an international body charged with charting opportunities for global economic growth. He is also Professor of Economics at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong. He was previously Dean of Stanford’s School of Business and Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

Michael Spence: The Sustainability Mindset

  MILAN – Markets and capitalist incentives have great strengths in promoting economic efficiency, growth, and innovation. And, as Ben Friedman of Harvard University argued persuasively in his 2006 book The Moral Consequences of Growth, economic growth is good for open and democratic societies. But markets and capitalist incentives have clear weaknesses in ensuring stability, equity, and sustainability, which can adversely affect political and social cohesion.

Obviously, abandoning market-capitalist systems, and implicitly growth, is not really an option. Collectively, we have little choice but to try to adapt the system to changing technological and global conditions in order to achieve stability, equity (in terms of opportunity and outcomes alike), and sustainability. Of these three imperatives, sustainability may be the most complex and challenging.

For many people, sustainability is associated with finite natural resources and the environment. The global economy will probably triple in size in the next quarter-century, largely owing to growth in developing countries as they catch up to developed-country incomes and adopt similar consumption patterns. Thus, there is a well-founded fear that the planet’s natural resources (broadly defined) and recuperative capacities will not withstand the pressure.
To some, this logic leads to the conclusion that growth is the problem, and that less growth is the solution. But, in developing countries, where only sustained growth can lift people out of poverty, limiting it cannot be the answer. The alternative is to change the growth model in order to lighten the impact of higher levels of economic activity on natural resources and the environment.


But there is no existing alternative to which we can all switch. Changing the growth model means inventing a new one over time, step-by-step, from complementary parts. The two key ingredients seem to be education and values. Everyone, not just policymakers, needs to understand the consequences of our individual and collective choices. We need to be aware for example, that population growth and rising consumption levels have intergenerational consequences, and that how we conduct ourselves will affect the lifestyles and opportunities of our children and grandchildren.

Thus far, the quality of our choices has been unimpressive, reflecting little sensitivity to sustainability and the impact of our choices on future generations. As a result, many developed countries have built up dangerously large public debts and even larger non-debt liabilities, owing to unsustainable growth patterns.

Most of us, I believe, do not knowingly make choices that adversely affect future generations. So perhaps incomplete knowledge of the consequences of our choices is responsible. Moreover, an unfunded liability path, once taken, is hard to leave, because at the point of departure, some generation is paying for past commitments and at least beginning to fund future ones. That seems unfair, because it is.

Most people might agree that living beyond our means in the aggregate, via unfunded social services and insurance, or disproportionate use of resources, imposes a burden on our offspring. But we might still fail to reach agreement on who should pay for funding these programs, or for reducing our consumption of resources. Too often, it is easier to deal with the distributional problem by shifting the burden to those who are not present, and who are insufficiently represented by those who are.

Education and values are the foundation of sound individual and, ultimately, collective choices. Without them, the incentives and policies that economists rightly argue are needed to increase energy efficiency, limit carbon emissions, economize on water usage, and much more will lack support and fail in the democratic decision-making process.

If sustainability is to triumph, it must be predominantly a bottom-up process. Environmentalists are right to focus on education and individual choices, even when their policy proposals are not always on target. Education and values will drive local innovation, alter lifestyles, and shift social norms. They will also affect business behavior via choices by customers and employees, including business leaders. Thus, they are essential components of the formulas needed to pursue sustainable patterns of growth.

But, while education and values are necessary, they clearly are not sufficient. Complementary national policies and international agreements will require careful scientific and economic analysis and thoughtful choices. The need for burden-sharing, particularly between advanced and developing countries, will not magically disappear. Climate-change risks, though serious, should not be mistaken for the entire sustainability agenda.


There are clear steps that can be taken. Appropriate regulation and sufficiently long time horizons can make structures of all kinds much more energy-efficient, without imposing burdensome costs. In a similar way, transportation can become less energy-intensive without restricting mobility. Some of these shifts might be subject to international coordination, in order to avoid adverse competitive consequences, whether real or perceived.

But too much coordination can be a bad thing. That is why climate-change negotiations are shifting from the misguided objective of seeking risky 50-year commitments to binding carbon-emissions targets to focusing on parallel, step-by-step processes, including higher energy efficiency, better urban planning, improved transportation systems, and on learning as we go. Likewise, businesses and industries that are heavy water users will simply develop new technologies and thrive in the face of scarcity.

Progress has been helped by growing awareness in populous Asia – and in developing countries generally – that sustainability is the key to achieving their longer-term growth objectives. This perspective perhaps comes more naturally in an environment of rapid growth, because their growth models require continual review and adaptation to be sustainable.

Over time, values shift as knowledge is acquired and disseminated. Policies aimed at sustainability are likely to follow. What is unknown is whether we will reach that point fast enough to avoid major disruptions, or even potential conflict.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Academic Board Chairman of the Fung Global Institute in Hong Kong, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Next Convergence – The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World.

