Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress (Ep. 172)

He is professor of economics at UC Berkeley.

他是加州大学伯克利分校的经济学教授。

He and I went to grad school together at Harvard.

他和我一起在哈佛大学读研究生。

He was one of the very first, if not the first economics blogger, and he, this year, has out a long-awaited New York Times best-selling book, Slouching towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.

他即使不是第一个经济学博主，也是最早的经济学博主之一。今年，他出版了一本期待已久的《纽约时报》畅销书《迈向乌托邦：二十世纪的经济史》。

Brad, welcome.

布拉德，欢迎。

A bunch of that is distribution, but a bunch of that is simply slow growth.

其中一部分是分配，但另一部分只是缓慢的增长。

Things like the 2 percent per year income and productivity growth that we have grown used to since the coming of the Second Industrial Revolution, since the start of Bob Gordon’s one big wave — that really is completely unprecedented.

自第二次工业革命到来以来，自鲍勃·戈登的一大浪潮开始以来，我们已经习惯了每年 2% 的收入和生产率增长，这确实是前所未有的。

There was nothing like that before, not in the biggest efflorescences, not in the classic British Industrial Revolution.

以前没有这样的事情，无论是在最大的繁荣时期，还是在经典的英国工业革命中都没有。

And you do what I do, which is say, “Let’s take real income growth and add half of population growth and call that technology growth.” Do that and you get something like 1.7 percent per year for the global rate of increase of “technology” from 1870 to 1913, which is four times what the worldwide average was back in the century before 1870.

你会做我所做的事情，也就是说，“让我们将实际收入增长加上一半的人口增长，称之为技术增长。”这样做的话，从 1870 年到 1913 年，全球“技术”的增长率约为每年 1.7%，这是 1870 年之前的一个世纪全球平均增长率的四倍。

It’s a huge shift, and it’s one of the things that makes the modern world, as we know, even vaguely possible to imagine.

这是一个巨大的转变，正如我们所知，它是使现代世界变得模糊可能想象的因素之一。

You only go from spending two hours a day, at least, thinking about how hungry you are and how it really would be nice to have more calories right now to not having to think about that once.

你只会从每天至少花两个小时思考自己有多饿以及现在摄入更多卡路里有多好，到再也不用考虑这个问题。

You only go from having your children so malnourished that the adult heights of the boys are 5 foot 3, to adult heights of 5 foot 9 or so, on average — you only do that once.

你只会让你的孩子营养不良，导致男孩的成年身高为 5 英尺 3 英寸，成年后平均身高为 5 英尺 9 英寸左右 ——你只需要做一次。

We did that, and we did that mostly in the 50 years after 1870, at least for the global north.

我们做到了，而且大部分是在 1870 年之后的 50 年里做到的，至少对于北半球来说是这样。

We’re doing equal things in terms of how much we’re making since, but with possible exceptions after 2006 slowdown.

就我们的收入而言，自那以后我们一直在做同样的事情，但 2006 年经济放缓后可能会有例外。

But in some sense, it means a great deal less because it doesn’t impact our thinking and our family tragedies and our children so malnourished that they’re badly stunted in such an obvious and visceral way, but there have been big changes.

但从某种意义上说，它的意义要小得多，因为它不会影响我们的思想和我们的家庭悲剧，也不会影响我们的孩子营养不良，以至于他们以如此明显和发自内心的方式严重发育不良，但已经发生了巨大的变化。

You want to talk about modes of production.

你想谈谈生产方式。

You want to be an orthodox Marxist in following, not so much Marx, but Friedrich Engels, and you say there’s a huge jump between feudal society and the commercial societies of the gunpowder empires, between 1000 and 1650 or so.

你想成为一个正统的马克思主义者，追随的不是马克思，而是弗里德里希·恩格斯，你说封建社会和火药帝国的商业社会之间有一个巨大的跳跃，大约在1000年到1650年之间。

Then there’s another equal jump between the gunpowder empire commercial societies and the steam-power societies of 1870, but the Second Industrial Revolution beasts of 1910 or so are a different animal, too, as are the mass-production societies of 1960, as was the global value chain society of 2000.

然后，火药帝国商业社会和 1870 年的蒸汽动力社会之间还有另一次同等的跳跃，但 1910 年左右的第二次工业革命野兽也是不同的动物，1960 年的大规模生产社会也是如此，2000 年的全球价值链社会也是如此。

Right now, we’re well onto an info-biotech economic revolution.

目前，我们正处于一场信息生物技术经济革命之中。

Now, the underlying technology-driven forces of production are continuing to change, and are continuing to change a lot, but in some sense, we think it means less simply because our needs are biologically much less urgent.

