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John Petrie’s Collection of Benjamin Franklin Quotes

2010-12-07T20:02:00.001-08:00

Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.

When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.

Where liberty dwells, there is my country.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: This is my country.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.

He that lieth down with dogs shall rise up with fleas.

If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.

Never confuse motion with action.

This will be the best security for maintaining our liberties. A nation of well-informed men who have been taught to know and prize the rights which God has given them cannot be enslaved. It is in the religion of ignorance that tyranny begins.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.

Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.

To find out a girl’s faults, praise her to her girl friends.

Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the laws of God and nature.

Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.

Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

He’s a fool who cannot conceal his wisdom.

What is the use of a new-born child? (When asked the use of a new invention)

...a frequent recurrence to fundamental principles...is absolutely necessary to preserve the blessings of liberty and keep a government free.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people mroe easily and more frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

一伙好汉兔

2010-10-09T19:17:00.005-07:00

一伙好汉兔结伴打败了贪婪残暴的兔子王。领头的大兔子说，这次牺牲了很多兔子，胜利来之不易。以后我们要更团结。有什么操心的事就让我来处理。大家好好的过小日子吧。众好汉兔觉得大兔子贡献最大又这么主动，开心的接受了。

几年过去，兔子越来越多，事务繁杂，大兔子却年事渐高。它信不过外人，也不想麻烦当年的弟兄，只好分权给自己的亲戚兔。结果一闭眼，亲戚兔就开始胡闹，兔百姓很吃不消。在世的好汉兔私下合计，联手废了亲戚兔。

虽然心底里觉得这样的折腾有些对不起百姓兔，好汉兔们也有些得意--毕竟宝刀不老，百姓兔还感激咱呢。事后，他们推举了能力最强的一只好汉兔管事，能力次强的好汉兔当顾问。其余的好汉兔继续过小日子，养子孙兔。

又几年过去，好汉兔相继去世，镇得住局面的越来越少，事儿倒越来越复杂。就想了折中的办法，从非子孙兔里培养几个有才能肯听话的，再从子孙兔里培养几个不怕累爱管人的。这样，运气好，百姓兔满意。运气不好，就算出了问题，只要让后面几个看住前面几个，还是好汉兔说了算。

兔百姓里有一拨觉得这不是最好的办法，站出来说，别忙活了，都是喝过胡萝卜墨汁的兔子，就不能让我们自己照顾自己么。活着的好汉兔想你算老几。连宝刀都不亮，很快收拾了这一拨兔子。

没想到，这拨兔子里面有几个其实是好汉兔转世。没刀没枪，可是很能写字。写字不伤人，却象病毒能传播。活着的好汉兔和转世的好汉兔就这么干上--你写，我禁；你禁，我写。也不知道为什么，活着的好汉兔越来越心虚，干脆关了一只最能写的转世兔。心想，这下能清静了不？

之后发生的事，大家现在都知道了。

青年的选择---马克思中学毕业论文

2010-10-09T19:06:00.000-07:00

青年的选择---马克思中学毕业论文（17岁）

图片点击可在新窗口打开查看

1835年，马克思中学毕业论文（马克思是年17岁）
　自然本身给动物规定了它应该遵循的活动范围，动物也就安分地在这个范围内运动，不试图越出这个范韫，甚至不考虑有其他什么范围存在。神也给人指定了共同的目标——使人类和他自己趋于高尚，但是，神要人自己去寻找可以达到这个目标的手段；神让人在社会上选择一个最适合于他、最能使他和社会得到提高的地位。
　　能这样选择是人比其他生物远为优越的地方，但是这同时也是可能毁灭人的一生、破坏他的一切计划并使他陷于不幸的行为。因此，认真地考虑这种选择——这无疑是开始走上生活道路而又不愿拿自己最重要的事业去碰运气的青年的首要责任。
　　每个人眼前都有一个目标，这个目标至少他本人看来是伟大的，而且如果最深刻的信念，即内心深处的声音，认为这个目标是伟大的，那它实际上也是伟大的，因为神决不会使世人完全没有引导的人；神总是轻声而坚定地作启示。
但是，这声音很容易被淹没；我们认为是灵感的东西可能须臾而生，同样可能须臾而逝。也许，我们的幻想没油然而生，我们的感情激动起来，我们的眼前浮想联翩，我们狂热地追求我们以为是神本身给我们指出的目标；但是，我们梦寐以求的东西很快就使我们厌恶——于是我们的整个存在也就毁灭了。　
　　因此，我们应当认真考虑，所选择的职业是不是真正使我们受到鼓舞？我们的内心是不是同意？我们常受到的鼓舞是不是一种迷误？我们认为是神的召唤的东西是不是一种自欺？但是，不找出鼓舞的来源本身，我们怎么能认清这些呢？
　　伟大的东西是光辉的，光辉则引起虚荣心，而虚荣心容易经人以鼓舞或者一种我们觉得是鼓舞的东西；但是，被名利弄得鬼迷心窍的人，理智已经无法支配他，于是他一头栽进那不可抗拒的欲念驱使他去的地方；他已经不再自己选择他在社会上的地位，而听任偶然机会和幻想去决定它。
　　我们的使命决不是求得一个最足以炫耀的职业，因为它不是那种使我们长期从事而始终不会感到大厌倦、始终不会松劲、始终不会情绪低落的职业，相反，我们很快就会觉得，我们的愿望没有得到满足，我们的理想没有实现，我们就将怨天尤人。
　　但是，不只是虚荣心能免引起对这种或那种职业突然的热情。也许，我们自己也会用幻想把这种职业美化，把它美化成人生所能提供的至高无上的东西。我们没有仔细分析它，没有衡量它的全部份量，即它让我们承担的重大责任；我们只是从远处观察它，而从远处观察是靠不住的。
　　在这里，我们自己的理智不能给我们充当顾问，因为它既不是依靠经验，也不是依靠深入的观察，而是被感情欺骗，受幻想蒙蔽。然而，我们的目光应该投向哪里呢？在我们丧失理智的地方，谁来支持我们呢？
　　是我们的父母，他们走过了漫长的生活道路，饱尝了人世辛酸。——我们的心这样提醒我们。
　　如果我们通过冷静的研究，认清所选择的职业的全部份量，了解它的困难以后，我们仍然对它充满热情，我们仍然爱它，觉得自己适合它，那时我们就应该选择它，那时我们既不会受热情的欺骗，也不会仓促从事。
　　但是，我们并不总是能免选择我们自认为适合的职业；我们在社会上的关系，还在我们有能力对它们起决定性影响以前就已经在某种程度上开始确立了。
　　我们的体质常常威胁我们，可是任何人也不敢藐视它的权利。
　　诚然，我们能够超越体质的限制，但这么一来，我们也就垮得更快；在这种情况下，我们就是冒险把大厦建筑在松软的废墟上，我们的一生也就变成一场精神原则和肉体原则之间的不幸的斗争。但是，一个不能克服自身相互斗争的因素的人，又怎能抗拒生活的猛烈冲击，怎能安静地从事活动呢？然而只有从安静中才能产生出伟大壮丽的事业，安静是唯一生长出成熟果实的土壤。
　　尽管我们由于体质不适合我们的职业，不能持久地工作，而且工作起来也很少乐趣，但是，为了克尽职守而牺牲自己幸福的思想激励着我们不顾体弱去努力工作。如果我们选择了力不胜任的职业，那么我们决不能把它做好，我们很快就会自愧无能，并对自己说，我们是无用的人，是不能完成自己使命的社会成员。由此产生的必然结果就是妄自菲薄。还有比这更痛苦的感情吗？还有比这更难于靠外界的赐予来补尝的感情吗？妄自菲薄是一条毒蛇，它永远啮噬着我们的心灵，吮吸着其中滋润生命的血液，注入厌世和绝望的毒液。
　　如果我们错误地估计了自己的能力，以为能够胜任经过周密考虑而选定的职业，那么这种错误将使我们受到惩罚。即使不受到外界指责，我们也会感到比外界指责更为可怕的痛苦。
　　如果我们把这一切都考虑过了，如果我们生活的条件容许我们选择任何一种职业，那么我们就可以选择一种使我们最有尊严的职业；选择一种建立在我们深信其正确的思想上的职业；选择一种能给我们提供广阔场所来为人类进行活动、接近共同目标（对于这个目标来说，一切职业只不过是手段）即完美境地的职业。
尊严就是最能使人高尚起来、使他的活动和他的一切努力具有崇高品质的东西，就是使他无可非议、受到众人钦佩并高出于众人之上的东西。
　　但是，能给人以尊严的只有这样的职业，在从事这种职业时我们不是作为奴隶般的工具，而是在自己的领域内独立地进行创造；这种职业不需要有不体面的行动（哪怕只是表面上不体面的行动），甚至最优秀的人物也会怀着崇高的自豪感去从事它。最合乎这些要求的职业，并不一定是最高的职业，但总是最可取的职业。
　　但是，正如有失尊严的职业会贬低我们一样，那种建立在我们后来认为是错误的思想上的职业也一定使我们感到压抑。
　　这里，我们除了自我欺骗，别无解救办法，而以自我欺骗来解救又是多么糟糕！
　　那些主要不是干预生活本身，而是从事抽象真理的研究的职业，对于还没有坚定的原则和牢固、不可动摇的信念的青年是最危险的。同时，如果这些职业在我们心里深深地扎下了根，如果我们能够为它们的支配思想牺牲生命、竭尽全力，这些职业看来似乎还是最高尚的。
　　这些职业能够使才能适合的人幸福，但也必定使那些不经考虑、凭一时冲动就仓促从事的人毁灭。
　　相反，重视作为我们职业的基础的思想，会使我们在社会上占有较高的地位，提高我们本身的尊严，使我们的行为不可动摇。
　　一个选择了自己所珍视的职业的人，一想到他可能不称职时就会战战兢兢——这种人单是因为他在社会上所居地位是高尚的，他也就会使自己的行为保待高尚。
　　在选择职业时，我们应该遵循的主要指针是人类的幸福和我们自身的完美。不应认为，这两种利益是敌对的，互相冲突的，一种利益必须消灭另一种的；人类的天性本来就是这样的：人们只有为同时代人的完美、为他们的幸福而工作，才能使自己也达到完美。
　　如果一个人只为自己劳动，他也许能够成为著名学者、大哲人、卓越诗人，然而他永远不能成为完美无疵的伟大人物。历史承认那些为共同目标劳动因而自己变得高尚的人是伟大人物；经验赞美那些为大多数人带来幸福的人是最幸福的人；宗教本身也教诲我们，人人敬仰的理想人物，就曾为人类牺牲了自己——有谁敢否定这类教诲呢？
　　如果我们选择了最能为人类福利而劳动的职业，那么，重担就不能把我们压倒，因为这是为大家而献身；那时我们所感到的就不是可怜的、有限的、自私的乐趣，我们的幸福将属于千百万人，我们的事业将默默地、但是永恒发挥作用地存在下去，而面对我们的骨灰，高尚的人们将洒下热泪。

我们为什么要有“中国梦”？

2010-08-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

易中天在北大：我们为什么要有“中国梦”？

一切已死先辈们的传统，会像梦魔一样纠缠着活人的头脑。

──卡尔・马克思

刚刚学会与各国平等交往的“天朝国民”，却在屈辱中开始了“中国梦”。

有个问题想先问一下：世界上，真有“中国梦”吗？如果有，什么时候开始的？

恐怕得在鸦片战争之后。因为之前国人的心目中，只有“天下”，没有“中国”。外国人眼里的“中国”，在中国人这里是“天朝”；中国人说的“中国”，则或者指天下的地理中心，比如“夏者，中国之人也”（许慎《说文解字》）；或者指天朝的政治中心，比如“刘备与（孙）权并力，共拒中国”（陈寿《三国志・鲁肃传》裴松之按语）。但无论哪一种，都跟我们现在讲的“中国”，不一个意思。

显然，现代意义上的“中国”，是国际社会之一员；传统意义上的“天下”，却是整个世界。天下的产权是天的，治权则属于天子。天子是“天之元子”，奉天承运，因天的授权而统治天下臣民。这个治权是遍及海内的，叫“普天之下，莫非王土；率土之滨，莫非王臣”。因此，东方和西方，在理论上都是天子的“王土”；华人和洋人，在理论上也都是天子的“王臣”。既然如此，又哪有什么中国和外国？也只有中央与地方、天朝与番邦。

