????這幾天好像所有人都在對資本主義品頭論足。

????上周，法國經濟學家托馬斯?皮凱蒂赴紐約和華盛頓宣傳自己的大部頭新作《21世紀的資本主義》（Capital in the Twenty First Century）。這本書通過詳細的分析證明，在資本主義社會，貧富差距以及財富集中在少數人手里是一種常態，而不是個別現象。

????政治顧問和社會理論學家杰里米?里夫金最近出版的作品《零邊際成本社會》（The Zero Marginal Cost Society）探討的也是類似問題，只是這本書不是那么冷靜，有時甚至過于樂觀。里夫金在書中強調，資本主義似乎正在斷送自己的前程。

????里夫金指出，私營市場追逐效率和生產率，導致我們越發靠近這樣一種態勢，那就是幾乎所有產品的邊際成本都會一步步地接近于零。

????里夫金在書中做了這樣的設想：工廠完全由機器人負責運營，使用風能或太陽能這樣的可再生能源；制造出來的產品由無人車輛運送，這些車輛同樣使用可再生能源。更有甚者，這些產品可能都不需要運輸——借助3D打印機，人們在家里或者幾個街區之外就能進行生產。

????說到我們的家，在里夫金的新世界里，人們用來修建住宅的很可能是3D打印機就地取材所制造的材料，而且修建時間之短前所未有，從而節省了大量的建材運輸費用。里夫金提到，麻省理工（MIT）的一座實驗室正在開發“不用人力”就能在一天內建起房屋構架的技術。他說，同樣的構架“可能需要整整一支建筑隊伍工作一個月。”

????大家應該已經想到，這樣的住宅將越來越多地使用清潔的可再生能源，其中安裝的傳感器數量之多將超過大家的想象；所有數據都將匯集到智能電網中，這樣住宅就能知道人們在什么時候需要多少電力，以及哪些東西需要維修。

????構建這樣一個高科技烏托邦的途徑就是把里夫金所說的通信互聯網（怎樣共享信息）、能源互聯網（怎樣共享能源需求信息以及怎樣分配能源）和物流互聯網（怎樣制造并運送產品）融合起來，這些網絡就是人們所說的物聯網。

????的確，打造這樣一個系統的初始成本可能會非常高。但里夫金認為，建成并投入運行后，這個系統所帶來的益處將從根本上改變我們的經濟秩序。他寫道：“物聯網已經讓生產率達到了以接近于零的邊際成本提供諸多產品和服務的水平，這些產品和服務實際上已經處于免費狀態。由此產生的結果是，公司利潤開始枯竭，產權開始弱化，富裕經濟開始慢慢取代以稀有性為基礎的經濟。”

????但實際情況是，美國公司的利潤正在上升，無論用絕對水平，還是用占國民收入的比例來衡量都是如此。當然，在科技的顛覆之下，有些行業正在苦苦掙扎（比如幾乎整個媒體行業）。同時，埃克森（Exxon）和雪佛龍（Chevron）等大型能源企業在尋找和開發新化石燃料資源方面遇到的高成本阻力讓人望而卻步。但總的來說，企業都在賺錢，而且賺的相當多。

????資本主義和里夫金的世界有什么契合點呢？他的答案是：“在即將到來的時代，隨著新生代越來越認同協作主義（Collaboratism），資本主義和社會主義都將失去主導社會的能力。”

????為了闡釋我們怎樣才能邁向這個經濟新篇章，《零邊際成本社會》帶著讀者在歷史中暢游了一番，從歐洲的封建社會到亞當?斯密和卡爾?馬克思，再到蒸汽、鋼鐵和鐵路的興起，然后是石油時代。里夫金指出，過去幾百年中，建立工業秩序的成本如此之高，以至于我們需要通用電氣（General Electric）、福特汽車（Ford）和美國電話電報公司（AT&T）這樣的大型上市公司。實現社會電氣化，用電話和鐵路把人們聯系在一起，以及讓普通民眾用上汽車，這些都是規模極為宏大的項目。過去，集權型企業可以勝任這項任務。但里夫金認為，今天，這些公司正在變得不那么舉足輕重。

????對里夫金來說，我們正在進入社會要素的時代；就消費者而言，和只是獲得物品相比，物品所有權已經不再處于那么核心的位置。他指出，汽車共享網站Zipcar、租房網站Airbnb和Courchsurfing.com以及兒童玩具交換網站Baby Plays和Spark Box Toys都是這方面的先驅。把這樣的行為延伸到其他經濟領域后，比如點對點的可再生能源共享以及通過眾籌方式獲得個人和企業貸款，所有公司的產品和服務銷量可能很快就會大幅下降，而他們的客戶甚至會減少得更厲害。衡量這樣的經濟是否成功也許不能再用GDP和利潤這樣的指標。

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

????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.

????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.

????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.

????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.

????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."

????That home will be powered by -- you guessed it -- increasingly cheap renewable energy, and it will be stocked with more sensors than you can imagine, all feeding data into a smart grid, so your house knows how much energy you need and when, and what needs to be repaired.

????This is a technological utopia brought to you by the convergence of what Rifkin calls the Communications Internet (how information is shared), the Energy Internet (how energy needs are shared and energy itself is distributed), and the Logistics Internet (how products are built and delivered), all equaling the so-called Internet of Things.

????Granted, the initial cost of building such a system will be substantial. But once it's up and running, Rifkin argues, the benefits will fundamentally reshape our economic order. "The Internet of Things is already boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them practically free," Rifkin writes. "The result is corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and an economy based on scarcity is slowly giving way to an economy of abundance."

????Actually, corporate profits in the U.S. are increasing, both in absolute terms and as a portion of national income. Sure, some industries are struggling against the waves of technological disruption (e.g. almost the entire media sector). And then there are energy giants like Exxon and Chevron, which are facing daunting, expensive headwinds in the search for and cultivation of additional sources of fossil fuel. But businesses overall are making money, and quite a bit of it.

????Where does capitalism fit into Rifkin's world? "In the coming era," he says, "both capitalism and socialism will lose their once-dominant hold over society, as a new generation increasingly identifies with Collaboratism."

????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.

????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.