想要提高托福閱讀能力，我們一定要在日常生活中有意識地增加英語閱讀量，提升語感和熟練度，這其中比較常用也比較方便地一個方式就是利用各類英文報刊雜志文章進行精讀與泛讀練習。下面我們來看一篇經濟學人文章：自由交流-更冷靜的頭腦。
Free exchange
A cooler head
Thomas Schelling, economist and nuclear strategist, died on December 13th, aged 95
自由交流
更冷靜的頭腦
經濟學家、核戰略家托馬斯·謝林于2016年12月13日辭世，享年95歲
WITHIN half an hour of waking up on October 10th 2005, Thomas Schelling received four phone calls. The first was from the secretary of the Nobel Committee, with news that he and Robert Aumann had jointly won that year’s prize for economics. During the fourth call, when asked how winning felt, he answered: “Well, it feels busy.” He was nothing if not truthful. He also confessed to feeling confused about which bit of his work had won the prize.
2005年10月10日，托馬斯·謝林(Thomas Schelling)在醒來后的半小時內接了四個電話。第一個是諾貝爾獎委員會的秘書打來的，告知他和羅伯特·奧曼(Robert Aumann)共同獲得了該年的諾貝爾經濟學獎。到了第四個電話，當被問到獲獎有何感受時，謝林答道：“哦，覺得挺忙的”。他再坦率不過了。他還坦言覺得納悶，不知道自己因為哪部分成果拿了這個獎。
It might have been his work on addiction—flicked off like ash from his own struggles with smoking. Economists must understand, he wrote, the man who swears “never again to risk orphaning his children with lung cancer”, yet is scouring the streets three hours later for an open shop selling cigarettes. Mr Schelling’s work laid (largely unacknowledged) foundations for future behavioural economists. In his thinking, addicts have two selves, one keen for healthy lungs and another craving a smoke. Self-control strategies involve drawing battle lines between them.
有可能是因為他對上癮的研究——從他自己與煙癮的苦戰中引發的思索。他寫道：經濟學家得理解，一個發誓“再也不冒得肺癌而讓孩子成為孤兒之險”的人，三個小時后就會滿大街找賣煙的小店。謝林的研究為未來行為經濟學家的工作奠定了基礎(這一點很大程度上未得到承認)。他認為，癮君子都有兩個自我，一個想要健康的肺，另一個惦記著那根煙。有效的自我控制策略需要在兩者間做出非此即彼的明確選擇。
The prize could also have been for his work on segregation, showing how mild individual preferences could lead to extreme group outcomes. Even if people do not mind living in a mixed community but have just a slight inclination to live near others like themselves, that could lead to deep racial segregation.
這個獎項也有可能是為了表彰他在隔離方面的研究。他論證了溫和的個人偏好會導致極端的群體結果。即便人們并不介意住在一個混合社區，但哪怕他們有一點輕微的偏向，想住在和自己類似的人附近，也會導致嚴重的種族隔離。
By the time Mr Schelling arrived in Sweden in December 2005, he had worked out what the prize was for. His acceptance speech observed that “the most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed 60 years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger…what a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune!” If achievement was the word, the credit was partly his.
到了2005年12月謝林抵達瑞典的時候，他已經弄清了獲獎的原因。他在獲獎感言里說道：“過去50年里最了不起的事是一件沒有發生的事。我們已經享受了60年沒有核武器憤怒爆炸的時光……這是多么驚人的成就——或者，如果這并不算成就，那是多么驚人的好運啊!”如果這算成就，那么有一部分要歸功于他。
Like so many of his generation, Mr Schelling was drawn to economics by the horrors of the Depression in the 1930s. By the time he had finished his PhD in 1948, the agenda had changed. With the wounds of the second world war still fresh, the priority was to prevent a third. He dipped into government, gaining first-hand experience of negotiations, such as those that established NATO. Then in the 1950s he began publishing academic work on bargaining, using his crystal-clear prose to formalise concepts that gifted negotiators knew instinctively, and shunning what Richard Zeckhauser, a colleague, called the “Journal of Advanced Economic Gobbledygook”.
和他那一代的很多人一樣，謝林被經濟學吸引是緣于對上世紀30年代大蕭條的恐慌。到1948年他獲得經濟學博士學位時，形勢已經發生了變化。二戰新傷未愈，防止第三次世界大戰爆發成了第一要務。他曾在政府里短暫就職，獲得了關于談判的第一手經驗，例如建立北約時的磋商。50年代他開始發表關于談判的學術著作，用他非常清晰明了的行文將一些有天賦的談判者憑直覺就知道的概念表述出來，避免成為同事理查德·澤克豪斯(Richard Zeckhauser)所說的“《高級經濟學天書期刊》”。
The conflicts Mr Schelling considered transcended the case of two parties scrapping for a bigger slice of a fixed pie. The richness of his subject lay in the truth that “in international affairs, there is mutual dependence as well as opposition.” As neither America nor the Soviet Union wanted to be engulfed in a nuclear mushroom cloud, there was scope for military strategy involving wit, not weaponry. In 1960 he set out his ideas in a book, “The Strategy of Conflict”, which showed how the advantages of co-operation could overcome antagonism, even without a formal bargain.
