A picnic in the sun on the lawn of the Paris School of Economics would have been better, but it’s too late. We are at Les Jardins de Paul Ha, a bakery turned deli in the 14th arrondissement, and Thomas Piketty is already biting into a hard-boiled egg.
在巴黎经济学院(Paris School of Economics)草坪上享受阳光下的野餐本来会更惬意，但时间已太晚。我们现在坐在巴黎14区一家面包房改造的、名为Les Jardins de Paul Ha的熟食店，托马斯皮凯蒂(Thomas Piketty)已经咬了一口一只煮老了的鸡蛋。
It’s a five-minute walk from the office of the man the media refer to as a “rock-star economist” but it’s hard to find much glamour here or in his life these days. The success of Piketty’s bookCapital in the Twenty-First Century(2013), a surprise 700-page bestseller, threw him into a year-long media whirlwind. But now its author longs for normality. And so here we are in a deserted backroom eating our meal from plastic containers on dark-blue trays, a faded, peeling poster of a beach in the Seychelles on the wall beside us.
这里距皮凯蒂的办公室步行仅五分钟，媒体称他为“摇滚明星经济学家”，但在这里，或者在他如今的生活中，已经很难找到多少光芒万丈的东西。皮凯蒂2013年出版的700页的《21世纪资本论》(Capital in the Twenty-First Century)意外成为畅销书，该书的成功让他卷入了长达一年的媒体旋风。而现在，这位作者渴望正常的状态。所以我们坐在僻静的后屋里，吃着深蓝色托盘上盛在塑料容器中的食物，身旁的墙上贴着一幅褪色、快要脱落的海报，上面是塞舌尔的海滩。

“I have had phases of promotion and conferences, which I enjoy very much, but I need to get back to normal life,” Piketty explains, crossing his legs and leaning on the empty chair next to him. “Normal life is sitting at my desk from 9am to 7pm, with no one bothering me. People don’t realise that research requires time and quiet. So a two-hour break for lunch...” he sighs, rolling his eyes.
“我参加过很多推广活动和会议，我很享受这些活动，但我需要回归正常生活，”皮凯蒂解释说，他翘着二郎腿，靠着旁边的空椅子。“正常的生活是从上午9点到晚上7点坐在办公桌前，没人打扰我。人们不知道研究需要时间和清净。所以，休息两小时吃顿午餐……”他不赞同地叹息道。
I had caught a glimpse of Piketty’s natural habitat when I picked the 44-year-old scholar up from his 12 sq m office, a stuffy room located in a grey postwar building that is home to the research institution he helped set up in 2006.
当我到这位44岁学者12平米的办公室接他时，我看了一眼他的“自然栖息地”。这是一间位于一座灰色战后建筑中的不通风的房间，这座建筑是他2006年帮忙建立的研究机构的所在地。
With its claim that capitalism, by its nature, worsens inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (first published in French in 2013 and then in English eight months later) caused a transatlantic furore, pitting proponents of state intervention against believers in the free market. While the book’s extensive compilation of data on income and wealth distribution has been widely praised, Piketty’s theories and conclusions — that the proportion of income and wealth going to the richest 1 per cent has reached a historic high; that return on capital usually exceeds economic growth, resulting in an automatic increase in inequality — have also been attacked. With his calls for higher taxes and more regulation, he has become the darling of the left and the enemy of the right.
由于宣称资本主义就本质而言加剧了不平等，《21世纪资本论》（2013年首先出版法文版，八个月后英文版面世）在大西洋两岸引起了轰动，在国家干预的支持者与自由市场的信徒之间点燃了争论。虽然该书大量汇编的收入和财富分配数据受到了广泛称赞，但皮凯蒂的理论和结论——收入和财富流向最富有1%人群的比例已达到历史新高；资本回报率通常超过经济增长率，导致不平等自动加剧——也受到了攻击。由于他呼吁增税以及加强监管，他成了左翼的宠儿，也成了右翼的敌人。
While I wait for my microwaved pasta bolognese to cool down, I ask him how it feels to be a celebrity. Piketty, wearing a close-fitting light-blue shirt with the top two buttons undone, says he welcomes it as long as it translates into selling more books. Two million copies have been bought so far, he says with pleasure.
