Conventional measures pose the wrong productivity question

繁荣的创新与低迷的生产率

Is the world running out of ideas? This pessimistic view seems amply justified by stubbornly slow productivity growth in many economies.

这个世界已无法产生创意了吗？许多经济体的生产率近年提升得很慢，似乎充分印证了这种悲观看法。

Today’s new technologies are nothing like as important economically as the innovations of the early 20th century, as Robert Gordon has argued: in an influential book he compared video gaming to indoor sanitation. In a recent paper a group of economists from Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — two of the world’s hot springs of idea-generation — calculate that it now takes more than 20 times the number of researchers to generate the same economic growth as it did in the 1930s.

正如罗伯特•戈登(Robert Gordon)所言，当今新技术对经济的影响远不及20世纪初的创新那么大：在一本颇具影响的著作中，他把视频游戏与室内卫浴设施做了对比。斯坦福大学(Stanford University)和麻省理工学院(MIT)是当今世界上的两大创意发源地。这两所大学的一组经济学家最近发表的一篇论文推算称，现在要想产生跟1930年代相同的经济增长，所需研究人员的数量是那时的20多倍。

Studies of specific phenomena support the slowdown hypothesis: Moore’s law is fizzling out; new pharmaceutical products take far more investment than they used to; agricultural productivity seems to have ground to a halt.

对特定现象的研究支持了放缓假说：摩尔定律(Moore’s law)开始失效；开发新药所需的投资远远超过以往；农业生产率似乎已陷入停滞。

Set against this evidence, should we see the promise of artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, graphene, cheap clean energy, and other emerging technologies as mere hype? Some of these innovations must surely contribute to productivity and economic growth.

在这一证据的背景下，我们是否应该把人工智能、合成生物学、石墨烯、廉价清洁能源和其他新兴技术的前景仅仅视为炒作？其中一些创新似乎注定会助推生产率和经济增长。

The question matters. As Alfred Marshall, one of the founding fathers of modern economics, pointed out in 1890, people cannot produce new matter, only new ideas: people’s “efforts and sacrifices result in changing the form or arrangement of matter to adapt it better for the satisfaction of wants”.

这个问题很重要。正如现代经济学的奠基人之一阿尔弗雷德•马歇尔(Alfred Marshall)在1890年指出的那样，人们不能产生新物质，只能产生新创意：人们的“努力和牺牲结果只是改变了物质的形态或排列，使它能较好地适合于欲望的满足”。

One explanation for the combination of dismal productivity figures and exciting innovation is delay: it takes a long time for new technologies to be turned into widely used commercial applications. The more fundamental the innovation, the longer the lag is likely to be. This was true for electricity, for computers in the early days, and will be true for newer technologies such as AI. Other potential factors include demographic change, the hangover from the financial crisis and misallocation of capital.

对于令人沮丧的生产率数据和令人兴奋的创新这一组合，一种解释是滞后：新技术需要很长时间才能转化为应用广泛的商业用途。创新越是根本，滞后的时间可能就越长。电力、早期的计算机都是如此，人工智能等较新的技术也不会例外。其他潜在因素包括人口结构变化、金融危机后遗症以及资本配置不当。

Another explanation favoured by some economists — and by the tech community — is that output, and therefore productivity, are being mis-measured. The Stanford/MIT paper defines an “idea” as a unit of national output (as currently measured) divided by the total number of researcher hours. In the advanced economies, the number of people engaged in research and development has grown steadily over the decades. So the question — are ideas becoming harder to find? — really asks why output growth has slowed. The answer, in part, is because of the way economic output, as gross domestic product, is defined.

一些经济学家——以及科技界——偏爱的另一种解释是，产出的衡量方法不对，因而对生产率的衡量方法有问题。上述斯坦福大学/麻省理工学院论文把一个“创意”定义为一个单位的国民产出（按目前的衡量标准）除以总的研究人员小时数。在发达经济体，研发人员数量在过去几十年里稳步增长。那么，“创意是不是变得更难找到了？”这个问题，其实问的是“为什么产出增长放缓了？”答案的一部分在于经济产出（国内生产总值(GDP)）的定义方式。

The issues with the definition are well known. For one thing, it excludes unpaid work in the home. Hence the steady transition of women into paid work during the second half of the 20th century flattered that era’s growth and productivity figures. For another, the investment figures included in GDP have omitted intangible investments, including in ideas. Statistics agencies are only just starting to incorporate these, so all of those researchers have been generating some uncounted output.

这个定义存在的问题是众所周知的。首先，它剔除了家里的无薪工作。因此，在20世纪下半叶，女性稳步过渡到带薪工作岗位，使那个时代的增长和生产率数字显得格外耀眼。另一方面，GDP所包括的那些投资数据忽略了无形投资，比如对创意的无形投资。统计机构才刚刚开始纳入这些数据，因此，所有那些研究人员的产出此前一直都没有被计算在内。

Another shortcoming, less noticed, goes deeper. GDP is a measure of final output after all intermediate outputs have been netted off, which seems perfectly logical.

另一个不足之处——更少被人注意到——隐藏在更深层。GDP是在扣除中间产出后得出的最终产出净值，这似乎完全合乎逻辑。

But then why do businesses change the structure of production? The advantages of specialisation — lower cost and better quality — have driven a massive reorganisation of production chains globally during the past generation, enabled by information and communication technologies. Companies now outsource many activities they previously did in house, from payroll and cleaning to the supply of sophisticated components or computing services. Another form of this kind of outsourcing can be seen in the transition to cloud computing.

但为什么企业要改变生产结构呢？得益于信息和通信技术，专业化的优势——成本更低、质量更好——在过去一代人的时间里推动了全球生产链的大规模重组。如今，企业将许多以前在内部完成的工作外包出去——从薪酬、清洁到提供复杂的组件或计算服务。向云计算的过渡，体现了这种外包的另一种形态。

Companies outsourcing activities think it will improve their profitability — why else bother? But how does this tally with slowing productivity growth? It is because GDP excludes all the intermediate links in the chain and the additional value is netted out. GDP statistics shed no light on worldwide disruptions to production since the 1980s because they literally do not account for it.

把业务外包的公司认为，这会提高它们的盈利水平——否则它们为何要找这个麻烦呢？但这与生产率增长放缓有何关联呢？这是因为GDP统计剔除了生产链中所有的中间环节，在计算净值的过程中扣除了中间部分的增加值。GDP统计数据没有揭示自1980年代以来全球范围的生产剧变，因为它们确实没有计入这一点。

The definition of economic output is a matter of convention. A broader concept is gross output, which adds in the intermediate links. Marshall would understand it; he argued that every stage of production involved valuable ideas and no stage was intrinsically more or less useful than the others.

经济产出的定义是一个约定俗成的问题。一个更广义的概念是纳入中间环节的总产出。马歇尔会理解这一点；他认为，每个生产阶段都包含着有价值的创意，没有哪个阶段在本质上比其他阶段更有用或更没用。

The opposite of pessimism is not Panglossian optimism. There is plenty wrong in the economy, not least the fact that so many households have seen no increase in their incomes for so long. But productivity calculated by taking account of intangibles and on this alternative definition of economic output would look somewhat better than the current statistics suggest.

悲观主义的反面不是过分的乐观主义。当今经济中有很多不对劲的地方，尤其是如此多的家庭在如此长的时间内收入没有增加这一事实。但是，纳入无形投资、并按照替代经济产出定义计算出来的生产率，看起来会比当前统计数据所显示的要美好一些。