Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future (Ep. 95)

At the local level, there were efforts, city by city, but there were no comprehensive national lockdowns.

在地方层面，各个城市都在做出努力，但没有实施全面的全国封锁。

In fact, if you study the economic history record, the archive of that period, the policy decision-making in, say, the Weimar Republic, which I’ve spent some time on — all the minutes of the Versailles Peace Conference — the flu barely figures.

事实上，如果你研究经济史记录、那个时期的档案、政策决策，比如我花了一些时间研究的魏玛共和国——“凡尔赛和会的所有会议记录”——“流感几乎不存在。

It figures in a sense that occasionally a prominent person will get sick, famously President Wilson.

从某种意义上说，这表明一位杰出人物偶尔会生病，比如著名的威尔逊总统。

The idea of a kind of comprehensive lockdown as part of a public health response, as far as I’m aware — and of course, this has taken us all aback and has caused us to reflect on what we might have missed in the historical record — I don’t remember it arising anywhere as an option.

据我所知，作为公共卫生应对措施一部分的全面封锁的想法 ——当然，这让我们所有人都大吃一惊，并促使我们反思我们可能在历史记录中错过了什么 ——我不记得它作为一种选择出现在任何地方。

And we know that the consequences were, of course, dramatic in terms of the loss of life, particularly in what was then the imperial world; the colonies, so-called, in Africa and India.

我们知道，就生命损失而言，其后果当然是巨大的，特别是在当时的帝国世界；非洲和印度的所谓殖民地。

We’re much more affluent than we were then by an extraordinary .

我们比当时富裕得多。

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。

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It’s very difficult to exaggerate in order of magnitude, broadly speaking, in terms of per capita income.

从广义上讲，就人均收入而言，很难夸大其数量级。

And we’ve chosen a very high-cost route for dealing with the epidemic this time.

而我们这次应对疫情，选择了一条成本非常高的路线。

It’s also a period of revolution in much of Europe, which causes huge disruption as well.

这也是欧洲大部分地区的革命时期，也造成了巨大的破坏。

So if there was a V-shaped recovery there, it was a V-shape that was recovering from many different forces.

因此，如果存在 V 形复苏，那也是从多种不同力量中恢复的 V 形。

Then, of course, there’s the savage deflation of 1920–1921, which also hit the global economy and the aftermath of the war and the flu.

当然，还有 1920 年至 1921 年的严重通货紧缩，这也打击了全球经济以及战争和流感的后果。

This time round, I’m definitely in the swoosh camp, modified swoosh.

这一次，我绝对属于 Swoosh 阵营，改良过的 Swoosh。

I don’t, frankly, have a strong set of priors about what a recovery from a collective, simultaneous shutdown of this scale looks like.

坦率地说，对于从如此规模的集体、同时关闭中恢复过来是什么样子，我没有一套强有力的先验知识。

And I am quite suspicious of the comparisons which treat China as a national aggregate and then say, “Well, that’s our future.” Because even allowing for the exaggerations of the regime’s propaganda there, they do seem to have contained the acute virus pandemic there in one particular province.

我对将中国视为一个国家整体然后说“好吧，这就是我们的未来”的比较表示怀疑。因为即使考虑到该政权在那里的宣传夸大其辞，他们似乎确实在某个特定省份遏制了严重的病毒大流行。

So we have to be quite careful about making comparisons with the US or Europe where we’ve had multiple Wuhan-style outbreaks.

因此，我们必须非常小心地与美国或欧洲进行比较，这些国家已经爆发了多次武汉式的疫情。

On a potential financial crises in China and the West

关于中国和西方潜在的金融危机

Whether it’s systemic in the Chinese context is a different question.

在中国的背景下它是否具有系统性是另一个问题。

Whether the collapse in that firm by itself would have a large enough ripple effect is an open question.

该公司的倒闭本身是否会产生足够大的连锁反应是一个悬而未决的问题。

The shadow banking system, in general, in China is a huge worry.

总体而言，中国的影子银行体系是一个巨大的担忧。

These are the banks which operate outside the mortgage lenders of various types, but also various types of lenders that support local governments.

这些银行是在各种类型的抵押贷款机构之外运营的银行，也是支持地方政府的各种类型的贷款机构。

Then there is the rather horrifying experience of 2015–2016, which is easily underestimated in the West.

然后是2015-2016年相当可怕的经历，这在西方很容易被低估。

We were distracted by a variety of other issues at that point.

当时我们被各种其他问题分散了注意力。

But China went through a really dangerous-looking foreign exchange run in ’15–’16, lost about a trillion dollars’ worth of reserves, which is large even for the Chinese to absorb.

但中国在15年至16年期间经历了一场看起来非常危险的外汇挤兑，损失了价值约一万亿美元的储备，这对于中国人来说也是巨大的吸收。

And that’s another model of what a shock might look like, a financial shock.

这是冲击的另一种模型，即金融冲击。

Mercifully being spared that so far this time around, it would be very bad news for the emerging market economies which are closely coupled to China.

幸运的是，这一次到目前为止，对于与中国关系密切的新兴市场经济体来说将是一个非常坏的消息。

And I think that’s really — in terms of managing the financial crisis as opposed to the real economic recession, which is coming our way — that’s probably the thing that Jay Powell, and central bankers in Europe as well, are most worried about.

我认为这确实是“在管理金融危机而不是真正的经济衰退方面，后者正在向我们袭来”，这可能是杰伊·鲍威尔和欧洲央行行长最担心的事情。

Are there actors out there that could be forced into various types of fire sale, which would then destabilize asset prices?

是否有参与者可能被迫进行各种类型的甩卖，从而破坏资产价格的稳定？

I don’t think necessarily there’s one number this time round.

我认为这一次不一定有一个数字。

One of the things I think they’re dealing with is that this isn’t a bank-centered financial crisis.

我认为他们正在处理的一件事是，这不是一场以银行为中心的金融危机。

This is — as Robin Wigglesworth once put it in the Financial Times, and he was quoting somebody he’d interviewed — that this was a financial market crisis, so it’s affecting lots of different markets for credit rather than the balance sheets of individual banks.

正如罗宾·维格尔斯沃思（Robin Wigglesworth）曾在《金融时报》上所说，他引用了他采访过的某人的话说，这是一场金融市场危机，因此它影响的是许多不同的信贷市场，而不是单个银行的资产负债表。

I think in ’08, we would have known.

我想在 08 年，我们就知道了。

We were extremely concerned about Citigroup.

我们非常担心花旗集团。

That might have been the mantra by December.

到了十二月，这可能已经成为口头禅。

This time around, I think the risk is more diffuse.

这一次，我认为风险更加分散。

It’s not obvious to me right now that the balance sheets of the core group of systemically important largest US banks are vulnerable to anywhere near the same extent as they were in ’08 anyway.

目前我还不清楚，具有系统重要性的美国大型银行核心集团的资产负债表是否容易受到与 08 年相同程度的影响。

But absolutely, you’re right.

但绝对，你是对的。

If this turns into a protracted, extended, real economic recession, if this is a very slow recovery, then feeding up from the bottom by way of households and companies’ inabilities to service that, you would expect that kind of shock to develop.

如果这变成了一场持久的、长期的、真正的经济衰退，如果这是一次非常缓慢的复苏，然后由于家庭和公司无力应对这种情况而从底部加剧，你会预计会出现这种冲击。

The government debt market is clearly one of the foundations of financial stability.

政府债务市场显然是金融稳定的基础之一。

So far, overall, once we came out of those two really dangerous weeks in the second and third week of March, perhaps not surprisingly given the scale of asset purchases by the central banks, the normal set of relationships between equity markets and bond markets seems to have been restored.

到目前为止，总体而言，一旦我们走出了 3 月第二周和第三周这两个真正危险的周，考虑到央行资产购买规模，也许这并不奇怪，股票市场和债券市场之间的正常关系似乎已经恢复。

There seems to be a safety function being performed by government debt markets, which must be reassuring.

政府债务市场似乎正在发挥安全功能，这一定令人放心。

If that were to become destabilized, that would set off warning lights flashing, I think.

我认为，如果这种情况变得不稳定，就会引发警告灯闪烁。

We’ve seen quite substantial deleveraging after ’08 in the American household sector, and you would expect business confidence to be shot in lower levels of investment.

我们看到 08 年之后美国家庭部门出现了相当大的去杠杆化，你会预计商业信心会因投资水平下降而受到打击。

That wouldn’t suggest that general macroeconomic circumstance, which would lead to inflation.

这并不表明总体宏观经济环境会导致通货膨胀。

On the other hand, the monetization is massive.

另一方面，货币化是巨大的。

Frankly, if we could have inflation of 4 percent or 5 percent, in many ways, that would solve a lot of our problems because it would act as a tax on nominal assets.

