Measures Fail to Account for Technology’s Benefits
科技的好處很難量化
By Eduardo Porter

When I was a young reporter we could not afford cellphones. I waited in line for a pay phone in Mexico City one afternoon to call in the news about the auction to privatize the phone company Telmex, driving those behind me crazy while a copy editor on the other end typed it into those glowing green letters of an earlier information age.
我還是個年輕記者時，我們買不起手機。某日下午，我在墨西哥市排隊，等著打一通付費電話，回報墨西哥電信公司民營化拍賣的新聞。排在我後面的人無不抓狂；電話另一端負責謄寫的編輯把我的話輸入電腦，化為較早期資訊時代的鮮綠色字母。

I traveled to Japan with a TRS-80 portable computer that ran on AA batteries and had cups to put over the phone receiver. It transmitted copy at the blistering speed of 300 bits per second. And I wrote about Mexico’s tequila crisis of 1994 without the benefit of a full set of Mexican financial statistics a few clicks away.
我曾帶一部TRS-80攜帶型電腦去日本出差，它使用AA電池，還有個杯狀物可扣在電話話筒上（編按：透過電話線路傳稿）。它傳輸速度高達每秒300位元。我還報導過1994年的墨西哥金融危機（編按：當時媒體借用當地名產龍舌蘭酒稱之為龍舌蘭酒危機），卻無法敲幾個鍵就取得完整的墨國財政數據。

From my perspective, the evolution of the tools of journalism between then and now has been nothing less than breathtaking.
在我看來，從當時到現在新聞工具的演進實在驚人。

Articles are more thorough – informed by complementary data and analysis, enriched with links to things like interactive charts, videos and slide shows. They get to readers much more quickly. Most important, they reach many more of them.
各種報導文章更透徹。它們參考補充性的相關資料及分析，同時輔以互動圖表、影片及幻燈片。報導更快傳給讀者。最重要的是可傳給更多讀者。

Measured by its contribution to gross domestic product, the most prominent indicator of the nation’s economic well-being, much of this new journalistic value enabled by information technology is not worth much.
以對國內生產毛額（GDP，衡量一國經濟狀況的最重要標準）的貢獻而言，資訊科技促成的這種新聞新價值大體上貢獻不大。

This is true not only of journalism. The failure of I.T. to deliver measurable value has been a popular meme among economists for years. Back in 1987 Nobel laureate Robert Solow posed a now famous paradox: “We can see the computers everywhere except in the productivity statistics.”
這個事實不僅限於新聞工作。資訊科技未能造就可衡量價值，多年來一直是通行於經濟學家之間的想法。1987年，曾獲諾貝爾獎的美國經濟學家索洛說出了如今十分有名的悖論：「電腦無所不在，唯獨不見於有關生產力的統計數字中。」

The meme is back. The burst of productivity during the dotcom revolution of the 1990s gave skeptics pause. But as productivity has slowed in recent years, doubts about whether information technology can power economic growth have re-emerged.
這種想法又回來了。1990年代達康革命期間生產力大爆發使懷疑論者暫時消音。然而隨著生產力近年減緩，有關資訊科技能否驅動經濟成長的懷疑論調已再次出現。

Last year, Robert J. Gordon of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, proposed that the I.T. revolution has pretty much exhausted its promise. He asked, provocatively: “Is U.S. economic growth over?” And he forecast stagnating living standards for the vast majority of Americans for decades to come.
伊利諾州艾文斯頓市西北大學的經濟學者戈登去年表示，資訊科技革命並未實現它的諾言。他以挑撥口氣問道：「美國的經濟成長是否已經結束？」他並認為，未來數十年絕大多數美國人生活水準將停滯不前。

Government statistics support his skepticism: Value added by the information technology and communications industries has remained stuck at around 4 percent of the nation’s economic output for the last quarter century.
官方統計數字佐證他的懷疑：過去25年間，資訊科技與通信業產生的附加價值始終只占全國經濟總產出的4%左右。

But these statistics miss much of what technology and the digital devices that people now use do for their well-being. Gross domestic product only values goods and services people pay for. It does not capture the value to consumers of economic improvements that are given away free.
然而這些數字卻大大隱沒了科技與時下數位裝置為人們創造的福祉。GDP只計算人們購買的商品與服務的價值，卻不及於消費者免費得到的經濟改善的價值。

The United States Commerce Department is revising the way it measures G.D.P. to take better account of the contributions of investment in research and development and artistic creation. But even though the revisions are expected to make the American economy look bigger, they are not devised to capture the value that Americans get from digital technologies.
美國商務部正在修改估算GDP的方式，以納入研發投資與藝術創作的貢獻。然而這些修改雖會使美國經濟規模看來更大，卻並未考慮數位科技為美國人創造的價值。

G.D.P. misses what Americans gain from sharing information on Facebook or finding information on Google or Wikipedia. It misses the time saved by drivers who use Google Maps and the time gained by consumers from shopping online.
GDP不計入美國人透過臉書分享資訊，或者透過谷歌、維基百科搜尋資訊的收獲，也不計算開車族使用谷歌地圖，消費者上網購物省下的時間。

“Pretty much every human on earth can access all human knowledge,” said Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist. But that is mostly ignored by our measures of progress.
谷歌首席經濟學者華里恩說：「每一個人幾乎都能接觸全人類的知識。」然而我們估量進步的標準大抵忽略了這一點。

Mr. Varian estimated that a search engine might be worth about $500 annually to the average American worker. Across the working population, this would add up to $65 billion a year.
他估算，一個搜尋引擎平均每年約可為美國勞工創造500美元的價值。全體勞動人口合計，每年達650億美元。

Last year, Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JooHee Oh concluded that the consumer surplus from free online services – the value derived by American consumers above what they paid for it – has been growing by $34 billion a year since 2002. If it were tacked on as “economic output,” it would add about 0.26 of a percentage point to annual G.D.P. growth.
麻省理工學院的布林約爾福森與吳珠熙去年表示，2002年起，各種免費網上服務為消費者創造的剩餘價值（美國消費者付費衍生的額外價值）每年增加340億美元。若視為「經濟產出」，約可為GDP年成長率增加0.26個百分點。

Technoskeptics may scoff. The Internet is hardly the first technology to offer consumers free goods. The consumer surplus from television is about five times as large as that delivered by free stuff online, according to Mr. Brynjolfsson’s calculations.
科技懷疑論者可能嗤之以鼻。網路並不是為消費者提供免費商品的第一種科技。布林約爾福森認為，電視為消費者創造的剩餘價值，約為網路免費服務的5倍。

The amount of time Americans devote to the Internet has doubled in the last five years. Information encoded in bits is bound to become a larger and larger share of our output. Much of its value will be delivered at a marginal cost of nearly zero.
5年來美國人用在網路上的時間增加一倍。以位元加密的資訊在我們的產出中分量一定越來越重。它的許多價值幾乎不須成本即可取得。

“We know less about the sources of value in the economy than we did 25 years ago,” Mr. Brynjolfsson wrote.
布林約爾福森說：「我們現在對經濟價值來源的所知，還不如25年前。」

If we really want to understand the impact of information technology on our future wellbeing, we first need to find a consistent way to measure it.
如果真想瞭解資訊科技對我們未來福祉的影響，先得找到估算它的一貫方法。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/statistics-miss-the-benefits-of-technology.html

2013-05-28聯合報/G5版/UNITEDDAILYNEWS 陳世欽譯 原文參見紐時週報十版上