【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障7系列】【7-19】经管

spencerX

这是明天的作业~所以大家别忘了先做完今天的作业再做这个~

越障是一篇paper的一部分，paper不是很长，有兴趣的童鞋可以下载附件之后查看此paper。

【速度】


【速度一】

Tick tock
Events as early as next week could challenge the assumption that time is on the euro zone’s side

AT LEAST August was quiet. Thanks to Mario Draghi, chief of the European Central Bank (ECB), euro-zone policymakers got some badly needed R&R. His promise in July to “do whatever it takes” to protect the euro from speculation was enough to persuade traders to pack their bags and head for the Riviera. Yet the euro zone now looks woefully behind in its mission to save the single currency. That is partly because a rescue is genuinely complicated. But it is also because too many people think that time is on their side.

Just now, sluggishness may seem like an odd accusation. The next month will contain a summer’s worth of news. As we went to press, Mr Draghi was to put flesh on his pledge to limit the cost of medium-term borrowing by governments (and hence companies). On September 12th Germany’s senior court will rule on whether a euro-zone rescue fund is constitutional. The same day the Dutch will vote and the European Commission will unveil its thoughts on a Europe -wide banking supervisor—a step towards a banking union. Within weeks the troika that has just arrived in Athens will report back on whether to give Greece its next slug of rescue money. And all the while, a restless succession of meetings will continue as leaders prepare for a big summit in October.

But, measured against what needs to be done, this is inadequate. Even if the ECB successfully intervenes, the euro zone’s politicians must ultimately determine the euro’s fate. Although work on a banking union has begun, they are many months away from actually setting one up. Leaders increasingly recognise the dangers of excessive austerity, but they still routinely demand harsh budgets as a token of merit. The debate about mutualising some government debt, which this newspaper thinks essential to restoring confidence, has barely begun. The vague German demand to shift political power to federal Brussels has hardly been broached in France.

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【速度二】

Some euro-zone leaders think that is fine. With time, the reform under way in the euro zone’s troubled economies will bear fruit. If sceptical politicians and voters have a chance to contemplate the ruinous alternative of a euro break-up, they will come round to mutualisation and federation, just as they have put up with bigger transfers of money and sovereignty than ever seemed possible at the outset of the crisis two years ago. In the end, self-interest and good sense will win out.

Onward and downward

In fact, time may be working against the euro. Uncertainty and austerity are deepening Europe’s economic plight. The euro zone looks to be back in recession. Unemployment is at a record high. Surveys of consumers and business activity make dismal reading—and the malaise has spread to Germany. Prolonged economic stagnation will make it more expensive to keep the euro together—and poison the politics of a rescue.

Any of next week’s events could throw up another barrier. Germany’s court ruling against the bail-out fund would be the most dramatic. But the Dutch vote could further tie the hands of its politicians, and the banking-union talks could spark a row over regulation. Far from bringing countries together, the crisis is tugging them apart.

To stop the rot, France and Germany, still at the heart of Europe, need to settle on a rescue and prepare their parties and their peoples to accept it. Nothing will happen without that. It means grappling with the sort of federalism that statist France has always rejected. It means Germany accepting some debt mutualisation. Nobody said this would be easy. But if Angela Merkel and François Hollande just wait for time to do their job for them, they will lose control of their fate.

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【速度三】

World Hunger: The Problem Left Behind
By TYLER COWEN

THE drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture.

The green revolution has slowed since the early 1990s, and it has become harder to bolster crop yields, as I have discussed in my book, “An Economist Gets Lunch.” And recent research by Dani Rodrik, a professor of international political economy at Harvard, indicates that agricultural productivity improvements are among the hardest to transmit from one nation to another.

For all its importance to human well-being, agriculture seems to be one of the lagging economic sectors of the last two decades. That means the problem of hunger is flaring up again, as the World Bank and several United Nations agencies have recently warned.

Consider Africa, which is often considered to have turned a corner and to be headed toward steady growth. The expansion of the African middle class and the decline in child mortality rates are both quite real, but the advances have not been balanced — and agriculture lags behind.