Michael Spence: Mind over Market / 理智戰勝市場

MILAN – In the 66 years since World War II ended, virtually all centrally planned economies have disappeared, largely as a result of inefficiency and low growth. Nowadays, markets, price signals, decentralization, incentives, and return-driven investment characterize resource allocation almost everywhere.

This is not because markets are morally superior, though they do require freedom of choice to function effectively. Markets are tools that, relative to the alternatives, happen to have great strengths with respect to incentives, efficiency, and innovation. But they are not perfect; they underperform in the presence of externalities (the un-priced consequences – for example, air pollution – of individual actions), informational gaps and asymmetries, and coordination problems when there are multiple equilibria, some superior to others.

But markets have more fundamental weaknesses. Or, rather, most societies have important economic and social objectives that markets and competition are not designed to achieve. In today’s rapidly globalizing world, the most important of these objectives – expressed in various ways through the political and policymaking process in a wide range of countries – are stability, distributional equity, and sustainability.

Consider stability. We live in a world of largely decentralized networks of increasing complexity: electronic networks, networks of supply chains and trade, financial networks that link the balance sheets of disparate entities. Market incentives cause actors to operate or modify parts of the network in ways that maximize efficiency locally. But the presumption – often an article of faith – that the whole remains stable and resilient has no theoretical or empirical support. Indeed, it seems inaccurate.

For example, it has been known for some time that networks that are efficient are often not resilient, because resilient networks have inefficient redundancies. Resilience is a public good, created by the right kind of redundancy.

In a decentralized structure, redundancy tends to be undersupplied in the process of local optimization. That is why the tsunami that hit Japan last year disrupted many global supply chains: they were (and still are) too efficient from the standpoint of withstanding shocks.
In financial markets, local optimization seems to lead to excessive leverage and other forms of risk-taking that undermine the stability of the system. Much research is needed to understand which interventions or restrictions on individual choice are needed to make certain kinds of market equilibria stable. But, clearly, markets do not do this well by themselves.

Consider, next, how labor-saving technological change and the integration of several hundred million new workers into global markets have affected income distribution, returns to education, and employment opportunities almost everywhere. In particular, the share of national income going to capital and human capital (highly educated people) is rising on a broad front, fueling increasing concentration of wealth.

Even so, income distributions vary widely among the developed countries. For example, in the US, the top 20% earns, on average, 8.4 times more than the bottom 20%. In the UK, the same ratio is 7.2, and it is only 4.3 in Germany (compared to a whopping 12.2 in China). These differential outcomes reflect distinctive combinations of market forces and social contracts.
Income distributions are influenced by taxation and fiscal policy, which usually have redistributive effects, directly and through the provision of social services and insurance. But these distributions are also affected by policies and investments that focus on the supply side, and that produce education and skills that match (or don’t match) a rapidly evolving global structure of labor demand.

Part of the challenge is that demand for labor moves to supply, rather than vice versa, because labor mobility in the global economy is limited. To assume a constant level and composition of labor demand would be as mistaken as taking current passenger demand as a fixed reference point in planning public-transportation systems. In this and other cases, supply influences demand over time (Steve Jobs, for example, understood this better than most).

That is why it is crucial to think about potential demand in tackling this kind of matching problem. As with stability, markets cannot be relied upon to deal effectively with this problem on their own. Public policy and public-sector investment matter, too.

Attention is increasingly – and, in my view, rightly – being focused on the role of the state, and in particular on the state’s balance sheet. Experience in developing and advanced countries alike suggests that states with substantial and healthy balance sheets are better positioned to deal with today’s stability, distributional, and sustainability challenges. The benefits are several, including an ability to withstand shocks and mount countercyclical responses, as well as a capacity to recycle income to households during periods like the present, when the share of income that goes to capital is rising (with adverse distributional consequences).

In addition, countries periodically need to be able to mount and sustain public-sector investment in technology, or to engage in risk-sharing, in order to adapt to shifting competitive conditions or respond to shocks. Minority public ownership can provide resources, while retaining the benefits of competition, and ensure that some of the returns accrue to the general public via government revenues.

Some of this will run counter to existing orthodoxy, and may provoke a healthy debate.  A relatively narrow focus on efficiency and growth, at least in many advanced countries, may have worked in the early decades after WWII, when distributional patterns were benign and instability rare. Today that is not enough. Stability, equity, and sustainability challenges have become crucially important, and the role of the state in relation to markets may need re-thinking as a result.

Re-orienting policy frameworks to longer time horizons, with a more balanced and forward-looking focus on stability and equity (without losing sight of efficiency and innovation), seems essential to meeting the needs, hopes, and expectations of people everywhere. Indeed, that is the key to addressing sustainability, to which I will turn next month.

Michael Spence, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His latest book is The Next Convergence – The Future of Economic Growth in a Multispeed World (www.thenextconvergence.com).

