2023年经济学人 推特帖子是有力的经济衡量指标(2)（在线收听）

    The Fed papers also see a third use for tweets: as a bellwether of sorts for monetary policy.

    美联储的论文还论及了推特帖子的第三个用途：作为货币政策的风向标。

    Ms Vega and colleagues find that the social-media site fares better than changes in bond yields in predicting monetary-policy decisions on the day of their announcement.

    维加和她的同事们发现，在宣布货币政策决定的当天，推特比债券收益率的变化更好地预测了货币政策决定。

    The Twitter sentiment index, meanwhile, is good at anticipating shocks from tighter policy such as rate increases.

    与此同时，推特情绪指数很擅长预测加息等紧缩政策带来的冲击。

    Tweets tend to turn sour just ahead of these moves.

    推特帖子往往会在这些政策推出之前变得情绪低迷。

    (That the website wastes no time in turning bitter will come as scant surprise to regular users.)(推特能瞬间情绪消沉，这对经常使用该网站的用户来说并不令人惊讶。)No one is about to ascribe powers of causation to X.

    没有人会将因果关系的力量归于X。

    The social-media posts instead reflect broader feelings that are already coursing through financial markets.

    社交媒体帖子只是反映了已经在金融市场上蔓延的广泛情绪。

    Still, the cornucopia of tweets does provide an additional way of measuring such sentiment, which, if proved valid over time, would be highly valuable.

    尽管如此，大量的帖子确实提供了衡量这种情绪的另一种方式，如果时间证明这种衡量是正确的，那么帖子会是非常有价值的。

    Beyond the Fed, some analysts are also finding other potential applications.

    除了美联储，一些分析师还发现了其他潜在的应用。

    Agustín Indaco of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar calculates that the volume of tweeting alone can account for about three-quarters of cross-country variation in GDP.

    卡塔尔卡内基梅隆大学的奥古斯丁·因达科计算出，仅推特帖子的发布量就可以解释大约四分之三的GDP跨国差异。

    Rather like satellite images of night lights, tweets may therefore be a way of observing economic health without relying so heavily on tardy official statistics.

    因此，与夜间灯光的卫星图像类似，推特帖子可能是观察经济健康状况的一种方式，不需要严重依赖迟缓的官方统计数据。

    This metric may work best in poorer countries, where heavy posting on social media would be a proxy for the state of telecommunications and use of smartphones.

    这一指标在较贫穷的国家可能效果最好，社交媒体上的大量帖子代表电信和智能手机的使用状况。

    If X is so economically useful, why is it not more lucrative?

    如果X对于经济如此有用，为什么它不能赚更多钱呢？

    The various papers do not venture so far as to examine the gulf between Twitter’s struggle for profitability and its evident utility—not just as an economic tool but as a platform for sharing information, opinions, jokes and more.

    这些论文都没有继续探讨推特的盈利困难与其明显的效用之间的差距，它的作用不仅是一种经济工具，也是一个分享信息、观点、笑话等等的平台。

    Mr Musk was onto something when he described the firm as a “common digital town square”.

    当马斯克将该公司描述为“一个共同的数字城市广场”时，他说得有道理。

    The problem in economic terms is that a town square falls into the category of public goods such as parks and clean water.

    用经济语言描述这个问题就是，城市广场属于公共财产的范畴，如公园和干净的水。

    Although public goods can be privately owned, it is notoriously hard to extract profits from them given that, by definition, it is difficult to charge people for all the benefits they confer.

    尽管公共财产可以为私人所有，但从公共财产中获取利润是出了名的困难，因为从本质上讲，很难向人们收取享用公共财产的费用。

    Mr Musk is doing his darnedest to shift the economic equation at X by giving additional privileges to users who pay $8 a month for the site’s blue-check verification.

    马斯克正在尽最大努力改变X的盈利状况，向每月支付8美元进行了蓝标验证的用户提供额外的特权。

    Tweets by users who cough up now receive extra promotion, among other benefits, appearing up more often in the feeds of other people on the site.

    除了其他好处，付费用户发的推文现在还会得到额外的流量推广，会更频繁地出现在其他推特用户的首页上。

    That, however, poses a trade-off.

    然而，这会导致得失的此消彼长。

    Paid-for tweets may start crowding out better-informed posts from users who would rather not subscribe to the site.

    付费推文可能会排挤掉那些不愿开通会员的用户所发布的消息更灵通的帖子。

    Over time, a social media site that prioritises payment over credibility will function less well as a town square and, by extension, as an economic indicator.

    渐渐地，一个将付费视为比可信性更重要的社交媒体网站将不再发挥城市广场的作用，也进而不会发挥经济指标的作用。

    The gain to X’s finances would be a loss to the Fed’s economists.

    X的财务收益将成为美联储经济学家的损失。