“婴儿荒”的解药，可能是AI | 经济学人社论

Leaders | The baby-bust economy

婴儿荒经济学

英文部分选自经济学人20230603社论版块

Leaders | The baby-bust economy

婴儿荒经济学

Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

What might change the world’s dire demographic trajectory?

全球生育率坍塌，经济影响深远。扭转人口颓势路在何方？

In the roughly 250 years since the Industrial Revolution the world’s population, like its wealth, has exploded. Before the end of this century, however, the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing. Although the trend may be familiar, its extent and its consequences are not. Even as artificial intelligence (ai) leads to surging optimism in some quarters, the baby bust hangs over the future of the world economy.

在工业革命之后的大约250年里，世界人口和财富都出现了爆炸性增长。然而到本世纪末尾，全球人口或许会经历黑死病之后的第一次缩减，不是因为死亡人口激增，而是因为出生人口锐减。全球大多数地方的生育率——即每位女性平均生育的子女数目——都出现了断崖式下跌。虽然生育率下降已经是老生常谈，但人们并不全然了解形势的严峻和潜在的后果。在“婴儿荒”的未来，虽然人工智能提振了对部分行业的乐观情绪，但世界经济的前景依旧笼罩在低生育危机之中。

注释:

1.baby bust：常与二战后的婴儿潮“baby boom”对比使用。例如：哈佛大学学者N. Gregory MANKIW 和David N. WEIL1989年发表的文章“The Baby Boom, the Baby Bust, and the Housing Market"。

2.Collapse: to fall suddenly because of pressure or having no strength or support 坍塌、垮掉、倒塌、崩溃

In 2000 the world’s fertility rate was 2.7 births per woman, comfortably above the “replacement rate” of 2.1, at which a population is stable. Today it is 2.3 and falling. The largest 15 countries by gdp all have a fertility rate below the replacement rate. That includes America and much of the rich world, but also China and India, neither of which is rich but which together account for more than a third of the global population.

2000年，全球生育率约为2.7，大幅高于维持人口数量稳定的标准人口置换率2.1。今天这个数字是2.3，并在仍在下降。GDP最高的15个国家中，出生率都已低于人口置换率。这其中既有美国和许多发达国家，也包括中国和印度这两个未富先老、人口总量占全球三分之一以上的人口大国。

注释:

replacement rate：is usually taken to be the level at which the population eventually stops growing.The level of total fertility that is compatible with a stationary population.人口置换率，是为使一个国家或某个区域在人口上出生与死亡达到某种相对的平衡而产生的一个比率，即每个妇女平均生小孩的个数，去扭转失调或保持平衡状态。联合国推算指出，标准的人口替代率为2.1。

The result is that in much of the world the patter of tiny feet is being drowned out by the clatter of walking sticks. The prime examples of ageing countries are no longer just Japan and Italy but also include Brazil, Mexico and Thailand. By 2030 more than half the inhabitants of East and South-East Asia will be over 40. As the old die and are not fully replaced, populations are likely to shrink. Outside Africa, the world’s population is forecast to peak in the 2050s and end the century smaller than it is today. Even in Africa, the fertility rate is falling fast.

结果就是，当今世界多见老态龙钟而少见蹒跚学步。老龄化严重的国家不再只有日本和意大利，还包括巴西、墨西哥、泰国。到2030年，40岁以上人口将占到东亚和东南亚地区总人口的一半以上。由于出生率低于死亡率，人口可能会减少。根据预测，除非洲以外地区的人口将在本世纪中叶达到顶峰，然后开始下降，并到本世纪结束时降到比今天还低的水平。而即使在非洲，生育率也在快速下跌。

Whatever some environmentalists say, a shrinking population creates problems. The world is not close to full and the economic difficulties resulting from fewer young people are many. The obvious one is that it is getting harder to support the world’s pensioners. Retired folk draw on the output of the working-aged, either through the state, which levies taxes on workers to pay public pensions, or by cashing in savings to buy goods and services or because relatives provide care unpaid. But whereas the rich world currently has around three people between 20 and 64 years old for everyone over 65, by 2050 it will have less than two. The implications are higher taxes, later retirements, lower real returns for savers and, possibly, government budget crises.

无论一些环保主义者怎么说，人口减少都会带来问题。世界人口还没有接近饱和，而年轻人口减少带来的经济困难则很多。显而易见的一个问题是，世界各地的养老金问题都越来越难解决。归根结底，退休福利保障仰赖于劳动适龄人口的产出：要么政府对这些劳动人口征税用以发放养老金，要么老人靠自己储蓄账户的收益养老，要么亲戚能提供无偿看护。目前在富裕国家一个65岁以上的老人平均由3个20至64岁之间的劳动力供养，但到2050年这个数字将降到2以下。这意味着将来税收会更高、退休会更晚、储户实际回报会下降，政府可能也会面临预算危机。

Low ratios of workers to pensioners are only one problem stemming from collapsing fertility. As we explain this week, younger people have more of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence”, the ability to think creatively so as to solve problems in entirely new ways .

