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Innovationpessimism
创新悲观论
Hasthe ideas machine broken down?
思维机器出故障了吗?
Theidea that innovation and new technology have stopped driving growth is gettingincreasing attention. But it is not well founded
创新和新技术已经不再推动增长的观点正在引发越来越多的注意力，但这种想法是没有根据的。
Jan12th 2023 | from the print edition
BOOMtimes are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once againadorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is thedemand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign offortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductorindustry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in itswake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feelfuturistic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of greatlibraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival inits business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.
硅谷再现繁荣。101公路沿线的办公园区再次贴满了信心十足的创业公司标志，随着对太浩湖等旅游城镇中度假屋需求的增加，租金在飞涨，财富在累积。湾区是半导体产业以及随之发展起来的计算机和互联网公司的诞生地。从触屏手机到对大型图书馆的即时搜索再到操控数千英里之外的无人机的能力，这里的天才带来了许多奇迹，让世界产生了进入未来的感觉。2011年以来，这里的商业活动在复兴。它告诉人们，进步正在隆隆向前。
Soit may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place isstagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades.Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an internet payment company, and the first outsideinvestor 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 asmall but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of theinnovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.
因此，当某些硅谷人士认为这里已经已经停滞不前，而且创新的速率几十年来一直在放缓时，你可能会感到惊讶。在线支付公司PayPal的创始人之一、社交网络脸谱的第一位外部投资人皮特泰尔认为，在美国，创新正处于困境与死亡之间的某个地方。各领域的工程师有着相同的失望情绪。有人认为，相比过去，当代创新的经济影响力可能显得黯然失色。持这种观点的经济学家虽然只是一小部分，但人数正在增加。
Some suspect that the rich world s economicdoldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-bookTyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financialcrisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing Great Stagnation. It wasthis which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment hadlong been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all . Thevarious motors of 20th-century growthsome technological,some nothad played themselves out, and new technologies were not going tohave the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all itsflat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run outof ideas.
有人怀疑，富国的经济低迷可能根植于长期的技术停顿。乔治梅森大学的经济学家泰勒柯文在2011年出版的一本电子书中指出，金融危机正在掩盖一次更深层次而且是更令人不安的大停滞。正是这种观点解释了为什么富国的实际收入和就业率一直在放缓并且自2000年以来几乎没有增长的原因。20世纪增长的各种引擎有些是技术方面的，有些不是已经熄火，而且新技术不会给未来经济带来相同的激励效应。尽管超薄显示器和高速宽带令人目不暇接，但世界似乎已经耗尽了灵感。
Glide path
滑行道
The argument that the world is on a technological plateau runs alongthree lines. The first comes from growth statistics. Economists divide growthinto 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 fromadding 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 itcan do the tenth-most good, and so on. If this were the only sort of growththere was, it would end up leaving incomes just above the subsistence level.
有关世界正处于技术巅峰的论调有三个方面的内容。第一个方面的内容来自增长的统计数据。经济学家把增长分为两种类型：外延型和内涵型。外延性增长是指投入更多的和/或更好的劳动力、资本和资源。此类增长的成果见于将更多的妇女投入劳动力市场以及提高工人的教育程度的国家。同时，正如柯文所言，此类增长受制于回报递减：使用第一个增加量的地方能发挥其最大作用，使用第十个增加量地方能发挥其十分之一的作用，以此类推。若这是增长的唯一类型，其结果是令收入仅仅高于生存的层次。
Intensive growth is powered by the discovery of ever better ways touse workers and resources. This is the sort of growth that allows continuousimprovement in incomes and welfare, and enables an economy to grow even as itspopulation decreases. Economists label the all-purpose improvement factorresponsible for such growth technologythough it includes things like better laws and regulations as wellas technical advanceand measure it using a technique called growthaccounting. In this accounting, technology is the bit left over after calculating the effect on GDP of thingslike labour, capital and education. And at the moment, in the rich world, itlooks like there is less of it about. Emerging markets still manage fastgrowth, and should be able to do so for some time, because they are catching upwith technologies already used elsewhere. The rich world has no such engine topull it along, and it shows.