现在，底层的技术驱动的生产力正在继续发生变化，而且正在继续发生很大的变化，但从某种意义上说，我们认为这意味着不那么简单，因为我们的需求在生物学上并不那么紧迫。

It is absolutely marvelous that you would expect the country that is the most industrialized and that has at least the most advanced universities in 1800 to have an enormous comparative advantage in driving forward technology and in maintaining its place as the industrial-technological leader — and yet not.

令人惊奇的是，你会期望 1800 年工业化程度最高、至少拥有最先进大学的国家在推动技术进步和保持其工业技术领先地位方面拥有巨大的比较优势——但事实并非如此。

Now, I would always talk about how Americans and Germans would be much more willing to invest in enterprise, and that in Britain, you really did not have the growth of the large intermediaries, like the Deutsche Bank on the one hand and the J.P.

现在，我总是谈论美国人和德国人如何更愿意投资企业，而在英国，确实没有大型中介机构的增长，一方面是德意志银行，另一方面是摩根大通。

Morgan partnership on the other, that saw themselves as being in the business of intermediating information — intermediating information between people who had money that they needed, whether they wanted to save and invest, and people who had ideas that they needed to deploy.

另一方面，摩根合伙企业则认为自己从事的是信息中介业务——在拥有所需资金、是否想要储蓄和投资的人们与有需要部署的想法的人们之间进行信息中介。

The rationalization and routinization of that through investment banking, universal banking in the years after 1870 played a substantial role.

通过投资银行业务的合理化和程序化，全能银行在1870年后的几年中发挥了实质性作用。

I was never really able to nail that down to my full satisfaction, but that was always my guess.

我从来没有真正能够完全满意地确定这一点，但这始终是我的猜测。

I would have to say, we really do not know, but that it does tell you how quickly, within one or two generations, what we think of as technological leadership and technological supremacy can ebb away as a matter of position in leading sectors, of the sheer mass of engineers engaged in communities of engineering practice, and also the educational system certainly played a big role.

我不得不说，我们真的不知道，但它确实告诉你，在一两代人的时间内，我们所认为的技术领先和技术霸权会以多快的速度消失，这取决于在领先行业中的地位、从事工程实践社区的大量工程师的地位，以及教育系统当然发挥了重要作用。

Germans were being trained to manipulate molecules in organic chemistry while Britons were being trained to write verses in the style of Macaulay, which would be the poems that the Romans would’ve written if they had been Scots, as a focus of their educational system.

德国人被训练如何操纵有机化学中的分子，而英国人则被训练以麦考利风格写诗，这将是罗马人如果是苏格兰人就会写的诗，作为他们教育系统的重点。

There’s one thing that happens that is extremely unusual.

发生了一件非常不寻常的事情。

Back before 1870, there’s no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake the economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough.

早在 1870 年之前，人类根本不可能将经济蛋糕烤得足够大，让每个人都能吃饱。

Which means that, principally, politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way, and then finding a way to run a force-and-fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society so that they at least can have enough.

这意味着，政治和治理将主要由一些精英组成，并排挤其他精英，然后找到一种方法对社会实施武力和欺诈的统治和剥削计划，以便他们至少能够拥有足够的东西。

When Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft, it was not metaphor.

当蒲鲁东在 1840 年代写道财产就是盗窃时，这并不是隐喻。

It was really fact.

这确实是事实。

What does this elite consist of?

这个精英由什么组成？

Well, it’s a bunch of thugs with spears, the people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they’re their bosses, and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists.

好吧，这是一群拿着长矛的暴徒，那些让拿着长矛的暴徒相信他们是他们的老板的人，以及他们驯服的会计师、官僚和宣传人员。

Which means, most of the time, when you have a powerfully-moving-forward set of people thinking about ideas, whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.

这意味着，大多数时候，当你有一群强有力的前进的人在思考想法时，这个想法是否正确可能是次要的，重要的是这个想法是否有助于帮助我在武力和欺诈统治和剥削的精英机器中保持作为温顺宣传者的地位。

This is a point I’ve stolen from Ernest Gellner, and I think it is very true.

这是我从欧内斯特·盖尔纳那里偷来的观点，我认为这是非常正确的。

Yet, somehow, the Royal Society decides, no. The Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment — what we are going to demand that nature tell us, or tell one of us, or at least someone writes us a letter saying they’ve done the experiment about what is true.

然而，不知何故，英国皇家学会决定不。皇家学会除了通过实验之外什么都不做决定——我们要求大自然告诉我们什么，或者告诉我们中的一个人，或者至少有人给我们写一封信，说他们已经做了有关真实情况的实验。

That is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation, and one to which I think we owe a huge amount.