在等待微波炉加热的意大利肉酱面冷却之时，我问他做名人感觉如何。身穿修身浅蓝色衬衫、敞着领口两颗纽扣的皮凯蒂说，只要能转化为书的更大销量，他对此表示欢迎。他开心地说，到目前为止，他的书已经售出200万册。
“The success of my book shows there are a lot of people who are not economists but are tired of being told that those questions are too complicated for them,” he says, picking at a mayonnaise-soaked slice of cucumber. He speaks fast and with plenty of hand gestures. He is curious about my age — “Oh, you’re younger than my sister” — and inquires about my career. He exudes self-confidence.
“这本书的成功表明，有很多人虽然不是经济学家，但他们厌倦了被告知这些问题对他们来说太复杂，”他边说，边小口吃着浸透蛋黄酱的黄瓜片。他语速很快，伴随许多手势。他很好奇我的年龄——“噢，你比我妹妹还年轻”，还询问了我的职业情况。他浑身散发着自信。
“Too often, economists build very complex mathematical models to look scientific and impress people. I have nothing against mathematics — I initially trained as a mathematician — but it’s usually to hide a lack of ideas. What pleases me is that this book reaches ‘normal’ people, a rather wide public. My mother is one example,” he says, adding that she rarely reads big academic books yet understood everything in his.
“经济学家老爱建立非常复杂的数学模型，以便看起来科学并给人们留下深刻印象。我一点儿也不反对数学——我最初是要被培养成为一名数学家——但这样做通常是掩盖观点的缺乏。让我开心的是，这本书可以让‘普通’人群（相当广泛的公众）读懂。我母亲就是一个例子，”他说，并补充道，她很少读大部头学术书籍，但可以明白他书中讲的一切。
When I ask if Piketty’s left-leaning family background has anything to do with his initial interest in inequality, he dismisses the link. Politics were not discussed at home, he says. In their youth his parents were Trotskyist militants with the Lutte Ouvrière but they quit the far-left party before he was born. Like many young radicals living in post-May 1968 France, they were lured by life in the countryside and moved out of the capital in the mid-1970s. For three years, they raised goats and sold cheese on markets in Castelnau-d’Aude, a village near Narbonne in southern France. Though neither parent has the baccalaureate, the national high school degree, Piketty’s mother later took night classes to train as a primary school teacher, and his father became a research technician at Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique.
当我问皮凯蒂，他左倾的家庭背景是否与他起初对不平等感兴趣有关时，他否认存在关联。我们家里不讨论政治，他说。他的父母年轻时是工人斗争党(Lutte Ouvrière)的托派武装分子，但他们在皮凯蒂出生前退出了这一极左政党。与生活在1968年5月之后法国的许多年轻激进分子一样，他们被乡村生活吸引，并在上世纪70年代中期搬离了巴黎。在三年的时间里，他们饲养山羊，并在卡斯黛诺-奥德（Castelnau-d’Aude，法国南部纳博讷附近的一个村庄）的市场里卖奶酪。尽管皮凯蒂的父母都没有业士文凭（法国高中文凭），但他的母亲后来上了夜校，经培训成为一名小学老师，而他的父亲成了法国农业科学研究院(Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique)的一名研究技术员。
Both cheered when Socialist leader Fran漀椀猀 Mitterrand was elected president in 1981. “They had long been waiting for the left to come to power,” says Piketty. But his grandfather on his father’s side, “from a bourgeois background,” voted for the centre-right candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, he says. “Like in any other family, some vote for the left, some vote for the right. I love them all!”
当社会党领导人弗朗索瓦密特朗(Fran漀椀猀 Mitterrand) 1981年当选总统时，他的父母都为之欢呼。“他们长期以来一直在等待左翼上台执政，”皮凯蒂说。但他说，他“出身资产阶级”的爷爷，投票给了中右翼候选人瓦莱里吉斯卡尔德斯坦(Valéry Giscard d'Estaing)。“像所有其他家庭一样，我们家有人投票给左翼，有人投票给右翼。我爱他们所有人！”
His parents were the opposite of pushy, he says. They had little to do with his getting into the 挀漀氀攀 Normale Supérieure, one of France’s most competitive “grandes écoles”, when he was 18, or his teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after earning a PhD at just 22. But they taught him “autonomy, to trust myself” — an approach he says that he replicates with his three daughters, Juliette, 18, Deborah, 15, and Hélène, 12.
