這篇關(guān)于2014年考研《經(jīng)濟學人》中英文對照：思維機器出故障了嗎?，是特地為大家整理的，希望對大家有所幫助！
Innovation pessimism
創(chuàng)新悲觀論
Has the ideas machine broken down?
思維機器出故障了嗎?
The idea that innovation and new technology have stopped driving growth is getting increasing attention. But it is not well founded
創(chuàng)新和新技術(shù)已經(jīng)不再推動增長的觀點正在引發(fā)越來越多的注意力，但這種想法是沒有根據(jù)的。
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
BOOM times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.
硅谷再現(xiàn)繁榮。101公路沿線的辦公園區(qū)再次貼滿了信心十足的創(chuàng)業(yè)公司標志，隨著對太浩湖(Lake Tahoe)等旅游城鎮(zhèn)中度假屋需求的增加，租金在飛漲，財富在累積。灣區(qū)是半導體產(chǎn)業(yè)以及隨之發(fā)展起來的計算機和互聯(lián)網(wǎng)公司的誕生地。從觸屏手機到對大型圖書館的即時搜索再到操控數(shù)千英里之外的無人機的能力，這里的天才帶來了許多奇跡，讓世界產(chǎn)生了進入未來的感覺。2011年以來，這里的商業(yè)活動在復興。它告訴人們，進步正在隆隆向前。
So it may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an internet payment company, and the first outside investor in Facebook, a social network, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead”. Engineers in all sorts of areas share similar feelings of disappointment. And a small but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of the innovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.
因此，當某些硅谷人士認為這里已經(jīng)已經(jīng)停滯不前，而且創(chuàng)新的速率幾十年來一直在放緩時，你可能會感到驚訝。在線支付公司PayPal的創(chuàng)始人之一、社交網(wǎng)絡(luò)臉譜的第一位外部投資人皮特·泰爾(Peter Thiel)認為，在美國，創(chuàng)新正處于“困境與死亡之間的某個地方”。各領(lǐng)域的工程師有著相同的失望情緒。有人認為，相比過去，當代創(chuàng)新的經(jīng)濟影響力可能顯得黯然失色。持這種觀點的經(jīng)濟學家雖然只是一小部分，但人數(shù)正在增加。 Some suspect that the rich world's economic doldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-book Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financial crisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing “Great Stagnation”. It was this which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment had long been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all (see chart 1). The various motors of 20th-century growth—some technological, some not—had played themselves out, and new technologies were not going to have the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all its flat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run out of ideas.
有人懷疑，富國的經(jīng)濟低迷可能根植于長期的技術(shù)停頓。喬治·梅森大學的經(jīng)濟學家泰勒·柯文(Tyler Cowen)在2011年出版的一本電子書中指出，金融危機正在掩蓋一次更深層次而且是更令人不安的“大停滯”。正是這種觀點解釋了為什么富國的實際收入和就業(yè)率一直在放緩并且自2000年以來幾乎沒有增長的原因(見圖表1)。20世紀增長的各種引擎——有些是技術(shù)方面的，有些不是——已經(jīng)熄火，而且新技術(shù)不會給未來經(jīng)濟帶來相同的激勵效應。盡管超薄顯示器和高速寬帶令人目不暇接，但世界似乎已經(jīng)耗盡了靈感。
Glide path
滑行道
The argument that the world is on a technological plateau runs along three lines. The first comes from growth statistics. Economists divide growth into two different types, “extensive” and “intensive”. Extensive growth is a matter of adding more and/or better labour, capital and resources. These are the sort of gains that countries saw from adding women to the labour force in greater numbers and increasing workers’ education. And, as Mr Cowen notes, this sort of growth is subject to diminishing returns: the first addition will be used where it can do most good, the tenth where it can do the tenth-most good, and so on. If this were the only sort of growth there was, it would end up leaving incomes just above the subsistence level.
有關(guān)世界正處于技術(shù)巔峰的論調(diào)有三個方面的內(nèi)容。第一個方面的內(nèi)容來自增長的統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)。經(jīng)濟學家把增長分為兩種類型：“外延型”和“內(nèi)涵型”。外延性增長是指投入更多的和/或更好的勞動力、資本和資源。此類增長的成果見于將更多的婦女投入勞動力市場以及提高工人的教育程度的國家。同時，正如柯文所言，此類增長受制于回報遞減：使用第一個增加量的地方能發(fā)揮其作用，使用第十個增加量地方能發(fā)揮其十分之一的作用，以此類推。若這是增長的類型，其結(jié)果是令收入僅僅高于生存的層次。
Intensive growth is powered by the discovery of ever better ways to use workers and resources. This is the sort of growth that allows continuous improvement in incomes and welfare, and enables an economy to grow even as its population decreases. Economists label the all-purpose improvement factor responsible for such growth “technology”—though it includes things like better laws and regulations as well as technical advance—and measure it using a technique called “growth accounting”. In this accounting, “technology” is the bit left over after calculating the effect on GDP of things like labour, capital and education. And at the moment, in the rich world, it looks like there is less of it about. Emerging markets still manage fast growth, and should be able to do so for some time, because they are catching up with technologies already used elsewhere. The rich world has no such engine to pull it along, and it shows.
內(nèi)涵型增長受比以往更好的利用工人和資源的方式的發(fā)現(xiàn)所推動。正是此類增長實現(xiàn)了收入和福利的持續(xù)改善，并且讓經(jīng)濟體即便在人口減少的情況下也能實現(xiàn)增長。經(jīng)濟學家為帶來此類增長的提高因素貼上了“技術(shù)”的標簽——盡管除了技術(shù)進步之外，還包括更完善的法律法規(guī)——并且用“增長核算”這個專業(yè)術(shù)語作為衡量標準。在這種核算體系中，在計算各種因素對GDP的影響時，“技術(shù)”被排在勞動力、資本和教育之后。從目前來看，富國的技術(shù)因素比原來要少。新興市場依舊在保持快速增長，并且應當能夠持續(xù)一段時間，這是因為新興市場正在追趕早已在其他地方得到應用的技術(shù)。眾所周知，富國不具備這種帶動其前進的引擎。 This is hardly unusual. For most of human history, growth in output and overall economic welfare has been slow and halting. Over the past two centuries, first in Britain, Europe and America, then elsewhere, it took off. In the 19th century growth in output per person—a useful general measure of an economy's productivity, and a good guide to growth in incomes—accelerated steadily in Britain. By 1906 it was more than 1% a year. By the middle of the 20th century, real output per person in America was growing at a scorching 2.5% a year, a pace at which productivity and incomes double once a generation (see chart 2). More than a century of increasingly powerful and sophisticated machines were obviously a part of that story, as was the rising amount of fossil-fuel energy available to drive them.
