Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence (Ep. 100)

On persistence

关于坚持

But when you look, in general, at places in Vietnam that have a similar recent history, but going back in time, one of them was part of a much stronger, more centralized state.

但总体而言，当你观察越南一些具有相似近代历史的地方，但回溯到过去，你会发现其中一个地方是一个更强大、更集权的国家的一部分。

The other one was part of what is today Cambodia, a much weaker state, generally ruled by local lords instead of by a strong centralized state.

另一个是今天柬埔寨的一部分，这是一个弱得多的国家，通常由当地领主统治，而不是由强大的中央集权国家统治。

You see the towns that were part of the stronger, centralized state going back before colonialism, so several hundred years ago.

你会看到，这些城镇是更强大、中央集权国家的一部分，可以追溯到殖民主义之前，也就是几百年前。

More recently, they have better-functioning local governments.

最近，他们的地方政府运作得更好。

They’re richer.

他们更富有。

They’re better off, which shows that places that have a long history of governance seem better able to do that more recently.

他们的境况更好，这表明具有悠久治理历史的地方最近似乎更有能力做到这一点。

So places going back a long time ago — they were part of the central state.

所以很久以前的地方——它们是中央国家的一部分。

They had to collect taxes locally to send up to the central state.

他们必须在当地收税，然后上交中央政府。

They had to organize military conscripts.

他们必须组织义务兵。

The central state mandated that they had certain laws.

中央政府规定他们必须制定某些法律。

More recently, those places also have more functional local governments and are also better off economically, whereas the places that never had that structure that comes from a state — it was, essentially, if you were living in that area, there’d be a warlord that you sent tribute to.

最近，这些地方的地方政府也更加职能化，经济状况也更好，而那些从来没有来自国家的结构的地方——本质上来说，如果你住在那个地区，就会有一个你向的军阀进贡。

But there was never any regular taxation, never any organized local government under a central state.

但从来没有任何定期税收，也没有任何中央政府管辖下的有组织的地方政府。

Those places much more recently — when there were constitutional reforms in Vietnam that gave them a degree of self-government — they weren’t able to do that very effectively.

这些地方最近——“当越南进行宪法改革，赋予它们一定程度的自治权时”——他们无法非常有效地做到这一点。

They weren’t able to keep the positions on their local city council filled.

他们无法填补当地市议会的职位。

They weren’t able to provide, as effectively, local public goods, like education or health services.

他们无法有效地提供地方公共产品，例如教育或医疗服务。

So really, having this long history of governance makes places more able to do that today.

事实上，拥有悠久的治理历史使得今天的地方更有能力做到这一点。

That’s relevant because there’s been a big push to have local governments provide an important role in providing public goods, et cetera.

这是相关的，因为人们大力推动地方政府在提供公共产品等方面发挥重要作用。

If places don’t have a history of doing that, perhaps not surprisingly, they tend to have a much harder time.

如果地方没有这样做的历史，也许并不奇怪，他们的日子往往会更加艰难。

When the World Bank says, “Well, we want to give local autonomy to let local governments decide how to provide schools in the way that works best for them,” that’s going to work in places that have a long history of providing education.

当世界银行说：“好吧，我们希望给予地方自治权，让地方政府决定如何以最适合他们的方式提供学校”，这将在那些拥有悠久教育历史的地方发挥作用。

In places that don’t, they’re more likely to have a hard time.

在没有的地方，他们更有可能遇到困难。

By looking within South Vietnam, we wanted to say, “Okay, these are places that had a much more recent modern history.

通过审视南越境内，我们想说：“好吧，这些地方的现代历史要近得多。

Can their past history still matter?” But we’re not saying that that begins to explain everything.

他们过去的历史还重要吗？”但我们并不是说这就开始解释一切。

There’s other forces that happened more recently that we think are also important.

我们认为最近发生的其他力量也很重要。

Certainly, there can be mean reversions, and the argument is not that things are always persistent.

当然，可能存在均值回归，并且争论并不在于事物总是持久的。

I think part of the literature is about understanding why sometimes things persist and sometimes they don’t.

我认为文献的一部分是关于理解为什么有时事情会持续存在而有时却不会。

Certainly, more recent events can matter, and we’re not claiming that there’s an R-squared of one that a place’s history is its destiny, but that there are these forces.

当然，最近发生的事件可能很重要，我们并不是说存在一个R平方，即一个地方的历史就是它的命运，而是存在这些力量。

I think that there’s ways in which looking beyond just household consumption today, I think you do very much see the legacy of the historical state in both places that were part of North and South Vietnam.

我认为，除了今天的家庭消费之外，还有很多方法可以让你在北越和南越这两个地方看到历史国家的遗产。

If you look at coronavirus, Vietnam has been remarkably effective at dealing with it.

如果你看看冠状病毒，就会发现越南在应对它方面非常有效。

They share a border with China, and yet they have almost no cases.

他们与中国接壤，但几乎没有病例。

They’ve been super successful at isolating their outbreaks.

他们在隔离疫情方面非常成功。

Life is much more normal there than it would be in the United States.

那里的生活比美国正常得多。

And I think that that, in large part, goes back to the fact that much of Vietnam does have this history of having a strong, centralized state that coordinates very well with local governments, and having local governments that have been effective at providing public goods like healthcare.

我认为，这在很大程度上可以追溯到这样一个事实：越南的大部分地区确实有过这样的历史：拥有一个强大的中央集权国家，与地方政府协调得很好，并且地方政府能够有效地提供医疗保健等公共产品。

That has come in really useful in this moment when you really need a strong, centralized response.

当您确实需要强有力的集中响应时，这确实非常有用。

That’s an example where I don’t have a way to prove that econometrically, but if you look throughout Vietnam, the parts that were part of North Vietnam as well as South Vietnam — they’ve been able to deal with this really effectively, and I don’t think that’s an accident.

这是一个我没有办法从经济学角度证明这一点的例子，但如果你放眼整个越南，北越和南越的部分地区——他们已经能够真正有效地处理这个问题，我不认为这是一个意外。

If persistence is so important at the aggregate level, shouldn’t development economics be more predictive successfully than it in fact is?

如果持久性在总体水平上如此重要，那么发展经济学难道不应该比实际情况更成功地进行预测吗？

Because few people really predicted the relative fates of South Korea and the Philippines, but we could have read off their entire past histories in 1960.

因为很少有人真正预测韩国和菲律宾的相对命运，但我们可以在 1960 年读出他们过去的全部历史。

And it was about the Cold War, and it was a really bad situation.

那是关于冷战的，那是一个非常糟糕的情况。

Much of the country had been destroyed.

该国大部分地区已被摧毁。

The politics were a bit of a mess.

政治有点混乱。

But if you had looked back at the longer history of Korea, you would have seen that they have this long history of having functioning institutions that are able to provide conditions that promote economic development, and that’s important.

但如果你回顾一下韩国悠久的历史，你就会发现他们拥有运作良好的机构，能够为促进经济发展提供条件，这一点很重要。

So in some sense, the 1950s and the ’60s were an aberration in Korea’s history.