这是一个奇迹般的、完全出乎意料的转变，我认为我们对此负有巨大的责任。

You have Francis Bacon saying that the world has been utterly transformed by the compass, by movable-type printing and gunpowder.

弗朗西斯·培根说过，世界已经被指南针、活字印刷术和火药彻底改变了。

The utopia he goes on to paint is one in which there is indeed Salomon’s House, a bunch of scientists devoted to uncovering the secrets of nature to the enlargement of the human empire and to the effecting of all things possible.

他继续描绘的乌托邦中确实有所罗门之家，一群科学家致力于揭开自然的秘密，以扩大人类帝国并实现一切可能。

That utopia, or cornucopia at least, is on our future and is going to be because we’ve figured out how to use our minds to understand things, rather than because we’ve managed to recover a golden age, or because some theological being has come to our rescue, or because we’ve finally figured out the right static social order.

这个乌托邦，或者至少是聚宝盆，是关于我们的未来的，并且将是因为我们已经弄清楚如何用我们的思想来理解事物，而不是因为我们已经设法恢复了黄金时代，或者因为某些神学存在来拯救我们，或者因为我们终于找到了正确的静态社会秩序。

That’s unusual.

这很不寻常。

I got to trace it to what happened between 1500 and 1600, which was the discovery of the New World, the subsequent Columbian exchange, the great reduction of the prices of carrying goods across the world as a result of the first globalization.

我必须追溯到 1500 年至 1600 年间发生的事情，即新大陆的发现、随后的哥伦布交换、由于第一次全球化而导致世界各地运输货物的价格大幅下降。

That and the tinkering culture of Western Europe meant that, in 1600, you could look back and, for the first time in history, really say, “Wow, things are a lot different than they were even 100 years ago.”

这一点以及西欧的修修补补文化意味着，在 1600 年，当你回顾过去时，你会有史以来第一次真正地说：“哇，事情与 100 年前相比有很大不同。”

In fact, we know more than anyone in the past ever did.

事实上，我们比过去任何人都了解得更多。

In earlier ages, you look back and you see monuments of at least some ancient civilization that look pretty impressive to you.

在早期的时代，当你回头看时，你会看到至少一些古代文明的纪念碑，它们对你来说看起来相当令人印象深刻。

By 1600, no.

到了 1600 年，没有。

By 1600, the idea that knowledge was a possible thing that humanity could grab for was in the air, and as you say, it all concentrates in England.

到了 1600 年，知识是人类可以获取的可能性的想法已经在空气中传播，正如你所说，这一切都集中在英国。

It all concentrates in England, or maybe better to say it all concentrates in a circle 300 miles around the port of Dover, because Hume and Smith and the other Scottish Enlightenment people head for London fairly quickly in order to get inside the circle and get inside the discourse.

这一切都集中在英格兰，或者更好的说法是，这一切都集中在多佛港周围 300 英里的一个圈子里，因为休谟和史密斯以及其他苏格兰启蒙运动人士很快就前往伦敦，以便进入这个圈子并进入话语范围。

That is a wonderful and marvelous thing to have happened.

这是一件奇妙而奇妙的事情的发生。

I think it is a systematic change from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 900, or from the empirical and metaphysical and alchemical researches of the researchers of the Song Dynasty.

我认为这是从900年巴格达智慧之家开始的系统性变化，或者说是从宋代研究者的实证和形而上、炼金术研究开始的。

As I say, we’re very lucky it happened.

正如我所说，我们很幸运它发生了。

There’s a fight between the Hyde people who think that Bronze Age empires were much more populous than others did, who think that the big increase in human settlement population and technology before the year zero came in the late Bronze Age with the Hittite and the Babylon and the Egyptian empires of the time.

海德人之间存在着一场斗争，他们认为青铜时代帝国的人口比其他帝国多得多，他们认为零年前人类居住人口和技术的大幅增长是在青铜时代晚期与当时的赫梯、巴比伦和埃及帝国发生的。

The rest of us tend to think that we see an acceleration with the coming of classical civilization as a whole in the Axial Age.

我们其他人倾向于认为，我们看到轴心时代整个古典文明的加速到来。

I’m on the Axial Age side, but it’s disputed.

我支持轴心时代，但这是有争议的。

After 150, though, things really do fall off a cliff, both in terms of the sophistication of high society and also in terms of the rate of increase of human population, at least Eurasia-wide.

然而，150 岁之后，无论是在上流社会的复杂程度方面，还是在人口增长率方面，情况确实急剧下降，至少在整个欧亚大陆是这样。

It’s not just that the Romans vanish from Britain, and it’s not just that the Latin language frontier gets pushed back so that it’s out of Britain completely and is moved 200 miles into France, as one elite succeeds another.

