資助哥倫布是糟糕投資 Capital ideas in a time of inequality

In January 1963, Warren Buffett included the following impish observation in his letter to his investment partners. “I have it from unreliable sources that the cost of the voyage Isabella underwrote for Columbus was approximately $30,000.”

1963年1月，沃倫•巴菲特(Warren Buffett)把以下頑皮觀點寫到了他寫給投資夥伴的信中。“我從不可靠的來源得知，伊莎貝拉(Isabella)女王資助給哥倫布(Columbus)的航海費用大約爲3萬美元。”

Unreliable indeed; there was no dollar in 1492. But we get the gist. Buffett goes on to observe that while the voyage could be considered “at least a moderately successful utilisation of venture capital”, if Queen Isabella had instead invested the $30,000 in something yielding 4 per cent compound interest, the invested sum would have risen to $2tn by 1962. For her inheritors’ sake, perhaps Isabella should have said no to Columbus and simply found the 15th-century equivalent of a passive index fund instead.

的確這並不靠譜；1492年美元還沒問世。但我們明白他的意思。巴菲特接着稱，這次航海可能會被視爲“至少是對風險投資比較成功的利用”，但如果伊莎貝拉女王把這3萬美元投資於複利爲4%的資產，那麼到1962年，這筆投資的價值將升至2萬億美元。爲她的繼承人着想，或許伊莎貝拉原本應該對哥倫布說不，然後在15世紀找到一筆相當於被動指數基金的投資。

Buffett’s thought experiment returned to me as I browsed through the latest list of billionaires from Forbes. None of the leading players had achieved their position by the simple accumulation of family wealth over generations. The top five — Bill Gates, Amancio Ortega, Buffett, Carlos Slim and Jeff Bezos — are all entrepreneurs of one form or another. According to economists Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver, the proportion of billionaires who inherited their fortunes has fallen from 55 per cent two decades ago to 30 per cent today.

我在瀏覽《福布斯》(Forbes)最新億萬富翁排行榜時，回想起了巴菲特的這一“思想實驗”。排在榜單前面的億萬富翁都不是通過簡單的一代又一代人累積家族財富而取得現在的地位的。列在該排行榜前5位的是比爾•蓋茨(Bill Gates)、阿曼西奧•奧特加(Amancio Ortega)、巴菲特、卡洛斯•斯利姆(Carlos Slim)和傑夫•貝索斯(Jeff Bezos)，他們都是某種形式的企業家。經濟學家卡洛琳•弗洛恩德(Caroline Freund)和莎拉•奧利弗(Sarah Oliver)表示，依靠繼承財富上榜的億萬富翁數量已從20年前的55%降至現在的30%。

Is this absence of old-money trillionaires because Buffett’s 4 per cent compound interest was unavailable to the wealthy and powerful of pre-industrial Europe? Hardly. If anything, 4 per cent is conservative. According to Thomas Piketty’s bestselling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), the real rate of return on capital, after taxes and capital losses, was 4.5 per cent in the 16th and 17th centuries, then 5 per cent until 1913. Although it fell sharply between the wars, the effective average rate of return was very nearly 4.3 per cent across the five centuries. At that rate, $30,000 invested in 1492 would be worth $110tn today.

通過繼承財富上榜的億萬富翁寥寥無幾，是否是因爲在工業時代以前的歐洲，富人和有權勢的人無法得到巴菲特所說的4%的複利？絕非如此。4%甚至是個保守數字。托馬斯•皮凱蒂(Thomas Piketty)所著的暢銷書《21世紀資本論》(Capital in the Twenty-First Century)（2013年出版）稱，計入稅收和資本損失後，16和17世紀的實際資本回報率爲4.5%，接着是5%，直到1913年。儘管在兩次世界大戰之間資本回報率曾大幅下滑，但5個世紀以來的平均實際回報率非常接近4.3%。按照這個回報率，如果在1492年投資3萬美元，現在的價值將達到110萬億美元。

Not to get too technical, but $110tn is a lot of money. It’s more than 1,000 times the wealth of the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. It’s 17 times the total wealth of the 1,810 billionaires on the Forbes list — or, alternatively, nearly half the household wealth of every citizen on the planet. (According to Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report, total global household wealth is $250tn.) Queen Isabella’s investment advisers apparently let her down. Patient, conservative investments would have left her heir today with a fortune to tower over every modern plutocrat.

我不想搞得太專業，但110萬億美元是一大筆錢。它是全球首富比爾•蓋茨財富總額的1000多倍，是《福布斯》排行榜上1810位億萬富翁財富總額的17倍，或者是全球所有公民家庭財富的近一半。（根據瑞信(Credit Suisse)的《全球財富報告》(Global Wealth Report)，全球家庭總財富爲250萬億美元。）伊莎貝拉女王的投資顧問顯然辜負了她。耐心保守的投資將讓她現在的繼承人坐擁超過任何一位現代富豪的財富。

All this brought to mind Piketty’s “r>g”, a mathematical expression so celebrated that people started putting it on T-shirts. It describes a situation where “r” (the rate of return on capital) exceeds “g” (the growth rate of the economy as a whole). That is a situation that described most of human history, but notably not the 20th century, when growth rates soared while capital had a tendency to be nationalised, confiscated or reduced to rubble.