因此，从某种意义上说，20世纪50年代和60年代是韩国历史上的一段失常时期。

Whereas, if you go back further in time in the Philippines, they were organized very differently.

然而，如果你追溯到菲律宾更远的时间，他们的组织方式就非常不同。

They did not have a history of a strong, centralized state, and that matters potentially for what they were able to do going forward.

他们没有强大的中央集权国家的历史，这对于他们未来能够做什么可能很重要。

I think, also, the argument is not necessarily that a strong state is always good for economic development.

我还认为，这个论点并不一定是一个强大的国家总是有利于经济发展。

There’s a huge literature looking at examples like Nazi Germany that shows in places where the Prussian state was stronger, the Nazis were better at exterminating Jews.

有大量文献研究了纳粹德国等例子，表明在普鲁士国家更强大的地方，纳粹更擅长消灭犹太人。

So depending on what the state wants to do, having that state capacity can be a good thing or a bad thing.

因此，根据国家想要做什么，拥有这种国家能力可能是好事，也可能是坏事。

It doesn’t necessarily promote economic development at all points in time, but it does, in some sense, seem to be largely a prerequisite.

它不一定在所有时间点都促进经济发展，但从某种意义上说，它似乎在很大程度上是一个先决条件。

If you can’t have a state that’s capable of monopolizing violence and promoting the conditions that we need for economic development, like providing public goods, then most of those places that have chronically had a weak state are very poor.

如果你不能拥有一个能够垄断暴力并促进我们经济发展所需的条件（例如提供公共产品）的国家，那么大多数长期国家薄弱的地方都非常贫穷。

If you have a strong state, it can be good or bad, depending on exactly what that state is doing.

如果你有一个强大的国家，它可能是好是坏，具体取决于该国家正在做什么。

And it can change over time, and there can be reversals.

它会随着时间的推移而改变，并且可能会发生逆转。

But it provides potential opportunities — if that state does pursue policies that are helpful instead of harmful for economic development — for that to happen.

但它提供了潜在的机会——“如果该国确实推行对经济发展有益而不是有害的政策”——从而实现这一目标。

Whereas in the Philippines, there’s some arguments that Marcos actually aspired to be a developmental dictator, and he just had no capacity to do that because nobody at the local level would really do what the central government ordered them to do.

而在菲律宾，有人认为马科斯实际上渴望成为一名发展独裁者，但他没有能力做到这一点，因为地方一级没有人真正按照中央政府的命令去做。

Instead, it was much easier just to steal things than to try to direct the state towards development because the central state in the Philippines didn’t have that capacity.

相反，仅仅窃取东西比试图引导国家发展要容易得多，因为菲律宾的中央政府没有这种能力。

Whereas in this paper, I was looking at the impacts of the Mexican Revolution, which is a historical conflict in economic development.

而在本文中，我研究的是墨西哥革命的影响，这是经济发展中的历史冲突。

And this historian, who had studied it extensively and knows a ton, was saying, “Well, I kind of see what you’re saying, and that holds in this case, but what about this exception?

这位对它进行了广泛研究并且了解很多的历史学家说：“好吧，我有点明白你在说什么，在这种情况下也是如此，但是这个例外又如何呢？

And what about that exception?”

那么那个例外呢？”

And my response was to say my partial R-squared, which is the percent of the variation that this regression explains, is 0.1, which means it’s explaining 10 percent of the variation in the data.

我的回答是，我的部分 R 平方（即该回归解释的变异百分比）为 0.1，这意味着它解释了数据中 10% 的变异。

And I think, you know, that’s pretty good because the world’s a complex place, so something that explains 10 percent of the variation is potentially a pretty big deal.

我认为，这非常好，因为世界是一个复杂的地方，所以解释 10% 的变化可能是一件相当大的事情。

But that means there’s still 90 percent of the variation that’s explained by other things.

但这意味着仍有 90% 的变异是由其他因素解释的。

And obviously, if you go down to the individual level, there’s even more variation there in the data to explain.

显然，如果深入到个人层面，数据中还有更多差异需要解释。

So I think that in these cases where we see even 10 percent of the variation being explained by a historical variable, that’s actually really strong persistence.

所以我认为，在这些情况下，我们甚至看到 10% 的变化是由历史变量解释的，这实际上是非常强的持久性。

But there’s a huge scope for so many things to matter.

但很多事情的影响范围很大。

I’ll say the same thing when I teach an undergrad class about economic growth in history.

当我在本科生课堂上讲授历史上的经济增长时，我也会说同样的话。

We talk about the various explanations you can have: geography, different types of institutions, cultural factors.

我们讨论您可以得到的各种解释：地理、不同类型的机构、文化因素。

Well, there’s places in sub-Saharan Africa that are 40 times poorer than the US.

嗯，撒哈拉以南非洲有些地方比美国贫穷 40 倍。

When you have that kind of income differential, there’s just a massive amount of variation to explain.

当存在这种收入差异时，就需要解释大量的差异。

Nathan Nunn’s work on slavery and the role that that plays in explaining Africa’s long-run underdevelopment — he gets pretty large coefficients, but they still leave a massive amount of difference to be explained by other things as well, because there’s such large income differences between poor places in the world and rich places.

内森·纳恩（Nathan Nunn）关于奴隶制及其在解释非洲长期不发达问题中所扮演的角色的研究 ——他得到了相当大的系数，但仍然留下了巨大的差异需要用其他因素来解释，因为世界上贫困地区和富裕地区之间存在巨大的收入差异。

I think if persistence explains 10 percent of it, that’s a case where we see really strong persistence, and of course, there’s other cases where we don’t see much.

我认为，如果持久性能解释其中的 10%，那么在这种情况下，我们会看到非常强的持久性，当然，在其他情况下，我们看不到太多持久性。

So there’s plenty of room for everybody’s preferred theory of economic development to be important just because the differences are so huge.

因此，由于差异如此之大，每个人所偏爱的经济发展理论都有很大的重要性。

But I’m not sure, quantitatively, how important you would think that is to economic development, and it’s actually something that we can’t even really measure.

但我不确定，从数量上来说，你认为这对经济发展有多重要，而实际上我们甚至无法真正衡量这一点。

A very small percentage of the population identifies as Chinese today.

今天，只有极少数人被认为是中国人。

Of course, there were far more Chinese that settled and intermingled with Vietnamese, and we don’t really have a measure of that.

当然，有更多的中国人定居并与越南人混居，我们对此没有真正的衡量标准。

So what do we think is actually driving the persistence effect across the different classes and villages in South Vietnam that you studied?

那么，我们认为是什么真正推动了您所研究的南越不同阶层和村庄的持久效应呢？

Because the institutions are endogenous, right?

因为制度是内生的，对吗？

And when it did that, it was very good at bringing new territories into the Vietnamese state.

当它这样做时，它非常擅长将新领土纳入越南国家。

If you look across other borders that were in effect for a couple hundred years, you don’t see any differences in income more recently.