这不仅仅是罗马人从英国消失，也不仅仅是拉丁语言的边界被推后，以至于它完全脱离了英国，并被移至200英里外的法国，因为一个精英接替了另一个精英。

It’s that there’s an enormous destruction of the mechanisms that were pushing ideas forward in the western, but also in the eastern Roman Empire, in Persia and in India, which are subject to repeated, fairly disastrous barbarian invasions, and the successor states never get back to the level of infrastructure and other investment and putting forward ideas about manipulating nature.

问题是，在西方以及东罗马帝国、波斯和印度，推动思想前进的机制遭到了巨大的破坏，这些国家屡屡遭受相当灾难性的野蛮人入侵，而后继国家再也没有回到基础设施和其他投资的水平，也没有提出操纵自然的想法。

In the fall of the Han Dynasty in China, and the Warring States period, and in the subsequent Tang Dynasty that you look .

在中国的汉朝灭亡、战国时期，以及随后的唐朝。

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。

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It isn’t until the Song arrive, and people start once again doing serious selective breeding with rice, that it looks like the rate of technology advance gets back in gear.

直到宋朝到来，人们再次开始对水稻进行认真的选择性育种，技术进步的速度才看起来恢复正常。

I can’t convince myself that between 800 and 1500, the rate of growth of world technology was any greater than in the age of classical Persia and Greece and the coming of Han China, even though the population in 800 was three times what it had been when classical Greece started.

我无法让自己相信，在800年到1500年之间，世界技术的增长速度比古典波斯和希腊以及汉朝到来的时代还要快，尽管800年的人口是古典希腊开始时的三倍。

So there’s a big interruption of the Romer story from 150 to 1500.

因此，从 150 年到 1500 年，罗默的故事有一个很大的中断。

Afterwards, it seems to me, it’s not so much two heads are better than one, but rather, we find and make much better institutions in fairly discrete steps.

后来，在我看来，并不是两个头脑比一个头脑好，而是我们以相当离散的步骤找到并建立了更好的机构。

So that after 1500, worldwide, it’s not 5 percent per century for technology.

因此，1500 年之后，全球范围内，技术每世纪的发展速度不再是 5%。

It’s more like 15 percent, and so you see population growth rates of maybe 30 percent per century worldwide.

大约是 15%，所以你会看到全球人口增长率可能为每世纪 30%。

But 30 percent per century is still a Malthusian economy.

但每世纪 30% 的经济仍然是马尔萨斯经济。

It’s got to be a somewhat richer one.

它必须是一个更丰富的。

You have to be somewhat richer so that your population can grow at 30 percent rather than 10 percent per century.

你必须变得更加富裕，这样你的人口才能以每世纪 30% 而不是 10% 的速度增长。

Still, half your babies die.

尽管如此，仍有一半的婴儿死亡。

Still, life expectancy is 30.

尽管如此，预期寿命还是30岁。

Still, you’d expect living standards to increase on average by just enough to support the 30 percent per century population growth rate, rather than the 10 percent, but it’s still a more Malthusian economy.

尽管如此，你仍然期望生活水平的平均提高足以支持每世纪 30% 的人口增长率，而不是 10%，但它仍然是一个更加马尔萨斯主义的经济。

The interesting question is, what happens between 1770 and 1870, when it looks like we get our global rate of technological progress up to almost half a percent per year, which means that a 1-percent-per-year population growth rate could eat all that up in terms of smaller farm sizes offsetting better technology?

有趣的问题是，从 1770 年到 1870 年，当全球技术进步率达到每年近 0.5% 时，会发生什么，这意味着每年 1% 的人口增长率可能会因为农场规模较小而抵消更好的技术而耗尽所有这些进步？

But you do have an upper class whose living standards are being transformed by new inventions, and you do have a doubling of humanity’s technological capacity every 70 years.

但确实有一个上层阶级，他们的生活水平正在因新发明而改变，而且人类的技术能力确实每 70 年翻一番。

Even though it is still the Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, “we’re not going to get anywhere unless we get a handle on our population growth” problem.

尽管这仍然是查尔斯·狄更斯、约翰·斯图尔特·米尔那样的问题，“除非我们解决人口增长问题，否则我们将一事无成”。

Is that 1770-to-1870 global economy still a Malthusian one?

1770 年至 1870 年的全球经济仍然是马尔萨斯经济吗？

I now have an 18-month-old laptop, and I find myself annoyed that it’s not as fast as another laptop I could get.

