The new crown epidemic that has swept the world has caused many economies to shut down. We cannot predict whether there will be any worse, and we will not know when it will be back on track. There is no doubt that we are experiencing a global depression. The question is, how long will the depression last, can the economy return to its previous growth rate?
The graph above is the growth trend of per capita GDP of human society in the past five hundred years. We are fortunate to live in the best era, the fastest growing period in the history of human society. It can be seen from the figure that since the Second World War, the GDP per capita of some developed economies around the world has embarked on a path of rapid development. Although there are some small twists and turns in the middle, the overall trend is rapid growth. .
However, I would like to assert that even if there is no new crown epidemic, global economic growth will encounter bottlenecks. The whole society is facing some serious problems, and it is these problems that will make the rapid economic growth become history.
Want to know whether the economy can continue to grow in the future, we must first understand what motivated the rapid economic growth in the past.
Producer: People who are capable and willing to produce
This factor is mainly composed of two parts, the ability and willingness of the producer. Ability is mainly related to the level of education, and countries with high levels of education will have high-level workers. Willingness refers to the willingness of people to create labor. If a society encourages labor to earn and distribute according to labor, then people are willing to work hard for a better life. Of course, the will is also related to culture, there are hard-working people and there are less hard-working people. But in general, the distribution mechanism has a greater effect on willingness.
Undoubtedly, with the increase of private wealth and national wealth, the education level of the people is getting higher and higher, and the ability of producers is getting stronger and stronger. This is one of the forces that have promoted social progress for a long time. In terms of labor will, the political system of developed Western countries has always been relatively stable, so we cannot see the impact on economic growth. Take China as an example, reform and opening upThirty years later, China’s per capita GDP has increased by about five times. Considering that China’s huge population base is also rising, this growth is not easy. The policy of reform and opening up has lifted a lot of restrictions that were not necessary for laborers, and stimulated the subjective initiative of each producer through a reasonable distribution method, and then burst out huge energy. This also makes China a vital engine for world economic growth.
Productivity tools: good tools can empower people
Technology is an important tool for promoting productivity. After the Second World War, the growth of developed economies in Europe and America is the fruit of new technologies. The widespread use of chemical fertilizers after World War II solved the basic food and clothing problems. Communication, industrial technology, aviation and other technologies that were rapidly developed during the war began to play an important role in the civilian field. A large number of technological dividends benefited the production field. Since then, semiconductors, large-scale integrated circuits, computers and other technologies have pushed wave after wave of social development.
In order to maintain a high rate of development, human society will appear every once in a while with a powerful and basic technological engine to promote economic development. In the past three or four decades, the most important engines have been personal computers, the Internet, mobile devices and mobile Internet. Today, the driving force brought by the previous new technologies has begun to weaken, and people have not yet found a new powerful engine. 5G, artificial intelligence, and IoT have all been given high hopes. In particular, artificial intelligence has attracted numerous venture capital funds, but it has not had a significant impact in any physical industry so far. China currently has high hopes for 5G, hoping that 5G can serve as an economic engine. Unfortunately for humans, video is already the highest-density form of information that human beings can accept. Compared to 3G, 4G makes mobile video possible, but 5G has no significant perceived advantage over 4G.
Producer connection
People are social animals. The power of a single person is limited. The achievements of human civilization are basically based on group collaboration. Humans, a species that has emerged from the primitive forest, can go to heaven and earth today, worry about food and clothing, and make various transformations to nature, relying on the collision of ideas between people, inheritance and learning, division of labor and cooperation. What affects the connection between people is the flow speed of information, the flow speed of people and things.
Since the earliest telegraph, the speed of information transmission has finally exceeded the speed of people’s movement (the people depended on the train at the time, 35km / h). As of today, there is basically no delay in the transmission of large-capacity information. At the level of information, the current transmission speedThis creature is basically enough. Because the largest amount of information received by people in a unit of time is the eye, and now HD video can be delivered quickly and smoothly. The biggest role of information transmission is to allow people to obtain more sufficient information to help individuals improve, such as learning more knowledge, generating better ideas, or assisting in making more reasonable decisions.
