【2017-02-26】 @whigzhou: 越想越觉得border-adjustment是个好东西，最好的地方是它可能会把川普糊弄过去（或者帮川普把他的支持者糊弄过去？），以他（和他的支持者）对经济问题的理解能力，这很可能。 ​​​​ @史搞特:这个border adjustment tax跟关税有啥不同 @whigzhou: 差别是：关税是对跨境交易额外征了一笔税，因而会提高税负，降低贸易额，而BA只是改变了跨境交易的税负分布，后者对贸易的影响会被汇率杠杆重新撬回来，最终效果只是提高了美元币值，总体上的贸易均衡位置不会改变。 @whigzhou: BA表面上看起来好像会减少美国的贸易逆差，其实不会，因为贸易逆差只跟境外对美元资产的投资需求有关，和其他因素统统无关，只要这一需求不变，逆差仍会延续，所有其他因素造成的影响都会被汇率杠杆撬回来。  

【2017-02-23】 @研二公知苗 不少人在讲移民问题时，都忽略社会，文化和政治成本，只讲纯经济收益。讲经济收益时，理论上，无论是受高等教育的合法移民还是从事低端工作的非法移民带来的纯经济收益理论上都是正的。但是这种收益不是一些人描绘的帕累托改进。相反，这种收益实际上带有很强的再分配性质。尤其是考虑到非法移民增加了低端工作岗位的供给，压低了低端岗位的工资，实际上是一种带有劫贫济富性质的再分配。 @whigzhou: 你说的是分配效应，distributive effect，不是再分配，后面这个词要难听得多 @whigzhou: 贸易开放、技术进步、资源发现，都有很强的分配效应，但不是再分配，后者是对由市场机制分配的要素报酬通过非市场手段进行人际转移 @whigzhou: 制度和政策上无视分配效应，是自由市场原则的要点之一，否则贸易保护、卢德分子、行会特权、工会垄断，就都有了位置 @研二公知苗: 但现实中，自由市场的运行还是需要政治上的保障。对受损者的补偿就是为了使得自由市场的基本原则在政治上具有可持续性。 @whigzhou: 妥协让步当然可以，但让步不能通过修改自己的是非观来进行，『你欠我100，还不起？好吧，那就免掉你30』vs『你欠我100，还不起？好吧，那就算你只借了70』  

【2017-02-21】 ​​​​@whigzhou: 如果让你列出五件东西，没了它们美国（在你眼里）就不再是美国了，你会选哪五件？我的选择：持枪权，[[stand your ground]]，陪审团，最高法院，州权。 @都市学派:宪法必须排第一。 @whigzhou: 宪法很难判定怎么算『没了』，我列的五件都很容易判别 @慕容飞宇gg:辉总的意思是没了其中一件还是全部没了？ @whigzhou: 每少一件就更远离一点啊（幸亏我不是本质主义者） @银色子弹V5: 那不也很好嘛，变成加拿大了 @whigzhou: 说到点子上了，没这些就是加拿大了，我之所以选这几件，不是说其他（比如言论自由、私人财产权）不重要，而是认为这些才是让美国比盎格鲁世界乃至自由世界的其他部分更自由的东西，是特别美国的东西  

【2017-02-17】 罗伯斯庇尔24岁时当上了阿拉斯主教区刑事法庭的法官，因为这项工作和他强烈反对死刑的原则相冲突，不久便辞职——哈哈，这是我今天听到的最大笑话。 ​​​​ 前几天还听到个笑话，有位自由派议员受不了[[Betsy DeVos]]当上教育部长，说要让自家孩子home schooling，也很劲爆。  

Is the FDA Too Conservative or Too Aggressive? FDA，过于保守还是过于激进？ 作者:Alex Tabarrok @ 2015-08-26 译者:小聂(@PuppetMaster) 校对:babyface_claire (@许你疯不许你傻) 来源:Marginal Revolution,http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/08/is-the-fda-too-conservative-or-too-aggressive.html I have long argued that the FDA has an incentive to delay the introduction of new drugs because approving a bad drug (Type I error) has more severe consequences for the FDA than does failing to approve a good drug (Type II error). In the former case at least some victims are identifiable and the New York Times writes stories about them and how they died because the FDA failed. In the latter case, when the FDA fails to approve a good drug, people die but the bodies are buried in an invisible graveyard. 我一直认为，FDA有充分的动机来延迟新药审批，因为对于FDA来说，批准一种不合格的药（第一型错误）比拒绝一种合格的药（第二型错误）后果要严重得多。在前一种情况下，至少某些受害人的身份是可以被证实的，《纽约时报》会报道他们的故事，和他们是怎么因为FDA的失败而死亡的。而在后一种情况下，FDA没能批准合格的药品，虽然导致死亡，但是受害者藉藉无名，只会被人们忘记。 In an excellent new paper (SSRN also here) Vahid Montazerhodjat and Andrew Lo use a Bayesian analysis to model the optimal tradeoff in clinical trials between sample size, Type I and Type II error. Failing to approve a good drug is more costly, for example, the more severe the disease. Thus, for a very serious disease, we might be willing to accept a greater Type I error in return for a lower Type II error. The number of people with the disease also matters. Holding severity constant, for example, the more people with the disease the more you want to increase sample size to reduce Type I error. All of these variables interact. 在一篇杰出的新论文中，Vahid Montazerhodjat和Andrew Lo使用了贝叶斯分析来为临床试验中的病人数量、第一型错误和第二型错误之间的取舍进行了建模。举个例子来说，疾病越严重，不批准一种优秀药品所造成的损失就越大。因此，对于非常严重的疾病，人们可能会愿意接受更大的犯第一型错误的可能，来换取较小的犯第二型错误的几率。患有疾病的人群数量也很关键。比如说在建模中控制疾病的严重性为常量之后，患病的人群数量越大，就越需要在临床试验中招募更多的病人，以此来降低犯第一型错误的可能性。以上提到的这些变量都是互相影响的。 In an innovation the authors use the U.S. Burden of Disease Study to find the number of deaths and the disability severity caused by each major disease. Using this data they estimate the costs of failing to approve a good drug. Similarly, using data on the costs of adverse medical treatment they estimate the cost of approving a bad drug. 作者创新性的使用了美国疾病负担研究结果中所有主要疾病所导致的死亡和残疾的数据。他们利用这些数据估算未批准一种合格药品所造成的损失。同样，他们也使用了药物不良反应带来的成本，以此来估算批准一种不合格药品所造成的损失。 Putting all this together the authors find that the FDA is often dramatically too conservative: 综上所述，作者发现FDA在新药审批方面通常是极为保守的：

“…we show that the current standards of drug-approval are weighted more on avoiding a Type I error (approving ineffective therapies) rather than a Type II error (rejecting effective therapies). For example, the standard Type I error of 2.5% is too conservative for clinical trials of therapies for pancreatic cancer—a disease with a 5-year survival rate of 1% for stage IV patients (American Cancer Society estimate, last updated 3 February 2013). The BDA-optimal size for these clinical trials is 27.9%, reflecting the fact that, for these desperate patients, the cost of trying an ineffective drug is considerably less than the cost of not trying an effective one.” “……我们的结果显示，现有的药品审批标准更偏向于避免第一型错误（批准无效的疗法）而不是避免第二型错误（拒绝有效的疗法）。譬如，对于胰腺癌——一种四期病人五年内存活率仅有1%的疾病（美国癌症协会预测，最后更新于2013年2月3日）——标准的2.5%第一型错误率实在是太过保守。这些临床试验经过贝叶斯决策分析优化过的容错标准为27.9%，这表明对于这些绝望的患者们，试用一种无效药物的成本大大低于不尝试一种有效药物的成本。”

(The authors also find that the FDA is occasionally a little too aggressive but these errors are much smaller, for example, the authors find that for prostate cancer therapies the optimal significance level is 1.2% compared to a standard rule of 2.5%.) （作者还发现FDA偶尔也会过于激进，但是偏离的程度小得多。例如，前列腺癌治疗的最优显著率是1.2%，而不是标准的2.5%。） The result is important especially because in a number of respects, Montazerhodjat and Lo underestimate the costs of FDA conservatism. Most importantly, the authors are optimizing at the clinical trial stage assuming that the supply of drugs available to be tested is fixed. Larger trials, however, are more expensive and the greater the expense of FDA trials the fewer new drugs will be developed. Thus, a conservative FDA reduces the flow of new drugs to be tested. 该结果十分重要，尤其因为在很多方面，Montazerhodjat和Lo低估了FDA坚持保守标准的成本。最关键的一点在于，作者们假定了待评估药物的供给是恒定的，并在此基础之上来优化临床试验阶段的容错标准。然而大型临床试验往往花费更高，这又导致新药研发的萎缩。因此，保守的FDA会降低新药研发的数量。 In a sense, failing to approve a good drug has two costs, the opportunity cost of lives that could have been saved and the cost of reducing the incentive to invest in R&D. In contrast, approving a bad drug while still an error at least has the advantage of helping to incentivize R&D (similarly, a subsidy to R&D incentivizes R&D in a sense mostly by covering the costs of failed ventures). 从某种意义上说，错误的拒绝一种好的药品有两种成本，一是没能拯救那些本来可以被拯救的病人的机会成本，二是减少了对新药研发做投资的激励所带来的成本。与之相对的是，批准一种不合格的药品，尽管仍旧是个错误，但是至少可以给新药研发带来正面的激励（类似的，对研发进行补贴的一个主要形式就是支付那些失败的研发项目经费，以此来激励更多的新药研发）。 The Montazerhodjat and Lo framework is also static, there is one test and then the story ends. In reality, drug approval has an interesting asymmetric dynamic. When a drug is approved for sale, testing doesn’t stop but moves into another stage, a combination of observational testing and sometimes more RCTs–this, after all, is how adverse events are discovered. Thus, Type I errors are corrected. On the other hand, for a drug that isn’t approved the story does end. With rare exceptions, Type II errors are never corrected. 而且，Montazerhodjat和Lo的分析框架是静态的，一个试验完了，故事就结束了。可实际上，药物审批流程有个独特的非对称机制。当药物被批准上市之后，测试并非就此结束，而是进入下一个阶段，往往由一系列观测性的测试，有时甚至是随机临床试验构成——毕竟，这是发现不良反应的方式。因此，第一型错误往往得到纠正。另一方面，对于一种不被批准的药物，故事到这里就结束了。第二型错误几乎没有被纠正过。 The Montazerhodjat and Lo framework could be interpreted as the reduced form of this dynamic process but it’s better to think about the dynamism explicitly because it suggests that approval can come in a range–for example, approval with a black label warning, approval with evidence grading and so forth. As these procedures tend to reduce the costs of Type I error they tend to increase the costs of FDA conservatism. Montazerhodjat和Lo的框架可以被视为这个机制的一个简化版本，但最好还是能具体的思考一下这个机制，因为这暗示了对于新药的审批结果其实可以是一个范围——比如说，批准（但是带有一个黑色警示标签），或是带有证据强度分级的批准，等等。因为这些举措可以有效降低第一型错误的成本，它们倾向于使FDA在过于保守时受到惩罚。 Montazerhodjat and Lo also don’t examine the implications of heterogeneity of preferences or of disease morbidity and mortality. Some people, for example, are severely disabled by diseases that on average aren’t very severe–the optimal tradeoff for these patients will be different than for the average patient. One size doesn’t fit all. In the standard framework it’s tough luck for these patients. Montazerhodjat 和Lo也并没有检验新药特征的不均一性所带来的影响，这些不均一性主要体现于病人对于治疗结果的偏好或是疾病的发病率和死亡率。例如，有些病人被那些平均而言并不太严重的疾病弄成了严重残疾，对这些病人来说，最优的取舍显然不同于一般的病人。同一个标准并不适用于所有的情况。所以在标准的优化框架里面，这些病人就被忽略了。 But if the non-FDA reviewing apparatus (patients/physicians/hospitals/HMOs/USP/Consumer Reports and so forth) works relatively well, and this is debatable but my work on off-label prescribing suggests that it does, this weighs heavily in favor of relatively large samples but low thresholds for approval. What the FDA is really providing is information and we don’t need product bans to convey information. Thus, heterogeneity plus a reasonable effective post-testing choice process, mediates in favor of a Consumer Reports model for the FDA. 而如果非FDA的评价机构（包括病人、医生、医院、卫生保健组织、美国药典、消费者报告，等等）相对来说起作用的话——这个观点虽然有待商榷，但我给病人开非处方药的经验表明它们是起作用的——这些评价机构就更适合于那些需要大量病人但是批准门槛较低的药。FDA真正提供的是信息，而我们没法从一刀切的禁令中获取有效信息。因此，不均一性，加上一个合理有效的试验后选择机制，间接的指向一个更好的消费者报告式的FDA模式。 The bottom line, however, is that even without taking into account these further points, Montazerhodjat and Lo find that the FDA is far too conservative especially for severe diseases. FDA regulations may appear to be creating safe and effective drugs but they are also creating a deadly caution. 就算不考虑以上这些引申观点，最起码，Montazerhodjat 和 Lo的研究表明，FDA在新药的审批上，尤其是针对特别严重的疾病时，显得过于保守了。FDA的监管或许给我们带来了安全和有效的药品，但是同时也带来了致命的谨慎。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Class, Caste, and Genes 阶级、种姓和基因 作者:Henry Harpending @ 2012-01-13 译者:尼克基得慢(@尼克基得慢) 校对:辉格(@whigzhou) 来源:West Hunter,https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/13/class-caste-and-genes/ An article by Sabrina Tavernise appeared in the New York Times a few days ago describing increasing perceptions of class conflict in America, and there is a lot of recent commentary in the press about this report from the Pew Charitable Trust that claims there is less class mobility here than in several other northern countries.   It is not very clear to me what the complaints really are or what alternatives exist. If there is any substantial heritability of merit, where merit is whatever leads to class mobility, then mobility ought to turn classes into hereditary castes surprisingly rapidly. 几天前，Sabrina Tavernise一篇描写美国阶级矛盾越发明显的文章刊登在了《纽约时报》上，这份来自皮尤慈善信托基金（the Pew Charitable Trust）的报告宣称美国的阶级流动性少于其他几个北方国家，最近的新闻对此有很多评论。但是我并没有搞清楚他们究竟在抱怨什么或者存在什么可行的替代选项。假设存在实质性的个体优势遗传，同时个体优势总会导致阶级流动，那流动性应该会迅速地把阶层转化为世袭的种姓式分化。 A start at looking into genetic consequences of meritocracy is to create the simplest possible model and follow its implications. Consider free meritocracy in a two class system, meaning that each generation anyone in the lower class who has greater merit than someone in the upper class immediately swaps class with them. Mating then occurs at random within class. There are no fitness differences, no selection at all, everything is neutral. 要开始调查精英制度的遗传后果，应该建立尽可能简单的模型并遵循其推论。设想有两个阶级系统的自由精英制度，这意味着每一代中任何身处较低阶级的人，都可立刻与更高阶级中能力弱于自身的人互换阶级。然后阶级内随机通婚。这里没有健康程度的不同，也完全没有自然或人工选择，所有都保持中性。 It is convenient to discuss what happens in terms of IQ because IQ is familiar and, in northern industrial nations, closely related to merit. On the other hand we have to keep in mind that our focus on IQ is like that of the drunk searching for his keys under the lamppost: we can measure IQ but have no good way to measure honesty nor time preference nor conscientiousness and so on. 方便起见，不妨从IQ的角度来讨论由此引出的结果，因为IQ广为人知，而且在北方工业国家中，IQ跟个人优势紧密相关。另一方面，我们也必须谨记，我们对于IQ的关注就像醉汉在路灯下找寻钥匙：我们可以测量IQ，却没有好方法来测量诚实、时间偏好或者尽责性等特质。 This figure shows an initial population with normally distributed merit. A new merit based class system is imposed such that the two new classes are of equal size. In this free meritocracy everyone with merit exceeding the population mean moves into the upper class and everyone with merit less than the average moves into the lower class. The second panel of the figure shows the resulting merit distributions by class before reproduction and the bottom panel shows the distributions after endogamous reproduction. This model assumes that the reshuffling of genes during reproduction leads to normal distributions in the next generation within classes. 上图的顶层显示了个体优势呈正态分布的初始人口。一种基于阶级系统的新优势被引入进来，据此划分的两个新阶级的人口数量相当。在这种自由精英制度中，每个能力超过人口平均值的人都进入上层阶级，每个能力达不到平均值的人都进入下层阶级。上图的中层表示在生育前所处阶级导致的个体优势分布，底层则表示在同阶级通婚生育后的个体优势分布。这个模型假设生育过程中的基因重组会导致同阶级的下一代在个体优势上的正态分布。 The process continues for several generations. By analogy with IQ the additive heritability of merit is set to 0.6 so there are substantial random environmental effects. The second figure shows the evolution of class differences over four generations or about 100 years in human terms. 这个过程持续了几代的时间。通过类比IQ，个体优势的可加性遗传率设为0.6，所以这就有了大量随机的环境影响。下图展示了四代（人类角度的大约100年）时间内阶级差异的演化。 Class mobility after the first generation is 30% while after four generations it has declined to 10% and continues to decline after that.  The average merit in the two classes is about -1SD in the lower and +1SD in the upper on the original scale, corresponding to IQs of 85 and 115. 第一代之后的阶级流动性是30%，而四代之后这个数字就已跌至10%并且之后继续下降。相较于原始水平，较低阶级的平均个体优势降低了一个标准差，较高阶级的平均个体优势增加了一个标准差， 对应的IQ数值为较低阶级的85和较高阶级的115。 Recall that there are no fitness differences in this model. Still, after four generations, about 70% of the variance is between classes, which can be compared to  about 35% of the variance among continental human groups for random genetic markers, i.e. colloquially class differences are twice neutral race differences. (The familiar among-population figure of 15% made famous by Lewontin refers to gene differences while here we are comparing genotype differences of diploids, hence the difference between 15 and 35.) 回想下这模型中是没有健康水平的差异的。但在四代之后，阶级之间的方差仍到达了70%，这都可以与随机遗传标记的跨大陆种群间35%的方差相比了，例如，通俗语境中的阶级差异是纯粹种族差异的两倍。（Lewontin提出的著名的种群间15%的差异数据是指基因差异，而这里我们是比较二倍体的基因型差异，因此差别在15到35之间。） A surprise to me from this model was the rapidity with which classes turn into castes: most of the action is in the first generation or so. In retrospect this seems so obvious that it is hardly worth saying but it wasn’t so obvious to me when I started toying with it. 这模型让我吃惊的地方在于阶级转化为世袭种姓的速度之快：大部分转变在第一代左右就已发生。回想起来，这过程看起来如此明显以致于都不值得谈论，但是一开始我很随意地思考时，我并没有注意到这点。 Even though everything here is selectively neutral, I wonder about the extent to which this free meritocracy mimics selection. Any mutant that boosts merit in carriers will be concentrated in the upper class and vice versa. Greg and I discuss in our book how environmental change initially selects for dinged genes that are “quick fixes” in carriers but detrimental in homozygotes, citing sickle cell in humans, broken myostatin in beef cattle, and numerous others. Does this social system mimic selection? 即使这里的每件事情都是有选择地设为中性，我很想知道这个自由的精英制度与选拔制相似到什么程度。任何让携带者具有个体优势的基因突变都会聚集在较高阶级，反之亦然。Greg和我在我们的书【编注：Greg是Gregory Cochran，作者与他合著了《万年大爆炸》一书，West Hunter是这两位作者的合作博客】中讨论环境改变最初如何选择出了那些丧钟般的“临时补丁”基因，他们能为携带者快速解决一些问题，但对纯合子有害，造成人体内的镰状细胞，菜牛内残缺的肌肉生长抑制素，和很多其他坏处。这个社会系统也模仿选择机制吗？ A correlate of IQ in humans is myopia, one idea being that IQ boosters relax early developmental constraints on CNS growth resulting in eyeballs too big for the socket, leading to myopia. I have read somewhere that myopia is positively related to income in the US. Time to try to find that literature. 跟人类IQ相关的是近视，一种观点认为IQ超群者放松了对中枢神经系统生长的早期发展限制，导致了眼球相比于眼窝过大，于是成了近视。我在某处读到，近视在美国跟收入是正相关的。该去试着找到那篇文献去了。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Entrepreneurship and American education 创业活动与美国教育 作者:Michael Q. McShane @ 2016-05-10 译者:Tankman 校对:混乱阈值(@混乱阈值) 来源:AEI,http://www.aei.org/publication/entrepreneurship-and-american-education/ Key Points 要点

