This article is from the public number:Internet and Entertainment Strange Group (ID:TMTphantom), author: head of the monster group Pei Pei, from the title figure: vision China

This week, three messages in my circle of friends have appeared repeatedly, that is, they have been repeatedly reprinted and repeatedly brushed by many friends. They made me into a meditation.

The first article is that Huawei Ren Zhengfei praised the “Hengshui Model” in Hebei. This is not news. It is not a day or two for Huawei to appreciate and learn from the organizational culture.

The second article is based on the fact that Taobao/Tmall is gradually becoming younger at the P8 level, with all members under 35 years old. To be honest, I don’t quite believe that this is a fact, because there is no way to be one size fits all. However, many people in my circle of friends believe and applaud, and think that “the cadre is younger” is the secret of the long-lasting Internet company.

The third article is the revision of the Minors Protection Act, which introduces online game time management. The details are not clear and the way of implementation is not clear. However, most of my friends still support it. I think that children are playing games. This legislation is still light.

What are the common characteristics of the above three news/old news? I thought of the ominous term: “involution.”

Involvement (InvoThe use of the term lution) in economics was first seen in 1963 by American scholars on the study of irrigated agriculture in Java, Indonesia, and has since been widely used to describe rice farming in the Jiangnan region of China during the Ming and Qing Dynasties. In short, the “involution in agriculture” process in the Jiangnan region is:

1. Because of the small number of people and the lack of technological innovation, the Jiangnan farmers have to adopt the strategy of “increasing labor input per unit area and increasing yields”.

2. In order to increase labor input, the elderly and children in the Jiangnan area have all been invested in rice farming, and the labor intensity of agricultural production has reached the top in the world.

3. Since the labor and monetary cost of the elderly and children is zero (internal settlement), family farming is much more efficient than specialization. The employment of the farms has led to the inability of the natural economy in the south of the Yangtze River to collapse, and agricultural production has never been scaled up.

4. Since the natural economy cannot be disintegrated, there is no surplus labor supply to the emerging handicraft industry, large-scale handicraft workshops cannot be popularized, and industrial production is tied to the family environment of “male farming and weaving” as agriculture.

5. In the above-mentioned “labor-intensive + natural economy” cycle, the value of the unit labor force has not increased, the laborer’s income has not increased for a long time, and the consumption power is low, which cannot stimulate the emergence of emerging consumption forms.

6. Therefore, in this environment, it is impossible to break the industrial revolution, nor can it have a real “capitalism sprout.” It is conceivable that if there is no modern system of globalization, the Jiangnan region will sink in the dead cycle for generations.

(The word entropy is annoying when you hear it.)

In short, involution is a simple and violent expansion with constant land resources and constant technical conditions.Large labor input to improve the process of agricultural yield and total output. This is a process of diminishing marginal effects – the same piece of land, twice the labor force, is likely to produce only 1.5 times the grain. This is another process of curbing innovation – people focus on squeezing the labor and labor time within the family, and are no longer actively seeking technological innovation and innovation in production relations, always repeating themselves at a low level.

Let me spread out and say: “Hengshui mode” is a typical involution. No matter how many people are recruited and the rate of enrollment is high, the number of enrollment quotas assigned to Hebei Province by 211/985 University is also unchanged; the enrollment quotas of various colleges and universities in Hebei are basically unchanged. Hengzhong is even stronger, but it is only encroaching on the resources for further study in other parts of Hebei, and it has prompted the top students to rush to Hengshui. Even those students who stayed in the local area, under the inspiration of the “Hengshui Spirit”, lived in the high school life that they study hard day and night. To be precise, for all Hebei students, the “Hengshui Model” is not only unhelpful but harmful – it prevents students from accumulating extracurricular knowledge, cultivating hobbies, and allowing famous universities to produce a stereotype that “Hebei candidates are test machines”. .

The “instrumentalization” generated by the “Hengshui Model” even spread to the other side of the ocean. The Chinese parents in Silicon Valley are desperately guiding their children to take the road of science and science, and the mathematics tutors for Chinese are almost open. Full. The reason is very simple: the children of the first generation of Chinese immigrants often have difficulty in matching the connections, social activities, and hobbies of white children, and it is difficult to compare sports with black children; if you want to think about it, you will get more immediate results. As a result, the mathematics and science scores of Chinese students are getting higher and higher. They are becoming more and more incurable nerds in the eyes of college admissions officers. The life of teenagers is becoming less and less happy… It’s almost like this, I know it will definitely There is a bar to desperately spray me.

(Real scientific research is done by talented teenagers/girls, how can we do research and research?)

“Minor online game time management” is also a typical involution. Before the implementation of the regulation, the game time of minors is controlled by themselves and their parents.In essence, it is self-disciplined behavior in the family: the family with good education, harmonious parent-child relationship, and high maturity of children, the probability that children are addicted to the game is low, and vice versa is high, forming a positive cycle. Assuming that the regulation is strictly enforced, the game time of all minors will be shortened by (or at least not growing), the entertainment utility gained through the game. decline. The problem is that reading is for the university, will the number of students enrolled in the university increase?

Obviously, the number of students enrolled in any university in the country will not increase due to the introduction of “minor online game time management”. As a whole, the entertainment effectiveness of minors has declined, and the effectiveness of higher education has not improved. Some people will argue that learning is not just for further studies, but also for learning a lot of scientific and cultural knowledge to benefit for life. I have to point out that if a child doesn’t want to learn, he has countless ways to make a difference. If you ban the game, he will watch the drama; it is forbidden to watch the drama, he will read the novel; if he bans the novel, he will chat with his friends; if he is not allowed to chat, he will be in a daze… You can never ban daze. If you don’t solve the fundamental problem and only do superficial articles, what you get is “involution.”

As for the “rejuvenation of Internet company cadres”, like the “996 work system” that caused widespread controversy, it is a huge driving force for involution. Not to mention the Internet industry. In the “old school” industry of finance, there are also serious unrestricted overtime and premature aging. In investment institutions, researchers over the age of 40 are rare, and management over the age of 50 is rare. Excessive death is not a legend of the horizon. I know more than one case of death after 80 years of work, because there are more cases of overtime work. The funny thing is that some people think that this is a comparative advantage of the Chinese economy! A well-known investment institution (name is not ordered) claims that Chinese entrepreneurs are generally more desperate and more indifferent than those in Silicon Valley, so China’s technology Innovation can certainly defeat the United States.

呃…