The world economy is like a supercomputer that churns through trillions of calculations of prices and quantities, and spits out information on incomes, wealth, profits, and jobs. This is effectively how capitalism works—as a highly efficient information-processing system. To do that job, like any computer, capitalism runs on both hardware and software. The hardware is the markets, institutions, and regulatory regimes that make up the economy. The software is the governing economic ideas of the day—in essence, what society has decided the economy is for.
世界经济就像是超级计算机，它通过数万亿美元的价格和数量计算，并吐出有关收入，财富，利润和就业机会的信息。这是资本主义的工作原理，这是一个高效的信息处理系统。为了像任何计算机一样做这项工作，资本主义在硬件和软件上都运行。硬件是构成经济的市场，机构和监管制度。该软件是当天的经济思想，本质上，社会决定了经济的目的。
Most of the time, the computer works quite well. But now and then, it crashes. Usually when that happens, the world economy just needs a software update—new ideas to address new problems. But sometimes it needs a major hardware modification as well. We are in one of those Control-Alt-Delete moments. Against the background of tariff wars, market angst about U.S. debt, tumbling consumer confidence, and a weakening dollar watched over by a heedless administration, globalization’s American-led era of free trade and open societies is coming to a close.
大多数时候，计算机运行良好。但是时不时地崩溃了。通常情况下，世界经济只需要软件更新即可解决新问题。但是有时它也需要重大的硬件修改。我们处于那些控制级降低的时刻之一。在关税战争的背景下，对美国债务的市场焦虑，消费者的信心，疲软的美元疲软，全球化的美国领导的自由贸易和开放社会的时代即将结束。
The global economy is getting a hardware refit and trying out a new operating system—in effect, a full reboot, the likes of which we have not seen in nearly a century. To understand why this is happening and what it means, we need to abandon any illusion that the worldwide turn toward right-wing populism and economic nationalism is merely a temporary error, and that everything will eventually snap back to the relatively benign world of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The computer’s architecture is changing, but how this next version of capitalism will work depends a great deal on the software we choose to run on it. The governing ideas about the economy are in flux: We have to decide what the new economic order looks like and whose interests it will serve.
全球经济正在进行硬件改装并尝试新的操作系统 - 有效，全面重新启动，我们近一个世纪以来都没有看到过这种操作系统。要了解为什么会发生这种情况及其含义，我们需要放弃任何幻想，即全世界转向右翼的民粹主义和经济民族主义只是一个暂时的错误，而一切最终将最终回到1990年代末和2000年代初的相对良性世界。计算机的体系结构正在发生变化，但是下一版本的资本主义将如何工作取决于我们选择在其上运行的软件。关于经济的管理思想正在泛滥：我们必须决定新的经济秩序是什么样的，以及它将提供的利益。
Read: Americans want to be rich
阅读：美国人想要富有
The last such force-quit, hard-restart period was in the 1930s. In the United States, the huge liquidity crunch caused by the 1929 Wall Street crash combined with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 to kill commercial activity and trigger the Great Depression. Bank failures swiftly turned into a mass failure of firms and industries; wages tumbled and unemployment shot up, in some areas to a quarter of the workforce. Despite the state interventions of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program, the economic situation stabilized and returned to sustained growth only in the ’40s, when wartime re-armament delivered a huge industrial stimulus.
最后一个Quit的艰难时期是在1930年代。在美国，1929年华尔街崩溃造成的巨大流动性紧缩结合了1930年的Smoot-Hawley关税法，以杀死商业活动并触发大萧条。银行失败迅速变成了公司和行业的大规模失败；工资在某些地区到四分之一的劳动力。尽管富兰克林·罗斯福（Franklin D.