如果你看看其他已经生效了几百年的边界，你不会发现最近的收入有任何差异。

But finally, you get to the mid-19th century, and the French show up to colonize Vietnam.

但最后，到了 19 世纪中叶，法国人开始殖民越南。

If the French hadn’t shown up, the Vietnamese state would have probably kept going and conquered all of what is today Cambodia because they were a much more effective state, militarily, at that point in time.

如果法国人没有出现，越南国家可能会继续前进并征服今天的柬埔寨，因为当时他们在军事上是一个更有效的国家。

But that doesn’t happen.

但这并没有发生。

The French show up, and effectively, the very southernmost part of what is today Vietnam had just been brought into the Vietnamese state.

法国人出现了，实际上，今天越南的最南端刚刚被纳入越南国家。

The French essentially stopped that process of integrating them.

法国人基本上停止了整合他们的过程。

According to the historical literature, the local institutions, the local customs essentially persist under the French because the French actually don’t have a lot of power to change things on the ground.

根据历史文献，当地机构、当地习俗在法国人统治下基本上仍然存在，因为法国人实际上没有太多权力来改变当地的情况。

So the local norms at the time that the French show up essentially persist.

因此，法国人出现时的当地规范基本上仍然存在。

Then we get forward to the period of independence, and that’s when we start observing all these differences in local governance.

然后我们进入独立时期，那时我们开始观察地方治理中的所有这些差异。

I think, essentially, what happens is that the French don’t really have the capacity to actually change things at a village level on the ground.

我认为，从本质上讲，法国人并没有能力真正改变乡村层面的情况。

They can show up and take over the top level of the government, but they don’t have the capacity to go into a village and say, “Change how you govern yourselves.”

他们可以出现并接管政府最高层，但他们没有能力走进一个村庄并说：“改变你们的管理方式。”

Essentially, that means that the way that things work in 1850 — that becomes pretty persistent over the next hundred years while the French are there, because there’s just not really a force to change the village government because the French say, “Do what you want at the village level.

从本质上讲，这意味着 1850 年的运作方式在接下来的一百年里变得相当持久，而法国人在那里，因为没有真正的力量来改变村政府，因为法国人说，“在村一级做你想做的事。

Pay taxes to us.” But they essentially don’t have the same capacity that the Vietnamese state had to conquer places, or they don’t have the desire to do it and bring them into a central state.

给我们纳税。”但他们本质上不具备越南国家征服地方的能力，或者他们没有意愿这样做并将其纳入中央国家。

I think the persistence is largely about that because then, when you move into the independence period, the South Vietnamese state is also, at the national level, a chronically weak state.

我认为这种坚持主要是因为，当你进入独立时期时，南越国家在国家层面上也是一个长期软弱的国家。

Again, the South Vietnamese state doesn’t have the capacity to go into the 18,000 hamlets that were in South Vietnam and say, “Change how you govern yourself.”

再说一遍，南越政府没有能力走进南越的 18,000 个村庄并说：“改变你们的治理方式。”

The persistence is really about there’s not a force to make a change, and maybe things drift a little bit over time.

坚持实际上是没有力量做出改变，也许随着时间的推移，事情会发生一些变化。

But going further back in time when the strong Vietnamese state comes in and really says, “Okay, you’re going to implement our institutions at the local level because this is the most effective way that we think we have to tax you and to make you contribute to the state,” then that’s a rupture, and the institutions change.

但追溯到更早的时候，当强大的越南政府介入并真正说：“好吧，你将在地方一级实施我们的制度，因为这是我们认为我们必须向你征税并让你为国家做出贡献的最有效方式”，那么这就出现了破裂，制度发生了变化。

When there’s not the pressure to do that, then essentially, the structure that they have for governing themselves just reproduces over time.

如果没有这样做的压力，那么本质上，他们的自我管理结构就会随着时间的推移而复制。

Places that had been part of this strong state historically — the village is the center of government.

历史上曾是这个强大国家一部分的地方——村庄是政府的中心。

There’s a village government.

有村政府。

They organize to tax.

他们组织起来征税。

They organize to enforce laws, et cetera, and that continues.

他们组织起来执行法律等等，而且这种情况仍在继续。

Whereas in places that had not been part of the Vietnamese state, that were on the periphery of this very weak Cambodian state, there was no form of village organization to speak of.

而在不属于越南国家的地方，即位于这个非常弱小的柬埔寨国家边缘的地方，没有任何形式的村庄组织可言。

You might live near other people, but there wasn’t a village government that had been elected the way that it had in Vietnam.

你可能住在其他人附近，但没有像越南那样选举产生的村政府。

Instead, the way that that social organization worked is that there is a local lord who owns the land.

相反，该社会组织的运作方式是有一个拥有土地的当地领主。

It’s almost like a feudal system.

这几乎就像一个封建制度。

When the French come in, they don’t have an interest or they don’t have the capacity to essentially change that.

当法国人进来时，他们没有兴趣，或者没有能力从根本上改变这一点。

And that power tends to reproduce itself until there’s a strong force to change.

这种力量往往会自我复制，直到出现强大的改变力量。

In the areas that had been part of this strong state, there weren’t strong landlords to speak of.

在曾经属于这个强国的地区，并没有什么强悍的地主可言。

There were these village governments, and the people who had the power in the village governments, the families — that tends to reproduce itself over time because people don’t want to let go of that power.

有这些村政府，以及在村政府中拥有权力的人，家庭——随着时间的推移，这些权力往往会自我复制，因为人们不想放弃这种权力。

Where things were organized differently, where it was more about these lords who had power and you paid tribute to them, and then they passed that up — again, they’re not going to willingly let their power go.

事情的组织方式不同，更多的是这些拥有权力的领主，你向他们致敬，然后他们放弃了——再次，他们不会心甘情愿地放弃自己的权力。

They want to reproduce that power.

他们想要重现这种力量。

And that, essentially, is central leading to persistence.

从本质上讲，这是导致坚持的核心。

Of course, there can also be cultural attitudes and all those other things that underlie that.

当然，也可能存在文化态度和所有其他因素。

Part of the dynamic of persistence is that when you have power, you want to do everything in your capacity to maintain that power.

坚持的动力之一是，当你拥有权力时，你会想尽一切努力来维持这种权力。

When you have economic resources, you want to do everything that’s in your capacity to maintain those resources.

当你拥有经济资源时，你会想尽一切努力来维持这些资源。

Sometimes we get these radical ruptures that change things substantially.

有时，我们会经历彻底的破裂，从而使事情发生重大变化。

Other times, maybe there’s a gradual wearing away because the world economy has changed or things like that.

其他时候，可能会因为世界经济发生变化或类似的事情而逐渐消失。

But there’s going to be this push towards persistence because people that benefit from the way things are want to keep it that way.

但将会有这种坚持下去的动力，因为从现状中受益的人们希望保持现状。

But if you go back, and you look, for example, at maps that were made in the 1930s by the French showing different types of infrastructure, which we think is likely to be correlated with economic development, you see more infrastructure in the north than in the south.