這是非常正常的。在人類歷史的大部分時間里，產(chǎn)出和整體經(jīng)濟福利的增長一直在減慢并且逐漸趨向停滯。在過去的2個世紀中，先是英國、歐洲和美國，然后是其他地方，增長開始起飛。在19世紀時，人均產(chǎn)出增長——一個有用的衡量經(jīng)濟體生產(chǎn)力的通用標準，并且是收入增長的有效指標——在英國呈穩(wěn)步加速狀態(tài)。到1906年，年均經(jīng)濟增長超過1%。到20世紀中葉，美國的人均實際產(chǎn)出以年均2.5%飛速增長，這種速度使生產(chǎn)力和收入在一代人的時間里實現(xiàn)了翻番(見圖表2)。這個過程中一個顯而易見的事實是，各類機器在一個多世紀的時間里日漸強大和成熟起來，同時，對驅(qū)動機器的化石能源的使用量也在增加。
But in the 1970s America's growth in real output per person dropped from its post-second-world-war peak of over 3% a year to just over 2% a year. In the 2000s it tumbled below 1%. Output per worker per hour shows a similar pattern, according to Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University: it is pretty good for most of the 20th century, then slumps in the 1970s. It bounced back between 1996 and 2004, but since 2004 the annual rate has fallen to 1.33%, which is as low as it was from 1972 to 1996. Mr Gordon muses that the past two centuries of economic growth might actually amount to just “one big wave” of dramatic change rather than a new era of uninterrupted progress, and that the world is returning to a regime in which growth is mostly of the extensive sort (see chart 3).
但是，到了20世紀70年代，美國的人均實際產(chǎn)出增長從二戰(zhàn)后巔峰時期的年均3%下降到年均略超2%。進入21世紀后，增長暴跌到1%以下。據(jù)美國西北大學的羅伯特·戈登(Robert Gordon)測算，每小時的人均產(chǎn)出呈現(xiàn)出相同的模式：在20世紀的大部分時間里增長強勁，隨后，在70年代開始暴跌。在1996年-2004年間，每小時的人均產(chǎn)出出現(xiàn)反彈;不過，2004年后，年化增長率又跌至1.33%，這種增長速度之慢同1972年-1996年之間的情況如出一轍。戈登調(diào)侃道，過去兩個世紀的經(jīng)濟增長總量可能實際上只相當于戲劇性變革的“一個大浪”，而不是一個新時代的不間斷的進程，同時世界正在向增長主要是外延性的那種體制回歸(見圖表3)。
Mr Gordon sees it as possible that there were only a few truly fundamental innovations—the ability to use power on a large scale, to keep houses comfortable regardless of outside temperature, to get from any A to any B, to talk to anyone you need to—and that they have mostly been made. There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.
戈登認為，造成這種情況的原因可能在于，只有少數(shù)幾個創(chuàng)新屬于真正的根本性創(chuàng)新——大規(guī)模利用電力的能力、不管外面溫度如何都能保持房屋舒適的能力、從任意一個地方到達另外一個地方的能力、同你需要與其交談的人進行交談的能力——并且它們大都已經(jīng)被人們創(chuàng)造出來。將來會出現(xiàn)更多的創(chuàng)新——但這不會改變世界對電力、內(nèi)燃機、排水管道、石化產(chǎn)品和電話的使用方式。柯文更愿意設(shè)想未來會出現(xiàn)巨大的技術(shù)進步，不過，他認為沒有多少容易實現(xiàn)的目標。同發(fā)現(xiàn)并大批量生產(chǎn)抗生素相比，將萬億字節(jié)的基因知識轉(zhuǎn)化為醫(yī)學成要困難得多。
The pessimists’second line of argument is based on how much invention is going on. Amid unconvincing appeals to the number of patents filed and databases of “innovations” put together quite subjectively, Mr Cowen cites interesting work by Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford University. In a 2002 paper Mr Jones studied the contribution of different factors to growth in American per-capita incomes in the period 1950-93. His work indicated that some 80% of income growth was due to rising educational attainment and greater “research intensity” (the share of the workforce labouring in idea-generating industries). Because neither factor can continue growing ceaselessly, in the absence of some new factor coming into play growth is likely to slow.
悲觀論第二個方面的內(nèi)容基于發(fā)明會有多少。在難以令人信服的專利申請數(shù)量與加起來相當主觀的“創(chuàng)新”數(shù)據(jù)庫之間，柯文引用了斯坦福大學經(jīng)濟學家查爾斯·瓊斯(Charles Jones)的有趣研究成果。在2002年的一份報告中，瓊斯對美國人均國民收入在1950年-1993年間增長有所貢獻的不同因素進行了研究。他的研究成果表明，大約80%的收入增長歸于教育程度的提高和“科研密度”(勞動力在腦力勞動行業(yè)中的占比)的增強。由于這兩個因素都不能保持不間斷地增長，在缺少某些新因素起作用的情況下，增長可能會放緩。 The growth in the number of people working in research and development might seem to contradict this picture of a less inventive economy: the share of the American economy given over to R&D has expanded by a third since 1975, to almost 3%. But Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University find that, though there are more people in research, they are doing less good. They reckon that in 1950 an average R&D worker in America contributed almost seven times more to “total factor productivity”—essentially, the contribution of technology and innovation to growth—that an R&D worker in 2000 did. One factor in this may be the “burden of knowledge”: as ideas accumulate it takes ever longer for new thinkers to catch up with the frontier of their scientific or technical speciality. Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997 alone, the typical “age at first innovation” rose by about one year.