• While educational entrepreneurship’s influence has been muted by policy and circumstance, this has nevertheless been a time of great growth for the field.
• 尽管政策和政治氛围已经压制了教育业中创业活动的影响，这个领域还是有了一段时间的显著增长。
• Over the next two decades, educational entrepreneurs will encounter a funding community, policy environment, and changing educational landscape that will profoundly affect the types of ventures and the ability of those ventures to scale, grow, and meet children’s needs.
• 在接下来二十年里，教育业的创业者会受到融资界，政策环境，教育业整体面貌变化等因素的冲击。这些因素会深刻影响风险投资的类型以及这些风险投资发起，壮大和满足孩子需求的能力。
• Entrepreneurship does not guarantee success. If anything, it ensures that there will be failure. For all its imperfections though, it offers a degree of imagination and natural winnowing well-suited to our sprawling, diverse, and pluralistic nation, and it creates an opportunity for truly world-changing products to emerge.
• 创业并不一定会成功。如果要说什么是确定的话，那就是一定会有失败产生。虽然有各种不完美，它提供了一定程度的想象空间和自然筛选，很好的适应了我们这个参差多元，分权共治的国家，而且创造机会让真正改变世界的成果得以涌现。

I have two adorable dogs who I love like children. Georgie is a precocious, 10-pound fur ball Bichon Frise I bought from an Amish man in rural Maryland. Beau is a seven-pound Maltese and silky terrier mix who spent the first five years of his life in a meth den in Missouri before my wife and I rescued him. When we travel, we have to find a place to board them. For years, we used kennels or “open-play” dog boarding facilities. By and large, we were pleased with the care that the dogs received, but boy, was it expensive. 我有两条可爱的狗，我像爱孩子那样爱他们。Georgie是只早熟的，10磅重的圆滚滚毛茸茸的比熊犬。我把它从马里兰州农村的一位阿米绪人那里买来。Beau有七磅，是一只的玛尔济斯犬和澳洲丝毛梗的后代。它生命的前五年在密苏里州的一个毒窝里度过，直到被我和我太太救了出来。当我们旅行时，我们必须为它们找个寄宿的地方。许多年以来，我们使用狗窝或者是“敞开”式宠物狗寄存设施。总体来说，我们对狗狗们受到的照顾感到满意。但这种服务很贵。 That is why it was great when my wife discovered the app Rover. Rover is kind of like Airbnb for dog sitters. Prospective sitters (or walkers or groomers) create profiles, post their rates, and have a space for customers to review them. People can find options that are convenient, in their price range, and the kind of environment they want for their dogs. We use the app whenever we travel and get what I think is far superior care for substantially less than we paid a kennel. It has been a big win for us and our dogs. 因此当我太太发现手机应用Rover时，一切实在太棒了。Rover像是宠物狗看护领域的Airbnb。潜在的看护们（或是遛狗者，或狗美容师）创建了个人简介，贴上他们的要价，留下一个给客户写评论的地方。人们能够在自己满意的价格区间，选择合适的选项，给宠物狗他们觉得合宜的环境。我们每次旅行都要使用这个应用，用明显比狗窝更低的价钱，换来一个更好的服务。这对狗狗和人都大有好处。 Rover illustrates disruptive innovation at work. Its founders identified a practical problem, leveraged knowledge and technology to devise a better solution, and then provided that solution in a way that upends old routines and assumptions. Rover体现了破坏性创新是如何工作的。它的创始人确定了一个实际问题，利用知识和技术来提供一个更好的解决方案，而后那个方案在某种意义上颠覆了旧的常规和假设。 I am of the opinion that it would be good for K–12 schooling if more teachers, school leaders, and entrepreneurs took a Rover-like approach to challenges that plague education. How can we better use school facilities? How can we help children find schools that are a good match for them? How can we help teachers identify the best strategies to address specific learning challenges? The list of vexing problems goes on and on. But what does it take for entrepreneurial problem solving to actually help students, and how do we think about the obstacles it faces and the problems it may create? 我有一种看法：如果更多教师、学校领导和企业家提供一个Rover式的解决方案来挑战如今重疾缠身的教育业，对基础教育将会产生积极影响。如何能更好的使用学校设施？如何能帮助孩子发现适合他们的学校？如何能帮助教师发现应对特定教学挑战的最优策略？令人头痛的问题的清单越拉越长。但是需要什么条件，才能用企业家解决问题的思维来帮助学生？这一途径面临的障碍是什么呢？这种方法又会带来什么问题呢？ Look, Rover is no panacea, but it is a great improvement. I would be the first to admit that in some cities it is probably impractical. There might not be enough supply for great potential dog sitters to want to get involved, or there might not be enough demand to keep prices attractive to sitters. For many dog owners, it is still too expensive. That said, Rover does help solve a particular problem for a lot of people, while opening the door to newer and better solutions. This is what entrepreneurial activity can do. 看，Rover不是一个万灵药，但却是一个巨大的改进。我可以爽快地承认，在某些城市，它很可能不现实。那里可能没有足够多的潜在宠物狗看护者想加入该平台，或是需求量不够大，价格也就无法吸引看护者加入。对很多狗主人来说，价格仍然太高。尽管如此，Rover的确帮很多人解决了一个特殊的问题，也给更新更好的方案留出了机会。这正是创活动所能作的。 In May 2016, Harvard Education Press is releasing a volume called Educational Entrepreneurship Today, which Frederick Hess and I edited.[1] Its content arose during a conference we hosted at AEI during the summer of 2015, where we brought together leading educational entrepreneurs, researchers in the field, and people with experience funding entrepreneurial ventures. What follows are a couple of big ideas that are circulating in the educational entrepreneurship world today and some of the tensions that will define educational entrepreneurship in the future. Will education be a place where Rover- (or Uber- or Airbnb-) like innovation takes place? Do we want it to be? 在2016年五月，哈佛教育出版社发布了一卷Frederick Hess和我编辑的文集，题为《今日教育行业创投》。[1]文集的内容形成于2015年夏季我们在美国企业研究所主持的一个讨论会。在这个会议上，我们把一流的教育业创业者，该领域的研究者和有创投经验的人士召集在了一起。随之而来的则是一些在今日教育业创业界流行的非凡创意，同时还有一些争论将在未来定义教育行业的创投活动。教育业会是一个产生类似Rover（或优步，或Airbnb）那样的创新的领域吗？我们希望如此吗？ Trends in Educational Entrepreneurship 教育业创业的趋势 The first and most important idea that those observing educational entrepreneurship should know is that while its influence over the past decade or so has been muted by policy and circumstance, this has nevertheless been a time of great growth for the field. Sure, it is true that school procurement systems (how schools and teachers shop for and purchase new materials) are stifling and outdated. Teachers and principals have limited flexibility to redesign schools or put new tools to work in ambitious ways. 教育行业创投的观察人士应该知道的第一个也是最重要的一个概念就是：教育行业创投在过去十多年一直在发挥作用，尽管目前已被政策和环境压制，该领域仍然有过一段显著增长期。当然，学校采购平台系统（学校和教师采购新材料的方式）是压抑创新且过时的。老师和校长们重新设计学校，或积极使用新的工作工具的灵活性是有限的。 But there have been many bright spots. Enrollment in charter schools doubled, and then doubled again. Venture capital investments grew from almost nothing to hundreds of millions’ worth. Companies such as Wireless Generation and SchoolNet thrived and then were sold at a handsome rate of return, emboldening more entrepreneurs and investors who seek to emulate those efforts. 但这一行业已然有很多闪光点。特许学校的录取数翻倍，又再翻倍。风险投资额从接近于零，变成几亿美元。如无线世代（Wireless Generation)或学校网（SchoolNet）这样的公司茁壮成长然后再以可观的回报率被收购，这鼓励了更多企业家和投资者去尝试复制上述成果。 The second thing worth noting is that what gets measured gets valued. The No Child Left Behind era heavily emphasized how students perform on state tests in reading and math. In the modern era, there has also been far less appetite or room for entrepreneurs who are not focused on closing reading and math “gaps” for low-income, African American, or Latino youth. Teachers are increasingly evaluated based on these metrics, district schools are at risk of being sanctioned if their students do not perform adequately, and charter schools know their existence depends largely on their test scores. 第二个值得注意的事情是，能被衡量比较的方面才是被认为有价值的。这个“不让一个孩子落后”的时代特别重视学生在州统考中的阅读和数学成绩。在如今这个时代，那些不重视为低收入群体、非裔和拉丁裔青少年缩小阅读和数学成绩差距的企业家很少受到青睐或者得到发展空间。教师评估越来越基于这些指标，如果学生表现不够好，学区的学校可能面临被制裁的风险。而特许学校也知道其生存很大程度上依赖于测试分数。 Test scores tend to define the ways in which schools are judged and compared, and they also mean that new providers can really only demonstrate their mettle in terms of reading and math. When policy and philanthropy treat reading and math tests as the coin of the realm, it creates problems for entrepreneurs who are not offering “whole school” models, focusing on tested grades or subjects, or tackling English Language Arts and math in ways that do not map onto tests. The metrics used to measure success shape the types of solutions that will be offered. 州统考测试分数倾向于被拿来作为评判和比较学校的标准。这也意味着新的教育供应者只能通过阅读和数学成绩来彰显他们的能力。政策和慈善业把分数当作教育业的法定货币，这给一些企业家带来了麻烦。比如有些企业家不提供“完整学校”的模式，他们只关注学校课堂成绩或科目而非州统考成绩或科目；还有些企业家用来促进英语文学和数学教育的方法，无法反映在考试分数上。衡量成功的指标影响了哪些类型的解决方案将被提供。 Finally, the field of educational entrepreneurship needs to take a hard look in the mirror and realize it has suffered from its insularity. As New Schools Venture Fund President Stacey Childress points out in her chapter in Educational Entrepreneurship Today, Teach For America (TFA) alumni were key founders of nearly one in five education ventures launched in the past 20 years.[2] That data point reflects the larger reality that educational entrepreneurs are likely to share common formative experiences and worldviews. This has produced a community that has tended to share certain assumptions (such as the importance of reading and math tests) and embrace a certain set of policies (such as test-based teacher evaluation and charter schooling). 最后，教育行业创投这一领域自身需要被仔细审视，并意识到该领域已经被其孤立性深深伤害。教育行业创投会议上，新学校风险基金的主席Stacey Childress在其专题演讲中指出，过去20年发起的教育业风险投资中，五分之一的创业公司由“为美国而教书”(TFA)组织的前成员作为关键创始人。[2]这数据反映出一个更广泛的现实：教育业创业者很可能有着共同的成长经历或世界观。这就创造了一个倾向于分享特定假设的共同体（例如阅读和数学的重要性），并且支持某特定的政策集（如基于统考测试的教师评估和特许学校教学）。 This insularity has contributed to a simmering tension in several cities with an abundance of entrepreneurial activity and new school formation, such as Detroit, Newark, and New Orleans. Activists, politicians, and community members charge that these ventures are being done to marginalized communities, not with them. Part of this tension is stoked by conflating entrepreneurship and “education reform” more generally (a phenomenon that we will tackle momentarily), but another comes from a genuine fear of snake-oil salesmen and carpetbaggers with agendas of their own. 这种偏狭性在几个创业活动和新式学校丰富的城市导致了沸腾的矛盾，如底特律，纽瓦克和新奥尔良。活动家、政客和社区成员指责这些创业公司让社区边缘化，而不是和社区相伴。更广泛的来说，把创业和“教育改革”结合起来的尝试，激化了部分矛盾（这现象我们很快会谈到）。而另外的激化则来自于对于兜售冒牌货的奸商和有着自己小盘算、想趁机渔利的外来政客的真实恐惧。 Two Dynamics That Will Shape the Next Two Decades of Educational Entrepreneurship 未来20年塑造教育行业创投的两个机制 The “what” of educational entrepreneurship is exciting. The “how” is a lot tougher. Over the next two decades, educational entrepreneurs will encounter a funding community, a policy environment, and a changing educational landscape that will profoundly affect the types of ventures they are able to create and the ability of those ventures to scale, grow, and meet children’s needs. How these dynamics will play out remains to be seen. In fact, there are several key dynamics in educational entrepreneurship that are worth exploring. 教育行业创投的概念是令人激动的。而其实现途径则要困难多了。在接下来二十年，教育业的创业者会受到融资界、政策环境、变化的教育界等因素的冲击。这些因素会深刻影响风险投资以及这些风险投资发起、壮大和满足孩子需求的能力。这些机制如何运作还有待观察。事实上，教育创业有几个关键机制值得探索。 The first dynamic is the tension between big bets and small bets. Because the outcomes of new ventures are uncertain, it makes sense to make a large number of small bets and winnow them over time. This reduces risk for everyone involved and accelerates the rate at which new models can be tried. But this approach flies in the face of much of the thinking that has characterized educational innovation and entrepreneurship during the past decade. Philanthropists and investors have been eager to find “what works” and invest in scaling it up. Proponents of the scale-up approach point to the need nationwide, the slow pace of change, and the messiness of a small-bet strategy. 第一个机制是大额投资和小额投资之间的张力。因为新的风险投资的结果不确定，下很多的小赌注然后再不断筛选它们是有道理的。这减少了每个人涉及的风险，加速了尝试新模式的速率。但是过去十年，教育行业创新、创业的特色思维很大程度上与这一思路相悖。慈善家和投资者渴望发现可行的方案，并加大投资。加大投资这一做法的支持者，提到了全国性的需求、变革的慢节奏以及小赌注方案无序混乱等理由。 