GRE阅读练习： 信用卡账单有钱不还为哪般

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The credit-card bill arrives.

信用卡账单到了。

You have enough money in a savings account to pay it off—the sensible thing to do, arithmetically speaking, since the interest rate on the credit-card balance far exceeds that earned on the savings.

你在储蓄账户中有足够的钱把账单付清——从算术上来说，这是该做的合理之事，因为信用卡余额的利率远远超出储蓄所得。

Yet you leave the savings untouched, and pay only as much of the bill as your current-account balance allows.

然而，你却让储蓄不被触及，仅支付你的常规账户余额允许你支付的那部分账单。

What looks a daft choice to most economists makes perfect sense to Richard Thaler, who on October 9th was awarded the Nobel prize for economics for his work in behavioural economics.

对大多数经济学家看起来来是愚蠢的选择，对10月9日因其对行为经济学的研究而荣获诺贝尔经济学奖的理查德·赛勒来说却具有重大的意义。

Mr Thaler helped demonstrate how human reasoning diverges from that of the perfectly rational homo economicus used in most economic modelling.

赛勒促成了人类推理行为如何迥异于被用在大多数经济学建模行为中的完全理性的经理人推理行为的阐释。

The world, and the field of economics, is better for his contributions.

这个世界以及经济学，因为他的贡献而愈发美好。

Economists mostly recognise that normal people fall short of perfect rationality in day-to-day decision-making.

经济学家大都承认，普通人在日常决策行为中缺乏完全理性。

Economic modelling requires simplification, however, and economists generally suppose that theories assuming people are well-informed and rational offer the best available account of economic activity.

然而，经济学上的建模行为要求简单化，同时经济学家通常认为，假设人们已经被很好地告知的理论以及理性，给经济行为提供了最 好的可用账户。

Over time, however, scholars have built up an imposing list of the ways in which humans systematically refuse to behave as the models predict.

然而，长期以来，学界却形成了一份堂堂正正的有关人类用以系统性地拒绝如模型所预期地那样行为的方法的名单。

Economists such as Herb Simon (who won the Nobel in 1978) , Daniel Kahneman (2002) and Robert Shiller (2013) are celebrated for their contributions to this effort.

(1978年赢得诺贝尔奖的)赫伯·西蒙、(2002年获奖的)丹尼尔·卡尼曼和(2013年获奖的)罗伯特·席勒等经济学家，已经因为他们对这方面尝试的贡献而为人称道。

But perhaps more than any other scholar, Mr Thaler lifted behavioural economics to prominence, and helped put its lessons into practice.

但是，赛勒可能比任何其他学者都要多地，将行为经济学提升到了突出地位，让这门科学的研究成果走入了实践。

Mr Thaler, an American born in New Jersey in 1945, spent most of his early career at Cornell Universitybefore moving to the University of Chicago in 1995.

赛勒，这位1945年出生在新泽西州的美国人，在1995年转投芝加哥大学之前，在康奈尔大学渡过了他早期学术生涯的大部分时间。

Unusually for an economist, he is known for the clarity of his ideas and the quality of his writing.

对于一位经济学家来说，不同寻常的是，他以观点的明晰和写作的质量而著称。

“Nudge”, a book co-written with Cass Sunstein, is both an extraordinarily influential work and a bestseller.

《助推》(Nudge)，这本他与凯斯·桑斯坦合写的书，既是一本具有特殊影响力的著作，也是一本畅销书。

Its lessons have been adopted by governments across the world; “nudge units” in America and Britain studied how to boost saving and taxpaying, encourage healthy behaviour and reduce energy use.

该书的经验教训已经被世界各地的政府所采纳：在美国和英国，“助推小组”已经对如何提高储蓄、促进缴税、鼓励健康的行为和降低能源使用展开了研究。

“Nudge” drew on years of work by Mr Thaler and co-authors identifying oddities in human behaviour.

《助推》综合了赛勒与合作者在辨识人类行为的异常方面所进行的多年研究。

Setting out to explore why people feel losses more keenly than gains, he helped uncover the endowment effect: a tendency to value something more highly just because you own it.

着手去探究为什么人们对损失比对收获感觉更强烈的他，促成了禀赋效应——这种仅仅是因为自己拥有就将其当作宝贝的倾向——的发现。

To detect it, he distributed coffee mugs at random to half of a group of test subjects, who were then invited to sell the mug, if they wished, to the other, mugless half.

为了探究这一效应，他把咖啡杯随机分发给了测试对象中的一半。之后，这一半测试对象受邀把杯子卖给没有杯子的另一半，如果他们希望这做的话。

Theory would predict that those with and without mugs should value them the same, on average, and so about half of the mugs should change hands.

理论会预期，总的来说，有杯子的没有杯子的应当对这些杯子给出一样的估价。因而，约有一半的杯子应当换手。

In fact, those with mugs valued them more than those without.

实际上，有杯子比没有杯子更把杯子当成宝贝。

Offers to buy the mugs by the have-nots were usually too low to convince the haves to sell, and relatively few transactions took place.

没有杯子的出价通常又太低，没法让有杯子的卖出杯子，因而只有相当少的交易发生。

This finding, since replicated many times, suggested that the context of an economic choice matters.

由于被反复做了多次，这一发现表明，经济选择的背景很重要。

That, in turn, means that the way choices are framed, by firms or governments, can influence how people respond.

反过来，这又说说明，选择被企业和政府所构建的方式可能影响人们如何应对。

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