内涵型增长受比以往更好的利用工人和资源的方式的发现所推动。正是此类增长实现了收入和福利的持续改善，并且让经济体即便在人口减少的情况下也能实现增长。经济学家为带来此类增长的提高因素贴上了技术的标签尽管除了技术进步之外，还包括更完善的法律法规并且用增长核算这个专业术语作为衡量标准。在这种核算体系中，在计算各种因素对GDP的影响时，技术被排在劳动力、资本和教育之后。从目前来看，富国的技术因素比原来要少。新兴市场依旧在保持快速增长，并且应当能够持续一段时间，这是因为新兴市场正在追赶早已在其他地方得到应用的技术。众所周知，富国不具备这种带动其前进的引擎。
This is hardly unusual. For most of humanhistory, growth in output and overall economic welfare has been slow andhalting. Over the past two centuries, first in Britain, Europe and America,then elsewhere, it took off. In the 19th century growth in output per persona usefulgeneral measure of an economy s productivity, and a good guide to growth inincomesaccelerated 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 wasgrowing at a scorching 2.5% a year, a pace at which productivity and incomesdouble once a generation . More than a century of increasinglypowerful and sophisticated machines were obviously a part of that story, as wasthe rising amount of fossil-fuel energy available to drive them.
这是非常正常的。在人类历史的大部分时间里，产出和整体经济福利的增长一直在减慢并且逐渐趋向停滞。在过去的2个世纪中，先是英国、欧洲和美国，然后是其他地方，增长开始起飞。在19世纪时，人均产出增长一个有用的衡量经济体生产力的通用标准，并且是收入增长的有效指标在英国呈稳步加速状态。到1906年，年均经济增长超过1%。到20世纪中叶，美国的人均实际产出以年均2.5%飞速增长，这种速度使生产力和收入在一代人的时间里实现了翻番。这个过程中一个显而易见的事实是，各类机器在一个多世纪的时间里日渐强大和成熟起来，同时，对驱动机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 droppedfrom 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 similarpattern, according to Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University:it is pretty good for most of the 20th century, then slumps in the 1970s. Itbounced back between 1996 and 2004, but since 2004 the annual rate has fallento 1.33%, which is as low as it was from 1972 to 1996. Mr Gordon muses that thepast two centuries of economic growth might actually amount to just one big wave of dramaticchange rather than a new era of uninterrupted progress, and that the world isreturning to a regime in which growth is mostly of the extensive sort .
但是，到了20世纪70年代，美国的人均实际产出增长从二战后巅峰时期的年均3%下降到年均略超2%。进入21世纪后，增长暴跌到1%以下。据美国西北大学的罗伯特戈登测算，每小时的人均产出呈现出相同的模式：在20世纪的大部分时间里增长强劲，随后，在70年代开始暴跌。在1996年-2004年间，每小时的人均产出出现反弹;不过，2004年后，年化增长率又跌至1.33%，这种增长速度之慢同1972年-1996年之间的情况如出一辙。戈登调侃道，过去两个世纪的经济增长总量可能实际上只相当于戏剧性变革的一个大浪，而不是一个新时代的不间断的进程，同时世界正在向增长主要是外延性的那种体制回归。
Mr Gordon sees it as possible that there were only a few trulyfundamental innovationsthe ability to use power on a large scale, to keep housescomfortable regardless of outside temperature, to get from any A to any B, totalk to anyone you need toand that they have mostly been made. There will be more innovationbut it willnot change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustionengines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is morewilling to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are nomore low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medicalbenefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.
