各界频现巨头扼首 垄断才是民主的敌人

“It takes a heap of Harberger triangles to fill an Okun gap,” wrote James Tobin in 1977, four years before winning the Nobel Prize in economics. He meant that the big issue in economics was not battling against monopolists but preventing recessions and promoting recovery.

詹姆斯•托宾(James Tobin)在1977年、也就是他获得诺贝尔经济学奖的四年前写道：“需要一堆哈伯格三角(Harberger triangle)才能填满一个奥肯缺口(Okun gap)。”他的意思是，经济学的重大课题不在于反垄断，而在于防止衰退和促进复苏。

After the misery of recent years, nobody can doubt that preventing recessions and promoting recovery would have been a very good idea. But economists should be able to think about more than one thing at once. What if monopoly matters, too?

经历过近些年的苦难后，所有人都认定防止衰退和促进复苏会是个很好的主意。但是经济学家应当有能力同时思考不止一件事。如果垄断也有重要影响，那又当如何？

The Harberger triangle is the loss to society as monopolists raise their prices, and it is named after Arnold Harberger, who 60 years ago discovered that the costs of monopoly were about 0.1 per cent of US gross domestic product – a few billion dollars these days, much less than expected and much less than a recession.

哈伯格三角代表垄断企业提价给社会造成的损失，它以阿诺德•哈伯格(Arnold Harberger)的名字命名。60年前，哈伯格发现，垄断给美国造成的损失相当于美国国内生产总值(GDP)的0.1%左右——按最近的GDP数据来算大约是数十亿美元——远远低于预期，也远小于一场衰退造成的损失。

Professor Harberger’s discovery helped build a consensus that competition authorities could relax about the power of big business. But have we relaxed too much?

哈伯格教授的发现促成了一个共识：反垄断机构可以放松对商业巨头力量的管制。但是，我们是不是放松得过头了？

Large companies are all around us. We buy our mid-morning coffee from global brands such as Starbucks, use petrol from Exxon or Shell, listen to music purchased from a conglomerate such as Sony (via Apple’s iTunes), boot up a computer that runs Microsoft on an Intel processor. Crucial utilities – water, power, heating, internet and telephone – are supplied by a few dominant groups, with baffling contracts damping any competition.

我们身边到处都是大公司。我们在星巴克(Starbucks)等国际品牌那里购买上午喝的咖啡，使用埃克森(Exxon)或壳牌(Shell)的汽油，（通过苹果(Apple)的iTunes）从索尼(Sony)等企业集团那里购买乐曲来欣赏，使用搭载英特尔(Intel)处理器、运行微软(Microsoft)软件的电脑。水、电、供暖、互联网、电话等关键公共服务都由少数在市场上占主导地位的集团来供应，它们手里拥有令人困惑的、抑制一切竞争的合同。

Of course, not all large businesses have monopoly power. Tesco, the monarch of British food retailing, has found discount competitors chopping up its throne to use as kindling. Apple and Google are supplanting Microsoft. And even where market power is real, Prof Harberger’s point was that it may matter less than we think. But his influential analysis focused on monopoly pricing. We now know there are many other ways in which dominant businesses can harm us.

当然，并非所有的大公司都具备垄断的实力。英国食品零售之王乐购(Tesco)发现，许多靠打折竞争的对手正将它的王座劈成柴烧。苹果和谷歌(Google)正在取代微软。此外，即使是在确实存在市场支配力的领域，哈伯格教授也认为其影响可能要比我们想象的小。但是，他颇具影响力的分析聚焦于垄断价格。我们如今知道，垄断企业还有很多其他方式能损害我们的利益。

In 1989 the Beer Orders shook up a British pub industry controlled by six brewers. The hope was that more competition would lead to more and cheaper beer. It did not. The price of beer rose. Yet so did the quality of pubs. Where once every pub had offered rubbery sandwiches and stinking urinals, suddenly there were sports bars, candlelit gastropubs and other options. There is more to competition than lower prices.

1989年，“啤酒令”(Beer Orders)促使由六家啤酒酿造商把持的英国酒吧业重新洗牌。这项法令的本意是希望引入更多竞争能提升啤酒的供应量、压低其价格。但结果并非如此。啤酒的价格不降反升。不过，酒吧的质量也提升了。之前，每个酒吧供应的三明治都味同嚼蜡，小便池散发阵阵臭气。“啤酒令”颁布后，突然间冒出了运动酒吧、烛光美食酒吧和其他选项。竞争的意义不仅仅是压低价格。

Monopolists can sometimes use their scale and cash flow to produce real innovations – the glory years of Bell Labs come to mind. But the ferocious cut and thrust of smaller competitors seems a more reliable way to produce many of the everyday innovations that matter.