謝林所考慮的沖突超越了“從固定大小的餡餅中搶奪更大塊”的情形。他立論的豐富是基于這樣一個事實：“在國際事務中，既有相互依賴，也有對立。”無論是美國還是前蘇聯都不想被核爆炸蘑菇云吞沒，那么就有了空間來施展依賴智慧而非武器的軍事策略。1960年他在《沖突的戰略》(The Strategy of Conflict)一書中闡述了自己的觀點，證明合作的好處如何能夠消減對立，甚至不需要一場正式的談判。
“Any time somebody talks about deterrence, they’re influenced by Schelling,” says Lawrence Freedman, author of “Strategy: A History”. This deterrence could take several forms. Counter-intuitively, limiting your options can strengthen your hand, by convincing the enemy of your seriousness. Applied to nuclear strategy, Mr Schelling saw that it was important to persuade the opposition that in the event of a nuclear attack, there would be a counter-strike. Weapons that would retaliate automatically if the country was attacked could deter nuclear aggression in the first place, so defending such weapons was the best way of defending civilian lives. The important thing was to avoid a situation in which one side attacked so as to offset the other’s perceived first-mover advantage.
“任何時候若有人談到威懾，就一定受到了謝林的影響。”《戰略的歷史》(Strategy: A History)的作者勞倫斯·弗里德曼(Lawrence Freedman)說道。這種威懾可能有多種表現形式。與我們的直覺恰恰相反的是，限制你的選擇能夠增強你的威懾力，因為這讓敵人確信你是認真的。運用到核戰略上，謝林認為重要的是要讓對方相信，自己在遭到核攻擊時會發起反擊。當國家受到襲擊時會自動實施報復的武器能在一開始就阻遏核侵略，因此支持使用這類武器是保衛國民生命的最佳方式。重要的是避免一種情況，即一方為了抵消它認為對方所具有的先發優勢而襲擊對方。
Mr Schelling also promoted the importance of reputation as a useful deterrent. Richard Nixon understood this with what he called his “madman theory”: the idea of making the North Vietnamese enemy believe he was capable of anything, including pressing the nuclear button. But consistent behaviour can have as deterrent an effect as erratic unpredictability: if your adversaries believe that you will keep your word, then your word can shape their actions. The danger of this approach, however, is that it could lead to perseverance with a stupid strategy, just to save face.
謝林還推崇名聲的重要性，認為這是一種有用的威懾力。尼克松很明白這一點，他有一套“瘋漢理論”：讓北越敵人相信他什么事都干得出來，包括按下核按鈕。然而始終一致的行為和古怪的不可預測性具有同樣的威懾力：如果你的對手相信你會說到做到，那么你的話語會塑造他們的行為。不過，這種方法的危險之處是它可能導致咬定一個愚蠢的戰略不放，僅僅是為了保全面子。
United we stand
Mr Schelling was often referred to as a game theorist, despite not calling himself one. His methods marked him apart. Mathematical minds had proven elegantly that Mr Schelling’s games would always have solutions. There would always be at least one set of strategies where each side was playing its best possible response to the other. When whittling down the number of options, however, the mathematical approach was to chuck more assumptions and equations at the problem. Mr Schelling, in contrast, thought that just as one could not deduce logically whether any given joke will make people laugh, so it was ludicrous to deduce what people might think in a nuclear war from logic alone.
團結一致
謝林常被人稱作博弈理論家，盡管他自己從不這么自稱。他的方法獨樹一幟。數學大師們已經很好地證明了謝林的博弈總是有其解決辦法，總會至少有一套戰略讓一方在應對另一方時發揮到最好。不過當要減少選項數量時，數學上的方法是給這個問題更多的假設、列更多方程式。與之相反的是，謝林認為正如無法從邏輯上推斷任何一個給定的笑話能否讓人發笑一樣，只從邏輯出發推斷人們在核戰爭中可能有怎樣的想法實在是荒唐可笑。
Mr Schelling looked to the real world for help, and argued that shared norms were the answer. When he asked his students to pick a meeting place in New York, unco-ordinated, most would settle on the clock at Grand Central station. In his prize lecture, Mr Schelling used this idea to help explain why nuclear weapons had not been used on the battlefield for so long: their use was a taboo, so the world could settle on a focal point.
謝林向現實世界尋求幫助，他認為答案在于共同的規范。當他讓他的學生們在紐約挑一個集會地點時，大部分人不約而同地選擇了中央車站的大鐘。在他的獲獎演說中，謝林用這個想法來解釋為什么這么久以來戰場上并沒有用到核武器：它們的使用是一種禁忌，因而這個世界會在一個焦點上妥協。
On that busy morning of October 10th, when pressed by the third journalist of the morning, Mr Schelling refrained from advising young people. “I wouldn’t necessarily try to talk somebody into…becoming an economist.” Instead of being confined by any academic discipline, he led by example, tackling some of the world’s most worrying—and most intractable—problems.
10月10日那個忙碌的早晨，盡管第三個打來電話的記者一再追問，他仍然不愿給年輕人什么忠告。“我不一定會勸誰……當經濟學家。”他沒有局限于任何學科，而是以身作則，對付世界上最讓人擔憂也最為棘手的一些問題。