坦率地说，如果我们的通货膨胀率能够达到 4% 或 5%，那么在很多方面，这将解决我们的很多问题，因为它相当于对名义资产征税。

And it’s one of the ways, historically, in which we have dealt with the sort of debt burden that we’re running up right now.

从历史上看，这是我们处理目前债务负担的方式之一。

You look at the history of the ’50s and ’60s — rapid nominal GDP growth, of which a fraction was inflation, was a key element in the formula for managing post–World War II debt.

回顾一下 50 年代和 60 年代的历史，名义 GDP 的快速增长（其中一部分是通货膨胀）是二战后债务管理公式中的一个关键要素。

In other words, prices actually do respond to monetary shocks, and that has a social underpinning.

换句话说，价格实际上确实会对货币冲击做出反应，并且这是有社会基础的。

For me, one of the reasons I’m skeptical about a strong inflation scenario is it’s not obvious to me that we have, as it were, the sociological guts that would — I don’t mean like bravery — I mean in the sense the underpinnings of a wage price spiral, which I think would be crucial to drive the kind of inflation that you’re talking about if we were to be in 15 percent and 20 percent.

对我来说，我对强劲通胀情景持怀疑态度的原因之一是，对我来说，我们并不明显地拥有这样的社会学勇气——“我不是说勇敢”——“我的意思是工资价格螺旋的基础，我认为如果我们处于15%和20%的水平，这对于推动你所说的那种通胀至关重要。”

It seems to me that you would need the mechanics of a wage price spiral and indexation of various types to be actually operating.

在我看来，你需要工资价格螺旋和各种类型的指数化机制才能实际运作。

And we stripped most of that out in a highly conflictual way, really, from the Volcker shock onwards if not before, through to the late 1980s.

事实上，我们以一种高度冲突的方式剥离了大部分内容，从沃尔克冲击开始，甚至更早，一直到 20 世纪 80 年代末。

And in the absence of that, it’s difficult for me to see the scenario in which we head towards spiraling inflation of the type you’re talking about.

如果没有这一点，我很难想象我们会走向你所说的那种螺旋式通货膨胀。

Of course, it’s an endogenous process.

当然，这是一个内生过程。

It’s much more attractive to join a trade union when you actually need to defend your wages against nominal price shocks.

当您确实需要保护自己的工资免受名义价格冲击时，加入工会更有吸引力。

So that might be a mechanism that would work.

所以这可能是一种有效的机制。

I find it difficult to imagine that being something that happens in 2021 or 2022.

我很难想象这会发生在 2021 年或 2022 年。

He coined this phrase saying there’s not one emerging market crisis; there are several because there’s a range of different pressures which are acting on them, starting with their relative exposure to the medical crisis, which we mustn’t forget is the fundamental driver here.

他创造了这句话，说不存在一场新兴市场危机，而是一场危机。有几个是因为有一系列不同的压力作用在他们身上，首先是他们相对容易受到医疗危机的影响，我们不能忘记这是这里的根本驱动因素。

If you use all of those different criteria, you can pick out a series of relatively vulnerable countries.

如果您使用所有这些不同的标准，您可以挑选出一系列相对脆弱的国家。

South Africa, I think, is top of most people’s lists — terrible health risks because of the large 7 million-plus people living with HIV, who, we imagine, are probably extremely vulnerable to COVID-19; long-standing huge unemployment problem; growth below population growth for a long time; just been down-rated to junk for its sovereign bonds.

我认为，南非在大多数人的名单中名列前茅 ——由于有 700 多万艾滋病毒感染者，他们面临着可怕的健康风险，我们认为，他们很可能极易感染 COVID-19；长期存在的巨大失业问题；增长长期低于人口增长；其主权债券刚刚被下调至垃圾级。

Rand has suffered a huge collapse, which, in due course, might generate export growth.

兰特遭受了巨大的崩溃，这在适当的时候可能会带来出口增长。

But anyway, that’s a candidate.

但无论如何，那是一个候选人。

Algeria I worry about as a European — 85 percent dependent on oil and gas exports, very fragile socially and politically.

作为一个欧洲人，我担心阿尔及利亚——85％依赖石油和天然气出口，其社会和政治非常脆弱。

Turkey is high on most people’s lists, not because it’s a desperately poor country but because of the political risk.

土耳其在大多数人的名单中名列前茅，不是因为它是一个极度贫穷的国家，而是因为政治风险。

Erdoğan has made clear that he won’t avail himself of IMF support despite the fact that the credit default swaps on Turkish debt have blown out to the same extent as South Africa’s have.

埃尔多安已明确表示，他不会利用国际货币基金组织的支持，尽管土耳其债务的信用违约掉期已经达到了与南非相同的程度。

That will be a portfolio of high-risk places.

那将是一个高风险地方的投资组合。

And I think North Americans should be profoundly concerned about the situation in Mexico, which has suffered a huge shock to the exchange rate.

而且我认为北美人应该深切关注墨西哥的局势，该国汇率遭受了巨大冲击。

Pemex is an accident waiting to happen.

Pemex 是一场等待发生的事故。

It’s hugely politically salient for the current administration because they have bold ambitions for national oil.

对于现任政府来说，这在政治上非常重要，因为他们对国家石油有着大胆的野心。

We’ve seen how hard the Mexicans negotiated over OPEC.

我们已经看到墨西哥人就欧佩克问题进行了多么艰难的谈判。

And it’s our neighbor.

这是我们的邻居。

And tens of millions of people living in the United States — obviously, their lives are directly entangled with Mexico.

而生活在美国的数以千万计的人——显然，他们的生活与墨西哥直接纠缠在一起。

I think that would be very high on my list if somebody in Treasury is monitoring that situation very closely.

我认为，如果财政部有人非常密切地监视这一情况，那么这将是我的清单上的非常重要的事情。

On Keynes

论凯恩斯

And there is no doubt at all that the front-loading of the demands, which is very understandable from the point of view of the financial needs of the French in particular, caused a huge bottleneck, if you like, early on in the history of the Weimar Republic when it was most fragile.

毫无疑问，提前提出的要求，特别是从法国人的金融需求的角度来看，这是可以理解的，如果你愿意的话，在魏玛共和国历史的早期，当它最脆弱的时候，它造成了一个巨大的瓶颈。

And that’s, as it were, the moment when I think the critique is most valid.

可以说，这就是我认为批评最有效的时刻。

And that’s why, for me, really, the hidden agenda of the economic consequences of the peace is an appeal, to the Brits but above all to the Americans, for large-scale debt concessions, on which one could only agree with Keynes that this was, in fact, absolutely critical, that market economies have unspoken fundamental political preconditions, which, in the aftermath of the massive war, have been disrupted.

这就是为什么，对我来说，和平的经济后果的隐藏议程实际上是呼吁英国人，尤其是美国人，要求大规模的债务减让，在这一点上，人们只能同意凯恩斯的观点，即事实上，这是绝对关键的，市场经济有不言而喻的基本政治先决条件，而在大规模战争之后，这些先决条件已被破坏。

And what you do not want to do is to port, if you like, the bitterness and the antagonism of politicized intergovernmental debt into the postwar period.

如果你愿意的话，你也不想把政治化政府间债务的痛苦和对抗带入战后时期。

Or, if you’re going to do that, you need to build a very, very solid framework around it.

或者，如果你打算这样做，你需要围绕它构建一个非常非常坚实的框架。

But to imagine, as the decision makers in the twenties did, that you could combine a rapid return to essentially a sort of Edwardian free-market model of capital flows and entangle that with politicized public debt — that was a tragic mistake.

但想象一下，就像二十年代的决策者所做的那样，你可以将资本流动的快速回归本质上是一种爱德华时代的自由市场模型结合起来，并将其与政治化的公共债务纠缠在一起——那就是一个悲剧性的错误。

What he’s not saying in The Economic Consequences of the Peace is what he said in many memos before he published that book, which is that America is key to the entire problem.

他在《和平的经济后果》中没有说的是他在出版该书之前在许多备忘录中所说的话，即美国是整个问题的关键。

He was rejected at Versailles, and he knew that the basic anchor of the reasonableness of his position had been shot down and removed by the Wilson administration.

他在凡尔赛遭到拒绝，他知道他的立场合理性的基本支柱已被威尔逊政府击落和移除。

So the book itself is, as it were, the fragment that emerges that he can place in the public realm.

因此，可以说，这本书本身就是他可以放置在公共领域的片段。

But despite the personal caricature of Wilson that he delivers in the book, which is, of course, very damning, he doesn’t, in fact, go very far in his criticism of the US administration at that moment.

但尽管他在书中对威尔逊进行了个人讽刺，这当然是非常可恶的，但事实上，他当时对美国政府的批评并没有走得太远。

So he’s playing political games.

