![[分享]「外媒精选」Economist：效率低下的建筑业](/skin/img/logo.png){kind=logo}
[分享]「外媒精选」Economist：效率低下的建筑业
这篇文章选自8月17日那期的Economist，第一次翻译和本行业相关的文章，不对的地方欢迎大佬在评论区指正。
这篇文章主要讲了影响建筑行业生产效率的几个原因，一直在学技术上的东西，没有怎么了解过本行业的运作方式，还有和制造业的差别，看完以后感觉还是挺受启发的。
这回采用了中英文对照的方式。
原文中比较难的单词做了红色标注。
紫色部分是我自己添加的注解。
Efficiency eludes the construction industry
效率低下的建筑行业
Aug 17th 2017
NINE years ago the first concrete was poured for Berlin Brandenburg airport. It was expected to open in 2012, to cost€1.2bn ($1.8bn) and to welcome 34m passengers each year. Today the only peoplein its terminals are those with hard hats（安全帽）. Sixtimes over budget, the project has had 66,500 building errors in need offixing. Last year its spokesman wassacked（开除） aftercalling the project a “shit-show” and saying no manager who was not “addictedto pills” could guarantee an opening date.
九年前，柏林勃兰登堡机场开始浇灌混凝土，这个机场原计划于2012年建成，耗资12亿欧元（18亿刀）每年将迎来340万人次的旅客。但是直到现在，机场里任然没有一个旅客，只有带着安全帽的工人们。这座建筑的预算已经超了六倍，而且还有66500个问题亟待解决。这项工程的发言人在去年被解雇了，他直言这个工程是“shit-show”，而且谁要是敢保证完工日期，那他绝对是嗑药嗑high了。
Berlin’s airport is an extreme example of abroader problem. Superficially, the construction industry would seem healthy enough. The global market is worth $10trn. Euler Hermes, an insurer, expects3.5% growth this year. Yet more than 90% of the world’s infrastructure projects are either late or over-budget, says Bent Flyvbjerg of Saïd Business School at Oxford University. Even the sharpest of tech firms suffer. Apple’s newheadquarters in Silicon Valley opened two years behind schedule and cost $2bn more than budgeted. Smaller projects have similar woes（顽症）. One survey of British architects found that 60% of their buildings were late.
柏林的机场是一个比较极端的例子，但是它也反映了业内普遍存在的问题。从表面上看，建筑业似乎是足够健康的，它在全球有10万亿（trillion）美元的市场，据安宜（法国的保险公司）估计今年仍将有3.5%的增长。然而牛津Saïd商学院教授Bent Flyvbjerg告诉我们全球超过90%的基础设施工程都有着超预算或者未能按时完工的问题。即使是最厉害的科技公司也遭遇着这种情况，苹果在硅谷的总部大楼已经延期了两年，预算也超了20亿美元。许多工程也有着相似的问题，英国建筑师的一项调查表明他们60%的工程都没能按时完工。
Construction holds the dubious（可疑的） honour of having the lowest productivity gains of any industry,according to McKinsey, a consultancy. In the past 20 years the global averagefor the value-added per hour has inched up by 1% a year, about one-quarter therate of growth in manufacturing. Trends in rich countries are especially bad.Over the same period Germany and Japan, paragons（典范） ofindustrial efficiency, have seen nearly no growth in construction productivity.In France and Italy productivity has fallen by one-sixth. In America,astonishingly, it has plunged by half since the late 1960s.
麦卡锡的数据表明，建筑业生产率的增长比其他任何行业都慢，在过去的二十年中平均每小时产值仅有1%的增长，制造业这一数据则高达25%。这项数据在发达国家则显得更加糟糕，像日本德国这样生产效率很高的国家，建筑业的生产率几乎没有任何增长。意大利和法国下跌了约六分之一，而美国建筑业的生产率只有六十年代的一半，这是很让人吃惊的。
Prices for building materials are not to blame. They are subtracted from measures of value-added (and have not risen inany case). The burden over time of complying with regulation—applying forpermits, for instance—is only partly responsible. In America such rules account for one-eighth of the productivity lost since 1987, according to the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
建材价格并非是导致这一问题的原因，在计算时已经考虑了价格因素（实际上建材价格根本没涨）。建筑行业一直以来的严格监管，可能在某种程度上解释了生产率的低下（比如建筑公司需要申请许可）。由劳工局的统计数据表明，美国严格的相关规程导致的生产率和87年相比下降了约八分之一。
More culpable are two broader structuraltrends. First, the industry has become less capital-intensive（资本密集）, with workers replacing machinery. This shift is more understandable in countries with access to inexpensive labour. In Saudi Arabia,for example, it is cheaper to import workers from India or Pakistan than to buymachinery. In many countries, however, labour costs might be expected to spur（刺激 马刺队spurs 也是这个词） firms to substitute workers with capital.
