Xu Jin: Even if 2019 is considered to be the bottom of the cycle, we can still look up at the starry sky, look back at history, and imagine the future.Will the world get better?

At the end of the year and the end of the year, even if the mind is absorbed in daily life, it will stop for a while, summarize the past, and think about the future for five minutes.

At the node of the times, ignoring the macro is mostly delusional.The macro is important, but it does not mean that the macro can be grasped.At the moment when the big history returns, the black swan and gray rhino incidents with low probability are no longer new, and predicting the future has become a dangerous move.At the beginning of 2018, analysts of China's top domestic brokerages predicted that 9 and a half out of ten predictions for 2018 were wrong.

Yes, you and I are mortals, and no one has a crystal ball. However, there is nothing new under the sun. Everything that happens is just a variation of what has happened.Even though 2019 is considered to be the bottom of the economic cycle, here, we can still look up at the starry sky, look back at half of the history, and imagine a moment of the future.

1. Will the world get better?

This was a question asked a hundred years ago.

This sentence was once doubted by Liang Ji, the father of Liang Shuming, a great thinker. He once asked Liang Shuming himself in this way.It was November 7, 1918. At that time, Liang Shuming was twenty-five years old. He was a young man with great ambition. He had been appreciated by Cai Yuanpei for his research on meta-casuism, and he became a teacher at Peking University.That day, Liang Shuming and Liang Ji talked about the current events of the European War, which were very popular at the time.Liang Shuming's answer at the time was this: I believe that the world is getting better day by day.

Is this the unique optimism of young people or the insight of a master?A hundred years of cloud and mist pass by in a blink of an eye, and sometimes it makes people doubt that the world is actually the same world, and it is not peaceful.

In 2018, Double Eleven is a shopping festival in China, and it is a century of World War I overseas. This may constitute a metaphor for a new era: the old world is still mourning the loss of the old order, while the new world is trying to use consumerism and massAdvantages create a new order.The new and the old do not mean the replacement of progress and backwardness, but only represent the sequence of time.

From today’s perspective, Liang Shuming’s answer is somewhat similar to the optimism of European trend researcher Mathias Holz; you can imagine that in the future, everything will get better and better.The world brings us a little reward every day, which also reflects the novelist Milan bull; Kundera's quip I am a skeptic, so I cannot be a pessimist.

This kind of optimism may be one of the foundations of human existence from ancient times to the present.In Harvard professor Steven bull; Pinker's book Enlightenment Now (Chinese version Zhanlu recently launched), Pinker tried to use data and facts to show that in terms of food, health and even wealth, the world is getting better and better, even if everyone feelsNot so.

2. Reiterate self-enlightenment

Enlightenment, in Pinker's works, has also become a part of the human heroic epic.From a conservative perspective, Pinker represents the shallow optimism of progressivism, but Pinker is right that knowledge is better than superstition and ignorance.

In today's information overload, it is not commonplace to reiterate ancient common sense, just as the economist Hayek believed that ideas need to gain vitality in constant re-interpretation, if old truths are to be retained in people's brains, they mustIt is constantly reaffirmed in the language and concepts.

In 1784, Kant defined enlightenment as follows: Enlightenment is the liberation of human beings from the immaturity that they have imposed on themselves.In his view, this requires overcoming laziness and cowardice and courageously using one's own reason.At present, intellectuals have bid farewell to the center of public opinion, and the function of enlightenment has become more of an individualized effort. Self-enlightenment and self-education have actually become the basic skills of modern people.

2019 is the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference and the centenary of the May Fourth Movement in China. At the beginning of the year, there were so few discussions, and imaginations such as the national destiny were at the center of public opinion.Even if one remembers the simplified narrative of Mr. De (democracy) and Mr. Sai (science), it is powerless to mention that freedom and order are actually concealed behind this narrative.