但如果你回顾过去，例如，看看法国人在 1930 年代制作的地图，显示了不同类型的基础设施，我们认为这可能与经济发展相关，你会发现北部的基础设施比南部更多。

So I think that we don’t have a great way to measure what economic output looked like historically, but I think it’s consistent with what we see more recently.

因此，我认为我们没有一个很好的方法来衡量历史上的经济产出，但我认为这与我们最近看到的情况是一致的。

I don’t think that there’s been a reversal in that case, despite what some GDP data may say.

尽管一些 GDP 数据可能会表明这一点，但我认为这种情况不会出现逆转。

We have to be pretty suspicious of that data in that period.

我们必须对那个时期的数据非常怀疑。

If you look at data from household consumption surveys today, you still see a very strong effect.

如果你看看今天的家庭消费调查数据，你仍然会看到非常强烈的影响。

But again, that doesn’t mean that it’s permanent.

但这并不意味着它是永久的。

And we were interested in looking at how that effect changed across time, and if anything, it does seem to get smaller across time, but then the problem is just your standard errors.

我们有兴趣了解这种影响如何随着时间的推移而变化，如果有的话，它似乎随着时间的推移而变小，但问题只是你的标准错误。

So we don’t have, really, enough data, and the changes across time aren’t large enough to really be able to establish if there’s some convergence.

因此，我们实际上没有足够的数据，而且随时间的变化也不足以真正确定是否存在某种收敛。

But this was something that we were actually interested in, in the context of this project.

但这是我们在这个项目的背景下真正感兴趣的事情。

Are there forces that can make these effects grow smaller across time?

是否存在一些力量可以使这些影响随着时间的推移而变小？

One of the forces is in these places that have had this long history of village government that have very effective local governments.

其中一股力量就在这些有着悠久村级政府历史、拥有非常有效的地方政府的地方。

They have high social capital.

他们拥有较高的社会资本。

You see that they’re actually less likely to have loans from commercial banks because they don’t need that.

你会发现，他们实际上不太可能从商业银行获得贷款，因为他们不需要贷款。

If you need to get a loan, you can go get it from your friends or family.

如果您需要贷款，可以向您的朋友或家人寻求贷款。

Whereas in the places that don’t have that high social capital, they’ve actually seen further inroads of commercial banks.

而在社会资本不那么高的地方，他们实际上看到了商业银行的进一步入侵。

Or, if you look when the Vietnamese state provides formal property titles, people are actually less likely to go and get a property title in the places that have a strong history of village governance, again, because you don’t really need it.

或者，如果你看看越南国家何时提供正式的产权，人们实际上不太可能去那些有着悠久村庄治理历史的地方获得产权，因为你并不真正需要它。

If your local government — if you trust them to enforce your property right, you don’t need to go get this thing from the provincial government, which people tend to trust less.

如果你的地方政府 ——如果你相信他们会强制执行你的财产权，你就不需要从省政府那里得到这个东西，因为人们往往不太信任省政府。

It’s just not necessary.

只是没有必要。

But that may matter as development continues.

但随着开发的继续，这可能很重要。

I think that there’s certainly forces that could lead to reversal, and maybe in another 10 years, we’ll have more data that we can look at and try to understand more carefully.

我认为肯定有一些力量可能导致逆转，也许再过 10 年，我们将拥有更多可以查看并尝试更仔细理解的数据。

But at least in the data that you see through the present, you still see pretty strong economic differences.

但至少从目前的数据来看，您仍然可以看到相当大的经济差异。

Maybe they’re getting weaker, but the differences across time that we’re able to observe — we don’t have, really, the power to say whether those relatively modest differences are convergence or they’re just noise in the data.

也许它们正在变得越来越弱，但我们能够观察到的随时间变化的差异——实际上，我们没有权力判断这些相对较小的差异是否是收敛的，或者它们只是数据中的噪音。

On what’s lacking economically in Vietnam

越南经济缺乏什么

The country was completely devastated by this conflict, which probably wouldn’t have happened without outside interference.

该国被这场冲突彻底摧毁，如果没有外部干涉，这种情况可能不会发生。

They’re completely devastated by the conflict.

他们被冲突彻底摧毁了。

And then they have this communist government with an ideology that doesn’t really work economically.

然后他们的共产主义政府的意识形态在经济上并没有真正发挥作用。

They try to implement, but actually aren’t successful at implementing, some really economically harmful forced collectivization policies in the ’80s.

他们试图实施一些在八十年代对经济有害的强制集体化政策，但实际上并没有成功。

Then, following reform in China, they start reforming as well, and since then it’s been relatively successful.

然后中国改革之后，他们也开始改革，而且比较成功。

I think the questions that we have about Vietnamese development going forward, in some sense, are similar to the questions about Chinese development, and to what extent is it important to have a democratic state to promote innovation?

我认为我们对越南未来发展的问题在某种意义上与中国发展的问题类似，民主国家对促进创新有多重要？

And these are questions — they’re very controversial questions that we don’t really have the answer to.

这些都是非常有争议的问题，我们并没有真正的答案。

Do we think that the policies of the Chinese government are actually bad for innovation because there’s not democracy and people are restricted in some ways?

我们是否认为中国政府的政策实际上不利于创新，因为没有民主，人们在某些方面受到限制？

Or are they able to tailor their policies enough that the lack of democratic institutions may be harmful in other ways, but for economic outcomes, it’s not stifling innovation?

或者他们是否能够调整自己的政策，以至于缺乏民主制度可能会在其他方面造成损害，但对于经济成果来说，这并没有扼杀创新？

And that’s something that is a little bit hard to resolve at this level of development because, by and far, they’re not at the level of development where, to keep growing, they have to innovate.

在目前的发展水平上，这个问题有点难以解决，因为到目前为止，他们还没有达到为了保持增长就必须创新的发展水平。

They still have some returns that can be made just by catching up with the global frontier of innovation.

只要赶上全球创新前沿，他们仍然可以获得一些回报。

What’s the way to think about what those parts of Latin America had that Vietnam didn’t?

如何看待拉丁美洲那些地区拥有越南所没有的东西？

And this gets at the “what’s lacking in Vietnam institutional capacity” question.

这就涉及到“越南机构能力缺乏什么”的问题。

If you go back to 1900, Bolivia versus Vietnam are both going to be extremely poor because industrialization essentially hadn’t arrived yet.

如果你回到 1900 年，玻利维亚和越南都将非常贫穷，因为工业化基本上还没有到来。

And part of that may be due to colonialism.

部分原因可能是殖民主义。

Part of it is due to broader factors about why does it take time for industrialization to spread from England to the rest of the world?

部分原因在于更广泛的因素，即为什么工业化需要时间才能从英国传播到世界其他地区？

So I think it’s a bit hard to take any specific date and say, “Okay, this place is doing better than that place,” because they all — especially for the middle-income-type countries today — they all tend to have patterns of up and down.

