大数据有望让计划经济复活

There are several theories why the Soviet Union collapsed: imperial overstretch, economic inefficiency, ideological bankruptcy. Take your pick or mix all three.

有多种理论可以解释苏联为何解体：帝国过度扩张、经济效率低下、意识形态破产。你可以任选一种，或者把三者都算进去。

But in his book Homo Deus, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests a more prosaic reason: planned economies (and authoritarian regimes) are rubbish at processing data. “Capitalism won the cold war because distributed data-processing works better than centralised data-processing,” he wrote.

但是，以色列历史学家尤瓦尔?诺亚?哈拉里(Yuval Noah Harari)在《人神》(Homo Deus)一书中，提出了一个更为平凡的原因：计划经济（以及威权政府）在处理数据方面是废物。他写道：“资本主义赢得了冷战，因为分布式数据处理比集中化的数据处理更有效。”

How could any central planner sitting in Gosplan’s offices in Moscow hope to understand all the moving parts of the Soviet economy across 11 time zones?

坐在莫斯科苏联国家计划委员会(Gosplan)办公室的一位中央规划者，有什么希望弄清楚横跨11个时区的苏联经济所有不断变化的部分？

The lunacy of that system was best explained to me by Otto Latsis, the late Russian economic journalist. He recounted how he once visited a Soviet roof tile manufacturing company, which had big expansion plans. He discovered that all the investment was being sunk into a separate plant to destroy discarded, imperfect tiles to stop them being sold on the black market by the factory’s workers.

俄罗斯已故经济记者奥托?拉齐斯(Otto Latsis)曾完美地向我解释了苏联体制荒唐的一面。他回忆自己曾参观一家苏联屋顶瓦制造公司，该公司有多项宏大的扩张计划。他发现，所有的投资都流入了另一家工厂，其业务是销毁报废的次品瓦片，以阻止工人们在黑市上销售这些瓦片。

As with most Soviet factories, the planners had set demanding targets for the new plant, focusing on quantity rather than quality, creating perverse incentives to smash up near-perfect tiles. It is hard to think of a starker example of the value destruction that wrecked the Soviet economy.

与大多数苏联工厂一样，规划者为新工厂设定了苛刻的目标，专注于数量而非质量，这带来了变态的激励——砸碎几近完美的瓦片。很难想出一个更赤裸的价值破坏的例子，正是这种价值破坏毁掉了苏联经济。

But the explosion of data in our modern world could — at least in theory — inform far better managerial decisions and reduce the information imbalances between a planned and a market economy. Central planners are rapidly acquiring the tools to process data a lot more effectively.

但是，我们现代世界的数据爆炸——至少在理论上——为进行更好的管理决策、减少计划与市场经济之间的信息失衡提供了指引。中央计划者正迅速获得能够更有效处理数据的工具。

All our connected devices are pumping out oceans of data about our real-time economic activities, demands and desires. Properly harnessed, that data could mimic the price mechanism as a means of matching demand and supply.

当今所有相互连接的设备源源不断地产生关于我们的经济活动、需求和欲望的海量实时数据。若恰当地加以利用，这些数据可以模拟价格机制，作为一种匹配需求与供应的手段。

For the past few decades, free market economists have been stomping on the grave of the planned economy. Might it rise again in a radically new form?

过去几十年，自由市场经济学家一直没有停止对计划经济的鞭挞。计划经济有可能以一种全新的形式复活吗？

Some seem to think so in China, which remains wedded to Communist ideology — no matter how loosely applied in practice — and is developing one of the most vibrant data markets in the world.

在中国，一些人似乎这样认为。中国仍坚持共产主义意识形态（无论在实践中应用得多么松散），同时正在发展世界上最具活力的数据市场之一。

Last year, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, the online platform with some 500m users, argued new technologies provided the means to gather and process data on a near-unimaginable scale.

去年，拥有约5亿用户的电商阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的创始人马云(Jack Ma)表示，新技术提供了以几乎难以想象的规模收集和处理数据的手段。

Applying artificial intelligence to those data sets was deepening our real-time understanding of the world. “As such, Big Data will make the market smarter and make it possible to plan and predict market forces so as to allow us to finally achieve a planned economy,” he told an economic conference.

将人工智能应用于这些数据集，正在加深我们对世界的实时认知。马云在一次经济会议上表示：因此，大数据将让市场更加智能化，使得计划和预测市场力量变得可能，让我们能够最终实现计划经济。