戈登认为，造成这种情况的原因可能在于，只有少数几个创新属于真正的根本性创新大规模利用电力的能力、不管外面温度如何都能保持房屋舒适的能力、从任意一个地方到达另外一个地方的能力、同你需要与其交谈的人进行交谈的能力并且它们大都已经被人们创造出来。将来会出现更多的创新但这不会改变世界对电力、内燃机、排水管道、石化产品和电话的使用方式。柯文更愿意设想未来会出现巨大的技术进步，不过，他认为没有多少容易实现的目标。同发现并大批量生产抗生素相比，将万亿字节的基因知识转化为医学成要困难得多。
The pessimistssecond 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 puttogether quite subjectively, Mr Cowen cites interesting work by Charles Jones,an economist at Stanford University. In a 2002 paper Mr Jones studied thecontribution of different factors to growth in American per-capita incomes inthe period 1950-93. His work indicated that some 80% of income growth was dueto rising educational attainment and greater research intensity . Because neitherfactor can continue growing ceaselessly, in the absence of some new factorcoming into play growth is likely to slow.
悲观论第二个方面的内容基于发明会有多少。在难以令人信服的专利申请数量与加起来相当主观的创新数据库之间，柯文引用了斯坦福大学经济学家查尔斯琼斯的有趣研究成果。在2002年的一份报告中，琼斯对美国人均国民收入在1950年-1993年间增长有所贡献的不同因素进行了研究。他的研究成果表明，大约80%的收入增长归于教育程度的提高和科研密度的增强。由于这两个因素都不能保持不间断地增长，在缺少某些新因素起作用的情况下，增长可能会放缓。
Innovationpessimism
创新悲观论
Hasthe ideas machine broken down?
思维机器出故障了吗?
Theidea that innovation and new technology have stopped driving growth is gettingincreasing attention. But it is not well founded
创新和新技术已经不再推动增长的观点正在引发越来越多的注意力，但这种想法是没有根据的。
Jan12th 2023 | from the print edition
BOOMtimes are back in Silicon Valley. Office parks along Highway 101 are once againadorned with the insignia of hopeful start-ups. Rents are soaring, as is thedemand for fancy vacation homes in resort towns like Lake Tahoe, a sign offortunes being amassed. The Bay Area was the birthplace of the semiconductorindustry and the computer and internet companies that have grown up in itswake. Its wizards provided many of the marvels that make the world feelfuturistic, from touch-screen phones to the instantaneous searching of greatlibraries to the power to pilot a drone thousands of miles away. The revival inits business activity since 2010 suggests progress is motoring on.
硅谷再现繁荣。101公路沿线的办公园区再次贴满了信心十足的创业公司标志，随着对太浩湖等旅游城镇中度假屋需求的增加，租金在飞涨，财富在累积。湾区是半导体产业以及随之发展起来的计算机和互联网公司的诞生地。从触屏手机到对大型图书馆的即时搜索再到操控数千英里之外的无人机的能力，这里的天才带来了许多奇迹，让世界产生了进入未来的感觉。2011年以来，这里的商业活动在复兴。它告诉人们，进步正在隆隆向前。
Soit may come as a surprise that some in Silicon Valley think the place isstagnant, and that the rate of innovation has been slackening for decades.Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, an internet payment company, and the first outsideinvestor 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 asmall but growing group of economists reckon the economic impact of theinnovations of today may pale in comparison with those of the past.
因此，当某些硅谷人士认为这里已经已经停滞不前，而且创新的速率几十年来一直在放缓时，你可能会感到惊讶。在线支付公司PayPal的创始人之一、社交网络脸谱的第一位外部投资人皮特泰尔认为，在美国，创新正处于困境与死亡之间的某个地方。各领域的工程师有着相同的失望情绪。有人认为，相比过去，当代创新的经济影响力可能显得黯然失色。持这种观点的经济学家虽然只是一小部分，但人数正在增加。
Some suspect that the rich world s economicdoldrums may be rooted in a long-term technological stasis. In a 2011 e-bookTyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, argued that the financialcrisis was masking a deeper and more disturbing Great Stagnation. It wasthis which explained why growth in rich-world real incomes and employment hadlong been slowing and, since 2000, had hardly risen at all . Thevarious motors of 20th-century growthsome technological,some nothad played themselves out, and new technologies were not going tohave the same invigorating effect on the economies of the future. For all itsflat-screen dazzle and high-bandwidth pizzazz, it seemed the world had run outof ideas.