所以他在玩政治游戏。

Was there a better alternative to the managed, dirty floating exchange rates of the 1920s?

除了 20 年代有管理的、肮脏的浮动汇率之外，还有更好的替代方案吗？

Because at the time, that was thought to have not been working well.

因为当时人们认为这种做法效果不佳。

The British revaluation of 1926 was a deflationary disaster.

1926 年英国的货币重估是一场通货紧缩灾难。

So what should we have done then with the international monetary order?

那么我们应该如何对待国际货币秩序呢？

And that’s, in a sense, for me, the problem also with some of Keynes’s critique of the gold standard restoration, is that he’s just refusing what is evidently the rationale behind the position, say, of the British government, which returns to gold at the prewar parity.

从某种意义上说，对我来说，凯恩斯对金本位恢复的一些批评的问题也在于，他只是拒绝了英国政府以战前平价回归黄金的立场背后的明显理由。

And the purpose of doing that is clearly to secure the high rating or the high standing of British sovereign debt.

这样做的目的显然是为了确保英国主权债务的高评级或良好信誉。

And that is the priority of the people making that decision.

这是做出该决定的人的首要任务。

Keynes says it’s not optimal for employment.

凯恩斯表示，这对于就业来说并不是最佳选择。

He’s right.

他是对的。

To lower the exchange rate of the pound would have been better.

降低英镑汇率会更好。

But if your aim of the game is basically to ensure that people who lent the British government money in 1914 don’t do much worse than people who lent the American government money during World War I, then, of course, the parity with the dollar has — the aim of the game is to restore it to its prewar level, and that is judged by the political elite of the 1920s in Britain to be the key criteria.

但如果你的游戏目标基本上是确保 1914 年借给英国政府钱的人不会比第一次世界大战期间借给美国政府钱的人做得更差，那么，当然，与美元的平价已经——游戏的目标是恢复到战前的水平，而这被 1920 年代英国政治精英认为是关键标准。

And Keynes is adducing, as it were, “Well, in fact, if you cared about unemployment, then, of course, you would have a lower exchange rate,” which everyone can agree with; it just wasn’t the priority because the other domestic priority of the group that is governing Britain in the 1920s is to restore class balance.

凯恩斯可以说是在引述，“好吧，事实上，如果你关心失业问题，那么，当然，你的汇率就会更低”，这是每个人都同意的。这并不是当务之急，因为 1920 年代统治英国的集团的另一个国内优先事项是恢复阶级平衡。

In the aftermath of World War I, apart from the flu, the thing that was going on that was really on everyone’s mind is the most dramatic period of class struggle in West European history.

第一次世界大战结束后，除了流感之外，每个人真正关心的事情是西欧历史上最戏剧性的阶级斗争时期。

It’s the last moment of genuine revolutionary possibility in most countries.

对于大多数国家来说，这是真正革命可能性的最后时刻。

Britain, in particular, faced a huge upsurge of labor militancy.

尤其是英国，面临着劳工斗争的巨大高潮。

And the restoration of the gold standard is part of a strategy of deflation, which is about undercutting the bargaining power of the British trade union movement, which had coalesced in the Triple Alliance, the fearsome alliance of railway workers, miners, and dockers, which can paralyze an early-20th-century economy.

恢复金本位是通货紧缩战略的一部分，通货紧缩战略旨在削弱英国工会运动的议价能力，英国工会运动联合了三重联盟，即由铁路工人、矿工和码头工人组成的可怕联盟，这可能使 20 世纪初的经济陷入瘫痪。

Breaking that alliance is key to what they’re doing.

打破这种联盟是他们所做的事情的关键。

When Keynes makes his criticism, it’s not simply what would be optimal from the point of view of maximizing some sort of welfare function.

当凯恩斯提出批评时，这不仅仅是从最大化某种福利函数的角度来看什么是最优的。

He’s basically offering an alternative program for Britain, which is the program that also, in his view, might stabilize the long-run possibilities for a Liberal Party, somewhere between Labour and the Conservatives, to actually have a voice in British politics.

他基本上是在为英国提供一个替代计划，在他看来，这个计划也可能稳定介于工党和保守党之间的自由党在英国政治中真正拥有发言权的长期可能性。

To do that, you need class conflict not to escalate in the way that the Tories were willing to allow it.

要做到这一点，你需要阶级冲突不以保守党愿意允许的方式升级。

The Conservatives were willing to see it escalate.

保守党愿意看到事态升级。

And you need Labour not to be the only voice of progressive politics in Britain, which it threatens to become in this period.

你需要工党不要成为英国进步政治的唯一声音，在这个时期工党有可能成为英国进步政治的唯一声音。

Those are the stakes which are involved in Keynes’s alternative program, which would have been basically for an adjustment of pegs, an adjustment of exchange rates.

这些都是凯恩斯替代计划所涉及的赌注，该计划基本上是为了调整钉住汇率、调整汇率。

Keynes, in the ’20s, is not advocating floating exchange rates.

20世纪20年代的凯恩斯并不提倡浮动汇率。

He’s arguing for a better-managed fixed exchange rate system.

他主张建立一个管理得更好的固定汇率制度。

On the failure of the Weimar Republic

论魏玛共和国的失败

But also, you could say the best hopes of Japanese moderates in the 1920s in the Taishō democracy period, and indeed even the relatively moderate phase of Mussolini’s regime in the 1920s when he was the darling of Wall Street — in each case, what you see is key actors saying, “In this hierarchical global system that we’re in, what are the best options available to us?”

而且，你也可以说日本温和派在 1920 年代大正民主时期的最大希望，甚至甚至是 1920 年代墨索里尼政权相对温和的阶段，当时他是华尔街的宠儿 ——在每种情况下，你看到的都是关键人物说，“在我们所处的这个等级森严的全球体系中，我们可以选择的最佳选择是什么？”

And insofar as the United States is able to hold the ring, that is, to moderate the aggression of, say, France within Europe, and to provide a steady rain of dollars down onto the economies of Europe and Japan, then, locally, if you like, the optimal strategy is, in fact, to adopt a position of cooperative subordination within that system.

只要美国能够守住这一环，即缓和法国在欧洲的侵略，并向欧洲和日本的经济提供稳定的美元雨点，那么，如果你愿意的话，在本地，最佳策略实际上是在该体系内采取合作从属的立场。

And so, you see quite remarkable things happen, like the British coming to terms on naval rearmament because America looks like a hegemon.

因此，你会看到非常引人注目的事情发生，比如英国在海军重整军备问题上达成协议，因为美国看起来像一个霸主。

And it’s really when that breaks in the early 1930s that, to my mind, the survival of the Weimar Republic becomes — it’s clear that something else is going to supersede the Weimar Republic.

在我看来，正是当这种情况在 20 世纪 30 年代初被打破时，魏玛共和国的生存才变得“——”很明显，其他东西将取代魏玛共和国。

It’s not obvious it’ll be the Nazi regime, but some alternative is likely to emerge, and not just in Germany.

目前尚不清楚纳粹政权会是纳粹政权，但可能会出现一些替代方案，而且不仅仅是在德国。

We see in Japan the same sort of shift.

我们在日本看到了同样的转变。

We see a radicalization in Mussolini’s regime.

我们看到墨索里尼政权的激进化。

So after the Weimar Republic had survived that initial shock that you’re talking about — the hyperinflation of the early 1920s — exactly as you’re suggesting, Germans can quite reasonably see that there is the prospect, if not for glory and national self-assertion, then at least for prosperity and a functioning politics in the Weimar Republic of the late 1920s.

因此，在魏玛共和国度过了你所说的“1920年代初期的恶性通货膨胀”这一最初的冲击之后，正如你所暗示的那样，德国人可以相当合理地看到，即使不是为了荣耀和民族自信，至少也有希望在1920年代末的魏玛共和国实现繁荣和正常运转的政治。

What we’ve got to explain is why that is broken apart.

我们必须解释的是为什么它会被分解。

And I don’t, by any means, want to say that this is all down to the United States.

无论如何，我不想说这一切都是美国造成的。

Of course, German political elites have choices to make, and a large fraction of them are obviously responsible for having made choices which turned out to be absolutely disastrous for their own country and for the rest of the world.

当然，德国政治精英必须做出选择，而且他们中的很大一部分人显然要为自己的选择承担责任，而这些选择对他们自己的国家和世界其他国家来说绝对是灾难性的。

But if you’re asking me, as it were, to say what I would argue personally, what my distinctive contribution to the debate has been is to show the way in which the collapse of the financial structures of the ’20s — which did indeed pivot on the United States — in the early ’30s shifted the terms of the debate within Germany and several other potential challenger, if you’d like, insurgent countries.

但如果你问我，可以说，我个人会争论什么，那么我对这场辩论的独特贡献就是展示了20世纪30年代初期金融结构的崩溃——它确实以美国为中心——改变了德国和其他几个潜在挑战者（如果你愿意的话）叛乱国家内部辩论的条款。

We don’t just see this in Germany.