Fundamentally, this tension highlights the competing visions of educational improvement in America today. Some see experimentation as eventually converging on a single or small number of “best” models, practices, or programs that should ultimately be adopted everywhere. Others see a far more fluid world, with “best” answers being highly contingent and context dependent. This is not a simple story of entrepreneurs versus bureaucrats, but of good-faith disagreements on the approaches most likely to serve the needs of schools and schooling. 基本上，这种张力突显了在今日的美国教育改进中的竞争理念。有些人把实验看作是最终会收敛的过程。他们认为最后发现的一个或少数几个最优模式、做法或项目应当被用于全国。另一些人则看到一个更加多变的世界，最优答案是高度机缘性且情境依赖的。这不是一个企业家和官僚相争的简单故事，而是一个关于最大可能有助于学校和教学的需要的方法上的善意争执。 The second dynamic—a tension that actually poses a serious risk to current and future entrepreneurial ventures—is the simultaneous desire for experimentation and uniformly positive results. In the world of educational entrepreneurship, there are calls for experimentation, the need to “think outside the box,” and a need to “fundamentally change” American schools. However, in the next breath, the same leaders and advocates who have preached the Innovation Gospel insist on “no excuses” accountability systems aiming for 100 percent proficiency and charter-authorizing systems that require all schools and offerings to prioritize performance on state tests. While it is hypothetically possible to square this circle, the reality is that educational entrepreneurs are whipsawed between an appetite for risk-taking and a strong aversion to it. 第二种机制——实际上给现在和未来的创业风投带来了严重风险——即同时渴望实验和始终如一的正面结果。在教育业创投的世界，有对实验的呼唤，有“跳出盒子思考”的需求，也有对美国学校进行“根本变革”的需求。但同时，同样这些鼓吹创新思维福音的领袖和支持者坚持毫不妥协的系统可靠性，一定要向100%的师资能力水平看齐，而特许学校系统的学校和方案都必须优先考虑州统考的表现。两者兼顾在假想中是可能的，但现实中，教育业创投者则卡在冒险冲动和强烈的风险厌恶之间左右为难。 The casual observer can easily imagine that all the expertise and money involved in venture capital and startups must deliver a high rate of success. The truth is quite different. Ninety percent of all new enterprises fail. Failure is most of what new ventures actually do. That Darwinian process of figuring things out or learning from others’ mistakes is essential to entrepreneurial success. 漫不经心的观察者很容易觉得：风险资本和创业公司配置了所有这些专家技能和资金，回报率一定很高。真相则十分不同。90%的创业公司会失败。失败是大多数新的创投公司实际所做的事。以达尔文过程找到解决方案，或是从别人的错误中学习，对创业公司的成功至关重要。 While the idea of “failure” is disquieting when it comes to children and schools, the value of failure has an important place in classrooms and learning. Students have to feel free to try something new and learn from the experience, whether or not it works out. In American education today, however, there is little tolerance for failure—in classrooms, schools, or the larger landscape. 也许一旦涉及到孩子或者学校，“失败”这个词就让人心神不宁。学生必须有尝试新东西和从经验中学习的自由，无论最后结果成功与否。然而在今日的美国教育领域，失败一点都不被容忍——在教室，学校，或者更大的范围。 This tension is particularly evident in the inclination to support large, established “entrepreneurial” ventures such as TFA or the KIPP Academies. These ventures show track records of success, have proven leaders, and constitute a well-known quantity. At the same time, these are the very things that tend to produce rigidity and routine in any organization. 这种矛盾在支持大型的、发展完备的所谓“创业”风投企业的倾向中显得特别明显，如对TFA或KIPP学院。这些企业有一系列成功的记录，有资质的领袖，规模也广为人知。与此同时，任何这样的组织都倾向产生僵化和陈规。 Organizations such as TFA and KIPP, with more than two decades of experience, records of accomplishment, alumni networks, and stakeholders, are no longer positioned to pioneer wholly new approaches. Rather, they become attractive to funders, policymakers, and education officials as they become less and less the entrepreneurial upstart and more and more a familiar piece of the new education establishment. Rather than think about new ways of preparing teachers, people keep supporting TFA. The consequence is that these organizations are asked to do more and more, stretching their ability to excel while potentially crowding out interest in unproven ventures. TFA和KIPP这样的组织拥有20多年经验、一系列的成就、会友网络和利益相关者，它们不再站在新方法的先驱位置。因为当它们变得越来越不像创业新星而越来越像人们熟悉的新的教育既得利益集团时，它们对投资人、政策制定者和教育官员都变得具有吸引力。人们一直支持TFA，而不是思考培训教师的新方法。后果就是，这些机构被要求做得更多，拓展了其卓越能力的同时也潜在地挤出了那些尚未被认可的创业公司的利益。 Questions about the importance of entrepreneurship and our tolerance for uncertainty are also central to policy debates over entrepreneur-friendly reforms such as education savings accounts, online learning, and expanded school choice programs. After all, such programs are, by their very nature, unproven. 在就对创投友好的各种改革进行政策辩论，如教育储蓄账户、线上课程和范围更宽的择校程序时，创投的重要性和我们对不确定性的容忍度等问题也居于中心。无论如何，这些项目在其最根本性质上尚未证明自己。 So What Can We Do? 那么我们能做什么呢？ If you, like me, appreciate the entrepreneurial impulse and think that it has something to offer the nation’s education system, then there are steps that can be taken to try and advance the cause. 如果你像我一样欣赏创业精神的脉动并认为这可以给这个国家的教育系统带来些什么，那么有以下策略可以尝试和推进这项事业。 Funders can make small bets, as well as large ones. This can help address both the fear of “failing big” and the sense that so much of education reform today is imposed by outsiders on local communities. Insofar as the groups receiving the majority of funding are outsiders that come to town with their already-baked models, well-intentioned philanthropy can unwittingly exacerbate this divide. 投资者可以进行小额投资，就像大投资一样。这可以帮助处理对“大失败”的恐惧，也缓和了如下事实所带来的隔阂感：今日如此之多的教育改革是本地社区的外来者强制推行的。目前的情况是，当拿到大笔投资的团体是来到镇上的外来人，并带着他们已备好的模式时，好心的慈善可以无意中加剧这一隔阂。 An easy rule of thumb here is for funders to be sure they are devoting some modest percentage of their investment giving—whether that is 5 percent or 20 percent—to new ventures. Fortunately, the resources to support the developing, prototyping, and testing process tend to be only a fraction of what it costs to contribute meaningfully to an established operation. 在这里，对投资人来说一个易于施行的拇指规则是，保证他们把投资的一些小额部分，不管是5%还是20%，捐给新的创新公司。幸运的是，用来支持开发，原型制作，和测试过程的资源往往只是有效地捐助一个已建成项目的所需的一小部分。 Entrepreneurs can start with “tiny schools.” Given varying tolerance for risk and limited resources for experimentation, prospective entrepreneurs should take a good look at New Orleans’ 4.0 Schools and their idea of “tiny schools” (described by 4.0 CEO Matt Candler in his chapter).[3] Creating a new charter school typically entails a dozen or more employees, scores or even hundreds of students, and a budget north of $1 million—meaning that failure is slow, expensive, and enormously disruptive. 创业者可以从“小微学校”开始。给定不同的风险容忍度和有限的实验资源，潜在的企业家可以好好审视一下新奥尔良的4.0学校和他们的“小微学校”理念（引自4.0的首席执行官Matt Candler的专题讲座）[3]。创建一所新的特许学校通常需要十几个或者更多雇员，几十甚至几百个学生，一个一百万美元以上的预算——这意味着失败是缓慢、昂贵和极其麻烦的。 Tiny schools mean that educators with a promising idea can start with 5 to 10 kids on Saturday mornings in a public library or school cafeteria. Such a model allows entrepreneurs to experiment, fail, improve, and iterate over the course of several sessions at very low cost and next to zero risk to students. Just as evolutionary change accelerates when new generations are born more often, so entrepreneurial invention benefits from shortened time horizons and more rapid iteration. 小微学校意味着带着有潜质创意的教育者可以从周六上午在公共图书馆或学校食堂以五到十个孩子的规模开始。这种模式允许创业者以一个很低的费用和对学生来说几乎为零的风险，来对课程环节进行实验、失败、改进和试错。就如同新世代出生得更频繁时进化会加速一样。这样，创业型发明就从更短的周期和更快的试错中获益。 Tiny schools accomplish two central tasks. First, they lower the risk of starting a new school. If the idea bears fruit, it can be ramped up. If the teaching methods do not connect with students, at worst, students have lost a couple of Saturdays. Even if the transition cannot be made to a whole-year model, only a few students are affected. 小微学校完成了两个核心任务。第一，他们降低了创立一个新学校的风险。如果创业有成果，它就可以壮大。如果教学方法对学生不起作用，最差也不过就是学生损失几个星期六。即使这一过渡模式无法变为一个全年模式，也只有几个学生会受影响。 Second, they lower the cost of experimentation. In starting an entire charter school, substantial philanthropic and then public dollars are spent on an experiment. It might work out; it might not. While over time there is reason to believe that this will lead to better schools, it is an expensive way to get there. By bridging the gap between nothing and a whole school, tiny schools create space for rapid iteration and improvement. 第二，它们降低了实验成本。为了启动一个完备的特许学校，大笔慈善和财政资金会被用于一次实验。也许有好结果，也许不成功。虽然一直以来这方法被认为会产生好学校，这仍是一个昂贵的手段。通过跨越从一无所有到完备学校的鸿沟，小微学校为快速试错和改进提供了一个空间。 State leaders can complete a comprehensive regulatory review. Although mundane, rules regarding subjects such as procurement, teacher preparation, new school creation, reporting, facilities, special education, online provision, staff development, and charter school authorization can create huge, counterproductive hurdles to new providers and new models of provision. Although these regulations may have made sense at one time, many no longer do. 州政府的领袖可以完成一个综合性规制评议。虽然平凡庸常，但在采购、教师培训、新学校创设、报告、设施、特殊教育、在线授课、雇员培训和特许学校授权机构等诸方面，各种规制能够产生巨大的消极作用，阻碍新的提供者和新的模式投入使用。虽然这些规制过去可能有意义，但也许现在很多已并非如此了。 State leaders would do well to put together a blue-ribbon panel of experts to scour the state education code for outdated and ill-suited statutes and regulations that may be stymieing entrepreneurial solutions. They can also encourage districts, charter authorizers, and schools of education to conduct similar surveys of their own operations and publicly report on where and what they are streamlining. 州政府的领导们能做得更好的方面，也许是推动组成专家委员会来革新州的教育法规并去除那些过时和适应性差并可能阻碍创投方案的法律和规章。他们也可以鼓励学区、特许学校授权机构和学校对其自身的运作进行类似的调查，并公布它们在何处采取了何种加强效率的措施。 Don’t Go Gaga for Entrepreneurs; Foster Entrepreneurship 不要迷信企业家；要鼓励创业精神 The exciting source of dynamism that created everything from Rover to the next cool app to teach students to read is entrepreneurialism, not any particular entrepreneur or entrepreneurial venture. Exciting new entrants age, grow, and evolve. Some succeed and some fail. Those that succeed, with time and success, tend to become members in good standing of the stodgy old establishment. That is the cycle of entrepreneurial life. 企业家精神而不是某个企业家或者创投企业才是令人振奋的动力源。这动力可以创造从Rover到下一个很酷的手机应用，也可以教学生阅读。令人振奋的参与者变得成熟，成长，并且进化。一些成功了，一些失败了。那些成功者，随着它们的年岁和成功，变成了乏味沉闷的老既得利益集团的一部分。这就是创业生命体的周期。 Entrepreneurship does not guarantee success. If anything, it ensures that there will be failure. Of course, if a half century of school reform has taught us anything, it is that system reform is also sure to produce failure—except on a much larger scale and without the dynamism, inventiveness, and self-correction that characterizes vibrant entrepreneurial sectors. 创业不能保证成功。如果说能保证什么的话，它保证这里将会有失败。当然，如果半个世纪的学校改革教会了我们什么的话，那就是系统改革也当然会产生失败--只不过这失败的规模更大，而且没有活力、激励、自我修正等这些有生命力的创业部门所拥有的特征。 For all its imperfections though, educational entrepreneurship offers a degree of imagination and natural winnowing that seems especially well-suited to the sprawling, diverse, and pluralistic nation that we live in, and it creates an opportunity for truly world-changing products to emerge. Those who believe in the power of the entrepreneurial impulse would do well never to cling to any particular venture. The social good is best served by creating the conditions in which entrepreneurs can thrive if—and only if—they are serving the best interests of students. 虽然有种种不完美，教育行业创投活动提供着某种程度的想象力和自然筛选，这些看来对于我们所生活的这个分散，多元和分权共治的国家特别合适。并且创投创造了机会，使得真正改变世界的产品可能涌现。那些相信创业冲劲的人应该避免一成不变地支持某个特定的创投公司。创造条件，让并且只让那些最能为学生利益服务的企业茁壮成长，才是服务社会的最好途径。 Notes 注记

1. Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane, Educational Entrepreneurship Today (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
2. Stacy Childress, “From Generation to Generation: Fifteen Years of Education Entrepreneurship,” in Educational Entrepreneurship Today, ed. Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2016).
3. Matt Candler, “Go Small or Go Home: Innovation in Schooling,” in Educational Entrepreneurship Today, ed. Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Education Press, 2016).

