经济学人下载:权势大亨们和飞机制造企业

That said, you might think that the normal answer would no longer do in such abnormal times—after a great recession and with 18m people still looking for work. And, sure enough, every week brings a flood of complaints in the media about the rich getting richer while the incomes of the middle class stagnate or fall. A survey for the New York Times has just reported that the median pay for top executives at 200 big companies last year was little shy of $11m a year—a mouth-watering 23% rise since 2009. Joseph Stiglitz, the holder of a Nobel prize in economics, claimed in Vanity Fair that the top 1% of Americans were taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income and controlled 40% of its wealth, though others dispute his numbers.

据说，也许你认为常规的答案已经不再适在这个反常的时代——大萧条以及1800万人口失业。而且，不出所料的是，媒体上每周都有大量的牢骚，抱怨有钱人越来越有钱而中产阶级的收入没有增加或者减少。纽约时报的一份调查显示，去年，200家大公司的首席执行官的年薪平均为将近1100万美元——自2009年以来，达到令人羡慕的23%的年增长率。诺贝尔经济学奖得主约瑟夫．斯蒂格利茨在《名利场》一书中声称：美国最富有的1%的人口持有将近全美国四分之一的收入并且控制着美国40%的资产，但很多人对他的数据存在争议。

As to whether such disparities should matter, that question has puzzled philosophers at least since the Enlightenment. This column proposes no definitive answer this week. The point here is only that Americans do not seem to mind about the widening inequality of income and wealth as much as you might expect them to in current circumstances. By and large, they have preferred opportunity to levelling; equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. The trouble with this is that America is a long way from providing equal opportunity. Children born into the bottom fifth of the income distribution are nearly five times as likely to end their lives there as those from families in the top fifth. Indeed, social scientists are no longer sure whether it is still easier to climb the ladder in the “classless” United States than it is in the supposedly class-hobbled lands of Western Europe.

对于这样的不公平是否应当引起重视，这个问题自启蒙运动以来就一直困扰着哲学家们。本专栏在本周不打算给出明确的答案，我们的重点是：当前情况下，似乎只有美国人不关心收入和财富差距越来越大，也许没有你期待的那么强烈。总体上来说，他们更喜欢机遇而不是公平，更喜欢机遇平等而不是结果平等。这种想法带来的问题是美国人一直以来提供公平的机遇。收入分配最低的5%的人中，其孩子出生后几乎有5倍的可能享受与收入最高5%人中的孩子一样的生活。的确，社会科学家已经不再确定在美国“无阶级”社会中攀登幸福生活的阶梯是否要比据称有等级阻碍的西欧国家更加容易。

What are vote-seeking politicians to make of this? That the American people appear to have kept faith in the hardest of times with the idea of leaving it mainly to markets rather than governments to allocate life’s material rewards strikes many Republicans as a marvellous thing—the glorious opposite of what happened in the 1930s, when the economically stricken turned to government for succour. In the case of the recent collapse, runs the Republican argument, misplaced government intervention—such as the egalitarian nonsense of extending credit for home-ownership to those who could not really afford it—was at least as much to blame as the excesses of the private sector. That, to judge by the eruption of the tea-party movement, is the verdict of many non-aligned Americans too. So the Grand Old Party is betting on this anti-government wave restoring it to power in 2012.

寻求选票的政客们怎么看待这个问题呢？美国人民似乎在最艰难的年代也信心十足，因为他们坚持让市场而不是政府去分配生活物资奖励，打击了很多共和党人的不可思议事情发生了——当20世纪30年代经济大衰退向政府寻求救援时，所发生的一切的光辉对立面。最近金融危机的事例中，共和党中争论不断，政府干涉错位——诸如将房产拥有者的信贷扩大到那些甚至无力偿还的人的荒谬平等主义——至少怪罪于私有部门的失误操作。从茶党运动的爆发来判断，也是很多持中立态度的美国人的最终答案。因此，美国共和党断言这股反政府浪潮能促使他们在2012年重建他们的政权。