Milanovic Says Mercantilism Replaces Free Trade in New Global Order

米拉诺维奇：新全球秩序下重商主义正取代自由贸易 西方国家通过对外加征关税和设置民族主义贸易壁垒来缓解中产阶级停滞，而非改革国内税收与教育体系。 在本期节目中，经济学家布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）探讨了从冷战后新自由主义全球化向“国家市场自由主义”时代的转变，其特征是国内市场政策与激进的国际重商主义及保护主义相结合。他分析了西方政府为何选择对外加征关税和诉诸民族主义，而非推行国内财富再分配，来应对其著名的“大象曲线”所揭示的中产阶级停滞问题。米拉诺维奇还详细阐述了中国40年来的快速资本主义转型、兼具发展中国家与科技超级大国的内部双重性，以及塑造后全球化秩序的政治动态。 冷战后的新自由主义全球化正被“国家市场自由主义”（National Market Liberalism）取代，这一新体系结合了国内市场自由竞争与国际重商主义及贸易保护主义。 (5:00) 过去30年间，西方中下阶层在全球收入分配中从第70百分位数跌至第55百分位数；面对阶层停滞带来的政治反弹，西方政府选择向外归咎于中国，而非在国内推进深层的财富再分配改革。 (13:00) 中国的经济转型在短短40年内培育出庞大的民营资本精英群体，这一进程在英国工业革命中耗时150年，彻底打破了西方经济学界此前对中国自主技术升级能力的低估。 (35:00) 美国前10%的高收入群体中涌现出新型精英阶层（“homo plutotia”），他们同时在劳动收入和资本收入上占据前10%的高位，构成了极具韧性与防御力的稳固统治阶层。 (30:00)

Economist Branko Milanovic argues that the era of free-market globalization has given way to "national market liberalism"—a framework that maintains domestic capitalism while replacing open international trade with protectionism and mercantilist rivalry. Driven by stagnant Western working-class incomes and China's rapid rise, Western governments have chosen external trade confrontation over domestic structural redistribution. The Structure of National Market Liberalism Milanovic identifies four economic epochs since 1974: the failed New International Economic Order, post-Cold War U.S. hegemony, neoliberal globalization, and today's national market liberalism. Classical neoliberalism relied on three pillars: domestic market mechanisms, egalitarian social policies, and international free trade with cross-border capital mobility. Under leaders such as Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron, Western policy has severed the international pillar through tariffs, industrial reshoring, and beggar-thy-neighbor measures, while preserving domestic private enterprise. This transition repudiates the 1990s consensus that global commerce would inevitably foster peace and assimilate rising powers into Western-style democracy. Instead, major powers are embracing mercantilist and national-security paradigms, recognizing that reliance on foreign production compromises sovereign defense and industrial capacity. The Elephant Chart and Externalizing Discontent (20:00) Milanovic’s "elephant chart" highlights the uneven distribution of global income gains: while the top 1% captured large gains and emerging Asia boomed, Western middle classes stagnated at roughly 1% annual per capita growth. Over three decades, relative status shifted substantially; for example, a bottom-decile Italian worker slid from the 70th to the 55th percentile of global income. This shift eroded relative purchasing power for finite positional goods like housing or international travel. To address this dislocation, Western policymakers could have pursued social-democratic measures—such as redistributive taxation, worker retraining, and public education investment. Instead, governments chose an external nationalist path, attributing domestic stagnation to Chinese trade practices. While Milanovic views the post-2016 realignment as a populist revolt against elite globalization, host Joe Weisenthal notes that political momentum was heavily fueled by border security and cultural resistance rather than purely anti-capitalist grievances. China's Transformation and Macroeconomic Imbalances (35:00) China’s trajectory defied Western predictions that state-led systems could not foster advanced technology. Between 1988 and 2023, China inverted the income source of its top 5%: private-sector earnings rose from one-third to two-thirds of elite income, completing in 40 years a class shift that took Britain 150 years during the Industrial Revolution. However, President Xi Jinping reversed earlier policies that integrated entrepreneurs into governance, deliberately subordinating corporate titans like Jack Ma to party control. China's macroeconomic profile remains defined by high savings and a low consumption-to-GDP ratio of roughly 40%, compared to 70% in the United States. Wage compression and profit retention by state enterprises allow Beijing to channel massive capital reserves into high-speed rail, commercial aviation, and artificial intelligence. Milanovic notes that because China has achieved upper-middle-income status, its continued high growth arithmetically increases global inequality between individuals worldwide, widening the gap with poorer African nations faster than it closes the gap with the United States. Homo Plutotia and the Pedagogical Wealth Tax (30:00) Milanovic identifies an emerging Western elite termed homo plutotia, comprising roughly the top 10% of Americans. Unlike historical capitalists who lived off dividends or mid-century managers who relied on salaries, members of homo plutotia simultaneously rank in the top decile for both labor income and capital returns. This dual foundation renders them structurally resilient against market downturns, while intense investments in elite education and long working hours reinforce a meritocratic ethos that their privileges are fully earned. To counter the political dominance of concentrated wealth, Milanovic advocates for public education investment and a "pedagogical tax" on extreme fortunes. Rather than functioning primarily as a fiscal revenue tool, this wealth levy is intended to serve an explicit democratic purpose: affirming that moneyed interests cannot dictate state policy. Milanovic outlines an optimistic path requiring diplomatic resolutions in Ukraine and the Middle East, followed by a "new Bretton Woods" that expands representation for emerging powers like China, India, Brazil, and Indonesia while reducing Europe's post-WWII overrepresentation. However, with European competitiveness undermined by demographic decline and expensive replacement energy, and with global powers prioritizing sovereign manufacturing over efficiency, the viability of a stable multilateral settlement remains unresolved.

经济学家布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）指出，冷战后以自由贸易为标志的新自由主义全球化已走向终结，全球正步入“国家市场自由主义”时代；主要经济体在维持国内市场机制的同时，在国际层面全面转向供应链回流、高关税保护主义与零和重商主义博弈。 国家市场自由主义的兴起与定义 米拉诺维奇梳理了1974年以来的四个经济阶段：国际经济新秩序运动的受挫、美国主导的单极霸权、新自由主义全球化，以及当下的国家市场自由主义。传统古典自由主义由三大支柱构成，即国内自由定价与竞争机制、国内社会包容政策以及跨境自由贸易与资本流动。当前新范式在特朗普或马克龙等领导人推动下，彻底切断了对外开放的国际支柱，代之以“以邻为壑”的关税战与产业补贴，但国内的市场自由主义经济框架仍被完整保留。 西方主流经济学界在过去数十年对发展中经济体做出了系统性误判。1990年代新自由主义意识形态占据绝对支配地位，主流学者普遍认定中国不可能独立实现尖端技术跨越，并预设其伴随经济繁荣必将转向西方代议体制。然而现实与预期完全相反：西方资本主义在20世纪曾通过引入凯恩斯主义福利国家机制自我拯救，而中国则在保留国家战略控制的前提下成功吸纳市场机制，不仅在高新技术领域与美国并立，更颠覆了“只有私有化才能催生科技升级”的西方经济学教条。 大象曲线、阶层相对衰落与外部化归咎 (20:00) 米拉诺维奇著名的“大象曲线”揭示了全球化收益分配的结构性失衡：新兴亚洲（尤其是中国）录得巨大增幅，西方前1%顶层富豪在1990年代实现每年3%以上的实际收入增长，而西方中产及工人阶层人均年增长率仅停滞在1%左右。从全球收入百分位数来看，三十年前处于第70百分位数的意大利底层工人，如今已下滑至第55百分位数。随着新兴经济体富裕阶层崛起，迪士尼度假、顶级赛事门票等排他性“地位商品”对西方普通家庭愈发昂贵，激化了阶层衰退感。 面对国内分配失衡，西方政府原本具备两条政策路径：一是社会民主主义方案，即对富裕阶层加税、加强转移支付并大规模投资公共教育与劳动技能培训；二是民族主义归咎方案，将产业空心化与薪资停滞归咎于外部威胁与不公平贸易。美欧政界最终全面倒向后者。以2016年特朗普当选为分水岭，西方跨党派共识迅速收紧对华鹰派立场，并由拜登政府延续至今，证明构筑外部壁垒已成为转嫁内部矛盾的政治权宜之计。 “智财合一”新精英与资本政治控制 (30:00) 米拉诺维奇提出“智财合一者”（homo plutotia）概念，用以概括美国前10%人口（约3000万人）的新型财富结构。与19世纪依赖食利的旧资本家或20世纪依赖工薪的职业经理人不同，当代精英阶层同时位居劳动报酬与资本收益的前10%。