In the 1980s, the thinker Li Zehou put forward the thesis that saving the nation over enlightenment may not be outdated today, but even the name Li Zehou is unfamiliar to ordinary netizens.It can be seen that the iteration of concepts is always full of strange time differences. Perhaps nothing can be changed in a hundred years, and perhaps one generation is enough to deconstruct too much.

Since 2019, various outlooks have appeared intensively.As a Chinese, the New Year is all about saying auspicious words and good luck. Even in the cold night, I hope to find traces of spring.Many prospects are actually psychological massages, and self-enlightenment probably starts with giving up psychological massages, which is the first step to face reality.What is real knowledge?Physicist Einstein said that, in his view, the further the human spirit evolves, the more certain it can be said that the road to true religious feelings is not fear of life and death, nor blind faith, butIt is the pursuit of rational knowledge.

3. In 2019, the year when soft-class habits slow down

When I was a child, I read the essayist Bo Yang, an ugly Chinese, and saw him criticize the slowness of the Chinese people. Every generation told the next generation that the future of China depends on your generation!, he summed up generation after generation, how many generations?At which generation can we really get better?When I read it at the time, I thought it was very reasonable. When I re-examined this sentence as an adult, it actually exposed the characteristics of Chinese people who hope to complete their efforts in one battle, which often makes radicalism overwhelm progressiveness.

If we regard China's social transformation as the historical Three Gorges that lasted hundreds of years, our road is still in the middle.The normalization of society, the drastic transformation between one or two generations, often leaves behind various hidden dangers.

The same goes for the economy.When the economic fire cooks oil, it is the era of accelerated depreciation.The iteration of the outlet trend track is not only a buzzword of various investment institutions, but also a buzzword that ordinary people are keen on.In the fast-growing China, everything is used to being fast. Some people have long estimated that one year in China is equivalent to seven years abroad. Both capital and users are afraid that it will be too late, lest they be abandoned by the times if they are half a step too late. Striving for the top is a collective mentality.As a result, running early has become the norm in life, children enter the world of adults early, young people enter the life arrangement of middle age early, and after the age of thirty-five, many people think about retirement and health preservation the most.

Is this speed really wonderful?Looking specifically at the economy after 2019, if it slows down from then on, it might not be a good thing.The pursuit of speed in the prosperous era has led to many structural distortions, overdrawing the future to support the present, which is neither efficient nor fair, and panic is no less than a war.A slowing down economy, on the one hand, needs to pay for the previous bills, on the other hand, the problems that were covered up by the high-speed growth during the period of high-speed growth have to be faced squarely at this moment, and slowing down can also be an opportunity for rectification.

With the economic downturn, Japaneseization has become a spoken language of many financial jokers. My research topic at the University of Tokyo is the comparison between China and Japan, and I have been writing books on Japanese economy over the years.What does Japaneseization mean? I am afraid that most of the people talking about it will not be able to accurately understand. Regardless of whether the Japanese economy has really fallen into the lost 20 years, the current Japanese society is a society where ordinary people can get basic security and dignity.

If 2019 is the beginning of the economic downturn, it may be an opportunity for adjustment, rather than forcibly reversing the trend again.As far as policy is concerned, what is more concerned at the moment is how not to waste this rare opportunity to adjust.

For the vast soft class who face pressure from career and wealth to family, 2019 will be the beginning of the soft class society showing its face. The soft class is soft because its foundation is unstable, and the birth of the middle-income group itself is shortDoomed to a miserable fate.If we really believe in the value of time, then we should not be too utilitarian in imagining the preemption and counterattack. We should pay more attention to how to start from ourselves and create a more transparent and competitive environment. What we should believe in is the possibility of self-change..

In the long run, everything is ultimately fair. This is like the life wisdom of investor Charlie Munger. The most reliable way to get something you want is to deserve it yourself..After all, our relationship with history, society and even ourselves is generally in opposition to each other in the end.

This article only represents the author's own opinion. The author is also the founder of the Economist Reading Club. The recent publication is not lost, not Tokyo, public name Xu Jin Economic Man (ID: econhomo)