番邦，就是“蛮夷之邦”。它的性质属于“邦国”，地位低于“天朝”。所以，其使节来华，见了天朝的皇帝，必须行三跪九叩之礼。皇帝说话的口气，也像对待自己的臣僚和子民。比如1793年乾隆皇帝给英国国王的文书，便开口就是“咨尔国王，远在重洋”，以及“具见尔国恭顺之诚，深为嘉许”云云。这些话在今天看来，真是哪跟哪呀！

但这就是鸦片战争之前中国人的“世界观”和“中国观”。甚至就在1840年，道光皇帝有关中英争端的上谕中，使用的仍然是“剿”、“抚”之类的字眼，就像当年大宋王朝之对待宋江、方腊。可是这种观念，1840 年以后，就被西方列强的炮火炸得粉碎。《南京条约》规定，以后大清与别国公文来往，应该称为“照会”。意思很清楚，国与国是平等的，别老用居高临下的口气说话，也别老是把我们叫做“蛮夷”和“鬼子”。这真是一件让人哭笑不得的事：我们中国人，竟然是通过签订不平等条约，学会跟世界各国平等交往的。

然而接下来的却是屈辱。割地赔款，丧权辱国，这样的事不能尽数。但有两件，却不能不说，一是甲午战争（1895），二是巴黎和会（1919）。前者导致了戊戌变法（1898），后者导致了五四运动（1919）。比较而言，巴黎和会给国人的心理刺激，似乎又更大。因为被“蕞尔岛夷”（日本）打败，虽然耻辱，却毕竟是败了，不能不含着眼泪签那《马关条约》。可这回我们也是“战胜国”呀！当时，与会国的代表名额分为三个等级：一等国五名，二等国三名，三等国两名。中国政府几乎想都没想，就派出了五人组成的代表团。结果到了会上，才知道我们是“三等国”，只能派两名代表，连后来争到“二等国”待遇的巴西、比利时和塞尔维亚都不如，更不用说还可能要陪上一个山东。这真是奇耻大辱！

没办法，弱国无外交。惟一的出路，就是自强。

中国梦，开始了。

� 只有政治文明、道德高尚，才配称为“强国”，也才能成为“强国”。

鸦片战争以后的“中国梦”，主旋律无疑是“强国”。这几乎全民的共识。问题是，何为“强大的国家”，我们又怎样才能“强大”？

值得庆幸的是，国人对此有不俗的认识。据秦晖教授《晚清儒者的“引西救儒”》（2010年6月17日《南方周末》），晚清时期，中国知识界那些明白人，比如徐继畲、郭嵩焘、薛福成、谭嗣同等，都几乎一致认为，所谓“强国”，决不仅仅就是船坚炮利、财大气粗，更重要的，还是政治文明、道德高尚。因为只有政治文明、道德高尚，才配称为“强国”；也只有政治文明、道德高尚，才能成为“强国”。

这无疑堪称“远见卓识”。由于这样的见识，“中国梦”一开始就有了很高的起点。

剩下的问题是“怎么办”。

晚清这些有识之士的主张，是“像西方人那样实现儒家的政治理想”。他们认为，世界上最先进、最文明的，以前是中国，现在却是欧美。为什么？因为老祖宗创造的先进文化和先进理念，在秦汉以后被“败家子”们丢得精光，却在西方开花结果，大放异彩。比如虚君共和，不就是“民贵君轻”吗？竞选制度，不就是“选贤与（举）能”吗？国会议员，不就是“为民请命”的乡绅吗？美国总统华盛顿，不就是“禅让天下”的尧舜吗？所以说，“三代”（夏商周）已经不在中国，跑到欧美去了（仍请参看前引秦晖文）。

哈，看起来是很像，但经不起推敲。比如郭嵩焘说，英国因为“仁爱兼至”，所以“环海归心”，就未免“走火入魔”。谁不知道，英国那些海外殖民地，是他们抢来的、霸占的？又比如，他们说西方人彬彬有礼，西方社会井然有序，都是“礼乐教化”的结果，也是“自作多情”。西方人，什么时候学过周公那一套？再说了，所谓“讲礼让”，人家是“女士优先”，咱们是“领导先走”，一样吗？

何况还有不能“对号入座”的。三权分立，相当于什么呢？三省六部？政党轮替，相当于什么呢？改朝换代？还有宪法，又相当于什么呢？总不能说“四书五经”就是。至于参众两院，更是无可类比。

当然，我们不能苛求古人。相反，这些人在当时能有那样的见解，已经非常了不起。他们是中国梦最早的践行者。我们在致敬的时候，请不要忘记他们！

但同时，我们也不能不反思。我们要问，为什么这些先行者们，在开始自己“中国梦”的时候，首先想到的就是三皇五帝、汤武孔孟？也只有一个原因──传统的力量。马克思早就说过，任何人都不能随心所欲地创造自己的历史。一切已死先辈们的传统，会像梦魔一样纠缠着活人的头脑（《路易・波拿巴的雾月十八日》），晚清的先贤们自然也不例外。

实际上，鸦片战争以后的中国梦，是有“底色”的。这个“底色”，就是我们的文化传统。因此，我们还要来回顾一下，此前的中国人，又曾经有过怎样的梦想。

�大同、小康、治世，是传统社会中国人的“天下梦”。

鸦片战争以前，中国人做的是“天下梦”。

天下梦与中国梦，有什么不同？中国梦，想的是“中国怎么样”；天下梦，想的是“人类怎么样”。前者是关于“国家”的愿景，后者是关于“社会”的理想。

那么，怎样的社会最理想？首先是“大同”，其次是“小康”。这两个概念，是儒家的经典《礼记》提出来的，在《礼运》篇。两者之间的根本区别，在于 “大同”是“天下为公”，“小康”是“天下为家”。表现为权力的交接，政权的交替，前者是“禅让”，后者是“世袭”。显然，大同比小康好。所以，晚清很多人认为，美国式的共和联邦制，比君主立宪制好。君宪制当中，英国式的“虚君立宪”，又比日本式的“实君立宪”好。

当然，这不是统治者的想法。他们最希望的，是一成不变。万不得已，才学日本，至少得有个“万世一系”。总之，晚清时期，是统治者选择实君，维新派喜欢虚君，革命党主张共和。因为只有共和，才能真正走向“天下为公”的“大同社会”。

然而，历史上的所谓“大同之世”，毕竟已经一去不复返了。取而代之的，是“小康”。小康的特点是“家天下”。这当然比“公天下”差，但也还对付。至少在后世儒家眼里，比秦汉到明清好。因为小康时代实行的，是周公创立的制度，包括宗法制、封建制和礼乐制。宗法制是社会制度，封建制是政治制度，礼乐制是文化制度。社会、政治、文化，三位一体。一以贯之的，则是这样一种政治思想：以人为本，以德治国，以礼维持秩序，以乐保证和谐。这同样为儒家所推崇。不妨说，在儒家眼里，大同之世是无忧无虑，小康之世是有德有序。所以孔子说，实在不行，能回到东周，也不错（《论语・阳货》）。

遗憾的是，就连这个理想，也都成为泡影。中国社会不可逆转地进入了帝国时代。如果说“大同之世”实行的是“帝道”，“小康之世”实行的是“王道”，那么帝国时代实行的就是“霸道”。霸道，就是中央集权，国家专政，君主独裁。这是法家的那一套，即谭嗣同他们恨之入骨的“秦政”和“荀学”（《仁学》之二十九）。这时，“无忧无虑” 是不可能了，“有德有序”也指望不上。能过上安生日子，就很不错。

因此帝国时代中国人想要的，是“治世”，也就是风调雨顺、政通人和、国泰民安。谁能帮我们实现这理想？除了老天爷，就是圣君、清官、侠客。最好能有好皇帝，其次有清官也不错。两个都没有，就只能寄希望于侠客，路见不平，拔刀相助。如果连侠客也找不到，便只能去读武侠小说。这其实是越来越没有指望，难怪谭嗣同他们要痛心疾首了。

这就是传统社会中国人的天下梦：大同、小康、治世。它们寄托了理想，也表现出无奈。因为谁看得出来，这三个梦，是每下愈况，一蟹不如一蟹。但这没办法。理想不能实现，就只好打折扣。要想“不折不扣”，就只能从这“梦境”中走出来。

于是，1949年以后，中国人的梦，就有了新的版本。

� 人民公社的梦想在“大同”，原则和构架却来自墨家。

新版本的主题，仍然是“大同”。

实际上，从国民党到共产党，从孙中山到毛泽东，“天下为公”四个字，何曾一日忘怀？只不过，有一个如何实现的问题，也有一个何时实现的问题。1949年后，中国大陆进入和平而统一的时代，毛泽东就觉得应该“只争朝夕”地做起来了。

于是便有了“人民公社”。这个“新生事物”，即便不是按照“大同”模式打造的，恐怕也有它挥之不去的影子。生产资料归集体所有，这是财富“不必藏于己” （此处及以下引文均见《礼记・礼运》）；社员参加集体生产，这是劳动“不必为己”；办食堂、学校、敬老院、幼儿园，定“五保户”，这是“老有所终，壮有所用，幼有所长，鳏寡孤独废疾者皆有所养”。社员过着集体生活，自然“不独亲其亲，不独子其子”。村与村、社与社之间，当然都“讲信修睦”。至于路不拾遗，夜不闭户，更是题中应有之意。就连“选贤与（举）能”，也部分地做到了，尽管只限于选生产队长。

人民公社的样板，是大寨。在当时的文艺作品中，大寨简直就是“人间天堂”：牛羊胖乎乎，新房齐崭崭；炕上花被窝，囤里粮冒尖。农民能过上这样的日子，当然 “梦里也笑声甜”。只不过我有点纳闷：这种“银光闪闪喜气多”的景象，跟改革开放以后要建设的“社会主义新农村”，有什么两样呢？这里体现的，究竟是毛泽东思想，还是邓小平理论？也许，小康与大同，原本就息息相通、一脉相承吧！

因此我猜想，当毛泽东吟诵着“喜看稻菽千重浪，遍地英雄下夕烟”，或者大笔一挥写下“人民公社好”时，他眼前浮现的，便正是“大同之世”的美好图景。

然而我们不能说，毛泽东心目中的“大同”，就是儒家那个“理想社会”。人民公社的原则和构架，恐怕更多地来自墨家。墨家也是向往“大同之世”的。在墨家眼里，那是一个“兼爱”而“尚同”的社会。它的分配原则，是自食其力，按劳取酬；它的人事制度，是各尽所能，机会均等；它的人际关系，是相亲相爱，互利互助。这，就是“兼爱”。至于组织纪律，则是个人服从团体，下级服从上级。“上之所是，必亦是之；上之所非，必亦非之”（《墨子・尚同》）。巨子（领袖）一声令下，墨者（门徒）“赴火蹈刀，死不旋踵”（《淮南子・泰族训》）。这，就是“尚同”。所有这些，不都是“公社的原则”吗？

甚至就连自力更生，艰苦奋斗，干部参加劳动，知识分子与工农群众相结合等等，在墨家那里都有。墨子自己，粗茶淡饭，草鞋布衣，劳作不止。他的学生，更是晴天一身汗，雨天一身泥，手脚长满老茧，肌肉鼓鼓，面黑如炭，活像当年上山下乡的知识青年。所以我曾半开玩笑地说，墨子恐怕是个“社会主义者”（拙著《我山之石》，广西师大出版社）。至少，他比孔孟、老庄、商韩，都更“草根”。他的思想，也更贴近下层人民和弱势群体。何况秦汉以后，墨家还变成了“地下党”。农民出身又领导革命的毛泽东，与之产生共鸣，或者心照不宣，一点都不奇怪。