这一群体深信优绩主义（meritocracy），认为自身高收入完全来源于名校教育与高强度工作，并向子女集中倾斜教育资本。由于劳动力高收入与资本避险机制形成双重闭环，该阶级展现出极强的抗风险能力与阶层固化倾向。 与西方政经精英的深度捆绑相对，中国精英结构呈现出极速扩张与政权强力管控并存的特征。米拉诺维奇的数据显示，1988年中国城市前5%高收入群体中，三分之二来自党政和国企体制；至2018–2023年间该比例完全颠倒，三分之二收入来自民营企业与个体业主。英国历史上资本家群体达到同等扩张规模耗费了150年（1688–1900），而中国仅用了40年。在政治边界上，中国明确了政权对私人资本的绝对主导，例如通过中层官员叫停蚂蚁集团上市，向富豪传递商业成功绝不能干涉国家决策的明确信号。基于此，米拉诺维奇建议西方同样应设立对超级财富的“教育性税收”，以民主法治重申“资本绝不可统治国家”。 产业主权回归与全球不平等的算术转向 (40:00) 传统自由贸易理论坚信“商业致和平”（doux commerce），但米拉诺维奇指出，霍布森与列宁关于列强为争夺海外市场和资源而爆发冲突的论断正在当今地缘格局中重演。1990年代预设的“无摩擦全球分工”已被证明是幻想，亚历山大·汉密尔顿关于国家必须保留战略制造业产能以维持国防主权的理论重新成为现实准则。与之相对，欧洲正陷入两难结构性困境：一方面自愿切断廉价俄罗斯能源而被迫转购昂贵的美国能源，另一方面在老龄化人口收缩背景下持续收紧移民门槛，直接重创了以德国汽车为代表的工业竞争力。 在地缘不平等维度，米拉诺维奇提出了一个逆转历史认知的统计算术事实：在1990至2010年代，拥有庞大低收入人口的中国实现高速增长，曾是拉平全球人际收入差距的“自动化减震器”；然而当中国步入中高收入行列后，其持续高增长由于快速拉大了与苏丹、埃塞俄比亚等低收入非洲国家的差距，且拉大速度快于其追赶美国的步伐，实际上已转变为扩大全球人际不平等的推手。米拉诺维奇强调，21世纪全球不平等能否进一步改善，将完全取决于尼日利亚等人口高增长非洲国家的经济命运。 米拉诺维奇提出了一种乐观的前景设想：大国需首先在乌克兰与中东达成停火以消除大战隐患，随后召开“新布雷顿森林会议”，削减欧洲在二战后过高的制度代表权，赋予中国、印度及印尼等新兴国家相应的国际治理份额。然而访谈主持人在最后提出反思，认为近年来西方选民转向民粹主义的主要动力或并非单纯的反资本经济诉求，而是边境安全与文化认同焦虑。若地缘对立与身份政治持续主导选票，国家市场自由主义可能演变为一种长期、高摩擦的国际阵营对抗体系。

## Background 本期节目由彭博社（Bloomberg）旗下的知名财经播客《Odd Lots》于2026年7月27日发布在 RSS 及网络平台上。节目简介指出，在经济全球化已然失宠、各界竞相为其新时代命名的背景下，知名经济学者布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）携新书《全球大转型》做客节目，系统阐释他提出的“国家市场自由主义”范式，并深入剖析中国的经济演进及其对西方精英阶层所带来的全方位冲击。 ## TL;DR 节目围绕新自由主义全球化的终结与“国家市场自由主义”的崛起展开深度对谈。米拉诺维奇指出，当前大国在国际层面切断了自由贸易规则并转向以邻为壑的重商主义，但在国内却依然维持甚至强化着市场资本主义机制与精英特权。对话结合著名的“大象曲线”分析了西方中产阶级因全球相对位次滑落而滋生的深刻焦虑，并拆解了美国兼具高额劳动收入与资本收益的新物种精英（Homoploutia）以及中国高速崛起的微观资本阶层。针对大国安全博弈压倒效率逻辑的现实，米拉诺维奇探讨了重构“新布雷顿森林体系”与推行具有政治威慑意义的“教学性税收”等应对可能。 ## Atmosphere & style 整场对话在深刻的宏观经济学洞察与主持人的幽默自嘲之间自如切换，兼具智识思辨的穿透力与轻松讽刺的闲聊质感。从开场两位白领精英对自身在 AI 与地缘重心东移面前的“地位焦虑”展开自我调侃，到米拉诺维奇以犀利生动的历史轶事（如送书给萨克斯、马云被部委中层约谈传闻）拆解复杂的体制差异，全篇毫无晦涩说教，反而充满生活化的精妙比喻。听众既能真切感受到西方知识分子对全球秩序断裂的深层危机感，又能在关于信托基金育儿调侃与“世界杯门票”的生动剖析中，获得极具共鸣且引人深思的沉浸式收听体验。 ## Bulletin - `07:45` 布兰科·米拉诺维奇在新书《全球大转型》中提出“国家市场自由主义”（National Market Liberalism），指大国在对外经贸上切断自由贸易规则并诉诸零和重商主义，但对内仍固守自由放任的市场资本主义。 - `15:00` 全球收入位次出现历史性洗牌：例如意大利底层10%人群在全球收入分配中的排位从三十年前的第70百分位下滑至第55百分位，使得西方普通家庭在争夺排他性全球消费资源（如世界杯门票）时被新兴富裕群体挤出。 - `37:35` 中国城市前5%精英的收入构成在1988至2023年间发生逆转，私营部门占比由三分之一跃升至三分之二；中国仅用40年便走完了英国工业革命时期资本家阶层耗费150年才完成的结构性替代。 - `26:45` 中国居民消费占GDP比重仅约40%，远低于印度的50%与美国的70%；政府将国企留存利润与储蓄集中投向高铁、AI研发、航空航天及海外战略基建，凭借3%至5%的实际工资增长维持宏观战略积累。 - `47:30` 随着中国迈入中高收入行列，其收入与极端贫困国家的差距拉开速度已超过追赶美国的收敛效应，算术上中国保持高增长正在轻微拉大全球个体间的不平等，这一拐点打破了其过去三十年作为全球不平等“自动减震器”的角色。 ## Key takeaways - `01:50` 西方知识与媒体精英正面临三重深层地位焦虑：AI对脑力服务业的重塑与替代、美国国内政治制度极化，以及全球经贸重心东移可能导致西方在缺乏语言文化优势下丧失话语权。 - `07:45` “国家市场自由主义”的本质是内外割裂：对外废弃互利共赢的多边自由贸易规则，转向重商主义防御与脱钩；对内维持保护资本利润、市场定价和削弱劳工保障的新自由主义内核。 - `20:45` 面对全球化利益失衡与西方中产阶层收入停滞（年均仅增约1%），美国等决策层放弃了对超级富豪课税和重构公立教育的社会民主路线，转而选择指责外部竞争与知识产权纠纷的政治实用主义路径。 - `24:45` 西方对华政策经历了从幻想走向焦虑的巨变：1990年代西方误判“经济富裕必然诱发西式自由民主转型”，而中国的韬光养晦为其自主技术跃升赢得了数十年的宝贵战略缓冲期。 - `26:45` 中国消费占比异常偏低（约40%）源于深刻的政治经济学逻辑：国家意志通过工资压制和国企留存利润，将资本系统性导向大飞机、AI、高铁及太空探索等尖端基建与战略领域。 - `30:00` 中国在文化基因上带有浓厚的向内聚焦与“孤立主义”色彩，对跨国潮流与意识形态运动缺乏盲从热情；这种文化惯性也导致其全球软实力受到局限，缺乏通过自身视角书写并塑造别国认知的学者群体。 - `32:45` 美国上层前10%人群形成了“同财同工者”（Homoploutia）新物种：他们同时位列全美劳动收入与资本收入的前10%，将功绩主义道德合法性与资本积累融为一体，构建了坚不可摧的代际壁垒。 - `45:00` 欧洲精英陷入了“需要廉价能源却主动切断俄罗斯供应、需要劳动力阻止负增长却严密封锁移民大门”的荒谬双重锁死困境，在“中国冲击”重创制造业的脆弱现状下，对特朗普的对华逻辑产生畸形同情。 - `52:32` 1990年代“开放带来和平”的新自由主义假说已彻底破产：出于国防军工肌肉记忆与主权防卫的需要，大国不可能在直升机、无人机等制造产能上完全依赖外部供应链。 - `50:00` 中国的高效制造不仅挤压了欧美，也引发了巴西、马来西亚等发展中国家的产业警惕，后发国家沿着中低端制造业逐级升级的传统阶梯正面临被中国超强产能封堵的风险。 - `55:20` 米拉诺维奇主张对超级富豪征收具有政治震慑意义的“教学性税收”（Pedagogical Tax），核心功能在于向巨富阶层宣示“即便拥有数百亿资产也绝无权统治政治与社会”。 - `01:00:00` 西方与中国在处理政商权力边界上存在根本分歧：特朗普本质上延续了对资本精英的减税与吸纳，而中国政治逻辑则回归传统政商戒律——允许商人合法致富，但严禁商业资本染指决策中枢。 ## Detailed walkthrough ### `01:50` 谁是全球精英？播客主持人的“精英身份焦虑” 节目开场，主持人乔·威森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）向搭档特蕾西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）抛出了一个颇具私密性的问题：“你觉得自己算是全球精英的一员吗？”特蕾西坦言，从客观履历来看确实如此——在多个国家辗转成长、就读国际学校与知名大学，如今在主流自由派媒体工作，符合大众眼中典型的“全球精英”模板；但从主观感受来说，极少有人会主动将自己划入这一阶层，尤其是面对大型科技巨头的首席执行官等真正掌控权力与资本的人群时，精英身份总是相对的。乔则指出，无论如何，他们受过高等教育、在《财富》500强企业拥有高薪工作、坐在舒适的空调办公室里工作，在客观统计意义上毫无疑问属于全球精英群体。 乔进一步反思，站在人生的当下节点，有三大核心力量正在引发精英阶层的“地位焦虑”。第一是人工智能（AI），人们完全无法预料它将对具体工作岗位及雇主企业带来何种颠覆；第二是美国国内政治的持续失轨与极化；第三则是全球经济重心的转移与“中国冲击”向服务业、金融业的蔓延。乔开玩笑地提到，自己并不会说中文（普通话），如果未来最具吸引力的市场与金融叙事完全转向以中国为中心的经济活动，西方知识阶层将丧失话语权与比较优势。特蕾西打趣称他无需学外语，因为如今的双向屏幕 AI 翻译硬件发展迅速；不过她也拿真人秀《90天未婚夫》（90 Day Fiancé）调侃，指出跨国交流中翻译软件经常闹出严重笑话，机器翻译在播客交流或复杂跨文化互动中依然难以取代真正的沟通。 - **引发西方精英地位焦虑的三大变量**： - **AI 技术变革**：重塑乃至替代传统高薪智力劳动与白领服务业岗位。 - **国内政治动荡**：美国内部政治体系极化与偏离正轨带来的系统性不确定性。 - **地缘与经济重心东移**：缺乏普通话语言与文化能力，面对新一轮触及高阶金融与专业服务领域的“中国冲击”时可能被边缘化。 --- ### `05:00` 全球化红利的消退与经济民族主义的回潮 两名主持人深入探讨了过去数年间全球政治经济格局的剧变。美中之间的紧张局势在特朗普第一任期内开始呈现线性上升趋势，并在新冠疫情期间急剧加速，如今更是跨越美国蔓延至欧洲。欧洲各界对丧失工业竞争力和深陷“对华焦虑”表现得尤为明显。这种转变甚至超越了单一的美中双边关系，演变为更广泛的“经济民族主义”（Economic Nationalism）。在疫情阻断物流、国际局势动荡（如对伊拉克和伊朗等中东局势的担忧及战争风险）的多重冲击下，各国政府的战略重心全盘转向构建自主可控的供应链、重建本土制造业与战略关键资源储备，竭力将产业回迁国内，其核心目标很大程度上就是减少对亚洲制造基地的依赖。 即将迎来46岁生日的乔感叹，如果幸运的话自己正处于人生的半程。在过去的前半生中，他这一代人充分享受并受惠于某种特定世界经济秩序所带来的“果实与特权”；然而审视四周的宏观图景，他深感支撑这些特权的国际制度安排不可能在人生的后半程继续维持原状。当维系了数十年的全球秩序出现断裂与瓦解，接替它的新秩序究竟会呈现出何种面貌，成为当前最亟待厘清的问题。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 全球化退潮与经济民族主义回潮的演变路径 accDescr: 展示从新自由主义全球化走向以内引回流和重商主义为核心的经济民族主义的演化过程。 subgraph Phase1 ["旧秩序：新自由主义全球化"] A["资本自由流动"] --> B["跨国供应链外包 (偏向亚洲)"] B --> C["西方知识精英享有红利"] end subgraph Shocks ["外部冲击与催化剂"] D["美中贸易冲突升温"] E["新冠疫情阻断全球供应链"] F["地缘战争与关键资源危机"] end subgraph Phase2 ["新范式：国家市场自由主义"] G["供应链安全与产业回迁 (Reshoring)"] H["对外重商主义与零和博弈关税"] I["对内保留市场定价与自由放任"] end Phase1 --> Shocks Shocks --> Phase2 ``` --- ### `06:30` 布兰科·米拉诺维奇与《全球大转型》 为了解答秩序重构的谜题，节目邀请了纽约市立大学研究生中心（CUNY Graduate Center）的研究教授、著名经济学家布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）。米拉诺维奇带来了他的最新著作《全球大转型：美国、中国与世界经济秩序的重构》（*The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order*）。 当被问及撰写该书的初衷时，米拉诺维奇笑称，当全书写完后，他意识到这在某种意义上是一部“知识自传”（intellectual autobiography）。尽管书中鲜少涉及他个人的琐碎生活，但他系统梳理了从1974年至今跨越半个世纪的全球经济秩序流变。米拉诺维奇的人生恰好见证了四大秩序的更迭： 1. **1974年的国际经济新秩序（NIEO）**：发展中国家试图打破不平等格局的大胆倡议及其最终失败； 2. **单极时刻（Unipolar Moment）**：美国在冷战胜利后确立起不仅在经济、政治、军事，更在意识形态上拥有压倒性优势的全球霸权； 3. **新自由主义全球化（Neoliberal Globalization）**：以市场自由化和贸易无界为标志、如今正在步入终局的旧秩序； 4. **国家市场自由主义（National Market Liberalism）**：当下正在诞生的全新范式。 --- ### `07:45` 何为“国家市场自由主义”？拆解内外割裂的经济新范式 米拉诺维奇详细阐释了他创造的新核心概念——“国家市场自由主义”（National Market Liberalism）。他指出，要理解这一概念，必须先将传统自由主义或新自由主义拆解为几个核心支柱： - **对内经济层面**：崇尚自由定价、充分竞争、去监管与市场机制； - **对内社会层面**：平权行动（Affirmative Action）与个人身份认同层面的平等主义； - **国际经济层面**：推动自由贸易、降低关税壁垒、允许商品与资本跨国界完全自由流动； - **国际意识形态愿景**：对劳动力这一生产要素实现跨境自由流动的乌托邦式设想（尽管实践中从未真正彻底开放，但在意识形态构想中始终存在）。 米拉诺维奇尖锐地指出，当前正在发生的大倒退，正是全球大国将上述“整个国际层面的规则一刀切断”。原本以互利共赢为导向的多边贸易规则被弃置一旁，取而代之的是赤裸裸的重商主义（Mercantilism）与“以邻为壑”（Beggar-thy-neighbor）政策。大国之间开展的不再是正和博弈，而是零和博弈（Zero-sum game）甚至负和博弈（Negative-sum game）。但具有讽刺意味的是，在面对国内经济时，无论是美国的特朗普政府，还是法国的马克龙政府，在本质上依然坚定奉行传统的新自由主义经济信条——保护企业利润、维持市场定价、削弱劳动保障。这种“对外推行重商主义防御与脱钩，对内维持资本与市场自由化”的割裂组合，正是“国家市场自由主义”的最典型写照。 ### `10:00` 拯救资本主义还是埋葬社会主义：米兰诺维奇与杰弗里·萨克斯的轶事 对话首先探讨了二战后资本主义与社会主义相互借鉴的假说：就像凯恩斯主义时期政府介入、注入微量社会主义元素以拯救资本主义一样，理论上社会主义似乎也可以通过引入市场机制来求得稳定。布兰科·米兰诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）笑着坦承自己当年在这个判断上完全错了。他回忆起自己在 1989 年出版第一本书时的真实轶事：当时他在波兰开展工作，偶遇了杰弗里·萨克斯（Jeffrey Sachs）和戴维·利普顿（David Lipton）。米兰诺维奇在书店买下自己的书送给萨克斯，并在题字时写道，致那位“正在试图拯救社会主义的人”。 萨克斯看到后一脸不可思议地看着他，直接反驳道：“你在胡说什么？