從事研究開發(fā)工作的人數(shù)的增長似乎同這種缺少發(fā)明經(jīng)濟的圖景互相矛盾：美國經(jīng)濟撥付給研究開發(fā)的份額自1975年以來增長了1/3，接近3%。但是，麻省理工學院的皮埃爾·阿祖萊(Pierre Azoulay)和西北大學的本杰明·瓊斯(Benjamin Jones)發(fā)現(xiàn)，盡管從事研究的人數(shù)增加了，但是他們的工作成就不如以前。他們推測，在1950年時，美國人均研發(fā)人員對“全要素生產(chǎn)率”——從根本上來說，就是技術(shù)與創(chuàng)新對增長的貢獻——做出的貢獻幾乎是2000年時的的7倍。這其中的一個因素可能是“知識的負擔”：隨著知識的累計，后人需要更長的時間才能追趕上他們科研專業(yè)領(lǐng)域的前沿。瓊斯認為，僅在1985年-1997年間，有代表性的“首次發(fā)明年齡”提高了將近一歲。
A fall of moondust
月塵降落
The third argument is the simplest: the evidence of your senses. The recent rate of progress seems slow compared with that of the early and mid-20th century. Take kitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitive things. Perishables were kept cool in ice boxes, fed by blocks of ice delivered on horse-drawn wagons. Most households lacked electric lighting and running water. Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europe feature gas and electric hobs and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwaves and dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcely change. The gizmos are more numerous and digital displays ubiquitous, but cooking is done much as it was by grandma.
第三個方面的內(nèi)容最簡單：感覺到的證據(jù)。同之前和20世紀中期相比，目前的發(fā)展速度似乎慢于它們。以廚房為例：在1900年的時候，即便在最時尚的房子里，廚房還是剛出現(xiàn)時的那個樣子。容易腐爛的食物被冷凍在冰盒中，這些盒子周圍放置著用馬車拉來的冰塊，大多數(shù)家庭沒有電燈和自來水。時間飛逝，到1970年時，美國和歐洲的中產(chǎn)階層家庭的廚房中用上了天然氣以及電熱爐、電烤箱、電冰箱、食品加工機、微波爐和洗碗機。再讓時間前進40年，情況卻基本沒有變化。盡管各種小玩意越來越多，數(shù)字顯示器無所不在，但是，做飯的方式同爺爺那個時代沒有什么不同。
Or take speed. In the 19th century horses and sailboats were replaced by railways and steamships. Internal-combustion engines and jet turbines made it possible to move more and more things faster and faster. But since the 1970s humanity has been coasting. Highway travel is little faster than it was 50 years ago; indeed, endemic congestion has many cities now investing in trams and bicycle lanes. Supersonic passenger travel has been abandoned. So, for the past 40 years, has the moon.
再以速度為例：19世紀的時候，馬車和帆船被火車和蒸汽輪船取代，內(nèi)燃機和噴氣渦輪機讓越來越多的事物以越來越快的速度運動成為可能。不過，自20世紀70年代以來，人們就開始滑行了。在高速公路上旅行只比50年前快那么一點;事實上，地方性的交通擁堵讓許多城市把資金投入到有軌電車和自行車道的建設(shè)上去。超音速的旅行方式已經(jīng)被禁止。因此，人類已經(jīng)40年沒有登上月球。
Medicine offers another example. Life expectancy at birth in America soared from 49 years at the turn of the 20th century to 74 years in 1980. Enormous technical advances have occurred since that time. Yet as of 2011 life expectancy rested at just 78.7 years. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research, people continue to fall to cancer, heart disease, stroke and organ failure. Molecular medicine has come nowhere close to matching the effects of improved sanitation. 醫(yī)學提供了另一個例子。在美國，出生時的預期壽命從20世紀開始時的49歲飛速上漲到1980年的74歲。從那之后，科技發(fā)展取得了巨大的成果。然而，到2011年，美國人的預期壽命僅停留在78.7歲。盡管花在科研上的資金達數(shù)千億美元，但是人們依舊會得癌癥、心臟病、中風和器官衰竭等疾病。分子醫(yī)學的成果根本沒法同改善衛(wèi)生設(shè)施的效果相提并論。
To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the world has to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr Thiel and his colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.
對于那些足夠幸運因而能從世界不得不提供的的事情中獲益的人來說，世界再也不能提供什么的事實會讓他們大失所望。正如泰爾及其風險投資公司“創(chuàng)始人基金”的伙伴所指出的那樣：“我們想要會飛的汽車，卻得到了短短幾句話。”如今，人人都能使用Twitter卻幾乎無人能夠乘飛機上下班，同過去所夢想的未來相比，這樣的一個世界給人留不下什么印象。
The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience and expectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important as it may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a taste for the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nor a binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of then current progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; for battlecruisers read space cruisers.
首先需要指出的是，這種對經(jīng)歷和期望的訴求正是20世紀中期科幻小說的訴求，因為這對于那些有志成為企業(yè)家或經(jīng)濟學家的人來說可能是重要的，這種訴求既不包括嚴肅的技術(shù)預測也沒有約束性的承諾，它就是一種通過對當時在速度、力量和距離方面的進步所做的推斷的慶祝。喜歡汽車的，從中發(fā)現(xiàn)了會飛的汽車;喜歡戰(zhàn)艦的，從中讀出了太空巡洋艦。
Technological progress does not require all technologies to move forward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always moving forward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years in terms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can show that planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply a matter of taste.
技術(shù)進步不要求所有的技術(shù)同步向前，它僅僅要求某些重要的技術(shù)總是向前發(fā)展。以速度而論，客運飛機在過去40年中沒有多大改進。計算機速度的提高無法衡量。除非你能夠向人們表明飛機更有用，不然的話，強調(diào)進步的停滯只是人們的喜好而已。
Mr Gordon and Mr Cowen do think that now-mature technologies such as air transport have mattered more, and play down the economic importance of recent innovations. If computers and the internet mattered to the economy—rather than merely as rich resources for intellectual and cultural exchange, as experienced on Mr Cowen's popular blog, Marginal Revolution—their effect would be seen in the figures. And it hasn't been.