不是东风压倒西风，便是西风压倒东风。

法家那一套，既适用于 “强国”，又适用于“阶级斗争”。

奇怪的是毛泽东自己并不这么说。他的说法，是“马克思加秦始皇”。

所谓“马克思加秦始皇”，就是“社会主义加法家路线”。这就又与晚清诸人迥异。他们的主张，可是“孔夫子加华盛顿”，即“资本主义加儒家理想”。更重要的是，他们对法家，对秦始皇，恨得咬牙切齿。谭嗣同就说：“二千年来之政，秦政也，皆大盗也；二千年来之学，荀学也，皆乡愿也。”（《仁学》之二十九）他还认为，就是这一套，害得我们在世界各国眼里，变成了“蛮夷”。长此以往，还会变成猿猴、猪狗、蛤蟆、河蚌（《仁学》之三十五）。法家和秦政，怎么要得？

谭嗣同的这些话，毛泽东不会不知道。何况先秦诸子中，法家可是最现实、最功利、最没有梦想的。社会主义也好，人民公社也好，与法家何干呢？

是不相干。但“强国梦”，与法家相干。

法家是主张强国的，而且能够强国。当年秦国的崛起，就是证明。实际上法家的那一套，确实管用。它对内有利于巩固政权，对外有利于国际竞争。这就很能打动毛泽东。因为毛泽东的“中国梦”，包含着两个内容──天下为公的“大同梦”，富国强兵的“强国梦”。前者考虑的是社会的命运，后者考虑的是国家的前途。这两个问题，都是他要考虑的。他不是狭隘的民族主义者，不会只考虑“中国怎么样”。他也不是空想的社会主义者，因此又必须考虑“中国怎么样”。中国必须怎么样？强大。谁能让我们强大？儒家能吗？墨家能吗？道家能吗？不能。谁能？法家。

何况法家的哲学，还是“斗争的哲学”。先秦诸子，墨家讲逻辑，其他三家讲矛盾。但儒家讲矛盾的统一，道家讲矛盾的转化。讲斗争的，就是法家。而且，法家讲的斗争，还是水火不容、你死我活的，不是东风压倒西风，便是西风压倒东风。这很符合毛泽东的思想，也很对他的脾气。他，可是认为与天、与地、与人斗，“其乐无穷”的。

更重要的是，这种哲学能够为“阶级斗争”的纲领服务。马克思和恩格斯在《共产党宣言》里说，一切社会的历史，都是阶级斗争的历史。毛泽东认为，这是“唯物史观”的精髓，也是颠扑不破的“真理”。既然如此，无论强国，还是大同，都必须搞阶级斗争。“马克思”和“秦始皇”，就这样走到了一起。

毛泽东的这些想法，在所谓“史无前例的文化大革命”中，得到了淋漓尽致的表现。结果，则如众所周知，强国梦没有实现，国民经济反而到了崩溃的边缘；大同梦也没有实现，反倒是“党、国家和人民遭到建国以来最严重的挫折和损失”（中共中央《关于建国以来党的若干历史问题的决议》）。这可真是南其辕而北其辙。

人民公社破产了，文化革命失败了。留下的，是一堆问题。虽然我们“不以成败论英雄”，但其中的教训，难道不该反思吗？

一个梦想，各自表述

没有个人，没有个人的权利和自由，就没有共产主义。

上看，人民公社和文化革命，是两码事。但内在的联系，却很清楚。人民公社的特点，是“一大二公”。文化革命的口号之一，是“破私立公”。一大二公，破私立公，天下为公，一以贯之的，不就是一个“公”字吗？

当然也有差别。传统意义上的“天下为公”，主要讲的是权力问题，即“政权乃天下之公器”。毛泽东，却似乎还要把财产和心灵都“归公”，都“公有化”。这才有了城里的“公私合营”，乡下的“集体所有”；也才有了“文革”当中的斗私批修，破私立公，灵魂深处闹革命，狠斗私字一闪念。

然而马恩却是重视个人权利和个体自由的。在《德意志意识形态》中，马克思和恩格斯宣称，任何人类历史的第一前提，就是“有生命的个人的存在”。在《共产党宣言》里，他们更是把共产主义社会界定为一个“联合体”。在那里，每个人的自由发展，是一切人自由发展的条件。也就是说，没有个人，没有个人的权利和自由，就没有共产主义。

可见，取消个人权利，限制个体自由，决非马克思主义，只能是法家的主张。法家甚至认为，一个国家，除了君主和官吏，只能允许两种人存在，这就是农民和战士。因为农民可以种田，战士可以打仗。显然，在他们眼里，人民不是人，是工具和武器。工具和武器，又要什么权利，讲什么自由？

不讲的，儒家也不在意。据金观涛先生检索，民主、共和这些概念，很早就进入了中国；而个人、个性这些概念，则要到五四以后才为国人知晓（请参看秦晖《晚清儒者的“引西救儒”》）。显然，这与我们的文化传统有关。毕竟，中国文化是以“群体意识”为思想内核的（请参看邓晓芒、易中天《黄与蓝的交响》）。所以，儒墨两家的“大同”也好，法家的“强国”也好，都不讲个人权利和个体自由，法家甚至还要剥夺。

这就只能让人苦笑。前面说过，从晚清的有识之士，到后来的革命党人，都认为美国的制度最好，英国次之，日本又再次。因为美国的制度，最接近“大同”。但不知是否有人想过，美国，恰恰最“个人主义”。没有所谓“个人主义”，就没有《独立宣言》，也不会有《联邦宪法》，更不会有“美利坚合众国”。个人，是可以忽略的吗？

幸亏还有道家。

道家也讲“大同”，但与儒墨两家有别。儒家的“大同”，是领导海选、权力禅让的“尧舜之世”。墨家的“大同”，是村长领着大家干活，有意见逐级向上反映的 “人民公社”。道家的“大同”，却是不要领导，或形同虚设。人民自由自在，无拘无束，想干嘛干嘛，爱怎么过就怎么过。用庄子的话说，就是“上如标枝，民如野鹿”（《庄子・天地》）。看来，同样是“大同”，道家是“个人主义”的，墨家是“集体主义”的，儒家则是“折衷主义”的（既要统一意志，又要个人自由）。这可真是“一个梦想，各自表述”。实现“中国梦”，我们并非只有一种传统可以借鉴，可以继承。

只可惜，道家的这个传统，被我们有意无意地忽略了。

没有个人，就没有人民

能够选择，敢于选择，就是成功。

说到这里，忽然想起一个故事。上个世纪七十年代末，社会上流行喇叭裤。某大学校方担心自己的学生受到“精神污染”，便在醒目处贴出标语进行规劝：喇叭裤能吹响向四个现代化进军的号角吗？学生们则在标语下面贴了张纸条：请问什么裤吹得响？

这事发生在改革开放之初，听说的人也大多一笑了之。但十年以后，却有了别样的意义。因为改革开放头十年，胆子最大，步子最快，思想最解放，成就最显著，以至于全国人民争相学习仿效的地方，就是最先穿喇叭裤的地方。

我们知道，它的名字，叫广东。

作为“天高皇帝远”的南国省份，广东历来就是一个“自由散漫”的地方，也是一个“自作主张”的地方。“鸟语花香”的方言，“生搬硬造”的文字，“茹毛饮血” 的饮食习惯，“花里胡哨”的奇装异服，所有这些，都让“中国之人”把广东看作“化外之地”。然而，正是这“教化不及，政令难达”的地方，在中国近代史上却有着非凡的表现，一次又一次地“敢为天下先”。这一回，只不过再次表现出“食头箸”的精神而已。

这当然不能归功于喇叭裤，却应该归功于广东对个人权利和个体自由，给予了最大限度的尊重。直到现在，广东也仍然是舆论最新锐、环境最宽松的地方。这才有了深化改革、扩大开放的“广东经验”，有了关注民生、自由言说的“南方视角”。事实证明，尊重公民权利，保护个性自由，不是离“大同”更远，而是离 “大同”更近。君子和而不同。没有了个体的差异，就不可能有“和谐”，还说什么“大同”呢？

但这还不是最重要的。更重要的是，我们为什么要有“中国梦”，我们又为什么要“强国”？国家富强，是为了人民幸福，而人民是由无数个“有生命的个人”组成的。没有个人，就没有人民；没有个人的幸福，就没有人民的幸福。这就首先要让全体国民，都成为“人格独立，意志自由”的人，充分地享有个人权利和个体自由。如果像法家主张的那样，把这些“个人”都变成既没有“独立人格”，又没有“自由意志”的齿轮和螺丝钉，那么，组装起来的，将是一架没有人性的机器，一架杀人的机器，毁灭人类的机器。大同梦也好，强国梦也好，全都将背离自己的初衷，走向自己的反面。

实际上，改革开放带来的一个重大变化，就是公民获得了越来越多选择的自由。农民可以进城打工，工人可以下海经商，大学生可以自主择业，所有人都可以跳槽。当然，这些选择，未必都成功，也未必都主动。但能够选择，敢于选择，就是成功。

更何况，无论五四以后“我的婚姻我做主”，还是现在“我的职业我做主”，体现的都是这样一个原则：我是公民，是独立的个人。我的权利我主张，我的事情我做主！

这是何等伟大的解放啊！

其实不过“同一首歌”

社会进步、国家富强和个人幸福，是当代中国人的中国梦。

与此同时，中国梦，也发生了深刻的变化。

最根本的变化，是我们不但可以有国家的梦想，也可以有个人的梦想。比方说，自己的公司可以发展，自己的孩子可以出国，自己的工作可以调换，自己的户口可以迁移，甚至不过是自己的冤屈可以有地方申诉。但不管怎么说，我们不必“集体做梦”，也不必在同一个框架和范围内考虑“个人问题”。我们可以各想各的，甚至 “同床异梦”。

其实，从天下为公的“大同梦”，到民富国强的“强国梦”，再到自我实现的“幸福梦”，可以说是一种必然。因为社会、国家、个人，原本就是三位一体的。社会不稳定，个人难发展；国家不强大，个人没前途。但，社会的进步，国家的富强，又归根结底是为了每个人的幸福，为了每个人的全面自由发展。背离了这个目标，则一切均无意义。天下梦，中国梦，个人梦，岂非互为前提，彼此成全？

弄清楚了这一点，我们就不难明白，为什么经过了那么多的努力，付出了那么大的代价，大同梦和强国梦，都未能很好地实现，甚至适得其反？就因为过去这两个梦，缺少了重要的一环──每个中国公民的 “幸福梦”。我们总是想当然地认为，只要社会进步了，国家富强了，人民自然就幸福了，谁知事实并非如此。恰恰相反，只有把每个公民的幸福放在第一位，社会进步和国家富强，才真正成为可能。这是改革开放的实践让我们意识到的。

于是我们对“中国道路”，也就有了新的认识。

毫无疑问，中国必须走自己的路，也只能走自己的路。这就既要植根于我们的传统，又要跟得上世界的潮流。事实上，人类有共同的追求，也有共同的价值，比如真善美，比如生命权、自由权和追求幸福的权利。一旦认识这些价值，我们就会发现，曾经被“各自表述”的“天下梦”，其实不过“同一首歌”；而看似矛盾的儒墨道法，其实不难取长补短，为我所用。关键是，强国梦和幸福梦，融为一体了吗？

这就只能靠我们共同努力了。实际上，中国道路从来就不是一个理论问题，而是实践问题。实现“中国梦”，既要追求，又要反思，更要实践。只要有越来越多的践行者，只要有越来越多的人加入这个行列，我们就总有一天能够实现自己的梦想──社会进步、国家富强和个人幸福。

也许，这就是当代中国人的中国梦。

这个梦可以实现。

这个梦应该实现。

（2010年8月1日于北京大学百年纪念讲堂演讲录，为“中国梦论坛而作。）

[转贴]一位民营企业家的哭诉：税真是太高了

2010-08-04T11:25:00.000-07:00

官府横征暴敛是社会不稳定的一个主要根源。立此存照。

[转贴]一位民营企业家的哭诉：税真是太高了
文章提交者：捂猫加帖在猫眼看人【凯迪网络】 http://www.kdnet.net

天涯社区 2010-08-04 02:08:22

编者按：中国上半年全国税收总收入同比增30.8% 个税增22%，土地增值税增97.4%。一方面是中国税收全面飘红；一方面是民众高喊税收太重。

　　当西方国家普遍用降税来应对金融危机的时候，中国的税收却仍然保持疯狂增长的态势。国际友人瞠目结舌。中国普通公民感觉不深，那些民营企业家则在痛苦万分。

　　今天下午，一位来自四川的企业家对我说：“这日子是没法过了。哪里是税收，简直就是抢劫嘛”。

　　当我们从理论上愤怒批判高税收的时候，也需要有一些实际的例证。

　　1，税收暴涨，不敢不交

　　他的生意与地产出租有关。仅仅在这个领域，他就数出了近来上涨的几个税种：“预征所得税从2%提高到5%，土地增值税从从2%涨到了4%，出租收入税从7%涨到了13.68%……普遍上涨幅度在100%以上”。

　　我问：这是你们湖北地方政府胡闹吧?全国不可能这么乱的。

　　他说：各地不一样，普遍都涨了很高。

　　一些国家，任何税种的开征，以及税率高低，都是要经过议会反复讨论的。那么，上述税收经过议会了吗?他说：哪里有什么讨论，税务局一纸通知就涨上去了。并且，还不是从税务局通知之日开始调整征收，而是要往前追溯半年。

　　税务局有什么权力制订税率?明明是议会的职责嘛。

　　我连连感叹“匪夷所思”。这位仁兄说：还有更荒唐的呢——“我们这里个人所得税没有完成上级安排的指标，于是税务局就通知我们公司：必须分红，然后叫所得税。你说这叫什么事儿?哪有强迫人家分红的?后来税务局又说：不分红也行，但是税不能少;没钱交，就由公司代缴。结果，现在公司欠我们股东的分红，我们股东又欠公司的税款。”

　　如此明显的违法行为，为什么不抵制呢?这位仁兄说：税务局也承认他们是违法的，可是，若我们敢不交税，他们就来查账。住在你这里一个月，把你查个底朝天，你什么生意也做不成。大家一合计，�共蝗绻怨越凰叭狭恕！�

　　高层知道地方上这些非法收税的现象吗?这位仁兄说：据我了解，基本上都是得到国家税务局指示的。

　　2，公务员一年发多少个月的工资?