我是在试图埋葬社会主义。”米兰诺维奇这才意识到两人根本性的认知差异：米兰诺维奇当时认为，引入市场准则、市场手段以及一定程度的私有化，类比于凯恩斯拯救大萧条中的资本主义，是通过改良来延续体制框架；但西方顾问们的真实意图是彻底终结它。虽然米兰诺维奇将此戏称为自己当年的“重大误判”，但主持人指出，这种“共产党执政同时大力拥抱市场机制”的模式，恰恰在毛泽东时代之后的中国成为了现实。 米兰诺维奇承认，如果把当年的理论套在当代中国身上，逻辑确实成立，尽管他当时脑海里想的完全是东欧和苏联。中国的发展超出了所有主流经济学家的预测框架——就在十五年前，那些斩获诺贝尔奖的经济学者们还在白纸黑字地断言“中国绝不可能在技术上实现自主跃升”，而如今的技术现实彻底粉碎了这些预言。 ### `12:35` 重商主义思维的蔓延与中国的双重现实 主持人提出，西方看待中国时存在一种奇特的分裂：一方面视其为兼具经济与国家安全的巨大威胁，认为其将掠夺一切；另一方面又常把中国看作一个存在大量贫困人口的落后国家。针对“中国对西方的威胁”这种提问方式，米兰诺维奇指出，当人们开始用“威胁”这一概念去讨论经济问题时，就已经完全脱离了传统经济学的范畴，而是步入了“重商主义国际博弈（mercantilistic international competition）”的语境。甚至许多专业经济学者都在不知不觉中被这种零和博弈思维同化。 米兰诺维奇举了一个切身经历的例子：他曾与一位知名经济学家同台录制节目探讨中国议题。当讨论到工资、进出口等普通经济学常规概念时，那位学者突然插话说：“不，这对我们美国是不利的。”米兰诺维奇当时大为震惊并心想：如果你是美国财政部的官员，为国家利益考虑是你的职责；但作为一名独立经济学者，分析问题理应着眼于全球福利的绝对收益（absolute gains），而非沉溺于国家间的相对收益（relative gains）。 谈及中国目前的真实国情，米兰诺维奇指出中国社会内部存在着极大的双重性（duality）： - **自我认同与中等收入现状**：中国人普遍不认为自己是富裕国家。按照世界银行标准，中国属于中高收入国家（upper middle income country），官方表述也定调为“全面建成小康社会”（moderately prosperous society），其人均收入远未达到法国或意大利的水平。米兰诺维奇分享了一位中国学者的亲身经历：她在向美国学术期刊投稿时，原以为按发展中国家标准只需支付 50 美元审稿费，对方却回复称中国已划入发达国家类别，必须按 100 美元标准缴费，这令很多中国人感到错愕。 - **贫困与尖端科技的极端并存**：中国部分偏远农村仍存在日均生活费低于 2 美元的极端贫困现象；但在科技前沿，中国在人工智能等领域却已是全球唯一能与美国并驾齐驱的超级大国。这种发展极端不均衡的面貌，导致外界对中国的认知呈现出巨大的分裂。 ### `15:00` 西方精英对华立场的转向与全球收入阶梯的滑落 主持人观察到，过去十年里，整个西方政治经济集团（包括美欧以及日韩等同盟国）在对华立场上几乎全盘转向，在某种程度上全面接受了特朗普在 2016 年提出的强硬对抗逻辑。米兰诺维奇对此表示赞同，并结合自己新书第一章的核心框架，指出分析中美与全球秩序必须同时放在“两个层面”去剖析： ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 宏观与微观层面的全球秩序重塑 accDescr: 展示国家宏观博弈与个人收入位次下滑对西方政治心态的双重冲击 subgraph MacroLevel["宏观国家层面（国家间博弈）"] GDP["GDP 规模与地缘重要性"] --> GeoComp["国家对国家的对抗<br/>（美欧 vs 中国）"] end subgraph MicroLevel["微观个体层面（全球收入分布）"] RiseAsia["中国与亚洲整体崛起"] --> GlobalPercentile["全球收入分位数洗牌"] GlobalPercentile --> WestDecline["西方底层阶层相对地位下滑<br/>（如意大利底层从第70百分位跌至第55百分位）"] WestDecline --> IndComp["普通劳动者的直接竞争<br/>（西方劳动者 vs 中国工人）"] end MacroLevel --> Nationalism["重商主义与国家市场自由主义崛起"] MicroLevel --> Nationalism ``` 米兰诺维奇结合自己三十年来对全球收入分配的研究指出，西方社会的焦虑不仅仅源于国家层面的实力消长，更源自个人维度的切肤之痛： - **两百年未有的地位滑落**：在过去两个世纪中，西方各收入阶层始终稳居全球顶端。但伴随亚洲及中国的飞速崛起，西方底层民众的全球相对排位首次发生持续下滑。 - **具体生活水平的对比**：以意大利底层 10% 的人群为例，在意大利国内他们固然属于低收入群体，但在三十年前，他们的收入水平处在全球收入分配的第 70 百分位数；而今天，这一位置已经大幅滑落到全球第 55 百分位数。米兰诺维奇打了一个生动的比方：如果意大利国家队打进世界杯，三十年前这个底层意大利人完全有财力出国观看比赛，而如今他已无力承担这场旅行。 - **双重层面的交织**：中国崛起不仅是在抽象的国家、地缘政治层面展开（美国或欧盟对抗中国政府），更是在微观个体层面真实发生（西方普通工人直面中国劳动者的竞争）。正是这种个人经济地位的动摇与宏观霸权焦虑的结合，彻底逆转了西方对全球化的态度。 ### `20:45` 大象曲线与两条十字路口：为何反全球化指向了外部而非国内 谈及“国家市场自由主义”（National Market Liberalism）的成因，主持人探讨了一个核心悖论：面对全球化带来的反噬与不满，西方国家选择拆解国际经贸秩序的自由化规则，在国内却依然完整保留甚至强化了资本主义自由市场体制。这本不是唯一的出路——政府完全可以通过国内的二次分配、调节贫富差距来缓解矛盾。布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）借用他著名的“大象曲线”（Elephant Chart）剖析了这一历史抉择。该曲线揭示出全球化进程中悬殊的利益格局：西方普通中产阶级的实际人均收入年增长率仅在 1% 左右，陷入停滞；而西方最富有的前 1% 精英（尤其是在克林顿执政时期）收入增长率则高达 3% 甚至更高；与此同时，以中国为代表的新兴经济体工薪与中产阶级则实现了飞跃式增长。 面对国内中产阶级的不满，当时的美国决策者面前摆着两条截然不同的道路。第一条道路是走向带有社会民主主义色彩的资本主义：对超级富豪课征重税、强化转移支付、大举投资公立教育体系（米拉诺维奇特别强调公立教育的重要，直斥当前许多名校已被亿万富翁的资金所左右），并为本土劳动力提供实质性的转岗与技能重塑培训。而第二条更具政治实用主义的道路，则是将矛头完全对外：“看，是中国抢走了我们的饭碗，是他们在侵犯知识产权、占尽便宜”。米拉诺维奇指出，2016 年特朗普当选是一个决定性的历史分水岭，特朗普时期开启的一系列对华经贸与科技围堵政策，在拜登政府任内不仅未被废除，反而以更加精细、更具技巧的方式延续并加速演进，最终将西方推向了对外的民族主义与重商主义。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 西方应对全球化失衡的政策分歧 accDescr: 面对中产阶级停滞与中国崛起，美国政府放弃了国内社会民主改良，转而选择对外经贸对抗的民族市场自由主义路线。 subgraph Causes["全球化利益失衡（大象曲线）"] C1["西方中产阶级收入停滞<br/>年均增速约 1%"] C2["西方顶层富豪收益飞涨<br/>年均增速超 3%"] C3["中国及新兴市场全面崛起"] end subgraph Crossroads["政府政策选择"] OptA["选项 A：社会民主改良<br/>对富人征税 / 发展公立教育 / 劳动力转岗培训"] OptB["选项 B：转移外部矛盾<br/>指责外部竞争 / 归咎知识产权纠纷"] end subgraph Outcome["实际走向：国家市场自由主义"] R1["2016 年分水岭：特朗普对华强硬"] R2["拜登政府继承并精细化推行"] R3["打破国际自由贸易规则，国内资本主义不变"] end Causes --> Crossroads Crossroads -.->|未被采纳| OptA Crossroads -->|最终选择| OptB OptB --> Outcome ``` - **西方中产阶级滞涨**：全球化高潮期，西方中产阶层实际人均收入年增长率仅约 1%，财富获得感微弱。 - **顶层精英与外部赢家**：西方最高收入群体在克林顿时期录得 3% 以上的年均增速，而中国各收入阶层均实现高速收入跨越。 - **政策路径依赖**：2016 年成为经贸思维彻底转向的分水岭，对外部竞争者的打击取代了国内深刻的阶级再分配改良。 --- ### `24:45` 1990 年代的新自由主义全盛霸权与中国的“韬光养晦” 回顾 1989 年柏林墙倒塌与苏联解体后的 1990 年代，新自由主义意识形态在西方确立了空前绝后的绝对统治地位。主持人感慨，当时整个世界似乎已经对“何种制度更优越”做出了终极判定，而中国竟然能在整个 90 年代顶住全球巨浪，对西方所谓的自由选举制度无动于衷，这种战略定力令人惊叹。米拉诺维奇回忆起自己在华盛顿世界银行工作的岁月，当时新自由主义被视作不可挑战的“常识”；任何人如果提出质疑，就好比指着一块木头坚称那是钢铁一样荒唐，会被主流学术圈立即打上“无知”或“疯癫”的标签。1999 年《每月评论》（*Monthly Review*）刊载的一篇质疑新自由主义的文章在当时显得极其另类，主流思想界普遍坚信历史已经终结。 在这一全盛霸权之下，中国在 1990 年代采取了极为低调的“潜伏”（sleeper）策略，完全不公开制造摩擦与波澜。米拉诺维奇分析指出，当时美国精英层普遍抱有一种一厢情愿甚至带有自我安慰性质的幻想：他们认为中国会沿着韩国和中国台湾的发展轨迹演变，即随着经济由穷变富，中产阶层扩大，中国最终会自然而然地步入西式民主化进程，变成一个“正常的资本主义自由民主国家”，成为美国的顺从伙伴。这种战略误判让中国获得了长达数十年的战略缓冲期，直到近十年来中国全方位崛起，西方才猛然意识到当初的预设彻底落空。 - **意识形态绝对垄断**：1990 年代新自由主义被视作如物理常识般的公理，任何异见在主流建制内均被边缘化。 - **现代化范式假说破产**：西方长期信奉“富裕必然带来西式民主”的历史决定论，以此逻辑看待中国的发展进程。 - **战略姿态反差**：中国在关键转型期保持极其克制的低调发展姿态，避免了与当时占据压倒性优势的西方秩序过早碰撞。 --- ### `26:45` 中国消费占比过低的政治经济学根源 针对外界热议的“中国中产阶级日益壮大却持续内需不振”的现象，米拉诺维奇从宏观政治经济学角度给出了独到分析。从数据层面看，中国的居民消费占 GDP 比例异常偏低，目前仅在 40% 左右；相较之下，印度约为 50%，而美国则高达 70%。即便从发展中国家的正常规律判断，中国的消费占比也理应高出大约 10 个百分点。西方经济学界通常将其归咎于对工薪阶层的“工资压制”（wage compression）以及国有企业留存的大量超额利润，但米拉诺维奇指出，这种资源配置模式背后存在深层的国家政治经济学逻辑。 政府将这些原本可以通过转移支付转化为民间消费的巨额留存利润集中在手中，具有极其清晰的战略投资导向。这些资金被源源不断地倾注到关键战略领域：从纵横全国的高速铁路网络、前沿的人工智能（AI）研发，到极少被西方舆论客观正视但成果惊人的太空探索工程，再到正在发力突破的大型商用客机制造，以及在非洲等全球南方国家施展的经贸地缘影响力。米拉诺维奇指出，这种“工资压制”之所以在社会层面得以维持，是因为居民工资年增速哪怕被压制，依然保持着 3% 至 5% 的绝对正增长；只要收入仍在改善，哪怕低于过去的 8%，社会对于资源向国家集中战略的容忍度就依然很高。同时，农村地区社会保障体系与公共福利兜底的相对欠缺，也是逼迫居民维持极高预防性储蓄的重要结构性成因。 - **家庭消费占比差距**：中国居民消费占 GDP 比重约为 40%，落后于印度的 50% 与美国的 70%，存在显著的结构性低估。 - **国家资本的战略导向**：国企留存利润与储蓄被国家意志系统性导入高铁网络、AI、航天工程、民航大飞机以及海外经贸基建。 - **可承受的工资增速**：工资虽然存在一定程度的压缩，但每年保持 3% 到 5% 的实际增长，为宏观战略积累提供了内生稳定性。 --- ### `29:30` 文化基因中的“孤立主义”：对外界时尚潮流的漠然 对话尾声，主持人追问中国为何在整个近现代历史中都对外界的“当红思潮”不感兴趣——不仅在 90 年代免疫了新自由主义，在更早的冷战时期对不结盟运动（Non-Aligned Movement）等第三世界潮流也保持着若即若离的疏离姿态。 米拉诺维奇对此给出了深刻的文化透视：他认为中国在文化本质上是一个深度“孤立主义”（isolationist）的国家。外界常常喜欢给美国扣上“孤立主义”的帽子，但美国政治中的孤立主义顶多是不想卷入欧洲纷争，其本质上始终寻求对整个西半球乃至全球利益的排他性控制。相比之下，中国的孤立主义深植于其悠久的文明心理与文化传统之中，天生对外部世界一时的政治时尚与跨国意识形态运动缺乏盲从的热情，更倾向于以自身深厚的历史惯性与内部节奏独立运转。 ### `30:00` “天朝心态”与中国软实力的局限 米拉诺维奇谈到他在中国出版著作的亲身经历，借此剖析了中国对外文化影响力的深层瓶颈。他的中国出版商曾坦言，米拉诺维奇的几本书在中国能卖出数万册已属难得，因为中国受众绝大多数只关心写中国自己的书；除了当前激烈的中美竞争外，普通读者对外部世界的其他国家几乎缺乏兴趣。米拉诺维奇认为，这种心态背后深植着传承数个世纪的“中央帝国”（Middle Kingdom）意识形态——自古以来，中国视自身为世界的中心，天下万邦皆来朝贡叩头，换点瓷器、带回几只长颈鹿便各自归家。 这种向内聚焦的文化潜移默化地限制了中国全球软实力的构建。米拉诺维奇指出，真正的软实力不仅仅是向外界展示自己，更在于去深入研究、书写其他国家，并在思想层面塑造这些国家对自身的认知。他以著名苏联史历史学家理查德·派普斯（Richard Pipes）为例：当派普斯于1989年造访苏联时，尽管其著作此前在体制内遭到封禁，却受到了近乎史诗般的尊崇与拥戴，因为一位外国学者的著作竟深刻影响了俄罗斯人理解自身历史的方式。只要中国学者和知识分子缺乏大批走向世界、深入书写并重塑别国认知的群体，其软实力发展就注定会受到巨大局限。 - **中国图书市场的阅读倾向**：读者极度关注本土话题与中美大国竞争，对世界其他地区的历史与现实缺乏自发的探索热情。 - **历史镜像与当代投射**：古代“中央帝国”朝贡体系的文化惯性，导致对外认知呈现出一种只等别国来适应自己、而非主动理解对方的单向输出状态。 - **派普斯式的影响力**：软实力的最高境界在于“让他国通过你的视角来审视他们自身”，这需要庞大的全球国别研究学者群支撑。 --- ### `32:45` “同财同工者”（Homoploutia）：当代美国复合型精英的新物种 ```mermaid flowchart LR accTitle: 传统精英与当代Homoploutia对比 accDescr: 对比19世纪古典资本家与21世纪美国前10%Homoploutia精英在收入结构与道德合法性上的差异。 subgraph Classical ["19世纪古典资本家"] A1["纯资本收入 / 企业所有权"] A2["不直接出卖体力或打工"] A3["靠阶级血统与财产权背书"] end subgraph Modern ["当代Homoploutia精英"] B1["资本前10% + 劳动前10%"] B2["名校高学历 + 疯狂加班"] B3["精英功绩制 + 坚守私有产权"] end Classical -.->|历史演变为| Modern ``` 话题转向米拉诺维奇新书中创造的新概念——“Homoploutia”（同财同工者，源自希腊语词根）。传统意义上的资本主义精英与劳动者有着清晰的阶级分野：19世纪的J.P. 摩根等资本巨头靠股息、资本利得和企业产权获利，在技术分类上绝非靠领薪水度日的“劳动者”；到了20世纪中期，詹姆斯·伯纳姆（James Burnham）曾预言管理主义革命，认为职业经理人阶层将取代死板的资本家掌管企业。