我现在有一台使用了 18 个月的笔记本电脑，但我发现自己很恼火，因为它的速度不如我能买到的另一台笔记本电脑。

I’m using a slightly — well, not a slightly improved — I’m using a significantly improved process of turning sand into something that can come dammed close to think with parts four nanometers on a side in the most complicated human manufacturing and division of labor process ever accomplished.

我正在使用稍微改进的工艺，将沙子变成可以用边长为四纳米的零件来思考的东西，这是有史以来最复杂的人类制造和劳动分工过程。

So complicated that in fact, there are only two productive organizations, each of which is absolutely essential for it, one of which is the one in the Netherlands that makes the extreme ultraviolet machines, and the other one is the one in Taiwan that knows how to actually use the extreme ultraviolet machines to carve paths for electrons to flow in stone made of sand.

如此复杂，事实上，只有两个生产组织，每个组织都是绝对必要的，一个是荷兰的制造极紫外机器的组织，另一个是台湾的一个知道如何实际使用极紫外机器为电子在沙石中流动的路径的组织。

Most of the time, I should be aware that materially, I’m very quite sated.

大多数时候，我应该意识到，在物质上，我非常满足。

When I do spend a lot of money on a dinner out and on a bottle of wine, I have a nagging worry that suppose I were to take this money and buy 20 McDonald’s gift certificates and go down to a local childcare center and hand them out to harassed single mothers who are having difficulty making ends meet.

当我确实在外出晚餐和一瓶酒上花了很多钱时，我有一个挥之不去的担忧，假设我要用这笔钱购买 20 张麦当劳礼券，然后去当地的托儿中心，将它们分发给那些入不敷出、饱受困扰的单身母亲。

Wouldn’t the smiles on their faces be better, make me happier than actually drinking this stuff?

他们脸上的笑容难道不会比实际喝这些东西更好、让我更快乐吗？

It’s a question.

这是一个问题。

Yet, as you say, I work pretty damned hard, and I work pretty damned hard in large part because I like my work, but also because I am somewhat of a status-seeking individual.

然而，正如你所说，我工作非常努力，我工作非常努力，很大程度上是因为我喜欢我的工作，但也因为我是一个追求地位的人。

It’s something like Liaquat Ahamed’s review of Slouching towards Utopia in Foreign Affairs this morning — the idea that someone as smart and accomplished and as knowledgeable as him thinks I actually belong in his company.

这有点像利亚卡特·艾哈迈德今天早上对《外交事务中的乌托邦》的评论——“像他一样聪明、有成就、知识渊博的人认为我实际上属于他的公司。”

That really does send me over the moon.

这确实让我欣喜若狂。

Is that a bad thing?

这是一件坏事吗？

Is that me living my best life?

这就是我过着最好的生活吗？

Would Keynes say that I am no longer in the kingdom of necessity, that in fact, I have outgrown the community of those hagridden by the vices of avarice, usury, and precaution — which we pretend are virtues because they’re socially useful — and I’m now living my best life wisely unwell?

凯恩斯会说我不再处于必然的王国里，事实上，我已经不再是那些因贪婪、高利贷和预防恶习而陷入困境的群体了——“我们假装这些是美德，因为它们对社会有用”——而我现在明智地过着最好的生活？

Or would I be better off simply taking things off and going down and hanging out at my cousin’s place in Malibu?

或者我直接脱掉衣服，去我表弟在马里布的家闲逛会更好吗？

You look at the old Twitter.

你看看旧的推特。

Yes, the old Twitter apparently was highly bureaucratized because nobody could get approval to ship anything.

是的，旧的推特显然是高度官僚化的，因为没有人能够获得批准来发布任何东西。

Whatever you think Elon Musk will do of Twitter — which in my view is, he’s most likely to simply light it on fire and burn it down — it is going to be an experiment in which he takes the organization that had become extraordinarily bureaucratic and seriously shakes it up, possibly to the long-run public good.

无论你认为埃隆·马斯克会对 Twitter 做什么——“在我看来，他最有可能只是点着火然后把它烧毁”——这都将是一次实验，他将这个已经变得极其官僚的组织彻底重组，这可能是为了长远的公共利益。

Well, in this book, I’ve taken the position — and I’m about 70 percent sure I’m right — that really, no, the story doesn’t continue.

好吧，在这本书中，我采取了这样的立场： ——而且我大约 70% 确信我是对的 —— 真的，不，故事不会继续。

That, say, from 1770 to 1870, you have about half of a percent per year, on average, of steady technological progress, but one-third of that comes because the last set of glaciers served as bulldozers and scraped all the post-Permian rock off of a good chunk of northwest Europe, leaving all the stored sunlight in the form of coal right there on the surface for you to pick up and then use to power steam engines.