　　这些暴涨的税收用到哪里去了?

　　打开中国任何一个税务局的网站，上面必然写几成大字“取之于民，用之于民”。可实际上，我们的税收用在哪里了呢?除了用在奥运会、世博会、南水北调、三峡这些“集中力量办大事”上面，就是用在公务员开支上了。

　　关于公款吃喝、公款养车、公款旅游这3大毒瘤，我们已经说了太多次。今天我们说另外一件“小”事：公务员工资一年发几个月?

　　我说：一般是13个月吧。

　　那位仁兄说：你太落伍了。现在最高的发到一年20个月，普遍是一年发15个月的工资。

　　一年发这么多工资，总要有个理由吧?是的，是有理由。评上个“精神文明先进单位”，多发一个月工资;评上个“共创什么什么单位”又多发一个月……以前大家以为个市县的机关党委没什么油水，其实是不了解。现在机关很肥，因为掌握着各种评奖，所以很多部门都来请吃请喝、送礼。

　　3，肥的部门很自在，不肥的部门想办法开辟财路

　　那么，是各地、个部门都一样吗?他说：也不是。沿海地区公务员发得基数高、月份也高，内地就差一些。

　　部门间也有差异。比如，检察院系统发得就少。

　　大家一般把公检法当成一体，其实，公检法3个部门情况不同。法院比较肥，因为有诉讼深入，有罚没款收入的提成;检察院和公安就比较惨，因为没有收入渠道。所以呢，公安就设计了很多搞灰色收入的渠道。比如前几天是八一，各个卖消防器材的商店都接到通知，要求去“慰问消防官兵”，一个老板咬咬牙带了1万元去。结果，消防官兵说：“这么少?你拿回去吧”。那老板当时汗就下来了，他知道过几天自己的商店就会被检查出问题。可他也没办法，他的公司是个小公司，一共还不到10个员工，实在拿不出太多钱……

　　纪委则比较肥，因为可以扣押一些款项，可以把违法收入移交司法部门，把违纪部分留下来花……

　　听了这个老板的话，我问他：你是不是不敢去投诉、上访?他说那当然不敢了。听说我要把他的上述话语写到文章里，这位老板说：你写吧，我都恨死现在的税收了。不过，你千万别把我的名字写上去，我还想多活两年。

　　声明：本人以人格担保，以上所反映乱收税内容是我忠实记载。至于该朋友所述是否属实，请各位自己判断。我拒绝向任何人透露该朋友身份。

Lines of words

2010-06-18T13:30:00.000-07:00

Humans are all alike-no matter where they from, the way they hate each other is just the same.

买了把新吉他

2009-12-19T18:14:00.000-08:00

http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t0/MusicPlayer/31237731.html

update:要听音色来这儿

http://www.mitbbs.com/article_t/MusicPlayer/31238209.html

如果觉得自己有的地方和别人不一样的时候怎么想？

2009-12-19T18:10:00.001-08:00

看看红鼻子鲁道夫的故事

http://hubpages.com/hub/The_Origin_of_Rudolph_the_Red-Nosed_Reindeer

万里谈话

2009-09-08T20:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.popyard.com/cgi-mod/newspage.cgi?num=390830&r=0&v=0

风雨苍黄五十年--国庆夜独语李慎之

2009-09-08T19:28:00.001-07:00

一样是雄壮威武的阅兵，一样是欢呼万岁的群众，一样是高歌酣舞的文工团员，一样是声震大地的礼炮，一样是五彩缤纷的焰火……。一切都那么相似，唯一的差别是五十年前我是在观礼台上亲眼目睹，而五十年后我已只能从电视机的屏幕上感受盛况。我已经是年近大耄的老人而且身有废疾，虽说还能站能走，但是要走那么长的路，站那么长的时间去观礼，已经是无能为力了。

　　最大的不同是心情，是脑子里的思想，跟五十年前比，可以说是完全不一样了。

　　一九四九年我是二十六岁，临时受命去迎接据说是斯大林亲自派来祝贺中华人民共和国成立大典的、以法捷耶夫为首的苏联文化代表团（那是当时唯一的外国来的贺客）。在天津迎到了贵宾，住了一夜，十月一日上午才乘专车到北京，在前门车站迎接的居然有刘少奇、周恩来、宋庆龄这样一些中国最高级的领导人。到贵宾下榻的北京饭店参加完欢迎的宴会以后，我本来应该回机关了，不料已经戒严，只得随代表团到天安门观礼。代表团的团长好像是上城楼了。其馀的人就由我们陪著在临时搭的西观礼台就坐。这样就从三点钟一直呆到十点钟。虽然几乎长达一整天，却是并无丝毫倦意，整整七个小时都是在极端兴奋中度过的。我从来也没有见过这样的阅兵式，也没有见过这样的礼花，这样几十万热情的人群。我至今还清楚地记得毛主席宣布“中华人民共和国中央人民政府成立了”的声音，甚至他宣读的中央人民政府委员会名单中若干委员的名字的声音。我不断回忆从延安走到北京一路的经历，回忆自小从启蒙到觉悟到参加革命的一切。我竭力想把当年的种种感受用诗的语言表达出来。我也想起不久前政协会议通过的人民英雄纪念碑的铭文“……由此上溯到一千八百四十年以来……的人民英雄永垂不朽”而热泪盈眶。想到毛主席十一天以前在政协开幕辞里讲的“中国人民从此站起来了”这句话，惊叹他说话总是那么简洁，那么有力，那么响亮。但是，想来想去竟是“万感填胸艰一字”，只能自己脑子里不断重覆“今天的感情决不是用文字所能表达的”这样一句话。这种感情，到九点多钟广场上从匈牙利参加国际青年联欢节回来的中国青年代表团带领著北京各大学学生涌向金水桥，向天安门城楼上高呼“毛主席万岁”的时候达到顶点。

　　我曾经长期感到不能理解“毛主席万岁”这样的囗号，但是这个时候我似乎理解了，接受了，我自己也想跟著喊了。

　　我自以为决然无法用文字表达的感情结果还是有人表达出来了，他就是胡风。“十一”以后大约一个多月，《人民日报》就连续几期整版的篇幅发表了他歌颂人民共和国的长诗，虽然我已完全记不得它的内容，但是却清楚地记得它的题目：《时间开始了》，甚至记得这五个字的毛笔字的模样。

　　时间开始了！我怎么就想不出这样的文字来呢？时间开始了！我完全了解胡风的思想和心理。决不止胡风和我两个人，我肯定那天在天安门广场的每一个都是人同此心，心同此理；中国从此彻底告别过去，告别半殖民地与半封建的旧社会，告别落后、贫穷愚昧……而走上了一条全新的路。--民主、自由、平等、博爱的路，新民主主义的路，而后面还有更神圣的事业呢，我们要建设社会主义，以后还要建设毛主席说的“无比美妙的共产主义”。世界上只有苏联现在走在这条道路上，我们有苏联作样板，我们有毛主席的领导，我们一定可以不久就赶上苏联，与它并驾齐驱，然后再把全世界，--甚么美国、欧洲、印度、非洲……都带上由社会主义而共产主义的光明大道上去。

　　时间开始了！我历来是不怎么赞赏胡风的才气的，但是这一句话是神来之笔，怎么偏偏是他能想得出这样的绝妙好词来！

　　我绝对想像不到，而且可以肯定胡风也绝对想像不到的是，不到六年以后，他竟被毛主席御笔钦点为“国民党反革命小集团”的头子，从此锒铛入狱，沉冤莫白者垂四分之一世纪。一直到一九八八年，也就是胡风去世三年之后，这个案子才得到最后的昭雪平反。

　　我当时绝对想像不到的还有，八年以后，从来没有成份问题，也与历史问题无缘，而且一贯被评为“模范”的我自己，竟被毛主席亲自发动的反右派运动定为“资产阶级右派分子”。而“右派分子”，照毛主席的说法，“实际上就是反革命”，称右派分子不过稍示客气而已。

　　“革命吃掉自己的儿女”这条残酷的真理居然应验到了我身上！然而这还仅仅是开始。除了一九四九年的开国大典外，给我印象最深的是一九八九年的国庆。十年大庆，二十年大庆，我都在劳改中。三十年大庆，我记得没有举行。一九八九年的“十一”是四十周年大庆，那时距“六四”不过四个月，五月十九日下的戒严令还没有解除。北京的外国人几乎走光了。旅馆的空房率在百分九十以上。国庆那天白天是不敢有甚么活动了，晚上则我以犯严重错误之身还有幸应邀参加在天安门举行的联欢晚会。凡出席的人都先要到机关集中，然后再坐小巴去会场，一路上要穿过许多大街小巷。我已久不出门，那天晚上才发现北京竟成了一座鬼城，不但灯火黯然，而且行人绝迹。每隔几十米就有一小堆六七个人坐著打扑克。人家告诉我，这都是“公安”的便衣。只有进入劳动人民文化宫转到天安门广场，才可能看到耀眼的灯光和盛装的男男女女。在观礼台上倒是见到了许多老同志、老战友，大家也没有多少话可说，只是默默地观赏烟火，广场上的歌舞实际上是看不清的。四十年来，真是风狂雨暴、苍黄反覆，不知有几个人曾经预见到。

现在是又十年过去了。国家似乎又繁荣了。就为准备这次国庆，据说就花掉了起码是上千亿的钱，一切的一切都是踵事增华。希特勒死了，斯大林死了，世界上追求这种壮观的场面的国家应该是不多了。以我之陋，猜想也许只有金正日领导下的朝鲜才有这样的劲头。但是它国小民穷，因此这两天报上登的外国反应大概是可信的，那就是“国庆盛典、世界第一”。

　　观看庆典的群众肯定是高兴的，这样的大场面，人生那得几回逢？就是练队练了几个月，到正日子还要从凌晨站起一直站到中午的学生也一定是高兴的。小孩子、青年人最可贵的就是永远不败的兴头，不管多苦、多累、等得多久，多单调，只要一踏上天安门，就是一辈子的幸福了。