有人怀疑，富国的经济低迷可能根植于长期的技术停顿。乔治梅森大学的经济学家泰勒柯文在2011年出版的一本电子书中指出，金融危机正在掩盖一次更深层次而且是更令人不安的大停滞。正是这种观点解释了为什么富国的实际收入和就业率一直在放缓并且自2000年以来几乎没有增长的原因。20世纪增长的各种引擎有些是技术方面的，有些不是已经熄火，而且新技术不会给未来经济带来相同的激励效应。尽管超薄显示器和高速宽带令人目不暇接，但世界似乎已经耗尽了灵感。
Glide path
滑行道
The argument that the world is on a technological plateau runs alongthree lines. The first comes from growth statistics. Economists divide growthinto 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 fromadding 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 itcan do the tenth-most good, and so on. If this were the only sort of growththere was, it would end up leaving incomes just above the subsistence level.
有关世界正处于技术巅峰的论调有三个方面的内容。第一个方面的内容来自增长的统计数据。经济学家把增长分为两种类型：外延型和内涵型。外延性增长是指投入更多的和/或更好的劳动力、资本和资源。此类增长的成果见于将更多的妇女投入劳动力市场以及提高工人的教育程度的国家。同时，正如柯文所言，此类增长受制于回报递减：使用第一个增加量的地方能发挥其最大作用，使用第十个增加量地方能发挥其十分之一的作用，以此类推。若这是增长的唯一类型，其结果是令收入仅仅高于生存的层次。
Intensive growth is powered by the discovery of ever better ways touse workers and resources. This is the sort of growth that allows continuousimprovement in incomes and welfare, and enables an economy to grow even as itspopulation decreases. Economists label the all-purpose improvement factorresponsible for such growth technologythough it includes things like better laws and regulations as wellas technical advanceand measure it using a technique called growthaccounting. In this accounting, technology is the bit left over after calculating the effect on GDP of thingslike labour, capital and education. And at the moment, in the rich world, itlooks like there is less of it about. Emerging markets still manage fastgrowth, and should be able to do so for some time, because they are catching upwith technologies already used elsewhere. The rich world has no such engine topull it along, and it shows.
内涵型增长受比以往更好的利用工人和资源的方式的发现所推动。正是此类增长实现了收入和福利的持续改善，并且让经济体即便在人口减少的情况下也能实现增长。经济学家为带来此类增长的提高因素贴上了技术的标签尽管除了技术进步之外，还包括更完善的法律法规并且用增长核算这个专业术语作为衡量标准。在这种核算体系中，在计算各种因素对GDP的影响时，技术被排在劳动力、资本和教育之后。从目前来看，富国的技术因素比原来要少。新兴市场依旧在保持快速增长，并且应当能够持续一段时间，这是因为新兴市场正在追赶早已在其他地方得到应用的技术。众所周知，富国不具备这种带动其前进的引擎。
This is hardly unusual. For most of humanhistory, growth in output and overall economic welfare has been slow andhalting. Over the past two centuries, first in Britain, Europe and America,then elsewhere, it took off. In the 19th century growth in output per persona usefulgeneral measure of an economy s productivity, and a good guide to growth inincomesaccelerated 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 wasgrowing at a scorching 2.5% a year, a pace at which productivity and incomesdouble once a generation . More than a century of increasinglypowerful and sophisticated machines were obviously a part of that story, as wasthe rising amount of fossil-fuel energy available to drive them.