所有這一切都讓人想起皮凱蒂的“r>g”，這是一個很有名的數學表達式，以至於人們開始把它寫在T恤上。它描述的是資本回報率高於經濟整體增速的情況。這是人類歷史上多數時候的情況，但20世紀令人矚目地不是這樣；在這個世紀，經濟增速飆升，而資本傾向於被國有化、沒收或變得一文不值。

“r>g” is significant because if capital is reinvested and grows faster than the economy, it will tend to loom larger in economic activity. And since capital is more unequally distributed than labour income, “r>g” may describe a society of increasingly entrenched privilege, where wealth and power steadily accrue in the hands of heirs.

“r>g”很重要，因爲如果資本被再投資而且增速快於經濟增長時，它傾向於在經濟活動上表現得更爲突出。由於與勞動收入相比，資本的分配更不平等，“r>g”可能描述的是一個特權越來越固化的社會；在這樣的社會，財富和權勢在繼承人手裏穩步積累。

This is a fascinating, and worrying, possibility. But it is a poor description of the modern world. For one thing, when billionaires divide their inheritance, mere procreation can be a social equaliser. Historically, the great houses of Europe intermarried and concentrated wealth in the hands of a single heir. (No wonder: one of Queen Isabella’s grandsons, Ferdinand I, had 15 children.) But these days, disinheriting daughters and second sons is out of fashion. (That said, “assortative mating”, the tendency of educated people to marry each other, is back and may explain more about rising income inequality than we tend to realise.)

這是一種有趣但令人擔憂的可能性。但它沒有很好地描述現代世界。首先，當億萬富翁分割遺產繼承權時，繁育後代可能成爲一個社會均衡器。從歷史上來說，歐洲大家族會通婚並把財富集中在單一繼承人手裏。（毫不奇怪的是：伊莎貝拉女王的孫子之一費迪南一世(Ferdinand I)有15個子女。）但在當今，剝奪女兒和次子繼承權的事情已不流行了。（儘管如此，“選擇性婚配”（即受教育人士之間通婚）現在迴歸，可能比我們所傾向於想象的更能解釋收入不平等程度上升。）

Another thing: the rich do not simply wallow in money vaults like Scrooge McDuck. They spend. According to Harvard economist Greg Mankiw: “A plausible estimate of the marginal propensity to consume out of wealth, based on both theory and empirical evidence, is about 3 per cent.” Instead of 4.3 per cent, then, wealth compounds at 1.3 per cent after allowing for this spending. Five centuries of compound interest at 1.3 per cent turns $30,000 into about $25m, a fine inheritance indeed but not the kind of money that will get you near the Forbes list.

另一點：富人不會像唐老鴨的舅舅史高治•麥克老鴨(Scrooge McDuck)那樣鑽到錢眼裏。他們會消費。哈佛大學(Harvard)經濟學家格里高利•曼昆(Greg Mankiw)稱：“根據理論和經驗證據，財富的邊際消費傾向的合理估值約爲3%。”若刨除這種消費，則財富的複利爲1.3%，而不是4.3%。按照1.3%的複利，3萬美元經過5個世紀會變成大約2500萬美元，這確實也是一筆豐厚的遺產，但不會讓你登上《福布斯》排行榜。

Of course, inherited privilege shapes our societies not only among the plutocracy but down in the rolling foothills of English middle-class wealth. There, economic destiny is increasingly governed by whether your parents bought a house in the right place at the right time — and by the UK government’s astonishing abolition of inheritance tax on family homes.

當然，繼承特權不僅在富豪中間，還在英國中產階級財富中間影響着我們的社會。經濟命運日趨取決於你的父母是否在正確的時間和正確的地點購買了房產，以及英國政府驚人地廢除對家庭住房徵收遺產稅。

But whether mega-wealth in the 21st century will be driven by the patient accumulation of rents on capital, rather than the disruptive entrepreneurship of the late 20th century, remains to be seen. After all, long-term real interest rates in advanced economies have fallen fairly steadily from 4 to 5 per cent three decades ago to nothing at all today. You don’t need to be Warren Buffett to figure out that if you want to get rich by accumulating compound interest of zero, you’ll be waiting a long time.

然而，我們仍不確定，21世紀的超級富豪是否會受到耐心累積資本租金的驅使，而非20世紀末顛覆性的企業家精神。畢竟，發達經濟體的長期實際利率已從30年前的4%至5%穩步降至現在的零。你不需要成爲沃倫•巴菲特就可以確定，如果你希望通過累積零水平的複利而變得富有的話，你要等很長時間。