　　庆典的标语和彩车所展示的，电视上与报纸上所宣扬的，这五十年是从胜利走向胜利，整个历史是伟大、光荣、正确的历史。

　　许多最重要的事情都被掩盖了、埋藏了。五十年前，为了向天下宣告新中国建立后的大政方针。毛泽东写了著名的《论人民民主专政》。其中很重要的一段说：“‘你们独裁’。可爱的先生们，你们说对了，我们正是这样。”最初读到的时候，心头不免一震。但是马上就想，这不过是毛主席他老人家以其特有的宏大气魄表达马列主义的一条原理而已。一直到一九五六年苏共二十大以后，我才看到意大利社会党总书记南尼提出的公式：“一个阶级的专政必然导致一党专政，而一党专政必然导致个人专政（独裁）。”后若干年，再回想在西柏坡的时候，听到传达毛主席的指示“要敢于胜利”，“要打到北平去，打扫龙庭坐天下”；又再过若干年，听到毛主席说“我就是马克思加秦始皇”。这才憬悟到，其中有一个贯通的东西，有一个规律，那就是阿克顿勋爵所说的“权力导致腐败，而绝对的权力导致绝对的腐败”。而那是我在开国的时候不但理解不了，而且想像不到的。

　　在《论人民民主专政》明确宣告不能“施仁政”以后，政治运动一个接一个：土改、镇反、三反、五反、肃反……几乎没有间歇过。这些，按马列主义理论来讲，还算是针对阶级敌人的，但是一九五五年四月的潘汉年案和五月的胡风案（还未提至今没见人说得清楚的同年二月的高饶案）就已经反到自己的营垒里来了。偏偏就在一九五六年上半年发生了苏共二十大赫鲁晓夫揭发斯大林的事件，随之发生了柏林事件、波兹南事件，冲激波扩大，在下半年又发生了波兰、匈牙利的“反革命事件”。毛泽东觉得大势不好，又运筹帷幄，定计设局，“引蛇出洞”，在一九五七年上半年公开宣布“急风暴雨式的阶级斗争基本结束”，今后必须正确处理人民内部矛盾。在下半年就发动反右派运动，无端端地打从人民内部“ 挖”出了五十五万犯有“反党反社会主义”罪行的右派分子。然后，乘反右胜利的东风又在一九五八年发动了超英赶美的大跃进运动与提前进入共产主义的人民公社运动，三年之内饿死了几千万人，为大炼钢铁而剃光了不知多少个山头，中间又为给大跃进鼓劲而在一九五九年发动了“反右倾运动”，反到了开国元勋、建军元帅张闻天、彭德怀这样的人头上。以后又因为伤害的人实在太多，经济实在太困难，刘少奇、周恩来等人不得不出来为毛打圆场，弥补一下错误，搞了一个三年调整时期，元气才稍有恢复。偏偏毛又怕把柄被人抓住而反戈一击，从一九六六年开始了大革一切文化之命的文化大革命，时间长达十年，当时八亿人囗中受牵累而遭殃者竟上了亿。斗争的矛头越来越转向内部，从刘少奇直到林彪，最后，刀锋甚至直逼现在已被某些人讥为“愚忠”的周恩来的头上，只是因为周毛先后谢世，斗争才没有来得及展开。

　　因此到一九七六年为止，共和国几近三十年的历史都可以说是腥风血雨的历史。毛主席一生的转折点就是胜利、建国，而作为新中国的建国大纲和建国方略的《论人民民主专政》，从一九四零年开始就宣传了十年的“新民主主义”从来就没有实行过，毛主席后来说社会主义从建国就开始了。当然物质建设总是有进步的，几千年前埃及的法老还造了金字塔，秦始皇还筑了万里长城呢，何况人类的技术发展已到了二十世纪，中国的现代化也已经搞了一百多年。

　　由一九七九年开始的邓小平时代靠着前三十年在毛泽东的高压统治下积聚起来的反弹力总算把这种高压冲开了一个缺囗，冤假错案平反了，经济活跃了，生活提高了，私人言论也确实自由了许多……。但是每一个有公民权利觉悟的人，只能认为体制实质上并没有变化，意识形态并没有变化，还是毛的体制，还是毛的意识形态。中国人在被“解放”几十年以后不但历史上传统的精神奴役的创伤远未治愈，而且继续处在被奴役的状态中。

　　邓小平冲破毛独裁而确立开放改革的路线确实立下了历史性的功绩，然而他在十年前调动部队镇压学生却是无可饶恕的罪行，我还清楚地记得“六四”刚过，四十年来一直是中国的老朋友的（日本）井上靖发来电报说：“镇压自己的人民的政府是不能称为人民政府的；开枪射杀赤手空拳的学生的军队是不能称为人民军队的。 ”

遍及世界的谴责者还不能理解中国人民更深沉的痛苦：“六四”的坦克不但射杀了弄不清有多少老百姓的生命，同时还压杀了刚刚开始破土而出的中国人民觉悟的嫩芽。历来有“以天下为己任”的传统的中国知识分子从此几乎销声匿迹了。

　　在改革开放之初，邓小平曾表示过要改革政治体制的意图，也提出过一些很好的意见。但是“六四”以后，政治体制改革就完全停摆了。当局虽然有时也还说几句政治改革的话，如要实行“法治”之类，但是既然领导一切的党可以高踞在法律之上，司法又根本不能独立，这样的话也就无非是空话而已。这就是为甚么邓小平在一九九二年提出“社会主义也可以搞市场经济”以后，经济改革虽然大大红火了一阵又归于蹭蹬不进的原因，更是民气消沉、人心萎靡的原因。

　　反思文化大革命，由此上溯再反思三十年的极权专制，本来是中国脱胎换骨、弃旧图新的最重要的契机，也是权力者重建自己的统治的合法性（或曰正当性）的唯一基础，可是在“六四”以后，竟然中断了这一历史进程。十年来当然也出版了不少有关反右、反右倾、文化大革命……的书，然而大多成了遗闻秩事，缺乏理解的深度，谈不上全民的反省，更谈不上全民的启蒙。

　　难道是中国无人吗？不见得。这主要是领导上禁止人们知道，禁止人们思考造成的。当局一不开放档案，二不许进行研究。它的代价是全民失去记忆，全民失去理性思考的能力。在我们这一代是昨天的事，在今天的青年已懵然不晓，视为天方夜谭。掩盖历史，伪造历史，随著这次五十周年的大庆的到来而登峰造极。五十年间民族的大耻辱，大灾难统统不见了。这些大耻辱、大灾难的罪魁祸首明明是毛泽东，但是一切罪过却都轻轻地推到林彪和四人帮头上，江青在法庭上明明直认不讳她自己“是毛主席的一条狗”，几十年间月月讲，天天读的都是毛主席的书、毛主席的指示，现在要把他一床锦被遮过，遮得了吗？别忘了：“莫为无人轻一物，他时须虑石能言。”

　　积重难返，二十年前要纠正毛泽东的错误有何等困难？然而在这方面出过大力，立过大功，而且按照中国宪法曾担任过中国最高领导人的胡耀邦、赵紫阳，连名字都在五十年的历史上不见了，甚至也当过两年 “英明领导”的华国锋也不见了。历史剩下的只有谎言，然而，据说我们一切的一切都要遵从的原则是“实事求是”。

　　我们的导师恩格斯说：“一个民族想要登上科学的高峰……是一天也不能离开理论的研究的。”而我们居然生活在谎言中。没有理论的指导，我们又怎么能进行改革呢？

　　日本对中国发动了那么残酷的战争，犯了那么大的罪，然而拒不忤悔，还要赖帐，装得没事人一样，它理所当然地受到了中国人的谴责。照说中国人对自己折腾自己的错误应该更加自知忏悔了，却并不。难道东亚民族都没有忏悔的传统和品格吗？

　　这次国庆还有一个极度夸饰之处，就是各种宣传机器都开足马力夸张中国的国力，甚至夸张中国的国际影响。《尚书》上说：“满招损，谦受益。”在中国成为安全理事会常任理事国以后，中国的民族主义本来已经得到满足，在这个日益全球化的世界上，若不防止极端民族主义而放任它发展，实实在在是十分危险的。

　　今年不但是“十一”五十周年，也是“六四”十周年。为当局计，其实大可乘这个日子大赦天下，并且抚恤受难者，这样不但可以收拾全国人心，给中国的进一步改革建立新的基础，而且可以大大提高中国的国际声望，使中国的改革有更好的外部条件。然而他们竟视若无睹，轻轻放过。另外，就在今年春夏之交发生的*** 功聚众与打砸美国使馆两件事已足以证明党和政府的控制力大幅度下降。照中国传统的说法，“天之示警，亦已至矣”，然而我们的领导人却置国计民生于不顾，是事与愿违。

　　今年还是“五四”的八十周年，然而当年提出的科学和民主的囗号，还有“个性解放”的目标并没有达到。今年上半年发生的“***功事件”既说明了科学精神在中国还远未养成，也说明了民主也没有在中国出现。处理***功的手段用的完全是毛主义的老一套。我完全不信***功的那一套，但是我坚决反对对***功的镇压。我知道同我想法一样的人是很多的。然而在各种各样的舆论工具中都听不到他们的声音，仅这一点，就可以说明民主和法治在中国是怎么一回事了。

　　不论现实多么令人沮丧，我还是抱著十年前由千家驹老人提出的“和平演变（或曰和平进化）”的愿望。理由十分简单，不是和平演变，那就只有暴力演变或者暴力革命了。我这样的人已经参加过一次革命而且尝到胜利的滋味了。但是五十年的经历使我不得不认同三千年前伯夷、叔齐的话：“以暴易暴，未知其可”。全人类的历史都证明了人类的进步大多是在和平的改良中取得的，暴烈的战争或革命很少能带来真正的进步。

因此，世人称赞的邓小平的“渐进主义”，我是赞成的。甚至在他进行“六四”镇压，我在明确表示反对因而获罪之后，也还常常在心里为他辩解。他毕竟是老经验，也许有他的理由，“以中国人囗之众，素质之低，问题之多……万一乱起来，怎么办呢？”

　　但是，渐进的要义是要进不要停。改革如逆水行舟，不进则退。船到中流，在水中打转转是可怕的。

　　邓小平的遗训是“稳定压倒一切”。中国确确实实需要稳定，但是，套毛泽东的一句话：以坚持改革求稳定，则稳定存；以停滞倒退求稳定，则稳定亡。

　　从“六四”到现在已经十年过去了。江泽民入承大宝，正位核心也已经整整十年了。虽然他对中华人民共和国的建立并无尺寸之功，但是仅仅因为“人会老”是一条自然规律，他的龙庭已经坐稳了，中国已经没有可以向他挑战的力量了。如果他是一个“明白人”，现在是他可以以大手笔为中国，为历史，也为他自己建功立业的时候了。

　　既然邓小平能以三七开的评价对毛泽东明扬实批，给中国人大大出了一囗冤气，理顺了相当一部分政治经济关系，为中国的改革事业开了一个好头。为甚么你不能学他的榜样，在邓小平因为历史局限而不得不止步的地方重新起步呢？

　　既然邓小平在一九九二年可以完全违反他自定的四项基本原则而说“资本主义可以搞市场经济，社会主义也可以搞市场经济”，从而使中国经济打开了一个新局面；为甚么你不能说“资本主义可以搞议会民主，社会主义也可以搞议会民主”，给中国的政治改革打开一个新局面呢？

　　“六四”已经过去十年，邓小平也已死了两年。中国进一步改革的条件不但已经成熟，而且已经“烂熟”了。不实行民主，人民深恶痛绝的贪污腐化只能越反越多。

　　我注意到江泽民现在也喜欢引用孙中山的话：“世界潮流，浩浩荡荡，顺之者昌，逆之者亡。”问题在于要看清甚么是世界潮流；全球化是世界潮流，市场经济是世界潮流，民主政治是世界潮流，提高人权是世界潮流，顺之者昌，逆之者亡，邓小平已经走出了决定性的两步，再走一两步，改革的大业应该可以基本完成了。以后的路当然还长，但是那是又一代人的任务了，是全新的任务了。

　　不要害怕会失掉甚么。人民从来不会固守僵死的教条而只珍视切身的大利。只有大胆地改下去，你才能保住自己，而且保住邓小平、毛泽东和共产党。

　　有一个中国人自己立下的榜样，蒋经国就是在国民党□断政权六十年之后开放报禁与党禁的。十年过去了，国民党垮了吗？没有。当然，国民党要千秋万代是不可能的，变化是辩证法的铁则，对于一个革命政党来说，能完成和平交班，向宪政政府交班，就是大功告成，功成身退的理想结局了。毛泽东早在《论人民民主专政》里已经预告了共产党的灭亡。在全世界现代化的浪潮冲激下，中国要开放报禁、党禁是必然的，不可阻挡的。能够吃准火候，抓住时机，顺乎大势，与时推移，就是中国传统中所说的“圣之时者也”。

　　毛泽东的名言是“历史的发展是不以人的意志为转移的”。很快就要到二十一世纪了，在这世纪末的时候，在这月黑风高已有凉意的秋夜里，一个风烛残年的老人，守著孤灯，写下自己一生的欢乐与痛苦，希望与失望……最后写下一点对历史的卑微的祈求，会不会像五十年前胡风的《时间开始了》那样，最后归于空幻的梦想呢？

Better performance

2009-01-18T15:35:00.005-08:00

After I came to Buffalo, I use the university gym as much as possible. The performance has been constantly improving. Here is what I did recently:

01/02/09 - Swimming, 1100 yards in 40 minutes.

