Everyone will have a lot of confusion, a lot of anxiety, the inner volume is just an expression, it is even difficult to define.
——Wu Xiaobo
Finishing / Ba Jiu Ling
Have you been swept up lately?
The verb roll was born out of "inner volume". It is a vocabulary that was born from biological research more than 300 years ago and was substituted into the economic field in the last century.
In 2020, it became a buzzword in China's online society.
In simple terms, inner volume refers to a state of vicious internal competition. Behind its popularity is actually the huge historical changes in the country, industry, and personal life, as well as the anxiety and uneasiness that people produce when dealing with this change.
In the third dialogue of "Wu Chat" on May 11, Teacher Wu, economist He Fan and historian Jiang Peng analyzed the internal volume from the perspective of economics and history respectively.
After listening to their conversation, we will find that some volumes exist, and some volumes are actually a false proposition.
Of course, "Wu Chat" in the words of Teacher Wu, is a dialogue program that often pulls and pulls on the topic, this text only sorts out the "no off-topic" part, if you are interested in the entire nearly 3 hours of dialogue, you can buy "Hear Wu Xiaobo Every Day" to get the complete dialogue audio.
The following is the essence of the text of the third "Talk about the Inner Volume of This Era" of "Wu Chat", and the chat combination: Wu Xiaobo & He Fan & Jiang Peng.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="23" >01, does China have an inner volume? </h1>
Wu Xiaobo: Actually, whether you look at history (referring to Jiang Peng), the concern of your generation of historians for history, including He Fan as an economist, is now doing research through fieldwork, in fact, I think it is all related to the inner volume.
If we look at the definition of the inner volume, it is defined under a certain development model, because the efficiency of resource utilization decreases, and people or production efficiency enters a high input and low output situation.
If we talk about internal volumes, it may involve, for example, the involution of people, the involution of enterprise organizations, and the involution of industries, including the involution of state reform.
In fact, I think what you (referring to He Fan) is actually doing now is to break through the original academic boundaries, in fact, to get rid of the model of the inner volume, like your thinking (referring to Jiang Peng) is the same, so how to get out of the inner volume of people?
He Fan: The word inner volume is all stirred up by media people.
Wu Xiaobo: Internet buzzwords.
He Fan: Originally, when Huang Zongzhi first talked about involution, he also talked very simply, that is, the ratio of population to land. Especially in China's Jiangnan region and north China, the population is particularly large, and the land is particularly small In the end, it fell into the situation of "high input and low output".
Wu Xiaobo: Huang did a comparative study in the past, they compared the textile industry in the London area of the United Kingdom, and finally broke through the inner volume through technological change
He Fan: But all models have a prerequisite, right? It depends。
If we look at it, it is a place where the ratio of population to land is particularly unfavorable, and it does not take place For example, in Wenzhou, if it is rolled inside, it will be rolled to death. It forces you to go outside, including places like Yiwu.
Wu Xiaobo: Yes, their research also mentioned why the steam engine was later invented in Britain. Because coal in England is wet coal and needs to be dehumidified, so it has to be done mechanically, by power.
He Fan: Because of the lack of resources, it is true that resources will affect production technology and production relations, but it is true that it will definitely lead to internal volumes due to the scarcity of such resources.
When you cross a certain threshold, it may be because of the scarcity of resources that people are forced to break through this boundary, especially in China, which is very different. So I don't think there's an inner roll in China.
I think the inner volume is your inner volume. (Hahahaha)
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="59" >02, typical involution domain</h1>
Jiang Peng: Let me tell you a happy thing.
I don't think my generation has caught up with academics.
Buying a house did not catch up, investment did not catch up, but there was one I caught up, not rolled up, I have a teaching position at Fudan University. Almost the last batch of PhDs graduated from the university to be able to teach at the university Just because it was so early, there was this opportunity. Some of the people who came to the job later were from Oxford University, some from the University of Tokyo and Princeton, and it was not so easy for them to get Fudan's teaching positions.
In fact, from the perspective of job search, this is also a typical internal volume.