比如说，从 1770 年到 1870 年，平均每年大约有 0.5% 的稳定技术进步，但其中三分之一是因为最后一组冰川充当推土机，刮掉了欧洲西北部大部分地区的所有后二叠纪岩石，将所有储存的阳光以煤炭的形式留在地表，供你拾取，然后用来为蒸汽机提供动力。

About one-third of that comes from the second globalization, allowing you to pull all the manufacturing of the world into the districts in which manufacturing was most productive and efficient.

其中大约三分之一来自第二次全球化，使您可以将世界上所有的制造业拉到制造业生产力最高、效率最高的地区。

By 1870, the really cheap coal was pretty much gone, and you’d already pulled in all the manufacturing.

到 1870 年，真正便宜的煤炭几乎消失了，所有的制造业都已经被吸引进来了。

That leaves you with the underlying rate of invention and innovation, which is about one-sixth of a percent per year — the things discovered, developed, deployed, and diffused in the world economy.

这就留下了发明和创新的基本比率，大约是每年百分之六分之一，即世界经济中发现、开发、部署和传播的事物。

That one-sixth — that only supports population growth at the rate of one-third percent per year as farm sizes grow smaller with higher population.

这六分之一只能支持每年三分之一的人口增长，因为农场规模随着人口的增加而缩小。

One-third of a percent per year — that’s just 10 percent a generation.

每年百分之三分之一 ——也就是一代人的百分之十。

That’s a steampunk economy in which you ran out of the coal, and you’d already globalized the manufacturing, and you just had invention at kind of the early 19th-century steam engine pace.

这是一种蒸汽朋克经济，在这种经济中，煤炭已经耗尽，制造业已经全球化，并且以 19 世纪初蒸汽机的速度进行发明。

That produces a steampunk economy that looks pretty damn Malthusian to me.

这产生了一种在我看来非常马尔萨斯式的蒸汽朋克经济。

But instead, we had the one big wave, as Gordon calls it.

但相反，我们迎来了戈登所说的一大波。

We had the sudden jump up so that we get our 2 percent per year productivity and real income growth after 1870.

1870 年之后，我们的生产率和实际收入实现了每年 2% 的突然跃升。

It’s that 2 percent, together with Schumpeterian creative destruction revolutionizing the economy to double human technological competence every generation — that wild ride from 1870 to today.

正是这 2%，再加上熊彼特式的创造性破坏，彻底改变了经济，使人类技术能力每一代人都翻了一番——从 1870 年到今天，这是一段疯狂的旅程。

That’s the story I want to tell.

这就是我想讲的故事。

That’s a story that Greg misses because Greg is simply viewing it from too high an altitude.

格雷格错过了这个故事，因为格雷格只是从太高的高度观看它。

Yes, Hayek had moods in which he said, “Of course, we’re not barbarians.

是的，哈耶克当时的心情是这样说的：“当然，我们不是野蛮人。

Of course, we have single-payer universal healthcare.” He also had moods in which he said that fishermen, who only have jobs because they can sell their fish into the world market, who want to complain about how the market is not rewarding them justly, should simply shut up and soldier.

当然，我们有单一付款人的全民医疗保健。”他也有这样的心情，他说，渔民们只有工作，因为他们可以将鱼卖到世界市场，他们想要抱怨市场没有公正地奖励他们，他们应该闭嘴并当兵。

There’s the Hayek who very much values the Western traditions of liberty, and there’s the Hayek who rails against permissiveness as the chief enemy of human civilization.

有的哈耶克非常重视西方的自由传统，有的哈耶克则痛斥放纵是人类文明的主要敌人。

Then there’s the Hayek who wants —

然后哈耶克想要 ——

When I want to annoy my left-wing friends, I want to say that if they want to learn how to truly crowdsource anything, they need to look at Hayek.

当我想惹恼我的左翼朋友时，我想说，如果他们想学习如何真正众包任何东西，他们需要看看哈耶克。

That what they’re pushing for is a central plan system in which someone at the top orders everyone around as if they were robots, and does so at no information.

他们所推动的是一个中央计划系统，在这个系统中，最高层的人像机器人一样命令周围的每个人，并且在没有任何信息的情况下这样做。

Or a bureaucracy in which a bunch of people have written the rulebook that requires everyone else to be a software bot when the rulebook only covers one-third of the possible cases.

或者是一个官僚机构，其中一群人编写了规则手册，要求其他人都是软件机器人，而规则手册只涵盖了三分之一的可能情况。

Or a market with private property and contract and individual initiative, so that all of the decision-making is pushed out to the periphery of society, where the information and the brains really are, and how you automatically solve the problem of incentivization as long as you manage to successfully align market prices with social values.