The computer built for the postwar period was solving to avoid a repeat of the ’30s. The software update was a new governing idea of full employment. Achieving that aim as the central raison d’être of the economy also entailed several hardware modifications. One was a policy of forcing wealth owners to use their capital locally by limiting their ability to move it out of the country. To maintain their profits, they were obliged to invest in technology that would increase productivity. In this virtuous cycle, high productivity allowed for high wages, which the state could then tax to fund social transfers. Combined with the government-spending power of revenues raised by high marginal taxes, America’s welfare state was born. Labor unions were seen more as partners in business enterprises, and political parties needed to appeal to the median, middle-income voter. These changes produced a political system in which the two main parties competed over a centrist consensus so bipartisan that people struggled to see the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
为战后时期制造的计算机正在解决，以避免重复30年代。该软件更新是一个全面就业的新统治想法。作为经济的中央理由的目标，实现这一目标也需要进行了几项硬件修改。一种是一种政策，迫使财富所有者通过限制将其移出国家的能力来利用本地资本。为了维持利润，他们必须投资于提高生产率的技术。在这个良性周期中，高生产率允许高工资，国家可以征税以资助社会转移。加上高边际税收筹集的政府支出能力，美国的福利国家诞生了。工会被视为商业企业的合作伙伴，而政党需要吸引中位数中等收入选民。这些变化产生了一个政治制度，在该制度中，两个主要政党在中间派共识中竞争了两党，人们努力地看到民主党人与共和党人之间的区别。
The New Deal did indeed avoid a repeat of the ’30s, but its software had a bug. If full employment meant running the economy hot to keep unemployment down, then eventually employers’ ability to keep their profits up by augmenting productivity would fail as workers’ demand for higher wages outstripped firms’ ability to pay them. By the mid-’70s, profits were falling as wages and inflation rose, so the U.S. investor class reached for the reboot switch. Holders of capital founded political-action committees, funded think tanks and media outlets to promote free enterprise, and helped get Ronald Reagan elected in 1980. Reagan busted unions and deregulated markets, accelerating the movement of capital from union strongholds to “right to work” states, which was effectively an onshore tryout of offshoring. Simultaneously, the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker raised interest rates to almost 20 percent to squeeze inflation, a measure that induced a harsh recession, which disciplined labor further by raising unemployment.
这项新交易确实避免了30年代的重复，但其软件有一个错误。如果充分就业意味着经济繁殖以使失业率降低，那么随着工人对较高工资的需求超过企业的付款能力，雇主通过提高生产力来保持利润的能力将失败。到70年代中期，随着工资和通货膨胀率上升，利润下降了，因此美国投资者班达到了重新启动开关。资本创立的政治行动委员会，资助的智囊团和媒体的持有人以促进自由企业，并帮助罗纳德·里根（Ronald Reagan）于1980年当选。里根（Reagan）破坏了工会和受管制的市场，加速了资本从工会堡垒从工会堡垒到“权利工作”州的发展，这实际上是在岸上的外交部骑行的近距离试训。同时，保罗·沃尔克（Paul Volcker）领导下的美联储将利率提高到了近20％，以挤压通货膨胀，这一措施诱发了严峻的衰退，这通过增加失业来进一步纪律。
As all of that implies, full employment ceased to be the governing economic idea. The software rewrite of this era instead made price stability, capital mobility, and the restoration of profits via globalization the new priorities. The hardware modification was to make central banks more independent—the better to enforce price stability and enable the recovery of profits. These new priorities were justified by Margaret Thatcher’s famous nostrum that “there is no alternative.” This reboot has come to be known as neoliberalism.
正如所有这些所暗示的那样，充分就业不再是管理经济思想。相反，软件改写了这个时代的稳定性，资本流动性和通过全球化的新优先事项来恢复利润。硬件修改是使中央银行更加独立 - 更好地执行价格稳定并使利润恢复。玛格丽特·撒切尔（Margaret Thatcher）著名的鼻子“别无选择”，这是合理的。这种重新启动已被称为新自由主义。
Read: The debate that will determine how the Democrats govern next time
阅读：将决定民主党下次如何统治的辩论
The computer was humming along again when I arrived from Scotland to attend graduate school in New York in the summer of 1992. The U.S. had entered a period that Ben Bernanke, then a Federal Reserve governor (and later Fed chair), called the “Great Moderation.” Globalization was good; finance was the future. Central banks had delivered sustainable prosperity, and the investor class saw its profits restored on a transnational scale.
1992年夏天，当我从苏格兰到达纽约的研究生院时，计算机再次嗡嗡作响。美国进入了一个时期，当时的美联储州长本·伯南克（后来是美联储主席）称为“大节制”。全球化很好；财务是未来。中央银行提供了可持续的繁荣，投资者阶级看到其利润在跨国规模上恢复了。
Once again, however, the system had a bug. The increase in profitability came not only as a result of improved domestic productivity but also at the expense of once-stable industrial regions of the U.S., as jobs, skills, and capital flowed out. Meanwhile, the authorities had presided over the deregulation of financial markets, which supplied the economy with copious credit. But one effect of this credit was to mask a chronic lack of wage growth and a rising level of inequality.
但是，该系统再次有一个错误。盈利能力的提高不仅是由于国内生产力提高而导致的，而且还牺牲了美国曾经稳定的工业地区，因为就业，技能和资本流失了。同时，当局主持了对金融市场的放松管制，该市场为经济提供了丰富的信誉。但是，这种信用的一种影响是掩盖长期缺乏工资增长和不平等程度上升的水平。
That turned out to be a major hardware issue: Neoliberalism’s financialized solutions to economic problems became liabilities when the next crash came, in 2008, as a tsunami of credit became an earthquake of debt. The hardware modification of the era—independent central banks—saved the system with colossal bailouts of the private sector, paid for by the public sector in the form of ever greater debt and more stringent fiscal policies. This liquidity dump enabled the economy to stagger on through the slowest-ever recovery from a recession—but only by pushing the bulk of the costs of those bailouts onto those least able to bear them. Signs of profound public disaffection in Western countries started to show in 2016: first with the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, then with Donald Trump’s rise in the U.S.
