Thegrowth in the number of people working in research and development might seemto contradict this picture of a less inventive economy: the share of theAmerican economy given over to R D has expanded by a third since 1975, toalmost 3%. But Pierre Azoulay of MIT and Benjamin Jones of NorthwesternUniversity find that, though there are more people in research, they are doingless good. They reckon that in 1950 an average R D worker in Americacontributed almost seven times more to total factor productivityessentially,the contribution of technology and innovation to growththat an R D worker in 2000 did. One factor in this may be the burden of knowledge: as ideas accumulate ittakes ever longer for new thinkers to catch up with the frontier of theirscientific or technical speciality. Mr Jones says that, from 1985 to 1997alone, the typical age at first innovation rose by about one year.
从事研究开发工作的人数的增长似乎同这种缺少发明经济的图景互相矛盾：美国经济拨付给研究开发的份额自1975年以来增长了1/3，接近3%。但是，麻省理工学院的皮埃尔阿祖莱和西北大学的本杰明琼斯发现，尽管从事研究的人数增加了，但是他们的工作成就不如以前。他们推测，在1950年时，美国人均研发人员对全要素生产率从根本上来说，就是技术与创新对增长的贡献做出的贡献几乎是2000年时的的7倍。这其中的一个因素可能是知识的负担：随着知识的累计，后人需要更长的时间才能追赶上他们科研专业领域的前沿。琼斯认为，仅在1985年-1997年间，有代表性的首次发明年龄提高了将近一岁。
Afall of moondust
月尘降落
Thethird argument is the simplest: the evidence of your senses. The recent rate ofprogress seems slow compared with that of the early and mid-20th century. Takekitchens. In 1900 kitchens in even the poshest of households were primitivethings. Perishables were kept cool in ice boxes, fed by blocks of ice deliveredon horse-drawn wagons. Most households lacked electric lighting and runningwater. Fast forward to 1970 and middle-class kitchens in America and Europefeature gas and electric hobs and ovens, fridges, food processors, microwavesand dishwashers. Move forward another 40 years, though, and things scarcelychange. The gizmos are more numerous and digital displays ubiquitous, butcooking is done much as it was by grandma.
第三个方面的内容最简单：感觉到的证据。同之前和20世纪中期相比，目前的发展速度似乎慢于它们。以厨房为例：在1900年的时候，即便在最时尚的房子里，厨房还是刚出现时的那个样子。容易腐烂的食物被冷冻在冰盒中，这些盒子周围放置着用马车拉来的冰块，大多数家庭没有电灯和自来水。时间飞逝，到1970年时，美国和欧洲的中产阶层家庭的厨房中用上了天然气以及电热炉、电烤箱、电冰箱、食品加工机、微波炉和洗碗机。再让时间前进40年，情况却基本没有变化。尽管各种小玩意越来越多，数字显示器无所不在，但是，做饭的方式同爷爷那个时代没有什么不同。
Ortake speed. In the 19th century horses and sailboats were replaced by railwaysand steamships. Internal-combustion engines and jet turbines made it possibleto move more and more things faster and faster. But since the 1970s humanityhas been coasting. Highway travel is little faster than it was 50 years ago;indeed, endemic congestion has many cities now investing in trams and bicyclelanes. Supersonic passenger travel has been abandoned. So, for the past 40years, has the moon.
再以速度为例：19世纪的时候，马车和帆船被火车和蒸汽轮船取代，内燃机和喷气涡轮机让越来越多的事物以越来越快的速度运动成为可能。不过，自20世纪70年代以来，人们就开始滑行了。在高速公路上旅行只比50年前快那么一点;事实上，地方性的交通拥堵让许多城市把资金投入到有轨电车和自行车道的建设上去。超音速的旅行方式已经被禁止。因此，人类已经40年没有登上月球。
Medicineoffers another example. Life expectancy at birth in America soared from 49years at the turn of the 20th century to 74 years in 1980. Enormous technicaladvances have occurred since that time. Yet as of 2011 life expectancy restedat just 78.7 years. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars spent on research,people continue to fall to cancer, heart disease, stroke and organ failure.Molecular medicine has come nowhere close to matching the effects of improvedsanitation.