或者是一个拥有私有财产、契约和个人主动性的市场，这样所有的决策都被推到了社会的边缘，那里才是信息和大脑真正所在的地方，只要你成功地将市场价格与社会价值结合起来，你如何自动解决激励问题。

There is no better way for harnessing the eight-billion-brain anthology intelligence of humanity to achieving the social goals we all want, other than to organize a well-functioning market system.

除了组织一个运转良好的市场体系之外，没有更好的方法可以利用人类 80 亿大脑的集合智慧来实现我们都想要的社会目标。

That is a basic and serious truth.

这是一个基本而严肃的事实。

The problem, though, is the kind of align prices with social values and the fact that in a real market, the only rights that matter are property rights.

但问题在于如何将价格与社会价值观结合起来，以及在真实市场中唯一重要的权利是产权。

Unless you are very, very good at making the distribution of property rights in accord, so that the people who control those property rights are issuing orders to the market that accord with what you believe utopia requires, then you get yourself into huge trouble.

除非你非常非常擅长使产权分配一致，以便控制这些产权的人向市场发出符合你认为乌托邦要求的命令，否则你会给自己带来巨大的麻烦。

Plus, you have to take care of all the externalities — the information externalities, the direct externalities, the macroeconomic externalities, and so forth.

另外，你还必须考虑所有的外部性——信息外部性、直接外部性、宏观经济外部性等等。

The only example I seriously know about this is the extinction of the spice silphium in the Roman Empire.

我真正了解的唯一例子是罗马帝国香料西菲姆的灭绝。

I still do not understand how it could have possibly happened because as silphium got scarce, for one of the many latifundistas of imperial Roman Italy to have established a silphium plantation would’ve seemed to be a very obvious thing to do.

我仍然不明白这是怎么可能发生的，因为随着硅变得稀缺，对于罗马帝国意大利的众多大庄园主之一来说，建立硅种植园似乎是一件非常明显的事情。

The middle-income trap looks to me a lot like that thing expanding its reach.

在我看来，中等收入陷阱很像扩大其范围的事情。

That governmental technology of appropriation improves along with other technologies, and so there comes a point where it’s better and easier and more comfortable for yourself to try to join the other government regimentation machine than to be out there in the entrepreneurial and positive-sum machine.

政府的拨款技术随着其他技术的进步而进步，因此到了一定程度，尝试加入其他政府管制机器比加入创业型正和机器对自己来说更好、更容易、更舒服。

My understanding of the middle-income trap is that that’s where it comes from, and it seems scarily persistent.

我对中等收入陷阱的理解是，它就是从这里来的，而且它似乎持续得可怕。

You combine that with Lenin’s extraordinary success at organization, and his pupils and their theological belief that the market must be damned to hell forever, and you get almost all of the divergence that we’ve seen since 1870.

你把这一点与列宁在组织方面取得的非凡成功、他的学生以及他们认为市场必须永远下地狱的神学信仰结合起来，你就得到了自 1870 年以来我们所看到的几乎所有分歧。

Then, in the generation after World War II, I could say, well, failure to converge after the end of colonialism — that’s because they destroyed state institutions, and building a state is a complicated thing.

然后，在二战后的一代人中，我可以说，殖民主义结束后未能融合——那是因为他们摧毁了国家机构，而建立一个国家是一件复杂的事情。

You have to reward your friends in order to maintain control and establish — like Henry VIII stole the monasteries.

你必须奖励你的朋友才能保持控制和建立——就像亨利八世偷了修道院一样。

Stealing entrepreneurial wealth is a good thing to do if you’re trying to maintain a stable state, and things will settle down.

如果你想保持稳定的状态，那么窃取企业财富是一件好事，事情就会安定下来。

Then I could say, well, African retardation — there are special problems of sub-Saharan Africa related to long-run destruction of social trust and so forth.

然后我可以说，非洲的落后——撒哈拉以南非洲存在与社会信任的长期破坏等相关的特殊问题。

Now I’ve run out of excuses for why middle-income and other traps persist.

现在我已经找不到中等收入陷阱和其他陷阱持续存在的借口了。

Maybe the fact that I’ve run out of excuses is combined with the fact that we’ve actually seen substantial convergence in the world since 2000.

也许我已经没有借口了，而且自 2000 年以来我们实际上已经看到了世界上的实质性趋同。

On the other hand, the coming of Xi Jinping’s new imperial China, and the coming of Narendra Modi and what looks a lot to me like national Hinduist India — those make me think that perhaps the middle-income trap will continue to be much stronger than I would wish, or than I had hoped five years ago when I was in the mood of I’ve run out of excuses.