他的父母并不望子成龙心切，他说。他18岁时考入了法国竞争最激烈的“大学校”(grandes écoles)之一——巴黎高等师范学院(挀漀氀攀 Normale Supérieure)，年仅22岁就获得博士学位，之后到麻省理工学院(MIT)任教，这些与他的父母都没有太大关系。但他们教会了他“独立、相信自己”。他说，他也用这种方法教育他的三个女儿——18岁的朱丽叶(Juliette)、15岁的黛博拉(Deborah)和12岁的埃莱娜(Hélène)。
I am determined to give the bolognese a chance but the floppy, overcooked fusilli brings back bad memories of my school canteen. Given the history of controversy between the French scholar and the Financial Times, I wonder if our lunch destination may be retaliation. After all, Piketty referred to the contentious article that highlighted discrepancies in his research as soon as we stepped in to the deli, joking that he didn’t want to cost the FT too much money given all the “free publicity” it has granted him.
我决定尝一下这份肉酱面，但这盘软塌塌、煮得过久的意大利螺旋面让我回想起学校食堂的糟糕伙食。考虑到这位法国学者与英国《金融时报》之间有过争论的历史，我怀疑今天午餐的选址可能是个报复。毕竟，我们一步入这家熟食店，皮凯蒂就提到了那篇突出其研究中矛盾之处的有争议的文章，并开玩笑说，鉴于英国《金融时报》给他做的所有“免费宣传”，他不想再让我们破费太多。
The FT analysis notably questioned Piketty’s conclusion that wealth inequality had widened in the UK. He responded to the allegations in detail and defended his methodology, arguing that, even if the criticisms were real, the inconsistencies would not change his findings.
英国《金融时报》的分析尤其质疑了皮凯蒂的结论，即英国的财富分配不均已经扩大。他详细地回应了这些指责，并为自己的方法进行了辩护，他称，即使这些批评在理，那些矛盾之处也不会改变他的发现。
“The FT? I never really read it. Sorry I shouldn’t have said that!” he says mischievously. “I find it a bit predictable. You know, when I read the first two sentences, I feel I know the rest of the story. OK, not always. And then there was the prize. It all looked a bit confused,” he says, referring to the fact that Capital in the Twenty-First Century won the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2014.
“英国《金融时报》？我从未真正读过这份报纸。对不起，我本不应该这样说！”他狡黠地说。“我觉得它的内容有点容易预测。你知道，当我读到头两句时，我觉得自己就知道剩下的故事了。好吧，其实并不总是那样。然后就是获奖。这一切看起来有点混乱，”他说——他指的是《21世纪资本论》荣获了英国《金融时报》和麦肯锡2014年度最佳商业图书奖(2014 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year)。
It would be a mistake, he continues, clearly warming to his theme, for the FT to deny the widening of inequalities in the UK “to defend the interest of your readers”. As I object, it dawns on me that Piketty thinks I am here simply to represent the interests of the top 1 per cent. When we agreed to meet, he said we would walk “to a simple salad and sandwich bar,” emphasising how much “the bill will interest the FT readers.”
他继续说（明显地开始对谈论自己的领域更加起劲），英国《金融时报》拒绝承认英国不断加剧的财富分配不均“以维护你们读者的利益”是一个错误。我表示了反对，并逐渐明白皮凯蒂认为我来这里只是为了代表最富有的1%人群的利益。当我们同意见面时，他说我们可以走到“一个简单的沙拉和三明治吧”，还强调这顿饭的账单将让英国《金融时报》的读者如何“感兴趣。”
Piketty says his interest in inequality crystallised after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the first Gulf war. He recalls visiting Moscow in 1991 and being struck by “the lines in front of shops”. He came back vaccinated against communism — “I believe in capitalism, private property, the market” — but also with a question central to his work: “How come those people had been so afraid of inequality and capitalism in the 19th and 20th century that they created such a monstrosity? How can we tackle inequality without repeating this disaster?”