戈登和柯文確實認為，像空中交通等成熟的技術(shù)更具影響力，但他們對近期創(chuàng)新的經(jīng)濟重要性并不看重。如果計算機和互聯(lián)網(wǎng)對經(jīng)濟產(chǎn)生影響——而不僅僅是像柯文廣受歡迎的博客“邊際革命”(Marginal Revolution)上進行的那種有著豐富資源的知識和文化交流——那么它們的影響力能從數(shù)據(jù)中得到驗證。但是，事實并非如此。
As early as 1987 Robert Solow, a growth theorist, had been asking why “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”. A surge in productivity growth that began in the mid-1990s was seen as an encouraging sign that the computers were at last becoming visible; but it faltered, and some, such as Mr Gordon, reckon that the benefits of information technology have largely run their course. He notes that, for all its inhabitants’ Googling and Skypeing, America's productivity performance since 2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
早在1987年，增長理論家羅伯特·索洛(Robert Solow)就發(fā)出了這樣的疑問：為什么“人們到處都能看到計算機時代，唯獨在生產(chǎn)力統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)中去看不到它”?始于20世紀90年代的生產(chǎn)力增長的迅速提高被認為是一個令人鼓舞的信號，它表明計算機終于可見了;但是，這種結(jié)果遲遲沒有出現(xiàn)。因此戈登等人認為，信息技術(shù)的效益尤其自身的規(guī)律。他指出，盡管人們在用Google進行搜索，用Skype打電話，但是美國的生產(chǎn)力表現(xiàn)自2004年以來不及20世紀70年代早期-90年代早期的低迷時期的水平。 The fountains of paradise
天堂的噴泉
Closer analysis of recent figures, though, suggests reason for optimism. Across the economy as a whole productivity did slow in 2005 and 2006—but productivity growth in manufacturing fared better. The global financial crisis and its aftermath make more recent data hard to interpret. As for the strong productivity growth in the late 1990s, it may have been premature to see it as the effect of information technology making all sorts of sectors more productive. It now looks as though it was driven just by the industries actually making the computers, mobile phones and the like. The effects on the productivity of people and companies buying the new technology seem to have begun appearing in the 2000s, but may not yet have come into their own. Research by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments in information-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity is between five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning, reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possibly pre-web.
然而，對近期數(shù)據(jù)的仔細分析顯示出樂觀的理由?？v觀整個經(jīng)濟體，生產(chǎn)率在2005年和2006年確實放緩——不過，制造業(yè)的生產(chǎn)率增長表現(xiàn)較好。全球金融危機及其余波使得對更多近期數(shù)據(jù)的分析難以進行。至于20世紀90年代出現(xiàn)的強勁的生產(chǎn)力增長，把它看作是讓所有部門更具競爭力的信息技術(shù)的影響還為時尚早。目前看來，這或許只是被生產(chǎn)計算機、手機以及與此相關(guān)產(chǎn)品的產(chǎn)業(yè)所帶動的結(jié)果。個人和公司購買新技術(shù)對生產(chǎn)率的影響似乎從21世紀開始就已經(jīng)開始，但是這種影響可能尚未進入全盛時期。波士頓大學的 Susanto Basu和舊金山聯(lián)邦儲備銀行John Fernald認為，信息通訊技術(shù)的投資與生產(chǎn)率的改進之間存在著5-15年的滯后。據(jù)此推論，2004年的生產(chǎn)力下降反映出的狀況據(jù)對是谷歌出現(xiàn)之前，并且還很可能是互聯(lián)網(wǎng)出現(xiàn)之前的狀況。
Full exploitation of a technology can take far longer than that. Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy. Steel boxes and diesel engines have been around since the 1900s, and their use together in containerised shipping goes back to the 1950s. But their great impact as the backbone of global trade did not come for decades after that.
相比之下，技術(shù)的全面推廣可能要耗費更多的時間。盡管在談到創(chuàng)新和技術(shù)時幾乎都是交替使用，但兩者不是一回事。創(chuàng)新是人們對怎樣去做的新想法，技術(shù)是人們實際上正在做什么;這正是技術(shù)對經(jīng)濟的影響所在。鋼制的盒子和柴油發(fā)動機在20世紀就已經(jīng)出現(xiàn)，把兩者共同應用到集裝箱航運是在20世紀50年代。但是，它們作為全球貿(mào)易支柱的影響力在此之后的幾十年才出現(xiàn)。
Roughly a century lapsed between the first commercial deployments of James Watt's steam engine and steam's peak contribution to British growth. Some four decades separated the critical innovations in electrical engineering of the 1880s and the broad influence of electrification on economic growth. Mr Gordon himself notes that the innovations of the late 19th century drove productivity growth until the early 1970s; it is rather uncharitable of him to assume that the post-2004 slump represents the full exhaustion of potential gains from information technology.
從詹姆斯·瓦特的蒸汽機的首次商業(yè)應用到蒸汽機對英國生產(chǎn)率的貢獻達到巔峰，兩者的時間間隔大約是一個世紀。從19世紀80年代電器工程的關(guān)鍵創(chuàng)新到電氣化對經(jīng)濟增長的廣泛影響力之間的間隔大約是40年的時間。戈登本人指出，19世紀晚期的創(chuàng)新直到20世紀70年代才推動生產(chǎn)率增長;生產(chǎn)率自2004年以后的下降代表了來自信息技術(shù)的潛力的全面枯竭，他的這種觀點相當犀利。
And information innovation is still in its infancy. Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of computer science and a devotee of exponential technological extrapolation, likes to talk of “the second half of the chess board”. There is an old fable in which a gullible king is tricked into paying an obligation in grains of rice, one on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, the payment doubling with every square. Along the first row, the obligation is minuscule. With half the chessboard covered, the king is out only about 100 tonnes of rice. But a square before reaching the end of the seventh row he has laid out 500m tonnes in total—the whole world's annual rice production. He will have t
Innovation pessimism
創(chuàng)新悲觀論
Has the ideas machine broken down?