然而在当今美国，前10%的人群（约3000万人）中出现了一种前所未有的结构性重叠：他们既身处全美“资本财产收入”的前10%，同时又稳居“全美劳动薪酬收入”的前10%。 米拉诺维奇结合丹尼尔·马科维茨（Daniel Markovits）关于“精英体制陷阱”的论述分析，这群富有的上层中产阶级构成了资本主义历史上从未出现过的新阶级。一方面，他们是坚定的私有财产捍卫者，坐拥丰厚的股票分红和资本资产；另一方面，他们毕业于顶尖精英名校，依靠极高的职业技能赚取天价薪酬。这导致精英功绩主义（meritocracy）、勤勉苦干的职业伦理与大规模资本积累完美结合在同一个人身上。这种双重身份赋予了他们一种无与伦比的道德合法性——他们发自内心地坚信：自己今天的财富地位完全是靠才智与汗水“应得的”（deserve it）。 - **Homoploutia的核心特征**：在个人或家庭层面上，高资本收入（股息、利息、房产增值）与顶级劳动收入（高额年薪、奖金）同时兼备。 - **历史反差**：不同于19世纪只靠资本食利而不从事劳动的寡头，也不同于20世纪仅凭专业技能拿固定高薪的纯管理者。 - **阶层规模**：研究样本覆盖美国收入前10%的阶层，总人数接近3000万人，代表了一种系统性的社会结构变迁而非极少数百亿富豪的个例。 --- ### `35:05` “亲民精英”（Folksy Elites）的自我伪装与固若金汤的壁垒 在社会学表象上，当今美国的Homoploutia精英展现出一种独特的阶层行为模式。米拉诺维奇观察到，简·奥斯汀时代的英国传统贵族极度渴望彰显自己的特权与优越地位，而现代美国精英却反其道而行之，热衷于伪装成“亲民精英”（Folksy Elites）。他们尽一切可能对外释放“我只是个普通人”的信号，极力淡化自身的阶级色彩。播客主持人随即会心自嘲，坦承自己也经常玩这套把戏，比如总对别人强调自己读的是德克萨斯大学这种“公立州立学校”，却刻意掩盖该校位列全美顶尖学府且资产雄厚的事实。 然而，这种亲民作风掩盖不了其不可撼动的社会优势。统计数据显示，当今美国工人的劳动时间随其时薪的增加而增加——这些精英实际上比普通人工作更长的时间。他们用汗水自我感动，认定自己的高品质生活理所应当，并将全部资源转化为教育与资本特权无缝传给下一代。米拉诺维奇犀利地指出，这造就了一个在经济周期中几乎“刀枪不入”的阶级：若遇股市崩盘、资产缩水，他们凭借名校光环和顶尖专业技能依旧能拿到巨额劳动薪资；若遭遇行业动荡或职场变动，他们庞大的资本积累又构成了坚不可摧的安全垫。 - **时薪与工时的反常挂钩**：与传统观念中富人悠闲度假不同，当代美国顶层高薪人群展现出极高的人均工作时长。 - **资本与劳动的双重对冲**：兼具劳动与资本双重护城河，使其在任何单一经济危机中都能迅速自愈，形成难以撼动的代际固化。 - **阶层心理悖论**：明知下一代享受着超额特权，父母却在“唯才是举”与“全力庇护子女”的本能之间形成认知妥协。 --- ### `37:35` 中国资本阶层的崛起：四十年走完英国一个半世纪的历程 针对中国崛起的定性，主持人提出追问：许多人习惯从历史库中寻找参照物，试图将其比作二战后的日本、美苏冷战时的苏联或战后的美国；但中国将如此庞大规模的生产制造能力集中于单一国家体内，其体量与财富复合积累速度是否已经脱离了既有历史类比的范畴？米拉诺维奇回应称，他对常规的“日本类比”或“苏联类比”持怀疑态度，在他看来，唯有英国工业革命时期资本主义阶级的演变过程，才能在结构上提供某种对标，但中国的发展节奏被压缩到了令人咋舌的地步。 米拉诺维奇与中国合作者追踪了中国城市前5%高收入群体（即中国现代经济精英层）自1988年以来的收入构成变化，发现了惊人的历史反转： | 考察年份 | 来自国企、政府机关与体制内的收入占比 | 来自民营企业、专业高管等私营部门的收入占比 | |:--- |:--- |:--- | | **1988年（初始阶段）** | 约 **66%（三分之二）** | 约 **33%（三分之一）** | | **2018年 - 2023年** | 约 **33%（三分之一）** | 约 **66%（三分之二）** | 米拉诺维奇将这一演进与英国经济史学家鲍勃·艾伦（Bob Allen）关于1688年至1900年英国资本家阶层兴起的研究进行了对照。英国从地主阶层占主导走向资本家在外延数量（群体规模扩大）与内涵质量（相对地主的收入水平反超）上的全面超越，整整跨越了150年；而在中国官方统称为“个体业主与规模所有者”的阶层，完成这一几乎完全相同的阶级结构大逆转仅仅花费了40年时间。这种无论是人口规模还是演变烈度上的剧变，在人类经济史上都绝无仅有。 ### `40:00` 国家市场自由主义下的乐观情景：重构国际秩序 主持人提出，随着“国家市场自由主义”（national market liberalism）的兴起，伴随而来的是巨大的潜在风险，包括大国冲突、战争、收入不平等加剧以及财阀统治（plutocracy）等。面对这种悲观的前景，是否存在某种相对良好的均衡态，使得这种新型市场自由主义能够与自身和平共处？ 布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）换上“乐观者的帽子”，提到他在新书第二章中专门探讨了经济学家与政治学家如何看待开放、全球化与战争和平之间的关系。历史上存在两大针锋相对的学派：一端是孟德斯鸠（Montesquieu）等人的“商业和平论”（doux commerce），认为贸易直接带来和平，因为双方为了互相做生意，必须以礼相待；另一端则是以约翰·霍布森（John A. Hobson，1902年《帝国主义》）、罗莎·卢森堡（Rosa Luxemburg）、列宁（Lenin）以及约瑟夫·熊彼特（Joseph Schumpeter）为代表的批判视角。他们认为大国企业为了争夺海外市场和廉价劳动力，会将国家机器绑架以扮演其所需的军事扩张角色——这与当今跨国巨头依赖国家力量撑腰的现状高度吻合。 米拉诺维奇提出了实现良性均衡的务实路径：首要任务是制止当下热点冲突，在俄乌战争、以及中东（伊朗、美国与以色列）达成停火与解决方案，排除爆发毁灭性大战的极端风险。只有在这个前提下，各国才能着手重新设计全球经济体系，推动类似“新布雷顿森林体系”（New Bretton Woods）的重构。在这套新秩序中，中国和印度等新兴大国将拥有与其经济体量相符的话语权，印尼、巴西等国的地位也将显著提升；而欧洲的代表权则必须大幅削减，因为战后建立的原有国际机构严重固化了1945年欧洲仍维系殖民帝国的过时格局。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 走出国家市场自由主义困境的乐观路径 accDescr: 展示从停火降温到重构新布雷顿森林体系并调整全球权力配比的演进逻辑 subgraph Step1["阶段一：安全底线保障"] A["停止热点冲突\n（俄乌战争停火 / 中东降温）"] --> B["消除世界大战与系统崩溃风险"] end subgraph Step2["阶段二：全球制度重组"] B --> C["启动‘新布雷顿森林体系’谈判"] C --> D["重新分配国际治理话语权"] end subgraph Step3["阶段三：权力格局再平衡"] D --> E["赋权新兴大国\n（中国、印度、印尼、巴西）"] D --> F["缩减欧洲超额席位\n（告别1945年殖民时代旧格局）"] end ``` ### `45:00` 欧洲精英的困境与对华战略的扭曲心理 谈及欧洲精英阶层的态度时，主持人询问米拉诺维奇近期在巴黎的观察：欧洲精英（如德国的默茨、法国的马克龙等）如今在对华政策上逐渐靠拢唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）的强硬立场，这是否让一向看轻特朗普的他们感到心理失衡？ 米拉诺维奇指出，这种转变并不意外，因为现实经济利益摆在眼前——中国电动汽车（EV）的崛起确实重创了德国制造业，欧洲因为面临相似的产业冲击，在利益计算上自然站到了与特朗普相近的立场。然而，米拉诺维奇直言自己对欧洲未来相当悲观，指出欧洲目前陷入了荒谬的“双重自我锁死”困境： - **能源困境**：欧洲过去四五十年的经济繁荣高度依赖廉价能源，但因俄乌战争爆发，欧洲主动切断了俄罗斯廉价能源供应，转而高价采购昂贵的美国能源。 - **人口困境**：欧洲是人口负增长的大陆，阻止人口萎缩的唯一途径是吸收移民，但如今除西班牙（桑切斯政府对拉美及整体移民持相对开放态度）外，北欧等绝大多数国家对移民关上了大门，民意也强烈反弹。“他们需要人口，却拒绝接纳人口；他们需要廉价能源，却主动切断能源。” 再加上“中国冲击”（China shock）对德国工业的正面打击，欧洲在极度脆弱的处境下，对特朗普产生了一种现实层面的同情。但米拉诺维奇形容，欧洲精英对待特朗普的心态就像“与关在笼子里的老虎同处一室”：你只是希望在老虎离开前苟活下来，于是竭尽所能讨好老虎说“你真是一只威武伟大的老虎”，内心深处却毫无真诚敬意，只求自保。 ### `47:30` 中国之行：“大分流”到“大趋同”的认知错位与不平等拐点 米拉诺维奇分享了他近期在中国北京、上海以及气候温润的南部城市（贵州省内的小城市）参加学术会议的经历。这些会议主要由经济史学者组成，核心议题围绕著名的“大分流”（Great Divergence）：探讨为何在1750年左右中英发展水平大体相当、中国拥有深厚科技发明积淀的情况下，工业革命最终却在英国爆发。 米拉诺维奇指出，自己的新书聚焦于中国带来的“大趋同”（Great Convergence），在某种程度上恰好构成对历史大分流的反转呼应。在与高校学者交流时，他观察到一个有趣的社会心理现象：许多中国人对于自身已经成为“富裕国家”的事实，依然抱有一种不自觉的不可置信感（disbelief）。 学者们并未对他的“大趋同”理论提出实质反驳，但米拉诺维奇在演讲中抛出的一个关于全球不平等演变的定量分析引发了深刻思考： - **1990年至数年前的旧阶段**：中国在客观上是全球不平等的“自动减震器”（automatic reducer）。作为一个人口基数极其庞大、起步时相对贫困的国家，中国的高速经济增长使得全球人际收入差距大幅缩小。 - **当前的新拐点**：随着中国跃升为中高收入经济体，这一动态已经逆转。如今中国若继续保持较高经济增速，在全球尺度上反而会轻微拉大全球不平等，因为中国的收入水平已经超越了全球平均中位数，开始拉开与世界其余贫困人口的距离。 ### `50:00` 中国崛起与“国家市场自由主义”的全球扩散 布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）首先分享了一个与中国年轻学生的生动交流场景。当他向他们指出，中国如今的高速经济增长实际上在拉大全球个体间的不平等时，那些年轻人几乎觉得受到了冒犯，反问道：“所以你的意思是说我们不应该继续增长了？”米拉诺维奇解释道，这纯粹是一个算术事实：中国现在已经足够富裕，当它的收入水平与苏丹、埃塞俄比亚、刚果等极端贫困国家的差距拉开的速度，超过了它追赶美国的速度时，算术上中国保持 8% 的增长就会扩大全球不平等。虽然中国国内的再分配是另一回事，但这反映出一个有趣的现象——中国人自己还没完全适应“虽然尚未成为极其富有的国家，但已经跨入了富裕国家俱乐部周边”这一现实定位。 接着，主持人提出疑问：这种在美、欧、日、韩蔓延的“对华焦虑”（China anxiety），是否会扩散到同样具备工业野心的较贫穷发展中国家？比如巴西拥有支线客机制造商巴西航空工业公司（Embraer），必然会面临中国商飞（COMAC）的竞争；马来西亚近期也出台政策，明确限制进口中国低端电动汽车。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 对华焦虑与国家市场自由主义扩散逻辑 accDescr: 展示中国制造业竞争力如何促使全球从自由贸易转向国家市场自由主义的逻辑链条 subgraph S1["制造业竞争压迫"] A["中国在中高端制造领域的超高效率"] --> B["挤压其他发展中国家产业升级空间<br/>(如巴西飞机、东南亚EV)"] end subgraph S2["政策范式转变"] B --> C["从全球自由主义转向国家市场自由主义"] C --> D["构筑国家边界内部的保护性自由市场<br/>(关税、配额与产业限制)"] end ``` 米拉诺维奇指出，这正是其新书核心概念“国家市场自由主义”（National Market Liberalism）的本质所在——自由主义被严格限定在国家市场范围之内，每个国家都在思考“我们该怎么应对来自外部的冲击”。他提及阿温德·萨勃拉曼尼亚（Arvind Subramanian）等人发表在《外交事务》（Foreign Affairs）上的文章，该文从印度视角指出，如果中国在高技术制造业和中端制造业都处于绝对领先，原本按常规路径进入中端制造业的国家就会被彻底挤出。 面对这种普遍的担忧，米拉诺维奇提出一个反向思考：“既然我们在这里抱怨只是因为中国过于高效、做得太好了，那这种抱怨有道理吗？如果中国在生产 X、Y、Z 商品上极其高效，为什么不放手让他们去生产？” - 中国当前增长扩大全球不平等纯属算术效应：其对极贫国家的拉开效应，已强于对美国等顶层的收敛效应。 - 发展中国家的产业警惕正逐渐显现：例如马来西亚对中国廉价电动车设置进口门槛，巴西飞机制造面临潜在竞争。 - 萨勃拉曼尼亚的文章印证了新兴市场面临的挤压风险：后发国家传统的制造业升级阶梯正在被中国封堵。 --- ### `52:32` 安全逻辑击碎 90 年代的新自由主义幻想 主持人针对“为何不能任由中国高效生产”进行了反驳：所有人固然每天都在享受中国高效制造业带来的实惠（廉价的电脑、手机和玩具），但亚历山大·汉密尔顿（Alexander Hamilton）早就阐明过国家主权的底层逻辑——军民两用技术具有通用性，失去制造民用汽车的肌肉记忆，最终就会失去造坦克、造直升机的国防制造基础；丧失了这种能力，国家主权便不复存在。 米拉诺维奇完全赞同这一现实地缘政治逻辑，并将其与霍布森（John A. Hobson）、列宁（Vladimir Lenin）和罗莎·卢森堡（Rosa Luxemburg）的理论相勾连——“开放即战争”（Openness is war）。任何不考虑冲突现实的绝对开放意识形态都是站不住脚的。这证明了 1990 年代大家普遍笃信的“新自由主义一统天下、矛盾彻底消除、不再有地缘冲突”的世界，从根本上说只是一种“幻想的世界”，支撑它的也是一套虚妄的意识形态。 米拉诺维奇强调，对于小国来说失去工业基础或许无关紧要，但对于大国而言，如果需要直升机或无人机时国内却根本没有工业产能，安全防线就会瞬间瓦解。因此，出于国家安全的警惕是完全正当的，且这种警惕不仅针对中国，也应当针对所有外部实体，因为“今天的盟友明天未必还是盟友”。这标志着世界已经彻底告别了忽视军事维度的无阻碍自由贸易时代。 --- ### `55:20` 全球与国内不平等的解法：“教学性税收” 谈及政策工具与分配效应时，米拉诺维奇区分了“全球不平等”与“国内不平等”的不同驱动机制。针对全球个体间的不平等，唯一的解药就是贫困国家维持极高的经济增速。 - **非洲的人口与增长命题**：非洲现有尼日利亚（约 2.2 亿人）以及其他 4 至 5 个拥有近 1 亿人口的大国，整体人口达 10 亿级别，且是全球唯一人口保持年均 2% 增长的区域。米拉诺维奇强调，21 世纪全球不平等的走向完全取决于印度，尤其是非洲能否实现追赶增长。 - **国内不平等的应对机制**：在国内层面，除了普遍认同的教育投资之外，针对极其庞大的财富，米拉诺维奇提出了独特的“教学性税收”（pedagogical tax）构想。 米拉诺维奇解释称，自己并不赞同不分青红皂白地对一切事物加税，但他坚信必须对极高额的财富征税。这种税收之所以具有“教学意义”，目的在于向巨富阶层宣告政治边界：“我们不在乎你拥有几百亿资产，你都绝不能统治我们；为了确保你无法统治我们，政府每年都会对你征收高额税收。”加布里埃尔·楚克曼（Gabriel Zucman）与托马斯·皮凯蒂（Thomas Piketty）都在提倡更激进的财富税方案；虽然具体税率定在 2% 还是 20% 尚可探讨，但“教学性”的政治威慑功能至关重要。 --- ### `58:05` 特朗普、普京与普罗大众对全球化赢家的反抗 访谈最后，主持人就米拉诺维奇书中第 141 页的一处观点提出质疑。书中写道：“正是在这种背景下，我们应当审视唐纳德·特朗普、习近平和弗拉基米尔·普京的政治实践，他们的政策试图遏制或控制金钱精英走向完全的经济与政治主导地位。” 