The speed of movement of people and things depends on the development of transportation. China has a very short and powerful slogan: “If you want to get rich, build roads first.” This sentence is correct. The development of transportation technology has made the circulation of things and things more convenient, resulting in a larger scope and more optimized collaboration and division of labor. At the same time, it has strengthened the communication and collision between people and brought innovation A lot of possibilities. The current upper limit of the speed of movement of people and things is the speed of the aircraft. At present, this speed does not exceed the speed of sound. Although we once had a supersonic passenger aircraft briefly, the supersonic passenger aircraft was quickly eliminated because of its low cost performance. The flow speed of people and things has been staying at the level of 900km / h for thirty-four years. Being able to stay for such a long time means that it is basically enough at present, and there is no urgent need to improve it.
The above connection emphasizes the distance between people in the physical world, but for division of labor and collaboration, the distance between hearts is more important. Now, although we can make video calls from across the ocean, this does not mean that people at both ends of the phone will trust each other and work together.
In the future, if we can make people more advanced, basic technologies more developed, and people have closer connections, we can continue to promote social progress and economic growth. But look at the current situation facing society today.
We do not have a new powerful technology engine
After the mobile devices and mobile Internet, there is no next level of technology engine that can promote social development. The perception of change brought about by 5G compared to 4G is not obvious. Artificial intelligence technology was proposed sixty or seventy years ago, and now it is prosperous only because of the improvement of computing power, making the actual calculation of artificial intelligence possible, but this technology still has a long way to go. Before that, we enjoyed the dividends brought by wave after wave of technology. The mechanism of the whole society is based on the expectation of high-speed growth in the future, especially the financial industry as the economic bloodline. When we cannot find the next powerful engine in time, the economy will suddenly stall, causing a chain reaction.
As for why we cannot find the next growth engine in time, a very important reason is that in the past, the information technology industry and the financial industry have grabbed too many resources. The financial industry grabs most of the benefits of social productionRun. In China, seven of the ten companies with the highest net profit in 2019 are in the financial industry. If the financial industry grabs profits, then the information technology industry grabs some of the most important things, capital resources and human resources. We have invented a thousand and one methods of online dating, and invested the most elite force to study how to let users click an advertisement on the web page. Countless companies exhaust all their efforts to let users stay more in their games. Time, spend more money, and some companies immerse hundreds of millions of people in short videos or junk news for several hours through superb algorithms. These industries are the darlings of the present age. Capital is eager to invest in these industries. Of course, they can attract the best talents to devote themselves to such “careers”. The headlines of the media will cheer for them to reach one milestone after another.
The rise of the Internet echoes the decline of hard technology. 20 years ago, the company with the highest market value in the world and the most powerful aero engine on the planet has been kicked out of the US Dow Jones Industrial Index (high performance aero engine is known as the crown of industry and is the most technically difficult industrial product) . IBM once invented the PC, disk, scanning tunneling microscope, and atomic etching technology. It was once one of the top ten companies with the highest market value in the world. It has long since fallen behind and made a living by selling software and services. Boeing, which has monopolized more than half of the world’s passenger planes, tried its best to make the stock price higher, but it still took the lead. Bell Labs, which won 8 Nobel Prizes and invented transistors, lasers, light-emitting diodes, solar cells, communication satellites, cellular mobile communication equipment, etc., began to decline sharply in the 1990s, and it is now non-existent. Feel it. Every time a demo video representing the most advanced robot technology on earth can be released, Boston Dynamics has changed hands several times, and the fate is bumpy, while the other is also a virtual video that only sends some demo videos (later broke out to find special effects companies) Reality company Leap Motion can easily raise billions of dollars. Although the rise and fall of each company has its own reasons, the decline of hard technology is an indisputable fact.