因此，我认为很难确定一个具体的日期并说：“好吧，这个地方比那个地方做得更好”，因为它们都 ——尤其是对于当今的中等收入国家来说——它们都倾向于有上升和下降的模式。

Most of them haven’t been able to sustain growth over a long enough period yet that they’ve converged to the global frontier.

它们中的大多数都未能在足够长的时间内维持增长，以至于无法收敛到全球前沿。

But if you look at Vietnam, it seemed to get on that path more recently.

但如果你看看越南，它似乎最近才走上这条道路。

Whereas Latin America has this strong growth performance that happens earlier, and then they stagnate.

而拉丁美洲则出现较早的强劲增长表现，然后就陷入停滞。

And that goes back to this idea of a middle-income trap.

这可以追溯到中等收入陷阱的想法。

People have talked about this comparison between East Asia and Latin America.

人们谈论过东亚和拉丁美洲之间的这种比较。

East Asia — their strong growth performance started later.

东亚 ——强劲的增长表现起步较晚。

Is China, is Vietnam going to get stuck in the same sort of middle-income trap that Latin America has seemed to be largely stuck in since the mid-20th century?

中国、越南是否会陷入自20世纪中叶以来拉丁美洲似乎基本上陷入的同样的中等收入陷阱？

Or is Vietnam going to be more like Taiwan or South Korea in that it can keep sustaining that growth across time?

或者越南会更像台湾或韩国，因为它可以长期维持这种增长？

I think that we don’t really have, from an empirical sense, a great understanding of why exactly Latin America got stuck.

我认为，从经验意义上来说，我们并没有真正理解拉丁美洲究竟为何陷入困境。

There’s some sense in the literature that it has a lot to do with political economy factors, that there were policies that were captured by elites.

文献中存在某种意义，这与政治经济因素有很大关系，有些政策被精英所掌握。

If you compare import substitution industrialization — they had that in South Korea, too.

如果你比较进口替代工业化——韩国也有这种情况。

But it was actually .

但实际上确实如此。

.

。

.

。

the policy was wielded to try to promote economic development and to help companies to develop technologies with some protection.

该政策旨在促进​​经济发展并帮助企业开发有一定保护的技术。

Then they were forced to go out and compete in global markets.

然后他们被迫走出去，在全球市场上竞争。

Whereas, when you look at how those policies were implemented in Latin America, they were directed towards enriching people connected to politicians.

然而，当你看看这些政策在拉丁美洲是如何实施的时，你会发现它们的目的是让与政客有联系的人致富。

And I think there’s some sense that things like that, that the capture of policies plays a role in getting stuck in this middle-income trap.

我认为有某种感觉，诸如此类的事情，即政策的捕获在陷入中等收入陷阱方面发挥了作用。

But it’s not clear, at this point, what will happen in Vietnam or will happen in China, and institutions are a high-dimensional thing.

但目前还不清楚越南会发生什么，中国会发生什么，而制度是一个高维的东西。

And as I said, having a state that’s capable does not necessarily mean it’s going to be good or bad for economic development.

正如我所说，一个有能力的国家并不一定意味着它对经济发展有好处或坏处。

It depends what that state does.

这取决于该州做什么。

But if you don’t have a capable state at all — those places tend to be disproportionately in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia that are extremely poor.

但如果你根本没有一个有能力的国家，那么这些地方往往不成比例地分布在撒哈拉以南非洲和东南亚部分极其贫困的地区。

And that really does seem to be a barrier to development because you need property rights or stability, public goods — those things to make it a worthwhile investment to invest in the things that promote economic growth, whether it’s investing in a business, investing in education, et cetera.

这似乎确实是发展的障碍，因为你需要产权或稳定、公共物品——这些东西才能使投资于促进经济增长的事物成为有价值的投资，无论是投资企业、投资教育等等。

On Mexican villages

在墨西哥村庄

And a lot of that seems, again, to go back to this particular form of property rights where a community is given land.

其中很多似乎又回到了这种特殊形式的产权，即社区获得土地。

It can’t be converted from agricultural to nonagricultural uses.

它不能从农业用途转变为非农业用途。

Households aren’t able to buy or sell the land.

家庭无法购买或出售土地。

It belongs to the community.

它属于社区。

The community decides how it’s divided.

社区决定如何划分。

That creates all kinds of political problems because the people with power in the community can sustain that power by holding control of land.

这就产生了各种政治问题，因为社区中有权势的人可以通过控制土地来维持这种权力。

That has been bad for economic development, which again goes back to a point that when we make these statements about how history matters, it’s very important to be precise.

这对经济发展不利，这又回到了这一点：当我们对历史的重要性做出这些陈述时，准确是非常重要的。

If you were to make a statement like “Land reform is bad for economic development,” that wouldn’t really be consistent with the evidence because there’s been land reforms in East Asia following World War II that gave people individual property rights.

如果你提出“土地改革不利于经济发展”之类的说法，那实际上与证据并不相符，因为二战后东亚进行了土地改革，赋予了人们个人财产权。

Much of the land was land that had been confiscated from the colonizers in the case of Taiwan.

就台湾而言，大部分土地都是从殖民者手中没收的土地。

And those seem to have been much more successful.

这些似乎更加成功。

Whereas when you have this odd form of community property rights in Mexico that’s subject to these political problems, it seems to be pretty bad.

然而，当墨西哥拥有这种奇怪形式的社区产权并受到这些政治问题的影响时，情况似乎相当糟糕。

To use another example, I’ve done some work showing that extractive institutions in Peru — forced labor in mines — was bad for long-run development and traced out the reasons why that was the case.

再举一个例子，我做了一些工作，表明秘鲁的采掘制度——“矿山中的强迫劳动”——不利于长期发展，并找出了造成这种情况的原因。

I have another paper looking at forced labor in Java in Indonesia, historically.

我还有另一篇论文研究了印度尼西亚爪哇岛历史上的强迫劳动。

And the conclusion there is that the places that were more affected by it are actually better off today.

结论是，受其影响较大的地方今天实际上状况更好。

Why would that be the case?

为什么会这样呢？

I think we can all agree that forced labor was horrible for the people that were subjected to it and were mistreated, but it has very different long-run effects depending on exactly how it was set up.

我想我们都同意，强迫劳动对于遭受强迫劳动和受到虐待的人来说是可怕的，但它会产生非常不同的长期影响，具体取决于它的设置方式。

In Peru, this is forced labor in mines.

在秘鲁，这是矿井中的强迫劳动。

They’re taking out silver.

他们正在取出银子。

Once the silver disappears, that economic activity is gone.

一旦白银消失，经济活动也就消失了。

You don’t build much infrastructure because it’s just one mine.

你不需要建造太多基础设施，因为它只是一个矿井。

All you have to do is get that silver down to the coast where you can put it on a boat and send it to Spain, so there’s not much infrastructure built along with that.

你所要做的就是把白银运到海岸，在那里你可以把它装上船并发往西班牙，所以没有太多的基础设施随之而来。

In order to make it easier for the government to force people to work in the mines, you don’t let other economic activity come into those regions because you don’t want competition for labor.