事实证明，这是一个主要的硬件问题：新自由主义对经济问题的财务解决方案在2008年发生下一次崩溃时成为责任，因为信贷的海啸成为债务的地震。该时代的硬件修改（独立的中央银行）以私营部门的巨大救助来避免该系统，并由公共部门以更大的债务和更严格的财政政策的形式支付。这种流动性转储使经济能够通过经济衰退的最慢的恢复，但只有将这些救助的大部分费用推向那些最不能力的人的费用。西方国家深深的公众不满的迹象在2016年开始露面：首先是英国英国脱欧投票，然后是唐纳德·特朗普在美国的崛起
Trump has acted as a catalyst for the next reboot. His hostile takeover of the Republican Party was leveraged by a new, more working-class electoral coalition based on a populist politics of resentment. His antipathy toward China may lack analysis, but by articulating a sense that American workers had lost out in the neoliberal era, it gave voice to authentic grievance. Trump’s chaotic first term made only limited progress in forcing another reboot, but his second term seems likely to foreclose on the Biden administration’s interim solution of keeping the neoliberal system running with a limited New Deal–like reindustrialization in new sectors such as renewable energy. The Inflation Reduction Act was a significant reinvention of industrial policy, something not seen for decades outside a national-security context, but Trump is abandoning this sort of intervention. Instead, he has chosen tariffs as his singular tool for reshoring industry.
特朗普是下一次重启的催化剂。他对共和党的敌对接管受到了一个基于民粹主义政治的新工人阶级的选举联盟的利用。他对中国的反感可能缺乏分析，但是通过表达出一种在新自由主义时代失去的感觉，它表达了真实的不满。特朗普的混乱第一任期在迫使再次重启时仅取得了有限的进展，但他的第二任期似乎可能会预期拜登政府的临时解决方案，即保持新自由主义体系在新领域的有限新交易（如可再生能源）中的新领域有限的重新工业化。《降低通货膨胀法》是对工业政策的重大重塑，几十年来在国家安全背景之外看不到这一点，但特朗普放弃了这种干预。取而代之的是，他选择了关税作为重新设计行业的单一工具。
To the extent that the Trumpian approach coheres, the economy’s new goal is to benefit native workers by restoring carbon-heavy industrial jobs while removing immigrants from the labor pool and encouraging women to have more children and become homemakers. This is not so much the building of a new computer system as the retrofitting of several old ones—a version of what a critic of Thatcherism once called “regressive modernisation.” The MAGA economic ideal derives from a blend of the 1950s, which saw a huge expansion of manufacturing jobs for men, and the ’40s, when women were pushed out of the wartime jobs and back into the home, and immigration was tightly restricted. This boost for the native labor force is in turn yoked to a 19th-century, mercantilist “spheres of influence” foreign policy.
在特朗普的方法相干的范围内，经济的新目标是通过恢复碳繁重的工业工作来使土著工人受益，同时将移民从劳动池中撤离，并鼓励妇女生更多的孩子并成为家庭主妇。这不是建立一个新的计算机系统，而是对几个旧旧系统的改造，这是对撒切尔主义曾经被称为“回归现代化”的批评的版本。MAGA经济理想源于1950年代的融合，该杂志为男性提供了巨大的制造业工作，而40年代，当妇女被推出战时工作并返回家中，移民受到严格限制。反过来，这对当地劳动力的增长也被驱逐到19世纪的重商主义“影响力领域”外交政策。
This hodgepodge of historical impulses speaks to the unsettled nature of Trumponomics. No new economic order is discernible, because the governing idea is still contested. The national-conservative movement, which seeks to rebrand the GOP as a workers’ party, has one vision, but other forces are also trying to shape this moment. The “Dark Enlightenment” wing of the tech sector is a player, too. Overinvested in AI and keen to grab government funding that was earmarked for elite research universities, the Silicon Valley billionaires imagine an economy that runs not as a return to hard-hat industry’s glorious past but as a posthuman future of automation and space exploration.
这种历史冲动的大概是说明特朗普学的不安本质。没有新的经济秩序是可以辨别的，因为关于理事的想法仍然有争议。国家保守运动试图将共和党重塑为工人党，有一个愿景，但其他力量也试图塑造这一刻。技术领域的“黑暗启蒙”翼也是一名球员。硅谷亿万富翁在AI中投入过度投资，并热衷于获得专门为精英研究型大学提供的政府资金，想象一个经济并不是一个经济，这并不是返回硬帽行业的光荣过去，而是自动化和太空探索的后来的未来。
The problem with such projects is that we cannot go back, any more than we can leap into the future; we can live only in the present. The populist-right reset will fail because tariffs may spur some reindustrialization, but robots will be the main producers, not working-class men on an assembly line. And little suggests that most women will relish the return to hearth and home that is planned for them. The techno-futurist update has nothing to offer the great mass of humanity and would benefit only the tech lords most invested in its realization.