另一方面，习近平新帝制中国的到来，纳伦德拉·莫迪的到来，以及在我看来很像印度教国家的印度——这些让我认为中等收入陷阱可能会继续比我希望的要严重得多，或者比我五年前所希望的要严重得多，当时我已经没有借口了。

But I think that insight is much deeper.

但我认为这种洞察力要深刻得多。

It’s not just that there’ll be a lot of noise — noise trading will be persistent — it will be that the largest and most influential financial players will be people who have not only taken positions that are overly risky in a beta sense.

这不仅会产生大量噪音——噪音交易将持续存在——而且最大、最有影响力的金融参与者将不仅持有贝塔意义上风险过高的头寸。

They will be overwhelmingly people who have massively failed to diversify and who have been very lucky three times in a row and who, as a result, think that they’re absolute geniuses.

他们绝大多数是在多元化方面严重失败的人，并且连续三次非常幸运，因此认为自己是绝对的天才。

We’re selecting for a market in which the celebrity participants, at least, are people with positively bad financial judgment, prone to bubbles and enthusiasms, and relatively right-wing in their politics because the right wing will offer them low taxes.

我们选择的市场中，名人参与者至少是那些财务判断力极差、容易产生泡沫和热情、在政治上相对右翼的人，因为右翼将为他们提供低税率。

The great and good financially of Britain have been told for 15 years that “austerity is an important thing to have, so that’s why you need to have us rather than the Labour Party in control.”

15 年来，英国金融界的伟大人士一直被告知“紧缩是一件重要的事情，所以这就是为什么你需要让我们而不是工党来控制。”

As near as I can see, the result has been a Britain that’s 10 percent poorer as a result of a failure to make public and private investments over the past decade and a half, and another 10 percent poorer because of the disaster of Brexit that was never supposed to happen.

据我所知，结果是英国由于过去十五年未能进行公共和私人投资而贫困了 10%，而由于英国脱欧灾难而本不该发生的灾难又使英国贫困了 10%。

It was just supposed to demonstrate that Boris Johnson was on the side of the little people of England.

这只是为了表明鲍里斯·约翰逊站在英国小人物一边。

Maybe the fiscal theory of the price level was only there because they believed what Cameron had told them, and that maybe you could actually bull through this.

也许物价水平的财政理论之所以存在，只是因为他们相信卡梅伦告诉他们的话，而且也许你实际上可以克服这一点。

If I were advising Liz Truss, I would say, “Go back and tell the European Union it was all some horrible mistake.

如果我为莉兹·特拉斯提供建议，我会说：“回去告诉欧盟，这都是一个可怕的错误。

We’ve come to our senses.”

我们已经醒悟过来了。”

There needs to be a long-run plan to definitely finance it, given that, as John Maynard Keynes said, the animal spirits of investors depend very much on investors’ attitude toward and confidence in the soundness of the government.

需要有一个长期计划来为其提供明确的资金支持，因为正如约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯所说，投资者的动物精神很大程度上取决于投资者对政府健全性的态度和信心。

And a hatred of investors for Léon Blum or the Labour Party is a powerful factor that must be taken into account.

投资者对莱昂·布鲁姆或工党的仇恨是一个必须考虑的重要因素。

I would indeed say that a Conservative government that makes incredibly promised substantial future wealth taxes to keep the deficit under control in the future is the right road forward to Britain.

我确实想说，保守党政府做出令人难以置信的承诺，承诺在未来征收巨额财富税，以控制未来的赤字，这是英国前进的正确道路。

I do not see how the Conservative Party, as it’s currently constituted, can make such long-run promises, and I certainly do not think that those whose credibility is needed for Britain to avoid a very nasty inflationary spiral over the next 10 or 15 years would trust the Labour Party at all.

我不明白目前的保守党如何能够做出如此长期的承诺，而且我当然不认为那些为英国避免未来 10 或 15 年非常严重的通货膨胀螺旋而需要信誉的人根本不会信任工党。

We’re likely to find that .

我们很可能会发现这一点。

.

。

.

。

Well, it happened to Léon Blum, or it happened to François Mitterrand.

好吧，这发生在莱昂·布鲁姆身上，或者发生在弗朗索瓦·密特朗身上。

Attempt to move left and find yourself having to tack right very, very quickly.

尝试向左移动，却发现自己必须非常非常快地向右调整航向。

But I microwaved the disc and have not played a video game since.

但我用微波炉加热了这张光盘，从那以后就没有玩过电子游戏了。

That’s not something I trust myself with.

这不是我对自己的信任。

I think I have a moral obligation to help Hamish and company put Substack forward in the future, and that it would be nice if they succeed in their long-run project for world domination.

我认为我有道德义务帮助 Hamish 和他的公司在未来推进 Substack，如果他们在统治世界的长期项目中取得成功，那就太好了。