双语新闻：资本主义正走向自毁的不归路上?

2014-05-09 15:05:18来源：可可英语

　　Capitalism seems to be getting it from all sides these days.

　　这几天好像所有人都在对资本主义品头论足。

　　French economist Thomas Piketty made the rounds in New York and Washington, D.C. last week to promote his new, widely praised tome, Capital in the Twenty First Century, an exhaustive analysis that argues that inequality and the concentration of wealth among the few are the norm, rather than the exception, within capitalist societies.

　　上周，法国经济学家托马斯•皮凯蒂赴纽约和华盛顿宣传自己的大部头新作《21世纪的资本主义》(Capital in the Twenty First Century)。这本书通过详细的分析证明，在资本主义社会，贫富差距以及财富集中在少数人手里是一种常态，而不是个别现象。

　　In a less sobering -- at times, overoptimistic -- side of a similar coin, political consultant and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin's recently published The Zero Marginal Cost Society highlights a capitalism that seems to be running itself out of business.

　　政治顾问和社会理论学家杰里米•里夫金最近出版的作品《零边际成本社会》(The Zero Marginal Cost Society)探讨的也是类似问题，只是这本书不是那么冷静，有时甚至过于乐观。里夫金在书中强调，资本主义似乎正在断送自己的前程。

　　Rifkin argues that the private market's drive for efficiency and productivity has brought us ever closer to a world in which the marginal cost to produce just about everything will inch closer and closer to zero.

　　里夫金指出，私营市场追逐效率和生产率，导致我们越发靠近这样一种态势，那就是几乎所有产品的边际成本都会一步步地接近于零。

　　Picture factories run entirely by robots, powered by renewable energy sources like wind and the sun, creating products delivered by driverless vehicles, also run on renewable energy. Maybe these products won't even need to make any kind of journey at all. Perhaps they can simply be produced at your home or a few blocks away with the help of a 3-D printer.

　　里夫金在书中做了这样的设想：工厂完全由机器人负责运营，使用风能或太阳能这样的可再生能源;制造出来的产品由无人车辆运送，这些车辆同样使用可再生能源。更有甚者，这些产品可能都不需要运输——借助3D打印机，人们在家里或者几个街区之外就能进行生产。

　　Speaking of your home, in Rifkin's new world, your next one may very well be built by locally generated, 3-D-printed materials, in record time, removing the considerable expense of transporting construction goods. Rifkin cites an MIT lab that is working to develop a house frame in a single day "with virtually no human labor." An equivalent frame, Rifkin says, "would take an entire construction crew a month to put up."

　　说到我们的家，在里夫金的新世界里，人们用来修建住宅的很可能是3D打印机就地取材所制造的材料，而且修建时间之短前所未有，从而节省了大量的建材运输费用。里夫金提到，麻省理工(MIT)的一座实验室正在开发“不用人力”就能在一天内建起房屋构架的技术。他说，同样的构架“可能需要整整一支建筑队伍工作一个月。”

本文关键字: 资本主义正走向自毁的不归路上?