In a recent address, Michael Lipton, an economist and research professor at Sussex University in Britain, offered a sobering look at Africa’s agricultural productivity. He suggests that Rwanda and Ghana are gaining, but that most of the continent is not. Production and calorie intake per capita don’t seem to be higher today than they were in the early 1960s. It remains an issue how Africa’s growing population will be fed.

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【速度四】

One huge problem is that the price of fertilizer in Africa is often two to four times the world price. Yet African soil and rainfall make much of the continent subpar for growing food. In other words, the region that probably needs fertilizer the most also has to pay the most for it, and much of Africa doesn’t have the prosperity to make this an easy stretch. The high prices result in large part from infrastructure and trade networks that aren’t developed enough to create a low-cost and competitive market. And the problem could worsen if economic troubles in China distract it from its beneficial investments in African roads and harbors.

On top of all that, many African nations have unhelpful policies toward agriculture. Malawi, for instance, subjects corn to periodic export and import restrictions as well as to price controls, all of which thwart development of a well-functioning market. When market speculators save corn in anticipation of greater scarcity, they may be punished by law. These restrictions of market incentives exacerbate the basic supply problems.

Such bottlenecks are a challenge for the future of the African economies. For comparison, the rapid expansions of economic growth in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were all preceded by significant progress in agricultural productivity. In these countries, higher yields created a domestic surplus for savings and investment, encouraged small-scale entrepreneurship, fostered a sense of economic security and helped the middle class expand.

In contrast, much of Africa’s growth has come from resource wealth — such as oil, diamonds, gold and strategic minerals — and, unfortunately, resource prices are notoriously volatile. Resource wealth is less well-suited to supporting sustainable democracies, because it tends to be connected with state-backed privileges and other legally entrenched entities. The Norwegian government manages its oil wealth just fine, for example, but autocracies and fledgling democracies are more likely to be corrupted.

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【速度五】

There is no shortage of writing — often from a locavore point of view — in support of more organic methods of farming, for both developed and developing countries. These opinions recognize that current farming methods bring serious environmental problems involving water supplies, fertilizer runoff and energy use. Yet organic farming typically involves smaller yields — 5 to 34 percent lower, as estimated in a recent study in the journal Nature, depending on the crop and the context. For all the virtues of organic approaches, it’s hard to see how global food problems can be solved by starting with a cut in yields. Claims in this area are often based on wishful thinking rather than a hard-nosed sense of what’s practical.

WHAT to do? First, put food problems higher on the agenda. In the United States, there is no general consciousness of the precarious state of global agriculture. Even in the economics profession, the field of agricultural economics is often viewed as secondary in status.

Second, the United States government should stop subsidizing its own corn-based biofuels, mainly ethanol. Today, about 40 percent of America’s field corn goes into biofuels, thanks to a subsidy and regulatory policy dating from 2005. With virtual unanimity, experts condemn these subsidies as driving up food prices, damaging land use and costing the taxpayers money. Once the energy costs of producing the biofuels are taken into account, it doesn’t even appear that this policy helps slow climate change. It has become a form of crony capitalism, at great global expense.

Today, we have two presidential candidates who both look a bit short on grand vision and transformational change. Perhaps they could look to helping solve the food problem — and making a big dent in global hunger — as America’s next beneficial legacy.

The world is not yet in that happy situation where “what’s for dinner?” is a boring question.

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【越障】

Self-Interest Without Selfishness: The Hedonic Benefit of Imposed Self-Interest
Jonathan Z. Berman and Deborah A. Small

Traditional economic theory assumes that human behavior is driven by self-interested pursuits. This assumption appears valid because there is a direct link between outcomes that benefit the self and happiness: Simply put, people feel good when their lot in life improves, and they feel bad when it worsens. Yet the self-interest assumption, first espoused by Thomas Hobbes (1651/1950), has been repeatedly challenged by empirical findings that people often make self-sacrifices to improve the welfare of others (Batson, 1991; Camerer & Thaler, 1995; Loewenstein & Small, 2007; but see Cialdini, Brown, Lewis, Luce, & Neuberg, 1997; Maner et al., 2002). Moreover, the relationship between self-interested pursuits and happiness is complicated. Much research in decision making has found that people often fail to choose what makes them happy and, as a result, may not choose what is best for them (see Hsee & Hastie, 2006). Furthermore, prosocial behavior has been shown to increase happiness—sometimes even more so than self-interested behavior (Dunn, Aknin, & Norton, 2008; Harbaugh, Mayr, & Burghart, 2007; Meier & Stutzer, 2008).

