经济学人双语精读：人多不只消耗多，创新也更多

2024年9月15日 文摘

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Population and prosperity
人口与繁荣

More people mean more innovation, not just more consumption
人多不只消耗多，创新也更多

So a rising population can solve many of the problems it causes, argues “Superabundance”
所以这本书认为不断增长的人口能解决自身造成的很多问题【《超富余》书评】

Mr Tupy, who works for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, and Mr Pooley (of Brigham Young University), think people should be free to have the number of children they want. Because they have brains as well as mouths, they argue, more people mean more innovation—which in turn means many of the problems caused by a rising population can be solved by it.
在自由意志主义智库卡托研究所任职的玛丽安·图皮和杨百翰大学的盖尔·普利认为，人们应该可以想生几个孩子就生几个。因为孩子不仅会张嘴吃饭，还会用脑思考，所以人多也意味着创新更多，他们认为这些创新反过来又会解决人口增长带来的许多问题。

This is not a new idea. It was the inspiration behind a bet between the late Julian Simon, an economist, and Paul Ehrlich, a population alarmist, in 1980. Mr Ehrlich was sure that the world was running out of stuff, so a basket of commodities (chromium, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten) would get more expensive over the next decade. Simon reckoned human ingenuity would unlock new resources, so they would get cheaper. Simon won the bet.
这个观点并非首创。已故经济学家朱利安·西蒙和人口悲观论者保罗·埃利希在1980年打了一个赌，赌的就是人口与创新的关系。埃利希深信全球资源正在耗尽，所以一篮子商品（铬、铜、镍、锡和钨）的价格将在随后的十年升高。西蒙则认为人类的聪明才智将释放新资源，因此这些商品会更便宜。最终西蒙赢了。

Mr Tupy and Mr Pooley have broadened the scope of Simon’s analysis. They look at a wider range of goods over a longer period of time (some of their data goes back to 1850). And they use a different measure of value. Instead of relying on prices in dollars and adjusting for inflation, which is hard to do accurately across borders and eras, they look at “time-prices”: how long it takes to earn enough to buy something. If someone earns $10 an hour and a banana costs $1, for example, the time-price of a banana is six minutes.
图皮和普利扩大了西蒙的分析范围。他们研究了更多的商品在更长的时间跨度里的价格变化（部分数据可以追溯到1850年）。他们还使用了不同的价值衡量标准。他们关注“时间价格”，即需要多长时间才能赚够买某样东西的钱。例如，如果有人每小时挣10美元，而买一根香蕉需要花1美元，那么一根香蕉的时间价格是6分钟。

As well as being robust, the method yields some cheering results. The average time-price of a basket of 50 commodities, from uranium and rubber to tea and shrimp, fell by 72% worldwide between 1980 and 2018. Resources are becoming more abundant (ie, available to more people) as new ways to find and exploit them are invented. The time-price of many manufactured goods fell even faster. In 1997 it took a typical blue-collar worker in America 828 hours to buy a flat-screen television; by 2019 that had fallen to 4.6 hours.
这种方法得出了一些令人振奋的结果。1980年至2018年间，从铀和橡胶到茶和虾，全球50种商品的平均时间价格下降了72%。随着发现和利用资源的新方法的发明，资源变得越来越丰富。许多制成品的时间价格下降得更快。1997年，一个典型的美国蓝领工人要花828个小时买一台平板电视；等到了2019年，这一数字已降至4.6小时。