背景介绍：
阿尔弗雷德·马歇尔的《经济学原理》开宗明义认为，经济学是一门研究人类日常生活的学问。这本 19 世纪的教科书创造了经济学家至今仍在使用的通用语言。马歇尔认为，经济学研究的是普通问题，譬如：我如何支付账单？我靠什么谋生？如果我生病了怎么办？我还能退休吗？芝加哥大学经济学家史蒂芬·莱维特则不这么认为，在他看来，经济学是一门科学，它拥有获得答案的绝佳工具，但却严重缺乏有趣的问题。莱维特和斯蒂芬·杜伯纳后来一起写了《魔鬼经济学》。《魔鬼经济学》通过一系列小故事，譬如作弊的相扑选手、挣最低工资的毒贩以及白人至上主义组织三K党为主角等，探讨了人们如何对激励机制做出反应，以及如何利用新颖的数据来揭示真正驱动人们行为的因素。
Why “Freakonomics” failed to transform economics
为何“魔鬼经济学”没能魔改经济学
The approach was fun, but has fallen out of favour
这个方法有趣，但已失宠
“Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life.” So starts Alfred Marshall’s “Principles of Economics”, a 19th-century textbook that helped create the common language economists still use today.
“经济学是一门研究人类一般生活事务的学问。”阿尔弗雷德·马歇尔的《经济学原理》一书的开篇如此写道。这本19世纪的教科书帮助创造了经济学家至今仍在使用的通用语言。
Marshall’s contention that economics studies the “ordinary” was not a dig, but a statement of intent. The discipline was to take seriously some of the most urgent questions in human life. How do I pay my bills? What do I do for a living? What happens if I get sick? Will I ever be able to retire?
马歇尔认为经济学研究的是“一般”事务，这并非嘲讽，而是陈述意图。这门学科就是要严肃地研究人类生活中一些最紧迫的问题。我怎么支付生活开销？我靠什么谋生？我生病了怎么办？我有退休那一天吗？
In 2003 the New York Times published a profile of Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, in which he expressed a very different perspective: “In Levitt’s view,” the article read, “economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions.”
2003年，《纽约时报》发表了一篇对芝加哥大学的经济学家史蒂芬·莱维特的人物专访，文中莱维特表达了截然不同的观点。文章写道：“在莱维特看来，经济学这门科学有的是绝妙工具来找出答案，但有趣的问题却严重不足。"
Mr Levitt and the article’s author, Stephen Dubner, would go on to write “Freakonomics” together. In their book there was little about the ordinary business of life.
莱维特和该文章作者斯蒂芬·杜伯纳后来共同撰写了《魔鬼经济学》。他们在书中几乎完全不谈一般生活事务。
Through vignettes featuring cheating sumo wrestlers, minimum-wage-earning crack dealers and the Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacist organisation, the authors explored how people respond to incentives and how the use of novel data can uncover what is really driving their behaviour.
两位作者通过各种小故事，例如作弊的相扑选手、拿最低工资的毒品贩子以及信奉白人至上主义的三K党，探讨了人们如何对激励做出反应，以及如何利用新颖的数据来揭示他们行为背后的真正动机。
Freakonomics was a hit. It ranked just below Harry Potter in the bestseller lists. Much like Marvel comics, it spawned an expanded universe: New York Times columns, podcasts and sequels, as well as imitators and critics, determined to tear down its arguments.
《魔鬼经济学》风靡一时，在畅销书排行榜上仅次于《哈利波特》。就像漫威漫画一样，它也催生了一个扩展宇宙：有《纽约时报》专栏、播客和续作，还有各路模仿者和决心推翻其观点的批评家。
It was at the apex of a wave of books that promised a quirky—yet rigorous—analysis of things that the conventional wisdom had missed. On March 7th Mr Levitt, who for many people became the image of an economist, announced his retirement from academia. “It’s the wrong place for me to be,” he said.
它是一大波书籍的巅峰之作，这些书无不宣称要对传统观念所忽略的事物进行古怪但严谨的分析。3月7日，对许多人来说已成为经济学家形象代表的莱维特宣布从学术界退休。他说：“这不是我该待的地方。”
During his academic career, Mr Levitt wrote papers in applied microeconomics. He was, in his own self-effacing words, “a footnote to the ‘credibility revolution’”. This refers to the use of statistical tricks, such as instrumental-variable analysis, natural experiments and regression discontinuity, which are designed to tease out causal relationships from data.
在他的学术生涯里，莱维特写过一些应用微观经济学的论文。他本人谦逊地说，他只是“‘可信度革命'的一个脚注”。这指的是使用各种统计技巧一一如工具变量分析、自然实验和回归不连续性一一从数据中梳理出因果关系。
He popularised the techniques of economists including David Card, Guido Imbens and Joshua Angrist, who together won the economics Nobel prize in 2021. The idea was to exploit quirks in the data to simulate the randomness that actual scientists find in controlled experiments. Arbitrary start dates for school terms could, for instance, be employed to estimate the effect of an extra year of education on wages.
他普及了戴维·卡德、吉多·因本斯和约书亚·安格里斯特等经济学家的方法，这些人共同获得了2021年的诺贝尔经济学奖。其设想是发掘数据中的怪异现象来模拟科学家在对照实验中发现的随机性。例如，通过任意设定学期的开始日期，可以估算出多接受一年教育对工资的影响。
Where the Freakonomics approach differed was to apply these techniques to “the hidden side of everything”, as the book’s tagline put it. Mr Levitt’s work focused on crime, education and racial discrimination.
正如书的副标题所称，《魔鬼经济学》方法的不同之处在于，它将这些方法应用于“隐藏在表象之下的真实世界”。莱维特着重研究的是犯罪、教育和种族歧视。
The book’s most controversial chapter argued that America’s nationwide legalisation of abortion in 1973 had led to a fall in crime in the 1990s, because more unwanted babies were aborted before they could grow into delinquent teenagers. It was a classic of the clever-dick genre: an unflinching social scientist using data to come to a counterintuitive conclusion, and not shying away from offence.
书中最具争议的一章认为，1973年美国全国范围的堕胎合法化导致了1990年代犯罪率降低，因为有更多意外怀上的婴儿在成长为问题少年之前就被打掉了。这是典型的自诩高明文体：一个毫不畏缩的社会科学家利用数据得出一个违反直觉的结论，而且毫不忌讳冒犯他人。
It was, however, wrong. Later researchers found a coding error and pointed out that Mr Levitt had used the total number of arrests, which depends on the size of a population, and not the arrest rate, which does not. Others pointed out that the fall in homicide started among women. No-fault divorce, rather than legalised abortion, may have played a bigger role.
然而，这个结论是错的。后来研究人员发现了一个编号错误，指出莱维特引用的是取决于人口规模的总逮捕人数，而不是与人口规模无关的逮捕率。还有人指出，凶杀案的下降首先出现在女性群体中。无过错离婚一一而不是合法堕胎一一可能起到了更大作用。
重难点词汇：
tear down 拆除；拆毁；撕下；破坏；贬低
rigorous [ˈrɪɡərəs] adj. 严密的；缜密的；严格的
tease out 梳理；套取；巧妙获得
delinquent [dɪˈlɪŋkwənt] adj. 不良的；有犯罪倾向的 n. 违法者