He Fan: If I correct it, there are some places where involution is still taking place. Academia is a typical inner volume, and Internet manufacturers and financial circles are typical internal volumes.
Wu Xiaobo: Before I came to do this show, there was a girl who talked about the inner volume, education had the inner volume, and the recent TV series called "Little Shede" talked about "chicken baby". She said that there is a plot in it, primary school students to take a qualification, need to fight the ability of parents, said that parents have the ability to have, no ability to have, this is the inner volume.
He Fan: When you draw the ground as a prison, you will definitely have an inner scroll. For example, internet manufacturers, it turns out that they are all start-ups, go there can learn a lot of things, mix well not to say, mix well there is equity. But now go, it's basically a screw on an assembly line, and it's rolled inward.
Jiang Peng: Teacher He's meaning, why didn't you come to Fudan to teach after you graduated from Oxford, you can jump out of the thinking mode.
Wu Xiaobo: Where did he go to teach?
Jiang Peng: He can not teach. Why does he have to teach? I went on teaching because I was the beneficiary of the process, and they were rolled out, right?
Wu Xiaobo: So you are the initiator of the inner scroll. (hahahahahahaha)
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="87" >03, no inner volume story</h1>
He Fan: Let me tell you one more thing that doesn't have an inner volume I just came back from Tongxiang, and then I visited a company in Tongxiang called Tongkun, a chemical fiber company, and I went to interview the workers on the production line, and I found that they were basically local students, basically didn't go to college, some were veterans, some may have gone to vocational and technical schools.
They all feel that their lives are very comfortable, their incomes are very stable, after all, they are listed companies; housing prices do not need to be considered, and they originally have homesteads and houses in the countryside. If Tongxiang people buy a house, it is a purpose - only buy school district houses. It's not that hard, you should have bought it a long time ago, and then the car was already bought.
It occurred to me that the book "Our Children" by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, which I had read, was about income inequality in the United States. He said that the American Dream was in the 1950s and 1960s, and that group of people believed in the American Dream.
At that time, he defined "what is the American Dream", that is, you are in the United States, you have not been to college, you are an ordinary high school student, and then you find a manufacturing enterprise in the local area, you can buy a house, buy a car, send your children to college, and then the American dream is realized. Kirito is very similar to what he wrote. In Tongxiang, you can see Chinese realize the American Dream.
So if you open your boundaries, you'll find that there's a lot to be in the world.
Wu Xiaobo: Is the inner volume a psychology or a state of existence?
He Fan: It is a state of existence.
Wu Xiaobo: Actually, the story Teacher He just told is very correct, and I have a very similar story that is Wu Renbao's Huaxi Village.
They took me to see the current situation of Huaxi Village, there are only a few hundred households in old Huaxi, and there are about 3,000 households in Xinhuaxi, and he told me that in the past 20 years, in this Huaxi village with nearly 10,000 people, only two people have left Huaxi Village.
Because there are textile factories in Huaxi Village, there are construction companies, and then there are steel trading companies, and then there are agricultural and sideline product processing enterprises, and there are tertiary production. Every year everyone divides the money, the girls in Huaxi Village are not willing to marry out, if they share it, they can divide it up to more than 100,000 yuan a year, the house is still divided, they also give gold bars, and they also divide the car, they have a car for each family for a year, and then all the sons-in-law are sons-in-law.
But this is only possible when the economy is very good
If it collapses, this part will be gone. You say that we are not just seeing people in a cycle or in a certain region, but not representing the entire era.
He Fan: Tongxiang is very special, because the chemical fiber industry inherently has a force through the cycle, it will be relatively stable, in the entire industrial chain and upstream, and the downstream is not the same, the downstream by the price fluctuations will be greater.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="119" >04, How do I open the boundaries of an inner volume? </h1>
Wu Xiaobo: This place is called Zhong Shu Ge. If a female undergraduate graduate here came here as a waitress and listened to Teacher He Fan say open the boundary, what could she do?