思維機器出故障了嗎?
The idea that innovation and new technology have stopped driving growth is getting increasing attention. But it is not well founded
創(chuàng)新和新技術(shù)已經(jīng)不再推動增長的觀點正在引發(fā)越來越多的注意力，但這種想法是沒有根據(jù)的。
Jan 12th 2013 | from the print edition
BOOM times are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once again adorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is the demand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign of fortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductor industry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in its wake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feel futuristic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of great libraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival in its business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.
硅谷再現(xiàn)繁榮。101公路沿線的辦公園區(qū)再次貼滿了信心十足的創(chuàng)業(yè)公司標志，隨著對太浩湖(Lake Tahoe)等旅游城鎮(zhèn)中度假屋需求的增加，租金在飛漲，財富在累積。灣區(qū)是半導體產(chǎn)業(yè)以及隨之發(fā)展起來的計算機和互聯(lián)網(wǎng)公司的誕生地。從觸屏手機到對大型圖書館的即時搜索再到操控數(shù)千英里之外的無人機的能力，這里的天才帶來了許多奇跡，讓世界產(chǎn)生了進入未來的感覺。2011年以來，這里的商業(yè)活動在復興。它告訴人們，進步正在隆隆向前。
So it may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place is stagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an internet payment company, and the first outside investor in Facebook, a social network, says that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead”. Engineers in all sorts of areas share similar feelings of disappointment. And a small but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of the innovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.
因此，當某些硅谷人士認為這里已經(jīng)已經(jīng)停滯不前，而且創(chuàng)新的速率幾十年來一直在放緩時，你可能會感到驚訝。在線支付公司PayPal的創(chuàng)始人之一、社交網(wǎng)絡(luò)臉譜的第一位外部投資人皮特·泰爾(Peter Thiel)認為，在美國，創(chuàng)新正處于“困境與死亡之間的某個地方”。各領(lǐng)域的工程師有著相同的失望情緒。有人認為，相比過去，當代創(chuàng)新的經(jīng)濟影響力可能顯得黯然失色。持這種觀點的經(jīng)濟學家雖然只是一小部分，但人數(shù)正在增加。 Some suspect that the rich world's economic doldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-book Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financial crisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing “Great Stagnation”. It was this which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment had long been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all (see chart 1). The various motors of 20th-century growth—some technological, some not—had played themselves out, and new technologies were not going to have the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all its flat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run out of ideas.
有人懷疑，富國的經(jīng)濟低迷可能根植于長期的技術(shù)停頓。喬治·梅森大學的經(jīng)濟學家泰勒·柯文(Tyler Cowen)在2011年出版的一本電子書中指出，金融危機正在掩蓋一次更深層次而且是更令人不安的“大停滯”。正是這種觀點解釋了為什么富國的實際收入和就業(yè)率一直在放緩并且自2000年以來幾乎沒有增長的原因(見圖表1)。20世紀增長的各種引擎——有些是技術(shù)方面的，有些不是——已經(jīng)熄火，而且新技術(shù)不會給未來經(jīng)濟帶來相同的激勵效應。盡管超薄顯示器和高速寬帶令人目不暇接，但世界似乎已經(jīng)耗盡了靈感。
Glide path
滑行道
The argument that the world is on a technological plateau runs along three lines. The first comes from growth statistics. Economists divide growth into two different types, “extensive” and “intensive”. Extensive growth is a matter of adding more and/or better labour, capital and resources. These are the sort of gains that countries saw from adding women to the labour force in greater numbers and increasing workers’ education. And, as Mr Cowen notes, this sort of growth is subject to diminishing returns: the first addition will be used where it can do most good, the tenth where it can do the tenth-most good, and so on. If this were the only sort of growth there was, it would end up leaving incomes just above the subsistence level.
有關(guān)世界正處于技術(shù)巔峰的論調(diào)有三個方面的內(nèi)容。第一個方面的內(nèi)容來自增長的統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)。經(jīng)濟學家把增長分為兩種類型：“外延型”和“內(nèi)涵型”。外延性增長是指投入更多的和/或更好的勞動力、資本和資源。此類增長的成果見于將更多的婦女投入勞動力市場以及提高工人的教育程度的國家。同時，正如柯文所言，此類增長受制于回報遞減：使用第一個增加量的地方能發(fā)揮其作用，使用第十個增加量地方能發(fā)揮其十分之一的作用，以此類推。若這是增長的類型，其結(jié)果是令收入僅僅高于生存的層次。
Intensive growth is powered by the discovery of ever better ways to use workers and resources. This is the sort of growth that allows continuous improvement in incomes and welfare, and enables an economy to grow even as its population decreases. Economists label the all-purpose improvement factor responsible for such growth “technology”—though it includes things like better laws and regulations as well as technical advance—and measure it using a technique called “growth accounting”. In this accounting, “technology” is the bit left over after calculating the effect on GDP of things like labour, capital and education. And at the moment, in the rich world, it looks like there is less of it about. Emerging markets still manage fast growth, and should be able to do so for some time, because they are catching up with technologies already used elsewhere. The rich world has no such engine to pull it along, and it shows.
內(nèi)涵型增長受比以往更好的利用工人和資源的方式的發(fā)現(xiàn)所推動。正是此類增長實現(xiàn)了收入和福利的持續(xù)改善，并且讓經(jīng)濟體即便在人口減少的情況下也能實現(xiàn)增長。經(jīng)濟學家為帶來此類增長的提高因素貼上了“技術(shù)”的標簽——盡管除了技術(shù)進步之外，還包括更完善的法律法規(guī)——并且用“增長核算”這個專業(yè)術(shù)語作為衡量標準。在這種核算體系中，在計算各種因素對GDP的影響時，“技術(shù)”被排在勞動力、資本和教育之后。從目前來看，富國的技術(shù)因素比原來要少。新興市場依舊在保持快速增長，并且應當能夠持續(xù)一段時間，這是因為新興市場正在追趕早已在其他地方得到應用的技術(shù)。眾所周知，富國不具備這種帶動其前進的引擎。 This is hardly unusual. For most of human history, growth in output and overall economic welfare has been slow and halting. Over the past two centuries, first in Britain, Europe and America, then elsewhere, it took off. In the 19th century growth in output per person—a useful general measure of an economy's productivity, and a good guide to growth in incomes—accelerated steadily in Britain. By 1906 it was more than 1% a year. By the middle of the 20th century, real output per person in America was growing at a scorching 2.5% a year, a pace at which productivity and incomes double once a generation (see chart 2). More than a century of increasingly powerful and sophisticated machines were obviously a part of that story, as was the rising amount of fossil-fuel energy available to drive them.