18/01/2009 - Swimming, 1000 yards (914 meters). It includes

a 500-yard front-crawl (12 minutes), a 250-yard breaststroke (7 minutes), a 250-yard front-crawl (7 minutes).

17/01/2009 - Running on Treadmills, 3.5 mile (5,632 meters), 32 minutes, 420+ calories

None of these are worth showing off. But I feel my health, strength, and endurance are much better than they were last year. I do not regret on spending so much time sweating instead of working!

Bronze and driftwood sculpture by HEATHER JANSCH

2009-01-11T09:34:00.007-08:00

I find them incredibly amazing! See more by following the link.

美国人民的创造力

2008-12-06T21:32:00.010-08:00

萧条之中，美国社区居民开会决定自发发行地方货币。这货币其实和购物券类似，变相增加货币供应，刺激消费需求。但是由于仅在本地通用，直接受益的是地方上的企业和商店，终归是帮助在本地就业的居民。可能有一举两得的效果。

当年在国内上班时，我也收了一堆购物卡。都是商户发行，企业购买后作福利发给员工。但没有多久就被政府叫停。因为当时中央在控制通货膨胀，而且很多企业有用用购物卡做工资逃税之嫌。

好事常会变坏事，坏事有时也变好事，这需要当事人头脑灵活，也需要国家政策灵活有弹性。美国的法律虽然繁杂，在这一点上却很务实——只要地方货币不照抄美元，就可以发行。当然，地方货币并不是美国独创。

或说回来，如果相当多的社区这么做，会不会对整体经济有不利的影响？比如削弱地区间贸易，政府税收，中央银行调控效果？如果有足够的关注，这可以是一个有趣的进行社会实验的机会。

美社区自行印钞救经济，鼓励本土消费

经济不景，美国大小乡镇的居民想尽办法自救。威斯康星州密尔沃基市两个社区的居民便想出自行印钞的方法，希望能鼓励本土消费。

这两个社区的居民代表近日开会，就印制地方货币一事进行商讨。他们计划发行的货币，实际作用类似购物券，可反覆在加入有关计划的当地店铺使用。他们希望，在全国经济陷入衰退之际，这种鼓励本地消费的做法能振兴地方经济。

“地方货币增居民社区自豪感”

印钞计划其中一名组织者法拉杰(Sura Faraj)说：“拥有本地货币的人会把钱用于本地商店。他们不能将这花在(大型连销百货公司)沃尔玛，但可以将它花在当地的五金店及杂货店。”法拉杰表示，地方货币可让人增强社区自豪感，扶助参与有关计划的商户，并减少交通污染。

事实上，地方自行发钞在美国不是新鲜事，在大萧条时，很多地方社区都自己发行货币。

根据美国现行法律，只要地方组织发行的货币不貌似美钞，便不违法。美国首个社区货币于1991年出现在纽约州伊萨卡，现时有2000人及300个商户参与，约有面值约7万美元(54.6万港元)的货币流通。

The big five personality test

2008-09-16T17:57:00.000-07:00

I'm a O90-C64-E27-A44-N7 Big Five!!

the illusionist

2008-07-12T14:00:00.002-07:00

The Jumping Rubber Band Illusion : Magic Tricks Revealed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p7gXtZnSSo&feature=related

three easy coin tricks explained

Vanishing And Reappearing Coin Trick Revealed

On holiday sales

2008-05-25T10:34:00.000-07:00

In the US, every holiday is just a day used to make consumption plans.

What US government thought of China and Tibet 60 years ago

2008-04-10T14:21:00.002-07:00

都人：藏独运动和国际大博弈(转)

2008-04-09T19:21:00.000-07:00

都人：藏独运动和国际大博弈

2001年06月08日星期五于 03:00:00 · 都人发表在: 国际关系

　　在中国西部大开发计划中，西藏特别引人注目。今年2 月，中国国务院批准建设从
青海的格尔木直通西藏首府拉萨、长达1118公里的二期青藏铁路，此举意在彻底“打开
”西藏的大门，加速西藏与内地的一体化过程，因此居中国未来五年内的“四大工程”
之首。西藏在中国西部的重要战略地位，因此不言而喻。

　　与此同时，美国对“藏独”运动的支持也日益升温。美国政府最近任命颇有政治背
景的杜布里安斯基为最新的“西藏问题特别协调员”，提高这一直接干预中国内政的美
国官员的政治地位。更有甚者，5 月23日是中国“和平解放西藏”50周年，美国总统布
什故意打破以前“非正式会面”的传统做法，特地在此日在白宫正式会见了第十四世達
賴喇×。美国在西藏问题上的明显政治挑衅，据报引起了江澤民的特别关注。

　　藏独运动的起源

　　从这正反两面的发展，可以感受到争夺亚洲腹地的新一轮国际大博弈的热度。笔者
已经介绍过，藏独运动的起源，追溯到19世纪至20世纪初英帝国和沙俄帝国争夺中亚的
国际大博弈。正如藏传佛教中的“活佛转世”，今天的“西藏问题”，很大程度上便是
这前一轮大博弈的“遗产”或“转世”。

　　　在第一轮国际大博弈中，俄国密使德尔智（俄名多尔日耶夫）入藏潜伏25年，
成为藏名村哓堪钦的西藏僧官兼哲蚌寺僧人。他曾经七次赴俄活动，往返圣彼得堡拉萨
之间十多次，策动所谓“西藏抗英獨立”，终于落空。因此，英国荣赫鹏（
Younghusband）上校的大举侵犯西藏，攻占拉萨等地，便被西方史家视作英国在第一轮
大博弈中赢得的最后一场血腥胜利。

　　尽管当时荣赫鹏率领英军在西藏一路烧杀掳掠，坚决抵抗的藏军和其他无辜僧俗民
众死伤巨大，后来的藏独人士却视其为友，当今第十四世達賴喇×更美化荣赫鹏的侵藏
为“远征”，正是“拜荣赫鹏远征之赐”（達賴本人原文），才有拉萨英国代表团和荣
赫鹏迫拉萨所签条约，因此证明西藏是“主权獨立”的国家云云。充分证明笔者的前述
命题，即今天藏独运动，源自第一轮大博弈。

　　一个短暂插曲是德意志在欧洲的统一和崛起，大博弈的矛盾主次和布局发生微妙变
化。新崛起的德国和奥斯曼帝国联手，要想在中亚分一杯羹，使得英、俄之间出现了短
暂的“低荡”。可是这一新局面为时不长，俄、德两帝国在一次大战中相继崩溃，奥斯
曼帝国也紧接着瓦解。英国尽管在一战中损失惨重，一时成了大博弈中硕果仅存的玩家
。可是苏维埃势力迅速获得胜利，亚洲各地共產黨纷如雨后春笋，英国在中亚的攻势受
阻。新兴的美国则受孤立主义支配，没有兴趣逐鹿中亚，苏联遂得以在旧俄属突厥斯坦
建立牢固控制。

　　维护中国对西藏主权

　　面对苏联的崛起，英国加紧了对包括西藏在内的亚洲腹地的动作，而辛亥革命后中
国内地的军阀混战，为英国加紧渗透西藏提供了机会，因此出现长时期内藏军军官用英
文发号施令、藏军军乐队演奏“天佑我王”之类的奇妙现象。

　　必须指出，北伐胜利后，蒋介石领导的南京－重庆国民政府，在极为困难的处境下
，对维护中国对西藏的主权作出了巨大的贡献，包括在亲英的第十三世達賴喇×逝世后
派黄慕松入藏，后来又责成马步芳护送年幼的青海灵童即第十四世達賴喇×及其父亲等
家属到拉萨等等。吴忠信代表国民政府入藏，“主持”達賴喇×坐床大典，更是伸张中
国主权的大事。此后亲中央政府的热振活佛出任年幼的達賴喇×的摄政，进一步限制了
西藏亲英势力。同时国民政府在大量藏族人口聚居的地区设立青海和西康两省，并在西
藏地区发展中国国民黨地下黨，加强中央政府对藏区的影响。

　　国民政府另一项意义深远的成功是其回族政策。无庸讳言，满清对回族长期歧视，
甚至到所谓“同（治）光（绪）中兴”，仍出现许多迫害回族的“恶性事件”。而南京
政府在相当短的时间内，就赢得绝大部分回族对中国的认同和忠诚。在回族名将白崇禧
的细致工作下，甘肃青海一带的回族马氏势力对中国始终忠诚不二，成为对英国策划的
藏独运动的致命障碍。这从今天達賴喇×的著作里还可以经常品味。就是在今天，回族
仍然是藏独运动的最大障碍之一。

　　抗战初期，中國政府命令马步芳在青海玉树修建可供轰炸机起落的军事机场，使得
后来蒋介石可以公开宣布：如果拉萨噶厦政府某些成员继续其离心动作，重庆政府将“
进军西藏”。同时中国国民黨大力支持印度国大黨的獨立运动，迫使英国在1943年正式
警告拉萨，如果重庆中央政府进军西藏，印英将爱莫能助。

　　但是英国并没有因此停止支持藏独，同时印度国大黨不顾中国对其早先的支持，俨
然以英帝国的当然继承人自居。西藏亲英势力因此不仅将热振活佛排挤出拉萨政权，在
英国驻藏代表黎吉生（Hugh Richardson ）的直接参预下，于1947年关押热振活佛并将
其秘密处死（有说法是在狱中“被捏碎睾丸致死”），同时支持热振活佛的三大寺之一
色拉寺的大批反英喇×被屠殺，而達賴喇×的父亲也在此际不明不白地死亡。此事的巅
峰，是在印度獨立后，马上有人企图在印度领土上宣布“西藏獨立”。

　　同时，随着英帝国的衰亡、国共内战中钟共的胜利和冷战的开始，美国政府一反多
年来支持中国对西藏的主权，开始接收英帝国在中亚的衣钵。早在1948年，美国驻迪化
（乌鲁木齐）领事包懋勋（Paxton）和副领事马可南（Mackernan ）便帮助组织“保卫
宗教反共反苏委员会”。1949年4 月，美国国务卿艾奇逊电告美驻印度大使：美国希望
西藏的军事抵抗能力暗中得到加强。1949年9 月，在钟共军队入疆前夕，马可南仓惶经
西藏逃亡，并对“反共”人士留下指示：“从西藏去巴基斯坦有个地方叫太吉努尔，…
在那里可以得到美国的帮助”。从此际起，在新的外国主顾下，藏独运动逐渐进入“现
代”阶段。

　　由于国民黨政府采取了一系列积极维护中国对西藏主权的措施，加上英国从次大陆
撤退，“中国军队”入藏成为一个迟早的历史大势。钟共1950年10月越过金沙江和半年
多后“十七条协议”的签订，无非是这一历史大势晚来的兑现而已。顺便一提，钟共军
队进藏时，马步芳当年在青海玉树修建的军事机场，起了不小的作用。

　　值得一提的历史事实，是在二次大战前后，美国政府一直相当坚决地支持中国在西
藏的主权，这也是二战时美英在亚洲的一个矛盾。但是由于国际政治的变迁，美国全面
接手第一次大博弈中英帝国争夺亚洲腹地的传统和“资产”，西藏不幸成为“冷战”的
战场和牺牲品。这是西藏的悲哀，也是全中国的悲哀。