垄断者有时能够利用它们的规模和现金流造就真正的创新——回想一下贝尔实验室(Bell Labs)的辉煌年代。但就造就许多重要的日常创新而言，中小竞争者构成的激烈竞争似乎是一种更可靠的方式。

That cut and thrust is no longer so cutting or thrusting as once it was. “The business sector of the US economy is ageing,” says a Brookings research paper. It is a trend found across regions and industries, as incumbent players enjoy entrenched advantages. “The rate of business start-ups and the pace of employment dynamism in the US economy has fallen over recent decades . . . This downward trend accelerated after 2000,” adds a survey in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

现在，这种竞争不再像原来那样激烈了。“美国经济的商业部门正在老化，”布鲁金斯学会(Brookings)的一份研究报告称。这种趋势见于各个地区和行业，既有的市场参与者享有根深蒂固的优势。《经济展望期刊》(Journal of Economic Perspectives)的一份调查补充道：“近几十年来，美国经济中的创业比率和就业活力的变化速度都下滑了……这一下滑趋势在2000年后有所加速。”

That means higher prices and less innovation, but perhaps the game is broader still. The continuing debate in the US over “net neutrality” is really an argument about the least damaging way to regulate the conduct of cable companies that hold local monopolies. If customers had real choice over their internet service provider, net neutrality rules would be needed only as a backstop.

这意味着价格上涨、创新减少，但博弈牵扯的范围可能还更大了。美国国内围绕“网络中立”(net neutrality)持续展开的辩论，实际上是在争论如何用损失最小的方式监管在地方享有垄断地位的有线电视公司的行为。如果消费者真的有条件选择互联网服务提供商，那么网络中立规则就只需作为一道最后的保障存在。

As the debate reminds us, large companies enjoy power as lobbyists. When they are monopolists, the incentive to lobby increases because the gains from convenient new rules and laws accrue solely to them. Monopolies are no friend of a healthy democracy.

正如这场辩论提醒我们的，大公司享有作为游说者的影响力。当大公司是垄断者时，它们游说的动力就更大了，因为它们能独占便利的新法规带来的利益。垄断者不是健康的民主制度的朋友。

They are, alas, often the friend of government bureaucracies. This is not just a case of corruption but also about what is convenient and comprehensible to a politician or civil servant. If they want something done about climate change, they have a chat with the oil companies. Obesity is a problem to be discussed with the likes of McDonald’s. If anything on the internet makes a politician feel sad, from alleged copyright infringement to “the right to be forgotten”, there is now a one-stop shop to sort it all out: Google.

遗憾的是，垄断者往往是政府官僚的朋友。这里涉及的不仅仅是腐败问题，还牵扯对政治人士或公职人员来说什么是方便的和易于理解的。如果他们想就气候变化问题做成一点事情，他们就和石油企业谈一谈。想解决国民的肥胖问题，就和麦当劳(McDonald's)之类的企业讨论一下。如果网上存在任何让政治人士感到不悦的东西，从涉嫌侵犯版权的东西到“被遗忘权”等等，现在有一站式的解决方法：找谷歌谈一谈。

Politicians feel this is a sensible, almost convivial, way to do business – but neither the problems in question nor the goal of vigorous competition are resolved as a result.

政治人士觉得这是一种合理的、近乎愉快的解决问题的方式——但这么做既不能解决他们所讨论的问题，也不能实现激烈竞争所能达成的目标。

One has only to consider the way the financial crisis has played out. The emergency response involved propping up big institutions and ramming through mergers; hardly a long-term solution to the problem of “too big to fail”. Even if smaller banks do not guarantee a more stable financial system, entrepreneurs and consumers would profit from more pluralistic competition for their business.

我们只需要想一想本次金融危机的过程。应急对策包括支撑大机构和强力推动合并；却几乎不包含什么长期对策来解决“大到不能倒”(too big to fail)的问题。尽管规模较小的银行不能保证让金融体系变得更加稳定，但银行业的多元竞争将使企业家和消费者受益。

No policy can guarantee innovation, financial stability, sharper focus on social problems, healthier democracies, higher quality and lower prices. But assertive competition policy would improve our odds, whether through helping consumers to make empowered choices, splitting up large corporations or blocking megamergers. Such structural approaches are more effective than looking over the shoulders of giant corporations and nagging them; they should be a trusted tool of government rather than a last resort.

没有任何政策能够保证带来创新、金融稳定、对社会问题的更多关注、更健康的民主制度、更高的品质和更低的价格。但是，坚定的反垄断政策可以提高我们的胜算，不论是通过帮助消费者做出更有掌控力的选择，还是通过对大公司进行拆分、或阻止巨型并购案。这类结构性对策比小心提防大公司并对它们唠唠叨叨有效，它们应当成为政府的一项可靠工具，而非万不得已的手段。

As human freedoms go, the freedom to take your custom elsewhere is not a grand or noble one – but neither is it one that we should abandon without a fight.

说到人类的自由，上别处买东西的自由算不上什么重大或崇高的自由——但它也不是一项我们应该不经抗争就放弃的自由。