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文章標題書摘 The great stagnation (大停滯) Does the Internet Change Everything ? (2) |
To be sure, the internet does generate some revenue. Google ads
improve the quality of advertising, and The New York Times
sells ads on its Web site, and Amazon sells books; eBay recycles
used goods more effectively and makes it easier to sell new stuff.
Maybe your Facebook friend helps get you a job, or businesses
make peer-to-peer deals based on Web site connections. So the
internet is by no means totally cut off from traditional measures
of economic activity. Still, relative to how much it shapes our
lives and thoughts, the revenue component of the internet is
comparatively small. A lot of the internet is a free space for
intellectual and emotional invention, a kind of open-ended
canvas for enriching our interior lives.
It's also the case that a lot of the internet's biggest benefits are
distributed in proportion to our cognitive abilities to exploit
them. That's a big difference between the internet and the major
technological advances of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. The internet is a public good, but you don't benefit
from it automatically in the same way you do from a flush toilet
or a paved road. Learning how to use it is a much more
specialized skill.
In the last chapter, I presented some reasons why GDP figures
overstated economic growth. Now we see one reason why GDP
figures understate economic growth. Much of the value of the
internet is experienced at the personal level and so will never
show up in the productivity numbers. Buying $2 worth of
bananas boosts GDP, but having $20 worth of fun cruising the
Web does not, at least not above and beyond your minuscule
consumption of the electricity it requires. Cruising the Web may
even lower GDP on net if instead you would have gone out to
buy an ice-cream cone or otherwise spent some money, even if
you would have had less fun away from your computer.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with an economic sector that
doesn't generate a lot of revenue, and in fact it's really nice to
have the internet freed from a lot of commercial constraints. For
instance, you can start a blog or read a blog without much in the
way of financial resources. Still, this more distant connection to
revenue generation has some problematic economic
implications.
製作日期:2012.9.8
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