　　美国从1950年代就认识到中国边疆地区的“民族矛盾”对美国亚洲战略的利用价值
。于是在北美，美国国务院等开始大力资助对中国边疆地区的“学术研究”；在中国，
美国则直接在军事上卷入西藏和其他边疆地区，“鼓励”少数民族对钟共的“反抗”。

　　中情局卷入西藏“秘密战争”

　　早在1950年代中期，美国中央情报局便秘密卷入策划西藏的“秘密战争”。1957年
起，美国中央情报局不断空运大批受过训练的藏族特工和武器进入西藏，同时美国在琉
球（即日本所谓冲绳）到科罗拉多州的各秘密基地，集中训练藏族武装人员。西藏反共
的“四水六岗”武装组织，完全是美国一手策划和装备的。仅从1957至1960年，美国即
给西藏“游击队员”空投了400 多吨物资。

　　1950年代初期北京和拉萨“蜜月”的结束和1959年西藏“武装起义”，就在这样的
国际背景下出现。“起义”前后美国中央情报局的作用，包括空投武器、人员、弹药，
直到指引達賴喇×“奔印”具体路线，连達賴喇×自己都不否认。

　　《最后一个達賴喇×》

　　另一必须指出的事实，是美国导演的这新一轮藏独运动，一开始完全是彻底的“暴
力”行动，而達賴喇×及其家族从最初就直接卷入。其实達賴喇×几位兄弟和美国中情
局的密切接触，可以追溯到1950年代中期甚至更早。而根据在美国出版、为藏独宣传的
《最后一个達賴喇×》一书，远在1959年西藏“武装起义”之前，目前以“慈悲和平”
面目到处游说的達賴喇×，便已经向坚持“暴力斗争”的四水六岗组织秘密传送了八封
“鼓励信”。

　　西藏的这场“武装斗争”，是冷战中一场标准的“代理人战争”，一如在越南战争
中武装利用印度支那半岛苗族来对付越共，是美国在冷战中唆使煽动“民族矛盾”以实
现政治军事目的的拿手好戏。一旦事情不成，或美国国际“利益”有变，华盛顿马上始
乱终弃。在越战败局已定，特别是美国准备“联华抗苏”之时，华盛顿全面放弃支持“
藏族武装斗争”，任四水六岗组织被尼泊尔皇家军队全歼，其无情无义程度，令许多当
事的中情局特工为之汗颜，甚至有因而“放下屠刀”而“出家”的。此是后话。

　　文武之道，一张一弛。曾几何时，健忘的美国开始“大树特树”西藏“和平斗争”
的“典型”。尽管各方人证物证俱全，美国政府特别是中情局对当年“武装斗争”历史
来个闭口不谈，“大众传媒”自然乐助其成。美国《芝加哥论坛报》1997年有一篇罕见
的坦率文章，报道了美国和西藏“流亡政府”各方为了维持“和平形象”，而对这段“
共同斗争”历史三缄其口，讳莫如深。在美国国会后来正式接手之前，達賴喇×曾长期
仰赖中情局津贴这一不光彩事实，更是西方传媒的大忌。

　　“塞翁失马”，尽管在军事上惨遭“出卖”抛弃，由于美国地缘战略的变化，特别
是苏联瓦解后对崛起的中国进行“离强合弱”的需要，達賴喇×“流亡政府”改走“和
平”路线，近年来在美国行情大涨。对比之下，君不见当年曾同样自己开办学校、医院
等等的苗族“王宝将军”部下，在印支战争结束后的悲惨命运，得到了多少西方的关心？

　　藏独运动的“暴力”背景

　　尽管有西方各国政府和传媒的大力支持、捧场及压制“不利新闻”，達賴喇×领导
的藏独运动的“暴力”背景，还是不断有蛛丝马迹可寻。達賴喇×与日本奥姆真理教及
其教主麻原彰晃的密切关系，包括出面“担保”、为奥姆真理教在日本获得正式“非牟
利团体”地位，便是一例。

　　另一件妙事，是1974年不丹发生企图谋杀新国王的未遂政变，達賴喇×亲兄嘉乐顿
珠直接卷入，事发后不得不间不容发地间关潜踪，逃亡印度，“越境乃免”。達賴喇×
驻不丹的正式代表和其他一些“西藏难民”就没有这么幸运，而遭受了牢狱之灾。这件
对達賴喇×“和平形象”大为不利的事件，当然不会受到西方传媒的张扬，以致最近有
位替達賴喇×代言的瑞典“民運女士”，怒斥此事乃是“天方夜谭式”的“无稽之谈”
。可是只要仔细查阅资料，就会发现当年的《纽约时报》、《新大英百科全书》、若干
严肃“学术著作”，甚至美国陆军部的出版物都报道了此事。

　　在西藏问题上，西方政府和传媒另一件不愿声张面对的事实，是近百多年来，真正
遭到“文化灭族”和“民族清洗”的原藏语和藏传佛教地区，决不是在中国境内，而正
是被原英帝国强占的大吉岭（原属锡金）、锡金（即哲孟雄，原属西藏）和拉达克等地
。它们今天都成了印度的正式领土，那里的藏语文化频临消失。中国境外唯一的藏语国
家不丹，也面临印度巨大的政治经济压力和效忠達賴喇×的“西藏难民”双重威胁。

　　笔者曾经介绍过：印度俨然以大英帝国在南亚的继承人自居，近年来“大国梦”膨
胀，其情报部门公然招募“精通汉语、藏语、尼泊尔语……的年轻人”。另一方面，印
度又面临国土面积有限、人口爆炸的严重威胁。中国之外大吉岭、锡金、拉达克等原藏
语区遭到印度的“非藏化”，实在为“藏独”运动提供了不祥的前车之鉴。故此笔者已
经预言：印度在日益恶化的人口危机下，完全可能参与新一轮国际大博弈，而在西藏问
题上有所企图。印度近日为布什的国家导弹防御体系大唱赞歌，岂徒然哉？

　　按照香港《明报》近日一篇署名文章的标题，布什在西藏问题上刻意挑衅北京，“
愈玩愈大胆”。随着美国战略重点的东移，争夺亚洲腹地的新一轮大博弈只会越演越烈
，这是不以人们主观意志为转移的战略现实。

曹操：让县自明本志令

2007-10-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

震：曹操向大家解释为什么自己不能归隐，像先贤那样enjoy life。挺实在。

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梦远白：此篇在网上流传，多名《让县自明本志令》，记得幼读《三曹文集》似名《让县自明志表》。藏书俱失，不能对正，存疑。曹操当时任丞相，封武平侯，向汉帝上表章推让封邑，所以，题目当以后者为是。
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孤始举孝廉［1］，年少，自以本非岩穴知名之士［2］，恐为海内人之所见凡愚［3］，欲为一郡守［4］，好作政教［5］，以建立名誉，使世士明知之［6］；故在济南［7］，始除残去秽［8］，平心选举，违迕诸常侍［9］。以为强豪所忿，恐致家祸，故以病还。

　　去官之后，年纪尚少［10］，顾视同岁中［11］，年有五十，未名为老。内自图之，从此却去二十年，待天下清，乃与同岁中始举者等耳。故以四时归乡里，于谯东五十里筑精舍［12］，欲秋夏读书，冬春射猎，求底下之地［13］，欲以泥水自蔽［14］，绝宾客往来之望。然不能得如意。

　　后征为都尉［15］，迁典军校尉［16］，意遂更欲为国家讨贼立功［17］，欲望封侯作征西将军［18］，然后题墓道言“汉故征西将军曹侯之墓”，此其志也。而遭值董卓之难［19］，兴举义兵［20］。是时合兵能多得耳，然常自损，不欲多之；所以然者，多兵意盛，与强敌争，倘更为祸始。故汴水之战数千［21］，后还到扬州更募［22］，亦复不过三千人，此其本志有限也。

　　后领兖州［23］，破降黄巾三十万众［24］。又袁术僭号于九江［25］，下皆称臣，名门曰建号门，衣被皆为天子之制，两妇预争为皇后。志计已定，人有劝术使遂即帝位，露布天下［26］，答言“曹公尚在，未可也”。后孤讨禽其四将［27］，获其人众，遂使术穷亡解沮［28］，发病而死。及至袁绍据河北［29］，兵势强盛，孤自度势，实不敌之；但计投死为国，以义灭身，足垂于后。幸而破绍，枭其二子［30］。又刘表自以为宗室［31］，包藏奸心，乍前乍却［32］，以观世事，据有当州［23］，孤复定之，遂平天下。身为宰相，人臣之贵已极，意望已过矣［34］。

　　今孤言此，若为自大，欲人言尽，故无讳耳。设使国家无有孤，不知当几人称帝，几人称王！或者人见孤强盛，又性不信天命之事，恐私心相评，言有不逊之志［35］，妄相忖度，每用耿耿。齐桓、晋文所以垂称至今日者［36］，以其兵势广大，犹能奉事周室也。《论语》云：“三分天下有其二，以服事殷，周之德可谓至德矣［37］。”夫能以大事小也［38］。昔乐毅走赵［39］，赵王欲与之图燕［40］。乐毅伏而垂泣，对曰：“臣事昭王，犹事大王；臣若获戾，放在他国，没世然后已，不忍谋赵之徒隶［41］，况燕后嗣乎［42］！”胡亥之杀蒙恬也［43］，恬曰：“自吾先人及至子孙，积信于秦三世矣［44］；今臣将兵三十余万，其势足以背叛，然自知必死而守义者，不敢辱先人之教以忘先王也。”孤每读此二人书，未尝不怆然流涕也。孤祖、父以至孤身［45］，皆当亲重之任，可谓见信者矣，以及子桓兄弟［46］，过于三世矣。

　　孤非徒对诸君说此也，常以语妻妾，皆令深知此意。孤谓之言：“顾我万年之后［47］，汝曹皆当出嫁，欲令传道我心，使他人皆知之。”孤此言皆肝鬲之要也［48］。所以勤勤恳恳叙心腹者，见周公有《金縢》之书以自明［49］，恐人不信之故。然欲孤便尔委捐所典兵众［50］，以还执事［51］，归就武平侯国［52］，实不可也。何者？诚恐己离兵为人所祸也。既为子孙计，又己败则国家倾危，是以不得慕虚名而处实祸，此所不得为也。前，朝恩封三子为侯，固辞不受，今更欲受之，非欲复以为荣，欲以为外援，为万安计［53］。

　　孤闻介推之避晋封［54］，申胥之逃楚赏［55］，未尝不舍书而叹，有以自省也。奉国威灵［56］，仗钺征伐［57］，推弱以克强［58］，处小而禽大。意之所图，动无违事，心之所虑，何向不济，遂荡平天下，不辱主命。可谓天助汉室，非人力也［59］。然封兼四县［60］，食户三万［61］，何德堪之！江湖未静，不可让位；至于邑土，可得而辞。今上还阳夏、柘、苦三县户二万，但食武平万户，且以分损谤议［62］，少减孤之责也。
-------------------　