He Fan: There are many things that can be done. She's in Shanghai, and she already knows how Zhong Shuge does it, and now she can go back to her hometown, and then there will be a bookstore as good as Zhong Shuge. The more you are on the edge, the more opportunities you can find. Even if you are a youth in a first-tier city, if you only imagine yourself as a youth in a first-tier city, you will definitely go to the inner volume.
In fact, the best business in China now is that you are in the first-tier cities, and then you think about how to make money for young people in third-, fourth- and fifth-tier cities.
Because we are different from the original now, that is, after your space is opened, there is a lot of room to move.
Therefore, many dilemmas in the world, in fact, there is a third choice, that is, the big deal is that Lao Tzu will not do it, and Lao Tzu will change his way of life.
In the past, I thought that you were crushing others in such a big factory or a big city, but now you actually find that people are at a breaking point.
Wu Xiaobo: Last year, I was an ambassador to the Zhejiang Provincial Department of Agriculture and was doing live broadcasting, and I met a Lishui person. He used to work as an employee in a large factory, and he was internalized at that time, and there was no sense of accomplishment. Since the beginning of the previous year, he went back to his hometown in Lishui to go to the village to sell honey and do live broadcasts. When I met him last year, he was able to do nearly 10 million a year and then brought all the people in the village to life. He was in Hangzhou, and he had no sense of accomplishment among the 100,000 people, and he became a typical figure in Zhejiang Province to help farmers. He copied Hangzhou's live broadcast and the ability of e-commerce companies to open stores to his village.
He Fan: In fact, the infrastructure has really done a good job in recent years, and the internet has made everyone's concept of consumption basically the same, in Shanghai you think that you are a high-class life, people in the county also have, so at this time, if you can better understand this kind of change in China, in fact, there are quite a lot of opportunities
Wu Xiaobo: I once went to Adi to do research, and Adi originally divided the Chinese market into several levels, such as the primary market in beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and then counted as a secondary market like Hangzhou, and then divided into 3 levels, 4 levels, 5 levels. Adi's new model, this year is definitely only sold in a few large markets in Hangzhou, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Hangzhou, to the Tieling area, basically until 4 years later, it is a pyramid sales model.
But after the Internet, this model does not exist at all, as soon as the product is sold, Tieling's and Haining's can be bought at the same time. The whole Internet creates a great penetration.
If this channel change is not done well, it will fall into inward rolling, and a different way of playing may be completely different.
Last year I went to Dunhuang to meet a pair of men and women from Shanghai, and now the best and most fashionable night market in Dunhuang is opened by them, and they package the local tea leaves in this way.
I met the chairman of Gansu Cultural Tourism again, and he said that these two people are a treasure to us. In Shanghai, they may be a passerby, and when they get to Gansu, they will become a treasure.
Jiang Peng: I think of cases in our history.
Generally according to the model of us talking about the inner volume, the admission ratio of the imperial examination in the Northern Song Dynasty was very high, and then the proportion of officials was relatively high, and after the Southern Song Dynasty, there were more people reading books.
As a result, when someone like Zhu Xi appeared, I would go back to the localities to run education and run a Righteous Zhuang Yishu without an official, and then economically speaking, some Yizhuang, if you are a widow or orphan, can still receive money, and then it can also form a set of influences.
He Fan: Later, when you look at the Yuan Dynasty, there was no longer any imperial examination, and then these literati began to write Yuan Qu.
Wu Xiaobo: This is also the background of the convergence of shi and business, because the population has increased and the proportion of examinations is too small.
He Fan: After the inner volume reaches a certain level, there will be overflow.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="161" >05, do you want to jump out of the inner volume</h1>
Wu Xiaobo: In an environment where I know it's an inner volume, should I jump out or roll it together?
He Fan: Of course, you have to jump out, you have to be in it is more and more volume. It's actually going to have the comfort zone that we're talking about. If you want to get involved, you have to be prepared. Economically speaking, you are pursuing fixed income.
For example, if you want to be in a big factory or in the system, you choose such a difficult path, but in the end, the rules of the game are still relatively clear, but the cost of giving up the inner volume is still very large.
I feel like I paid the price, but got a lot .
