我们需要穿着脏鞋的专家

我们需要穿着脏鞋的专家

一位英国前驻伊朗大使会查看使馆人员的鞋子脏不脏。“如果不脏的话，我就知道，他们没有走出使馆走访城里的民众。”——最好的专家穿着脏鞋

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

Aftermath 后果；余波['ɑːftəmæθ]

embassy 大使馆['embəsɪ]

income inequality [劳经] 收入不平衡；所得不均

homogeneous 均匀的；同类的[,hɒmə(ʊ)'dʒiːnɪəs; -'dʒen-]

flinch 退缩；畏惧['flɪn(t)ʃ]

Bolsover 博尔索弗 (英国国会选区)

glean 收集；拾落穗[gliːn]

mortgage 抵押['mɔːgɪdʒ]

glitzy 闪光的；耀眼的['glɪtsɪ]

hedge fund 避险基金；对冲基金 避险基金|是指由金融期货、金融期权等金融衍生工具与金融组织结合后，以盈利为目的的金融基金。其最初目的为透过套期保值

阅读即将开始，建议您计算一下阅读整篇文章所用时间，并对照下方给出的参考值来估算您的阅读速度。

如果您读完全文用时为： 那么，您的阅读速度相当于 每分钟阅读的英文单词数

4分52秒 母语为英语者的朗读速度 140

2分24秒 母语为英语的中学生的阅读速度 250

1分9秒 母语为英语的大学生的阅读速度 350

0分6秒 母语为英语的速读高手 1000

The Best Economist is One with Dirty Shoes （662words）

By Sarah O’Connor

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In the aftermath of the Iranian revolution in 1979, the UK foreign secretary commissioned a secret internal inquiry into why British diplomats had failed to predict it. One problem, the report found, was that the embassy in Tehran had little contact with people beyond the elites around the shah.

Subsequent generations of diplomats have taken this lesson to heart. They prize what they call “ground truth”: how things really feel out there; what people are really thinking. One former ambassador to Iran used to check whether his staff’s shoes were dirty. “If not, I knew they hadn’t been getting out of the embassy and meeting people in town.”

The economics profession could learn from this. Look through a few spreadsheets on the UK economy in recent years and you might wonder why people have not been dancing in the streets. Unemployment is 5 per cent, the lowest in 11 years. Participation in the labour market is near a record high. Income inequality, far from rising, has actually declined since the financial crisis. Yet 52 per cent of voters have just chosen to leave the EU.

That group is far from homogeneous and many were motivated by topics that have nothing to do with economics. It is clear, though, that some voters felt they had been left behind by the modern economy and had nothing to lose.

Andy Haldane, the Bank of England’s chief economist, described last month how he encountered this “ground truth” when he met a group of charities in Nottingham, a former industrial city in the Midlands. When he started talking about the economic recovery they stopped him short. They did not see any evidence: homelessness, food bank use, mental health problems were all going up. “The language of ‘recovery’ simply did not fit their facts,” Mr Haldane said. Some economists will flinch at the idea of taking “ground truth” too seriously. They will say — rightly — that anecdotal evidence is almost always unrepresentative and can lead to the wrong conclusions. But so can data if you rely on it too heavily. Combine the two and you can tease out where they differ. You can also find clues as to why.

A few months ago I went to Bolsover, a former mining town in Derbyshire whose economy looked fairly good on paper. Average wages were low but the proportion of people on jobless benefits had dropped below the UK average. Yet the man who ran the pub said he had made all his staff self-employed so he did not have to pay taxes or the minimum wage. The people in the church were giving sleeping bags to young men who had dropped off the benefits register and were living in disused garages. The women working in the shops said local retail jobs were part-time and the bus fare was too high to make it worth travelling to a full-time job elsewhere.

Statisticians do their best to capture these subtleties. But there is a limit to how much you can learn about the economy by staring at a spreadsheet in a London office. And the bits you miss might be the bits that matter.

Of course, there is “ground truth” to be gleaned from newspapers and other secondary sources, but there is no substitute for first-hand knowledge. Take Steve Eisman and his colleagues at the FrontPoint hedge fund. Michael Lewis, who wrote about them in The Big Short , described how they confirmed their hunch about the looming mortgage crisis in 2007 by flying to a glitzy subprime conference in Las Vegas. They chatted to the bankers, investors and rating agency guys who were making money from thin air. When they flew home, they doubled their bet against the US housing market.

Michael Gove, the pro-Brexit former government minister, was wrong when he said we have had enough of experts. As the UK navigates an uncertain future, we need experts more than ever. What we really need is experts with dirty shoes.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1. Which country’s embassy is mentioned in the example about the revolution?

A. UK

B. Iran

C. Tehran

D. US

2. What is the meaning of ‘ground truth’?

A. how things really feel out there

B. what people are really thinking

C. both A and B

D. neither A nor B

3. What is the ‘ground truth’ in Nottingham?

A. Homelessness, food bank use, mental health problems were all going up

B. Unemployment is lowest in 11 years

C. Participation in the labour market is near a record high

D. Income inequality has declined since the financial crisis

4. Why the author said Michael Gove was wrong?

A. we have had enough of experts

B. we really need experts with dirty shoes

C. experts always like new shoes

D. there is no way to glean “ground truth” from newspapers

[1] 答案 A. UK

解释：1979年伊朗革命爆发后，时任英国外交大臣委托进行了一项秘密的内部调查：为什么英国外交官未能预测这场革命。

[2] 答案 C. both A and B

解释：后来的历代英国外交官都将这一教训牢记于心。他们高度重视所谓的“第一线真相”：外面的气氛究竟是怎样的；人们真正在想什么。

[3] 答案 A. Homelessness, food bank use, mental health problems were all going up

解释：对于电子表格上显示的乐观数字，研究员们看不到任何证据：无家可归、食物赈济库(food bank)的利用、精神健康问题都在加重。

[4] 答案 A. we have had enough of experts

解释：当支持退欧的前部长级官员迈克尔?戈夫(Michael Gove)称我们已经听够了专家的高见时，他错了。在英国把握一个不确定的未来之际，我们比以往任何时候都更需要专家。但我们真正需要的是接地气的专家。