我们不仅仅在德国看到这种情况。

There is a factor which goes beyond the particularities of German politics or Japanese politics or Italian politics or, indeed, even British politics or Soviet politics, which is this broader question about the viability, really, of the liberal order.

有一个因素超越了德国政治、日本政治、意大利政治，甚至英国政治或苏联政治的特殊性，这就是关于自由主义秩序的可行性的更广泛的问题。

And when that liberal order becomes less plausible, it changes the parameters of everyone’s decision-making.

当自由主义秩序变得不那么可信时，它就会改变每个人的决策参数。

Then, of course, it’s up to local forces.

当然，这取决于当地力量。

And as you’re stressing, of course, in Germany, there is a powerful militarist group, conservative group, which is willing to gamble on Hitler to provide them with a democratic base, and that turns out to be an epic historical miscalculation.

当然，正如你所强调的，在德国有一个强大的军国主义团体，保守派团体，他们愿意赌希特勒为他们提供民主基础，结果证明这是一个史诗般的历史误判。

Somebody like Schacht is a contemporary of Keynes, and that’s Hitler central banker and an adventurous monetary thinker.

像沙赫特这样的人是凯恩斯的同时代人，凯恩斯是希特勒的央行行长，也是一位富有冒险精神的货币思想家。

He’d learned to think outside the monetary box, if you like, in the efforts to stabilize Weimar’s currency in 1923–24.

如果你愿意的话，他在 1923-24 年稳定魏玛货币的努力中学会了跳出货币框架思考。

And he’s certainly an expansionary.

他无疑是一个扩张者。

He’s not afraid of monetary finance and of using off-balance-sheet vehicles to provide liquidity and to provide credit for an underemployed economy.

他并不害怕货币金融，也不害怕使用表外工具来提供流动性，并为就业不足的经济提供信贷。

And quite reasonably, no one’s worried about inflation in 1933 because Germany has massive unemployment.

相当合理的是，1933 年没有人担心通货膨胀，因为德国失业率很高。

So, in that sense, they are adventurous, macroeconomic, monetary economists.

因此，从这个意义上说，他们是富有冒险精神的宏观经济货币经济学家。

They’re not Keynesians for the simple reasons that Keynesianism, classically, of course, is a liberal economic politics.

他们不是凯恩斯主义者，原因很简单，凯恩斯主义当然是一种古典的自由经济政治。

It believes in a multiplier, and the multiplier’s the be-all and end-all really of Keynesian economics because what it suggests is that small, intermittent, discretionary interventions by the state — relatively small — will generate outside reactions from the economy, which will enable the state to serve a very positive role in stabilizing the economy but doesn’t require the state to permanently intrude and take over the economy.

它相信乘数，而乘数实际上是凯恩斯主义经济学的全部和最终目标，因为它表明，国家小规模、间歇性、酌情的干预——“相对较小”——将产生经济的外部反应，这将使国家在稳定经济方面发挥非常积极的作用，但并不要求国家永久干预和接管经济。

That’s a post-1945 kind of vision of a mixed economy.

这是 1945 年后混合经济的愿景。

Keynes himself — that’s why he wants the multiplier to be three because if the multiplier is three, then $1 by government spending generates $3 of private economic activity.

凯恩斯本人——这就是为什么他希望乘数为 3，因为如果乘数为 3，那么 1 美元的政府支出会产生 3 美元的私人经济活动。

You can think of government intervention as sporadic.

你可以认为政府干预是零星的。

It’s emergency medicine.

这是急救医学。

It’s not chronic care.

这不是长期护理。

That, of course, is the antithesis of what the Nazis are doing because they are ramping up government spending, not across the board, but highly focused on rearmament because what they’re doing is not just creating jobs, though they do create jobs as a side effect.

当然，这与纳粹正在做的事情相反，因为他们正在增加政府支出，不是全面增加，而是高度关注重新军备，因为他们所做的不仅仅是创造就业机会，尽管他们确实创造了就业机会作为副作用。

What they’re doing is restructuring the economy towards building the foundation for rearmament in a war economy.

他们正在做的是重组经济，为战争经济中的重新武装奠定基础。

What they’re actually trying to do is systematically repress the multiplier because they do not want people employed in armaments factories to go out and buy clothing and fancy food, which requires imports.

他们实际上想做的是系统性地抑制乘数，因为他们不希望军工厂的员工出去购买需要进口的衣服和高档食品。

They want the money to be circled straight back into the armaments effort.

他们希望这些钱能直接投入到军备工作中。

Saving various types of financial oppression is the order of the day.

拯救各种类型的金融压迫已成为当务之急。

They’re macroeconomists, the Nazis.

他们是宏观经济学家，纳粹分子。

They’re adventurous macroeconomists.

他们是富有冒险精神的宏观经济学家。

They’re doing massive intervention, but they’re not Keynesian.

他们正在进行大规模干预，但他们不是凯恩斯主义者。

Relative to the United States, the productivity and manufacturing per hour worked or per person in agriculture and manufacturing — and for all I know, in services too — there was a huge gap transatlantically between all of the European economies and the United States.

相对于美国，农业和制造业的每小时或人均生产率和制造业——据我所知，服务业也是如此——跨大西洋所有欧洲经济体与美国之间存在巨大差距。

There’s an elaborate debate going back, really, all the way to the 19th century — but in the form of Chandler and so on — about what constitutes the secret sauce that gives the United States this much higher per capita productivity across all sectors.

实际上，早在 19 世纪就存在着一场复杂的辩论——但是以钱德勒等人的形式进行的——关于什么是让美国在所有部门获得如此高的人均生产率的秘密武器。

We could go into that.

我们可以深入探讨这一点。

There’s a whole variety of obvious factors that you might cite.

您可能会引用各种各样的明显因素。

And then, between Germany and France and Italy on the one hand and Great Britain on the other, there is also a huge gap in terms of output per person, but that isn’t to do with productivity difference within sectors.

然后，德国、法国、意大利和英国之间，人均产出也存在巨大差距，但这与部门内的生产率差异无关。

German manufacturing and British manufacturing — you might not believe this, but in the 1930s were very similar in terms of output per hour worked.

德国制造业和英国制造业 ——你可能不相信这一点，但在 20 世纪 30 年代，就每小时工作产出而言非常相似。

But the structure of the British economy was far more advanced.

但英国的经济结构要先进得多。

By 1911, less than 10 percent of the British workforce is in agriculture, and in agriculture, very little is in peasant farming.

到 1911 年，只有不到 10% 的英国劳动力从事农业，而在农业中，从事小农耕作的人更是少之又少。

It’s in big farms.

这是在大农场里。

By the 1930s, it’s extremely rare for any women to work in farms in Britain.

到 20 世纪 30 年代，英国女性在农场工作的情况极为罕见。

Whereas in Germany, in the 1930s, four or five million women are registered as working full time in farms.

而在 20 世纪 30 年代的德国，有四五百万女性登记在农场全职工作。

So you have two different types of productivity difference: one is across all sectors, which is a transatlantic difference, and then a huge sexual difference between the German economy and that of Great Britain.

因此，存在两种不同类型的生产率差异：一种是跨所有部门的，这是跨大西洋的差异；另一种是德国经济和英国经济之间巨大的性别差异。

And what Wages of Destruction was trying to do is to say, “Okay, let’s write a history of the Third Reich against the backdrop of assuming that this makes a difference.”

《毁灭的工资》试图做的是说，“好吧，让我们在假设这会有所作为的背景下写一部第三帝国的历史。”

What do we see if we assume that these structural differences are large?

如果我们假设这些结构性差异很大，我们会看到什么？

Let’s not argue about the percentages of how large, but they’re large by any measure.

我们不要争论有多大的百分比，但无论如何衡量它们都很大。

And furthermore, they are something that contemporaries know about and factor into their thinking.

此外，它们是同时代人所了解并纳入其思维的因素。

What kind of a take, what kind of a read do we get on Nazi politics if we take these seriously?

如果我们认真对待这些问题，我们会对纳粹政治有什么样的看法和解读？

As I hope I demonstrate in Wages, in fact, it’s profoundly illuminating to think about this double problem: on the one hand, the magic, if you like, of the United States, which is just more productive across the board, and dramatically so, and on the other hand, the structural disadvantage.

事实上，正如我希望在《工资》中所展示的那样，思考这个双重问题具有深刻的启发性：一方面，如果你愿意的话，美国的魔力，它在全面提高生产力，而且戏剧性地如此；另一方面，结构性劣势。

You could add in, of course, the fact that the United Kingdom commands a global empire, which Germany never does to any substantial extent.

