走近理查德•塞勒

There are many ways, all easy and enjoyable, to appreciate the work of Richard Thaler, the economist who this week was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. If you do nothing else, and know nothing else about his work, simply read his New York Times column from two years ago on why normal people are not like Mr Spock.

欣赏理查德•塞勒(Richard Thaler)的研究成果有许多方式，这些方式都很轻松愉悦;这位经济学家本周被授予诺贝尔经济学奖(Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences)。如果你其他什么都不做，又对他的其他研究成果一无所知，那就读一读他从两年前开始在《纽约时报》(New York Times)上写的专栏，关于正常人为什么不像斯波克(Mr Spock，《星际旅行》主角之一——译者注)。

Know that his column is an elegant snapshot of his wit, gift of communication and life’s work in economics. A founder of the field of behavioural economics, his mission has been to analyse economic decisions as real people make them. (The Times has a curated page with a selection of some of his other newspaper columns.)

要知道，他的专栏是他的智慧、沟通天赋、以及他在经济学上投入的毕生心血的一个精美写照。作为行为经济学领域的创始人，塞勒的使命是分析现实世界的人们做出经济决策的方式。(《泰晤士报》(The Times)曾策划过一个版面，收集了塞勒在其他报纸上写的专栏。)

For more depth, you could do worse than reading the Nobel committee’s popular information paper and the scientific background paper, which are entirely accessible. They show Thaler’s work as organised around three related concepts: bounded rationality, bounded willpower and bounded self-interest.

如果要更深入地了解塞勒，看看诺贝尔评奖委员会受人欢迎的信息文件和科学背景文件是不错的选择，这些资料都是深入浅出的。它们展示了塞勒的研究成果围绕三个相关的概念：有限理性(bounded rationality)、有限意志力(bounded willpower)以及有限自利(bounded self-interest)。

To mention a few examples: on bounded rationality, he documented the so-called endowment effect. The price people say they are willing to pay for a given object is often a fraction of the price for which they are willing to part with it, even after possessing it for only a few minutes.

举几个例子：关于有限理性，塞勒提出了所谓的禀赋效应(endowment effect)。人们称他们愿意为某一物品支付的价格，往往是他们愿意卖出该物品的心理价位的一小部分，即使他们拥有这件物品只有几分钟。

On bounded willpower, Thaler was among the first to demonstrate the particular bias for consumption today. Humans put a much higher premium on the present relative to the imminent future than they discriminate between two moments separated by the same length of time but further into the future. This leads people to take less care of their future than they really intend to.

关于有限意志力，塞勒是最先论证人们对于即时消费的特别偏好的学者之一。相对于即将来临的未来，人类对“当下”看重得多，以至于他们区别对待两个间隔相等、但其中一个在更遥远未来的时刻。这导致人们为自己的将来“未雨绸缪”的程度往往低于他们的真正意愿。

On bounded self-interest, he popularised experiments such as the “dictator” and “ultimatum” games. These are stylised problems of sharing an amount of money where a true homo economicus would keep everything for himself or herself, but real people show a strong preference for fairness. The preferences for fairness that he and his colleagues first identified have held up in a variety of settings and contexts, including with large amounts of real money.

关于有限自利，塞勒推广了“独裁者”和“最后通牒”等实验。这些是关于分一笔钱的理论问题;在这类问题上，一个真正的“经济人”(homo economicus)会将一切据为己有，但真实的人会表现出对公平的强烈偏好。塞勒和他的同事们最先确认的这种对公平的偏好存在于各种场合和背景下，包括在处理一大笔真正的钱时。

I said you could do worse than read the Nobel committee papers. You could also do better, which is by reading some of Thaler’s own work. His wonderfully didactic approach is on superb display in the “Anomalies” section he has written at various intervals for the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Each Anomaly piece documents a behavioural pattern that is simple, immediately recognisable and flies in the face of conventional economic theory. Happily, the columns are available for open access on the JEP website.

前面说了看看诺贝尔评奖委员会的文件是个不错的方法。但还有更好的选择，那就是读一些塞勒自己的著述。他不定期为《经济展望期刊》(Journal of Economic Perspectives)撰写一个名为《异常现象》(Anomalies)的专栏，出色地展现了自己精湛的说教方式。该专栏的每篇文章都记录了一种简单、马上就让人认得出、而且公然违背常规经济学理论的行为模式。很幸运，这些专栏文章都可以在《经济展望期刊》的网站上找到。

But beyond the content of Thaler’s work, I want to emphasise its extraordinary reach — intellectually, in its policy influence, and in its impact on the profession.