這是非常正常的。在人類歷史的大部分時間里，產(chǎn)出和整體經(jīng)濟福利的增長一直在減慢并且逐漸趨向停滯。在過去的2個世紀中，先是英國、歐洲和美國，然后是其他地方，增長開始起飛。在19世紀時，人均產(chǎn)出增長——一個有用的衡量經(jīng)濟體生產(chǎn)力的通用標準，并且是收入增長的有效指標——在英國呈穩(wěn)步加速狀態(tài)。到1906年，年均經(jīng)濟增長超過1%。到20世紀中葉，美國的人均實際產(chǎn)出以年均2.5%飛速增長，這種速度使生產(chǎn)力和收入在一代人的時間里實現(xiàn)了翻番(見圖表2)。這個過程中一個顯而易見的事實是，各類機器在一個多世紀的時間里日漸強大和成熟起來，同時，對驅(qū)動機器的化石能源的使用量也在增加。
But in the 1970s America's growth in real output per person dropped from its post-second-world-war peak of over 3% a year to just over 2% a year. In the 2000s it tumbled below 1%. Output per worker per hour shows a similar pattern, according to Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University: it is pretty good for most of the 20th century, then slumps in the 1970s. It bounced back between 1996 and 2004, but since 2004 the annual rate has fallen to 1.33%, which is as low as it was from 1972 to 1996. Mr Gordon muses that the past two centuries of economic growth might actually amount to just “one big wave” of dramatic change rather than a new era of uninterrupted progress, and that the world is returning to a regime in which growth is mostly of the extensive sort (see chart 3).
但是，到了20世紀70年代，美國的人均實際產(chǎn)出增長從二戰(zhàn)后巔峰時期的年均3%下降到年均略超2%。進入21世紀后，增長暴跌到1%以下。據(jù)美國西北大學的羅伯特·戈登(Robert Gordon)測算，每小時的人均產(chǎn)出呈現(xiàn)出相同的模式：在20世紀的大部分時間里增長強勁，隨后，在70年代開始暴跌。在1996年-2004年間，每小時的人均產(chǎn)出出現(xiàn)反彈;不過，2004年后，年化增長率又跌至1.33%，這種增長速度之慢同1972年-1996年之間的情況如出一轍。戈登調(diào)侃道，過去兩個世紀的經(jīng)濟增長總量可能實際上只相當于戲劇性變革的“一個大浪”，而不是一個新時代的不間斷的進程，同時世界正在向增長主要是外延性的那種體制回歸(見圖表3)。
Mr Gordon sees it as possible that there were only a few truly fundamental innovations—the ability to use power on a large scale, to keep houses comfortable regardless of outside temperature, to get from any A to any B, to talk to anyone you need to—and that they have mostly been made. There will be more innovation—but it will not change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustion engines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is more willing to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are no more low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.
戈登認為，造成這種情況的原因可能在于，只有少數(shù)幾個創(chuàng)新屬于真正的根本性創(chuàng)新——大規(guī)模利用電力的能力、不管外面溫度如何都能保持房屋舒適的能力、從任意一個地方到達另外一個地方的能力、同你需要與其交談的人進行交談的能力——并且它們大都已經(jīng)被人們創(chuàng)造出來。將來會出現(xiàn)更多的創(chuàng)新——但這不會改變世界對電力、內(nèi)燃機、排水管道、石化產(chǎn)品和電話的使用方式。柯文更愿意設(shè)想未來會出現(xiàn)巨大的技術(shù)進步，不過，他認為沒有多少容易實現(xiàn)的目標。同發(fā)現(xiàn)并大批量生產(chǎn)抗生素相比，將萬億字節(jié)的基因知識轉(zhuǎn)化為醫(yī)學成要困難得多。
The pessimists’second line of argument is based on how much invention is going on. Amid unconvincing appeals to the number of patents filed and databases of “innovations” put together quite subjectively, Mr Cowen cites interesting work by Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford University. In a 2002 paper Mr Jones studied the contribution of different factors to growth in American per-capita incomes in the period 1950-93. His work indicated that some 80% of income growth was due to rising educational attainment and greater “research intensity” (the share of the workforce labouring in idea-generating industries). Because neither factor can continue growing ceaselessly, in the absence of some new factor coming into play growth is likely to slow.
悲觀論第二個方面的內(nèi)容基于發(fā)明會有多少。在難以令人信服的專利申請數(shù)量與加起來相當主觀的“創(chuàng)新”數(shù)據(jù)庫之間，柯文引用了斯坦福大學經(jīng)濟學家查爾斯·瓊斯(Charles Jones)的有趣研究成果。在2002年的一份報告中，瓊斯對美國人均國民收入在1950年-1993年間增長有所貢獻的不同因素進行了研究。他的研究成果表明，大約80%的收入增長歸于教育程度的提高和“科研密度”(勞動力在腦力勞動行業(yè)中的占比)的增強。由于這兩個因素都不能保持不間斷地增長，在缺少某些新因素起作用的情況下，增長可能會放緩。 The growth in the number of people working in research and development might seem to contradict this picture of a less inventive economy: the share of the American economy given over to R&D has expanded by a third since 1975, to almost 3%. But Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of Northwestern University find that, though there are more people in research, they are doing less good. They reckon that in 1950 an average R&D worker in America contributed almost seven times more to “total factor productivity”—essentially, the contribution of technology and innovation to growth—that an R&D worker in 2000 did. One factor in this may be the “burden of knowledge”: as ideas accumulate it takes ever longer for new thinkers to catch up with the frontier of their scientific or technical speciality. Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997 alone, the typical “age at first innovation” rose by about one year.