当然，你还可以加上这样一个事实：英国掌控着一个全球帝国，而德国从未在很大程度上做到过这一点。

So the wager, intellectually, of the Wages of Destruction is to see what happens when we revisit history on the basis of this very different understanding.

因此，从理智上讲，《毁灭的代价》的赌注是看看当我们基于这种截然不同的理解重新审视历史时会发生什么。

Different, I mean, because, if you grew up in 1970s Britain or between Britain and Germany, as I did, and you had the conventional industrial policy assumptions, say, of 1980s America, you would assume that Germany was an industrial powerhouse that dominated the world, bestrode the world.

我的意思是，不同是因为，如果你像我一样在 20 世纪 70 年代的英国或英国和德国之间长大，并且你有传统的产业政策假设，比如 20 世纪 80 年代的美国，你会认为德国是一个主宰世界、超越世界的工业强国。

Audi, Mercedes, BMW.

奥迪、奔驰、宝马。

Of course they were an industrial powerhouse in the 1930s.

当然，他们是 20 世纪 30 年代的工业强国。

It just isn’t substantively true.

这实际上并不正确。

That doesn’t actually capture the reality of the interwar economy.

这实际上并没有反映两次世界大战期间经济的现实。

What Wages of Destruction was doing was trying to unpick those anachronistic assumptions about the obvious dominance of the German economy, and on the basis of that double comparison with the US and Great Britain, to reread the history of the Third Reich.

《毁灭的工资》所做的就是试图解开那些关于德国经济明显占据主导地位的不合时宜的假设，并在与美国和英国的双重比较的基础上，重新解读第三帝国的历史。

What you see is the significance of the agrarian sector, that profound inferiority complex which drives Nazi planning, their relentless focus on agricultural expansion in the east, the very severe problems of labor shortage in agriculture, and the relatively modest scale of their industrial capacity compared to Britain and the United States.

你看到的是农业部门的重要性，驱动纳粹计划的深刻的自卑情结，他们对东部农业扩张的不懈关注，农业劳动力短缺的严重问题，以及与英国和美国相比相对较小的工业能力规模。

It’s more or less level pegging with the Brits and hugely inferior to the US.

它或多或少与英国人持平，并且远远低于美国。

And there was a school of thought which said this all stacked up.

有一个学派认为这一切都是叠加的。

There was a school of thought that said the Blitzkrieg victory of the Germans in 1940 was the result of their technological industrial superiority, which expressed itself on the battlefield in Stukas and tanks.

有一种学派认为，1940年德国人的闪电战胜利是其技术工业优势的结果，这一优势体现在战场上的斯图卡和坦克上。

So the logic was quite simple.

所以逻辑很简单。

But if you take this alternative view, then, as you’re saying, in fact, comparing motorization, France is more motorized than Germany by a very large degree.

但如果你采取另一种观点，那么，正如你所说，事实上，比较机动化，法国的机动化程度比德国高出很多。

Renault is a far more substantial motor car manufacturer than any car manufacturer in Germany.

雷诺是一家规模比德国任何汽车制造商都要大得多的汽车制造商。

In fact, the only substantial motor car manufacturer in Germany in the 1930s is Opel, which is owned by GM, and it’s only substantial on account of that.

事实上，20 世纪 30 年代德国唯一一家大型汽车制造商是通用汽车旗下的欧宝，因此它才具有规模。

Ford would be the other contender.

福特将是另一个竞争者。

What that means is, exactly as you’re suggesting, that there are key moments in the history of the regime that can’t be explained by economic factors in any simple sense of the word.

正如您所暗示的那样，这意味着该政权历史上的某些关键时刻无法用任何简单意义上的经济因素来解释。

And clearly, the battlefield events of 1940 are one such moment.

显然，1940 年的战场事件就是这样一个时刻。

But in general, the decision by Hitler to go to war against the kind of backdrop that I’m offering doesn’t make sense from the point of view, if you like, of a correlation of forces, a material balance–type argument.

但总的来说，如果你愿意的话，从力量对比、物质平衡型论证的角度来看，希特勒在我提供的背景下发动战争的决定是没有意义的。

So the question then is, what sense do we make of the fact that the Germans are going to war without an evident material superiority?

那么问题是，我们对德国人在没有明显物质优势的情况下发动战争这一事实有什么意义呢？

And that is where then, for me, the power of ideology comes into the picture as an absolutely essential and irreducible element in any kind of meaningful history of the Third Reich.

对我来说，这就是意识形态的力量作为第三帝国任何有意义的历史中绝对必要且不可还原的元素而出现的地方。

Because we have to explain why they went to war even against odds which really didn’t look favorable at all.

因为我们必须解释为什么他们在看似完全不利的情况下仍要发动战争。

And the bitter lesson the Germans learned in World War I is that that kind of a highly efficient international division of labor, which is one of the keys to the higher productivity per capita of the overall British economy relative to the German economy, is its dependence on imported food.

德国人在第一次世界大战中得到的惨痛教训是，这种高效的国际分工，是英国整体经济相对于德国经济人均生产率较高的关键之一，就是其对进口食品的依赖。

It’s better for somebody else to do the farming and you to do the services and manufacturing.

最好是别人从事农业，你从事服务业和制造业。

In the case of a war, the total war, especially if you face an enemy like the British, you deploy the economic weapon as one of their key strategic tools and have the navy to do it.

在战争、全面战争的情况下，特别是当你面对像英国这样的敌人时，你可以部署经济武器作为他们的关键战略工具之一，并让海军来做到这一点。

That dependence is a key vulnerability.

这种依赖性是一个关键的弱点。

And in Hitler’s paranoid worldview, it’s also, of course, where the world Jewish conspiracy brings its influence and its power to bear on modern Germany.

当然，在希特勒偏执的世界观中，这也是世界犹太人阴谋对现代德国产生影响和力量的地方。

And it’s that dependence that has to be broken.

必须打破的正是这种依赖。

In practice, what this means is that — though you’re right, Germany has plenty of land — it is not able, in the 1930s, to feed itself at the kind of levels and the standard of living that it’s become accustomed to, on the terms of trade between industry and agriculture which people have become accustomed to.

实际上，这意味着“尽管你是对的，德国拥有充足的土地”，但在 20 世纪 30 年代，它无法按照人们已经习惯的工业和农业之间的贸易条件，以人们已经习惯的水平和生活水平养活自己。

And that’s the problem.

这就是问题所在。

What they want the land for is to improve, if you’d like, the tradeoff between the relative standard of living in the city and the countryside on the one hand, and the degree of self-sufficiency on the other.

如果你愿意的话，他们想要土地的目的是一方面改善城市和农村的相对生活水平，另一方面改善自给自足的程度。

So the fantasy is really that you could have a Midwest, you could have a Canada, you could have an Australia bolted onto Germany, and that that would augment and it would provide Germany with the kind of balance that the continental US has, which makes continental United States a largely self-sufficient economic entity, or that the British Empire has with the complementarity between the manufacturing and service hub in Great Britain and the agricultural and raw material providers of the empire.

因此，人们的幻想实际上是，你可以拥有一个中西部，你可以拥有一个加拿大，你可以拥有一个与德国相连的澳大利亚，这将增强德国的平衡，从而使美国大陆成为一个基本上自给自足的经济实体，或者像大英帝国一样，在英国的制造和服务中心与帝国的农业和原材料供应商之间具有互补性。

On things under- and overrated

关于被低估和高估的事情

Immediately, now we know from all of the great recent work supported by various types of swap line arrangement, by ’67, clearly almost dead in the water, and then in ’71, just tossed overboard by the next administration.

现在，我们立即从最近由各种类型的互换额度安排支持的所有伟大工作中得知，到了 67 年，显然几乎死在了水中，然后在 71 年，刚刚被下一届政府扔到了海里。

Funny kind of regime that, I would say.

我想说，这种制度很有趣。

And all together, that, to me, suggests the need to think of international economic history not in terms of big lumpy regimes, which have a certain logic that governs them, but more as a sort of continuous re-improvised makeshift.

总而言之，对我来说，这表明我们需要思考国际经济史，而不是从大的、不稳定的政权的角度来思考，因为这些政权有一定的统治逻辑，而更多地是将其视为一种持续的、重新即兴创作的权宜之计。

On the the prospects of various EU members

关于各个欧盟成员国的前景

And frankly, if the North European states will accept that, that would be, again, one of the more tolerable outcomes here.

坦率地说，如果北欧国家接受这一点，那将再次成为这里更容易容忍的结果之一。

But the tragedy of Italy’s economic development over, as you say, the last 18 years is — Along with many others, I have been campaigning and banging the drum for years to try and get the political elites in both Brussels and Berlin to recognize that they cannot expect political legitimacy to be maintained in the face of that kind of economic track record.