生产率低下的真正原因在于建筑业的两个结构性问题。
首先，随着业内人工对机械的反向替代，建筑业变得越来越缺乏资本密集性（资本密集，即一个产业进行生产活动时对资本设备的需求程度大于劳动人力）。这一变化更容易发生在那些容易得到廉价劳动力的国家。比如在沙特阿拉伯，引进印度或者巴基斯坦的劳工要比购买机械更便宜。不过在另外一些国家（比如不愿意引进劳工的日本），高昂的人工费也可能会促使企业使用机械代替人力。
Instead, volatility（波动） in demand for construction has trained builders to curb investment. “The industry has learned through bitter experience to prepare for the next recession,” says Luc Luyten of Bain & Company, a consultancy.Capital-heavy approaches to construction bring high fixed costs（固定成本） that are difficult to cut in downturns（down turn）. Workers, in contrast, can be fired.
然而建筑业需求的波动性也抑制了资本的投入。贝恩公司的分析师Luc Luyten说，业界已经在过去的痛苦经历中学会了如何为下一次不景气做准备。重资本的运作方式（即研发机械替代人力）会带来过高的固定成本，这在萧条到来之时是很难cut掉的。相较之下，建筑工人们则可以被轻易开除。
The second big problem is that the industry has, for the most part, failed to consolidate（巩固，加强）.Efficient firms should theoretically squash（镇压，压制）laggards（落后者）,yielding（屈服 就是钢筋荷载超过比例极限那个屈服 也有generate那个意思 即 产生） bigger, more productive companies. “But construction is an industry that appears to have defied Adam Smith,” says Mr Luyten. That is partly because building codes（建筑规范） differ not just between countries but within them, which makes it harder to reap the benefits of scale（规模效应）. The customised（定制） nature of most projects further（进一步地）limits the usual advantages of size. Because the designs of most projectsdiffer, contractors have to start from scratch（从头开始）for each one.
业界的另一个重大的问题是，在多数情况下，替代升级效应失灵了。理论上效率高的公司会压制行业中的落后者，然后产生更大，更高效的企业。“但是建筑业的情况，似乎推翻了亚当斯密（国富论作者）的论断。”Luyten如是说到。这部分是因为建筑规范在不同国家有着非常大的差别，这使得企业难以通过扩大规模来获利。而且建筑业的「定制」特性也进一步限制了通常的规模优势。由于每一个建筑都是不一样的，所以建造者接手新工程时又得从头开始。
America now has about 730,000 building outfits（全套装备）, with an average of ten employees each. In Europe there are 3.3m withan average of just four workers. Competition is fierce and profit margins（利润） are thinner than for any industry except retail（零售）. This fragmentation creates its own problems. Slim margins make investment even less likely. Often projects have more than a dozen subcontractors（分包商）, each keen to maximise profit rather than collaborate to contain costs, says Thijs Asselbergs, a professor at Delft University of Technology.
美国现在有73万家建筑机构，平均每家有十名员工，在欧洲这个数字是330万家，平均只有四名员工。竞争是如此的激烈，而利润率却比除零售业以外的所有的行业都低。行业的碎片化也产生了一些问题。微薄的利润会进一步缩紧投资。代尔夫特理工大学（欧洲土木名校）的教授Thijs Asselbergs说，通常一项工程会有超过一打的分包商参与，每一家都企图最大化自己的利润，而非通力合作以控制成本。
The result is an industry that raises prices for clients and mostly ignores tools that might improve productivity.“While we are all using iPhones, construction is still in the Walkman phase,”says Ben van Berkel, a Dutch architect. Many building professionals usehand-drawn plans riddled with errors. A builder of concrete-framed towers fromthe 1960s would find little has changed on building sites（建筑工地） today, except for better safety standards.