医学提供了另一个例子。在美国，出生时的预期寿命从20世纪开始时的49岁飞速上涨到1980年的74岁。从那之后，科技发展取得了巨大的成果。然而，到2011年，美国人的预期寿命仅停留在78.7岁。尽管花在科研上的资金达数千亿美元，但是人们依旧会得癌症、心脏病、中风和器官衰竭等疾病。分子医学的成果根本没法同改善卫生设施的效果相提并论。
To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the worldhas to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr Thiel andhis colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: We wantedflying cars, instead we got 140 characters. A world where allcan use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than thefutures dreamed of in the past.
对于那些足够幸运因而能从世界不得不提供的最好的事情中获益的人来说，世界再也不能提供什么的事实会让他们大失所望。正如泰尔及其风险投资公司创始人基金的伙伴所指出的那样：我们想要会飞的汽车，却得到了短短几句话。如今，人人都能使用Twitter却几乎无人能够乘飞机上下班，同过去所梦想的未来相比，这样的一个世界给人留不下什么印象。
The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience andexpectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important asit may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a tastefor the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nora binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of thencurrent progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; forbattlecruisers read space cruisers.
首先需要指出的是，这种对经历和期望的诉求正是20世纪中期科幻小说的诉求，因为这对于那些有志成为企业家或经济学家的人来说可能是重要的，这种诉求既不包括严肃的技术预测也没有约束性的承诺，它就是一种通过对当时在速度、力量和距离方面的进步所做的推断的庆祝。喜欢汽车的，从中发现了会飞的汽车;喜欢战舰的，从中读出了太空巡洋舰。
Technological progress does not require all technologies to moveforward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always movingforward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years interms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can showthat planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply amatter of taste.
技术进步不要求所有的技术同步向前，它仅仅要求某些重要的技术总是向前发展。以速度而论，客运飞机在过去40年中没有多大改进。计算机速度的提高无法衡量。除非你能够向人们表明飞机更有用，不然的话，强调进步的停滞只是人们的喜好而已。
Mr Gordon and Mr Cowen do think that now-mature technologies such asair transport have mattered more, and play down the economic importance ofrecent innovations. If computers and the internet mattered to the economyrather thanmerely as rich resources for intellectual and cultural exchange, as experiencedon Mr Cowen s popular blog, Marginal Revolutiontheir effect wouldbe seen in the figures. And it hasn t been.
戈登和柯文确实认为，像空中交通等成熟的技术更具影响力，但他们对近期创新的经济重要性并不看重。如果计算机和互联网对经济产生影响而不仅仅是像柯文广受欢迎的博客边际革命上进行的那种有着丰富资源的知识和文化交流那么它们的影响力能从数据中得到验证。但是，事实并非如此。
As early as 1987 Robert Solow, a growth theorist, had been askingwhy you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivitystatistics. A surge in productivity growth that began in the mid-1990s wasseen as an encouraging sign that the computers were at last becoming visible;but it faltered, and some, such as Mr Gordon, reckon that the benefits ofinformation technology have largely run their course. He notes that, for allits inhabitants Googling and Skypeing, America s productivity performance since2004 has been worse than that of the doldrums from the early 1970s to the early1990s.
早在1987年，增长理论家罗伯特索洛就发出了这样的疑问：为什么人们到处都能看到计算机时代，唯独在生产力统计数据中去看不到它?始于20世纪90年代的生产力增长的迅速提高被认为是一个令人鼓舞的信号，它表明计算机终于可见了;但是，这种结果迟迟没有出现。因此戈登等人认为，信息技术的效益尤其自身的规律。他指出，尽管人们在用Google进行搜索，用Skype打电话，但是美国的生产力表现自2004年以来不及20世纪70年代早期-90年代早期的低迷时期的水平。
The fountains of paradise
天堂的喷泉
Closer analysis of recent figures, though, suggests reason foroptimism. Across the economy as a whole productivity did slow in 2005 and 2006butproductivity growth in manufacturing fared better. The global financial crisisand its aftermath make more recent data hard to interpret. As for the strongproductivity growth in the late 1990s, it may have been premature to see it asthe effect of information technology making all sorts of sectors moreproductive. It now looks as though it was driven just by the industriesactually making the computers, mobile phones and the like. The effects on theproductivity of people and companies buying the new technology seem to havebegun appearing in the 2000s, but may not yet have come into their own.Research by Susanto Basu of Boston College and John Fernald of the SanFrancisco Federal Reserve suggests that the lag between investments ininformation-and-communication technologies and improvements in productivity isbetween five and 15 years. The drop in productivity in 2004, on that reckoning,reflected a state of technology definitely pre-Google, and quite possiblypre-web.