劳动者与养老金领取者的比例过低，只是生育率暴跌带来的诸多问题之一。正如本周《经济学人》相关文章指出的，年轻人拥有更多心理学家所说的“流动智力”，即运用创新思维，找到新办法解决问题的能力。

注释:

fluid intelligence：流动智力或流体智力，与固定智力或晶体智力（crystallized intelligence）是一对概念，最初于1971年由美国心理学家雷蒙德·卡特尔提出并加以区分。固定智力是指应用先前已获得的知识经验的能力，流动智力是指在混乱状态中发现新知识、解决新问题的能力。固定智力能够持续增长，但流动智力则在成年初期达到峰值，随后逐渐下降。

This youthful dynamism complements the accumulated knowledge of older workers. It also brings change. Patents filed by the youngest inventors are much more likely to cover breakthrough innovations. Older countries—and, it turns out, their young people—are less enterprising and less comfortable taking risks. Elderly electorates ossify politics, too. Because the old benefit less than the young when economies grow, they have proved less keen on pro-growth policies, especially housebuilding. Creative destruction is likely to be rarer in ageing societies, suppressing productivity growth in ways that compound into an enormous missed opportunity.

年轻人带来的活力和改变，能与资深工人积累的知识技能形成互补。真正革新性的专利往往是“英雄出少年”。老龄化严重的国家普遍缺乏精气神和行动力，不愿意承担风险——事实上，这些国家的年轻人也是如此。选民老龄化还会造成政治僵化。经济增长时，老年人的获利不如年轻人多，因此，他们对刺激经济发展的政策并不感冒，尤其是对地产行业。老龄化社会更难出现“创造性破坏”，这将导致错失巨大的发展机会，阻碍生产力的发展。

注释：

1.Ossify: to become unwilling to consider new ideas or change your behaviour墨守成规; 僵化

2.Creative construction：创造性破坏是由奥地利经济学家约瑟夫·熊彼特提出的重要观点，熊彼特认为,创新就是不断地从内部革新经济结构，即不断破坏旧的，创造新的结构。

详见：

https://wiki.mbalib.com/wiki/%E7%86%8A%E5%BD%BC%E7%89%B9%E7%9A%84%E5%88%9B%E9%80%A0%E6%80%A7%E7%A0%B4%E5%9D%8F%E7%90%86%E8%AE%BA 

All things considered, it is tempting to cast low fertility rates as a crisis to be solved. Many of its underlying causes, though, are in themselves welcome. As people have become richer they have tended to have fewer children. Today they face different trade-offs between work and family, and these are mostly better ones. The populist conservatives who claim low fertility is a sign of society’s failure and call for a return to traditional family values are wrong. More choice is a good thing, and no one owes it to others to bring up children.

综上所述，生育率低下似乎可以被认定为一个需要解决的危机。其实导致生育率走低的原因，也不乏积极因素。随着经济水平的提高，人们更倾向于少生孩子。今天，人们在工作和家庭之间面临的权衡与过去不同，而这往往是好现象。民粹主义保守派认为低生育率是社会失败的标志，呼吁回归传统家庭价值观。其实选择变多是好事，不生养孩子也没有亏欠任何人。

注释：

Trade-off: a balance between two opposing things, that you are willing to accept in order to achieve something 权衡

Liberals’ impulse to encourage more immigration is more noble. But it, too, is a misdiagnosis. Immigration in the rich world today is at a record high, helping individual countries tackle worker shortages. But the global nature of the fertility slump means that, by the middle of the century, the world is likely to face a dearth of young educated workers unless something changes.

自由派则鼓励接收更多移民，这一思路虽然在道德层面更为高尚，但仍然是药不对症。当今富裕国家的移民人数创下历史新高，帮助个别国家解决了劳动力短缺问题。然而，如果全球性的生育率暴跌得不到改善，本世纪中叶，世界范围内受过教育的年轻劳动力将严重不足。

注释：

1.Slump: to suddenly go down in price, value, or number剧降

2.Dearth: a lack of something 缺乏

What might that be? People often tell pollsters they want more children than they have. This gap between aspiration and reality could be in part because would-be parents—who, in effect, subsidise future childless pensioners—cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages or inadequate fertility treatment. Yet even if these are fixed, economic development is still likely to lead to a fall in fertility below the replacement rate. Pro-family policies have a disappointing record. Singapore offers lavish grants, tax rebates and child-care subsidies—but has a fertility rate of 1.0.