主持人对此表示不解，认为将特朗普归入这一类过于牵强：在实际执政中，特朗普推行的是极端正统的富人减税政策，并将大批商界高管引入联邦政府，其对资本精英的让步程度几乎前所未有，网络上认为他具备“非正统经济学”（heterodox economics）倾向纯属幻想。 米拉诺维奇回应并厘清了自己的逻辑：从国内政策来看，特朗普确实继续甚至深化了新自由主义政策，这完全符合“国家市场自由主义”的定义——对内维持自由市场与新自由主义资本逻辑。然而，将特朗普与中俄领导人并列分析的核心在于其**权力基础与政治反弹机制**：特朗普之所以能够上台，其核心动能来自于对“新自由主义全球化既得利益者”怀有强烈怨恨的底层选民群体。这种政治力量的崛起，本质上是全球化受损群体对跨国金钱精英发起的一场制度性反弹。 ### `01:00:00` 政治狂人的选民基础与中国对富豪阶层的“训诫法则” 布兰科·米拉诺维奇（Branko Milanovic）深入剖析了西方民粹主义政治家与中国政治领导层在处理“富人与权力”关系上的根本差异。有7700万选民将选票投给了唐纳德·特朗普，究其根本，是因为这部分群体对新自由主义全球化的现状极其不满——他们原本期待获得更多回报，现实中得到的却少得多。米拉诺维奇指出，特朗普成功把自己包装成反抗建制精英的斗士，但在现实中，他本人不仅是精英阶层的一员，还把一众富豪带入权力中枢，并推行了极度保守的税收政策，对资本所得的征税力度远低于劳动所得，更未触动富人的顶层税率。 与此形成鲜明对比的是中国与俄罗斯的权力逻辑，其中习近平的治理模式尤为典型。米拉诺维奇强调，习近平上台后明确表示不希望富人进入中国共产党的权力决策层，这与江泽民时期提出“三个代表”重要思想、从意识形态上为私营企业家入党提供正当性的路线截然不同。中国恢复了历史上对待商人的传统治理哲学：“你们可以发家致富，赚得盆满钵满，但绝不要试图来指挥政权该怎么做；决策权属于国家与党，你们只管赚钱。” 米拉诺维奇还分享了一则广为流传的轶事（尽管无法完全证实其真实性）：当阿里巴巴创始人马云被告知蚂蚁集团首次公开募股（IPO）被叫停时，打来电话通知他的仅仅是财政部的一名中层官员。在中国体制下，绝没有任何事情是偶然发生的。这一细节传递了极具象征意味的政治训诫——哪怕你贵为顶级商业巨头，在国家机器面前，你的对等层级也仅仅对应一名中层官员。 - **西方民粹政治的反讽**：特朗普以“反建制精英”为政治号召赢得7700万张选票，执政后推行的税收政策却进一步倾斜于资本利得，将富豪精英进一步吸纳入决策体系。 - **中国政治哲学的回归**：从“三个代表”时期允许资本家入党，转向清洗并剥离富人直接干预政治决策的通道，商人仅保留积累财富的经济空间。 - **权力层级的制度宣示**：蚂蚁集团IPO被叫停传闻由部委中层出面通知，精准传达了国家政治权力凌驾于任何私人商业资本之上的绝对定位。 ```mermaid flowchart TD accTitle: 西方与中国对待资本精英的政治逻辑对比 accDescr: 对比特朗普的新自由主义税收/吸纳精英与中国政权对资本家政治权力的剥离。 subgraph WEST["西方民粹主义模式 (以特朗普为例)"] W1["底层民众不满全球化"] --> W2["民粹领袖树立反精英人设"] W2 --> W3["实际执政: 吸收精英入阁 & 降低资本税"] W3 --> W4["国内依然延续市场自由主义"] end subgraph CHINA["中国治理模式 (习近平时期)"] C1["告别'三个代表'时期的资本吸纳"] --> C2["确立政治戒律: 富豪不得涉足决策中枢"] C2 --> C3["商人专注于经商致富，政治权力牢牢归党"] C3 --> C4["典型案例: 敲打科技巨头与IPO叫停"] end ``` --- ### `01:02:18` 播客尾声：信托基金的育儿幽默与“向内收缩”的时代叙事 在米拉诺维奇结束访谈致谢离场后，两位主持人乔·维森塔尔（Joe Weisenthal）和特雷西·阿洛威（Tracy Alloway）展开了一段轻松且充满幽默的闲聊。特雷西打趣地问乔，他打算何时向自己的孩子们宣布他们不会继承遗产以证明自己的“平民草根作风”。乔笑称，如果运气好死后还能剩点钱，多少还是会留点给孩子；但他透露自己女儿最近不知从电视剧还是朋友那里学到了“信托基金（Trust Fund）”这个词，跑来问自己将来会不会有一笔信托基金。乔断然拒绝，并耐心地告诫女儿：“社会上没有人会真正尊重坐享信托基金长大的富家子弟，这就是为什么你不能做那种人。” 玩笑过后，两人迅速将话题拉回米拉诺维奇讨论的核心宏旨：全球化时代的终结与政策的全面“内向化”是当今时代最重大的历史叙事。特雷西敏锐地指出，当大众因自身财富增长不如预期而心生愤懑时，统治阶层给出的解药几乎全都是“对外出击”——例如加征关税与发起贸易壁垒，而绝非在内部进行大刀阔斧的财富再分配。其结果是，即便对外大搞重商主义与国家主义，各个国家内部运行的依然是冷酷的市场自由主义机制。 --- ### `01:04:47` 大象曲线、排他性商品竞争与民粹主义驱动力之争 乔结合自己在2010年代的观察，回顾了米拉诺维奇著名的“大象曲线（Elephant Chart）”。那张在2014与2015年席卷无数经济学幻灯片的图表清晰地展示出，全球新兴的中产阶级绝大多数来自亚洲（中国、韩国、越南等）。乔反思道，一个处在意大利收入中位数水平的普通人按全球标准仍然算相当富裕，为什么亚洲中产阶级的崛起会让西方中产阶层感到被剥夺与受伤害？ 特雷西与乔认为，米拉诺维奇在访谈中举出的“世界杯门票”案例是极佳的隐喻，它揭示了“定位性商品（Positional Goods）”带来的挤出效应： 1. **排他性消费的挤占**：像世界杯门票或迪士尼乐园度假这类供给有限的体验，在20世纪70至80年代曾是西方普通工薪家庭触手可及的消费；然而随着全球新兴富豪队伍急剧膨胀，这些资源的门票被疯狂竞标推高，使得西方中位家庭在相对排位竞争中被彻底排挤出局。 2. **民粹崛起的动力异议**：乔对单纯用“经济受挫与对全球精英的怨恨”来解释特朗普的崛起表达了不同意见。他指出，特朗普在2016年大选中最强大的号召口号是“修建边境墙（Build the Wall）”，以及在2024年攻击拜登政府宽纵的边境政策。修建边境墙的目的绝不是为了防范墨西哥的变压器或高管，而是针对底层移民。因此，特朗普政治成功的最大基石本质上是对移民潮的抵触与对文化变迁的焦虑，而非纯粹出于对资本主义制度性不平等的抗议。 节目的最后，特雷西与乔介绍了制作团队名单，并邀请听众关注《Odd Lots》的每日通讯、Discord讨论社区以及彭博无广告音频订阅渠道，在日常赞助广告播报中正式结束了本期播客。 ## Notable quotes > `10:00` 你在胡说什么？我是在试图埋葬社会主义。 — 杰弗里·萨克斯 > `12:35` 不，这对我们美国是不利的。 — 知名经济学家（米拉诺维奇引述） > `20:45` 看，是中国抢走了我们的饭碗，是他们在侵犯知识产权、占尽便宜 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `45:00` 他们需要人口，却拒绝接纳人口；他们需要廉价能源，却主动切断能源。 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `45:00` 你真是一只威武伟大的老虎 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `50:00` 所以你的意思是说我们不应该继续增长了？ — 中国年轻学生 > `50:00` 既然我们在这里抱怨只是因为中国过于高效、做得太好了，那这种抱怨有道理吗？如果中国在生产 X、Y、Z 商品上极其高效，为什么不放手让他们去生产？ — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `55:20` 我们不在乎你拥有几百亿资产，你都绝不能统治我们；为了确保你无法统治我们，政府每年都会对你征收高额税收。 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `58:05` 正是在这种背景下，我们应当审视唐纳德·特朗普、习近平和弗拉基米尔·普京的政治实践，他们的政策试图遏制或控制金钱精英走向完全的经济与政治主导地位。 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇（著作引文） > `01:00:00` 你们可以发家致富，赚得盆满钵满，但绝不要试图来指挥政权该怎么做；决策权属于国家与党，你们只管赚钱。 — 布兰科·米拉诺维奇 > `01:02:18` 社会上没有人会真正尊重坐享信托基金长大的富家子弟，这就是为什么你不能做那种人。 — 乔·威森塔尔 ## Mentioned Joe Weisenthal, Tracy Alloway, Branko Milanovic, The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order, Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton, Daniel Markovits, Bob Allen, Richard Pipes, Montesquieu, John A. Hobson, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Schumpeter, Arvind Subramanian, Alexander Hamilton, Gabriel Zucman, Thomas Piketty, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Jack Ma, CUNY Graduate Center, World Bank, Monthly Review, Foreign Affairs, COMAC, Embraer, Ant Group, 90 Day Fiancé, Odd Lots ## Video description <p>It's pretty obvious by now that globalization has fallen out of favor. And while many pundits have deemed economic globalism dead, we are still figuring out what to call this new era. Branko Milanovic's chosen phrase is "national market liberalism," a term that sums up how a world once defined by the free movement of capital has begun to contract as the most powerful governments have come to favor mercantilism and nationalism. In his new book, <em>The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order</em>, the famed economist explains what comes after globalization. He talks to us about China's economic evolution, the pressure it has put on elites in the West, and much more.</p><p>See <a href="https://omnystudio.com/listener">omnystudio.com/listener</a> for privacy information.</p> [Source](https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/tracking.swap.fm/track/UVBrz8bN8aM2Xe47PEPu/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/8a94442e-5a74-4fa2-8b8d-ae27003a8d6b/dac96181-5b1e-4549-a0f9-b491013fe961/audio.mp3?in_playlist=982f5071-765c-403d-969d-ae27003a8d83)

[10:00] 杰弗里·萨克斯: 你在胡说什么？我是在试图埋葬社会主义。 [12:35] 知名经济学家（米拉诺维奇引述）: 不，这对我们美国是不利的。 [20:45] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 看，是中国抢走了我们的饭碗，是他们在侵犯知识产权、占尽便宜 [45:00] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 他们需要人口，却拒绝接纳人口；他们需要廉价能源，却主动切断能源。 [45:00] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 你真是一只威武伟大的老虎 [50:00] 中国年轻学生: 所以你的意思是说我们不应该继续增长了？ [50:00] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 既然我们在这里抱怨只是因为中国过于高效、做得太好了，那这种抱怨有道理吗？如果中国在生产 X、Y、Z 商品上极其高效，为什么不放手让他们去生产？ [55:20] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 我们不在乎你拥有几百亿资产，你都绝不能统治我们；为了确保你无法统治我们，政府每年都会对你征收高额税收。 [58:05] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇（著作引文）: 正是在这种背景下，我们应当审视唐纳德·特朗普、习近平和弗拉基米尔·普京的政治实践，他们的政策试图遏制或控制金钱精英走向完全的经济与政治主导地位。 [60:00] 布兰科·米拉诺维奇: 你们可以发家致富，赚得盆满钵满，但绝不要试图来指挥政权该怎么做；决策权属于国家与党，你们只管赚钱。 [62:18] 乔·威森塔尔: 社会上没有人会真正尊重坐享信托基金长大的富家子弟，这就是为什么你不能做那种人。

[9:00] Branko Milanovic: I ran into Jeff Sachs and David Lipton, whom I knew from work on Poland... I said to Jeff Sachs, who is trying to save socialism. And Jeff kind of looks at me, he says, 'What are you talking about?' I remember these words exactly. He says, 'I am trying to bury socialism.' And I said, 'Oh, why wait?' [13:00] Branko Milanovic: I was once on a show with a very famous economist... We were talking about general things, about wages, exports, imports... where general economic principles should apply. And then he suddenly says, 'No, no, but for us, the United States, it is bad.' And I was thinking, wait, you're not in the government... As a general economist, you have to think about whether it is good for the world or not. [55:00] Branko Milanovic: You are not going to rule us.