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A Case against Child Labor Prohibitions 对禁用童工的一个反对意见 作者:Benjamin Powell @ 2014-07-29 译者:Eartha(@王小贰_Eartha) 校对:辉格(@whigzhou) 来源:Cato Institute,http://www.cato.org/publications/economic-development-bulletin/case-against-child-labor-prohibitions Halima is an 11-year-old girl who clips loose threads off of Hanes underwear in a Bangladeshi factory.1 She works about eight hours a day, six days per week. She has to process 150 pairs of underwear an hour. At work she feels “very tired and exhausted,” and sometimes falls asleep standing up. She makes 53 cents a day for her efforts. Make no mistake, it is a rough life. 哈丽玛是个十一岁的小女孩，在孟加拉的工厂里给Hanes牌内衣修线头，每天工作八小时，每周六天。① 她每小时需要处理150套内衣，工作时觉得“非常劳累”，有时站着就睡着了。而这样的努力工作每天能换来53美分。毫无疑问，这种生活非常艰苦。 Any decent person’s heart would go out to Halima and other child employees like her. Unfortunately, all too often, people’s emotional reaction lead them to advocate policies that will harm the very children they intend to help. Provisions against child labor are part of the International Labor Organization’s core labor standards. Anti-sweatshop groups almost universally condemn child labor and call for laws prohibiting child employment or boycotting products made with child labor. 任何一个正派人的内心都会对像哈丽玛这样的童工充满同情。但遗憾的是，人们的情绪化反应常常指引他们支持错误的政策，这反而会伤害那些他们原本想帮助的孩子。禁用童工条款是国际劳工组织的核心劳工标准的一部分。反对血汗工厂的团体几乎一致谴责使用童工的行为，呼吁通过禁止雇佣童工的法律或是抵制使用童工生产的商品。 In my recent book, Out of Poverty: Sweatshops in the Global Economy, I argue that much of what the anti-sweatshop movement agitates for would harm workers and that the process of economic development, in which sweatshops play an important role, is the best way to raise wages and improve working conditions. Child labor, although the most emotionally charged aspect of sweatshops, is not an exception to this analysis. 在我的新书《走出贫困：全球经济中的血汗工厂》中，我认为反血汗工厂运动的许多诉求将会损害工人们的利益，经济发展才是提高工资与改善工作环境的最好办法，而血汗工厂在其中发挥着重要作用。虽然在情感上，雇佣童工是血汗工厂最受世人谴责的方面，但它在上述分析中也不例外。 We should desire to see an end to child labor, but it has to come through a process that generates better opportunities for the children—not from legislative mandates that prevent children and their families from taking the best option available to them. Children work because their families are desperately poor, and the meager addition to the family income they can contribute is often necessary for survival. Banning child labor through trade regulations or governmental prohibitions often simply forces the children into less-desirable alternatives. When U.S. activists started pressuring Bangladesh into eliminating child labor, the results were disastrous. 我们期望看到童工的终结，但是这需要一个过程，要能为孩子们提供更好的机会，而不是通过法令阻止儿童和他们的家庭做出最佳的可行选择。儿童去工作是因为他们的家庭陷入了极度贫困，尽管收入微薄，但这对于整个家庭的生存来说通常是必要的。通过商业法规或政府管制来禁止雇佣童工常常只是在逼迫儿童们进入更糟糕的环境。美国的活动家们开始对孟加拉施压要求消除童工之后，显现的结果是灾难性的。 Effects of Child Labor Bans 童工禁令的效果 In 1993 Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which would have banned imports from countries employing children. In response, that fall Bangladeshi garment companies let go approximately 50,000 children. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It is widely thought that most of them have found employment in other garment factories, in smaller, unregistered subcontracting garment workshops, or in other sectors.”2 1993年，爱荷华州的民主党参议员汤姆·哈金提出了《童工慑止法》（the Child Labor Deterrence Act），意在禁止从雇佣童工的国家进口商品。那年秋天，孟加拉服装制造业对此作出反应，解雇了约50,000名童工。据美国劳工部的信息，“普遍认为，这些被解雇的儿童大部分在其他服装工厂，更小的、未经注册的转包作坊或是其他行业里找到了工作。”② That makes the introduction of the bill seem simply ineffective. The Department of Labor is sugarcoating the situation. Paul Krugman summarizes what happened more bluntly: “The direct result was that Bangladeshi textile factories stopped employing children. But did the children go back to school? Did they return to happy homes? Not according to Oxfam, which found that the displaced child workers ended up in even worse jobs, or on the streets—and that a significant number were forced into prostitution.”3 提出这部法案看起来毫无作用。劳工部的说法是在粉饰现实。保罗·克鲁格曼作了更直白的总结：“直接结果是孟加拉的纺织工厂停止了雇佣童工，但是这些孩子就此回到学校了吗？他们回到快乐的家里了吗？至少根据乐施会的资料，并没有。他们发现这些被解雇的童工最终找了更加糟糕的工作，或是流落街头——其中相当多的孩子被迫出卖身体。”③ Based on the information they have, families tend to choose the best available job for their children. Taking that option away does not eliminate the necessity of work; it forces them to take a less-desirable job. As repulsive as a child working in a sweatshop may be, it is not nearly as repulsive as a child forced into prostitution through the actions of unthinking Western activists. 基于所拥有的信息，每个家庭都想为自己的孩子在可选职业中挑出最好的。剥夺了那个选项并不等于消除了工作的需求，反而逼迫他们选择一个没那么好的工作。一个儿童在血汗工厂里工作，这确实让人反感，但这远远比不上看着一个孩子因为不动脑子的西方活动家而被迫出卖身体来的让人厌恶。 The Bangladesh story is a dramatic one, but it illustrates the general point that when children lose factory jobs they find less desirable jobs to replace the jobs they lost. In countries where sweatshops locate, child labor is often the norm, and most of the children work in less remunerative sectors with fewer opportunities for advancement than manufacturing, such as agriculture or domestic services. 孟加拉的故事有些极端，但它展示了一个要点：当儿童们失去了工厂里的工作之后，他们会寻找稍次的工作作为替代。在那些血汗工厂所处的国家里，雇佣童工是个惯例，并且大部分儿童工作的行业，如农业与国内服务业，酬劳没有制造业那么多，晋升机会也比较少。 In 2003 the World Bank measured the percentage of children aged 10 to 14 that were working in most countries.4 As Table 1 shows, child labor is not uncommon. Rates of child labor range from a high of nearly 27 percent of children in Bangladesh to a low of 3.3 percent in Costa Rica.5 2003年，世界银行调查了大部分国家中10至14岁儿童中童工的比例。④如表一所示，童工并不罕见，比例高可至孟加拉的几近27%，低的如哥斯达黎加的3.3%。⑤ The World Bank also collects data on the economic sectors in which children are employed. Figure 1 presents the distribution of employment of economically active children between the ages of 7 and 14 by sector.6 世界银行也从雇佣童工的各个经济部门收集数据。表一依照经济部门展示了7-14岁年龄段中参与经济活动的儿童在各行业中的分布情况。⑥ In seven of the nine countries for which data exists, most children were employed in agriculture, often by a wide margin.7 In the two exceptions, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic, the leading sector employing children was service. India had the highest proportion of children employed in manufacturing, and there it was a little over 14 percent. 有数据可查的九个国家中，七个国家的大部分儿童受雇于农业部门，远超其他行业。⑦ 哥斯达黎加与多米尼加共和国是两个例外，雇佣童工最多的是服务业。印度制造业雇佣童工的比例在各国中最高，略超过14%。 Protests against sweatshops that use child labor implicitly assume that ending child labor in sweatshops by taking away the option to work in a factory will, on net, reduce child labor. Evidence on child labor in countries that have sweatshops indicates that is wrong. It is not a few “bad apple” firms exploiting children in factories. Child labor is common. Employment in agriculture is not necessarily safer, either. A 1997 child labor survey showed that 12 percent of children working in agriculture reported injuries, compared with 9 percent of those who worked in manufacturing.8 对雇佣童工的血汗工厂进行抗议，这种行为暗含了一种预设，即通过除去儿童在工厂工作的选择从而终结血汗工厂里的童工现象，童工数量就会出现净减少。从拥有血汗工厂的国家所获取的证据显示，这是错的。真相并不是个别“害群之马”在工厂里剥削儿童。雇佣童工的现象是普遍的。而且，在农地里工作也并不必然更加安全。一份1997年的童工调查显示，农业部门有12%的童工曾遭伤害，制造业则是9%。⑧ Child Labor and Economic Development 童工与经济发展 The thought of Third World children toiling in factories to produce garments for us in the developed world to wear is appalling, at least in part because child labor is virtually nonexistent in the United States and the rest of the more developed world.9 Virtually nowhere in the developed world do kids toil long hours every week in a factory in a manner that prevents them from obtaining schooling. 第三世界的儿童们在工厂里辛苦劳动，为我们这些发达地区的人生产服装——这种念头让人惊骇，至少部分原因在于童工事实上并不存在于美国及其他发达地区。⑨ 事实上，没有发达国家会允许儿童们每周长时间地在工厂里辛苦工作，以至于无法接受学校教育。 Children typically worked throughout human history, either long hours in agriculture or in factories once the industrial revolution emerged. The question is, why don’t kids work today? Rich countries do have laws against child labor, but so do many poor countries. In Costa Rica the legal working age is 15, but an ILO survey found 43 percent of working children were under the legal age.10 纵观人类历史，儿童其实一直都在工作，不管是长时间在农地里劳作，还是工业革命之后进入工厂工作。真正该问的问题是：为何今天儿童不工作了？富裕国家确实有禁止童工的法律，但是很多贫穷的国家也有。哥斯达黎加的法定工作年龄是15岁，但是国际劳工组织的一项调查发现有43%的童工低于法定年龄。⑩ Similarly, in the United States, Massachusetts passed the first restriction on child labor in 1842. However, that law and other states’ laws affected child labor nationally very little.11 By one estimate, more than 25 percent of males between the ages of 10 and 15 participated in the labor force in 1900.12 Another study of both boys and girls in that age group estimated that more than 18 percent of them were employed in 1900.13 Economist Carolyn Moehling also found little evidence that minimum-age laws for manufacturing implemented between 1880 and 1910 contributed to the decline in child labor.14 同样，在美国，马萨诸塞州在1842年最先对童工加以限制。然而，那部法律连同其他州的法律对于全国范围内的童工情况影响甚微。⑾ 有人估算过，1900年10-15岁的男性中超过25%的人参与工作.⑿ 另一项研究将同年龄段的女性也纳入了估算范围，结果发现1900年有超过18%的儿童参与了工作。⒀ 经济学家卡洛琳·莫和林也找不到证据证明1880至1910年间针对制造业实施的最低工资法起到了减少童工的作用。⒁ Similarly, economists Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz examined the period between 1910 and 1939 and found that child labor laws and compulsory school-attendance laws could explain at most 5 percent of the increase in high school enrollment.15 The United States did not enact a national law limiting child labor until the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed in 1938. By that time, the U.S. average per capita income was more than $10,200 (in 2010 dollars). 经济学家克劳迪亚·戈尔丁与拉里·卡茨仔细调查了1910至1939年间的情况，发现童工相关的法律与强制入学的法律最多只能解释5%的高中入学率增长幅度。⒂ 直到1938年《公平劳动标准法》通过，美国才有了全国性的限制童工的法律。在那时，美国人均收入已超过10,200美元（以2010年美元计算）。 Furthermore, child labor was defined much more narrowly when today’s wealthy countries first prohibited it. Massachusetts’s law limited children who were under 12 years old to no more than 10 hours of work per day. Belgium (1886) and France (1847) prohibited only children under the age of 12 from working. Germany (1891) set the minimum working age at 13.16 此外，如今的富裕国家当年第一次出台法律禁止童工时，其定义要比现在狭窄的多。马萨诸塞州法禁止12岁以下儿童每天工作超过10小时。比利时（1886年）与法国（1847年）只禁止12岁以下儿童工作。德国（1891年）将最低工作年龄限定在13岁。⒃ England, which passed its first enforceable child labor law in 1833, merely set the minimum age for textile work at nine years old. When these countries were developing, they simply did not put in place the type of restrictions on child labor that activists demand for Third World countries today. Binding legal restrictions came only after child labor had mostly disappeared. 英格兰在1833年通过了第一部童工法，将纺织业的最低工作年龄仅仅设在9岁。当这些国家处于发展阶段，他们通过的限制标准可比不上今天这些活动家对第三世界国家所要求的。有效的法律约束只有在童工几近消失之后才会到来。 The main reason children do not work in wealthy countries is precisely because they are wealthy. The relationship between child labor and income is striking. Using the same World Bank data on child labor participation rates we can observe how child labor varies with per capita income. Figure 2 divides countries into five groups based on their level of per capita income adjusted for purchasing power parity. In the richest two fifths of countries, all of whose incomes exceed $12,000 in 2010 dollars, child labor is virtually nonexistent. 富裕国家的儿童不工作的主要原因就是他们比较富有。童工比例与收入之间的相关性是显著的。通过前文提到的世界银行关于童工比例的数据，我们可以观察到童工比例是如何随人均收入的变化而改变的。经购买力平价调整后，图2按照人均收入水平将各国分成五组。最富有的两组国家人均收入超过12，000美元（以2010年美元计算），童工几乎不存在。 It is only when countries have an income less than $11,000 per year that we start to observe children in the labor force. But even here, rates of child labor remain relatively low through both the third and fourth quintiles. It is the poorest countries where rates of child labor explode. More than 30 percent of children work in the fifth of countries with incomes ranging from $600 to $2,000 per year. Economists Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik econometrically estimate that 73 percent of the variation of child labor rates can be explained by variation in GDP per capita.17 只有当一个国家的人均年收入低于11,000美元时，我们才开始观察到童工。即便如此，在第三与第四组国家中，中等及中等偏上收入家庭的童工比例相对来说也很低。而在穷国，童工比例暴增。最为贫穷的那组国家中，人均年收入在600美元到2，000美元之间，童工比例超过了30%。经济学家Eric Edmonds 与 Nina Pavcnik 运用计量经济学测算，认为童工比例差异中的73%可由人均GDP差异来解释。⒄ Of course, correlation is not causation. But in the case of child labor and wealth, the most intuitive interpretation is that increased wealth leads to reduced child labor. After all, all countries were once poor; in the countries that became rich, child labor disappeared. Few would contend that child labor disappeared in the United States or Great Britain prior to economic growth taking place—children populated their factories much as they do in the Third World today. 当然，有相关性不代表存在因果关系。但是当我们思考童工与财富之间的关系时，最符合直觉的解读就是财富的增长减少了童工。毕竟，所有国家都有过贫穷的阶段；在那些富裕起来的国家里，童工就消失了。鲜有人认为美国或者英国的童工在经济发展之前就已经消失了——就像今日的第三世界，工厂里到处都是儿童。 A little introspection, or for that matter our moral indignation at Third World child labor, reveals that most of us desire that children, especially our own, do not work. Thus, as we become richer and can afford to allow children to have leisure and education, we choose to. 我们对历史所做的一些反省，抑或出于对第三世界童工现象的道德愤慨，这些其实都反映了我们中的大部分人不希望孩子们去工作，尤其是自己的孩子。因此，当我们变得有钱，能够为孩子们提供闲暇的生活与教育之时，我们就这样做了。 Conclusion 结论 The thought of children laboring in sweatshops is repulsive. But that does not mean we can simply think with our hearts and not our heads. Families who send their children to work in sweatshops do so because they are poor and it is the best available alternative open to them. The vast majority of children employed in countries with sweatshops work in lower-productivity sectors than manufacturing. 让儿童在血汗工厂里工作的想法令人厌恶，但这不意味着我们就该简单地让同情心泛滥，而舍弃大脑的思考。家长把孩子送去血汗工厂里工作，是因为他们太穷了，而这已是可选的选项中最好的选择。在有着血汗工厂的国家里，大多数童工所在行业的生产能力比制造业更低。 Passing trade sanctions or other laws that take away the option of children working in sweatshops only limits their options further and throws them into worse alternatives. Luckily, as families escape poverty, child labor declines. As countries become rich, child labor virtually disappears. The answer for how to cure child labor lies in the process of economic growth—a process in which sweatshops play an important role. 出台贸易制裁措施或其他法律，将这些儿童的工作机会夺走，这只会进一步限制他们的选择，陷他们于更糟糕的境地之中。值得庆幸的是，当这些家庭脱离贫困之后，童工就减少了。随着国家慢慢富裕起来，童工在事实上就会消失。如何解决童工问题的答案就在经济发展的过程之中，而血汗工厂则在其中扮演了重要角色。 Notes 注记

1. National Labor Committee, “Child Labor: 11 year-old Halima Sews Clothing for Hanes,” 2006. A video of this interview with Halima is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTIfY9SmJdA.
2. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of International Labor Affairs, 1994 Child Labor Report, Bangladesh, http://www.dol.gov/ilab/media/reports/iclp/sweat/bangladesh.htm
3. Paul Krugman, “Reckonings; Hearts and Heads,” New York Times (April 22, 2001), p. 17. Similarly, UNICEF, The State of the World’s Children (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), http://www.unicef.org/sowc97/, reports that many of these children turned to prostitution.
4. World Bank, World Development Indicators, CD-ROM (Washington: World Bank, 2005).
5. Mauritius is excluded from Table 1 because it is an outlier that is not representative of the general situation as I explain in Out of Poverty.
6. For each country, an average was taken for all years between 2000 and 2009 for which data are available.
7. The World Bank database does not include data for Vietnam, but Eric V. Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik, “Child Labor in the Global Economy,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 204, report that 92 percent of children working in Vietnam in 1998 worked in agriculture.
8. Kebebew Asshagrie, Statistics on Working Children and Hazardous Child Labour in Brief, Geneva: International Labor Organization (1997).
9. The International Labor Organization (ILO) estimates that 18 percent of children aged 5 to 14 are economically active worldwide. Of these, it estimates that 94 percent of them are in low-income countries, and only 2 percent are in what it classifies as developed countries. ILO, Every Child Counts: New Global Estimates on Child Labour, Geneva: ILO (2002).
10. International Labor Organization, Summary of the Results of the Child and Adolescent Labour Survey in Costa Rica, Geneva: ILO (2002), http://www.ilo.org/ipec/ChildlabourstatisticsSIMPOC/Questionnairessurveysandreports/lang—en/index.htm.
11. The remainder of this paragraph and the next draws on research found in Joshua C. Hall and Peter T. Leeson, “Good for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: International Labor Standards and Comparative Development,” Journal of Labor Research 28, no. 4 (September 2007): 658–76.
12. Robert Whaples, “Child Labor in the United States,” in EH.Net Encyclopedia, ed. R. Whaples, retrieved from http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.childlabor.
13. Samuel Lindsay, “Child Labor in the United States,” American Economic Association 8, (February 1907): 256–259.
14. Carolyn Moehling, “State Child Labor Laws and the Decline in Child Labor,” Explorations in Economic History 36, no. 1 (1999): 72–105.
15. Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, “Mass Secondary Schooling and the State: The Role of State Compulsion and the High School Movement,” NBER Working Paper No. 10075 (2003).
16. France and Prussia both had earlier laws prohibiting child labor, but they were not enforceable. See Hall and Leeson (2007).
17. Edmonds and Pavcnik, (2005): 210.