如何才能改变这种现状呢？人们在接受调研的时候总会说，他们在生孩子这件事上面是“心有余而力不足”。生育意愿与生育现状之间之所以存在差距，部分是由于准父母们无力负担抚养更多孩子的开销（实际上，以后无孩老人的养老开销也是靠他们贴补），或者是因为住房短缺、生育医疗缺乏等其他政策问题。然而，即使这些问题都被解决了，经济发展仍有可能导致生育率低于人口置换率。鼓励生育的政策鲜有成效。新加坡提供了慷慨的补助、退税和育儿补贴政策，但其生育率仅为1.0。

注释：

subsidise：资助（等于 subsidize）；给……补助金

Unleashing the potential of the world’s poor would ease the shortage of educated young workers without more births. Two-thirds of Chinese children live in the countryside and attend mostly dreadful schools; the same fraction of 25- to 34-year-olds in India have not completed upper secondary education. Africa’s pool of young people will continue to grow for decades. Boosting their skills is desirable in itself, and might also cast more young migrants as innovators in otherwise-stagnant economies. Yet encouraging development is hard—and the sooner places get rich, the sooner they get old.

即使生育率没有显著改善，激活全球贫穷人口的潜力也将有助于改善受教育年轻劳动力的短缺情况。中国三分之二的儿童生活在农村，上的大多是简陋的学校；印度25到34岁的人群中，占同样比例的民众没能完成高中教育；非洲的年轻人数量将在未来几十年内继续增长。提升他们的技能本身就是一件大好事，此外，其他原本经济发展陷入停滞的国家还可以吸纳这些年轻移民，汲取创新原动力。然而，鼓励发展不容易，而且富得早、老得也早。

注释：

1.unleash：If you say that someone or something unleashes a powerful force, feeling, activity, or group, you mean that they suddenly start it or send it somewhere. 释放

2.dreadful：If you say that something is dreadful, you mean that it is very bad or unpleasant, or very poor in quality. 糟糕透顶的 

Eventually, therefore, the world will have to make do with fewer youngsters—and perhaps with a shrinking population. With that in mind, recent advances in ai could not have come at a better time. An über-productive ai-infused economy might find it easy to support a greater number of retired people. Eventually ai may be able to generate ideas by itself, reducing the need for human intelligence. Combined with robotics, ai may also make caring for the elderly less labour-intensive. Such innovations will certainly be in high demand.

因此，世界最终将不得不适应年轻人减少的局面，甚至可能面临人口总数不断下降的情况。鉴于此，人工智能的最新进展恰逢其时。人工智能的应用能够提高生产力，帮助经济体更从容地供养不断增加的退休人口。或许有一天，人工智能还能自主生成创意，从而减少对人类智力的需求。人工智能与机器人技术相结合，或许也能减少照料老年人所需的劳动力投入。对此类创新的需求必将无比旺盛。 

注释：

Infuse: to cause to be permeated with something (such as a principle or quality) that alters usually for the better

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/infuse

If technology does allow humanity to overcome the baby bust, it will fit the historical pattern. Unexpected productivity advances meant that demographic time-bombs, such as the mass starvation predicted by Thomas Malthus in the 18th century, failed to detonate. Fewer babies means less human genius. But that might be a problem human genius can fix.

如若科技的发展真的能助力人类解决低生育率的问题，这也是符合历史规律的。生产力出人意料地突飞猛进，帮助人类规避了许多人口“定时炸弹”的爆炸——比如18世纪托马斯·马尔萨斯 (Thomas Malthus) 所预测的大规模饥荒就没有发生。坏消息：新生儿的减少意味着未来也许不会再有那么多天才。好消息：天才的人类或许有办法应对这一挑战。

注释：

1.demographic time-bombs: The country's population is falling faster than ever before, and it's prompted economists to call the nation a "demographic time bomb" — defined as a place where fertility rates are falling at the same time that longevity is increasing.

Source: 

https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-becoming-demographic-time-bombs-2017-8#:~:text=The%20country's%20population%20is%20falling,time%20that%20longevity%20is%20increasing.

2.Thomas Malthus: 托马斯·罗伯特·马尔萨斯（1766年2月13日—1834年12月23日），英国牧师、人口学家和政治经济学家。他的《人口学原理》至今在社会学和经济学领域仍有争论，但影响深远。在1798年发表的《人口学原理》中，马尔萨斯作出一个著名的预言：人口增长超越食物供应，会导致人均占有食物的减少。

Source: 
https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%89%98%E9%A9%AC%E6%96%AF%C2%B7%E7%BD%97%E4%BC%AF%E7%89%B9%C2%B7%E9%A9%AC%E5%B0%94%E8%90%A8%E6%96%AF

延伸阅读：《专访奥德·盖勒：“不要担心中国的人口下降”》

Source: https://hfri.phbs.pku.edu.cn/2022/twelfth_0815/1894.html

3.Detonate：to explode with sudden violence

Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/detonate

翻译组：

Summerr，Stay hungry, stay foolish

Martina，女，爱电影爱生活，爱金融经济
Vivifang，女，外币债券交易员，满眼都是鲍威尔。

Vic，男，曾在52街和第6大道的投行人，目前的券商兵；市场和历史的学生

校对组：

Claire，进进退退，摇摇摆摆，探索世界ing
风筝，热爱生活 热爱翻译 热爱搞钱 热爱猫咪

Diamond，男，血汗工厂搬砖工，经济学人粉丝