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When you're running a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline At the Hartford the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering, and claims experience. Learn more at thehartford.com slash risk mitigation. Policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut. Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal. And I'm Tracy Alloway. I have a personal question for you this time. All right. Do you think of yourself as like a member of like the global elite? like are you do you consider yourself elite i probably should in some ways because i think a lot of people would say someone who grew up in different countries went to international schools went to i guess a high profile university now works in the the liberal media as people would say would be like a classic elite But does anyone ever actually think of themselves as the elite No I try to you know maintain journalistic unbiased I would say, look, Joe Tracy, they are clearly among the elite. They have good jobs at a Fortune 500 company. They are among the most well-educated demographic to ever exist in history. We get to work in a nice air condition of office, etc. On the other hand, I could say like, look, that's nice. The real elite are big tech CEOs, et cetera. But I – look, I think – Everything's relative. We're an elite. I think objectively speaking. But I also think – I was thinking about this. There's really three big things that I think are like – if we think about the second – the rest of our lives or et cetera, like three really big things that would like cause me to have sort of like elite status anxiety. Go on. One of them is AI because we don't really know what it's going to mean for our literal jobs or the companies we work for, et cetera. That's a really big one. Domestic politics. I think like, you know, I think we're living in the United States. Domestic politics feel like they continue to go off the rails in various ways that could impact a lot of things And then I think unfortunately maybe I change this one day I don speak Mandarin And if all of the interesting markets, finance news, if that becomes like the center of economic activity in like some really big way, people talk about the China shock that they mostly are talking about, sort of Rust Belt manufacturing. There's like a China shock for like sort of service level, financial services, etc. I don't think like, you know, I don't think I would have as much to contribute in that world. You won't need to learn Mandarin, Joe. You can just use AI. You know, have you seen the AI translator gadgets? I have. Yeah. They're cool. Some of them are really good. Yeah. Yeah. And like you had these things, there's two sides of a screen and you're just talking them for the other person. Yeah. But setting that aside, I don't know how well that would work on the podcast or video medium. I got to say, I still watch 90 Day Fiance. Do you know that show? No. Americans dating and marrying foreigners from abroad. And there are a lot of translation apps on that show, many of which go very, very wrong. So anyway. Anyway, on this last point, though, I think like we know that probably start certainly with like the first Trump administration, sort of like U.S.-China attention has. [5:00] been sort of on this linear increase. It probably accelerated during COVID. And it's clearly spread beyond the US. It just seems to get more intense by the week, including in Europe, where I think China anxiety, the loss of industrial competitiveness has now really become top of mind. Right. And it's even broader than China. I mean, we've spoken about it on the show, but it seems like there's a real nationalism to economics nowadays. Because of the pandemic, because of the war in Iran now and various other disruptions that we've seen, governments are really focused on building up their own supply chains, building up their own manufacturing bases, their own critical resources and all of that. So everyone seems to be trying to bring things in-house, which at the moment largely means taking things away from Asia. Yeah, that would be the goal, right? They want to replace these things. Anyway, I think as, you know, I'm about to turn 46, so maybe if I'm lucky, I'm about halfway through my life. I would say the first half of my life, I have benefited a lot from a certain order of things. And when I look around the landscape I would say I am not so sure that the order from which I enjoyed many fruits and privileges is going to be as durable in the second half Sure That fair Okay So we should talk about what were these fruits and privileges that we enjoyed and perhaps what would a new sort of order in which some of these arrangements from which we benefited if they change what could some of this look like in the future All right. Well, I'm very excited to say we really do have the perfect guest, someone we've wanted to talk to for a long time, someone whose work is right in the heart of this. We're going to be speaking with Bronco Milanovic. He is a research professor at the Graduate Center at CUNY, the City University of New York. And he is also the author of a new book came out this year, The Great Global Transformation, the United States, China and Remaking of the World Economic Order. Professor Milanovic, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you very much for having me. It's a pleasure. What was the goal going into this new book? Why write a new book right now? You know, to some extent, when I finished the book, I thought the goal was basically to write an autobiography. OK. That could sound strange because there is very little of me in that book. But I covered the period from 1974 Actually I started the book in 1974 with the new international economic order and then how it failed and how then unipolar moment came and how the United States was Not only the most powerful country economically politically militarily, but also ideologically And how that order which you might call neoliberal globalization is now expiring And when I think actually my entire life, I remember each of these four orders And I'm now present at the birth of what I call national market liberalism, which I think, as you were saying before, is a new economic order where lots of activities would be brought back home and where external economic policies would be essentially mercantilistic and not free trade. Why do you call it national economic liberalism? I call it because I was thinking, actually, if you define liberalism in the most general sense, or take also neoliberalism, which should not be very different. You have on domestic side, you have policies which are liberal policies economically, everybody knows that, you know, free pricing, competition, so on. You have socially policies which are about affirmative action egalitarianism in terms of personal identity And then internationally you have policies on free trade low tariffs movement of capital labor and goods and so on And finally, you have an aspirational policy about the movement of the other factor of production labor. That has never really happened. But aspirationally, you can say ideologically it is there. What is happening now is that we take this entire international part, chop it off and say, wait, these rules do not apply anymore. What applies now is essentially national sort of mercantilist policy. It's a policy of, you know, beggar thy neighbor to some extent, but certainly zero-sum game or even a negative-sum game. It's entirely different. But domestically, I really see the administrations like Trump, Macron, and others, I see them as essentially continuing with neoliberal policies domestically. So that's what I think, actually, that's why I We went into this new term that was the kind of national liberalism. So it's not and to be more precise, national liberalism on the market side, not necessarily on the social side domestically. It's interesting. You say something interesting in the beginning of your book where you talk about, you know, going back to the middle of the 20th century or maybe in the immediate wake of the Great Depression to stabilize capitalism. We adopted. [10:00] sort of like the government got involved. We took in a little dose of socialism, and that saved capitalism. And then you sort of kind of a joke, you talk about like, okay, well, the goal was maybe to sort of like post-World War II era, save socialism and various by injecting some market element. And then there's like this yin-yang effect that you sort of see, where it's like two different systems adopt some element of each other in theory, or that could have gone the way as a way of like bringing about stability. Well, that was my idea. Actually, I was wrong in that sense, because I actually in the very beginning of the book, as you know, in the introduction, I bring up my first book was published in 1989. And actually, in the very first sentence of the book, I mentioned that I ran into Jeff Sachs and David Lipton, whom I knew from work on Poland. Yeah. And so I told them, well, I've got this book. And actually, I gave the book to Jeff Sachs as a present. I found it in the bookstore. And then he said, okay, you have to write something. And I said to Jeff Sachs, who is trying to save socialism. And Jeff kind of looks at me, he says, what are you talking about? And I remember these words exactly. He says I trying to bury socialism And I said oh why wait And that what I actually understood the misunderstanding For me the introduction of market principles and market measures and privatization to some extent was exactly the same by analogy what Keynes did to save capitalism for Great Depression. You inject doses of socialism in order to preserve the capitalist framework. So I thought the same would happen in 1989. My big mistake. But I just wanted to mention that because I think it's a nice anecdote that actually we saw the same thing but saw them in two different ways. But arguably that is a characterization of what did happen in China particularly after Mao, right? So it's like you have this communist country, still communist, but clearly a country that has embraced – I don't know about capitalism, but markets for sure in a very big way, maybe even better than us. No, I mean, definitely. You can actually then translate what they said and say, well, maybe I was right because I really meant China. But I did not. In those days, I really meant Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. China is, of course, a very special case. And of course, I'm sure we'll talk more about China. But it is an example that again 15 years ago nobody expected what has happened And if people tell me they did expect I could just go back to what they wrote And they got Nobel Prize you know prizes for writing that China would never technologically develop like 15 years ago. And then we see now the reality, which is entirely different. By the way, I'm going to get you to sign my copy of the book in the hopes that it makes it into the preface of your next piece of work. I'll put some very new job. Yeah. Okay. With a place like China, I'm glad you brought this up because there's this weird tension in the way people talk about it as both an economic and security threat. You know, China is going to compete with us and it's going to get everything, etc. And then talk about it as a relatively weak country in some ways. People still talk about it sometimes as a developing country or even, you know, 10 or 20 years ago, people would talk about the poor farmers. You hear less about that nowadays. But how would you explain the dual way that people tend to think and talk about China in terms of its threat to the West? Let me start first by rephrasing your question, because once you start speaking of the threat to somebody then we are really no longer in economics as we studied it We are now exactly in that world of mercantilistic international competition And you know it has actually sort of moved into our thinking without us even realizing To give you another anecdote, I was once on a show with very famous economist, I will not mention the name. And, of course, the topic was China. We'll Google it. The topic was China. And then, you know, we're talking about the general things, about, you know, wages, exports, imports, something like very general, where actually general economic principles should apply. And then he suddenly says, no, no, but for us, the United States, it is bad. And I was thinking, wait, you're not in the government. I understand. I would understand if you were in the treasury. Yes, of course, this is your duty to look after the United States. But you as a general economist, you have to think about whether it is good for the world or not. Right. I think you have to have personal politics. Absolute gains versus relative gains. But since we are now in this new world, what do I think about China? First of all, I have to tell you that, for example, what you see in China, actually, it happened to me like a week ago. People are very much surprised when you tell them you're now a rich country. I mean, when I say, okay, by the World Bank definition, actually this is the real conversation, you are the upper middle class income country, and they are kind of surprised. And there was a woman who tells me, you know, I submitted a publication for the U.S. Journal, and I paid, I think, $50 as a developing country, and they write back to me and say, no, you're [15:00] classified as advanced country, and you have to pay $100 for the submission fee. But you know, this stuff is still very much present in China. I think Chinese do not see themselves by and large as a rich country. They speak of this, as you know, officially moderately prosperous society. And I think it's a correct denomination, if you will. China is not France, it's not Italy, doesn't have the income level. But on the other hand, as you actually implied, technologically, it is at the level which is actually only similar to the United States. And that is that duality that we observe, you know, maybe the villages, I have not been there, but I know that actually there are villages who are below $2 per day, you know, we are absolute poverty line. And on the other hand, we have them as a leader, the artificial intelligence. So hard to reconcile. You know, I think for a long time, people in the West, like, didn't think about China. I mean, maybe like people in the treasury or whatever. They didn't think about China very much. It feels to me like one of the remarkable things about the last 10 years and it literally has been 10 years has the whole West the Western political economic unit So it like governments in Europe and obviously the US And then as you say in your book you might also as part of this Western political bloc might even incline to include like Korea and Japan. You travel around, you were recently in Paris. Has everyone essentially come around in some level to where Trump was in 2016? Yes, I think basically that's the case. And that actually, if I go back to my book and chapter one, it is structured on two levels. We talked so far about the level, the first level, which is countries' GDPs and countries' importances. And of course, China then suddenly starts playing a very important role there. But there is another level, which of course, thanks to the work that I've done for like 30 years on global income distribution, I also observe. And that second level is personal income level. What happens with the rise of Asia and China in particular is for the first time in two last centuries, you have lower parts of Western income distributions sliding down in global order. So if you are bottom-de-side in Italy, okay, you're not rich by Italian standards, but you know, you're okay. In the world level you at the 70th percentile of the world 30 years ago Well now you at the 55th percentile In other words if Italy had qualified for the World Cup that Italian would not have the money to come to watch Italy But he had money 30 years ago to come to watch Italy. So, you know, there is this loss of economic position of individuals in Western countries. So, you know, the China thing plays on two levels. It plays at the level US versus China or the European Union, which is an abstract level of state versus state. But it plays at the level U against the Chinese guy. And that, I think, is actually that's what I try to bring in the book, these two levels. And I think it's important to have them in mind. 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Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures. Quick one before you jump back in. You're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more. I like the idea of measuring wealth in ability to watch World Cup games. It's internationally priced good, you know. Yeah, absolutely. It makes sense. Just going back to the idea of national market liberalism and pressing on the point you just made the response to or the backlash against globalization in your description has been I guess tearing down the liberal aspect of the international economy and international trade and not domestically. So domestically, you still preserve large parts of capitalism. It didn't have to go that way, right? You could have had domestic changes in terms of income redistribution and things like that. Why do you think so much of it was just focused on the international order rather than domestically? You know, I don't know, but let me try to answer that question. You know, I'm very often asked, probably you would have asked if I don't bring it up first, that was the elephant chart. The elephant chart. Yeah, the great elephant chart. I was going to ask if you're annoyed every time anyone mentions the elephant chart. I'm actually tired of it, but still I have to use it. You know, the elephant chart, what it showed, really the bottom line is, okay, middle classes of the West have not been doing well. Growth rate of 1% per annum per capita, not very well. The top of the Western distributions are doing very well, you know, under Clinton especially, you know, 3% and more. And then of course China is doing very well So you are sitting there you are a government of the United States let say You have two possible options You have okay we go for policies that would actually tax the rich that would transfer the money, that would do, I don't know, serious start of risk killing of labor, public education, because I come from public education, public education rather than private, get rid of all these fancy schools that are being bankrupt by billionaires and do a serious effort. Or you say, oh, look, China is like screwing us. So let's go after China. China is really benefiting because they are stealing property rights and they are doing this or that. And eventually the decision was made why it was made like that, but maybe politically it was more pragmatic or whatever. And I think the Trump 2016 for me is the watershed year because many of the policies that Trump then imposed regarding China that continued under Biden. They were done in a more maybe intelligent way, but basically they continued. And I think that was the change. And then after that, we really have an acceleration in these policies. But you have a very good question, maybe for political scientists. I don't know. It could have gone the other way. I totally agree. It would have gone into more social democratic capitalism, rather to go into this nationalist liberalism Yes Yeah because this is something I think about a lot which is like let say we were to like take back rewind the clock to like 1989 or 1992 And I always think to myself, like I was nine years old in 1989, so I didn't think about these things. But I always think to myself, like if I had been, say, like in my early in my career, in my 20s, in those years, I'd be like, oh, it's obvious. Like liberalism or neoliberalism, one of those two