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Aid and Politics 援助与政治 作者:Angus Deaton @ 2013-08-16 译者:沈沉(@你在何地-sxy) 校对:辉格(@whigzhou) 来源:Princeton University Press,http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s2_10054.pdf To understand how aid works we need to study the relationship between aid and politics. Political and legal institutions play a central role in setting the environment that can nurture prosperity and economic growth. Foreign aid, especially when there is a lot of it, affects how institutions function and how they change. Politics has often choked off economic growth, and even in the world before aid, there were good and bad political systems. 要理解援助是如何运作的，我们需要对援助与政治之间的关系做一番研究。在创造恰当环境以促进繁荣和经济增长方面，政治和法律制度扮演着关键的角色。外国援助，特别是大额外国援助，会影响制度的运作及其变迁。政治向来能阻碍经济增长，即便是在援助流行以前，世上也既有好的政治体系，也有坏的。 But large inflows of foreign aid change local politics for the worse and undercut the institutions needed to foster long-run growth. Aid also undermines democracy and civic participation, a direct loss over and above the losses that come from undermining economic development. These harms of aid need to be balanced against the good that aid does, whether educating children who would not otherwise have gone to school or saving the lives of those who would otherwise have died. 但是，外国援助的大规模流入恶化了地方政治，损害了促进长期增长所必须的体制。援助还会破坏民主和公民参与，这种直接损失比破坏经济发展所导致的损失更为严重。援助的这些危害需要与援助所带来的好处进行平衡考量，不管这些好处是给那些原本无法上学的孩子提供教育，还是挽救原本会死去的生命。 From its beginnings after World War II, development economics saw growth and poverty reduction as technical problems. Economists would provide the knowledge that would tell the newly independent rulers how to bring prosperity to their people. If development economists thought about politics at all, they saw politicians as the guardians of their people, motivated by the promotion of social welfare. Politics as an end in itself, as a means of civic participation, or as a way of managing conflict was not part of their operations manual. 自二战结束后发展经济学建立伊始，这门学科就将经济增长和减少贫困视为技术问题。经济学家会向新近获得独立的统治者们提供知识，告诉他们如何为自己的人民带去繁荣。如果说发展经济学家思考过任何政治问题，那就是将政客们看作是人民的守护人，他们的动机是促进社会福利。政治，无论作为目的本身、作为公民参与手段，还是作为冲突管理方式，都不曾体现于他们的操作手册中。 Nor would development experts much concern themselves with the fact that, in many cases, the governments through which they were working had interests of their own that made them improbable partners in a broad-based development effort. There have been dissenting voices over the years, but it is only relatively recently that mainstream development economics has focused on the importance of institutions, including political institutions, and on politics itself. 发展专家们也不太关心这一事实：在许多情形下，他们的工作所需借力的那个政府，自身也拥有利益诉求，因而不太可能在一个牵涉广泛的发展计划中当好合作伙伴。历年来，持不同意见的声音一直都存在，但直到相对晚近时，主流的发展经济学才开始集中关注包括政治制度在内的制度的重要性以及政治本身。 Economic development cannot take place without some sort of contract between those who govern and those who are governed. The government needs resources to carry out its functions—preserving territorial integrity and maintaining its monopoly of violence, at the very least, and beyond that providing a legal system, public safety, national defense, and other public goods—and the resources that these functions require must be raised in taxes from the governed. It is this need to raise taxes, and the difficulty of doing so without the participation of those who are taxed, that places constraints on the government and to some extent protects the interests of taxpayers. 如果在统治者和被统治者之间不存在某种形式的契约，那么经济就不太可能得到发展。政府需要资源才能执行其功能——至少需要保持领土完整、维持垄断暴力，更进一步则需要提供法律体系、公共安全、国防和其他公共物品。而维持这些功能所需要的资源则必须从被统治者头上以税收形式获得。正是这种征税需求，再加上如果没有征税对象参与，税收很难征得，这就给政府施加了约束，并在一定程度上保护了纳税人的利益。 In a democracy, direct feedback from the electorate evaluates the government’s performance, in effect a sort of project evaluation on the programs that are carried out using taxpayers’ money. While this sort of feedback works best in a democracy, the need to raise funds exists every where, and it will often constrain the ruler to pay attention to the demands of at least some of the population. One of the strongest arguments against large aid flows is that they undermine these constraints, removing the need to raise money with consent and in the limit turning what should be beneficial political institutions into toxic ones. 在民主国家，直接来自选民的反馈可以评估政府的表现，实际上就是对那些用纳税人的钱实施的项目进行评估。虽然这种反馈只在民主国家才运作得最好，但是筹集资金的需要到处都存在，而这通常都会约束统治者，迫使他们关心至少人口中一部分人的需求。反对巨额援助涌入的最强论点之一就是：援助会破坏这种约束，移除征得同意以筹集资金的必要性，在极端情况下还会将本来有益的政治制度变成有害的。 Without an adequate capacity to tax, a state denies its citizens many of the protections that are taken for granted in the rich world. They may lack the protection of the law, because the courts do not work or are corrupt, and the police may harass or exploit poor people instead of protecting them. People may be unable to start businesses, because debts are not paid and contracts are not enforced or because civil “servants” extort bribes. They may face threats of violence from gangs or warlords. They may lack clean water or minimal sanitation facilities. There may be local endemic pests that threaten them and especially their children with medically preventable but potentially fatal diseases. They may lack access to electricity, to functioning schools, or to a decent health service. All of these risks are part of what it means to be poor in much of the world, all are causes of poverty, and all are attributable to the lack of state capacity. Anything that threatens that capacity is inconsistent with improving the lives of poor people. 如果缺乏足够的征税能力，国家就不会向其国民提供富裕世界的人认为理所当然的许多保护措施。他们可能会缺少法律保护，因为法院不起作用或者腐败不堪。警察也可能骚扰或剥削穷苦人群，而不是给他们提供保护。人们可能没法做生意，因为欠债可以不还、契约无法执行，或者因为人民“公仆”会索取贿赂。他们还可能面临黑社会或军阀分子的暴力威胁，可能缺少淡水或最基本的卫生设施。也可能存在地方性的病害虫，给他们、特别是他们的孩子带来潜在致命的疾病威胁，尽管它们医学上完全可以预防。他们可能得不到电力供应，没有学校，或者适当的医疗服务。在世界的许多地区，所有这些风险正是贫穷这一词汇的部分内涵所在，也都是贫困的原因所在，并且都可归因于国家能力的缺乏。所有一切损害这一能力的事物，都与改善穷人生活这一目的相悖。 The argument that aid threatens institutions depends on the amount of aid being large. In China, India, or South Africa, where ODA in recent years has been less than 0.5 percent of national income, and only occasionally more than 1 percent of total government expenditures, aid is not important in affecting government behavior or the development of institutions. The situation is quite different in much of Africa. Thirty-six (out of forty-nine) countries in sub-Saharan Africa have received at least 10 percent of their national income as ODA for three decades or more. 援助危及制度这一论点能否成立，取决于援助量的大小。在中国、印度或南非，近年来的政府开发援助（ODA）都只相当于国民收入的不到0.5%，而且只是偶尔才会占到政府财政支出总量的1%以上，因此援助在影响政府行为或者制度变迁方面并不重要。但在非洲的大部分地区，情况则截然不同。撒哈拉以南非洲（49国之中）有36国的国民收入中至少10%来自于ODA，这种情况已延续长达三十年甚至更久。 Given that ODA comes to governments, the ratio of aid to government expenditure is larger still. Benin, Burkina Faso, the DRC, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Togo, and Uganda are among the countries where aid has exceeded 75 percent of government expenditure for a run of recent years. In Kenya and Zambia, ODA is a quarter and a half of government expenditure, respectively. 考虑到ODA是流向政府的，因此援助在政府支出中所占比例会更高。贝宁、布基纳法索、刚果（金）、埃塞俄比亚、马达加斯加、马里、尼日尔、塞拉利昂、多哥和乌干达等国所接受的援助最近连续多年占到政府开支的75%以上。在肯尼亚和赞比亚，ODA分别是政府开支的四分之一和二分之一。 Given that much of government expenditure is pre-committed and almost impossible to change in the short run, for these countries (and others for which the data are not available) discretionary expenditures by governments are almost entirely dependent on funds from foreign donors. As we shall see, this does not mean that the donors are dictating what governments spend—far from it. Yet the behavior of both donors and recipients is fundamentally affected by the existence and magnitude of these aid flows. 考虑到大部分政府开支都有预定用途，短期内不太可能改变，因此这些国家（以及数据尚不可得的其他一些国家）政府的自由开支几乎就全部依赖于外国援助者手中的资金。我们将看到，这并不意味着援助者能够决定政府把钱花在哪里——远非如此。不过，援助者和受援者的行为都从根本上受到这类援助资金的存在与规模的影响。 Aid is not the only way in which rulers can rule without consent. A commodity price boom is another. One famous example comes from Egypt in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, with its insatiable demand for cotton, the two main sources were the American South and Egypt, and Egypt’s sales of cotton accounted for most of its trade with the outside world. Egypt’s ruler, Muhammad Ali Pasha, often described as the founder of modern Egypt, paid only a fraction of the world price to the fellaheen who produced the cotton, and he and his court became fabulously wealthy on the proceeds. 援助并不是统治者不经同意而实现统治的唯一途径。大宗商品价格飙升也是。一个著名的例子是19世纪中期的埃及。在这个工业革命的鼎盛时期，市场对棉花的需求无穷无尽，主要的棉花产地有美国南部和埃及，而埃及的棉花销售占了该国对外贸易的绝大部分。当时的埃及统治者穆罕默德·阿里帕夏（常被称为现代埃及的奠基人）只给种植棉花的农民支付世界市场价格的一个零头，自己及朝廷则因棉花收益而富得流油。 The American Civil War tripled the world price in only three years, and under Ali’s successor Isma’il Pasha, this led to what a British report later described as “fantastic extravagance,” while “immense sums were expended on public works in the manner of the East, and on productive works carried out in the wrong way or too soon,” including the Suez Canal. The scale of the spending was so great that it could not be supported even by the wartime cotton price, and Isma’il borrowed on the international capital market. When the price of cotton collapsed after the war, there were riots, armed intervention, and ultimately foreign occupation by Britain. 因美国发生内战，世界棉花价格三年内翻了三倍。在阿里的继任者伊斯梅尔帕夏治下，这种价格飙升导致了一份英国报告后来所称的“极端挥霍”，“发挥东方国家风格，公共工程靡费巨资，生产性项目上的巨额开销要么方向错误，要么上马太快”，其中包括苏伊士运河的开凿。开支规模如此巨大，以至于连战时棉花价格都难以支撑，伊斯梅尔只能向国际资本市场借款。随着战后棉花价格暴跌，埃及出现暴乱，接受武装调停，最后引来英国的占领。 Cotton prices rose from $9.00 for 112 pounds in 1853 to $14.00 in 1860, to a peak of $33.25 in 1865, and they fell to $15.75 in 1870. One might have thought that the foreign lenders—if not Isma’il—would have understood the trouble that lay ahead, but then, as now, the lenders could rely on another government—Britain—to protect and recover their investments. Yet this story of catastrophe is not without its bright side; the Suez Canal, after all, was a useful investment whose benefits need to be counted. 棉花价格从1853年的每112磅9美元上升到1860年的14美元，再于1865年攀至最高价33.25美元，然后在1870年回落到15.75美元。你也许会想，即便伊斯梅尔想不到，那外国放款人本来总该能认清即将发生的麻烦。但那个时候跟现在一样，放款人可以依靠另外一个国家——英国——来保护和收回自己的投资。当然，这场灾难并非全无是处；苏伊士运河毕竟是个有用的投资，其好处需要承认。 There are many parallels between commodity price booms and foreign aid. One is that cash flows come and go in a way that is divorced from domestic needs or domestic politics. In the cotton boom, the cause was the Civil War in America; with aid, it is the economic and political conditions in the donor countries, or international events such as the Cold War, or the war on terror. That aid stimulates government expenditure has been repeatedly documented, and, as in the Egyptian case, the government is freed of the need to consult or to gain the approval of its people. 大宗商品价格和外国援助之间存在许多相似之处，其中之一就是：现金流的进出与国内需求或国内政治脱节。棉花热的原因是美国内战；援助则视乎援助国的经济政治状况，或如冷战一类的国际事件，或反恐战争。援助会刺激政府开支，此类事例史载不绝，如埃及案例所显示的，此时政府已不再需要征询民众意见或寻求民众认可。 With state-owned mines, a high world price, an unlimited supply of poor workers, or a well-funded army, a ruler can stay in power without the consent of his people. With sufficient foreign aid, the ruler can even do without the mines, as eventually happened in Zaire under Mobutu. Aid from abroad kept the regime in business, and most of the aid went to doing so, so that when the regime eventually fell, there was little left, in Swiss bank accounts or elsewhere. 如果统治者拥有国有矿藏，国际市场价格高企，贫穷工人源源不断，或军队资金充裕，那他就能无需其人民同意而掌握大权。若有充足的外国援助，统治者甚至可以无需占有矿藏，蒙博托治下的扎伊尔最终就是如此。外国援助维持着政权运转，而且绝大多数援助款都被用在这方面，所以最终政权垮台时，不管是瑞士的银行账户还是别的什么地方，全都所剩无几。 