One reason why the exclusive pursuit of self-interest may not always maximize well-being is that it often entails sacrificing the needs of others along the way. Every dollar spent on oneself could otherwise be donated to someone in need. In many situations, opportunity costs are not salient (Frederick, Novemsky, Wang, Dhar, & Nowlis, 2009; Spiller, 2011), but when they are, the trade-off between self and other may foster internal conflict (Mellers, Haselhuhn, Tetlock, Silva, & Isen, 2010) that could taint the otherwise pleasurable experience of gaining.

Indeed, the experimental methods used to test the self-interest assumption—such as the dictator game—directly pit helping oneself against helping others (Camerer & Thaler, 1995). If an individual selects an option of self-interest, he or she may feel guilt, unease, or even reproach for prioritizing him- or herself above others. If an individual selects a prosocial option, he or she fails to reap the benefits inherit in self-interest. Consistent with this view, research has shown that people will avoid making direct trade-offs between self and other, if they can (Dana, Weber, & Kuang, 2007).

We therefore propose that imposing an otherwise selfish option removes the negative experience that arises when trading off one’s own well-being with the well-being of others. When agency is removed, individuals no longer feel a sense of responsibility over their outcomes and can enjoy the pleasure inherent in self-interest while avoiding self-reproach for failing to help others. Thus, imposing an option of self-interest can be liberating by allowing individuals to enjoy self-interest without feeling selfish.

Choice and Well-Being

The research presented in this article contributes to a broader literature identifying when the provision of choice is beneficial or harmful to well-being (Botti & Iyengar, 2006; Schwartz, 2004). Although providing more choice options makes economic sense—allowing for preference matching by permitting individuals to select an option they desire the most—sometimes, additional choice hurts. As a decision becomes more complex, people experience choice conflict, which thereby inhibits satisfaction (Iyengar & Lepper, 2000). Increased choice conflict leads decision makers to defer choice, select a default option, and employ heuristics to guide decision making (e.g., Dhar, 1997; Luce, 1998; Shafir, Simonson, & Tversky, 1993).

Taken to the extreme, even removing choice altogether can be beneficial. In particular, choosing among relatively undesirable options reduces satisfaction because individuals tend to blame themselves for making a bad decision (Botti & McGill, 2006). Further, imposing an outcome alleviates negative emotions that result from making a decision involving highly upsetting trade-offs, such as the decision to terminate life support for a severely ill newborn (Botti, Orfali, & Iyengar, 2009).

Choice also hurts well-being when it requires people to make harmful comparisons between alternatives. When options within a choice set have both clear advantages and clear disadvantages, comparisons often hurt (Brenner, Rottenstreich, & Sood, 1999). However, we expect that certain comparisons are more damaging than others. For example, one study found that individuals who select a candy bar (vice) over fresh fruit (virtue) feel worse about their selection than individuals who choose between two different candy bars (Dhar & Wertenbroch, 2012). Whereas choosing a vice over a virtue represents a strong signal to one’s self that one is weak willed, choosing between two vices does not contain the same diagnostic value.

Similarly, we expect that when individuals select an option of self-interest over a prosocial option, they are likely to feel selfish, which is undesirable. Whereas previous research has shown that imposing an option is likely to be beneficial when people choose between undesirable alternatives (Botti & McGill, 2006; Botti et al., 2009), neither self-interest nor prosocial behavior is inherently undesirable. Rather, the meaning of a self-interested outcome is altered by the presence of a prosocial option: Self-interest becomes undesirable when it is chosen over a prosocial option but not when it is imposed.

Imposed self-interest versus imposed charity

Although we expect that imposing self-interest increases happiness, this is not likely to be true of imposing charity. Even though imposing charity likewise removes any internal conflict, it also removes agency. Individual agency is a key determinant of the pleasure derived from engaging in prosocial behavior: People primarily gain pleasure from helping others when they are personally responsible for helping (Andreoni, 1990; Harbaugh et al., 2007; Weinstein & Ryan, 2010). Although some findings point toward imposed prosocial behavior boosting happiness (Dunn et al., 2008), this may not be true when individuals do not feel ownership over their good deeds.