以上种种因素，都导致建筑成为了一个成本居高不下，并且忽视使用机械以提高生产力的行业。“这就好像其他行业都用上了iPhone时候，建筑业还处于随声听的阶段。”荷兰建筑师Ben van Berkel说到。许多建筑专家仍在使用手绘计划，并且漏洞百出。除了建筑标准变得更好更安全了之外，60年代的混凝土塔建造者，到如今的建筑工地上几乎不会察觉到有什么变化。
Examples of how the industry might move forward are not hard to find. More builders could use computer-aided design, asis standard among architects. Other methods are in earlier stages, but show promise, such as remote-controlled cranes（起重机） and self-drivingbulldozers（推土机） (Komatsu, a Japanese equipment-maker, is developing the latter). A few niches（生态位，细分市场）, such as maritime construction, have shown how investments in technology and mass production can boost efficiency. On land, a few firms are mass-producing homes. BoKlok, a spin-off（从母公司分立出来的公司）from IKEA, a Swedish flat-pack-furniture seller, does only one-fifth of its construction work on site; the rest is done in factories. Parts can be standardised and costs cut as a result. BoKlok reckons that it builds twice as quickly as the industry norm. An American firm called Katerra also buildsprefabricated（预制的） sections of apartments at a factory in Arizona. It helps that each firm does every stage of construction itself, rather than relying on a tangle of subcontractors.
其实关于业界进步的例子也不难找，越来越多的从业人员都开始使用计算机辅助设计，这也是建筑师的标配。虽然其他进展依然处于起步阶段，但是展现出了成功的希望，比如远程控制的起重机和自驾驶的推土机（日本公司小松正在研发这个推土机），在一些细分领域，比如海上建筑，已经展现出了加大研发资金投入，与大规模生产，对提高生产率的巨大作用。在陆上，也有一些公司开始采用规模化生产，比如从宜家拆分出来的BoKlok公司，他们只在工地上做五分之一的工作，其余都是在工厂里完成的，这样建筑模块可以实现标准化生产，同时也降低了成本，据他们自己估计这样的建造速度是行业标准的两倍。美国公司Katerra也在亚利桑那的工厂里生产预制模块。这使得各家公司能够独立完成建造的每一个环节，而不是交给一大堆乱七八杂的分包公司。
The fastest gains are in China. Labour productivity is racing ahead at 7% a year, albeit（虽然） from a low base. Tightening labour supply has prompted firms to test automation—WinSun, a constructioncompany, has built flats using 3D printing. Modular building is also on therise, with one company erecting a 57-storey tower in 19 days.
建筑业最快的收益发生在中国，那里劳动生产率正在以7%的速度增长，尽管其基数较低。劳动力供应的收紧也在促使一些公司尝试自动化生产，一家叫日胜的公司已经成功使用3D打印技术建了几栋公寓。模块化建筑同样在发展，有家公司只用了十九天就立起了一座57层的高塔。
However, such techniques remain unusual.For most firms, slim margins and the spectre（幽灵） of future downturns continue to restrain investment. Even for companies that do adopt new methods, growth maybe limited by doubts about the quality of new techniques. A few modular towers in China have seen water seep between units. In Britain, past attempts at mass-produced housing are a sour memory: poorly built modular social housingfrom the 1960s has been demolished. British mortgage（抵押） lenders（放款人） shun（避免）homes built with “non-traditional construction methods”. BoKlok and Katerra hope their buildings will last a century. But perceptions, like so much else in construction, can be slow to change.
然而，这种技术仍然并不常见。对大多数公司来说，微薄的利润和萧条的幽灵仍然在抑制投资。即使对于采用新方法的公司来说，由于社会上对新技术质量的怀疑，增长也会受到限制。在中国的一些使用建筑模块修筑的塔，发生了渗水事故。在英国，过去大规模生产住房的尝试，是一种痛苦的记忆：从60年代开始建造的劣质模块化社会住房已经被拆除。英国抵押贷款机构也在避免接收使用「非传统建设方法」建造的房屋。Boklok和Katerra这两家公司希望他们的建筑可以维持100年。但是许多观念（关于模块化修筑的房子质量差的观念），就像建筑业中的其他东西一样，可能需要很长时间才能扭转。