然而，对近期数据的仔细分析显示出乐观的理由。纵观整个经济体，生产率在2005年和2006年确实放缓不过，制造业的生产率增长表现较好。全球金融危机及其余波使得对更多近期数据的分析难以进行。至于20世纪90年代出现的强劲的生产力增长，把它看作是让所有部门更具竞争力的信息技术的影响还为时尚早。目前看来，这或许只是被生产计算机、手机以及与此相关产品的产业所带动的结果。个人和公司购买新技术对生产率的影响似乎从21世纪开始就已经开始，但是这种影响可能尚未进入全盛时期。波士顿大学的 Susanto Basu和旧金山联邦储备银行John Fernald认为，信息通讯技术的投资与生产率的改进之间存在着5-15年的滞后。据此推论，2004年的生产力下降反映出的状况据对是谷歌出现之前，并且还很可能是互联网出现之前的状况。
Full exploitation of a technology can take far longer than that.Innovation and technology, though talked of almost interchangeably, are not thesame thing. Innovation is what people newly know how to do. Technology is whatthey are actually doing; and that is what matters to the economy. Steel boxesand diesel engines have been around since the 1900s, and their use together incontainerised shipping goes back to the 1950s. But their great impact as thebackbone of global trade did not come for decades after that.
相比之下，技术的全面推广可能要耗费更多的时间。尽管在谈到创新和技术时几乎都是交替使用，但两者不是一回事。创新是人们对怎样去做的新想法，技术是人们实际上正在做什么;这正是技术对经济的影响所在。钢制的盒子和柴油发动机在20世纪就已经出现，把两者共同应用到集装箱航运是在20世纪50年代。但是，它们作为全球贸易支柱的影响力在此之后的几十年才出现。
Roughly a century lapsed between the first commercial deployments ofJames Watt s steam engine and steam s peak contribution to British growth. Somefour decades separated the critical innovations in electrical engineering ofthe 1880s and the broad influence of electrification on economic growth. MrGordon himself notes that the innovations of the late 19th century droveproductivity growth until the early 1970s; it is rather uncharitable of him toassume that the post-2004 slump represents the full exhaustion of potentialgains from information technology.
从詹姆斯瓦特的蒸汽机的首次商业应用到蒸汽机对英国生产率的贡献达到巅峰，两者的时间间隔大约是一个世纪。从19世纪80年代电器工程的关键创新到电气化对经济增长的广泛影响力之间的间隔大约是40年的时间。戈登本人指出，19世纪晚期的创新直到20世纪70年代才推动生产率增长;生产率自2004年以后的下降代表了来自信息技术的潜力的全面枯竭，他的这种观点相当犀利。
And information innovation is still in its infancy. Ray Kurzweil, apioneer of computer science and a devotee of exponential technologicalextrapolation, likes to talk of the second half of the chess board. There is an oldfable in which a gullible king is tricked into paying an obligation in grainsof rice, one on the first square of a chessboard, two on the second, four onthe third, the payment doubling with every square. Along the first row, theobligation is minuscule. With half the chessboard covered, the king is out onlyabout 100 tonnes of rice. But a square before reaching the end of the seventhrow he has laid out 500m tonnes in totalthe whole world sannual rice production. He will have to put more or less the same amount againon the next square. And there will still be a row to go.
不过，信息创新尚处成长期中。雷库兹韦尔是计算机科学的一位先驱者，并且是函数技术推论法的信徒，他喜欢谈论的话题是棋盘的下半部分。这是一个古老的寓言：一位容易上当受骗的国王被骗用大米来支付他的债务，在棋盘的第一个格子中放一粒大米，第二个格子中放两粒大米，第三个格子中放四粒大米，随着格子的增加他的付出也成倍地增加。沿着第一排格子摆放，他的债务只是一个小数目。当上半个棋盘被摆满后，国王拿出来的大米大约只有100吨。但是，当摆到第七排最后一个格子之前，他拿出来得大米总数已经达到50亿吨相当于全世界的大米年产量。他不得不在下一个格子中摆上差不多相同数量的大米，并且还有一排格子需要去摆。