Overview of the present studies

The following studies tested our hypothesis that removing choice and trade-offs between benefits to the self and others increases the hedonic value of self-interest. Whereas previous research has emphasized the general benefit of removing choice to alleviate the negative effects of emotionally difficult trade-offs (Botti et al., 2009), our theory proposes an asymmetric relationship. Study 1 shows that externally imposing an option of self-interest (a reward) increases outcome happiness compared with allowing choice, but externally imposing a prosocial option (a donation to charity) does not.

Study 2 provides additional evidence for our hypothesis, showing that trade-offs between self-benefiting and prosocial options reduce outcome happiness more than trade-offs that involve the self only. In Study 3, we further revealed the mechanism driving our results by directly manipulating perceived agency. Participants indicated their preference for a self-benefitting or a prosocial option and eventually received their preferred option. However, some participants knew that they would receive their preference, whereas others were led to believe that the outcome was externally chosen by a computer. Participants were happier with self-interest when they believed that it was externally chosen.

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铁板神猴

我是占到sofa了了了~~~

fightfor700

2:11 2:05
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越障：8:51

miffyhui

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越障：
Traditional theory assumes that human behavior drives by theself-interest. But this assumption was attacked by the empirical finding thatpeople often make sacrifices to improve other people’ welfare.
Reason: people may feel guilt when they pursue self-interestand when they consider other people’s welfare, they cannot reap theself-interest completely.----the conflict when trade-off between self andothers.
So, if imposing a selfish option, people may feel happywithout feeling selfish.
People may not feel selfish when they choose between twovices but when they select an option of self-interest over a prosocial option,they are likely to feel selfish.
An imposed clarity cannot lead to results.
Present studies: Study 1: imposing a selfish option increases happiness. Study 2: select betweenselfish option and prosocial option decrease the happiness. Study 3: manipulatingthe mechanism driving our results.

SuperR

最爱经管有木有！！！

puffywhite

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01''32(- -这篇只懂了个70%)
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obstacle: 06''34
the tranditional finding that those who can achieve their self-pursit will feel more happier might be wrong as some current experiments show. when facing with different choices, people might incline to choose prosocial one rather than self-interested one even if their may suffer some loss.
experiment points out that people will feel guilt and unease if they eatablish their well-being over others' loss.but when the self-agency were removed, people tended more to perfer the self-interested choices.
meanwhile, some experiments point out that too many choices will lead to a conflict, deferring the decision and decreasing the satisfation. when facing with alternative bad choices or specified comparisions, people will feel even worse.
at last, survey points out that when self- interest is not consitent with the charity, people will feel more satified when choosing the self-interested one.

kathy0911

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7:59---I heart psych
1. The traditional theory: ppl follow their self-interested pursuits because they are directly linked with self and happiness. However this theory has been challenged constantly by other findings.
2. Focusing only on one's self-interest means sacrificing other's needs. It is the trade-off between self and others that creates the conflict. Most of the time, ppl feel guilty when choosing his/her well-being over other ppl's.
3. The author propose that by imposing another selfish option can help eliminating the negative feeling when trading off one's well-being with other's.
4. More choice does not necessarily means better well-being because ppl experience choice conflict when trying to get rid of some options.
5. Choice hurts well-being when ppl needs to make harmful comparisons between options.
6. Neither self-interested nor prosocial behavior is undesirable. But when two options are put together, the self-interested one becomes undesirable. It is the opposite when self-interested choice is imposed.
7. What if charity is imposed? ppl may not feel as good since they want to feel that they personally made that choice.
8. More studies are done to help teste the author propose

谢谢Spencer的美文！

rhesusmonkey

2'22''
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GMATER800

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angela不怕孤单

thanks~spencerX
speed
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obstacle
14:52
1/topic human behaviour is driven by self-interested pursuits.
2/benefiting self leads to happiness;
   self-interest and self-sacrific;
   self-interest is complicated
3/sacrific other people will not lead to happiness.
....
感觉信息量太大了，虽然有小标题，还是没有看懂框架。最后的review让我稍稍清晰了一点。大概就是三项研究成果，并解释支持了每项成果。