《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期
10 In Section IV we turn to the core new results of this paper –those regarding the role of choice for procrastination. The implications of choice for procrastination derive from the fact that the two aspects of a person‘s decision–which task to do and when to do it–are determined by two different criteria. A person plans to do the task which, taking into account her taste for immediate gratification, yields her the highest long-run net benefit. But whether the person ever completes that task depends on a comparison of its immediate cost to the benefits forgone by brief delay, and has very little to do with either its long-run benefit or the features of other tasks available. 11 The disjunction between these two criteria can produce some realistic behavior patterns inconsistent with conventional economic models. Our first finding is that providing a person with additional options can induce procrastination. If a new option has a sufficiently high long-run net benefit, the person will plan to do this new option rather than what she would have otherwise done; and if this new option has a sufficiently large cost relative to its immediate benefit, the person now procrastinates. For example, a person might immediately invest her savings in her company‘s 401(k) plan if there were a single investment option available, but might procrastinate if she must choose from a menu of different investment options because she constantly plans to figure out her best option in the near future. As Voltaire should have meant by the opening quote (but did not), a person may never complete a good task because of persistent but unfulfilled aspirations to do a better job.1
12 Our second main finding is that people may procrastinate more in pursuit of important goals than unimportant ones, or equivalently that increasing importance can exacerbate procrastination. The more important are a person‘s goals, the more ambitious are her plans. But the more ambitious are her plans–i.e., the higher is the effort she intends to incur–the more likely she is to procrastinate in executing those plans. We formalize this intuition by supposing that the long-run net benefit of all tasks are increased either by making the person more patient or by increasing per-period benefits, and identify classes of situations where a sufficiently large increase in the long-run benefits of all tasks induces a person to procrastinate.
13 Our model does not imply that people always procrastinate the most when pursuing their most important goals. Indeed, this possibility requires the combination of self-control problems, na?veté, and multiple options. If any of the three factors is missing, increasing the long-run net benefits of all tasks makes the person more likely to do a task. Even with all three factors present, increased importance can sometimes reduce procrastination. But our model shows that any 1
Although we, like many people, interpreted Voltaire to be referring to procrastination, a proper reading of Voltaire‘s (1878) statement in the original Italian makes clear that he meant something more akin to, ―If it ain‘t broke, don‘t fix it.‖
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presumption that people do not procrastinate on important tasks should be dismissed.1
14 We view it as neither a flaw nor a virtue that some of our results are paradoxical from the perspective of traditional economic analysis. Rather, we are interested in their economic relevance. In O‘Donoghue and Rabin (1999c), for instance, we argue with some calibration exercises that such issues can be an important determinant of whether and how a person invests her savings for retirement. Investing for retirement is perhaps the single most important economic decision that people (should) make. Our theoretical model matches what seems to be empirically true: in spite of–or perhaps because of–its immense importance, many people never get around to carefully planning their investment for retirement. We conclude the paper in Section V with a brief discussion of the results in that paper, as well as a discussion of how the intuitions in this paper might play out in extensions of our model, such as supposing that a person must allocate time among more than one task, or can improve upon what she has done in the past.
Background and Culture Notes
1. The reading material is the Introduction part of the paper entitled ―Choice and Procrastination‖ by Ted O‘Donoghue and Matthew Rabin. Ted O‘Donoghue and Matthew Rabin, ―Choice and Procrastination,‖ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 116, No. 1 (Feb., 2001), pp. 121-160.
2. The word procrastination refers to the act or habit of putting things off till later. It is a troubling problem that affects everyone. Estimates indicate that 80-95% of college students engage in procrastination. Researchers from a variety of different fields study this subject and repeat the theme that procrastination is dangerous. For example, in economics, researchers consider the relative lack of retirement savings behavior as a form of procrastination, in which many start preparing for their later years too late.
I. Read the following statements and decide whether they are true (T) or false (F). 1. The authors‘ model assumes that a procrastinator is unaware of her self-control problems. 2. Some economists argue that people have a time-inconsistent taste for immediate gratification,
which connotes procrastination.
3. The authors‘ model predicts that, faced with an attractive new option, people will probably
end up doing nothing at all.
4. According to the conventional assumption of time-consistent preferences, a person may
procrastinate more severely when pursuing important goals than unimportant ones.
5. The authors argue that many economists have made a methodological and empirical mistake
assuming that people are fully aware of their future self-control problems. 1
And as such, our model is another example where careful analysis does not bear out the commonplace conjecture that harmfully irrational behavior is eliminated by (―sufficiently‖) large stakes.
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6. According to Laibson, oftentimes a person values immediate gratification more than
long-term benefits.