Although today we clearly know that the greenhouse effect will make our living environment worse and worse, and it is already happening, we still ca n’t get rid of the heavy dependence on fossil energy, and we ca n’t make a practical supersonic passenger aircraft. It has been almost 70 years since the maximum speed of human movement stayed at the upper limit of 1000km / h. What kind of technology can become the basic technology to promote social progress? The most fundamental and most important is energy technology, technologies related to energy production, transportation and storage. The reason why oil is called the blood of industry is why the United States exerts its influence and control on the world because all industries ultimately depend on energy and are ultimately limited by energy. If there is a more efficient energy source, many problems can be solved, even if it seems to be nowThe core of the helpless global warming problem is to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We can already synthesize carbon dioxide in the laboratory to other compounds, but this process requires a lot of energy, which is much greater than the fossil fuels that produce these carbon dioxide. The energy released, so this method is currently not feasible. If we have a more efficient energy source, such as the energy generated by controlled nuclear fusion, then we can store carbon dioxide in large quantities to solve the global warming crisis.
Fossil energy has brought a series of problems. In addition to the increasingly serious environmental problems, oil is also a centralized energy source, and the price and supply of oil are controlled by the United States. Controlling oil basically controls everything, because energy is almost the foundation of everything. If we can replace oil as a source of energy at the bottom of the pot and replace it with an energy source that cannot be controlled centrally, such as controllable nuclear fusion technology, then the US hegemony will inevitably be unsustainable, and the world will also achieve energy equality and sufficient Supply, human civilization can also go to a higher level.
Another thing that can promote social progress is transportation technology. Transportation technology is also designed to optimize collaboration and division of labor among people on a larger scale, which is why China will spend great efforts in the two most developed cities, Beijing and Shanghai. The underlying logic between the construction of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail. If we have flying cars and faster long-distance aircraft, people can save a lot of time in transportation and focus more on labor creation. The greater significance is that the boundaries of the city will be greatly expanded, and the city can accommodate more people and resources. It will not be too concentrated (the house prices in the city center will not be so high), everyone has more opportunities to connect with other people and organizations, and the social division of labor and collaboration will eventually lead to a larger and better solution. As a simple example, most of the employees employed by a company are mostly distributed within a certain distance of the company, because it is limited by traffic factors. However, if the transportation technology is greatly improved in the future, the scope of talent distribution will be more extensive. For companies, candidates can be selected on a larger scale. For job seekers, you can choose a company in a larger range, so it will eventually lead to a larger range of better solutions.
Excessive entertainment is hurting people ’s ability to create labor
In the 1980s, Neil Bozeman saw the erosion of culture by television, worried that we humans would eventually be destroyed by what we love, and wrote the book “Entertainment to Death.” Bozeman ’s worries seemed a bit over-the-top in the TV era, but today, when mobile short video is highly developed, supplemented by artificial intelligence algorithms, beauty technology and countless anchors, we have finally entered an era of entertainment to death.
With the efforts of the entire Internet industry, everyone spends more and more time on mobile phones. In China, the average time spent by netizens on mobile phones in Q4 2019 is 5.1 hours.
What is this concept? We subtracted 8 hours of work and 8 hours of sleep and 2 hours of meal time, leaving 6 hours in a day. That is to say, in terms of the average number, people’s free time is almost completely in the mobile phone, what do they do in the mobile phone? Pure entertainment projects such as video and games account for more than 36.9%, and each mobile netizen spends more than 1.88 hours on video and games on an average day.
The developed Internet continues to occupy user time through algorithms, and most of it is spent on entertainment projects that do not create value. From the perspective of labor creation, the time spent on learning promotion and labor creation can create greater value for society. Of course, these behaviors create value for Internet companies. The longer users use the App, the more valuable the corresponding company. But the price behind this value is too great. All mobile netizens spend a few hours a day on these apps, pushing the market value of these companies up to tens of billions of dollars. What difference does it make?