is just like it's clearly the way of the future. It's clearly superior. It's proven itself in the decisive test against like which was the better model against the Soviet Union. Even to this day, I actually find it pretty remarkable the degree to which China held the line in that decade when everything was pointing to it. It's like the question is settled. We know what's the better system. And now, of course, we have lots of people questioning all the systems. But it's sort of remarkable to me that in the 90s specifically, you had like one country that not only didn't just sort of like embrace free elections, et cetera, like it didn't even ever seem to be to come particularly close. Well, I often think of the 90s. I was older than you then, and I was then in Washington. [25:00] and working for the World Bank, you know, the neoliberal ideology was so omnipresent, and it was actually commonsensical. So it's like if you were to now argue, like, okay, this is not wood, this is actually steel. Well, we all see that it's not, actually. So it was very commonsensical, and you believe that whoever would actually say something against that is like either uneducated or crazy or some mixture of the two, because it has indeed had actually total ideological hegemony, total ideological hegemony. I was not happy, but I was not happy for other reasons which have to do with my life and other things. And actually, recently I found an article, a long article that was then published, I think, in the Monthly Review, which questioned, it was very early, 1999. But, you know, it was an unusual article, and I think we all took it as a common sense that it is an ideology that it would win. Now, come to China very briefly. China played it very low then. They did not actually, they were like a sleeper. They were not disturbing things at all. And then of course many people in America now, I think some are self-serving, they say, oh, we really did not bother with China because we thought China would evolve the way that South Korea did and Taiwan It would become richer it would become our partner then they would democratize and they would become like another United States and it would be everything fine Whether they really believe that or not, I don't know. But China was not at the center of attention that it actually became over the last 10 years. There is no doubt about that. People implicitly believed, I think, or wanted to believe that China would become a quote-unquote normal capitalist liberal country. I mean, since we're talking about a normal capitalist liberal country, in quotes, one of the things about China is you always hear that the government is trying to boost consumption, right? Reduce savings, boost consumption. And they seem to struggle with it. And so I'm curious how you square, you know, the growth of the middle class in China and the idea that actually, you know, by certain standards, they're pretty wealthy now with that reluctance to spend? You know, that's a very complicated question, and I'm not a macroeconomist, but I had only a couple of days ago the discussion on Twitter and the sub-stock on that. First, there are the effects. The fact is actually China consumption to GDP ratio is very low. It like about 40 US is 70 India is 50 So clearly it should be at 10 percentage points higher People of course argue that there is compression of wages and of course that state enterprises then have large retained profits. Now, the good use of these retained profits by the state, essentially, is they can actually use enormous amounts of money to direct to certain activities, for example, railroad construction or artificial intelligence, or actually what people don't mention, but China has really done very well in space exploration as well. And this is not like no money at all. And I think the next one would be air production of the airplanes, which they already have started, but they have not broken. And you can use that money also to have political economic influence in Africa and elsewhere. So I think there is a political economy reason why China needs to have, from the point of view of the government, these large amounts of money. And I think it's easier to have the so-called wage compression, or actually lack of sufficient growth of wages, if your wages still grow by 3 or 4 or 5% per year. Now, if your wages were at zero, then it's harder to have a compression. But if you have 5%, fine. In the past, maybe you had 8%, but 5% is good enough. So I think there is a political economy reason behind that in China So I not quite sure if they really what they say they really would like to accomplish that and they cannot because yes for example they could increase social transfer significantly, and people would spend that money. Lots of saving, I think it's not untrue, is due in China to the fact that actually, particularly in rural areas, you don't have social protection. Just real quickly, going back to the question of like, how did China not get swept up in the neoliberal consensus that was like so hegemonic in the 1990s. The other thing that you observe in your book is that even earlier in the century, it never got particularly interested in like the non-aligned movement or the so-called third world countries, etc. Is it just have a history of not being particularly interested in the flavors of the month outside of I actually think that China is an isolationist country, culturally. People talk about the US being isolationist and all that. And of course, there is a trend of politics in the US, which is basically meant to control the Western Hemisphere. So it's not really totally isolationist, but at least not get entanglements in Europe. But China, I think culturally, and I actually recently discussed that with some friends, [30:00] Like all Chinese economists, all Chinese authors essentially writes about China. And my publisher in China says to me, I had several books, three books, I think, published in China. And he says to me, look, we are actually very happy with your books. We sold, I don't know, probably several, I mean, I'm talking about much, several thousand copies. Because he says, you know, Chinese audience, they don't want to read anything which is not about China. So it's hard to sell things that are not talking about China. US, yes, because now there's this competition. But the rest of the world, not that much. So I think there is a certain ideological thing which might go really back centuries that, you know, China thought itself the center of the universe. It's the Middle Kingdom. It's the Middle Kingdom. And everybody comes to the Middle Kingdom and they just, you know, do kowtow and say, well, you guys are great. And maybe we trade the giraffe for a little bit of porcelain and then you go home. So I think that that ideology, I mean, there is still a presence of that, and I think that limits China's influence in terms of soft power. Because if you don't want to study others, and to write books about them and to actually try to fashion what they think about themselves you not going to have soft power Let me just finally give an example I read recently Richard Pipes He was a famous historian of the Soviet Union When he went to the Soviet Union in 1989 he was not published before you know under communist regime. He was greeted there by accident, read that somewhere, like a greatest historian in the history and all that, because his books were so influential in influencing Russians see their own history. So that's what I meant when you're interested in other countries. So you have to have somebody and not only one person, but you have lots of people who would write about other countries and influence what other countries think about themselves. And so long as China does not have that, its own self-power, I think, will be limited. You have a chapter in the book about the elites. So about Joe and me. Yeah. In it, you invent a new word. My Greek is not very good, but homo plautia. Yes, that's correct. Homo plautia. And this is the idea that in America, certainly, like the wealthy have been getting increasingly rich, both through actual labor income. So how much they're being paid to do their jobs, as well as capital income. So dividends or whatever. And this is something new, according to you. So I really curious like how do you explain the rise of homo plutea And I always think you know if you think about someone who making a lot of money from both labor and capitalism you got to talk about Elon Musk right Like, he's sort of the standard bearer. I mean, because the book deals with the top 10 percent of Americans. So this is not a small group, you know, it's like we're talking about we take this is all empirical. We take like the top 10 percent, which is, you know, 30 million people approximately. And what you find there is that there is an increasing percentage of people who are in that top 10% who are also in the top 10% by income from property, cash income from property, and top 10% by income from labor, from your job. And that is new. And now actually there are more studies. This is early on, but now there are people starting exploring whether it existed in 1930s and 20s and so on. But think of the 19th century capitalism. You had big guys like JP Morgan or millions of others, you know, not millions, hundreds, but they were not laborers technically. You know, they made money through entrepreneurship and sort of corporate management of the company. Their income was income from corporations income from capital But here now we have a significant upper middle class that is rich in both ways And I think it I mean we are probably here all belong to that group. And what is interesting then, that's actually what I use is that in the book, I use Daniel Markowitz's work on meritocracy a lot. That class is very specific because in one hand, it is rich capitalists, quote unquote, they really defend private property. In the past, when people spoke of the professional managerial class, they thought these would be people who run state-owned companies or private companies. I use James Burnham, you know, he was saying the capitalists will be dead because managers would run companies regardless, so they would be in charge. And secondly, these people, because they have high labor incomes and they went to fancy schools, they believe they deserve it. And that means that the meritocracy, protection of private property, large capitalism, and hardworking ethos is combined. And I would venture to say this is a new combination in history of capitalism. So we didn't have that. I feel like I'm part of that class. I worked really hard. I went to an elite school. Don't you call it folksy elites, right? I'm sorry? Folksy elites. Yeah, they're folksy elites, because they love to be folksy. [35:00] An interesting thing, I mean, I think sociologically, if you look at the elite that you were seeing, the Jane Austen and so on, they actually wanted to show their elite. What you find in the American elite, and I've spent some time around that elite, is that they really want to show that they're not an elite. They do give you signals that they are, but they do it in a fairly discreet way, and they like many of the things to actually be very folksy. Make no mistake. No, no, I do it. I say like, oh, I went to a public university, the University of Texas. It's just a state school, which happens to be one of the best schools of the nation and incredibly wealthy. But that is how I do that folksy elite move by reminding I'm just a product of public education. And of course, they like to mention that they work hard, which is true. Actually, if you look at the number of hours of work in the US, it's actually increasing with wage per hour. So they do work a lot. So they work a lot. They study it quite a lot They feel they deserve it They have the capital incomes And they transmit all these advantages to their children That they believe actually children deserve that But the problem That was what Markowitz says The problem then actually does create in sort of an elite that has a self that it deserves that And that is to some extent really unpregnable elite because you cannot get rid of them because they have a hard capital income Since the stock market goes down, they would actually have labor income. I love my children. They don't deserve it. They're very spoiled. They didn't do anything to deserve the lifestyle that they have. But you say that because you want to be Foxy elite, you know? No, no, no, no. Actually, like just getting all personal a little bit. Just like, no, it bothers me a little bit because it's like they have all these. No, no, it bothers all of us, but actually we still do it because you're not going to go to work against your kids. No, nobody does. So, I mean, this is a I mean, this is a very good elite as the elites go. But it is an elite nevertheless. Going back to China, when people talk about China. They were human, so we always do this. We reach for historical analogies, right? Maybe the story is that it's kind of like Japan. Maybe the story is that it's kind of like the US after World War II and you pull different strands from it, etc. But I think more and more people are saying no this is a new thing This extraordinary concentration of so much production in one country specifically it is novel And the numbers, setting aside the qualitative differences, you have some distinct metrics, including just the sheer population level, like wealth compounding gains over the last several decades. is it really just a sort of like a new phenomenon that we don't have good analogies for and can you like talk about like just the scale of what we call the rise of china well the scale i can talk about the scale i mean i really i don't know i'm wary of analogies i don't know if there is like analogy with japan as well there is analogy of the soviet union there's analogy with the u.s actually i use the analogy even with the with english with industrial revolution because the growth going back just for a moment on on the elites the growth we actually did the same thing I did this with the co-authors, actually Chinese co-authors. We did 5% top of Chinese urban population. And this is their elite. And what you see in that elite, 1988, where the first data begin, is that two-thirds, broadly, two-thirds of the income of the elite comes from state-owned enterprises, government jobs, and jobs in the Communist Party Okay Well go today to 2018 and now we have a date for 2023 It the reversal Two of total income from the elite in the elite for the elite comes from private sector jobs, professional jobs in private companies, and one-third from state-owned enterprises, Communist Party, and government. So, that was why I made the comparison with the UK, because the number of so-called, you can call it capitalists, and they are called actually, In Chinese official terminology, they are called individual owners and larger owners, not capitalists, but owners. When we look at the data that were done by Bob Allen, English economic historian, for the growth of the capitalist class in England between 1688 and, I suppose, 1900, we see exactly the same thing, but over 150 years. There is more capitalists. There were a small number in the beginning. then they became much larger number, and their relative income compared to our landlords originally was much lower and then starts catching up. So what I call that extensive and intensive increase of capitalists. And in China, it took 40 years for that, and the UK took 150. So the change in China is just at the level that we have not historically seen. So in that sense, I talk [40:00] I agree with you. It is something that in terms of size of the population and the speed, we do not have an equivalent case. 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Go to public.com slash market and fund your account in five minutes or less. That's public.com slash market. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Complete disclosures available at public slash disclosures Quick one before you jump back in You listening for ways to help teams move faster make sharper decisions and turn scattered context into work they can use ChatGPT for Business can help ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codecs in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more. I mean, there are risks that come with the rise of the sort of national market liberalism. And you talk about the potential for great power conflicts, for war, basically, for more income inequality, plutocracy, all that stuff. Can you envision, is there any scenario where you get like a relatively good equilibrium? Harmony. Yeah. Like, I mean, could this type of market liberalism live in peace with itself, I guess? Okay. Let me put the other hat now, the optimistic hat. You know, the chapter two in the book deals with precisely that question. That was a question which I think is really so relevant It says what did economists and political scientists think about the relationship between openness slash globalization and war and peace And then you have people from Montesquieu who actually believe that trade leads immediately to peace because we are both trying to actually sell our goods. We have to be nice to each other and stuff like that. I remember that. And, of course, the other extreme is John Hobson with imperialism in 1902, and then Russell Luxembourg and Lenin. who actually, and Schumpeter, who believe that when you have a large powers, they fight for markets, companies fight for markets, but because they need markets, control of the labor force in foreign countries and elsewhere, they basically take the state to play that military role that they need, which is actually what we see today. It's basically large-scale companies need the support of the state if they want really to do jobs elsewhere. And that was really sort of a negative, more belligerent sort of variant of that view. But if I want to be optimistic, I think, I mean, let's go concretely to the questions today. If we could stop and find a ceasefire and a solution of the war in Ukraine and Russia, [45:00] least, Iran and the United States and Israel, I think that we would then at least eliminate the possibility of a huge war, which then, of course, if you have a huge war, all the chips are off. You know, you have no idea what will happen. But at least then we could start, I think, redesigning economic system, having, as people have said, a new Bretton Woods and having a solution where actually China would have greater influence and not only China, India as well. Europe definitely much less because Europe has the influence in these organizations that reflected 1945, when obviously Europe was basically still colonial powers, and countries like Indonesia, Brazil, and so on. So that would be the optimistic scenario. Stop the wars and renegotiate international economic relations. You were in Paris recently. How are Europeans' elites, how are they living with themselves having come around to Trump's view on China? That must drive them crazy, right? They must create this terrible psychic toll on them to have to agree with Donald Trump on something. But you hear it all the time from Mertz Macron etc How are they digested this I don think it was that hard because Germany definitely has been affected by China in electric vehicles Yeah, no, no. The math is clear. They side now with Trump because they do have similar problems. I don't really know European elites, but what I find strange about Europe, I'm not very optimistic on Europe for many reasons. But you know, what I find strange is that Europe really needed in order to, needs actually, in order to prosper two elements. It first needs cheap energy, which was really fueling European growth in the last 40 years or 50 years. But then they decided because of the war with Russia and Ukraine to just cut off Russian energy and to buy much more expensive