英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(10)（在线收听）

Consider the changing political and economic geography of nation states over the past 40 years. The statistics that dominate political debate are largely national in character: poverty levels, unemployment, GDP, net migration. But the geography of capitalism has been pulling in somewhat different directions. Plainly globalisation has not rendered geography irrelevant. In many cases it has made the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.

想想过去40年里各民族国家政治和经济地理的变化。在政治辩论中占主导地位的统计数据在很大程度上是全国性的：贫困水平、失业率、GDP、净移民。但资本主义的地理位置却在向不同的方向发展，显然，全球化并没有让地理位置变得无关紧要，很多情况下它反而加大了位置在经济活动中的重要性，加剧了成功地区(如伦敦或旧金山)和欠成功地区(如英格兰东北部或美国“锈带”地区)之间的不平等。其中所涉及的主要地理单位也不再是民族国家，而是那些兴衰起伏的城市、地区或者单个城市社区。

The Enlightenment ideal of the nation as a single community, bound together by a common measurement framework, is harder and harder to sustain. If you live in one of the towns in the Welsh valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians talking of how "the economy" is "doing well" are likely to breed additional resentment. From that standpoint, the term "GDP" fails to capture anything meaningful or credible.

启蒙运动理想中的国家是一个由共同度量框架连接在一起的单一社区，而这种理想越来越难以维持。威尔士山谷里的城镇曾经依靠钢铁制造业和采矿业供人们谋生，如果你住在那里的一个城镇上，谈论“经济”如何“表现良好”的政治家可能会招致更多不满。从这一点来看，“GDP”一词并不能准确反映任何有意义或可信的东西。

When macroeconomics is used to make a political argument, this implies that the losses in one part of the country are offset by gains somewhere else. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians. Immigration may be good for the economy overall, but this does not mean that there are no local costs at all. So when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose? On what principle of give and take is that justified?

当宏观经济学被用来进行政治辩论时，说明这个国家某一地区的损失和其它地方的收益中和了。花里胡哨的国家指标(比如GDP和通胀)掩盖了各国政客不常讨论的局部收益和损失。移民从整体上来说可能有益，但并不是说不需要付出丝毫代价。当政客们用国家指标来证明自己的论点时，他们含蓄地假定选民都是爱国的，都有某种相互奉献的精神：这次可能是受损方，下次可能就是受益方。但是，如果形势从未逆转呢？如果每次都是同一个城市或地区获胜、其它城市或地区失败呢？给予和索取应当遵循什么样的原则才合乎情理呢？

In Europe, the currency union has exacerbated this problem. The indicators that matter to the European Central Bank (ECB), for example, are those representing half a billion people. The ECB is concerned with the inflation or unemployment rate across the eurozone as if it were a single homogeneous territory, at the same time as the economic fate of European citizens is splintering in different directions, depending on which region, city or neighbourhood they happen to live in. Official knowledge becomes ever more abstracted from lived experience, until that knowledge simply ceases to be relevant or credible.

在欧洲，货币同盟加剧了这一问题。例如，对欧洲中央银行(ECB)来说，那些代表5亿人口的指标才是重要的指标。欧洲央行关心的是整个欧元区的通胀或失业率，就好像它是一个单一区域。与此同时，欧洲公民的经济命运正因他们恰好住在哪个地区、城市或者社区而分裂成不同的方向。官方知识从生活经验中变得越来越抽象，直到这种知识不再相关或可信。