大數據有望讓計劃經濟復活
There are several theories why the Soviet Union collapsed: imperial overstretch, economic inefficiency, ideological bankruptcy. Take your pick or mix all three.
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，以色列歷史學家尤瓦爾?諾亞?哈拉里(Yuval Noah Harari)在《人神》(Homo Deus)一書中，提出了一個更爲平凡的原因：計劃經濟（以及威權政府）在處理數據方面是廢物。他寫道：“資本主義贏得了冷戰，因爲分佈式數據處理比集中化的數據處理更有效。”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?
坐在莫斯科蘇聯國家計劃委員會(Gosplan)辦公室的一位中央規劃者，有什麼希望弄清楚橫跨11個時區的蘇聯經濟所有不斷變化的部分？
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.
俄羅斯已故經濟記者奧托?拉齊斯(Otto Latsis)曾完美地向我解釋了蘇聯體制荒唐的一面。他回憶自己曾參觀一家蘇聯屋頂瓦製造公司，該公司有多項宏大的擴張計劃。他發現，所有的投資都流入了另一家工廠，其業務是銷燬報廢的次品瓦片，以阻止工人們在黑市上銷售這些瓦片。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.
與大多數蘇聯工廠一樣，規劃者爲新工廠設定了苛刻的目標，專注於數量而非質量，這帶來了變態的激勵——砸碎幾近完美的瓦片。很難想出一個更赤裸的價值破壞的例子，正是這種價值破壞毀掉了蘇聯經濟。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，我們現代世界的數據爆炸——至少在理論上——爲進行更好的管理決策、減少計劃與市場經濟之間的信息失衡提供了指引。中央計劃者正迅速獲得能夠更有效處理數據的工具。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.
當今所有相互連接的設備源源不斷地產生關於我們的經濟活動、需求和慾望的海量實時數據。若恰當地加以利用，這些數據可以模擬價格機制，作爲一種匹配需求與供應的手段。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?
過去幾十年，自由市場經濟學家一直沒有停止對計劃經濟的鞭撻。計劃經濟有可能以一種全新的形式復活嗎？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.
在中國，一些人似乎這樣認爲。中國仍堅持共產主義意識形態（無論在實踐中應用得多麼鬆散），同時正在發展世界上最具活力的數據市場之一。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，擁有約5億用戶的電商阿里巴巴(Alibaba)的創始人馬雲(Jack Ma)表示，新技術提供了以幾乎難以想象的規模收集和處理數據的手段。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.
將人工智能應用於這些數據集，正在加深我們對世界的實時認知。馬雲在一次經濟會議上表示：因此，大數據將讓市場更加智能化，使得計劃和預測市場力量變得可能，讓我們能夠最終實現計劃經濟。
