The 21st-Century Economy: How to Measure Prosperity

21世纪经济：繁荣该如何衡量

 

GDP is a bad gauge of material well-being. Time for a fresh approach

GDP不是衡量物质福祉的好标准，是时候换一种新方法了

 

Which would you prefer to be: a medieval monarch or a modern office-worker? The king has armies of servants. He wears the finest silks and eats the richest foods. But he is also a martyr to toothache. He is prone to fatal infections. It takes him a week by carriage to travel between palaces. And he is tired of listening to the same jesters. Life as a 21st-century office drone looks more appealing once you think about modern dentistry, antibiotics, air travel, smartphones and YouTube.

 

你是愿意做中世纪的国王呢，还是当现代的上班族？国王仆役成群，身穿最精美的丝绸，享用山珍海味，但却拿牙疼没辙，而且有可能因为感染而丧命。坐马车来往于不同宫殿之间要一周的时间，总听那帮弄臣讲笑话也会生厌。只要想到现代牙科、抗生素、乘飞机旅行、智能手机和YouTube，就会觉得当21世纪的上班族看起来更有吸引力。

 

The question is more than just a parlour game. It shows how tricky it is to compare living standards over time. Yet such comparisons are not just routinely made, but rely heavily on a single metric: gross domestic product (GDP). This one number has become shorthand for material well-being, even though it is a deeply flawed gauge of prosperity, and getting worse all the time. That may in turn be distorting levels of anxiety in the rich world about everything from stagnant incomes to disappointing productivity growth.

 

这个问题可不仅是个游戏，它说明了要比较不同时代的生活标准有多么棘手。但是，人们不但经常做这样的比较，而且还非常依赖单一的标准：国内生产总值（GDP）。这一数字已经成了物质福祉的代名词，尽管它作为衡量繁荣的指标存在严重缺陷，而且还一直都在变得更糟。它可能会进而让富裕世界对一切都更加焦虑——从收入停滞不前，到生产率增长令人失望。

 

Faulty speedometer

有缺陷的测速表

 

Defenders of GDP say that the statistic is not designed to do what is now asked of it. A creature of the 1930s slump and the exigencies of war in the 1940s, its original purpose was to measure the economy’s capacity to produce. Since then, GDP has become a lodestar for policies to set taxes, fix unemployment and manage inflation.

 

维护GDP的人认为，它本来就不是用来衡量繁荣水平的。GDP是上世纪三十年代经济大萧条时期以及四十年代二战期间紧急状态的产物。它最初的用途是衡量一国的生产能力。自那以后，GDP已成为设置税率、扭转失业和管理通胀等相关政策的指南针。

 

Yet it is often wildly inaccurate: Nigeria’s GDP was bumped up by 89% in 2014, after number-crunchers adjusted their methods. Guesswork prevails: the size of the paid-sex market in Britain is assumed to expand in line with the male population; charges at lap-dancing clubs are a proxy for prices. Revisions are common, and in big, rich countries, bar America, tend to be upwards. Since less attention is paid to revised figures, this adds to an often exaggerated impression that America is doing far better than Europe. It also means that policymakers take decisions based on faulty data.

 

但是GDP经常很不准确：2014年统计人员调整了统计方法之后，尼日利亚的GDP陡增89%。估计的成分也很大：英国就假设有偿性服务市场的增长与男性人口的增速一致，并以艳舞俱乐部的收费标准作为性服务的价格。GDP数据还经常被修正，而且在除美国以外的富裕国家，修正后的数字往往更高。 由于修正后的数据少有关注，这加深了一种通常被夸大的印象，即美国的经济发展大大好于欧洲。这也意味着决策者制定政策时依赖的是错误的数据。

 

If GDP is failing on its own terms, as a measurement of the value-added in an economy, its use as a welfare benchmark is even more dubious. That has always been so: the benefits of sanitation, better health care and the comforts of heating or air-conditioning meant that GDP growth almost certainly understated the true advance in living standards in the decades after the second world war. But at least the direction of travel was the same. GDP grew rapidly; so did quality of life. Now GDP is still growing (albeit more slowly), but living standards are thought to be stuck. Part of the problem is widening inequality: median household income in America, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for 25 years. But increasingly, too, the things that people hold dear are not being captured by the main yardstick of value.

 

如果说作为衡量一国经济附加值的指标，GDP本身已问题多多，那么作为衡量福祉的基准，它就更不可靠了。而且其实它一直不可靠：环境卫生带来的好处、医疗的改善以及供暖或空调造就的舒适几乎可以肯定地表明，自二战以来的数十年里，GDP增速不足以反映实际生活水平的提高。但是至少两者之间是一种正向关系。GDP快速增长，生活质量也大幅提高。现在GDP仍在增长（尽管慢了许多），但人们却认为生活水平止步不前。原因之一是不平等加剧：考虑通胀因素之后，美国家庭收入的中位数在过去25年里几乎没有变化。 然而，越来越多为人们所看重的东西却不在GDP这一主要价值指标的考量范围之内。

 

With a few exceptions, such as computers, what is produced and consumed is assumed to be of constant quality. That assumption worked well enough in an era of mass-produced, standardised goods. It is less reliable when a growing share of the economy consists of services. Firms compete for custom on the quality of output and how tailored it is to individual tastes. If restaurants serve fewer but more expensive meals, it pushes up inflation and lowers GDP, even if this reflects changes, such as fresher ingredients or fewer tables, that customers want. The services to consumers provided by Google and Facebook are free, so are excluded from GDP. When paid-for goods, such as maps and music recordings, become free digital services they too drop out of GDP. The convenience of online shopping and banking is a boon to consumers. But if it means less investment in buildings, it detracts from GDP.

