《零边际社会成本》国内外相关点评

20142014 年年 1111 月月 2626 日日 零边际社会成本零边际社会成本 国内外各界的观点点评国内外各界的观点点评 0 The Zero Marginal Cost Society by Jeremy Rifkin 2014 3 21 Machines are about to change what it means to be human According to social theorist Jeremy Rifkin they will undermine our sense of private property take away our jobs and turn us into free agents in a new global sharing economy For good measure they will also destroy capitalism before the middle of the 21st century If you re already thinking that The Zero Marginal Cost Society belongs to the genre of techno futurism that resorts to extreme predictions to attract attention then you d be right The value of this book however doesn t lie in the accuracy of its specific forecasts but rather in the extrapolations of current trends that enable Rifkin to reach them On that measure this is a thought provoking read that pushes some of the most important new technologies to their logical and sometimes scary conclusions Take the machines that underpin the book s central argument They will be self replicating capable of producing their own spare parts and propagating themselves indefinitely They will be powered by an alternative energy source like the sun allowing them to run more or less forever And they will be connected by the coming internet of things a self organising network that will allow them to operate as part of a new pervasive intelligent infrastructure These machines will also be fully automatic and require no human labour to operate As a result they will throw off products at virtually no cost save the minimal one of supplying the basic raw materials This gets to the heart of Rifkin s argument If the marginal cost of producing each additional item falls to essentially nothing then everything becomes free In their pursuit of profit businesses will have irrevocably undermined their own margins capitalism will have destroyed itself But don t despair Rising in its place Rifkin argues will be a civilisation based on a new and more fulfilling communitarianism free of the hang ups that have characterised the materialistic individualism of the late capitalist age Though only 300 or so pages this is sometimes a dense book Besides detours into subjects such as the economic history of the human race from earliest times there are sections that pack in extensive descriptions of some of the key technologies They include 3D printing open source software the internet of things the sharing economy the online courses that are reshaping education and the artificial intelligence enabling machines to replace many types of human labour An extensive bibliography shows that Rifkin has read widely and compressed the results into his latest tome though to be fair to his previous work he has also written entire books himself on several of the themes that converge here That makes this something of a grand unifying theory of his thinking over four decades Three of Rifkin s predictions serve to illustrate both the breadth and the finality of his arguments One is that the sharing economy think letting out your spare room on Airbnb or summoning a car on Uber will overthrow some of the biggest companies on the planet It will only take between 10 and 30 per cent of a particular market to shift to these self help networks argues Rifkin for the thin profit margins of giant companies to shrink to nothing 1 A second prediction is that a decentralised network of alternative energy sources will replace the existing vertically integrated carbon based energy industry It will be made up of prosumers generating their own power and networked together through a smart grid that routes power to where it is needed By the middle of this century says Rifkin 80 per cent of electricity will be generated this way an estimate he claims is conservative A third trend is the elimination of work as the machines take over According to Rifkin workers and the profitmaking companies that employ them can look forward to one last hurrah This will cover the 40 year period it takes to build the world s smart self replicating infrastructure After that it will be the end of history for labour apart from a few people needed to programme and monitor the machines it s all over for the wage slaves and salarymen This all sounds ominous But Rifkin reaches an optimistic conclusion He anticipates a world of plenty where individuals will lead more fulfilling lives than they do now with their material wants taken care of and their days of toil at an end Fulfilment he argues will come from building social capital Freed from the need to earn a living people will get closer to the things that really matter collaborating and empathising with other people There are obvious quibbles to be had with much of this One is that capitalism has proved pretty adaptable so far When markets are commoditised and profits evaporate capitalists have been good at either monopolising industries or finding new sources of value to build on top of the commoditised markets of the past Just because from the blinkered present we can t see what the markets of the future will be it doesn t mean they won t exist A second quibble is with Rifkin s assumptions about how human nature will change to accommodate the new realities he describes After all if everything is free won t that lead to an even greater materialism that wrecks the planet for good The way Rifkin sees it replacing scarcity with abundance will spell the death of materialism When everything is in plentiful supply why gather and hoard Rather than outright ownership the humans who populate his future will be content with access to material goods many of which will be shared just as they are already becoming accustomed to accessing digital goods in a world of infinite supply The millennial generation as he sees it is already hankering for this more collaborative altruistic society He also sees an automatic stabilisation that brings the human race into a permanent equilibrium