为了让政府更容易强迫人们在矿山工作，你不会让其他经济活动进入这些地区，因为你不希望劳动力竞争。

Part of that was not giving people secure property rights because they didn’t want landowners to come in and be competition with the state for this labor, and that has important effects.

其中一部分原因是没有给予人们安全的财产权，因为他们不希望土地所有者介入并与国家竞争这种劳动力，这会产生重要的影响。

Whereas in Indonesia, it wasn’t about mines.

而在印度尼西亚，这与地雷无关。

It was about sugar, and it was very large scale.

这是关于糖的，而且规模非常大。

It was actually a larger-scale system than what you saw in Latin America.

这实际上是一个比你在拉丁美洲看到的更大规模的系统。

It was a huge share of Dutch revenue.

这是荷兰收入的很大一部分。

But sugar has a very different production process.

但糖的生产过程却截然不同。

Once you cut the raw sugar, you can’t put that on a boat and send it to Spain.

一旦你切割了原糖，你就不能把它放在船上并发往西班牙。

It’ll spoil quickly.

它很快就会变质。

It’s very heavy to transport.

运输起来非常重。

You can’t even take it more than a few miles.

你甚至不能带它超过几英里。

It needs to be processed, and that processing needs to happen in what, for the time, was a sophisticated food-processing factory.

它需要被加工，而加工需要在当时是一个复杂的食品加工厂进行。

So what happens is you end up building a lot of infrastructure for factories, for transport because you have many of these factories scattered all out across Java.

因此，最终会发生的情况是，您最终会为工厂和运输建造大量基础设施，因为许多此类工厂分散在爪哇岛各地。

It’s not a single mine in one place.

它不是一个地方的一个矿井。

And for each of those factories, you need a road or a railroad to get that back to the port, to send it then to the Netherlands, which was the colonizing power.

对于每一个工厂，都需要一条公路或铁路将其运回港口，然后运往殖民国家荷兰。

Then you have these factories with sophisticated technology that’s set up.

然后你就会拥有这些拥有先进技术的工厂。

And the sugar that wasn’t good enough to be sent back to the Netherlands could be sold on the local markets.

质量不够好而无法运回荷兰的糖可以在当地市场上出售。

And you need to put that sugar in other food.

你需要将糖放入其他食物中。

Sugar has really dense linkages to a lot of other industries because you put sugar into everything.

糖与许多其他行业有着非常紧密的联系，因为一切都含有糖。

So you set up other food-processing factories nearby, and that’s a source of agglomeration.

所以你在附近建立其他食品加工厂，这就是集聚的来源。

They’re both forced labor.

他们都是强迫劳动。

The objectives of both of those institutions were to make as much money as possible for the colonial powers.

这两个机构的目标都是为殖民国家赚取尽可能多的钱。

In both cases, they didn’t care much at all for the colonial population as long as they stayed alive and kept contributing to the first forced labor — that was the objectives of the colonizers.

在这两种情况下，他们根本不关心殖民地人口，只要他们活着并继续为第一批强迫劳动做出贡献——这就是殖民者的目标。

But because there’s two very different technologies and associated sets of infrastructure that come along with mining versus sugar production, the long-run effects are totally different.

但由于采矿业和制糖业存在两种截然不同的技术和相关基础设施，因此长期影响完全不同。

I think the persistence is important in both cases, but the effects it has are very different.

我认为坚持在这两种情况下都很重要，但它所产生的效果却截然不同。

So we have to be specific —

所以我们必须具体一点 ——

They’re supposed to be sent teachers from down in the city.

他们应该是从城里派来的老师。

The teachers never come.

老师们从来不来。

They say, basically, no one ever comes up to see the village.

他们说，基本上没有人来看这个村庄。

So if we look at per capita income numbers from 1920, 1930, even 1980, 1990, why do we trust them much?

那么，如果我们看看1920年、1930年，甚至1980年、1990年的人均收入数据，为什么我们如此相信它们呢？

Aren’t they just numbers that Mexican workers made up so they didn’t have to go visit the village?

难道这些数字不是墨西哥工人编造出来的，这样他们就不用去村子里参观了吗？

So I think you’re exactly right to say that we should be suspicious of the data and to try to find multiple indicators and make sure that they are going in the same direction.

所以我认为你说我们应该对数据持怀疑态度并尝试找到多个指标并确保它们朝着同一方向发展，这是完全正确的。

That’s going to be enormously important.

这将非常重要。

And the sampling is going to be enormously important.

抽样将非常重要。

If you only get the poorest households or the richest households, that’s going to look very different.

如果你只考虑最贫困的家庭或最富有的家庭，情况就会大不相同。

All these issues are absolutely critical.

所有这些问题都绝对至关重要。

I think that’s part of the reason why having diversity is super important, because if you have more people with different backgrounds, they’ll ask different questions, which are all quite important.

我认为这就是为什么多元化非常重要的部分原因，因为如果有更多具有不同背景的人，他们会问不同的问题，这都非常重要。

So in my case, a lot of the questions that I’m interested in — probably the reason I find them interesting does go back to things that happened in my childhood.

所以就我而言，我感兴趣的很多问题——可能我觉得它们有趣的原因确实可以追溯到我童年时期发生的事情。

I have written about issues related to security — a paper on the Vietnam War and the effects of bombing versus other strategies, and whether or not those were effective for achieving US objectives.

我写过一些与安全相关的问题——一篇关于越南战争、轰炸与其他战略的影响以及这些战略是否有效实现美国目标的论文。

Or I’ve done stuff on the drug trade in Mexico and effects of trying to crack down on the drug trade.

或者我研究过墨西哥的毒品贸易以及试图打击毒品贸易的影响。

I think part of my interest in security goes back to the fact that my parents both worked at an air force base when I was growing up, and I was surrounded by people in that world.

我认为我对安全的兴趣部分源于这样一个事实：在我成长的过程中，我的父母都在空军基地工作，而我周围都是那个世界的人。

There’s lots of examples like that that I could point to, that in many ways, the things that we as researchers find interesting are a product of our experiences and, oftentimes, the experiences that happened as a kid or in college.

我可以举出很多这样的例子，在很多方面，我们作为研究人员发现有趣的事情是我们经历的产物，而且通常是小时候或大学里发生的经历。

On standardized tests

关于标准化测试

If you look at two students who are similar in other ways, and one of them has a much stronger SAT score than the other, that probably tells you something.

如果你观察两个在其他方面相似的学生，其中一个人的 SAT 成绩比另一个人高得多，这可能会告诉你一些事情。

But we have to appreciate that the SAT alone conflates a lot of different things and not just that student’s potential to thrive.

但我们必须认识到，SAT 本身就融合了很多不同的东西，而不仅仅是学生的成长潜力。

Again, it’s one of those things, as you point out, what do we really have that’s better?

再说一遍，正如您所指出的，这是其中之一，我们真正拥有什么更好的东西？

Extracurriculars — maybe to an even greater extent, some students have more opportunities than others.