In addition to occupying time, entertainment will also greatly change people’s habits. We are getting impatient now, and the two-minute video is too long because we are used to the 15S rhythm of Douyin. We are used to the rapid switching of video screens, making it harder to sink and read and think.We are used to the beauty of long-legged awl face in the video and the stimulating pictures in the game, but it is difficult to find similar stimuli in real life. Reality is becoming more and more uninteresting to us, and more willing to immerse in the virtual world. In short, excessive entertainment leads us to have no time, no will, and no ability to carry out serious thinking. When people stop thinking, we will usher in the regression of group intelligence.
What ’s more serious is that the over-entertainment of the entire society has begun to penetrate the underage. Children who see their parents playing vibrato to play games will also go to play, a large number of young people began to be anchors on short video platforms to ask for praise, and more young people in the game. In a 2018 survey conducted by Xinhuanet for young people, more than 50% of people chose “Anchor” or “Internet celebrity” for “what do you want to do in the future”. This is the point of concern in Neil Bozeman ’s another book, The Lost Childhood. Modern technology breaks the boundaries between adults and children, allowing children to grow in an overly adult context, which will make Children’s growth faces great challenges, and they go astray without even noticing.
Excessive entertainment impairs people ’s ability to create labor as producers. This damage is greater for the next generation and occurs earlier. People are the most important factor in economic growth. If we continue on the road from entertainment to death, I do not see the possibility of sustained growth.
The problem of current education
As mentioned earlier, education has always enabled more people to become more capable laborers. One possible solution to the problem that Bozeman also considered in “Entertainment to Death” is to solve the problem through education to prevent excessive entertainment in society.
The above discussion focused too much on the negative effects of technology, and we have also seen the changes that the Internet has brought to education. There are also a lot of learning content on the Internet, knowledge payment is becoming more and more common, and online education also covers a considerable number of people. However, Dewey once said that in learning, the knowledge to be learned is the least important. The thinking and learning process is the valuable part. In the context of flooding information and rapid switching, thinking is becoming more and more difficult. Compared with changes in society, changes in education are too slow, resulting in education itself not keeping up with society’s demand for education. Taking Chinese education as an example, excessive test orientation leads students to spend too much time on the test. Students become test machines and can get higher scores, but at the cost of curiosity and creativity being wiped out. The enthusiasm is also lost, which is an unbearably heavy price for social development.
The widening gap between the rich and the poor leads to a more and more serious class stratificationFailure, competition is limited to individuals of a certain class, even individuals of other classes, even if their talents are different, may not even have the opportunity to participate in the competition. The widening gap between rich and poor is an inevitable result of the development of the capitalist financial industry. Making money with money is the fastest way, and the closest link to money is also the most profitable. The financial industry serves capital appreciation, and because the financial industry is closest to money, the financial industry has the highest investment efficiency among all investment methods. Before the rapid economic growth, because the cake has been growing, although the rich get most of the results, but other classes can still share some results. If the cake is no longer bigger, then in the fight for the stock cake, the rich will still get the most, while others may not get any results at all and may even face depreciation of wealth.
In terms of education, taking China as an example, the college entrance examination is still a fair selection mechanism, but unlike 30 years ago, the extracurricular tutoring classes are now standard. Urban families have invested heavily in tutoring. Others include a degree room, which also links education to economic strength. With their talents and hard work, it is no longer possible for poor children to achieve good results in the college entrance examination. There are fewer and fewer children from rural areas in first-class universities. On the other hand, the parents of most urban families will strictly control their children ’s access to electronic devices, and rural parents are not very aware of this aspect, and many are left-behind children. The use of electronic devices is not controlled, causing children to become addicted early Games or short videos are out early in the competition for learning. In the future, most of them will always be at the bottom of society.
