The Curse of Machinery
第7章
机器之祸
AMONG THE MOST viable of all economic delusions is the belief that machines on net balance create unemployment. Destroyed a thousand times, it has risen a thousand times out of its own ashes as hardy and vigorous as ever. Whenever there is long-continued mass unemployment, machines get the blame anew. This fallacy is still the basis of many labor union practices. The public tolerates these practices because it either believes at bottom that the unions are right, or is too confused to see just why they are wrong.
在所有的经济学谬论中，相信机器在总体上导致失业最为阴魂不散。这种谬论曾经被无数次驳倒过，但总能死灰复燃，并且和以往一样张狂。每当出现长时期失业潮的时候，机器总是被指责为造成失业的罪魁祸首。这一谬论仍然是许多工会组织开展实际运动的理论基础。而公众则普遍容忍这些做法，要么认为工会做得对，要么是稀里糊涂，搞不清工会错在哪里。
The belief that machines cause unemployment, when held with any logical consistency, leads to preposterous conclusions. Not only must we be causing unemployment with every technological improvement we make today, but primitive man must have started causing it with the first efforts he made to save himself from needless toil and sweat.
所有那些机器导致人们失业的想法，若讲一点点逻辑上的一致性，必然都会得出荒谬的结论：不但我们今天的每一项技术进步都会带来失业，就连原始人动心起念摆脱无谓的蛮干时，就已经开始造成自己的失业了。
To go no further back, let us turn to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. The first chapter of this remarkable book is called “Of the Division of Labor,” and on the second page of this first chapter the author tells us that a workman unacquainted with the use of machinery employed in pin-making “could scarce make one pin a day, and certainly could not make twenty,” but with the use of this machinery he can make 4,800 pins a day. So already, alas, in Adam Smith’s time, machinery had thrown from 240 to 4,800 pin-makers out of work for every one it kept. In the pin-making industry there was already, if machines merely throw men out of jobs, 99.98 percent unemployment. Could things be blacker?
也不必追溯那么遥远。让我们看一下1776年出版的亚当•斯密的《国富论》。这本巨著的第一章叫做“论分工”，在这一章的第二页上，作者给我们举了个饰针制造业的例子。一个劳工，如果不知道如何使用制造饰针的机器，“也许一天也做不出1枚饰针，要做20枚，就绝无可能了”。但是使用机器，他一天能做4 800枚饰针。这样看来，很不幸，在亚当•斯密时代，每出现一个操作机器的劳工，就得有240到4 800名做饰针的劳工丢掉饭碗。如果机器只会让人失业的话，那么饰针制造业的失业率就已经有了99.98%，还有什么比这更糟的吗？
Things could be blacker, for the Industrial Revolution was just in its infancy. Let us look at some of the incidents and aspects of that revolution. Let us see, for example, what happened in the stocking industry. New stocking frames as they were introduced were destroyed by the handicraft workmen (over 1000 in a single riot), houses were burned, the inventors were threatened and obliged to flee for their lives, and order was not finally restored until the military had been called out and the leading rioters had been either transported or hanged.
的确还有更糟的，毕竟工业革命那时正处于萌芽期。让我们来看看那场革命中的一些事件的方方面面。以针织袜业为例，新织袜机刚投入使用时就遭到了手工工人的破坏（单单一次暴动，被毁掉的机器就超过1 000台），厂房被烧毁，机器发明者们受到威胁而被迫逃命。直到最后出动了军队，并把暴动领袖们流放或绞死以后，秩序才得以恢复。
Now it is important to bear in mind that insofar as the rioters were thinking of their own immediate or even longer futures their opposition to the machine was rational. For William Felkin, in his History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures (1867), tells us (though the statement seems implausible) that the larger part of the 50,000 English stocking knitters and their families did not fully emerge from the hunger and misery entailed by the introduction of the machine for the next forty years. But insofar as the rioters believed, as most of them undoubtedly did, that the machine was permanently displacing men, they were mistaken, for before the end of the nineteenth century the stocking industry was employing at least a hundred men for every man it employed at the beginning of the century.