但正如你所说，过去 18 年意大利经济发展的悲剧是 —— 与许多其他人一样，我多年来一直在竞选和敲鼓，试图让布鲁塞尔和柏林的政治精英认识到，面对这种经济记录，他们不能指望维持政治合法性。

And you don’t need to be a nationalist populist, I think, in Italy to be resentful and furious at the lack of hearing that they received for that position.

我认为，在意大利，你不需要成为一个民族主义民粹主义者，就能对他们在这一职位上没有得到倾听而感到不满和愤怒。

And far too often, the Bundesbank and quite mainstream conservatives in Germany engage in a monetary populism, essentially, which blames the ECB for low interest rates, which problematizes this de facto round-the-back sharing of risk by way of the ECB balance sheet.

德国央行和德国相当主流的保守派往往会推行货币民粹主义，本质上是指责欧洲央行的低利率，这使这种事实上通过欧洲央行资产负债表来分担风险的做法出现了问题。

Hans-Werner Sinn, the notable Munich economist, can command the pages of serious German newspapers with his polemics against the so-called TARGET2 balances, which are really just a reflection in the balance sheet of the ECB of movements within the European financial system.

著名的慕尼黑经济学家汉斯-沃纳·辛恩（Hans-Werner Sinn）可以通过他对所谓“TARGET2”余额的争论占据德国严肃报纸的版面，而这些余额实际上只是欧洲央行资产负债表中欧洲金融体系内部变动的反映。

And all of that makes for a very unstable brew.

所有这些都会导致酿造非常不稳定。

What I worry about is a spiral of de-legitimization, fundamentally, in which an unspoken, as you say, convenient technocratic fix to the problem doesn’t in fact remain unspoken.

从根本上说，我担心的是去合法化的螺旋式上升，正如你所说，对问题的方便的技术官僚解决方案实际上并不是不言而喻的。

Then, you have an insurgent economic nationalism against that, which is where the AFD, the right-wing party — which has haunted German politics in recent years — comes from.

然后，就会有一种反叛的经济民族主义来反对这一点，这就是右翼政党德国民主力量党（AFD）——近年来一直困扰着德国政坛——的来源。

It’s not an anti-immigrant party in the first instance.

它首先不是一个反移民政党。

It’s an anti-Draghi party in the first instance, a party directed against Mario Draghi.

这首先是一个反德拉吉的政党，一个针对马里奥​​·德拉吉的政党。

And the Alternative für Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany — they want an alternative to the sorts of monetary fix that we’re talking about, the activism on the part of the ECB.

德国的另类选择（Alternative for Deutschland）——他们想要我们正在谈论的货币修复方案的替代方案，即欧洲央行的激进主义。

They then bring suits in front of the German constitutional court, which is an avenue favored by political activists.

然后他们向德国宪法法院提起诉讼，这是政治活动人士青睐的途径。

And the German constitutional court is put in the embarrassing position of having, basically, to sign off on what everyone understands are legal fig leaves to avoid the embarrassment of blowing up Angela Merkel’s Europe policy, or rather Angela Merkel’s nonpolicy towards Europe.

德国宪法法院处于尴尬的境地，基本上必须签署大家都认为合法的遮羞布，以避免炸毁安格拉·默克尔的欧洲政策，或者更确切地说，安格拉·默克尔对欧洲的非政策。

And if that channel was not there, I would say, I’d be totally with you: bury this stuff.

如果那个渠道不存在，我会说，我会完全支持你：埋掉这些东西。

Bury it deep, and let’s never talk about it again.

深深地埋葬它，让我们永远不再谈论它。

But unfortunately, that is not how the German political system works.

但不幸的是，这不是德国政治体系的运作方式。

Very striking contrast to France, which is, in a sense, essentially in exactly the same boat, also a risk sharer with Italy.

与法国形成鲜明对比，从某种意义上说，法国本质上是同一条船，也是与意大利的风险共担者。

And it’s not even a subject of serious conversation.

这甚至不是严肃谈话的主题。

I mean, it’s never been a serious subject for conversation there.

我的意思是，这从来都不是一个严肃的话题。

And that’s the reason why I’m not sure that this status quo will hold, though de facto, I think that’s where we’re headed.

这就是为什么我不确定这种现状是否会持续的原因，尽管事实上，我认为这就是我们的发展方向。

Likewise, the massive downturn in the auto industry.

同样，汽车行业也出现了严重衰退。

Hungary is basically an extension of the German car plant system.

匈牙利基本上是德国汽车工厂系统的延伸。

And where global demand for German cars turns down, Hungary gets very badly hit.

当全球对德国汽车的需求下降时，匈牙利受到了严重打击。

So it’s not obvious to me that Orbán’s formula will in fact work in a less friendly economic environment, the one he’s enjoyed.

因此，对我来说，欧尔班的公式实际上并不能在他所喜欢的不太友好的经济环境中发挥作用，这一点并不明显。

That’s a wait-and-see kind of a response.

这是一种观望的回应。

The Dublin rules are, basically, if they come to your country, they stay there.

都柏林的规则基本上是，如果他们来到你的国家，他们就会留在那里。

There’s no formula for redistribution within the EU.

欧盟内部没有重新分配的公式。

I agree, that is part of a poly crisis scenario, which is what we saw in ’15.

我同意，这是多重危机情景的一部分，这就是我们在 15 年看到的情况。

If you think back to 2015, it’s this remarkable moment where we see the Chinese economy under pressure — we talked about that earlier — the Greek crisis blowing up, the Ukraine crisis still very hot in ’15, and the refugee crisis.

如果你回想2015年，这是一个非凡的时刻，我们看到中国经济面临压力 ——我们之前谈到过这一点—— 希腊危机爆发，乌克兰危机在15年仍然很严重，还有难民危机。

We know how explosive that combination was for European politics.

我们知道这种结合对于欧洲政治来说具有多大的爆炸性。

We could indeed be heading back to a scenario which is every bit as bad as that.

我们确实可能会回到同样糟糕的情况。

And that’s one of the reasons why I say worry about Algeria, because that could produce a huge new flow of migrants from an economically distressed North African country, which France would be ill equipped to deal with.

这就是我对阿尔及利亚表示担忧的原因之一，因为这可能会从一个经济陷入困境的北非国家产生大量新移民，而法国没有能力应对这一问题。

It’s not obvious that we did anything more than stick a sticking plaster on it.

很明显我们除了在上面贴了一块橡皮膏之外还做了什么。

And the Europeans will defend themselves — I think quite reasonably — and say they move from crisis to crisis and they do improvisations.

欧洲人会为自己辩护——“我认为相当合理”——并说他们从一个危机走向另一个危机，他们会即兴发挥。

They move incrementally, and they move trap-wise, and Europe is forged in crisis — all of those clichés of a kind of EU pragmatism.

它们是渐进式的、陷阱式的，欧洲是在危机中锻造出来的——所有这些都是欧盟实用主义的陈词滥调。

The question one has to ask, of course, is, when do you reach the limit?

当然，人们必须问的问题是，你什么时候达到极限？

When do you hit an obstacle which is too big, which is too difficult, and which exposes your fundamental failure to come to terms with the basic issues that need to be addressed and the legacy of bitterness, which is built up in the series of makeshifts that you’ve adopted?

你什么时候会遇到一个太大、太困难的障碍，并且暴露出你根本上未能解决需要解决的基本问题以及你所采取的一系列权宜之计所积累的痛苦遗产？

What I worry about, and many other people worry about, is whether we’re at that point now on several definitions on COVID-19 itself, the long-standing immiseration of the Italian economy, and, as you say, a refugee crisis that might crop up.

我和许多其他人担心的是，我们现在是否对 COVID-19 本身、意大利经济长期贫困以及可能突然出现的难民危机有多种定义。

And if Turkey is one of the fragile EMs , then, of course, all bets are off, if you like.

如果土耳其是脆弱的新兴市场之一，那么当然，如果你愿意的话，所有的赌注都将落空。

But there are, again, always possibilities for negotiation.

但谈判的可能性还是存在的。

Maybe a sweetheart deal for Erdoğan is precisely the thing that will open the door to some sort of refugee fix.

也许与埃尔多安达成的甜心协议正是为某种难民解决方案打开大门的事情。

I imagine that the EU will restore mobility on a similar level to the United States of America.

我认为欧盟将恢复与美国类似水平的流动性。

I imagine Europe will move quite quickly towards the sort of regional deal that seems to be emerging between New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

我想欧洲将很快朝着纽约、康涅狄格、宾夕法尼亚和新泽西之间正在出现的那种区域协议迈进。

Those are the kind of blocs which could move relatively smoothly back towards the restoration of something like mobility.

这些集团可以相对顺利地恢复流动性之类的东西。

I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a relatively free-flowing mobility regime within the EU.

如果欧盟内部没有相对自由流动的制度，我会感到非常惊讶。

It’s one of the core values.