但除了塞勒著述的内容以外，我想强调的是它在理论上、政策影响上、以及对经济学专业的影响上达到的非凡程度。

Intellectually, the Nobel paper links Thaler to traditions of thought going back to Aristotle, Adam Smith (in particular his theory of moral psychology) and Freud. Thaler’s focus on the importance of “choice infrastructure”, applied for example in his FT opinion piece on the Brexit referendum, connects him with the political theory literature on power, which stresses that defining the menu of choice is an exercise of power more important than dictating what to choose.

从理论水平上说，诺贝尔文件将塞勒与可以追溯至亚里士多德(Aristotle)、亚当•斯密(Adam Smith)(尤其是他的道德心理学理论)和弗洛伊德(Freud)的思想传统联系在一起。塞勒重视“选择基础设施”的重要性——他在英国《金融时报》发表的关于英国退欧公投的评论文章就运用了这一理论——将他与有关权力的政治理论文献联系起来，这种理论强调，定义选择菜单是一种对权力的行使，其重要性超过决定选择什么。

His immediate intellectual predecessors were Maurice Allais and Herbert Simon (also Nobel economics winners). And the list of contemporary scholars who have touched on topics similar to Thaler is a who’s who of economics and decision theory: George Akerlof, Gary Becker, Daniel Kahneman, Reinhard Selten, Thomas Schelling, Amartya Sen, Robert Solow — economic Nobel laureates all.

他的思想上的直接前辈是莫里斯•阿莱(Maurice Allais)和赫伯特•西蒙(Herbert Simon)——这两人也是诺贝尔经济学奖得主。曾经研究和塞勒类似课题的当代学者名单，简直像是经济学和决策理论领域的名人录：乔治•阿克洛夫(George Akerlof)、加里•贝克(Gary Becker)、丹尼尔•卡内曼(Daniel Kahneman)、赖因哈德•泽尔腾(Reinhard Selten)、托马斯•谢林(Thomas Schelling)、阿马蒂亚•森(Amartya Sen)以及罗伯特•索洛(Robert Solow)，这些人全都是诺贝尔经济学奖得主。

But Thaler’s patient dedication to behavioural economics has arguably influenced policymaking and the economics profession more than any of these earlier laureates. As Tim Harford explains, Thaler’s work made possible the behavioural turn in public policy popularly known as “nudge”. This approach is to exploit people’s behavioural biases and irrationalities in order to non-coercively make them behave in ways seen as more desirable by policymakers — and ideally by the “nudged” themselves. Thaler and his collaborator Cass Sunstein use the paradoxical (but not oxymoronic) term “libertarian paternalism”.

但是可以说，塞勒孜孜不倦钻研行为经济学对政策制定和经济学专业的影响，超过了上述所有的诺贝尔经济学奖得主。正如蒂姆•哈福德(Tim Harford)解释的那样，塞勒的研究成果让公共政策引入行为理论(通常被称为“助推”)成为可能。这种做法是利用人们的行为偏好和不理智倾向，以非强制的方式，让他们以政策制定者认为更加可取的方式行事——理想情况下这些“助推”的对象也会认为这种方式更加可取。塞勒和其合作者凯斯•桑斯坦(Cass Sunstein)使用了“自由意志主义的家长制”这个似非而是(但并非矛盾)的术语。

As to his role in the academe, Justin Fox tells how Thaler was a consciously quiet revolutionary, who was determined not to antagonise the economics profession with his revolution. The result was to change the system — to some extent at least — from within, and “generations of graduate students have now come of age in an economics profession where behavioural research is, if still not central, perfectly respectable.”

就塞勒在学术界的角色而言，贾斯汀•福克斯(Justin Fox)讲述了塞勒是一个有意识低调的革命者，他小心翼翼地不让自己的革命得罪经济学专业。结果是从内部——至少在某种程度上——改变了经济学体系，而“一代又一代的研究生在行为学研究受到经济学专业尊敬(如果还不是处于核心位置的话)的氛围培养出来”。

John Maynard Keynes wrote that “the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman philosopher . . . touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought . . . No part of man’s nature or his institutions must lie entirely outside his regard.” Few living economists fit Keynes’s billing better than Thaler.

约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)写道，“经济学大师必须具备多种天赋的罕见结合。他必须是数学家、历史学家、政治家和哲学家……在同一个思绪中触及抽象与具体……还必须考虑到人性或人的制度的每一部分”。在如今仍健在的经济学家当中，没几个人比塞勒更符合凯恩斯的描述。