这是非常正常的。在人类历史的大部分时间里，产出和整体经济福利的增长一直在减慢并且逐渐趋向停滞。在过去的2个世纪中，先是英国、欧洲和美国，然后是其他地方，增长开始起飞。在19世纪时，人均产出增长一个有用的衡量经济体生产力的通用标准，并且是收入增长的有效指标在英国呈稳步加速状态。到1906年，年均经济增长超过1%。到20世纪中叶，美国的人均实际产出以年均2.5%飞速增长，这种速度使生产力和收入在一代人的时间里实现了翻番。这个过程中一个显而易见的事实是，各类机器在一个多世纪的时间里日渐强大和成熟起来，同时，对驱动机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 droppedfrom 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 similarpattern, according to Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University:it is pretty good for most of the 20th century, then slumps in the 1970s. Itbounced back between 1996 and 2004, but since 2004 the annual rate has fallento 1.33%, which is as low as it was from 1972 to 1996. Mr Gordon muses that thepast two centuries of economic growth might actually amount to just one big wave of dramaticchange rather than a new era of uninterrupted progress, and that the world isreturning to a regime in which growth is mostly of the extensive sort .
但是，到了20世纪70年代，美国的人均实际产出增长从二战后巅峰时期的年均3%下降到年均略超2%。进入21世纪后，增长暴跌到1%以下。据美国西北大学的罗伯特戈登测算，每小时的人均产出呈现出相同的模式：在20世纪的大部分时间里增长强劲，随后，在70年代开始暴跌。在1996年-2004年间，每小时的人均产出出现反弹;不过，2004年后，年化增长率又跌至1.33%，这种增长速度之慢同1972年-1996年之间的情况如出一辙。戈登调侃道，过去两个世纪的经济增长总量可能实际上只相当于戏剧性变革的一个大浪，而不是一个新时代的不间断的进程，同时世界正在向增长主要是外延性的那种体制回归。
Mr Gordon sees it as possible that there were only a few trulyfundamental innovationsthe ability to use power on a large scale, to keep housescomfortable regardless of outside temperature, to get from any A to any B, totalk to anyone you need toand that they have mostly been made. There will be more innovationbut it willnot change the way the world works in the way electricity, internal-combustionengines, plumbing, petrochemicals and the telephone have. Mr Cowen is morewilling to imagine big technological gains ahead, but he thinks there are nomore low-hanging fruit. Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medicalbenefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics.
戈登认为，造成这种情况的原因可能在于，只有少数几个创新属于真正的根本性创新大规模利用电力的能力、不管外面温度如何都能保持房屋舒适的能力、从任意一个地方到达另外一个地方的能力、同你需要与其交谈的人进行交谈的能力并且它们大都已经被人们创造出来。将来会出现更多的创新但这不会改变世界对电力、内燃机、排水管道、石化产品和电话的使用方式。柯文更愿意设想未来会出现巨大的技术进步，不过，他认为没有多少容易实现的目标。同发现并大批量生产抗生素相比，将万亿字节的基因知识转化为医学成要困难得多。
The pessimistssecond 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 puttogether quite subjectively, Mr Cowen cites interesting work by Charles Jones,an economist at Stanford University. In a 2002 paper Mr Jones studied thecontribution of different factors to growth in American per-capita incomes inthe period 1950-93. His work indicated that some 80% of income growth was dueto rising educational attainment and greater research intensity . Because neitherfactor can continue growing ceaselessly, in the absence of some new factorcoming into play growth is likely to slow.
悲观论第二个方面的内容基于发明会有多少。在难以令人信服的专利申请数量与加起来相当主观的创新数据库之间，柯文引用了斯坦福大学经济学家查尔斯琼斯的有趣研究成果。在2002年的一份报告中，琼斯对美国人均国民收入在1950年-1993年间增长有所贡献的不同因素进行了研究。他的研究成果表明，大约80%的收入增长归于教育程度的提高和科研密度的增强。由于这两个因素都不能保持不间断地增长，在缺少某些新因素起作用的情况下，增长可能会放缓。