现在，我们应该记住，从暴动者们的角度来看，想到他们的明天乃至于更远的将来，他们抵制机器的行动是理性的。威廉•费尔金（William Felkin）在《机器针织和花边织制商历史》（History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery Manufactures；1867年）中告诉我们（尽管他的陈述听上去令人难以置信），在采用机器后的40年里，英格兰的50 000名做针织长袜的手工工人和他们的家庭，大多数最终都没能从饥寒交迫的悲惨境地中解脱出来。然而，暴动者们相信，无疑地他们中大部分持此看法，机器会不断地取代人力，他们却是错的，因为到了19世纪末，针织袜业所雇用的劳工人数，比该世纪初的时候反而增长了至少100倍。
Arkwright invented his cotton-spinning machinery in 1760. At that time it was estimated that there were in England 5,200 spinners using spinning wheels, and 2,700 weavers—in all, 7,900 persons engaged in the production of cotton textiles. The introduction of Arkwright’s invention was opposed on the ground that it threatened the livelihood of the workers, and the opposition had to be put down by force. Yet in 1787—twenty-seven years after the invention appeared—a parliamentary inquiry showed that the number of persons actually engaged in the spinning and weaving of cotton had risen from 7,900 to 320,000, an increase of 4,400 percent.
阿克赖特（Arkwright）在1760年发明了棉纺机。据估计，当时在英格兰有5 200名使用纺车的纺纱工，以及2 700名织布工——总共有7 900人从事棉纺织品的生产。阿克赖特的发明在推广应用时遭到了抵制，理由是它将威胁到棉纺工人的生计，最后，当局只好动用武力来平息抵制浪潮。然而到了1787年，也就是阿克赖特的发明问世后的第27个年头，议会的一项调查表明，实际从事棉纺织业的人数，从7 900人增加到32万人，增加了4 400%。
If the reader will consult such a book as Recent Economic Changes, by David A. Wells, published in 1889, he will find passages that, except for the dates and absolute amounts involved, might have been written by our technophobes of today. Let me quote a few:
要是读者们有机会去翻一翻1889年版戴维•韦尔斯（David A. Wells）所著的《近来的经济变革》（Recent Economic Changes），便会发现其中一些章节，只要把日期和数字改一改，就跟今天那些科技恐惧症患者所写文字如出一辙。让我们来看看其中几段：
During the ten years from 1870 to 1880, inclusive, the British mercantile marine increased its movement, in the matter of foreign entries and clearances alone, to the extent of 22,000,000 tons… yet the number of men who were employed in effecting this great movement had decreased in 1880, as compared with 1870, to the extent of about three thousand (2,990 exactly). What did it? The introduction of steam-hoisting machines and grain elevators upon the wharves and docks, the employment of steam power, etc….
从1870年到1880年这十年间，包括首尾两年，英国商船运量增加，光是进出口清关吨数就增至2 200万吨……然而，从事于这一巨大装卸工作量的人员人数，与1870年相比，1880年雇用的人数只剩下约3 000人（准确数字是2 990人）。这是怎么回事呢？原来，各个码头和船坞都安装了蒸汽吊装机和谷物提升机、采用蒸汽动力等等……
In 1873 Bessemer steel in England, where its price had not been
enhanced by protective duties, commanded $80 per ton; in 1886 it was
profitably manufactured and sold in the same country for less than $20
per ton. Within the same time the annual production capacity of a
Bessemer converter has been increased fourfold, with no increase but
rather a diminution of the involved labor.
1873年，贝塞麦转炉（Bessemer）生产的钢材在英格兰能卖到每吨80美元，这个价格并不是因保护性关税所形成的高价。而到了1886年，还是在英格兰，每吨的售价不到20美元，产销仍有利可图。同期，贝塞麦转炉的年产能翻了四番，而所用的人工比从前不增反降。
The power capacity already being exerted by the steam engines of the
world in existence and working in the year 1887 has been estimated by
the Bureau of Statistics at Berlin as equivalent to that of 200,000,000
horses, representing approximately 1,000,000,000 men; or at least three
times the working population of the earth….
根据柏林统计局估计，1887年在全世界投入使用的蒸汽机的动力总和，大约相当于2亿匹马的力量，相当于约10亿人的劳动力；至少是全球劳动人口的总和的三倍……
One would think that this last figure would have caused Mr. Wells to
pause, and wonder why there was any employment left in the world of
1889 at all; but he merely concluded, with restrained pessimism, that
“under such circumstances industrial overproduction . . . may become
chronic.”