这是核心价值观之一。

It’s what the EU is for.

这就是欧盟的目的。

And I don’t think this crisis is going to blow that off course.

我认为这场危机不会让这一点偏离轨道。

Does that mean that there won’t be various types of pandemic management structure in place?

这是否意味着不会有各种类型的流行病管理结构？

That’s a different issue.

那是另一个问题了。

Will there be electronic passports and temperature monitoring devices at most European countries?

大多数欧洲国家都会有电子护照和温度监测设备吗？

I wouldn’t be surprised by that, nor would I think it terribly significant, to be honest.

老实说，我不会对此感到惊讶，也不认为这有什么重大意义。

And we don’t discuss the airport security provisions of Italy versus Germany very much because they’re not very interesting and they don’t matter very much.

我们不会过多讨论意大利与德国的机场安全规定，因为它们不是很有趣，也不是很重要。

And I think that might be the sort of place that we’re in.

我认为这可能就是我们所处的情况。

The blanket bans on movement will not continue.

全面的行动禁令将不会继续下去。

I think they’re just impractical, both at a national, regional, and an international level.

我认为它们在国家、地区和国际层面都是不切实际的。

On the Adam Tooze production function

关于 Adam Tooze 生产函数

And one of the things I realized in the course of that is that, actually, rather than thinking it was something terrifying that I had to steel myself to do, the best way to think about it was as something I do every day, so it’s like exercise.

在此过程中我意识到的一件事是，实际上，与其认为这是一件可怕的事情，我必须让自己坚强起来去做，不如将其视为我每天都会做的事情，所以它就像锻炼一样。

If I have the chance, I like to exercise.

如果有机会，我喜欢锻炼身体。

It’s a puzzling activity.

这是一项令人费解的活动。

I just treat it almost as a game, rearranging the words, trying to fix things.

我几乎把它当作一个游戏，重新排列单词，试图解决问题。

And one of the things I realized in the course of that is that, actually, rather than thinking was something terrifying that I had to steel myself to do, the best way to think about it was as something I do every day, so it’s like exercise.

在此过程中我意识到的一件事是，实际上，与其说思考是一件可怕的事情，我必须让自己坚强起来去做，不如把它当作我每天都会做的事情来思考，所以它就像锻炼一样。

If I have the chance, I like to exercise.

如果有机会，我喜欢锻炼身体。

It’s a puzzling activity.

这是一项令人费解的活动。

I just treat it almost as a game, rearranging the words, trying to fix things.

我几乎把它当作一个游戏，重新排列单词，试图解决问题。

I’ll say to all of my grad students, you can do that for 10 minutes every single day, regardless of what else is going on in your life.

我会对我所有的研究生说，无论你生活中发生了什么，你每天都可以这样做 10 分钟。

You can always find that 10-minute slot.

您总能找到 10 分钟的时段。

So that is the thing that I make sure I do.

所以这就是我确保做的事情。

And that means even big projects slowly move along because then, when you get the big slice of time, the three or four hours at the weekend or something, it’s actually top of stack.

这意味着即使是大型项目也会慢慢进展，因为当你获得大量时间时，例如周末的三四个小时或其他时间，它实际上是最重要的。

You know where to go because you’ve been puzzling away at it and chewing on it every day, even if it’s only for 10 minutes.

你知道该去哪里，因为你每天都在苦苦思索、咀嚼它，即使只有 10 分钟。

What is your most unusual habit for how you absorb and process information?

您吸收和处理信息的最不寻常的习惯是什么？

You read an enormous amount.

你读了很多书。

What’s your trick?

你有什么绝招？

But from the point of view of parsing the flow of macroeconomic news, which I know we’re both kind of addicted to, this is a good way of doing it.

但从解析宏观经济新闻流的角度来看，我知道我们都对宏观经济新闻上瘾，这是一个很好的方法。

It’s a bit like sharing slides back and forth amongst wonky friends.

这有点像在古怪的朋友之间来回共享幻灯片。

“Look at this graph.

“看看这个图表。

This is a really good one.” That has become, for me, that metabolic system of reading, and then reproducing and sharing has become a key motivator of consumption.

这真是一件好事。”对我来说，这已经成为阅读、复制和分享的新陈代谢系统，成为消费的关键动力。

It’s not just, as it were, production for its own sake.

可以说，这不仅仅是为了生产本身。

It’s actually a way of structuring how you consume.

这实际上是一种构建消费方式的方式。

And their breakfast table would consist of a series of “Oh, have you seen this article?” It was basically kind of analog breakfast table Twitter.

他们的早餐桌上会包含一系列“哦，你看过这篇文章吗？”它基本上是一种模拟早餐桌 Twitter。

“But you should really check this out.

“但你真的应该检查一下。

I’ll save this for you.” They would cut things out and shove them across the breakfast table.

我会为你保存这个。”他们会把东西切下来然后把它们推到早餐桌上。

And that experience for me was absolutely formative.

那次经历对我来说绝对是有影响的。

And their engagement with the real world — I mean, they continued writing.

他们与现实世界的接触 —— 我的意思是，他们继续写作。

My grandfather basically died over his word processor in his early 90s.

我的祖父在 90 岁出头时基本上就死于他的文字处理器。

What they did a lot of was digesting and synthesis.

他们做的很多事情就是消化和综合。

They would go to the Wellcome Medical Library in London, and they would read all of the papers because they were multilingual, lots of German, French, Spanish, Russian, some Scandinavian languages.

他们会去伦敦的威康医学图书馆，阅读所有的论文，因为它们是多语言的，有很多德语、法语、西班牙语、俄语和一些斯堪的纳维亚语言。

They would try and synthesize the best and most recent work on key issues of concern for them.

他们会尝试综合关于他们关心的关键问题的最好和最新的工作。

And they were materialists.

他们是唯物主义者。

They were originally Marxists, but they had become deeply concerned with issues of nutrition.

他们原本是马克思主义者，但后来开始深深关注营养问题。

“You are what you eat,” in the famous Feuerbachian phrase.

用费尔巴哈的名言来说，“你吃什么就是什么”。

They took that and turned it into a politics, which was around malnutrition, ultimately, and ensuring that the majority of mothers, crucially, were well enough nourished during pregnancy to ensure that the progeny and the future population of the country were not stunted — who didn’t suffer from the damage of poverty before they were even born.

他们把这一点变成了一种政治，最终围绕着营养不良，确保大多数母亲在怀孕期间得到足够的营养，以确保后代和国家未来的人口不会发育迟缓——他们在出生之前就不会遭受贫困的损害。

On advising BP executives

关于为 BP 高管提供建议

These were very senior, brilliant people, who would spend a week in university campuses around the world, and one of the weeks they would spend was in Cambridge.

这些人都是非常资深、才华横溢的人，他们会在世界各地的大学校园度过一周，其中一周是在剑桥度过的。

We worked through the entire leadership team with this oil major.

我们与这家石油巨头的整个领导团队进行了合作。

Our job was to unsettle — certainly the Cambridge camp — our job was to unsettle their familiar frameworks.

我们的工作是扰乱——“当然是剑桥阵营”——我们的工作是扰乱他们熟悉的框架。

The questions were political, ethical.

这些问题是政治性的、道德性的。

“How do you think about your license to operate?”

“您如何看待您的经营许可证？”

I used to run — just to give one example — a session which started with a series of slides, which were American bombing, aerial reconnaissance, of a chemicals plant in Silesia.

我曾经举办过“——仅举一个例子”——一个以一系列幻灯片开始的会议，这些幻灯片是美国对西里西亚一家化工厂的轰炸、空中侦察。

And I would fly them in still by still until they suddenly realized that we were looking at Auschwitz.

我会让他们一动不动地飞进来，直到他们突然意识到我们正在看奥斯维辛。

They were looking at a chemicals plant, and they had recognized the chemicals plant first because they’re chemical engineers, and then they realized they were looking at Auschwitz.

他们正在看一家化工厂，他们首先认出了化工厂，因为他们是化学工程师，然后他们意识到他们正在看奥斯维辛。

The aim of the game was to confront them with the way in which a company like IG Farben, which was a world-beating industrial firm, the best by a million miles; hugely superior to DuPont in its technology; Nobel Prize winners on the board right, left and center — how a totally cosmopolitan, globalized company — not by any means an obvious supporter of German economic nationalism — how it could end up building the largest chemicals plant in Europe at the time at Auschwitz.

游戏的目的是让他们面对像 IG Farben 这样的公司，这是一家世界一流的工业公司，领先一百万英里；技术远远优于杜邦；董事会右翼、左翼和中间都是诺贝尔奖得主——“一家完全国际化的全球化公司”——“绝不是德国经济民族主义的明显支持者”——“它如何最终能够在奥斯威辛建造当时欧洲最大的化工厂。”

And that was the sort of challenge that I wanted to confront them with because we have to take seriously the historic responsibility of giant capitalist corporations.

