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  • 通俗经济学：如何更好地工作和享乐

    2007-09-11

    [2007.09.06] Popular economics：How to work and play a little better

    Popular economics
    通俗经济学

    How to work and play a little better
    如何改进工作和享乐
    Sep 6th 2007
    From The Economist print edition

    TYLER COWEN tugs popular economics in the direction of self-help: how you can use simple insights and intuitions from economic theory to get more of what you want. The dust jacket of his book promises tips on love, work and dentistry, and that's only the start. There are suggestions for improving your reading habits, surviving torture, getting the dishes done at home, collecting fine art, going to the cinema, giving to charity and ordering food when eating out (at an expensive restaurant, “If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good”).
    泰勒·考恩将通俗经济学拖上了自助读物的路子：教你怎样用来自经济学理论的简单观点和直觉得到更多你想得到的东西。书的护封上许诺了关于爱情、工作和看牙 医的小贴士，这还只是开始。还建议你如何改进阅读习惯、躲过殴打、让子女乖乖洗盘子、收集绘画、看电影、施舍、外出就餐时点餐（在菜价高昂的餐厅，“假若 听起来很糟糕，可能吃起来味道却特别好”）。

    If you didn't know that Mr Cowen was an economist, you might take him for a psychologist. The version of economics advanced here has nothing to do with algebra or interest rates. It is economics in Ludwig von Mises's formulation of a “logic of choice”. How do we decide what we want? How do we know what other people want? If we can make a bit of progress on those two fronts, says Mr Cowen, we can probably improve the quality of our everyday life.
    如果你先前不知道考恩先生是一位经济学家，你可能会把他当成心理学家。他描绘的经济学跟数学和利率无关。是米塞斯构想的作为“选择的逻辑”的经济学。我们 怎样决定我们想要什么？我们怎样得知别人想要得到什么？考恩说，如果我们能在这两方面有所进步，我们也许就能提高我们的日常生活的质量。

    One of his recurrent warnings is to allow for the complexities of human emotions. What people want cannot always be expressed in money. You cannot, for example, pay your children to respect you, any more than you might pay your spouse to love you. And even in situations where cash incentives might seem appropriate, you are liable to come up against the general truth that people hate to feel manipulated. A teenage child might balk at washing dishes at home to qualify for pocket money—but would willingly do the same thing in the café down the road, where a job and a wage signalled independence.

    他反复提醒的是要考虑到人类情感 的复杂性。人们想得到的东西并不总是金钱。比如，你不能付钱要你的孩子尊重你，就像你不能付钱给你的配偶以获得对方的爱一样。即使在现金激励看起来合宜的 情况下，你也会碰到人们不喜欢感到被人控制这一普遍的真理。一个十来岁的孩子可能不肯为了零花钱而在家里洗盘子，但愿意在街角的咖啡馆里洗盘子，在那里的 一份工作和薪水象征着独立。

    Mr Cowen is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virgina, and a co-owner of marginalrevolution.com, one of the best economics blogs on the internet. At George Mason he has helped to build a creative and widely admired economics faculty. The seriousness of his academic credentials should still any doubts about the conversational tone of his writing. This could easily have been a much longer and more densely argued book had the author so wished. Even so, and allowing for the intended general readership, it is still prone to skip from idea to idea with little pause for thought—a virtue in blogging, where ideas are floated for debate, but less so in a book, where the reader expects rounded argument.
    考恩先生是乔治·梅森大学的经济学教授，互联网上最好的经济学博客之一marginalrevolution.com的主人之一。在乔治·梅森大学，他帮 助建立了一个有创造力、广受赞誉的经济学系。他的学术声誉的严肃性该能平息对他的作品的交谈语调的质疑。如果作者愿意的话，这本可以是一本篇幅更长、论辩 更深入的著作。纵然如此，它考虑的是写给更广大的读者群，它仍然倾向于从一个观点跳到另一个观点，很少停下来深入思考——这对提出大量观点供辩论的博客来 说是一个优点，但对一本书来说就算不上优点了，读者期望读到严密的论证。

    “Discover Your Inner Economist” joins a recent school of books demystifying and popularising economics that began with Steven Landsburg's “Armchair Economist” in 1993, and conquered the bestseller lists in 2005 with “Freakonomics” by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It stands apart from its predecessors by making its revelations not so much about the way the world works as about the way we ourselves work (and play) and how we can take practical steps to do both better.
    “发现你的经济学潜能”加入的是去除经济学神秘的面纱、使之大众化的系列书籍，这类书的开山之作是史蒂文·兰斯伯格1993年的《足不出户的经济学家》， 2005年史蒂文·列维特和史蒂芬·都伯纳的《怪诞经济学》打进了畅销书榜。它和前贤们的著作的区别是，它揭示的不是世界运行的方式，而是我们自己工作和 享乐的方式，以及我们可以怎样采取实际的步骤对它们加以改进。

    Mr Cowen's model for running better meetings is hard to beat: put in place a system (he suggests body sensors) that enables participants to signal their boredom anonymously. When everyone is known to be bored, the meeting halts. It's a pity, however, that Mr Cowen doesn't really arrive at any useful advice for keeping the dentist in line. The problem here, to extend his line of argument, may be that you want a dentist whose supreme value is to avoid inflicting pain; yet who, with that supreme value, would ever become a dentist?
    考恩先生提出的更好地开会的模式无懈可击：在座位上安装一种装置（他提议的是身体感应器），使参与者可以匿名地表达他们的厌烦之情。当得知人人都厌烦了之 后就散会。但遗憾的是，考恩先生没能就如何搞定牙医提出任何有益的建议。按照他的思路往下说，这里的问题也许是，你希望牙医最重要的职责是不让你感到疼 痛，但是带着这样的职责，谁还能当得成牙医呢?

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