这样的项目的问题在于，我们不能回去，比我们可以跨越未来的更多。我们只能生活在现在。民粹主义权利的重置将失败，因为关税可能会刺激一些重新工业化，但是机器人将是主要的生产商，而不是在装配线上的工人阶级男人。很少有人暗示大多数妇女会喜欢为她们计划的炉膛和炉膛和家。技术上的技术更新无助于提供大量人类，只会使技术领主在实现其实现方面受益。
Read: What Chris Murphy learned from the new right
阅读：克里斯·墨菲（Chris Murphy）从新的权利中学到了什么
So we seem to be stuck, which is why this moment is so perplexing. The system upgrade is pending: The right is offering its regressive modernization as the update. The left has yet to figure out which one of three paths it wants to take.
因此，我们似乎被卡住了，这就是为什么这一刻如此困惑的原因。系统升级正在等待：权利正在提供其回归现代化作为更新。左派尚未弄清楚它要采取的三条路径之一。
One possibility is to stay put with the gerontocracy of the Democratic Party and wait for Trumpism to implode. That might happen, and the Democrats’ current position as the party of the institutionalist status quo makes this the most likely path. But this will be a losing proposition if no reversion to the mean of the pre-MAGA American politics occurs.
一种可能性是依靠民主党的老年礼物，并等待特朗普主义爆炸。这可能会发生，民主党人目前作为制度主义现状的政党的立场使这成为最有可能的道路。但这将是一个失败的主张，如果没有对马加前政治的平均值进行归还。
The effort by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders to rally an anti-oligarchy movement advocates for a second option, of left-wing populism. But whether this appeals to young men who have been drawn to Trump, as well as young women who poll as more progressive, and can create a broad-enough coalition remains to be seen.
代表亚历山大·奥卡西奥·科尔特斯（Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez）和参议员伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）的努力集结了左翼民粹主义的第二种选择。但是，这是否吸引了被特朗普吸引的年轻男子，以及投票更加进步并可以建立广泛的联盟的年轻女性，还有待观察。
A third approach is the “abundance” agenda, promoted recently by Ezra Klein and The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson, which proposes a progressive political program based on lower-regulation, pro-growth policies as a spark for renewed economic growth—though critics on the left accuse this approach of failing to confront corporate power.
第三种方法是埃兹拉·克莱因（Ezra Klein）和大西洋的德里克·汤普森（Derek Thompson）最近提起的“丰度”议程，该议程提出了一项基于较低监管的，促成增长的政策的进步政治计划，以此作为新的经济增长的激发，尽管左右批评者却指责这种方法未能与人类的权力相遇。
To develop an alternative to the regressive modernization underpinning Trump’s reelection, the left must come up with a governing economic idea that can compete. Technocratic fixes of the old system look very unlikely to inspire a broad-enough coalition to defeat the potent, if unstable, electoral alliance that reelected Trump. The most promising avenue—one that could address the needs of millions of Americans who feel shut out of growth and prosperity and alienated from America’s governing elite—might be a fusion of AOC/Bernie populism with a more political, less technocratic version of abundance.
为了建立替代特朗普连任的回归现代化的替代方案，左派必须提出一个可以竞争的经济观念。旧制度的技术官僚修复看起来很不可能激发一个广泛的联盟来击败当选特朗普的强大，不稳定的选举联盟。最有前途的途径 - 可以解决数百万美国人的需求，这些美国人感到不受成长和繁荣的态度，并与美国的统治精英疏远 - 可能是AOC/Bernie民粹主义与更政治上，更少的技术专家的丰富性融合在一起。
Regardless of whether such a project can materialize, we have to accept that a transformation is under way. A new economic order is forming—which means that it is not yet fixed and can still be shaped. But time is running out. As jumbled as the regressive modernization is, it could win the day if we do not come up with a different governing idea of what the economy is and whom it is for. And we need enough people in our democracy to agree that this new purpose is the right one. The ideas are there to be found. They just need politicians with the courage to try them.
无论该项目是否可以实现，我们都必须接受正在进行的转型。一个新的经济秩序正在形成 - 这意味着它尚未固定并且仍然可以塑造。但是时间耗尽。就像回归现代化一样混乱，如果我们不提出关于经济是什么以及它是谁的管理观念，它可能会赢得这一天。我们需要足够多的民主国家来同意这一新目标是正确的目标。这些想法可以找到。他们只需要勇于尝试他们的政客。