Michael Spence: 理智戰勝市場

米蘭——  自二戰結束以來的66年裡，實際上所有中央集權的計劃經濟都消失了，主要原因是低效和低增長。如今，市場、價格信號、分散管理、刺激措施以及回報驅動的投資幾乎是各地資源分配的特征。

這並不是因為市場在道德上更勝一籌，盡管市場需要自由選擇才能有效運行。與其他工具相比，市場工具在刺激措施、效率和創新方面正好擁有巨大的優勢。但是市場並不完美，當面臨外部影響（個人行動所帶來的無法計價的后果——比如，空氣污染）、信息差距和不對稱性以及協調問題（當有多項平衡，一些平衡比另一些平衡更重要時）時，市場就會表現不佳。

但是市場有更加根本性的弱點。具體點說，大多數社會都有重要的經濟和社會目標，而市場和競爭並不是為了實現這些目標。在當今快速全球化的世界裡，其中最重要的目標——各國在政治和決策過程中都有不同的表述——是穩定、分配公平和可持續性。

先談一下穩定。我們生活在一個網絡基本上分散但日益復雜的世界裡：電子網絡、供應鏈和貿易網絡以及連接不同實體資產負債表的金融網絡。市場的刺激促使當事人因地制宜最大限度地提高效率，運營網絡或改進部分網絡。但是假設——通常是一種信仰——是總體而言仍然是穩定的，恢復力沒有理論和經驗依據。實際上，這似乎不准確。

比如，高效的網絡常常沒有恢復力，原因是有恢復力的網絡有過剩現象，效率不高，人們知道這一點已經有一段時間了。恢復力是對大家都有利的東西，適當的剩余量創造了恢復力。

在分散的結構中，在局部最優化過程中，剩余量往往供應不足。這就是去年海嘯襲擊日本破壞了許多全球供應鏈的原因：就承受沖擊而言，它們以前太高效了，現在仍然是如此。

在金融市場上，局部最優化似乎會導致過度杠杠化和其他形式的冒險行為，破壞金融系統的穩定性。為了使這類市場平衡穩定，要知道對個人的選擇採取那類干預措施或限制措施尚需大量研究。但是，清楚的是市場自身無法做好這一點。

接下來看一下節省勞動力的技術變革以及數億新工人融入全球市場是如何影響各地的收入分配、教育回報以及就業機會的。尤其是，國民收入投資資本和人力資本（受過良好教育的人）的比重正在大幅增加，助長財富日益集中。

即便如此，各發達國家的收入分配也大不相同。比如，在美國，頂層20%的平均收入是底層20%的8.4倍。在英國，這一數字為7.2倍，在德國隻有4.3倍（在中國則高達12.2倍）。這些不同的結果反映出市場力量和社會契約獨特的組合。

收入分配受到稅收和財政政策的影響，稅收和財政政策常常通過提供社會福利和保險直接起到重新分配的作用。但是這些分配還受到政策和投資的影響，政策和投資主要關注的是供應方並能催生與快速演化的全球勞動力需求結構匹配（或不匹配）的教育和技能。

部分挑戰是勞動力供不應求而不是供過於求，這是因為全球經濟環境下的勞動力流動是受到限制的。與拿當前的客流量作為公共交通系統規劃的固定參照點一樣，制定固定的勞動力需求水平和組成成分也是錯誤的。在這個以及其他問題上，隨著時間的推移，供應會影響需求（比如，史蒂夫•喬布斯對這點的理解比大多數人都深刻）。

這就是考慮解決這類匹配問題潛在需要至關重要的原因。至於穩定問題，不要依賴市場自身能夠有效地解決它。公共政策和公共部門的投資也至關重要。

人們的注意力日益集中到國家的作用上，尤其是國家的資產負債表上，在我看來，這是對的。發展中國家和發達國家的經驗都表明，擁有大量良好資產負債表的國家能夠更好的應對如今的穩定性、分配和可持續性的挑戰。有不少好處，其中包括承受沖擊和作出反周期反應的能力以及在投資資本的收入比重不斷增加（對分配不利）時期，比如說現在，將收入返還到家庭手中的能力。

此外，各國需要定期增加和維持公共部門對技術的投資，或者共擔風險，以便適應變化的競爭環境或應對沖擊。在獲取競爭好處的同時，少量國有企業可以提供資源並確保通過政府的收入，普通民眾能夠增加部分收入。

其中的一些東西與現存的正統說法沖突，可能會引發一場良性的激辯。相對狹隘地關注效率和經濟增長可能在二戰后的前幾十年發揮了作用（至少在許多發達國家是如此），這段時間分配方式良好，較穩定。如今，這樣已經不夠了。穩定、公平和可持續性的挑戰已經變得非常重要，因此與市場相關的國家作用可能需要重新考慮。

重新調整政策框架著眼於更加長遠的未來，以更加平衡和前瞻性的眼光關注穩定和公平（同時兼顧效率和創新），這似乎對於滿足各地人民的需要、希望和期待來說必不可少。實際上，這是解決可持續性問題的關鍵，下個月我將討論這個問題。

Michael Spence，曾獲諾貝爾經濟學獎、現任紐約大學斯特恩商學院經濟學教授、美國對外關系委員會傑出訪問學者、斯坦福大學胡佛研究所高級研究員，最近著有《下一次趨同——多速世界經濟增長的未來》一書。