with the planet As living standards rise birth rates in poorer parts of the world will fall the global population will gradually fall back to a sustainable 5bn though it isn t clear why Rifkin picked this level Alternative futures seem equally plausible Wealth and income inequality could become more accentuated as a winner takes all capitalism takes hold The millions emerging from extreme poverty in developing countries could find themselves in a world of limited opportunity The loss of employment may create a permanent and growing underclass If Rifkin s predictions have value however it is in bringing home the extent of the technologically induced upheaval that may lie ahead How we deal with the consequences is up to us 2 Capitalism is making way for the age of free Jeremy Rifkin 2014 3 31 Karl Marx spent a lifetime trying to uncover what he suspected were the deep contradictions that drove the capitalist system forward but that would one day lead to its demise Although his search revealed a number of important ancillary contradictions his focus on the relationship between the means of production surplus value and alienated labour kept him from unmasking an even deeper paradox at the heart of the system In a capitalist market governed by the invisible hand of supply and demand sellers are constantly searching for new technologies to increase productivity allowing them to reduce the costs of producing their goods and services so they can sell them cheaper than their competitors win over consumers and secure sufficient profit for their investors Marx never asked what might happen if intense global competition some time in the future forced entrepreneurs to introduce ever more efficient technologies accelerating productivity to the point where the marginal cost of production approached zero making goods and services priceless and potentially free putting an end to profit and rendering the market exchange economy obsolete But that s now beginning to happen Over the past decade millions of consumers have become prosumers producing and sharing music videos news and knowledge at near zero marginal cost and nearly for free shrinking revenues in the music newspaper and book publishing industries Some of the US s leading economists are waking up to the paradox Lawrence Summers former US treasury secretary and J Bradford DeLong professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley addressed this in August 2001 in a speech delivered before the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Summers and DeLong focused their presentation on the new communication technologies that were already reducing the marginal per unit cost of producing and sending information goods to near zero They began by acknowledging that the most basic condition for economic efficiency is that price equal marginal cost and further conceded that with information goods the social marginal cost of distribution is close to zero They then went to the crux of the problem If information goods are to be distributed at their marginal cost of production zero they cannot be created and produced by entrepreneurial firms that use revenues obtained from sales to consumers to cover their fixed set up costs companies must be able to anticipate selling their products at a profit to someone Summers and DeLong opposed government subsidies to cover up front costs arguing that they destroy the entrepreneurial spirit Instead they supported short term monopolies to ensure profits declaring that this is the reward needed to spur private enterprise to engage in such innovation They realised the trap this put them in recognising that natural monopoly does not meet the most basic condition for economic efficiency that price equal marginal cost but nonetheless concluded that in the new economic era this might be the only practical way to proceed The pair had come up against the catch 22 of capitalism that was already freeing a growing 3 amount of economic activity from the market and threw up their hands favouring monopolies to artificially keep prices above marginal cost thwarting the ultimate triumph of the invisible hand This final victory if allowed would signal not only capitalism s greatest accomplishment but also its death knell While the notion of near zero marginal cost raised a small flurry of attention 12 years ago as its effects began to be felt in the music and entertainment industry and newspaper and publishing fields the consensus was that it would likely be restricted to information goods with limited effects on the rest of the economy This is no longer the case Now the zero marginal cost revolution is beginning to affect other commercial sectors The precipitating agent is an emerging general purpose technology platform the internet of things The convergence of the communications internet with the fledgling renewable energy internet and automated logistics internet in a smart inter operable internet of things system is giving rise to a third industrial revolution Siemens IBM Cisco and General Electric are among the firms erecting an internet of things infrastructure connecting the world in a global neural network There are now 11 billion sensors connecting devices to the internet of things By 2030 100 trillion sensors will be attached to natural resources production lines warehouses transportation networks the electricity grid and recycling flows and be implanted in homes offices stores and vehicles continually sending big data to the communications energy and logistics internets Anyone will be able to access the internet of things and use big data and analytics to develop predictive algorithms that can speed efficiency dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing and distributing physical things including energy products and services to near zero just as we now do with information goods Summers and DeLong glimpsed that as marginal costs approach zero the competitive paradigm cannot