American energy. You'll say, well, that's kind of bizarre, but okay, let's do it. Then it's also the continent with a decline in population And the only way to stop that decline in population Is to have immigration But then they say, and it's increasing now They don't want immigration at all You have maybe Spain that is an outlier That is in favor of immigration But nobody else does If you look at Nordic countries They won't let them in They don let them in yeah In Spain they liberal towards Latin American immigration Yes but they liberal immigration in general And actually Sanchez government is totally at odds with everybody else on that on immigration And so they need people, but they don't want people. They need cheap energy, but they decided to cut off the energy. And then China shock comes, especially to Germany. So they are in, I think, different situation. And in such a situation, they have found some sympathy for Trump. But there may be some feigned sympathy as well, because they treat, I think, actually, many people treat Trump like a tiger in a cage. You're with the tiger there, and you just want to survive until the tiger is gone, you know? So you just please the tiger and say, OK, you know, you big tiger, you are great, but you don't really believe that. So there is that part as well, I think. Say more about your recent trip to China. And I assume you met some Chinese elites over there and talked to them. It was really about economic history. And it was super interesting because the conferences that I went to, they were in three from Beijing, Shanghai, and then also one in a smaller city, Guangzhou province, which is in the south, very sort of tropical. We talked about the great divergence And that was why that was a topic which is very popular among historians Why is that the Industrial Revolution took place in England and not in China If you look at 1750 the two countries are at a similar level of development China is big, has many technological innovations. You know, they have a book of technological innovations over 2,000 years and so on. So the story, the conference was about that. But then because of my book is really now the great convergence of China, then, of course, that was interesting because it is, to some extent, a pound down of what happened before. And it is interesting to speak, obviously, to many people. These are people at universities and so on. As I was saying before, many people have a little bit of a disbelief that they are the rich country. I was going to ask, do you get any pushback on the convergence thesis or not really? Not really. But for example, what I did get is that when I was given that presentation for a while in China, I talked about global inequality. And I say between 1990 and actually until probably until several years ago, China was a sort of automatic reducer to global inequality because it's a big country. It was still relatively poor and they grow faster and global inequality goes down. And then I say, but that's no longer the case. Today, China's high growth is slightly inequality increasing at the world level because China then becomes [50:00] further apart from poor countries like Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, and so on, gets closer to the US, but the first element is stronger than the second. So when I say to them, that was interesting, young people especially, when I say to them Chinese growth today is globally inequality increasing, they almost took it like it's an insult. So you're telling us we should not grow. I said, no, guys, this is an arithmetical thing. It is simply that your country has become too rich now, arithmetically, if you grow at 8%, it's going to increase global inequality. Maybe you should redistribute within China, but I'm not talking about that one. But what I find interesting is that people are still real, as I was saying before, they have a little bit of problem getting adjusted to the fact that they are now not a very rich country, but they have joined the club, around the club of the rich countries. That's it. Do you think that this China anxiety that so prevalent in the US Europe maybe Japan and Korea etc do you think it will spread further and become a thing in the actual poorer parts of the world who presumably have industrial ambitions of their own I mean Brazil has a plane maker They presumably the COMEC is going to compete with Embraer et cetera Like could China find itself in a situation in which, there was recently a story, Malaysia, specifically limiting the number of imports of low-end Chinese EVs. Like, could what, okay, it started in the US with Trump, spread to Europe over the last several years, could it spread further? It could, but you know, let me just say that's actually what my book is good. This is national market liberal. It's actually liberalism limited to the national market. So we really now totally think in terms like what are we doing to do? Is Malaysia going to stop these goods? Is Brazil going to stop other goods? There was recently an article, I think in Foreign Affairs by Subramanian and another author, mostly from the Indian perspective, but essentially saying, If China is better in high-end manufacturing and middle-level manufacturing, then countries that would normally go into middle-level manufacturing actually would be also spaced out by China. But then I really have problem with the target because I'm thinking, well, we are all kvetching here because China is too efficient and too good That doesn make sense If China is efficient and too good in producing X Y and Z let them be producing X Y and Z Why do we complain about this Well, okay, I have a thought why we might want to complain about this. So clearly, we all enjoy every day the benefits of efficient Chinese production, and we have affordable computers and affordable phones and lots of other things and inexpensive toys, etc. One reason we might not love that is that if you can't build a car, if you can't build – you can't build a tank ultimately, right? Dual-use technologies, you lose that manufacturing muscle. I understand that. You lose that manufacturing muscle for commercial goods, and then you no longer have the muscle for military. And if you can't do that, as Alexander Hamilton said, you don't have sovereignty as a nation. This is like – great. We all love these benefits. I love cheap things as much as anyone. But like this, when I think about the world order, if no country can like actually protect itself militarily because they've lost that has become totally hollowed out. Isn't that a reason to be anxious? No, no, there is a reason. But then you go to chapter two and you say well I agree with Hobson Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg Openness is war That means basically we cannot have ideologically an openness that is actually open without thinking about conflict And I think it's legitimate stuff because, of course, conflict has been with us for so long. But that poses the question of what we started at with your belief and my own belief, and I think your belief in the 1990s, That all these contradictions are gone, that there was neoliberalism, it is ruling everything, there will be no conflict, that we don't have to think about that. And if somebody produces X, Y, and Z, that's excellent, and so on. Joe and I both did international relations degrees in the early 2000s. We are well aware of this environment. And that actually, I agree with the real world is such as you described it. But that simply means that the world that we believed in 1990 was not the real world. That was a fantasy world. And that means that that ideology which underpinned that fantasy world was a fantasy ideology. So I understand from the point of view of military technology and all of that, that of course countries cannot simply, particularly large, big powers. Small countries, it doesn't really matter. For big powers, it does matter, because then if big powers need helicopters and they cannot produce helicopters because they don't have any industrial capacity, yes, they are not going to have [55:00] have helicopters and that would be it as we see now with drones and so on. So I agree from the point of view of national security. Yes, one has to be not concerned about China because I hate China bashing, but to be concerned about other countries in general, you know, because everybody who is your ally might not become your ally tomorrow. You never know. So in that sense, yes, I agree with Alexander Hamilton. But as I said, then we are really in a different world from the world of unimpeded free trade where basically you don't believe that there are significant military considerations. I would not say zero, but not significant. Most of your work famously focuses on inequality and distributional effects and that sort of thing. When you look at the tools of, again, this national market liberalism, we think about sanctions or tariffs, obviously, industrial policy, things like that. Do you have a preferred tool that would come with some distributional benefits, rather than just shuffling rents between countries? When it comes to global income inequality and I been working on that as you know for many years the ironic stuff about that is if you want to reduce global income inequality between individuals you really have to worry about growth Because the best way to reduce, and practically the only way at the global level, is high growth rates of poor countries. And that's why Africa, in that point of view, and that's what I was telling the Chinese students when they were surprised that China is no longer, I say to them, The key point now is India's growth and especially Africa. Because Africa, you have five large countries, around 100 million people, actually 220 is Nigeria, but others are about 100 million. So we are talking there about these five or six countries with the 1 billion people and growing the only part of the world which is growing at 2% annually in terms of population. So that really is going to define 21st century. Are we going to have a reduction in global inequality? or not. If Africa doesn't catch up, we will have another increase in global inequality. So when it comes to global inequality, you really have to worry about growth. When it comes to inequality within nation state, then of course the situation is different. You have a host of policies that are quite well known You know education I think is crucially important in my opinion And you know I not a huge fan of not slapping a tax on anything You know some people immediately just want to tax everything But I do actually believe that there is a case for taxing extraordinary wealth And I've called it in my sub-stack, I called it a pedagogical tax. And I tell you why it is pedagogical, because you have to tell people with extraordinary wealth, you are not going to rule us. I don't care how many billions you have. You're not going to rule us. And in order for you not to be able to rule us, I'm going to have an extortionary tax on you every year. And this is pedagogical tax. That was Zupan is actually calling for that. Piketty is calling for even stronger tax. I don't really have a view whether it should be 2%, 20% of that. But I think that should be a pedagogical tax. There's one line in your book I didn't really like. Or I didn't get it. There may be more lines. I didn't. Maybe I didn't get it. I didn't like it. There are many things. So page 141 says, It is in this context that we should look at the politics of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, and Vladimir Putin. Their policies try to stem or control the rise to complete economic and political dominance of the money elites. This strikes me with Trump in particular as a thing I see post like to say on Twitter and they fantasize that he sort of like secretly I don know secretly heterodox economics or something like that When I look at the actual administration, I see a administration that is very orthodox when it comes to tax cuts on the rich. I see an administration that has invited big business leaders into the operations of government at a degree that's sort of unparalleled. In what sense is it defensible to put Trump in this category? It's a very good question because it raises also the issue that I address by talking about national market liberalism. I actually put Trump in a category of people domestically that pursues and continues and actually in some sense deepens the policies of neoliberalism domestically. But what I wanted to say here, maybe it was not clear, but what I wanted to say is they came to power on the basis of support that came from parts of the population that were resentful about the people who, the winners of the neoliberal globalization. For the US, I don't need to expand on all that. People who voted for Trump, it has been studied, you know, in extents so much more than I know. And, but the fact is, [60:00] 77 million people actually voted for him, and I think essentially voted because they were unhappy with what they have seen. They were expecting much more. They got much less. So I think in that sense, he fashioned himself as somebody who is fighting the elites. Of course, in reality, he's not. Actually, he is not only part of the elite. He has, as you said, brought them all in, and he does follow very conservative policies when it comes to taxes. Actually, of course, taxing capital less than labor, taxing top less, I mean, not less, but actually not increasing the tax rates and so on. So I agree. So what I wanted to say there, maybe it was not clear, the reasons for them coming to power was that a significant section of the population was unhappy with neoliberal globalization. And I think in the case, interesting case is Xi Jinping for me, Putin as well. But Xi Jinping, what is interesting is I think he came and he actually explicitly said that he doesn't want rich people to enter the decision making bodies of the Communist Party. It's the pedagogical point you made. Yeah, pedagogical. He says to the rich people as China historically had a case merchants yes you get rich do extremely well but don come here and tell us what we should be doing We decide and you get rich And I think actually under Jiang Zemin he had this policy of the three represents which ideologically justified the influence of the rich people in the Communist Party. And I think it's very clear that with Xi Jinping, there is a purge of such people out. So they can be still rich. I heard the story. Maybe it's apocryphal. You guys must know that probably much better than I. But I was told when Jack Ma was told that he is not going to have his IPO, the phone call was made by the mid-level official in the Ministry of Finance. And things don't happen by accident in China. That was the message. You don't treat with the Ministry of Finance. You treat with the mid-level official. That's your level. Bronco Milanovic, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Very fun conversation. Really appreciate you taking your time. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It was really fun. I actually love these conversations that are unscripted. Yeah, that's how we like to do it. Let's just, you know, just a little tour around the world. But no, that was great. Thank you so much. Up until prepping for this episode I had just like totally forgotten about the elephant chart and how that was like man that must have been in a million slide presentations in like 2015 and 2014 etc Joe? Yes? Can I be in the room when you tell your children that they're not getting an inheritance because you need to prove your folksy credentials? Well, I assume they, you know, if I'm fortunate enough to have a little bit left over that they'll get some inheritance. But my daughter recently, like, I don't know if it was like from a TV show or a friend. I don't know. She learned the term trust fund recently. And she's like, oh, do I get a trust fund? And I was like, absolutely not. That is not something in your future. And then she was like disappointed. And I was like, no, no, like you have to understand, no, even if no one respects those people. This is why you don't want money. Yeah. It's like, no, no, no one respects those people, et cetera. So she is learning about the world of, you know, so far I've told her she'll inherit something. I hope I hope I have a little cash left over. She'll not be getting a trust fund. Anyway, that was a fascinating conversation. Yeah And I do think this is like the big story of our time Yeah 100 It the sort of turning away from globalization and bringing everything more inwards I do think it very interesting and perhaps telling that so much of the policy you know we're talking about people who are upset because they're not getting as wealthy as they once could have been, basically. And I think it's interesting and telling that the policy solutions to that are all very much focused outward things like tariffs and things like that rather than anything focused domestically. So domestically, you still get market liberalism. Yeah. No, I think that's interesting. You know, I remember like, again, going back to the 2010s and I was, you know, you see that elephant chart. What the elephant chart showed was that like on a global scale, the new middle class was coming from Asia, China, Asia in general, more broadly, which he talks about in the book. But on the flip side, it's like, okay, so some person who's sort of like in the middle in Italy, right? Like they're pretty wealthy by global standards. If their status in the globe goes down because suddenly a lot more people are wealthy in China and Korea and Vietnam, et cetera. I'm like, I don't really see how that hurts them. Right. It was interesting. I like, [65:00] World Cup ticket example is sort of a symptom of this phenomenon. There aren't that many things that are like the World Cup where the existence of wealthy people elsewhere actually diminishes your relative. You know, you do see a few things like this. People observe that the Disney vacation is not as available to a median household the way it would have been in the 70s or 80s because there are just so many more people who are – Right. It's also a competitive thing in the same way as the World Cup. I am also a little bit skeptical of the sort of basic economics claim that, say, the rise of Donald Trump or the success, I would say, electorally of Donald Trump is about this like aggrieved. There is like this sort of like, of course, there's this anti-elite, maybe anti-liberal elite tinge to it. But another big part of it, his success in 2016 was build the wall. Right. Which is like a very different thing. It's about keeping other people out. There very little to do with sort of like you know the sort of like success of wealthy people in the United States You not building a wall to keep out Mexican transformers It was a huge part of the success in 2016 And I would say 2024 with sort of the perception or the sort of liberal border policies of the Biden administration. So I think like it's very people like to say, oh, it's like there's this middle class and they look at the elite. No, a big part of Trump's success specifically clearly has to do with immigration, which is a different story and perceived cultural change rather than inequities of capitalism or whatever. All right. Shall we leave it there? Sure. Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway. And I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at The Stalwart. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, Dashiell Bennett at Dashbot, Kale Brooks at Kale Brooks. and Kevin Lozano at Kevin Lloyd Lozano. And for more Odd Lots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Odd Lots, where we have a daily newsletter and all of our episodes. And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our Discord, discord.gg slash Odd Lots. 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