课外活动——也许在更大程度上，有些学生比其他学生有更多的机会。

The more concerning thing is not, to me, so much the name but in what sort of esteem is he held?

对我来说，更重要的不是这个名字，而是他受到什么样的尊重？

And if they decided to change the name, I personally would be fine with that.

如果他们决定更改名称，我个人会同意。

But I think it’s also important that we have conversations about his legacy and his views and the role of colonialism more generally, rather than trying to pretend like it didn’t happen.

但我认为同样重要的是，我们更广泛地讨论他的遗产、他的观点以及殖民主义的作用，而不是试图假装这一切没有发生。

The reason that I really like running long distances are you can get out, explore nature.

我真正喜欢长跑的原因是你可以出去探索大自然。

And in some ways, it’s like a very, almost a very meditative activity.

从某些方面来说，这就像一项非常、几乎非常冥想的活动。

In modern life, we tend to be very focused on what we have to do next, on where we’re going to.

在现代生活中，我们往往非常关注下一步要做的事情以及要去哪里。

Whereas, when you run long distances, all of that, in some sense, fades away, and you’re just focused on the activity of running, on where you are, and you stop worrying about what you’re going to do next, what happened previously.

然而，当你长距离跑步时，所有这些在某种意义上都会消失，你只专注于跑步的活动，专注于你所在的位置，而不再担心你下一步要做什么，之前发生了什么。

That, in some ways, is a very liberating experience.

从某些方面来说，这是一次非常解放的经历。

Even if you look at the US, hotter years are really bad for agriculture, even though we have things like irrigation and more resistant seeds and things like that.

即使你看看美国，炎热的年份对农业来说确实很不利，尽管我们有灌溉和抗性更强的种子之类的东西。

Still, weather has a very big impact on agriculture.

尽管如此，天气对农业的影响还是很大的。

But agriculture is a tiny share of US GDP, so it doesn’t really matter for the overall picture that we see.

但农业只占美国国内生产总值的一小部分，因此它对于我们看到的整体情况并不重要。

Whereas in poorer countries, agriculture is a much bigger deal.

而在较贫穷的国家，农业的重要性要大得多。

But as you say, it’s not just about agriculture.

但正如你所说，这不仅仅是农业的问题。

If you think about T-shirt factories in Bangladesh, people are working in pretty bad conditions.

想想孟加拉国的 T 恤工厂，人们的工作条件相当恶劣。

There’s certainly not air conditioning.

肯定没有空调。

Oftentimes, there’s not even a fan.

很多时候，甚至没有粉丝。

There’s been numerous studies, both in the field and in labs, that when it’s extremely hot, you’re less productive at physical activities, and you’re less productive at cognitive tasks.

现场和实验室的大量研究表明，当天气极热时，您的体力活动效率会降低，认知任务的效率也会降低。

If all of our air conditioning was to go out on a hundred-degree day, we would be less productive.

如果我们所有的空调在一百度的天气里全部关闭，我们的工作效率就会降低。

And so like that comes into play as well.

因此，这也发挥了作用。

Finally, there’s an impact on political stability.

最后，这会对政治稳定产生影响。

If agriculture has much lower output, food prices will go up.

如果农业产量大幅下降，粮食价格就会上涨。

Oftentimes, there’s food-price riots, and that can spill over into more generalized political instability.

通常，食品价格暴乱可能会蔓延至更普遍的政治不稳定。

And that matters for economic outcomes as well.

这对于经济成果也很重要。

I think, even short of air conditioning, which is very expensive, even just things like fans or having access to electricity, having more efficient building standards can make a big difference and is probably more realistic, at the same time, than getting air conditioning to everyone in sub-Saharan Africa now, which would be very, very costly.

我认为，即使没有非常昂贵的空调，即使只是风扇或电力之类的东西，拥有更高效的建筑标准也可以产生很大的影响，同时可能比现在为撒哈拉以南非洲的每个人提供空调更现实，这将是非常非常昂贵的。

But there are actually studies — more enriched countries — looking at if you have the school standardized tests on a hot day, does that matter for scores?

但实际上有研究——“更富裕的国家”——看看如果你在炎热的天气里参加学校标准化考试，这对分数有影响吗？

And does it matter if your school has air conditioning or not?

你的学校有没有空调有什么关系吗？

And people find a relationship there, that if you’re taking a standardized test in Massachusetts where most of our schools don’t actually have air conditioning, and it happens to be really hot, students don’t do as well.

人们在那里发现了一种关系，如果你在马萨诸塞州参加标准化考试，那里我们的大多数学校实际上没有空调，而且天气又很热，学生们的表现就不会那么好。

Something that I read recently was looking at the development of the polio vaccine, and there’s really a lot of parallels to our current situation with the coronavirus.

我最近读到的一些内容是关于脊髓灰质炎疫苗的开发，这与我们目前的冠状病毒情况确实有很多相似之处。

Polio is a disease that — many people don’t know — if you get polio, about 80 percent of people are asymptomatic, but then it can be really serious.

脊髓灰质炎是一种“很多人不知道”的疾病，如果患上脊髓灰质炎，大约 80% 的人没有症状，但情况可能会非常严重。

It’s not as if you get polio, you’re automatically paralyzed.

这并不是说你得了小儿麻痹症，你就会自动瘫痪。

It’s probably just a mild stomach virus in most people, but with some small chance that it invades your central nervous system and you get paralyzed.

对于大多数人来说，这可能只是一种温和的胃病毒，但也有很小的机会它会侵入您的中枢神经系统，导致您瘫痪。

But it was very difficult to control with things like contact tracing because so many people are asymptomatic.

但通过接触者追踪等措施很难控制，因为很多人都没有症状。

I was reading about the push for the polio vaccine in the 1950s, which is this super interesting case because over a hundred million Americans donated to the drive by the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis to develop a polio vaccine.

我读到了 20 世纪 50 年代推动脊髓灰质炎疫苗的进展，这是一个非常有趣的案例，因为超过一亿美国人向国家小儿麻痹症基金会捐款，以开发脊髓灰质炎疫苗。

It was developed almost entirely with this private donation–based funding.

它几乎完全是由私人捐赠资金开发的。

So they develop a successful vaccine, but then they’re in a big rush to push it to market.

因此，他们开发了一种成功的疫苗，但随后他们急于将其推向市场。

And the federal government’s committee that’s supposed to license vaccines spends less than two hours reviewing who to license, which in comparative perspective, they spend years and years today, typically.

负责发放疫苗许可的联邦政府委员会只花了不到两个小时的时间来审查向谁发放许可，而从比较的角度来看，他们今天通常要花很多年的时间。

And it ended up that there was a company that wasn’t really qualified to produce vaccine, and they produced 400,000 doses of polio vaccine that had live virus in it.

结果有一家公司根本不具备生产疫苗的资格，他们生产了40万剂脊髓灰质炎疫苗，里面有活病毒。

I got interested in reading about that history through the current events.