Wu Xiaobo: You don't care about this very much, but many people will care about this matter. Would have been good to stay up.
He Fan: If you want to be in the system, the system will help you solve a lot of things, and the same is true for the big factories. But if you want to go out on your own, you have to have swiss army knife-style ability, which will be more challenging for the individual, and then your profit may be higher or lower So it's like the stocks we invest in, right? It may have higher returns, but it will also have higher risks.
So it's up to you. If you want to roll, you don't have to think about saying that I have higher returns, you roll up to the end must be 0 excess profits, in a fully competitive market there is absolutely no excess profits.
Then if you have to choose that path, you have to be prepared, and I may have a higher return, but a higher risk. Then we have to re-cultivate our core abilities
Wu Xiaobo: Like you, you are counted in the colonel, and the teacher's inner curl is strong?
Jiang Peng: I think it's quite strong, that is, our research on history is now very fragmented, which is actually quite terrible.
He Fan: There are some careers that you have to get involved in, for example, if you don't have a particularly good college diploma, it's getting harder and harder for you to enter a national ministry, and it's impossible for you to go to colleges and universities as a teacher, and then you want to go to these big factories, and it's impossible.
But if you open it, it's different again. For example, what is now live streaming with goods, playing online games, Internet celebrity Plum Ziqi, doing talk shows, which industry in these industries must be involved? No, you don't. Instead, it must be derived before it can develop.
From a macro point of view, this opportunity will be more and more, but from a micro point of view, every industry will have risks You have to be prepared if you can do your best in the market segment.
Jiang Peng: The head is always one or two
He Fan: Many people he does not dare to make this choice, he imagines the loss as infinite, in fact, the loss is not infinite, in order to overcome this choice and all kinds of worries are the same.
Wu Xiaobo: So what else is needed besides courage?
He Fan: I think that courage is not enough, but also the ability to survive in the wilderness, because you often have a wrong judgment about yourself It turns out that you are in the big factory colonel, and you will feel that you are very good. But your cow is largely because of the aura given to you by the big factory or the colonel.
Once you come out, you will definitely encounter this problem, when the system can no longer shield you from the wind and rain, you yourself think about all the things you should solve yourself, at this time you can not put up a shelf, can not be arrogant, you should learn new things to learn new things.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="206" >06, is it possible that China's economy will be rolled up? </h1>
Wu Xiaobo: Is the inner volume an inevitable consequence of social development?
He Fan: From an economic point of view, it is easy to understand that the inner volume is actually about the relative price of production factors is very important, if the population is large and the land is small, it will be rolled inward, right? At this time, for example, there is a sudden change, like a change brought about by the Black Death in Europe, that is, the population has suddenly decreased, so the population has changed relative to the relative price of land, and there is no internal volume.
Actually, now you have a diploma of 985, and the relative price of this factor of production is going down, and if you have the ability to survive in the wild, the relative price of this factor of production is going up.
Wu Xiaobo: I was thinking that China's economic development today may lead to internal rolling, and China's internal volume has a premise, that is, China has a large enough domestic demand market. I was looking at the new energy automotive industry recently, in 2009 China surpassed the United States with more than 16 million cars, and last year it was 26 million, and I didn't talk about car exports
Japan produced more than 8 million vehicles in 1986 and 1987, so it had to be exported, and if it didn't export, more than 100 million people could not bear it. You see we are now with other countries, you are not good to me, I will not enter your iron ore, I will not buy your things, this is a typical involution thinking.
He Fan: I think the domestic market is not an inner volume, but an internal cultivation. The original domestic market, you did not cultivate it very well.
If you think of China's economy as a portfolio, we're over-allocated to the coastal areas.
All the talents in the interior went to the coastal areas At the time when China's pace of opening up to the outside world was the fastest, the inland areas were in decline It was in the late 1990s to the early 2000s, including Wuhan and Xi'an.
But in recent years they've all risen. The background of the rise is that many of them began slowly after 2008, that is, after globalization began to be in decline
So I think you said it wouldn't be rolled up until one day, you didn't continue to open up, you might roll inside, but you haven't reached that time yet.