be fully appropriate for organising commercial life but admitted we do not yet know what the right replacement paradigm will be Now we know A new economic paradigm the collaborative commons has leaped onto the world stage as a powerful challenger to the capitalist market A growing legion of prosumers is producing and sharing information not only knowledge news and entertainment but also renewable energy 3D printed products and online college courses at near zero marginal cost on the collaborative commons They are even sharing cars homes clothes and tools entirely bypassing the conventional capitalist market An increasingly streamlined and savvy capitalist system will continue to operate at the edges of the new economy finding sufficient vulnerabilities to exploit primarily as an aggregator of network services and solutions allowing it to flourish as a powerful niche player But it will no longer reign Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring bits and pieces of their lives from capitalist markets to the emerging global collaborative commons operating on a ubiquitous internet of things platform The great economic paradigm shift has begun things economic shift 4 The Zero Marginal Cost Society The capitalist era is passing not quickly but inevitably Rising in its wake is a new global collaborative Commons that will fundamentally transform our way of life Ironically capitalism s demise is not coming at the hands of hostile external forces Rather The Zero Marginal Cost Society argues capitalism is a victim of its own success Intense competition across sectors of the economy is forcing the introduction of ever newer technologies Bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin explains that this competition is boosting productivity to its optimal point where the marginal cost of producing additional units is nearly zero which makes the product essentially free In turn profits are drying up property ownership is becoming meaningless and an economy based on scarcity is giving way to an economy of abundance changing the very nature of society Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to global networked Commons Prosumers are producing their own information entertainment green energy and 3 D printed products at nearly zero marginal cost and sharing them via social media sites rentals redistribution clubs bartering networks and cooperatives Meanwhile students are enrolling in massive open online courses MOOCs that also operate at near zero marginal cost And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses crowdsourcing capital and even creating alternative currencies in the new sharable economy As a result exchange value in the marketplace long the bedrock of our economy is increasingly being replaced by use value on the collaborative Commons In this new era identity is less bound to what one owns and more to what one shares Cooperation replaces self interest access trumps ownership and networking drubs autonomy Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for at least the next half century albeit in an increasingly diminished role it will no longer be the dominant paradigm We are Rifkin says entering a world beyond markets where we are learning how to live together collaboratively and sustainably in an increasingly interdependent global Commons rifkin K 9781137278463 The Zero Marginal Cost Society In The Zero Marginal Cost Society New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin describes how the emerging Internet of Things is speeding us to an era of nearly free goods and services precipitating the meteoric rise of a global Collaborative Commons and the eclipse of capitalism Rifkin uncovers a paradox at the heart of capitalism that has propelled it to greatness but is now taking it to its death the inherent entrepreneurial dynamism of competitive markets that drives productivity up and marginal costs down enabling businesses to reduce the price of their goods and services in order to win over consumers and market share Marginal cost is the cost of 5 producing additional units of a good or service if fixed costs are not counted While economists have always welcomed a reduction in marginal cost they never anticipated the possibility of a technological revolution that might bring marginal costs to near zero making goods and services priceless nearly free and abundant and no longer subject to market forces Now a formidable new technology infrastructure the Internet of things IoT is emerging with the potential of pushing large segments of economic life to near zero marginal cost in the years ahead Rifkin describes how the Communication Internet is converging with a nascent Energy Internet and Logistics Internet to create a new technology platform that connects everything and everyone Billions of sensors are being attached to natural resources production lines the electricity grid logistics networks recycling flows and implanted in homes offices stores vehicles and even human beings feeding Big Data into an IoT global neural network Prosumers can connect to the network and use Big Data analytics and algorithms to accelerate efficiency dramatically increase productivity and lower the marginal cost of producing and sharing a wide range of products and services to near zero just like they now do with information goods The plummeting of marginal costs is spawning a hybrid economy part capitalist market and part Collaborative Commons with far reaching implications for society according to Rifkin Hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives to the global Collaborative Commons Prosumers are plugging into the fledgling IoT and making and sharing their own information entertainment green energy and 3D printed products at near zero marginal cost They are also sharing cars homes clothes and other items via social media sites rentals redistribution clubs and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost Students