我对通过时事来了解这段历史产生了兴趣。

But then I realized, you look at where they sent this live vaccine, and effectively, it seems almost as if it’s more or less random because some lots were good; some lots — they didn’t successfully kill off the polio virus, which means they gave children who were injected with it, polio.

但后来我意识到，你看看他们将这种活疫苗送到哪里，实际上，它似乎或多或少是随机的，因为有些批次是好的;有些批次——他们没有成功杀死脊髓灰质炎病毒，这意味着他们给注射了脊髓灰质炎病毒的儿童带来了脊髓灰质炎。

And where exactly that went seems to be something that you could actually exploit.

而它的具体去向似乎是你可以实际利用的东西。

So we’re interested now in looking at how did that affect attitudes towards vaccination in the longer run?

因此，我们现在感兴趣的是，从长远来看，这如何影响人们对疫苗接种的态度？

Did it affect it at all, or did it not?

它对它有影响吗？还是没有影响？

A lot of emphasis gets placed on things like, “What’s your math background?” But I think that if you’re interested in the right questions, there’s a lot of capacity to make up potential deficits.

很多重点都放在诸如“你的数学背景是什么？”之类的事情上。但我认为，如果你对正确的问题感兴趣，就有很大的能力来弥补潜在的缺陷。

What additional math classes do I need to take?

我还需要参加哪些额外的数学课程？

Or what additional technical skills do I need to learn?

或者我还需要学习哪些额外的技术技能？

But I think almost part of it depends on how you look at the world.

但我认为这几乎部分取决于你如何看待世界。

Do you look at things and then try to think, “Okay, how can I simplify this?

你是否会在审视事物后尝试思考：“好吧，我怎样才能简化这个过程？

How can I take something that’s incredibly complex and narrow in on a specific dimension and really understand that in a way that can shed light on the world?” And then along with that, also being humble about the fact that that doesn’t mean that you’ve understood everything.

我怎样才能在特定维度上理解极其复杂和狭窄的事物，并以一种能够照亮世界的方式真正理解它？”除此之外，也要谦虚地承认这并不意味着你已经理解了一切。

You’ve looked at one dimension.

你已经看到了一个维度。

It sheds light on things, but you need to, really need to know what you don’t know.

它揭示了事情的真相，但你需要，真的需要知道你不知道的事情。

It’s been very specifically geared towards specific things which are like single-column books and just does not do well with digitizing historical data on a large scale.

它非常专门针对特定的事物，例如单栏书籍，并且不适合大规模数字化历史数据。

So we’ve been really investing in methods in computer vision as well as in natural language processing to process the output so that we can take data, historical data, on a large scale.

因此，我们一直在投资计算机视觉和自然语言处理方法来处理输出，以便我们可以大规模获取数据、历史数据。

These datasets would be too large to ever digitize by hand.

这些数据集太大，无法手动数字化。

And we can get them into a format that can be used to analyze and answer lots of questions.

我们可以将它们转化为可用于分析和回答许多问题的格式。

One example is historical newspapers.

历史报纸就是一个例子。

We have about 25 million-page scans of front pages and editorial pages from newspapers across thousands and thousands of US communities.

我们对美国成千上万个社区的报纸头版和社论版进行了约 2500 万页的扫描。

Newspapers tend to have a complex structure.

报纸往往具有复杂的结构。

They might have seven columns, and then there’s headlines, and there’s pictures, and there’s advertisements and captions.

他们可能有七个专栏，然后是标题、图片、广告和标题。

If you just put those into Google Cloud Vision, again, it will read it like a single-column book and give you total garbage.

如果你只是将它们放入 Google Cloud Vision，那么它会像一本单栏书籍一样阅读它，并给你带来完全的垃圾。

That means that the entire large literature using historical newspapers, unless it uses something like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal that has been carefully digitized by a person sitting there and manually drawing boxes around the content, all you have are keywords.

这意味着所有使用历史报纸的大型文献，除非它使用像《纽约时报》或《华尔街日报》这样的东西，这些东西已经被坐在那里并在内容周围手动画框的人仔细数字化，否则你所拥有的只是关键词。

You can see what words appear on the page, but you can’t put those words together into sentences or into paragraphs.

您可以看到页面上出现的单词，但无法将这些单词组合成句子或段落。

And that means we can’t extract the sentiment.

这意味着我们无法提取情感。

We don’t understand how people are talking about things in these communities.

我们不明白人们如何在这些社区中谈论事情。

We see what they’re talking about, what words they use, but not how they’re talking about it.

我们看到他们在谈论什么，使用什么词语，但不知道他们是如何谈论的。

So, by devising methods to automatically extract that data, it gives us a potential to do sentiment analysis, to understand, across different communities in the US, how people are talking about very specific events, whether it be about the Vietnam War, whether it be about the rise of scientific medicine, conspiracy theories — name anything you want, like how are people in local newspapers talking about this?

因此，通过设计自动提取数据的方法，它使我们有可能进行情绪分析，了解美国不同社区的人们如何谈论非常具体的事件，无论是关于越南战争，还是关于科学医学的兴起、阴谋论 — 说出任何你想要的东西，比如当地报纸上的人们如何谈论这个？

Are they talking about it at all?

他们在谈论这件事吗？

We can process the images.

我们可以处理图像。

What sort of iconic images are appearing?

什么样的标志性图像正在出现？

Are they appearing?

他们出现了吗？

So I think it can unlock a ton of information about news.

所以我认为它可以解锁大量有关新闻的信息。

We’re also applying these techniques to lots of firm-level and individual-level data from Japan, historically, to understand more about their economic development.

我们还将这些技术应用于日本的大量公司层面和个人层面的历史数据，以更多地了解其经济发展。

We have annual data on like 40,000 Japanese firms and lots of their economic output.

我们拥有大约 40,000 家日本企业及其大量经济产出的年度数据。

This is tables, very different than newspapers, but it’s a similar problem of extracting structure from data, working on methods to get all of that out, to look at a variety of questions about long-run development in Japan and how they were able to be so successful.

这是表格，与报纸非常不同，但这是一个类似的问题，从数据中提取结构，研究将所有这些结构提取出来的方法，研究有关日本长期发展的各种问题以及他们如何能够如此成功。

More broadly, I’m really excited about unlocking data that not just us, but that lots of other people can use to understand lots of questions, not just about persistence, but maybe there’s some interesting variation in the past, and you want to use that to understand something that happened in the past.

更广泛地说，我真的很兴奋能够解锁数据，这些数据不仅是我们，而且还有很多其他人可以用来理解很多问题，不仅仅是关于持久性，而且也许过去存在一些有趣的变化，你想用它来理解过去发生的事情。

And you’re not concerned about if it persisted, but that variation is interesting.

你并不关心它是否持续存在，但这种变化很有趣。

Hopefully, with these tools, it will unlock data.

希望通过这些工具能够解锁数据。

Other researchers can use them to unlock their own data.

其他研究人员可以使用它们来解锁自己的数据。

And that will open the door to lots of interesting questions.

这将为许多有趣的问题打开大门。