我们可以想象，最后得出的这些数据应该会让韦尔斯先生暂时放下手中的笔，琢磨琢磨为什么到1889年这个世界上竟然还有人有工作可做。但他只以审慎地悲观态度作了这样的结论：“照此下去，工业生产过剩……可能会成为一种长期的现象。”
In the depression of 1932, the game of blaming unemployment on the machines started all over again. Within a few months the doctrines of a group calling themselves the Technocrats had spread through the country like a forest fire. I shall not weary the reader with a recital of the fantastic figures put forward by this group or with corrections to show what the real facts were. It is enough to say that the Technocrats returned to the error in all its native purity that machines permanently displace men—except that, in their ignorance, they presented this error as a new and revolutionary discovery of their own. It was simply one more illustration of Santayana’s aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
在经济大萧条期间的1932年，把失业问题归罪到机器头上的把戏再次上演。短短几个月内，一群自称技术统治论者的人提出的理论象森林大火一样席卷全美。我不打算在这里复述这些人罗列的怪诞数字，或是修正其数据而揭示实情来使读者为此疲倦发腻。读者们只需要知道技术统治论者鼓吹机器会永远取代人力是老调重弹就够了，而这些人竟然无知地以为这个论调是他们新创的革命性的真知灼见，再次印证了作家乔治•桑塔亚纳（George Santayana）那句格言——“忘记历史，就意味着重蹈覆辙”。
The Technocrats were finally laughed out of existence; but their doctrine, which preceded them, lingers on. It is reflected in hundreds of make-work rules and featherbed practices by labor unions; and these rules and practices are tolerated and even approved because of the confusion on this point in the public mind.
技术统治论者最终在人们的嘲笑声中销声匿迹；但是在他们之前早已存在的信条却阴魂不散。它反应在成百上千的工会所设计创造的制造工作机会的规定及闲职就业的实践中，此类规定与实践之所以得到容忍乃至于赞同，是因为公众还没有弄清楚这个问题。
Testifying on behalf of the United States Department of Justice before the Temporary National Economic Committee (better known as the TNEC) in March 1941, Corwin Edwards cited innumerable examples of such practices. The electrical union in New York City was charged with refusal to install electrical equipment made outside of New York State unless the equipment was disassembled and reassembled at the job site. In Houston, Texas, master plumbers and the plumbing union agreed that piping prefabricated for installation would be installed by the union only if the thread were cut off one end of the pipe and new thread were cut at the job site. Various locals of the painters’ union imposed restrictions on the use of sprayguns, restrictions in many cases designed merely to make work by requiring the slower process of applying paint with a brush. A local of the teamsters’ union required that every truck entering the New York metropolitan area have a local driver in addition to the driver already employed. In various cities the electrical union required that if any temporary light or power was to be used on a construction job there must be a full-time maintenance electrician, who should not be permitted to do any electrical construction work. This rule, according to Mr. Edwards, “often involves the hiring of a man who spends his day reading or playing solitaire and does nothing except throw a switch at the beginning and end of the day.”
1941年3月，科温•爱德华（Corwin Edwards）代表美国司法部在美国临时经济委员会（TNEC）作证时，围绕这类实践列举了大量实例。例如，纽约市的电气工会被指控拒绝安装纽约州以外的企业生产的电气设备，除非那些设备在安装现场拆解后重新组装才行。在得克萨斯州的休斯敦，管工工会要求，在施工现场，预制管道一端的螺纹必须锯掉，重新切削螺纹，才准安装。各地油漆工会的分会则纷纷限制使用油漆喷枪，只准用效率低下的油漆刷，主要是为了“制造工作机会”。美国卡车司机工会的一个分会，要求进入纽约市区的每一辆卡车，除了原来开车的司机，还必须多雇用一名当地的司机。许多城市的电气工会要求，建筑工地如果要使用临时照明或临时用电，必须雇用一名全职的维修电工，但不准安排这个电工参与电气施工工作。爱德华先生说，根据这个规定，建筑工地“往往雇用一名终日无所事事的人，整天翻报纸、玩纸牌，全部的工作只是在上下班时拨一下电源开关”。
One could go on to cite such make-work practices in many other fields. In the railroad industry, the unions insist that firemen be employed on types of locomotives that do not need them. In the theaters unions insist on the use of scene shifters even in plays in which no scenery is used. The musicians’ union required so-called stand-in musicians or even whole orchestras to be employed in many cases where only phonograph records were needed.
在其他许多领域，也都存在这种凭空“制造工作机会”的做法。在铁路行业，工会坚持在那些不需要司炉的火车机车上雇用司炉。在戏剧业，工会坚决要求说，即使在用不上布景的剧目中，也必须雇用布景装拆工人。音乐家联合会要求在可以放唱片的场合雇用所谓的占位音乐家，或甚至整团的占位管弦乐队。
By 1961 there was no sign that the fallacy had died. Not only union leaders but government officials talked solemnly of “automation” as a major cause of unemployment. Automation was discussed as if it were something entirely new in the world. It was in fact merely a new name for continued technological advance and further progress in labor-saving equipment.
到了1961年，仍然没有迹象表明这种谬误已经消亡。不但工会领袖，连政府官员也郑重地把“自动化”当作失业问题的一个主要原因。人们谈到自动化，就好像那是一个全新的事物。其实，它不过是持续的科技进步和省力设备不断改进后的新名称而已。
（未完待续）