皮凯蒂说，他是在柏林墙被推倒及第一次海湾战争之后才开始对不平等感兴趣。他回忆起1991年访问莫斯科，他被“商店门前排起的长龙”所震惊。回来之后，他就对共产主义产生了免疫力——“我信仰资本主义、私有财产和市场”——但他的著作也提出一个核心问题：“那些19、20世纪的人们为何如此惧怕不平等和资本主义，以至于他们创造出这样一个怪物？我们怎样才能在不重蹈这些灾难的情况下解决不平等？”
The first Gulf war, he believed, demonstrated the cynicism of the west: “We are told constantly that states can’t do anything, that it’s impossible to regulate the Cayman Islands and the other tax havens because they are too powerful, and all of a sudden we send a million soldiers 10,000km from home to allow the emir of Kuwait to keep his oil.”
他认为，第一次海湾战争展现了西方的犬儒主义：“我们被不断告知国家不是万能的，无法管控开曼群岛及其他避税港，因为它们太过强大，却突然派遣大量士兵到离家万里之外的科威特，帮助该国的埃米尔保住他的石油。”
I am halfway through the now tepid bolognese when I ask him why his work had such an impact in the US without causing anything like such a stir in France at the time of its original publication. Piketty says he caught American attention in 2003 when, together with Emmanuel Saez, a fellow French economist who teaches at the University of California, he first compiled historical data on the US’s wealthiest people. In 2009, newly elected President Obama used the French economists’ graph that showed inequality was back to its 1929 peak. “We became the target of Republican think-tanks,” he recalls. The French version of the book acted as a teaser to those critics, he believes, helping propel it to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list for three weeks when it was released in English.
我边吃着已经变得温热的肉酱面，边问他为什么他的著作在美国影响如此之大，但最初在法国出版时却没有引发类似的轰动。皮凯蒂说，他在2003年就引起了美国人的注意，当时他与在美国加州大学任教的法国经济学家埃曼努埃尔嬠斯(Emmanuel Saez)一起首次汇编了关于美国最富有人群的历史数据。2009年，新当选的美国总统巴拉克攠巴马(Barack Obama)引用了他们的曲线图，该图展示出不平等程度已回升至1929年峰值。“我们成了共和党智库的攻击目标，”他回忆说。他认为，法文版《21世纪资本论》起到了诱导那些批评人士的作用，这帮助英文版发行时将该书推至亚马逊(Amazon)畅销书排行榜首位，并持续三周时间。
“The rise of the top 1 per cent is an American thing. It’s not by chance that Occupy Wall Street happened in Wall Street, and not in Brussels, Paris or Tokyo,” he says. “It’s different in Europe. Here, inequality takes the form of unemployment and public debt.”
“最富有1%人群的崛起是美国人的事。‘占领华尔街’(Occupy Wall Street)发生在华尔街，而非布鲁塞尔、巴黎或东京，这并非偶然，”他说，“欧洲的情况不同。在欧洲，不平等以失业和公共债务的形式存在。”
Though Piketty concedes that the global wealth tax he recommends is a “utopian” dream, he also says a confiscatory tax rate of more than 80 per cent on earnings exceeding $1m would work. In fact, he continues, such a rate was in place for five decades before the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and would curb exuberant executive pay without hurting productivity. “It did not kill US capitalism then — productivity grew the fastest during that time,” he notes. “This idea, according to which no one will accept to work hard for less than $10m per year... It’s OK to pay someone 10, 20 times the average worker’s salary but do you really need to pay them 100 or 200 times to get their arses in gear?”
尽管皮凯蒂承认自己建议的全球财富税是一个“乌托邦式的”梦想，但他还说，对超过100万美元的收入课以80%以上的没收性税率将是可行的。实际上，他继续说，这样的税率在罗纳德里根(Ronald Reagan)成为美国总统之前的50年间一直存在，而且会在抑制过高的高管薪酬的同时不损害生产率。“这种税率当时没有扼杀美国的资本主义——那段时期的生产率增长最快，”他说，“有种想法，认为如果一年赚不到1000万美元，没人会愿意努力工作……向某人支付10或20倍于普通工人的工资，没问题，但为了让他们好好工作，你真的需要付给他们100或200倍工资吗？”