Wu Xiaobo: Do you think that the crisis of inward involvement of China's industrial economy does not exist?
He Fan: As far as our current piece is concerned, we have not yet fully released its potential The huge domestic consumption power, you have not fully satisfied them now, because we do have a very strong production capacity, but a lot of our production is for export orders, it does not know how I can transfer to the domestic market, this business opportunity is very large
The industry also does not have an inner volume. In the past, we participated wholeheartedly in globalization, which was the principle of efficiency first. If you don't do NO.1 and no one does business with you, it's hard to innovate locally.
The Sino-US trade friction in the past two years has made us understand a truth, that is, efficiency and security are equally important. This provides a chance for many Chinese companies to survive, I may not be able to do NO.1, but I can make it, it is best that I can do NO.2, NO.3, I can survive, in the past I could not survive, but now I can survive, because my existence is not to say how many things I sell, but my existence is valuable, my existence increases the sense of security of the Chinese economy and the sense of security of Chinese enterprises, you have to give me money, I am the spare tire
Wu Xiaobo: So after the Sino-US trade friction began in 2018, in fact, China's industry is facing great anti-globalization challenges on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also possible to reconstruct some new industrial capabilities. So your new native era is based on the premise of judgment?
He Fan: In the era of globalization, what we especially liked was to learn from others, because we felt that others had standard answers. Now when you get to the local era, you will have two problems, one is that other people have standard answers that they don't tell you, like chips, it has standard answers and he doesn't tell you, right? You say that he will make trouble for you by teaching myself, and he will kill you
The second is that he doesn't have a standard answer either. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic. We used to think that we had taken a bad card, and then people always said that you saw that you played this card, if I played I would definitely win, and he ended up playing worse than you.
You suddenly find that something like this is the epidemic, and he doesn't have a standard answer, and you can only learn from yourself
I don't think we know this, as far as we know how to learn from others, China has always been a very good student, but we don't know how to learn from ourselves to make ourselves better.
Jiang Peng: Our learning ability is amazing. I once went to hold a trilateral youth academic conference between China, Japan, and South Korea. Both sides are talking about the Sino-Japanese War, and after the Chinese scholars finished speaking, the Japanese scholars were very surprised, and your entire research was reviewing the problems of the Qing Dynasty, so why didn't you criticize the militarism of Japan at that time?
I thought yes, we are really a good student.
In fact, we have successful cases in history, such as Song Ming Lixue.
Before that, our intellectual history had a process of outward learning. The vast majority of Chinese scholars lack some logical thinking ability, but the greatest help of Buddhism to Chinese intellectuals is to establish logical ability. But then anti-Buddhism, because Buddhism inhibited culture, on the contrary, it was found that the other party did have good things, so everyone returned to Confucius, and finally came up with such a set of Song Ming theory, I think this is a successful case of learning from the outside first and finally learning from themselves.
But the process was actually very long, about four hundred years or so.
He Fan: Our generation will accelerate.
Wu Xiaobo: Actually, we discussed a bunch of inner volumes. I think that the inner volume is actually the product of a country and an economy after it has developed to a certain stage; the same is true of the big factories, and the big factories must not have had an inner volume model 20 years ago; the reform is the same, and when the reform reaches more than 40 years, there will be vested interests, there will be precipitation, and there will be some quagmire
So the inner volume is actually an era to this stage, it should be to a mature stage that must happen; life is the same, the remaining few people, under such a premise that it is possible to roll in, how can he get rid of himself.
We had two teachers, one historian and one economist, and we talked about the changes in our growth over the years, and the challenges and confusions that the times have brought to us, and we talked about some of our views on the present around the involution.
Everyone will have a lot of confusion, a lot of anxiety, the inner volume is just an expression, it is even difficult to define, this is where we are embarrassed when we face a lot of topics.
But when we do "Wu Chat", in fact, one of the things that I think will help you a lot is not to give a standard answer, but to let everyone know that these scholars in China today think like this, they are doing their own research in this way, and finally for you, you can form a real problem of your own. Then go back to your own life and work to solve it.