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

　　To explain how we reached this novel economic moment, The Zero Marginal Cost Society takes readers on a grand historical tour, from feudal Europe, to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, to the rise of steam, steel, and railroads, and the oil age. Rifkin argues that creating the industrial order of the past few centuries was so expensive that it required massive, publicly held companies like General Electric, Ford, and AT&T. Electrifying society, connecting them by phone and rail, and putting the masses behind the wheel of a car were wildly ambitious projects. Centralized corporations were up to this task. Today, Rifkin argues, those companies are becoming less relevant.

　　为了阐释我们怎样才能迈向这个经济新篇章，《零边际成本社会》带着读者在历史中畅游了一番，从欧洲的封建社会到亚当•斯密和卡尔•马克思，再到蒸汽、钢铁和铁路的兴起，然后是石油时代。里夫金指出，过去几百年中，建立工业秩序的成本如此之高，以至于我们需要通用电气(General Electric)、福特汽车(Ford)和美国电话电报公司(AT&T)这样的大型上市公司。实现社会电气化，用电话和铁路把人们联系在一起，以及让普通民众用上汽车，这些都是规模极为宏大的项目。过去，集权型企业可以胜任这项任务。但里夫金认为，今天，这些公司正在变得不那么举足轻重。

　　To Rifkin, we are entering the age of the social commons, where ownership of goods is less essential to consumers than merely having access to them, pointing to car sharing services like Zipcar, apartment sharing sites like Airbnb and Courchsurfing.com, and children's toy exchanges like Baby Plays and Spark Box Toys as pioneers. Expand this kind of behavior to other parts of the economy -- peer-to-peer renewable energy sharing and crowdfunded personal and business loans, for example -- and all sorts of companies may soon end up selling far fewer goods and services to even fewer people. You would need to put aside measurements like GDP and profits to gauge the success of such an economy.

　　对里夫金来说，我们正在进入社会要素的时代;就消费者而言，和只是获得物品相比，物品所有权已经不再处于那么核心的位置。他指出，汽车共享网站Zipcar、租房网站Airbnb和Courchsurfing.com以及儿童玩具交换网站Baby Plays和Spark Box Toys都是这方面的先驱。把这样的行为延伸到其他经济领域后，比如点对点的可再生能源共享以及通过众筹方式获得个人和企业贷款，所有公司的产品和服务销量可能很快就会大幅下降，而他们的客户甚至会减少得更厉害。衡量这样的经济是否成功也许不能再用GDP和利润这样的指标。

　　There are, of course, hitches to this master plan. Rifkin himself admits several of them. To start, how can you deliver all the wonders of an "Internet of Things society" when, for example, a little less than 30% of the U.S. population has a fixed broadband Internet subscription? Rifkin praises incipient efforts to build a nationwide, free Wi-Fi network in the U.S., but such proposals are in their infancy and will likely face opposition from broadband behemoths like Time Warner Cable and Comcast, two companies that will gain even more control of the market if their proposed merger goes forward.

　　当然，这个宏伟计划也面临着一些障碍。里夫金自己也承认存在这样的不利因素。比如，首先一点，在只有将近30%的美国人能用上宽带的情况下，怎么创造出“物联网社会”的所有这些奇迹呢?里夫金对在美国建立全国免费无线Wi-Fi网络的初步努力表示赞赏，但这样的方案才刚刚起步，而且时代华纳有线(Time Warner Cable)和康卡斯特(Comcast)这样的宽带市场巨无霸可能会出面阻挠——如果这两家公司的合并计划付诸实施，它们对市场的控制力就会进一步加强。

本文关键字: 资本主义正走向自毁的不归路上?