Of course, with aid the government has a responsibility to the donors, and, unlike in the Mobutu case, which was driven by Cold War geopolitics, one might hope that the donors have the interests of the people in mind. But as we shall see, there are good reasons why this does not work in practice; the motivation of the donors helps much less than one might think. 当然，接受援助的政府对援助者负有责任，而且与冷战地缘政治所导致的蒙博托案例不同，你可能觉得，援助者心中会考虑人民的利益。但我们将看到，有很多可信的理由使得实情并非如此。援助者的动机助益不大，比你想象的要小得多。 Aid, like commodity price booms, can have other unhappy effects on local institutions. Without unrestricted inflows, governments not only need taxes, but also need to be able to collect them. The huge oil revenues in the Middle East are partly responsible for poor democratic institutions in the oil-producing countries. In Africa, presidential systems are common, and an externally funded president can govern through patronage or military repression. Parliaments have limited power; they are rarely consulted by the president; and neither parliaments nor judiciaries have power to rein in the presidency. There are no checks and balances. In extreme cases, large external flows, from aid or commodity sales, can increase the risk of civil war, because rulers have the means to avoid sharing power, and because the value of the inflows gives both sides a prize that is worth fighting over. 跟大宗商品价格飙升一样，援助可能对当地制度造成不幸的影响。如果没有源源不断的资金流入，政府不仅仅需要税收，而且需要有能力征税。中东地区产油国缺少民主，部分原因就在于它们拥有巨额石油收入。总统制在非洲很流行，一个得到外部资金支持的总统能够通过政治分赃或军事镇压维持统治。议会权力有限；总统很少征求其意见；不管是议会还是司法机关都无力约束总统。没有分权制衡。在极端情况下，大额的外部资金流入，不管是来自援助还是来自商品销售，都可能增加内战之危，因为统治者有办法拒绝分享权力，也因为流入资金庞大到值得双方不惜为之一战。 Why does accountability to the donors not replace accountability to the local population? Why can’t the donors withhold aid if the president refuses to consult parliament, declines to reform a corrupt police force, or uses aid flows to bolster his own political position? 那么，为什么受援国统治者对本国人民负责的必要性（因外国援助而放松之后）无法由他们对援助者负责的必要性所取代呢？如果总统拒绝与议会磋商，拒不改革腐败的警察机关，或者使用援助资金来巩固自身政治地位，为什么援助者不能暂停援助呢？ One problem is that the donor governments and their constituents—the ultimate donors—can’t make the right calls because they do not experience the effects of aid on the ground. Even when the crunch comes, and the donors see what is happening, it is rarely in the interests of the donor countries to withhold aid, even in the face of egregious violations of agreements, however much they may have wished to do so in advance. 困难之一是：援助国政府及其选民——也就是最终的援助者——并不能做出正确的决策，因为他们并没有亲自体验援助的影响。即便危机降临，援助者看清了正在发生的事，哪怕恶性违反协议的行为当面发生，暂停援助也很少会符合援助国的利益——无论事前他们是多么渴望这么做。 It is the local people, not the donors, who have direct experience of the projects on which aid is spent and who are in a position to form a judgment. Such judgments will not always be well informed, and there will always be domestic debate on cause and effect and on the value of specific government activities; but the political process can mediate these normal divergences of views. For foreign donors or their constituents—who do not live in the recipient countries—there is no such feedback. They have no direct information on outcomes; they must rely on the reports of the agencies disbursing the aid, and so tend to focus on the volume of aid, not its effectiveness. 只有当地人民，而不是援助者，才能直接体验援助款所支持的那些项目，也才有资格做出判断。这类判断并不总是信息周全的，对于特定政府活动的原因结果及其价值，国内也总是存在争议，但政治进程能够调和这类常规的观点分歧。然而对于外援国或他们的选民而言，由于他们并不生活在受援国，就不存在这种反馈。对于结果，他们没有直接的信息来源，他们必须依赖负责分配援助的各种机构所提供的报告，所以会倾向于更加关注援助的体量，而不是其效力。 The aid agencies, in turn, are accountable to their ultimate donors, and there is no mechanism that holds them responsible if things go wrong for the recipients. I once asked an official of one of the most prominent non-governmental aid agencies in which part of the world she spent most of her time. “The West Coast”—which turned out not to be Africa, but the United States, where several of the agency’s largest donors lived. As we have already seen, World Bank officials have long moved on to other things by the time the effects of their handiwork become visible. There is no responsibility of donors to the recipients of their aid. 而援助机构则是对最终援助者负责，如果受援者那里出了问题，并没有什么机制来追究援助机构的责任。我曾问过某著名非政府援助机构的一个官员，她在世界上什么地方呆的时间最长久。答案是“西海岸”——不是非洲西海岸，而是美国西海岸，该机构几位最大的援助者就住在那里。正如我们所见，早在他们的劳动效果显现之前很久，世界银行的官员们就已经忙别的事去了。援助者对于受援者并没有负什么责任。 Sometimes the agencies know that aid is going wrong and are alarmed by what they see, but can do nothing about it. The director of one national aid agency gave me a bloodcurdling account of how aid funds had gone to gangs of murderers—people who had already carried out one massacre and were training and arming themselves to return to finish the job. I asked him why he continued to supply aid. Because, he replied, the citizens of this country believe that it is their duty to give and will accept no argument that aid is hurting people. The best that he could do was to try to limit the harm. 有时候，援助机构知道援助已出了问题，并且已经对所见所闻感到忧虑，却什么也做不了。某国家援助机构的主任曾向我提供过一份令人毛骨悚然的记录：援助资金到了谋杀团伙的手里，这些人已经实施过一次大屠杀，现在正在加强训练和武装，准备杀回去把事情做个彻底。我问他为什么还要继续提供援助。他回答说，因为本国公民相信提供援助是他们的义务，并且拒不接受任何指出援助正在害人的观点。他能做的，只是尽力减少伤害。 Even when donors know what conditions ought to be imposed, they will often be reluctant to penalize recipient governments who flout them. Donors may threaten punishment to induce good behavior, but when the good behavior is not forthcoming they may be reluctant to take action if the penalties harm themselves or their constituents. 即便援助者知道应该施加何种限制条件，但当受援政府无视这些条件的时候，通常援助者也会对是否惩罚左右迟疑。援助者可能会以惩罚相威胁的方式来诱导良好的行为，但如果好行为迟迟不出现，且如果真正施加惩罚会伤及自身或本国选民，他们可能又会迟疑。 This would hardly apply to the arming of murderers, but it can be a problem in lesser cases. In effect, aid conditionality is “time-inconsistent,” a favorite term of economists: what you want to do in advance is no longer in your interests after the fact. The governments who are receiving aid understand this very well; they can call the donor’s bluff and ignore the conditions with impunity. 在武装谋杀犯问题上，这种情况当然不太可能发生，但在其他没那么严重的事情上，则可能成问题。实际上，援助的限制条款具有“时间不一致性”（这是经济学家爱用的一个词汇）：在木已成舟的情况下，你原先想做的事已经不再符合你的利益。接受援助的各国政府深知这一点，他们面对援助者的虚张声势，会直接要他们摊牌，从而能无视限制条件而不受任何惩罚。 Why the reluctance to enforce conditionality? 为什么在执行限制条件上产生迟疑？ The economist Ravi Kanbur was the World Bank representative in Ghana in 1992. He was called upon to enforce conditionality by withholding a tranche of a previously agreed loan in response to the government having violated the agreement by awarding an 80 percent pay increase to public-sector workers. The tranche was large, almost an eighth of Ghana’s annual import bill. Opposition to the cut-off came from many sources, not just the government of Ghana. Many innocent bystanders would be hurt, both Ghanaians and foreign contractors, who would likely not be paid. 经济学家Ravi Kanbur曾于1992年担任世界银行驻加纳代表。由于加纳政府违反协定，给公共部门工作人员增加了80%的工资，Kanbur接到呼吁，要求他执行限制条款，暂停拨付贷款协议中的一笔款项。这笔款项数额巨大，大约是加纳年度进口额的八分之一。反对中断贷款的呼声此起彼伏，加纳政府只是其中之一。许多无辜旁人，包括加纳和外国的承包商，都有可能受到伤害，因为他们可能将收不到工程款。 More fundamentally, the normal, good relations between the donors and the government would be disrupted, threatening not only the government but also the operations of the aid industry itself; “the donors control so much in the way of funds that to stop these, at any rate to stop them sharply, would cause major chaos in the economy.” In effect, it is the aid industry’s job to disburse funds, and its operatives are paid to do so and to maintain good relations with its client countries. A face-saving compromise was eventually reached, and the loan went ahead. 更为根本的是，援助国与加纳政府的正常友好关系可能受到破坏，不仅会危及加纳政府，而且也会危及援助行业本身的运转。“援助者对资金运作有很大控制，以至于如果停止贷款，至少停贷过于突然，将会给经济造成重大混乱。”实际上，援助行业的任务就是分配资金，从业人员拿着薪水就是要做好这一本职工作，并与客户国维持良好关系。最终，双方保存体面，达成妥协，贷款得以继续发放。 Kenya provides another example of the dance among donors, the president, and parliament. The donors periodically become exasperated by the corruption of the president and his cronies, and they turn off the flow of aid. Parliament meets and starts discussing how to raise the revenue required for the government to meet its obligations. The donors heave a huge sigh of relief—they too are under threat if the aid ceases to flow—and turn the taps back on; parliament is shuttered until the next time. Government ministers also sigh with relief and order up the latest-model Mercedes from Germany; the locals refer to these wealthy beneficiaries as the “WaBenzi.” 关于援助者、总统和议会之间的这种委蛇周旋游戏，肯尼亚也是个例子。援助者总是会周期性地被总统及其党羽的腐败激怒，然后暂停援助。此时议会就会召开，开始商量如何增加政府收入，以满足政府履行义务的必需用度。援助者会大松一口气，然后又把水龙头打开——因为如果援助真正停止，他们也会面临威胁。于是，议会就可以关门歇业了，直到下次再发生类似事情。政府的部长们也会大松一口气，又开始从德国订购最新型号的奔驰汽车。当地人管这些富裕的受益者叫做“奔驰族”。 The award for sheer creativity might go to Maaouya Ould Sid’Ahmed Taya, president of Mauritania from 1984 to 2005. He adopted a pro-Western stance and in 1991 abandoned his previous support for the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. Even so, in the early 1990s, his domestic repression became too much for donors, and aid was withdrawn. Real political reforms were begun—at least until the president had the brilliant idea of becoming one of the few Arab countries to recognize Israel. The aid taps were reopened and the reforms rescinded. 绝对原创奖可能还是要颁给1984至2005年任毛里塔尼亚总统的马维亚·乌尔德·西德·艾哈迈德·塔亚。塔亚1991年采取了亲西方的立场，放弃支持伊拉克的萨达姆·侯赛因政权。即便如此，90年代初他在国内的镇压行动对援助者来说仍属过分，援助因此而撤销。此时，真正的政治改革拉开大幕，改革至少维持到了总统突发奇想，成为承认以色列的极少数阿拉伯国家之一。援助龙头重新打开，改革又被废止了。 Domestic policies in the donor countries can also make it difficult to turn off aid. Government aid agencies are under pressure from their domestic constituencies to “do something” about global poverty —a pressure that is stoked by a well-intentioned but necessarily poorly informed domestic population—and this makes it hard for government agencies to cut back on aid even when their representatives on the ground know that it is doing harm. Politicians in both donor and recipient countries understand this process. 援助国的国内政策也可能使停止援助面临阻碍。国内选民会向政府援助机构施加压力，要求他们为全球贫困“做点事”。这些国内民众虽然满怀好意，但在信息掌握上却总是非常缺乏。他们把这压力之火烧得通红，使得政府机构难以切断援助，即便它们在当地的代表知道援助正在害人。 Recipient governments can use their own poor people as “hostages to extract aid from the donors.” In one of the worst such cases, government officials in Sierra Leone held a party to celebrate the fact that UNDP had, once again, classed their country as the worst in the world and thus guaranteed another year’s worth of aid. 受援国政府能把自己的贫困人口当做“从援助国身上索取资金的人质”来使用。塞拉利昂的政府官员是此类案例最糟糕的表现之一，在联合国开发计划署再次将该国列为世界最差国家，因此保证了该国下一年度的援金之后，他们居然开了一个派对来庆祝。 On the other side, donor politicians can give aid to buy political credibility at home when they are deeply unpopular for unrelated reasons; they too will oppose the cessation of aid, even when it is clearly being misused. When this happens—as it did with British aid during the Kenyan elections in 2001, when aid was used to subvert the elections and preserve the power of a corrupt elite—Africans suffer to burnish the tarnished reputations of Western politicians. 另一方面，如果援助国的政客因为其他一些无关原因而非常不受欢迎，他们也可能通过提供援助来收买国内政治信用。因此即便援金明显遭到滥用，他们也会反对停止提供。比如英国在肯尼亚2001年大选期间提供的援助就是如此，当时援金就被用于颠覆选举，帮助腐败精英维持大权。此类事情发生时，相当于非洲人民为了擦洗西方政客的声名污点而受苦受难。 Lyndon Johnson helped hype a largely nonexistent famine in India in order to distract attention from the Vietnam War, not to mention to gather support from American farmers by buying their crops. The givers and receivers of aid, the governments in both countries, are allied against their own peoples. All that has changed from colonial times is the nature of what is being extracted. 为了把民众视线从越南战争上面引开，林登·约翰逊不仅帮助印度虚假宣传了一场基本上并不存在的大饥荒，还通过收购美国农民的农产品来收买支持。援助的提供者和接受者，即两国政府，联合起来欺瞒自己的人民。与殖民时代相比，唯一的变化只是它们索取的东西性质不同了。 