Our society is increasingly fragmented
Although today’s technology allows us to collaborate and divide labor on a larger scale, people’s willingness to collaborate and divide labor is not stronger than before. The whole earth is not a global village we envisaged, but it is increasingly divided in culture and cognition. Fragmentation increases the cost of trust, communication becomes more difficult, division of labor and cooperation are no longer smooth, and the exertion of collective power will be limited. In some cases, even with confrontation and war, the consequences of non-cooperation are okay, but confrontation will cost both parties a serious price. Just like a company, when the various departments of the company begin to split and confront each other, the development of the entire company will be affected.
Thanks to modern technology, although we can communicate with anyone in any corner of the world in real time, there are fewer and fewer common languages among humans. The fundamental reason is that the amount of information everyone faces today is increasing, and each will pay attention to different information, which itself will bring about a reduction in common language. For example, 30 years ago, all TV viewers had to watch the content arranged by the TV station, such as “Journey to the West” so everyone has a common cognitive basisWith discussion topics, you can get together and have a lively discussion on “Journey to the West”. But today, everyone can choose to watch from the massive content on the video website, which makes it difficult to have a basis for joint discussion. Everyone or every group of people is in an information cocoon room. There are many forms of information cocoon room, one is artificial intelligence technology to push their favorite content according to people’s preferences, excluding different voices, many news feed streams are this form. There is an information cocoon room, which is a platform for a group of people to provide information and communication, such as an app for a specific group of people. There is also an information cocoon room that is artificially filtered, filtered, and processed. For example, in the Hong Kong Independence incident last year, the information received by young people in Hong Kong was intentionally created for a certain purpose. The proliferation of information and the existence of individual information cocoon rooms have led to the false identification of information, followed by neglect and misunderstanding, which must deepen the fragmentation.
We are facing more than a split between different countries and regions, a split at the spatial level. There is also a split in the time dimension of different age groups, such as the generation gap problem. These two divisions are already happening. The trend of populism and nationalism has become more and more serious on a global scale. Globalization, which has brought many benefits to the world, has a retrogressive trend. At least in China, the separation between different age levels we have observed is also more serious. Different ages have different contexts. They have special apps, special topics, special public topic characters, and special clothing and dress. They are immersed in this context that is exclusive to them, and do not need or bother to communicate with the outside world. And people of other ages are often unable to understand the topics they are discussing and why they want to dress up in one way or another. This fragmentation of the time dimension also affects the division and creation of productive labor. In the development and history of human civilization, intergenerational inheritance is a very important part. With more and more misunderstandings between contemporary times, it is difficult to expect the younger generation to inherit more experience and methods from their predecessors.
Others: After all, the debt of the natural environment must be repaid after all
Unfortunately, mankind chose fossil energy as the main energy supply for human development. In the past hundred years, humans have turned the organic matter deposited on the earth in the past millions of years up from the ground, burned carbon dioxide and discharged it into the atmosphere, and today has formed a serious global warming crisis. , Plastic pollution, soil pollution and water pollution, all of which peaked in the past few decades, behind the rapid growth of GDP per capita is the high price that the natural environment silently bears, and after decades, these changes in the natural environment finally It’s time for humans to feel the pain of skin-cutting.
We are living in an era of unprecedented abundance of materials, but also an era of unprecedentedly bad environment. We must not only face more and more natural disasters and secondary disasters brought by extreme climates, such as large-scale wildfires caused by drought. These pollutions may eventually affect people. Heavy metals and plastic particles will eventually enter the human body through the food chain. The polluted atmosphere is directly inhaled, which will eventually affect people’s health and even endanger life. We need to deal with a series of cascading changes brought about by climate warming, which includes land degradation, water shortage, crop yield reduction and so on. We need to spend more energy to control pollution. The cost of pollution control is much greater than the revenue generated from the original pollution emissions. We need to invest a lot of money and medical resources to deal with the health problems caused by pollution.
If the problems we face are not improved, a recession, and a continuous recession will inevitably come.