《Freakonomics》- (A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything) by Steven D, Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.Freakonomics是两个词Freak和Economics合成的。
这是女儿推荐给我的一本书。很高兴我们可以互相推荐书了。
Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.
Incentive在本书中是最重要的词。
The conventional wisdom is often wrong.
Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.
Chap 1 - What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common?
例子是芝加哥地区的学校老师为了让自己所教的班的成绩好而在考试成绩上作假，因为如果成绩太差，有可能失去教职。相扑选手在某些情况下（特别是在知道自己已经稳进决赛圈），可能会“假摔”来赢取某些利益。
书中不止举了这两个例子（那是经济上的利益），还有社会和道德层面上的。
提到的一个例子很有意思：
这是在以色列的十个幼儿园研究(20个星期）。前四个星期仅记录每天晚来接孩子的家长，平均起来，每个幼儿园每个星期有8个晚来的家长。从第五个星期，幼儿园宣布，如果家长晚接孩子的时间超过10分钟，需交$3。不知道各位能够想见到加上这些收费的后果是什么？晚来接孩子的人数增加了！实验接近结束时，又取消了这样的收费，可晚来接孩子的家长数并没有回到开始的状况。
不知各位有什么看法？我是觉得非常有趣。
There are three basic flavors of incentives: economics, social, and moral. Very often a single incentive scheme will include all three varieties.
Who cheats?
Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right. You might say to yourself, I don't cheat, regardless of the stakes. And then you might remember the time you cheated on, say, a board game. Last week. Or the golf ball you nudged out of its bad lie. Or the time you really wanted a bagel in the office break room but couldn't come up with the dollar you were supposed to drop in the coffee can. And the took the bagel anyway. And told yourself you'd pay double the next time. And didn't.
For every clever person who goes to the trouble of creating an incentive scheme, there is an army of people, clever and otherwise, who will inevitably spend even more time trying to beat it. Cheating may or may not be human nature, but it is certainly a prominent feature in just about every human endeavor. Cheating is a primordial economic act: getting more for less.
啊......
Could any man resist the temptation of evil if he knew his acts could not be witnessed?
是不是有时把人看的太透也挺没劲的？
Chap 2 - How is the Ku Klux Klan like a group of real-estate agents?
这章基本上是在讲信息的不对称性。当年三K党的起落是和民众对其内幕的了解有很大的关系。而不动产经纪多的仅仅是了解的信息多了点，随着互联网的发展，他们的优势不再。
It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been gravely wounded by the Internet.
作为消费者，具有足够的新技术知识和网络安全意识将会变得越来越重要。
Among economists, there are two leading theories of discrimination. ....... The first type is called taste-based discrimination, which means that one person discriminates simply because he prefers to not interest with a particular type of other person. In the second type, known as information-based discrimination, one person believes that another type of person has poor skills, and acts accordingly.
在歧视别人的时候，应该总是觉得自己是强过别人吧，哪怕只有一点点或仅仅在很少的几个方面。
The Gulf between the information we publicly proclaim and the information we know to be true is often vast. (or, put a more familiar way: we say one thing and do another.) This can be seen in personal relationships, in commercial transactions, and of course in politics.
Chap 3 - Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?
这章叙述的事实挺有趣的--一般的贩毒者的收入并不高，这有点出乎我们的想象。
So if crack dealing is the most dangerous job in America, and if the salary was only $3.30 an hour, why on earth would anyone take such a job?
Well, for the same reason that a pretty Wisconsin farm girl moves to Hollywood. For the same reason that a high-school quarterback wakes up at 5 am to lift weights. They all want to succeed in an extremely competitive field in which, if you reach the top, you are paid a fortune (to say nothing of the attendant glory and power).
......
The problem with crack dealing is the same as in every other glamour profession: a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes. Earning big money in the crack gang wasn't much more likely than the Wisconsin farm girl becoming a movie star or the high-school quarterback playing in the NFL. But criminals, like everyone else, respond to incentives. So if the prizes is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance.
这是慢慢变老时认识到的：走大家都走的路会比较轻松。可年轻人不是更应该闯闯吗？！
In the glamour professions - movies, sports, music, fashion - there is a different dynamic at play. Even in second-tier glamour industries like publishing, advertising, and media, swarms of bright young people throw themselves at grunt jobs that pay poorly and demand unstinting devotion. An editorial assistant earning $22,000 at a Manhattan publishing house, an unpaid high-school quarterback, and a teenage crack dealer earning $3.30 an hour are all playing the same game, a game that is best viewed as a tournament.
The rules of a tournament are straightforward. You must start at the bottom to have a shot at the top. ...... You must be willing to work long and hard at substandard wages. in order to advance in the tournament, you must prove yourself not merely above average but spectacular. ...... And Finally, once you come to the sad realization that you will never make it to the top, you will quit the tournament.
Char 4 - Where have all the criminals gone?
这是比较混乱的一章。列举了事实说明经济的繁荣和犯罪率的下降没有关系。可我仍然怀疑，街上失业的人多了，治安会好吗？
提出了太多的原因，让人看得云里雾里。
有一种做法被广泛赞同，据说是纽约警察局长提出的，就是当年轻人犯了小错时，就要给予惩罚，让其体会到不爽，这样对继续发展到大的犯罪有抑制作用。有点意思。
First, the guns. Debates on this subject are rarely coolheaded. Guns advocates believe that gun laws are too strict; opponents believe exactly the opposite. How can intelligent people view the world so differently? Because a gun raises a complex set of issues that change according to one factor: whose hand happens to be holding the gun.