There are also practical reasons that restrict the ability of donors to enforce conditionality. Aid is fungible; a recipient can promise to spend aid on health care and do so with projects that would have been undertaken in any case, freeing up funds for nonapproved purposes. It is often difficult for donors to monitor such diversions. The aid industry is competitive, and if one country refuses to fund another will often step in, with a different set of priorities and conditions. The donor who tries to enforce conditions is then shut out and may lose political influence or commercial opportunities, with no compensating gain. 也有一些实践上的原因会限制援助国执行限制条款的能力。援助具有可替代性；比如受援国可以先承诺将援助用于医疗保健，然后用即使没有援助本来就会实施的项目来履行承诺，从而腾挪资金用于未经授权的项目。援助者很难对这类腾挪实施监督。援助行业充满竞争，某国拒绝提供援助，另一国就会带着一套新的政策偏好和限制条款来插手。于是，试图执行限制条款的援助国会被拒之门外，可能会丧失其政治影响力或商业机会，而且得不到补偿。 Aid agencies have recently tried to move away from conditionality, and their language has moved toward an emphasis on partnership. The recipient proposes a plan according to its own needs, and the donor decides what to finance. Of course, none of this disposes of the reality that the donors are responsible to their constituents in the rich world, and that the recipients, knowing this, will design plans that mimic just what they think the donors would have proposed on their own—a process that has been aptly described as “ventriloquism.” It is not clear what sort of partnership is sustainable when one side has all the money. 近来，援助机构已在试图放弃限制条款，转而强调伙伴关系。受援国会根据自身需要提出一份计划，然后由援助国来决定向哪些提供资助。当然，这些都无法绕开援助者需对身处富裕世界的本国选民负责这一现实，受援者深知这一点，因此他们在提出计划时会刻意鹦鹉学舌，提出在他们的心目中援助国自身可能设想出的方案。这一过程已经被人恰当地称为“腹语术”。在一方拥有全部资金的情况下，我们想不出何种伙伴关系才是可持续的。 Politics and politicians, doing what they regularly do, undermine aid effectiveness, but it works the other way too: aid flows undermine the effectiveness of politics. Donors decide matters that should be decided by recipients; even democratic politics in donor countries has no business deciding whether HIV/AIDS should be prioritized over antenatal care in Africa. Conditionality violates national sovereignty. 政治和政治家的惯常行事准则会破坏援助的有效性，但事情也可能在相反方向上发生：援助资金会破坏政治的有效性。本应由受援者决定的事，变得由援助者来决定了。即便是援助国的民主政治也没有理由来决定非洲国家是否应将艾滋病优先于产前保健考虑。限制条款侵犯国家主权。 Imagine a well-funded Swedish aid agency coming to Washington, D.C., and promising to pay off the national debt and fund Medicare for fifty years. The conditions are that the United States abolish capital punishment and fully legalize gay marriage. Perhaps some governments are so dysfunctional that such violations have little cost to their populations. But taking a country into foreign receivership is hardly a good start on building the kind of contract between government and governed that might support economic growth over the long haul. It is not possible to develop someone else’s country from the outside. 试想，如果瑞典一家资金充裕的援助机构跑到华盛顿来，承诺帮我们清偿所有国家债务，并会援助国家医疗保险五十年，条件是美国废除死刑，并将同性结婚全面合法化。也许有些国家政府确实无能透顶，因而此类侵犯行为并不会对该国人民造成什么损害。但是，一国接受外国的托管，对于建立政府与人民之间的契约关系而言并不是什么好开头，而这种契约关系从长远来看可能有助于经济增长。不可能从外部来发展别国。 We have already seen that it is difficult to give convincing evidence of the effects of aid on economic growth, and the same applies when we look at the effects of aid on democracy or on other institutions. Yet once again, we have the fact that small countries that get a lot of aid also tend to be less democratic; sub-Saharan Africa is the least democratic area of the world, and the one that receives the most aid. Countries that receive aid from their ex-colonists are not the most democratic. Perhaps most interesting is a counterpoint to Figures 1 and 2: there has been an upsurge not only in growth but also in democracy in Africa since the cut in aid that followed the end of the Cold War. As always, there are other possible explanations for these facts, but they are what we would expect if democracy were undermined by foreign aid. 之前我们已经提到，关于援助对经济增长的效用，我们拿不出什么有说服力的证据。同样，援助对民主或其他制度的效用也是如此。不过，我们这里又有一个事实：接受大量援助的小国也趋向于更不民主；撒哈拉以南的非洲是全世界最不民主的地区，同时也是接受援助最多的地区。接受原殖民母国援助的国家并非最民主的。最有意思的可能是图1和图2【译注：原文无图，略】的对比：随着冷战结束后援助的减少，非洲不但出现了经济上升，而且出现了更多的民主政体。当然，对于这类事实，总是有其他可能的解释。但是如果民主会受到外援的破坏，这一事实就与我们的预期一致了。 The antidemocratic aspects of foreign aid have been exacerbated by the long-held donors’ belief that aid—and economic development itself—is a technical issue, not a political one. In the hydraulic theory (recall, we are just fixing the plumbing), there can be no legitimate dispute over what needs to be done. This belief has led donors and advisers to ignore or be impatient with local politics. 外援的反民主面向还被援助者长期持有的一种信念加剧了：他们相信援助和经济发展本身都只是技术问题，而非政治问题。在水力学理论（记住，我们不过是在修理水管）看来，关于我们需要做什么，没有什么值得争论的。这一信念导致援助者和建议者都对当地政治置之不理或毫无耐心。 Worse still, the donors have often deeply misunderstood what people needed or wanted. Population control is the worst case; to the donors it was obvious that if there were fewer people each person would be better off, while to the recipients, the opposite was just as obviously (and correctly) true. Western-led population control, often with the assistance of nondemocratic or well-rewarded recipient governments, is the most egregious example of antidemocratic and oppressive aid. Effective democracy is the antidote to the tyranny of foreign good intentions. 更糟的是，关于人民需要什么或渴望什么，援助者通常误解甚深。人口控制就是最糟糕的例子：在援助者看来，很显然人口更少则人均状况就会更好，但是在受援者看来，相反的看法【编注：即人口多没坏处】同样显而易见且真确无误。西方人推动的人口控制，通常伴随着非民主或受益丰厚的受援国政府的协助，是援助之反民主和压迫性的最恶劣例证。有效的民主是外国善心暴政的解毒剂。 The anthropologist James Ferguson, in The Anti-Politics Machine, one of the greatest books about aid and economic development, describes a large Canadian-funded development project in Lesotho in the 1980s that was based on a profound misunderstanding of the way the economy functioned; what in reality was a reservoir of labor for the South African mines was reimagined as a textbook subsistence-farming economy. 人类学家詹姆斯·弗格森在《反政治机器》这本有关援助和经济发展的杰作中，为我们描绘了1980年代在莱索托实施的一项由加拿大资助的发展项目，该项目从根本上就对经济运转方式存在深刻误解。该国经济模式实际本来应是南非矿业的劳动力储军，却被臆想为一种教科书式的自给农业经济。 The agricultural investment projects designed for the imagined economy were about as likely to be successful as a project to grow flowers on the moon. The project administrators—busily fixing the plumbing—remained unaware of how the project was being manipulated by the ruling party for its own political purposes and against its political opponents. In the end, there was no development or poverty reduction, only an extension of the state’s monopoly of political control, an anti-politics machine that made an extractive elite even less responsive to its people. 为这种想象的经济所设计出来的农业投资项目，其成功的可能性就跟在月球上栽花差不多。该项目被执政党操纵，以实现他们自身的政治意图，压制政治对手，而忙于修水管的项目管理人员自始至终对此毫不知情。最后，项目得到的并不是发展或贫困减少，而只是加强了国家对政治控制的垄断性质，催生了一种反政治的机器，这种机器使得榨取型精英对其人民甚至更加漠视。 The technical, anti-political view of development assistance has survived the inconvenient fact that the apparently clear technical solutions kept changing—from industrialization, planning and the construction of infrastructure to macroeconomic structural adjustment, to health and education, and most recently back to infrastructure. That the ideas kept changing did nothing to imbue the developers with humility or uncertainty, nor did the sensitivity of the fashions to first-world politics appear to undercut the technical certainty of the aid industry. The antipoverty rhetoric of the World Bank when Lyndon Johnson was U.S. president was replaced by the “getting prices right” rhetoric when Ronald Reagan was president. “Our” politics seems to be a legitimate part of development thinking, while “their” politics is not. 发展援助问题上的这种技术性、反政治的观点始终存在，尽管我们面临一个尴尬事实：看似显然的技术解决方案经常在变，从工业化、计划和基础设施建设变成宏观经济结构调整，又变成健康和教育，最近又回到基础设施。想法一直在变，但这并没能促使开发人员保持谦逊或心生犹疑，发生在第一世界政治领域中的潮流敏感似乎也没能减少援助行业的技术自信。林登·约翰逊担任美国总统期间由世界银行提出的反贫困辞藻在罗纳德·里根当政时期被“矫正价格”的辞藻所取代。“我们的”政事似乎在发展思考当中理所应当占据一席之地，而“他们的”政事则并不如此。 Aid and aid-funded projects have undoubtedly done much good; the roads, dams, and clinics exist and would not have existed otherwise. But the negative forces are always present; even in good environments, aid compromises institutions, it contaminates local politics, and it undermines democracy. If poverty and underdevelopment are primarily consequences of poor institutions, then by weakening those institutions or stunting their development, large aid flows do exactly the opposite of what they are intended to do. It is hardly surprising then that, in spite of the direct effects of aid that are often positive, the record of aid shows no evidence of any overall beneficial effect. 毫无疑问，援助和由援金所资助的项目助益良多；世上多出了许多公路、大坝和医院，没有援助是不可能的。但援助的负面影响始终存在；即便实施环境友好，援助也会损害制度、污染当地政治，且会破坏民主。如果说贫困和欠发达首先是因为制度糟糕，那么通过削弱此类制度或阻碍其正常发展，大规模援助资金的实际效果确实事与愿违。因此，尽管援助的直接效果通常都是正面的，但援助史上并没有证据表明它们总体上带来了有益效果，对此我们不必感到惊讶。 The arguments about foreign aid and poverty reduction are quite different from the arguments about domestic aid to the poor. Those who oppose welfare benefits often argue that aid to the poor creates incentives for poor behavior that help to perpetuate poverty. These are not the arguments here. The concern with foreign aid is not about what it does to poor people around the world—indeed it touches them too rarely—but about what it does to governments in poor countries. The argument that foreign aid can make poverty worse is an argument that foreign aid makes governments less responsive to the needs of the poor, and thus does them harm. 关于外国援助与减少贫困之间关系的论争，与关于针对穷人的国内援助的论争颇为不同。反对福利津贴的人通常论证说，援助穷人会激励穷人做出使得贫困得以长期维持的行为。我们这里的论证则与此不同。在外国援助问题上，我们所关注的并不是它们对世上的穷人起到了什么作用——实际上援助极少触及穷人——而是它们对贫穷国家的政府起到了什么作用。外国援助会使得贫困恶化这一论点说的是，外国援助会使得受援国政府更加漠视穷人的需求，从而对他们造成损害。 The harm of aid—even in the presence of some good—poses difficult ethical problems. The philosopher Leif Wenar, criticizing Peter Singer’s vision, with which I began this chapter, notes that “poverty is no pond”; Singer’s analogy is not helpful. Those who advocate more aid need to explain how it can be given in a way that deals with the political constraints. They should also think hard about the parallels with the colonialism that came before the era of aid. 援助的危害——即使也会有某些好处——提出了一些伦理难题。本章开头，我曾引用过哲学家彼得·辛格的设想【译注：本文是作者著作The Great Escape第7章的一小节。第7章开头数页，作者曾提到辛格的著名比喻：由于我们所需要付出都很小，拒绝援助非洲儿童的伦理错误就跟拒绝挽救池塘落水儿童一样。而我们离非洲较远、离落水儿童较近这一事实并不会造成什么伦理上的区别】。莱夫·韦纳对此提出批评，他说“贫困并非池塘”，辛格的比喻并没有什么用。鼓吹加大援助的人需要解释，援助如何以一种能够考虑政治约束的方式分发。他们也应该努力思考，援助与援助时代之前的殖民主义之间的对比。 We now think of colonialism as bad, harming others to benefit ourselves, and aid as good, hurting us (albeit very mildly) to help others. But that view is too simple, too ignorant of history, and too self-congratulatory. The rhetoric of colonialism too was all about helping people, albeit about bringing civilization and enlightenment to people whose humanity was far from fully recognized. This may have been little more than a cover for theft and exploitation. 我们现在觉得殖民主义是坏的，只是损人利己，而援助则是好的，是损己（尽管很轻微）利人。但这种观点过于简化，对历史过于无知，同时也过分自夸。殖民主义的论调一样说的全是帮助他人，虽然只是要把文明和启蒙带给其人性尊严远远还未被承认的人们。这种说法有可能仅仅只是偷盗或剥削的文过饰非。 The preamble to the charter of the UN, with its ringing and inspiring rhetoric, was written by Jan Smuts, premier of South Africa, who saw the UN as the best hope of preserving the British Empire and the dominance of white “civilization.” Yet at its worst, decolonization installed leaders who differed little from those who preceded them, except for where they were born and the color of their skins. 联合国宪章的序言部分用语响亮且令人振奋，其作者南非前总理杨·史末资可是将联合国视为维持大英帝国和白人“文明”统治地位的最大希望所在。然而，在最糟糕的情形中，殖民地独立后上台的领导人跟他们的前辈并没有什么不同，区别只在于出生地点和皮肤颜色。 Even today, when our humanitarian rhetoric acts as a cover for our politicians to buy themselves virtue, and when aid is our way of meeting our moral obligations to deal with global poverty, we need to be sure that we are not doing harm. If we are, we are doing it for “us,” not for “them.” 即便是在今天，当人道主义辞藻被我们的政客用来为自己购买德性名声时，当援助被我们当成是履行自己对于全球贫困所负道德义务的手段时，我们也需要明确，我们并没有在害人。如果我们确实在害人，那援助就只是为了“满足自己”，而不是为了“帮助他人”。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