從事研究開發(fā)工作的人數(shù)的增長似乎同這種缺少發(fā)明經(jīng)濟的圖景互相矛盾：美國經(jīng)濟撥付給研究開發(fā)的份額自1975年以來增長了1/3，接近3%。但是，麻省理工學院的皮埃爾·阿祖萊(Pierre Azoulay)和西北大學的本杰明·瓊斯(Benjamin Jones)發(fā)現(xiàn)，盡管從事研究的人數(shù)增加了，但是他們的工作成就不如以前。他們推測，在1950年時，美國人均研發(fā)人員對“全要素生產(chǎn)率”——從根本上來說，就是技術(shù)與創(chuàng)新對增長的貢獻——做出的貢獻幾乎是2000年時的的7倍。這其中的一個因素可能是“知識的負擔”：隨著知識的累計，后人需要更長的時間才能追趕上他們科研專業(yè)領(lǐng)域的前沿。瓊斯認為，僅在1985年-1997年間，有代表性的“首次發(fā)明年齡”提高了將近一歲。
A fall of moondust
月塵降落
The third argument is the simplest: the evidence of your senses. The recent rate of progress seems slow compared with that of the early and mid-20th century. Take kitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitive things. Perishables were kept cool in ice boxes, fed by blocks of ice delivered on horse-drawn wagons. Most households lacked electric lighting and running water. Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europe feature gas and electric hobs and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwaves and dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcely change. The gizmos are more numerous and digital displays ubiquitous, but cooking is done much as it was by grandma.
第三個方面的內(nèi)容最簡單：感覺到的證據(jù)。同之前和20世紀中期相比，目前的發(fā)展速度似乎慢于它們。以廚房為例：在1900年的時候，即便在最時尚的房子里，廚房還是剛出現(xiàn)時的那個樣子。容易腐爛的食物被冷凍在冰盒中，這些盒子周圍放置著用馬車拉來的冰塊，大多數(shù)家庭沒有電燈和自來水。時間飛逝，到1970年時，美國和歐洲的中產(chǎn)階層家庭的廚房中用上了天然氣以及電熱爐、電烤箱、電冰箱、食品加工機、微波爐和洗碗機。再讓時間前進40年，情況卻基本沒有變化。盡管各種小玩意越來越多，數(shù)字顯示器無所不在，但是，做飯的方式同爺爺那個時代沒有什么不同。
Or take speed. In the 19th century horses and sailboats were replaced by railways and steamships. Internal-combustion engines and jet turbines made it possible to move more and more things faster and faster. But since the 1970s humanity has been coasting. Highway travel is little faster than it was 50 years ago; indeed, endemic congestion has many cities now investing in trams and bicycle lanes. Supersonic passenger travel has been abandoned. So, for the past 40 years, has the moon.
再以速度為例：19世紀的時候，馬車和帆船被火車和蒸汽輪船取代，內(nèi)燃機和噴氣渦輪機讓越來越多的事物以越來越快的速度運動成為可能。不過，自20世紀70年代以來，人們就開始滑行了。在高速公路上旅行只比50年前快那么一點;事實上，地方性的交通擁堵讓許多城市把資金投入到有軌電車和自行車道的建設(shè)上去。超音速的旅行方式已經(jīng)被禁止。因此，人類已經(jīng)40年沒有登上月球。
Medicine offers another example. Life expectancy at birth in America soared from 49 years at the turn of the 20th century to 74 years in 1980. Enormous technical advances have occurred since that time. Yet as of 2011 life expectancy rested at just 78.7 years. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research, people continue to fall to cancer, heart disease, stroke and organ failure. Molecular medicine has come nowhere close to matching the effects of improved sanitation. 醫(yī)學提供了另一個例子。在美國，出生時的預期壽命從20世紀開始時的49歲飛速上漲到1980年的74歲。從那之后，科技發(fā)展取得了巨大的成果。然而，到2011年，美國人的預期壽命僅停留在78.7歲。盡管花在科研上的資金達數(shù)千億美元，但是人們依舊會得癌癥、心臟病、中風和器官衰竭等疾病。分子醫(yī)學的成果根本沒法同改善衛(wèi)生設(shè)施的效果相提并論。
To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the world has to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr Thiel and his colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.
對于那些足夠幸運因而能從世界不得不提供的的事情中獲益的人來說，世界再也不能提供什么的事實會讓他們大失所望。正如泰爾及其風險投資公司“創(chuàng)始人基金”的伙伴所指出的那樣：“我們想要會飛的汽車，卻得到了短短幾句話。”如今，人人都能使用Twitter卻幾乎無人能夠乘飛機上下班，同過去所夢想的未來相比，這樣的一個世界給人留不下什么印象。
The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience and expectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important as it may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a taste for the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nor a binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of then current progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; for battlecruisers read space cruisers.
首先需要指出的是，這種對經(jīng)歷和期望的訴求正是20世紀中期科幻小說的訴求，因為這對于那些有志成為企業(yè)家或經(jīng)濟學家的人來說可能是重要的，這種訴求既不包括嚴肅的技術(shù)預測也沒有約束性的承諾，它就是一種通過對當時在速度、力量和距離方面的進步所做的推斷的慶祝。喜歡汽車的，從中發(fā)現(xiàn)了會飛的汽車;喜歡戰(zhàn)艦的，從中讀出了太空巡洋艦。
Technological progress does not require all technologies to move forward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always moving forward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years in terms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can show that planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply a matter of taste.
技術(shù)進步不要求所有的技術(shù)同步向前，它僅僅要求某些重要的技術(shù)總是向前發(fā)展。以速度而論，客運飛機在過去40年中沒有多大改進。計算機速度的提高無法衡量。除非你能夠向人們表明飛機更有用，不然的話，強調(diào)進步的停滯只是人們的喜好而已。
Mr Gordon and Mr Cowen do think that now-mature technologies such as air transport have mattered more, and play down the economic importance of recent innovations. If computers and the internet mattered to the economy—rather than merely as rich resources for intellectual and cultural exchange, as experienced on Mr Cowen's popular blog, Marginal Revolution—their effect would be seen in the figures. And it hasn't been.