 

除电脑等个例之外，GDP假设生产和消费的产品品质保持恒定。这一假设在大批量生产标准化产品的时代行得通。但当服务业在经济中占比越来越高时，它就不那么可靠了。企业争抢客户靠的是其产出的质量及是否能够迎合个人品味。如果餐厅菜品减少而价格提高，即使其中体现了客户所希望的改变，如食材更新鲜、桌数更少，这仍然会推高通胀、拉低GDP。谷歌和Facebook提供给用户的服务免费，也就没有计算在GDP之内。一旦地图和音乐唱片等有偿产品变成免费数字服务，它们也会被从GDP中剔除。网上购物和网银的便利对于消费者而言是福音，但如果这些意味着建筑投资的减少，同样也会拉低GDP。

 

Stop counting, start grading

别算了，分级吧

 

Measuring prosperity better requires three changes. The easiest is to improve GDP as a gauge of production. Junking it altogether is no answer: GDP’s enduring appeal is that it offers, or seems to, a summary statistic that tells people how well an economy is doing. Instead, statisticians should improve how GDP data are collected and presented. To minimise revisions, they should rely more on tax records, internet searches and other troves of contemporaneous statistics, such as credit-card transactions, than on the standard surveys of businesses or consumers. Private firms are already showing the way – scraping vast quantities of prices from e-commerce sites to produce improved inflation data, for example.

 

要更好地衡量繁荣需要三方面的改变。改进GDP对生产的衡量最为易行。全盘抛弃不能解决问题：GDP历久不衰的吸引力就在于它能够，或者说看似能够给出一个汇总的统计量，告诉人们一个经济体的运行情况。不能抛弃GDP，统计工作者应该改进GDP数据收集和呈现的方式。为了最大程度地减少修正，他们不应仅仅依靠对企业或消费者的标准调查，而应该更多地依赖税收记录，互联网搜索数据以及其他大量被忽视的同期统计数据，如信用卡交易记录。私营企业已经指明了方法，比如从电子商务网站收集大量价格信息，以便得出更高质量的通胀数据。

 

Second, services-dominated rich countries should start to pioneer a new, broader annual measure, that would aim to capture production and living standards more accurately. This new metric – call it GDP-plus – would begin with a long-overdue conceptual change: the inclusion in GDP of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives. GDP-plus would also measure changes in the quality of services by, for instance, recognising increased longevity in estimates of health care’s output. It would also take greater account of the benefits of brand-new products and of increased choice. And, ideally, it would be sliced up to reflect the actual spending patterns of people at the top, middle and bottom of the earnings scale: poorer people tend to spend more on goods than on Harvard tuition fees.

 

其二，服务业占主导的富裕国家应该开始探索一种全新的、范围更广的年度衡量标准，以便更准确地反映生产和生活标准。这个称为“GDP+”的新指标首先应该在概念上做出一个早就应该有的变化：把无偿的家庭工作纳入到GDP之中，比如照顾亲人。GDP+还应该测算服务品质的变化，比如在估算医疗产出时考虑到寿命的延长。它还会更多地考虑全新产品和选择增多所来的益处。而且在理想的情况下，可以将其分成几部分来反映高中低各收入水平人群的实际支出模式：比如穷人的主要支出是购买商品而不是哈佛的学费。

 

Although a big improvement on today’s measure, GDP-plus would still be an assessment of the flow of income. To provide a cross-check on a country’s prosperity, a third gauge would take stock, each decade, of its wealth. This balance-sheet would include government assets such as roads and parks as well as private wealth. Intangible capital – skills, brands, designs, scientific ideas and online networks – would all be valued. The ledger should also account for the depletion of capital: the wear-and-tear of machinery, the deterioration of roads and public spaces, and damage to the environment.

 

尽管GDP+对现有的衡量方法做了很大改进，它仍是一个对收入流的估算。为了能够核对一个国家的繁荣程度，第三个衡量指标还应该每十年对财富的存量进行估算。这一资产负债表会包含道路、公园等政府资产，涵盖私人财富，还会评估技能、品牌、设计、科学理念以及在线网络等无形资本的价值。表中还应计入资本的损耗：设备的磨损、道路及公共空间的老化以及对环境的毁坏。

 

Building these benchmarks will demand a revolution in national statistical agencies as bold as the one that created GDP in the first place. Even then, since so much of what people value is a matter of judgment, no reckoning can be perfect. But the current measurement of prosperity is riddled with errors and omissions. Better to embrace a new approach than to ignore the progress that pervades modern life.

 

建立这些基准需要国家统计机构的变革，如同当年创造GDP一样大胆果敢。即便如此，由于人们珍视的东西大多非常主观，没有哪个测算会是十全十美的。但目前对繁荣的测量错漏百出，与其忽视现代生活的种种进步，不如接受一个全新的方法。

下载：英文、中文版本