这就是我想要面对他们的挑战，因为我们必须认真对待大型资本主义公司的历史责任。

Most of the time, of course, their activities are quite innocuous, but they’re not always.

当然，大多数时候，他们的活动是无害的，但情况并非总是如此。

Their impact and their footprint is huge, and they can find themselves in situations which burden them with vast historic responsibility as IG Farben did.

他们的影响力和足迹是巨大的，他们可能会发现自己陷入了像 IG Farben 那样承担巨大历史责任的境地。

We happen to know a lot about IG Farben because of the Nuremberg trials.

由于纽伦堡试验，我们碰巧对 IG Farben 有了很多了解。

It’s a case study that would blow their minds permanently.

这是一个让他们永远震惊的案例研究。

It actually was hugely — I don’t mean this at all cynically — it was an incredibly productive exercise to watch them struggle with this problem, for them to scan their own activities and think about where they might be engaged in various sides of bargains because we can get inside their heads.

这实际上是巨大的——“我并不是愤世嫉俗的”——“观看他们与这个问题作斗争是一种非常富有成效的练习，让他们审视自己的活动并思考他们可能参与讨价还价的各个方面，因为我们可以进入他们的头脑。

All of the IG Farben corporates wrote rather introspective accounts afterwards, when they were in jail awaiting trial, so we can get quite deep inside the psychology of the decision makers who made those disastrous decisions.

所有 IG Farben 公司事后在监狱等待审判时都写了相当内省的账目，因此我们可以深入了解做出这些灾难性决定的决策者的心理。

That was the sort of thing that we were doing, and it totally changed me.

这就是我们正在做的事情，它彻底改变了我。

It turned me into a global historian because I was a rather parochial Europeanist.

它使我成为一名全球历史学家，因为我是一个相当狭隘的欧洲主义者。

Then I met these people who were operating this global company whose vision was far wider than mine — not academic, but vastly wider, and that really shocked me.

然后我遇到了这些经营这家跨国公司的人，他们的视野比我广阔得多——不是学术性的，而是广阔得多，这真的让我震惊。

Before COVID hit, I was working on a book on climate, and I will go back to that.

在新冠疫情爆发之前，我正在写一本关于气候的书，我会再回顾一下。

But in so doing, I was really, for me, reconnecting with a set of questions that I’d first addressed 20 years ago under the impact of working with these people.

但通过这样做，对我来说，我确实重新思考了 20 年前在与这些人一起工作的影响下首次解决的一系列问题。

On how to visit Germany

关于如何访问德国

It would be the city where — if the universities could offer the sorts of terms and conditions and facilities that the American universities do — I would probably most like to live and work.

这将是一个“如果大学能够提供美国大学所提供的各种条款、条件和设施”的城市，我可能最喜欢生活和工作。

That is not the situation, unfortunately, of the German university system.

不幸的是，德国大学系统的情况并非如此。

But it’s an extraordinary city.

但这是一座非凡的城市。

So it would be a varied tour.

所以这将是一次丰富多彩的旅行。

My wife works in the travel business, and she has her own boutique travel company.

我的妻子从事旅游行业，她拥有自己的精品旅游公司。

We were planning a trip that has just been canceled, unfortunately, that goes from Berlin to Dresden to Prague to Vienna, a sort of essential European tour with a historic theme and the best vineyards that we can find in central Europe along the way.

不幸的是，我们原本计划的旅行刚刚被取消，从柏林到德累斯顿到布拉格再到维也纳，这是一次重要的欧洲之旅，以历史为主题，沿途我们可以在中欧找到最好的葡萄园。

I would say travel.

我会说旅行。

Get on the train.

上火车吧。

Unless you’re a car nut, and you want to experience the freedom of driving a Porsche at 200 miles an hour, which you can do if you do it at 2:00 am.

除非您是汽车迷，并且想体验以每小时 200 英里的速度驾驶保时捷的自由，如果您在凌晨 2:00 就可以做到这一点。

The roads are clean enough, and they’re smooth enough.

道路足够干净，也足够平坦。

But other than that, ride the train.

但除此之外，乘坐火车。

Sit in an ICE going at, absolutely no kidding, 200 miles an hour, powered by solar power, and watch your coffee not even vibrate.

坐在 ICE 里，绝对不是开玩笑，时速 200 英里，由太阳能供电，看着你的咖啡甚至不会振动。

It’s absolutely stunning.

这绝对是令人惊叹的。

They have to put speedometers into the trains to make people aware of how fast they’re going.

他们必须在火车上安装速度表，让人们知道火车的行驶速度。

You watch the cars on the interstate, and these are un-speed-limited interstates.

你观察州际公路上的汽车，这些都是不限速的州际公路。

Just you zoom past them.

只要你快速掠过他们。

You’re going faster than a Ferrari or a Porsche flat out.

你的速度比法拉利或保时捷还要快。

And you can literally sit there, and your coffee doesn’t move.

你实际上可以坐在那里，你的咖啡不会移动。

Compare that, of course, with the experience of your average Amtrak ride.

当然，请与您乘坐美国铁路公司 (Amtrak) 的平均乘车体验进行比较。

It’s the way to do it.

这是做到这一点的方法。

Travel the country, see the countryside, do the extraordinary variety of landscape and culture because it’s an incredibly heterogeneous place.

环游全国，参观乡村，领略各种各样的风景和文化，因为这是一个极其多样化的地方。

One of the bizarre projects of German nationalism was to weld it into a uniform country, which it just doggedly refuses to be.

德国民族主义的奇异计划之一是将其融合成一个统一的国家，但它却顽固地拒绝这样做。

It’s Catholic and Protestant.

这是天主教和新教。

It’s both rural and intensely urban.

它既是农村的，也是城市化的。

Experience that diversity.

体验这种多样性。

It is one of the great underrated tourist destinations, certainly, of Europe.

当然，它是欧洲最被低估的旅游目的地之一。

Very hospitable, English speaking.

非常热情好客，会说英语。

One of the bizarre projects of German nationalism was to weld it into a uniform country, which it just doggedly refuses to be.

德国民族主义的奇异计划之一是将其融合成一个统一的国家，但它却顽固地拒绝这样做。

It’s Catholic and Protestant.

这是天主教和新教。

It’s both rural and intensely urban.

它既是农村的，也是城市化的。

Experience that diversity.

体验这种多样性。

It is one of the great underrated tourist destinations, certainly, of Europe.

当然，它是欧洲最被低估的旅游目的地之一。

Very hospitable, English speaking.

非常热情好客，会说英语。

You’re looking for somebody who can see — frankly, our conversation has had the feel of a historical conversation.

你正在寻找一个能够看到的人——坦率地说，我们的谈话有一种历史对话的感觉。

We started out with economics, and we’ve ended up in a very different place.

我们从经济学开始，但最终却走向了一个完全不同的境地。

But you’re looking for that combination of analysis on the one hand, but then also an awareness of the way in which arguments are made in language and how they’re framed in writing, and then ability to read through and around that.

但你一方面需要分析的结合，另一方面还要了解如何用语言提出论点以及如何以书面形式表达论点，然后是通读和围绕这些论点的能力。

Another way of putting that same point would be an awareness of the function, the active function of interpretation.

表达同一观点的另一种方式是对功能的认识，即解释的主动功能。

I’m looking for a student who can say, “Well, X’s view of problem Y is Z, and that argument Z they’re making is different from A’s view of problem Y because A’s view of problem Y is W.” So an ability to, as it were, triangulate between the subject matter that’s being discussed, the point of view of the observer of that subject matter, and then the type of argument they’re offering that connects the two.

我正在寻找一个学生，他可以说：“嗯，X 对问题 Y 的看法是 Z，他们提出的论点 Z 与 A 对问题 Y 的看法不同，因为 A 对问题 Y 的看法是 W。”因此，可以说，能够在正在讨论的主题、该主题的观察者的观点以及他们提供的连接两者的论证类型之间进行三角测量。

And that triangulation is crucial for sophisticated history writing.

这种三角测量对于复杂的历史写作至关重要。

And the more self-consciously one can position oneself in that triangle — who am I in relation to my object, and what is the nature of the type of argument that I’m making?

一个人越能自觉地将自己定位在那个三角形中——“相对于我的对象，我是谁？我正在提出的论证类型的本质是什么？”

Which is, of course, one tends to say it’s subjective, but in fact, it’s a repertoire of arguments that are available to everyone thinking about that problem.

当然，人们倾向于说这是主观的，但事实上，这是每个思考该问题的人都可以使用的一系列论点。

That’s what you’re really looking for in somebody who’s interested and serious about history.

这就是你真正想要寻找对历史感兴趣且认真的人。