It might be worthwhile to take a step back and ask a rudimentary question: what is a gun? It's a tool that can be used to kill someone, of course, but more significantly, a gun is a great disrupter of the natural order.
A gun scrambles the outcome of any dispute. Let's say that a rough guy and a not-so-tough guy exchange words in a bar, which leads a fight. It's pretty obvious to the no-so-tough guy that he'll be beaten, so why bother fighting? the pecking order remains intact. But if the not-so-tough guy happens to have a gun, he stands a good chance of winning. In this scenario, the introduction of a gun may well lead to more violence.
我们常常顽固地认为我们觉得对的观念就是对的。这就是我常常要女儿多读多听别人的观念的原因之一。
最近读了“一九六八年的北京江湖”，想来如果当时周长利一方的人手里有枪或者双方手里都有枪的话，结果应该是如何呢？
我想作为男人，一辈子多多少少会遭遇到被欺负而且还不得不忍气吞声，会想些什么？我TMD手里要是有把枪......！有一次和朋友聊天，说美国在衰退，会衰退到被人欺负的地步吗？哥儿们，想到美国打仗吗？
Chap 5 - What Makes A Perfect Parent?
No one is more susceptible to an expert's fearmongering than a parent. Fear is in fact a major component of the act of parenting. A parent, after all, is the steward of another creature's life, a creature who in the beginning is more helpless than the newborn of nearly any other species. This leads a lot of parents to spend a lot of their parenting energy simply being scared.
The problem is that they are often scared of the wrong things. It's not their fault, really. Separating facts from rumors is always hard work, especially for a busy parent. And the white noise generated by the experts - to say nothing of the pressure exerted by fellow parents - is so overwhelming that they can barely think for themselves. The facts they do manage to glean have usually been varnished or exaggerated or otherwise taken out of context to serve an agenda that isn't their own.
随着孩子的长大才慢慢体会到做父母的困难和自己的无能。其实我们大多父母在某种程度上都是不合格的，这里面的因素非常多而且常常是不可抗拒的。
But fear best thrives in the present tense. That is why experts rely on it; in a world that is increasingly impatient with long-term processes, fear is a potent short-term play.
The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?
Clearly, bad parenting matters a great deal. As the link between abortion and crime makes clear, unwanted children - who are disproportionately subject to neglect and abuse - have worse outcomes than children who were eagerly welcomed by their parents. But how much can those eager parents actually accomplish for their children's sake?
This question represents a crescendo of decades' worth of research. A long line of studies, including research into twins who were separated at birth, had already concluded that genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child's personality and abilities.
So if nature accounts for half of a child's destiny, what accounts for the other half? Surely it must be the nurturing - the Baby Mozart tapes, the church sermons, the museum trips, the French lessons, the bargaining and hugging and quarreling and punishing that, in to, constitute the act of parenting. But how then to explain another famous study, the Colorado Adoption Project, which followed the lives of 245 babies put up for adoption and found virtually no correlation between the child's personality traits and those of his adopted parents? Or the other studies showing that a child's character wasn't much affected whether or not he was sent to day care, whether he had one parent or two, whether his mother worked or didn't, whether he had two mommies or two daddies or one of each?
So what does all this have to say about the importance of parents in general? Consider again the eight ECLS factors that are correlated with school rest scores:
The child has highly educated parents.
The child's parents have high socioeconomic status.
The child's mother was thirty or older at the time of her first child's birth.
The child had low birthweight.
The child's parents speak English in the home.
The child is adopted.
The child's parents are involved in the PTA.
The child has many books in his home.
And the eight factors that are not:
The child's family is intact.
The child's parents recently moved into a better neighborhood.
The child's mother didn't work between birth and kindergarten.
The child attend Head Start.
The child's parents regularly take him to museums.
The child is regularly spanked.
The child frequently watches television.
The child's parents read to him nearly every day.
To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are; the second list describes things that parents do. Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn't seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television.
For parents - and parenting experts - who are obsessed with child-rearing technique, this may be sobering news. The reality is that technique looks to be highly overrated.
But this is not to say that parents don't matter. Plainly they matter a great deal. Here is the conundrum: by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago - who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead. If you are smart, hardworking, well educated, well paid, and married to someone equally fortunate, then your children are more likely to succeed. (Nor does it hurt, in all likelihood, to be honest, thoughtful, loving, and curious about the world.) But it isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are. In this regard, an overbearing parent is a lot like a political candidate who believes that money wins elections - whereas in truth, all the money in the world can't get a candidate elected if the voters don't like him to start with.
老实说，看到这里，真觉得自己的无知。我觉得我无论如何应该和女儿聊聊这段。想你的孩子出色吗？做好你自己吧！wow!!
还有，我们希望孩子会成为什么样的人呢？应该是一个完整和幸福的人吧！
Chapter 6 - Perfect Parenting, Part II; Or: Would a Roshanda by any other name smell as sweet?
名字真的有那么重要吗？