7. A person‘s na?ve perception of his or her future self-control problems is a major factor
determining procrastination.
8. According to O‘Donoghue and Rabin, a mild self-control problem can cause a partially na?ve
person severe procrastination.
9. The authors argue that, when faced with multiple tasks, a person will choose the task that
brings about the highest long-term net benefit. The long-run benefit spurs the person on to complete the task.
10. One of the main findings in this paper is that: the more important are people‘s goals, the more
ambitious are their plans, the more they procrastinate. II. Read the article and sum up the major points.
1. The authors‘ argument: .
2. Recent research in economics conceives of people‘s self-control problems as
____________________________. These conventional models of procrastination assume that _________________________________________________.
3. The formal model of partial na?veté contributes to the literature on _____________________.
The analysis suggests that ____________________________________________________. 4. Research on self-control problems concentrates on two assumptions:
1) ____________________________________; 2) ____________________________________.
5. The purpose to formalize time-inconsistent preferences is to __________________________.
The study concludes that _______________________________________________, with the implication that ____________________________________________________..
6. According to the authors, one important determining factor of procrastination is
_______________________________________. 7. The two main findings of this paper are:
1) ________________________________________________________; 2) ________________________________________________________. Unit 8
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Anxiety among the American Middle Class
by Don Peck
1
Over time, both trade and technology have increased the number of low-cost substitutes for
American workers with only moderate cognitive or manual skills—people who perform routine tasks such as product assembly, process monitoring, record keeping, basic information brokering, simple software coding, and so on.______1______, and workers lacking higher education have suffered. 2
For the most part, these same forces have been a boon, so far, to Americans who have a good
education and exceptional creative talents or analytic skills._____2_____, sophisticated analysis, high-end deal-making, and many forms of design and artistic creation, rather than replacing that work. And global integration has meant wider markets for new American products and high-value services—and higher incomes for the people who create or provide them. 3
The return on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income
stratification. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy‘s evolution has produced a startling divergence._____3_____, and the gains have grown larger over time: from 2002 to 2007, out of every three dollars of national income growth, the top 1 percent of earners captured two. Nearly 2 million people started college in 2002—1,630 of them at Harvard—but among them only Mark Zuckerberg is worth more than $10 billion today; the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution, which are creating much bigger winners much faster than ever before—a result that‘s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings. 4
Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-market countries have sent more people
to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. ―It‘s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,‖ Autor told me. ―Among people with professional and even doctoral degrees, in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. _____4_____. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They‘ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don‘t have extremely specialized,
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hard-to-find skills.‖
5 College graduates may be losing some of their luster for reasons beyond technology and trade. As more Americans have gone to college, Autor notes, the quality of college education has become arguably more inconsistent, and the signaling value of a degree from a nonselective school has perhaps diminished. ____5_____. 6
Without doubt, it is vastly better to have a college degree than to lack one. ____6_____But
that‘s largely because the prospects facing people without a college degree have been flat or falling. Throughout the aught, incomes for college graduates barely budged. In a decade defined by setbacks, perhaps that should occasion a sort of wan celebration. ―College graduates aren‘t doing badly,‖ says Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the University of Wisconsin and an expert on inequality. But ―all the action in earnings is above the B.A. level.‖ 7
America‘s classes are separating and changing. A tiny elite continues to float up and away
from everyone else.____7____—unexceptional college graduates for whom the arrow of fortune points mostly sideways, and an upper tier of college graduates and postgraduates for whom it points progressively upward, but not spectacularly so. The professional middle class has grown anxious since the crash, and not without reason. Yet these anxieties should not distract us from a second, more important, cleavage in American society—the one between college graduates and everyone else. 8
If you live and work in the professional communities of Boston or Seattle or Washington,
D.C., it is easy to forget that nationwide, even among people ages 25 to 34, college graduates make up only about 30 percent of the population. And it is easy to forget that a family income of $113,000 in 2009 would have put you in the 80th income percentile nationally. The true center of American society has always been it nonprofessionals—high-school graduates who didn‘t go on to get a bachelor‘s degree make up 58 percent of the adult population. _____8_____.
Background and Culture Notes
1. Boston is the capital and largest city of Massachusetts, and one of the oldest cities in the United States. As the largest city in New England, Boston is considered the economic and cultural center of the region. With 30 colleges and universities within the city and surrounding area, Boston is a center of higher education and a center for medicine. It was also home to the first subway system in the United States.
2. Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States and the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country. In 2010, Seattle was the 6th busiest port in the United States, serving as a major gateway for trade with Asia. The city developed as a technology center in the 1980s. More recently, Seattle has become a hub for ―green‖ industry and a model for sustainable developments.
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