【2017-02-15】 Flynn事件的最佳结果是：除掉川普团队中的几条川普狗，让共和党主流塞进更多人，最终让川普专注于上镜头过戏瘾和给白左做脱敏治疗，把大事交给其他人……好像也不是完全不可能。 ​​​​  

【2017-02-14】 这两份书单的质量非常高，其中不少是我打过五星的，估计其余的也不错，打算通读： The 25 most stimulating economic history books since 2000 Big History and “Deep Determinants” (published since 2000)  ​​​​  

‘We Hillbillies Have Got to Wake the Hell Up': Review of Hillbilly Elegy “我们这些山巴佬该醒醒了”——《山乡挽歌》书评 A family chronicle of the crackup of poor working-class white Americans. 一份贫穷糟糕美国白人工薪阶层的家庭编年史 作者:Ronald Bailey @ 2016-07-29 翻译:Drunkplane(@Drunkplane-zny) 校对:babyface_claire 来源:reason.com,http://reason.com/archives/2016/07/29/we-hillbillies-have-got-to-wake-the-hell 【编注：hillbilly和redneck、yankee、cracker一样，都是对美国某个有着鲜明文化特征的地方群体的蔑称，本文译作『山巴佬』】 Read this remarkable book: It is by turns tender and funny, bleak and depressing, and thanks to Mamaw, always wildly, wildly profane. An elegy is a lament for the dead, and with Hillbilly Elegy Vance mourns the demise of the mostly Scots-Irish working class from which he springs. I teared up more than once as I read this beautiful and painful memoir of his hillbilly family and their struggles to cope with the modern world. 阅读这本非凡之作的感受时而温柔有趣，时而沮丧压抑，而且，亏了他的祖母，还往往十分狂野，狂野地对神不敬。挽歌是对死人的悼念。Vance用《山乡挽歌》缅怀了苏格兰-爱尔兰裔工人阶级的衰亡，他自己便出身于此阶级。这本书描写了他的乡下家庭及其在现代社会中的挣扎，在阅读这本美丽而痛苦的回忆录时，我几度流泪。 Vance grew up poor with a semi-employed, drug-addicted mother who lived with a string of five or six husbands/boyfriends in the fading Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio. The only constants in his chaotic life were his grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw. Vance nearly failed out of high school but eventually graduated from Yale Law School. That personal journey is in the book, but Vance's main story is about the ongoing collapse of hillbilly culture as seen through the lens of his own family's disordered experiences. Vance在贫穷的环境中长大，他母亲半失业且吸毒成瘾，同她的五六个丈夫/男友生活在地处铁锈带、正在凋零中的俄亥俄州米德尔敦。他混乱糟糕的生活中唯一不变的是他的祖父母。Vance差点从高中退学，但最终还是从耶鲁法学院毕业。这段个人生活也被写进了书中，但书的主要情节是透过作者自己家庭颠沛流离的经历来描绘乡村文化的不断衰败。 Before going on, I should make a disclosure: Like Vance, I grew up as a hillbilly. Neither of my grandfathers could read nor write. My paternal grandparents, Mom and Daddy Bailey, left the Appalachian coal country of McDowell County, West Virginia, around 1950 and bought a dairy farm 80 miles away in Washington County, Virginia. I grew up on that farm. 在继续往下写之前，我要坦白：同Vance一样，我也是个山巴佬。我的爷爷外公都不会读写。我的爷爷、妈妈和爸爸Bailey在1950年左右离开了西弗吉尼亚州阿巴拉契亚山麓的煤城麦克道尔，在离弗吉尼亚州的华盛顿县80英里的地方买了处奶牛场。我便在那农场长大。 For most of my childhood, all six of my grandparents' adult children lived within 10 miles of the home place, as did my dozens of cousins. Every Sunday, a massive family midday "dinner"—somewhere around 40 to 50 people—convened at my grandparents' house. I left the farm at age 16, when my parents got divorced. I will spare you further details, but let's just say that the Baileys did not model their family life on the Waltons. Before I made my escape to the University of Virginia, I lived for a while with my mother and one of my sisters in a rented trailer. 在我童年的大部分时间，我祖父母的六个成年孩子都生活在离家10英里的范围内，我的表兄妹们自然也是如此。每个星期天中午，超级家宴——大约40到50个人——就会在我祖父母的家里上演。我16岁时离开那个农场，当时我父母离婚了。多的我就不讲了，我只告诉你，我们Bailey家后来在沃尔顿并没有继续那种家庭生活。在我逃到弗吉尼亚大学之前，我、妈妈和我的一个妹妹在一个租来的拖车里生活了一段时间。 HarperCollinsThough he mostly grew up in the Rust Belt, Vance identifies as a hillbilly—his family's roots are in the hollers of Breathitt County, Kentucky. Vance's Papaw and Mamaw, like tens of thousands of other mountain folk, left coal country in 1947 to find work and their shot at the American Dream in the booming steelworks 200 miles north. As a kid, Vance would accompany his grandparents as they traveled back nearly every weekend to visit with family in Kentucky. Middletown was Vance's "address," but the town of Jackson in Breathitt County where his great-grandmother Mamaw Blanton lived is his "home." 尽管Vance基本在铁锈带长大，但他自认为是个“山巴佬”——他家庭的根在肯塔基州布莱斯郡的溪谷中。Vance的爷爷奶奶，像成千上万其他山民一样，在1947年离开煤城到200英里以北的新兴钢铁企业寻找工作和实现美国梦的机会。小时候，每当他祖父母周末回到肯塔基，Vance总是陪伴他们左右。米德尔顿是Vance的“住址”，但他祖父母生活过的布莱斯郡的杰克逊才是他的“家”。 Today hillbilly culture is scarred by spectacular rates of joblessness, single motherhood, drug addiction, crime, and incarceration. Vance places most of the blame for this on the hillbillies' own shoulders. Globalization and automation decimated the manufacturing jobs that many low-skilled workers leveraged into a middle-class lives in the mid-20th century, he argues, but that's no excuse for fatalistic victimhood now. 今天的山巴佬文化被骇人的高失业率、单身母亲、毒品上瘾、犯罪和牢狱搞得遍体鳞伤。Vance认为责任主要在山巴佬自己。全球化和自动化削减了制造业的工作岗位，而20世纪中叶许多低技能的工人正是靠这些工作跻身中产阶级。但这并不能成为当下宿命论式的受害者情结的借口，Vance强调。 Throughout the book, Vance offers stories from family, friends, and neighbors that illustrate the growing cultural dysfunction among poor whites. For example, he takes a job at a floor tile warehouse for $13 an hour where one of his co-workers is a 19-year-old with a pregnant girlfriend. The warehouse owner gives the girlfriend a job as a receptionist. The 19-year-old and his girlfriend are warned about their increasingly frequent absences and tardiness, and eventually both were fired. The 19-year lashes out at the manager, saying, "How could you do this to me? Don't you know that I've got a pregnant girlfriend?" 通过这本书，Vance用自己家庭、朋友和邻居的故事向我们展示了贫穷白人中的文化失调。举个例子，他曾在一个地板瓷砖仓库工作，每小时13美元，他的一个同事是个19岁的小伙子，有个怀了孕的女友。仓库的主人给他同事的女友一份前台接待的工作。这个19岁的小伙子和他的女友因为越来越频繁的缺席和懈怠而被警告，并最终被解雇。小伙子对着经理大吼大叫，“你怎么能这样对我？你不知道我还有个怀孕的女友吗？” At another point, Vance meets an old acquaintance in a Middletown bar who tells him he recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. Later, the same guy was complaining on Facebook about the "Obama economy" and how it had affected his life. 还有一次，Vance在米德尔敦的一个酒吧碰见一位老熟人，那人告诉Vance，自己因为厌倦了早起而辞掉了工作。之后这个家伙又在Facebook上抱怨“奥巴马的经济政策”如何影响了他的生活。 Hillbilly culture is suspicious of outsiders and enforces a violent code of honor. Vance recalls that boys who got good grades in school were considered "sissies" or "faggots," an attitude that keeps people ill-educated and isolated. As their hopes for achieving the American Dream have faded, his hillbilly relatives, friends, and neighbors have come to see the institutions of society, government, and the economy as rigged against them. This has engendered a deep and debilitating pessimism among poor working-class whites. Hillbillies are killing themselves so effectively with drugs and alcohol that their life expectancies are actually falling. 山乡文化对外来者警惕怀疑并且极端强调荣誉。Vance回忆小时候在学校得了高分的男孩会被当成“娘炮”或“基佬”，这种态度让山巴佬无法受到良好教育并且被孤立。随着他们实现美国梦的机会逐渐消失，他的山巴佬亲戚、朋友和邻居逐渐认为社会体系、政府和经济都被操纵着跟他们作对。这在贫穷白人中催生了一股根深蒂固的、让人颓废的悲观情绪。山巴佬们用毒品和酒精毒害自己，他们的生活前景越发惨淡。 Does Vance offer any solutions for white working-class despondency and fatalism? "These problems were not created by government or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them," he argues. "We hillbillies have got to wake the hell up." He provides several examples of members of his extended family who have managed to leave poverty and family dysfunction behind. Tellingly, nearly all of them are women, got educations beyond high school, and married men who were not hillbillies. Vance是否为白人工薪阶级的悲观情节和宿命论提供了任何解决方案呢？“这些问题不是由政府或企业或任何人搞出来的。我们自己搞出了这些问题，只有我们自己能搞定它们，”他认为，“我们山巴佬们该清醒了。”他从他的亲戚中举了几个成功摆脱贫穷和家庭分崩离析命运的例子。值得一提的是，几乎所有人都是女性，在高中后继续接受教育并嫁给了不是山巴佬的男人。 "People sometimes ask whether I think there's anything we can do to 'solve' the problems of my community," Vance writes. "I know what they're looking for: a magical public policy solution or an innovative government program. But these problems of family, faith, and culture aren't like a Rubik's Cube, and I don't think that solutions (as most understand the term) really exist." “人们有时会问我是否觉得我们可以做些什么来‘解决’我们社区的问题，”Vance写道，“我知道他们想要什么：一个神奇的公共政策或一个创新的政府项目。但解决这些家庭、信仰、文化的问题不像玩魔方，我不认为存在什么通常意义上的解决方案。” Well, there is at least one "solution." Vance observes that all of his successful friends from Middletown did one other thing: They got the hell out of Middletown. They moved to where the jobs are. Just as Vance's hillbilly grandparents left the impoverished hollers of Kentucky to build middle-class lives in Middletown, today's urban hillbillies could get on the highway to opportunities elsewhere. In the meantime, the government should stop paying poor people to languish in Appalachian and Rustbelt poverty traps. 好吧，至少还是有个“药方”。Vance发现他所有来自米德尔敦的成功朋友都做了一件事：滚出米德尔敦。他们搬到有工作的地方。就像Vance的山巴佬祖父离开肯塔基毫无生气的溪谷并在米德尔敦过上中产生活一样，今天的城市山巴佬可以开车驶向高速公路，去别的地方找到机会。同时，政府应该停止向阿巴拉契亚和铁锈带陷入贫穷陷阱中的穷人发钱。 Vance calls himself a "cultural emigrant." By leaving his hillbilly culture behind, he has been able to create and enjoy a better life. I made much the same journey from Appalachian poverty to what has been a fascinating and fulfilling life. Vance clearly has some regrets about his cultural emigration; I have none. Vance称自己为“文化移民”。离开了山乡文化，他懂得了创造并过上了更好的生活。我走过相同的路，从我阿巴拉契亚的穷人生活中走出并过上了精彩充实的生活。Vance显然对自己的文化叛逃有几分悔意，而我没有。 Despite all their failings, Vance fiercely identifies with and loves his people. He is also a natural storyteller who makes compellingly personal the statistics and news stories about the cultural and economic coming apart of America. It hits close to home. 尽管山民在许多方面的失败，Vance仍视自己为其中一员并对他们怀着深厚感情。他天生会讲故事。关于美国在文化和经济上的分裂【编注：此处双关，Coming Apart是政治学家Charles Murray的一部著作】，在别处你会读到平淡的统计数字和新闻故事，但他能让你感同身受。这就是我们的家乡。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

——海德沙龙·翻译组，致力于将英文世界的好文章搬进中文世界——

Why are we so afraid to leave children alone? 为什么我们害怕让孩子独处？ 作者:Pat Harriman & Heather Ashbach, UC Irvine @ 2016-08-23 译者:明珠(@老茄爱天一爱亨亨更爱楚楚) 校对:babyface_claire(@许你疯不许你傻) 来源:UC, http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-are-we-so-afraid-leave-children-alone Leaving a child unattended is considered taboo in today’s intensive parenting atmosphere, despite evidence that American children are safer than ever. So why are parents denying their children the same freedom and independence that they themselves enjoyed as children? 在今天这种强化父母责任的社会氛围中，留下孩子无人照看被视为禁忌，虽然有证据表明美国孩子比以往任何时候都更安全。那么，为什么父母拒绝孩子拥有从前他们自己是孩子时享受的同样的自由和独立呢？ A new study by University of California, Irvine social scientists suggests that our fears of leaving children alone have become systematically exaggerated in recent decades – not because the practice has become more dangerous, but because it has become socially unacceptable. 加州大学尔湾分校社会学家们的一项新研究认为，近几十年，我们对单独留下孩子的恐惧被系统性地放大了——不是因为这种做法更危险，而是它对社会已变得不可接受。 “Without realizing it, we have consistently increased our estimates of the amount of danger facing children left alone in order to better justify or rationalize the moral disapproval we feel toward parents who violate this relatively new social norm,” said Ashley Thomas, cognitive sciences graduate student and lead author of the work, published online this month in the open-access journal Collabra. “我们没有意识到这一点，所以不断提高对孩子被留下独处时所面临危险的估值，并以此更好地为我们对违反这个相对较新的社会规范的家长所做出的道义谴责加以正当化或合理化，”Ashley Thomas说。他是一名认知科学研究生，也是本月在开放获取期刊COLLABRA上在线发表的相关研究的第一作者。 The survey-based study found that children whose parents left them alone on purpose – to go to work, help out a charity, relax or meet an illicit lover – were perceived to be in greater danger than those whose parents were involuntarily separated from them. 一项基于调查的研究结果发现，（人们对被单独留下的孩子所面临危险的评估，和父母离开的原因有关，）比起情非得已的离开，因自己有事而离开，比如上班、助阵慈善、放松或与非法情人幽会，人们感知到的危险更大。 The researchers presented survey participants with five different scenarios in which a child was left alone for less than an hour. Situations ranged from a 10-month-old who was left asleep for 15 minutes in a cool car parked in a gym’s underground garage to an 8-year-old reading a book alone at a coffee shop a block from home for 45-minutes. 研究者为被调查者提供了五种不同场景，每个场景里有一个孩子独处不超过1小时。情景从10个月的婴儿独自躺在停于体育馆地下车库的凉爽小汽车里熟睡15分钟，到8岁孩子独自在离家一个街区的咖啡店看书45分钟。 “Within a given scenario, the only thing that varied was the reason for the parent’s absence,” said Kyle Stanford, professor and chair of logic & philosophy of science. “These included an unintentional absence – caused by a fictitious accident in which the mother was hit by a car and briefly knocked unconscious – and four that were planned: leaving for work, volunteering for a charity, relaxing or meeting an illicit lover. After reading each scenario and the reason behind each child being left alone, the participants ranked on a scale of 1 to 10 how much estimated danger the child was in while the parent was gone, 10 being the most risk.” “在每个给定场景中，唯一变量是父母离开的原因，”逻辑学和科学哲学教授Kyle Stanford说。“这些场景包括一个不得已的离开，比如虚构一个事故导致母亲被车撞暂时昏迷，另外四个是有计划的：工作，到慈善机构志愿服务，放松和与非法情人见面。了解每个场景和孩子被单独留下的原因后，被调查者从1到10给父母不在期间孩子独处的危险性评分排序，10最危险。” Moral disapproval inflates estimate of risk 道义谴责放大了风险评估 Overall, survey participants saw all of these situations as quite dangerous for children: The average risk estimate was 6.99, and the most common ranking in all scenarios was 10. Despite identical descriptions of each set of circumstances in which children were alone, those left alone on purpose were estimated to be in greater danger than those whose parents left them alone unintentionally. 总体上，被调查者认为所有场景对孩子都相当危险：平均危险值是6.99，而在所有场景中最常见值是10。尽管孩子独处的每个场景描述相同，但父母有意离开留孩子独处的危险评估比无意留下他们的情况更大。 “In fact, children left alone on purpose are almost certainly safer than those left alone by accident, because parents can take steps to make the situation safer, like giving the child a phone or reviewing safety rules,” said Barbara Sarnecka, study co-author and associate professor of cognitive sciences. “The fact that people make the opposite judgment strongly suggests that they morally disapprove of parents who leave their children alone, and that disapproval inflates their estimate of the risk.” “其实，有意让孩子单独留家几乎肯定比因意外让孩子单独留家更安全，因为父母可以采取措施让情况变得更安全，比如给孩子一个电话或重申安全准则，”认知科学副教授和研究共同作者Barbara Sarnecka说。“人们坚定做出相反判断的事实表明，他们在道德上不赞成父母离开让孩子独处，这种谴责放大了对风险的评估。” This is also born out in participants’ view of children left alone by a parent meeting an illicit lover as being in significantly more danger than children left alone in precisely the same circumstances by a parent who leaves in order to work, volunteer for charity or just relax. 这也是为何在完全相同的环境背景下，受调查者认为家长约会非法情人而把儿童留家独处比起父母因工作、参加慈善志愿服务或放松而离开让儿童留家独处更危险。 In scenarios where participants were asked to judge not only how much danger the child was facing, but also whether the mother had done something morally wrong, researchers expected the perceived risk ranking to be lower. 当受调查者不仅被要求判断孩子面临多少危险，还要判断母亲是否有失德行为时，研究人员预计在这些场景下所感知的风险排名会降低。 “We thought giving people an alternative way to express their disapproval of the parent’s action would reduce the extent to which moral judgments influenced perceptions of risk,” Thomas said. “But just the opposite happened. When people gave an explicit judgment about the parent’s conduct, estimates of risk to the child were even more inflated by moral disapproval of the parent’s reason for leaving.” “我们认为，给人们一种不喜欢父母行为的替代表达方式，能减少影响感知风险的道德评判程度。”Thomas说。“然而事实正好相反。当人们对父母行为给出明确评判后，对孩子的风险估计会因对父母离开原因的道义谴责而更加被放大。” In fact, people’s risk estimates closely followed their judgments of whether mothers in the scenarios had done something morally wrong. Even parents who left children alone involuntarily were not held morally blameless, receiving an average “moral wrongness” judgment of 3.05 on a 10-point scale. 事实上，人们的风险评估与母亲在场景中是否做了失德的事的判断密切相关。在10分制评价里，即便不得已导致孩子单独在家的父母也并非被认为在道德上无可指责，他们也要接受平均3.05分的“失德”判断。 Fathers given more leeway than mothers 父亲的回旋余地比母亲更多 The authors found another interesting pattern when they replaced mothers in the stories with fathers: For fathers – but not mothers – a work-related absence was treated more like an involuntary absence. This difference could stem from the view that work is more obligatory and less of a voluntary choice for men. 作者把故事里的母亲替换成父亲时，发现另一个有趣的现象：对于父亲——而不是母亲——因为工作离开更容易被当作不得已的情况对待。这种差异源于一种观念，认为工作对男人而言更义不容辞，是更不得已的选择。 “Exaggerating the risks of allowing children some unsupervised time has significant costs besides the loss of children’s independence, freedom and opportunity to learn how to solve problems on their own,” Sarnecka said. “As people have adopted the idea that children must never be alone, parents increasingly face the possibility of arrest, charges of abuse or neglect, and even incarceration for allowing their children to play in parks, walk to school or wait in a car for a few minutes without them.” “除了在孩子的独立性、自由和学习自己解决问题的机会方面的损失之外，夸大给孩子些无人看管时间的风险，有很大的代价。”Sarnecka说。“当人们都认为孩子们绝对不能独处的时候，家长越来越多面临逮捕，被指控虐待或疏忽的可能性，甚至因为允许孩子在公园玩，步行到学校或独自在车里待几分钟而被监禁。” “At a minimum,” she continued, “these findings should caution those who make and enforce the law to distinguish evidence-based and rational assessments of risk to children from intuitive moral judgments about parents – and to avoid investing the latter with the force of law.” “至少，”她继续说，“这些发现应该提醒那些制定和执行法律的人，把依据证据与理性地评估孩子的风险从对家长的直觉道德评判中区分出来——并避免因为法律的力量而将判断权交给后者。” The study involved survey responses by 1,328 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk ranging in age from 18 to 75, with a fairly even split of men and women and those with and without children. Females accounted for 52 percent of respondents, while 48 percent were male; and 56.43 percent had children, while 43.57 percent did not. More than 80 percent of the participants were white, and two-thirds had completed at least some college. 本研究在Amazon Mechanical Turk网站上调查了从18岁至75岁的1328人，男性与女性，有孩子与没孩子人的回答有相当差异甚至泾渭分明。受调查者中，女性占52％，男性48％；有孩子的占56.43％，没有的占43.57％。超过80％是白人，三分之二有大学文凭。 （编辑：辉格@whigzhou） *注：本译文未经原作者授权，本站对原文不持有也不主张任何权利，如果你恰好对原文拥有权益并希望我们移除相关内容，请私信联系，我们会立即作出响应。

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