戈登和柯文確實認為，像空中交通等成熟的技術(shù)更具影響力，但他們對近期創(chuàng)新的經(jīng)濟重要性并不看重。如果計算機和互聯(lián)網(wǎng)對經(jīng)濟產(chǎn)生影響——而不僅僅是像柯文廣受歡迎的博客“邊際革命”(Marginal Revolution)上進行的那種有著豐富資源的知識和文化交流——那么它們的影響力能從數(shù)據(jù)中得到驗證。但是，事實并非如此。
As early as 1987 Robert Solow, a growth theorist, had been asking why “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics”. A surge in productivity growth that began in the mid-1990s was seen as an encouraging sign that the computers were at last becoming visible; but it faltered, and some, such as Mr Gordon, reckon that the benefits of information technology have largely run their course. He notes that, for all its inhabitants’ Googling and Skypeing, America's productivity performance since 2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early 1990s.
早在1987年，增長理論家羅伯特·索洛(Robert Solow)就發(fā)出了這樣的疑問：為什么“人們到處都能看到計算機時代，唯獨在生產(chǎn)力統(tǒng)計數(shù)據(jù)中去看不到它”?始于20世紀90年代的生產(chǎn)力增長的迅速提高被認為是一個令人鼓舞的信號，它表明計算機終于可見了;但是，這種結(jié)果遲遲沒有出現(xiàn)。因此戈登等人認為，信息技術(shù)的效益尤其自身的規(guī)律。他指出，盡管人們在用Google進行搜索，用Skype打電話，但是美國的生產(chǎn)力表現(xiàn)自2004年以來不及20世紀70年代早期-90年代早期的低迷時期的水平。 The fountains of paradise
天堂的噴泉
Closer analysis of recent figures, though, suggests reason for optimism. Across the economy as a whole productivity did slow in 2005 and 2006—but productivity growth in manufacturing fared better. The global financial crisis and its aftermath make more recent data hard to interpret. As for the strong productivity growth in the late 1990s, it may have been premature to see it as the effect of information technology making all sorts of sectors more productive. It now looks as though it was driven just by the industries actually making the computers, mobile phones and the like. The effects on the productivity of people and companies buying the new technology seem to have begun appearing in the 2000s, but may not yet have come into their own. Research by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the San Francisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments in information-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity is between five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning, reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possibly pre-web.
然而，對近期數(shù)據(jù)的仔細分析顯示出樂觀的理由?？v觀整個經(jīng)濟體，生產(chǎn)率在2005年和2006年確實放緩——不過，制造業(yè)的生產(chǎn)率增長表現(xiàn)較好。全球金融危機及其余波使得對更多近期數(shù)據(jù)的分析難以進行。至于20世紀90年代出現(xiàn)的強勁的生產(chǎn)力增長，把它看作是讓所有部門更具競爭力的信息技術(shù)的影響還為時尚早。目前看來，這或許只是被生產(chǎn)計算機、手機以及與此相關(guān)產(chǎn)品的產(chǎn)業(yè)所帶動的結(jié)果。個人和公司購買新技術(shù)對生產(chǎn)率的影響似乎從21世紀開始就已經(jīng)開始，但是這種影響可能尚未進入全盛時期。波士頓大學的 Susanto Basu和舊金山聯(lián)邦儲備銀行John Fernald認為，信息通訊技術(shù)的投資與生產(chǎn)率的改進之間存在著5-15年的滯后。據(jù)此推論，2004年的生產(chǎn)力下降反映出的狀況據(jù)對是谷歌出現(xiàn)之前，并且還很可能是互聯(lián)網(wǎng)出現(xiàn)之前的狀況。
Full exploitation of a technology can take far longer than that. Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not the same thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is what they are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy. Steel boxes and diesel engines have been around since the 1900s, and their use together in containerised shipping goes back to the 1950s. But their great impact as the backbone of global trade did not come for decades after that.
相比之下，技術(shù)的全面推廣可能要耗費更多的時間。盡管在談到創(chuàng)新和技術(shù)時幾乎都是交替使用，但兩者不是一回事。創(chuàng)新是人們對怎樣去做的新想法，技術(shù)是人們實際上正在做什么;這正是技術(shù)對經(jīng)濟的影響所在。鋼制的盒子和柴油發(fā)動機在20世紀就已經(jīng)出現(xiàn)，把兩者共同應用到集裝箱航運是在20世紀50年代。但是，它們作為全球貿(mào)易支柱的影響力在此之后的幾十年才出現(xiàn)。
Roughly a century lapsed between the first commercial deployments of James Watt's steam engine and steam's peak contribution to British growth. Some four decades separated the critical innovations in electrical engineering of the 1880s and the broad influence of electrification on economic growth. Mr Gordon himself notes that the innovations of the late 19th century drove productivity growth until the early 1970s; it is rather uncharitable of him to assume that the post-2004 slump represents the full exhaustion of potential gains from information technology.
從詹姆斯·瓦特的蒸汽機的首次商業(yè)應用到蒸汽機對英國生產(chǎn)率的貢獻達到巔峰，兩者的時間間隔大約是一個世紀。從19世紀80年代電器工程的關(guān)鍵創(chuàng)新到電氣化對經(jīng)濟增長的廣泛影響力之間的間隔大約是40年的時間。戈登本人指出，19世紀晚期的創(chuàng)新直到20世紀70年代才推動生產(chǎn)率增長;生產(chǎn)率自2004年以后的下降代表了來自信息技術(shù)的潛力的全面枯竭，他的這種觀點相當犀利。
And information innovation is still in its infancy. Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of computer science and a devotee of exponential technological extrapolation, likes to talk of “the second half of the chess board”. There is an old fable in which a gullible king is tricked into paying an obligation in grains of rice, one on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, the payment doubling with every square. Along the first row, the obligation is minuscule. With half the chessboard covered, the king is out only about 100 tonnes of rice. But a square before reaching the end of the seventh row he has laid out 500m tonnes in total—the whole world's annual rice production. He will have t