　【注释】

　　［1］孤：古代王侯自谦之称。曹操当时任丞相，封武平侯，故此自称。孝廉：汉代从武帝开始，规定地方长官按期向中央推举各科人才，分孝廉、贤良、方正等科目，听候使用，东汉时每年由各郡、国从二十万人中荐举一人，曹操被举为孝廉时才二十岁。孝指善事父母，廉指清廉方正。［2］岩穴知名之士：指隐居而有名望的人。汉朝风尚，儒生常故意隐居深山，抬高声价，以待举荐。岩穴，山洞石室。［3］海内人：这里主要指世家豪族。曹操出身宦官家庭，故被轻视。［4］郡守：一郡的最高行政长官，即太守。［5］政教：行政和教化。［6］世士：世人。［7］在济南：曹操于中平元年（184）为济南国相，职位相当于太守。济南国辖境在今山东济南一带。［8］除残去秽：曹操任济南相时，下属官吏多趋附权贵，贪赃枉法。曹操奏请撤免八个县官，下令捣毁六百多所祠庙，严禁祭祀鬼神，因此得罪了当时的权贵近臣。［9］违迕（ｗǔ五）：违背、触犯。诸：之于。常侍：也称中常侍，皇帝的侍从近臣，掌管宫廷文书和传达皇帝命令。东汉末年，中常侍改用宦官，权势很大，地方官多逢迎他们。［10］年纪尚少［ｓｈａ︸哨］：曹操任济南相期满，朝廷调他为东郡太守。他托病辞官还乡，年方三十来岁。［11］同岁：同一年被举为孝廉的人。［12］谯（ｑｉáｏ樵）；今安徽亳县。曹操的故乡。精舍：指精致的书房。［13］底下之地：低洼之地，指瘠薄的土地。［14］泥水自蔽：意谓老于荒野，不求闻达。［15］都尉：官名，管军事，官阶相当于太守。［16］典军校尉：武官名，掌管近卫兵，多由皇帝亲信担任。中平五年（188），汉灵帝刘宏建立西园军，设置八校尉，以小黄门蹇硕为上军校尉，袁绍为中军校尉，曹操为典军校尉。［17］讨贼：指讨伐地方军阀和镇压农民起义军。［18］征西将军：东汉时授征西将军的有四人，他们对东汉王朝都立过功劳。曹操借此述志，表示愿做东汉王朝的功臣。［19］董卓之难：董卓原是凉州（今甘肃、宁夏一带）豪强，灵帝时任并州（今山西太原）牧。中平六年（189），汉灵帝死，少帝刘辩即位，外戚何进为了消灭宦官，召董卓领兵入洛阳，废少帝，立献帝刘协。董卓自封都尉和相国，操纵朝政。各州郡起兵反对，成立讨卓联军。［20］兴举义兵：指初平元年（190），关东各州郡纷纷起兵讨伐董卓，都自称“义兵”。曹操也在陈留郡己吾县（今河南省陈留县）招募五千人起兵讨董。董卓挟持献帝和数十万居民从洛阳迁都长安，沿路死人无数，洛阳被焚。初平三年，董卓被王允、吕布所杀。［21］汴水之战：初平元年（190），以袁绍为盟主的关东各州郡声称讨董，实各怀私利，又怕董卓兵强，不敢先进。曹操独率军西进，与董卓部将徐荣在荥阳的汴水（今名索河，在河南省荥阳县西南）一带交战，因兵少无援失败。曹操本人被流矢所中，连夜逃走。［22］扬州更募：曹操汴水战败后，与夏侯惇等到扬州重新召募兵丁。东汉末年，扬州的州治在今安徽省合肥，辖今江苏、安徽一带。［23］兖（ｙǎｎ眼）州：东汉十三州之一，辖今山东西南部和河南东部。［24］破降黄巾：初平三年（192），青州黄巾农民军起义攻入兖州，杀刺史刘岱。济北鲍信与兖州官吏迎曹操为兖州牧。曹操领兵攻黄巾军于寿张（今山东省东平县西南），追至济北，黄巾军三十万被迫投降。曹操从中挑选精壮，组成自己的强大军事力量，号为“青州兵”。［25］袁术：字公路，袁绍的异母弟，九江郡太守，东汉末年江淮一带世族豪强大军阀。僭（ｊｉàｎ见）号：盗用皇帝称号。建安二年（197）袁术以九江太守称帝于寿春（今安徽省寿县）。九江：郡名，辖今江苏、安徽省南部和江西省。［26］露布：布告，宣示。［27］禽：同“擒”。建安二年（197）九月，袁术攻陈（今河南省淮阳县），曹操引兵击之，大胜，擒斩袁术的四个部将桥蕤（ｒｕì锐）、李丰、梁纲、乐就。［28］解沮（ｊǔ举）：瓦解崩溃。［29］袁绍：字本初，袁术之兄。建安四年（199）三月，消灭了公孙瓒，占有黄河以北的冀、青、幽、并四州，成为北方最强大的割据势力。［30］枭（ｘｉāｏ消）：即枭首，斩首而悬之示众。建安五年（200），曹操在官渡（今河南省中年县东北）之战中，以少胜多，消灭袁绍军的主力。两年后，袁绍病死。明年，其子袁谭、袁尚因争夺冀州互相攻杀，袁谭求援曹操，袁尚始退军。后袁谭背叛曹操。建安十年正月，曹操又出兵击杀其子袁谭，袁尚和他的次兄袁熙逃奔辽西乌桓。建安十二年五月，曹操北征乌桓。袁熙、袁尚又逃往辽东，九月为操部属公孙康所杀。曹操乃悬首示众。［31］刘表：字景升，汉皇族鲁恭王刘余的后代，东汉末豪强军阀。献帝初平（190—193）中任荆州刺吏。［32］乍前乍却：忽前忽后。意喻投机。据史载：官渡之战，袁绍向刘表求援，刘暗与勾结，未敢出兵。有人劝他归附曹操，他也持观望态度。［33］当州：当地，即荆州，辖今湖北、湖南等地。建安十三年（208）七月，曹操南征刘表，八月刘表病死，九月其幼子刘琮即以荆州降曹操。［34］“人臣”二句：建安十三年，汉献帝为了表彰曹操平定三郡乌桓的功绩，废太尉、司徒、司空三公，恢复西汉的丞相和御史大夫制度，任曹操为丞相。［35］不逊之志：不忠顺的想法。指代汉自立为皇帝。［36］垂称：垂名，称颂。［37］“《论语》云”四句：见《论语·泰伯篇》。［38］以大事小：以强大的诸侯来侍奉弱小的天子。曹操借用《论语》中的话，表示自己拥护东汉王朝，并无夺取帝位之心。［39］乐毅：战国燕昭王时名将，曾率赵、楚、韩、魏、燕五国军队破齐，攻下齐国七十余城，后封为昌国君。昭王死，惠王立，中了齐将田单的反间计，让骑劫代乐毅为将，乐毅恐留燕被害，于是投奔赵国。［40］赵王：赵惠文王。［41］徒隶：犯人和奴隶，此泛指地位低贱的人。［42］后嗣：后代，指燕惠王。以上“昔乐毅”以下一段，据《太平御览》卷四二○可知，系转引《史记》。然今本《史记》不载。［43］胡亥：秦始皇嬴政的小儿子，继始皇立，称二世。蒙恬（ｔｉàｎ田）：秦始皇时名将，秦统一六国后，他率兵三十万，北击匈奴，修筑长城。秦始皇死后，赵高伪造始皇遗诏，逼使蒙恬自杀。［44］三世：蒙恬祖父蒙骜、父亲蒙武、连自己共三代。均为秦国名将。［45］祖、父：指曹操的祖父曹腾和父亲曹嵩。曹腾在汉桓帝时任中常侍、大长秋（管理皇宫事宜的官），封费亭侯；养夏侯氏的孩子为子，即是曹嵩，汉灵帝时官至太尉。曹嵩生曹操。［46］子桓：曹操次子曹丕的字。［47］万年：死的代称。［48］肝鬲（gé革）之要：出自内心的至要之言。鬲，同 “膈”，胸膈。［49］周公：姓姬名旦，周武王弟，周成王叔。金縢（ｔéｎｇ腾）：《尚书·周书》篇名。其中记述武王病时，周公曾作祷辞祭告于神，请求代武王死，祭毕将祷词封藏在金縢柜中。武王死，成王年幼，周公摄政。成王的另两个叔父管叔、蔡叔等诽谤周公篡位，引起成王怀疑。于是周公避居东都（现河南洛阳市）。后来成王启柜发现祷词，知其忠贞，大为感动，亲自迎回了周公。縢，封缄。金縢密封的金属柜。［50］便尔：就此。委捐：放弃，交出。［51］执事：指朝廷统率军队的主管权。［52］武平侯国：建安元年（196），献帝以曹操为大将军，封武平侯。武平，在今河南鹿邑县西。［53］为万安计：曹操此令公布后，据《魏书》记载：汉献帝在第二年，即建安十六年（211），封曹操之子曹植为平原侯，曹据为范阳侯，曹豹为饶阳侯。［54］介推（ｃｕī摧）：即介子推，春秋时晋国人，曾随晋公子重耳出亡十九年。后重耳回国即位，大封从亡诸臣。介子推不言己功，偕其母隐于绵山而死。后世又传说重耳曾烧山要他出来做官，他坚不出山，抱木被烧而死。［55］申胥：即申包胥，春秋时楚国大夫。伍子胥率吴军伐楚，攻下郢都。申包胥求救于秦，痛哭七日，终于感动了秦哀公，求得救兵，击退吴军。楚昭王回到郢都，赏赐功臣。他避而逃走，不肯受赏。［56］威灵：指汉皇室祖宗的威武神灵。［57］钺（ｙｕè月）：古兵器，形似大斧，也是天子出征时的一种仪仗。皇帝授钺给主将，即象征代表天子出征。［58］推：指挥。［59］天助汉室：这是曹操表示不自居功的客气话。［60］四县：指武平、阳夏（ｊｉǎ甲，今河南太康县）、柘（今河南柘城县北）、苦（ｈù户，今河南鹿邑县东）。［61］食户三万：受三万户人家所纳赋税的供养。［62］分损：减少，平息。

[转载]我们这一代东京人：日本经济起飞的略影

2007-07-14T16:38:00.000-07:00

震按：对大众来说，阳光下无新事。

我们这一代东京人：日本经济起飞的略影

新井一二三

新井一二三,女，1962年生，日本东京人。中文专栏作家，明治大学（东京）讲师。
早稻田大学政治经济学系毕业 ,曾在北京外国语学院、广州中山大学留学。中
文著作有《东京上流》（台湾大田出版，以下同） ,《午后四时的啤酒》、《我和阅
读谈恋爱》等十多种。

我们这一代东京人是新井的个人历史，记述了日本经济起飞中的个人历史，其中
涉及的发展中的社会和环境问题，对中国的发展不无启示。

我是一九六二年在东京出生的，户口簿上写的出生地址是涩谷区红十字会产院，算是东
京较好的医院之一。比我大两岁多的哥哥也在同一个地方出生。听说，奶奶当时对儿媳
的决定颇有意见，毕竟她把自己的九个孩子都在家里生下的，何必花好多钱到医院生小
孩？说家里，其实十整天都有很多人来来去去的寿司店后面。母亲属于战后受民主教育
长大的一代，绝不肯服从婆婆的命令。多年以后，她还对我诉苦道：“刚怀孕的时候，
你奶奶叫助产士诊察过我。就是跟铺子只隔一张纸门的地方，又没办法锁住，随时会有
人拉开门进来的。当时，店里雇佣好几个伙计、徒弟，全是年轻小伙子。我怎么受得了
他们好奇的眼光。”

看统计，一九五五年在日本呱呱坠地的孩子当中，在产院出生的只有百分之十八，到了
一九六五竟增加到百分之八十四：分歧点是六〇年，此后在产院出生的婴儿永远超过一
半（直到二十世纪末，才出现一些人批判产院分娩造成母子之间的心理鸿沟，主张恢复
家庭分娩）。那一年谢国权医生（台南诗人竹轩谢溪秋三男）写的《性生活之智慧》问
世，用照片介绍做爱姿势的书轰动全日本，成了总发行量达三百万万本的超级畅销书。
当时，他就在红十字会医院当产科主任，我是由他接生的，可见母亲多么会赶时髦！奶
奶一个人无法挡住时代潮流的势头，最后非让步不可了。但是，婆媳关系日趋激化。我
懂事的时候，父母早已从寿司店搬出来，在新宿区神田川边只有一间房的木造平屋，独
立经营小家庭了。

我平生第一个记忆是一九六四年十月十日开幕的东京奥运会，虽然当时我才二岁半，但
是全体社会及其兴奋的气氛还是留下了相当深刻的印象。父母不知从哪里弄来了一挺手
枪，乃用来发出竞赛开始的信号声，成了我和哥哥整个童年时代的头号宝物。东京奥运
会是战后日本头一次举办的国际级节目，全国上下齐心祝贺的状况，跟三十多年后长野
冬奥时多数人漠不关心的世情截然不一样。为了迎接外国游客，东京、大阪两大城市之
间开通了东海道新干线。在东京中心区，则完成了首都高速公路网第一工程。跟日本多
数家庭一样，我家也是为了观看奥运会直播而买了第一部电视机，乃黑白的乐声牌。

现在许多人都说，奥运会以前和以后，东京的景观彻底改变了。如今回顾“美好昨日”
的文章，一般也就讲到奥运会之前，一九六〇年左右的日子，他们指出，直到五十年代
末，东京室内还处处看得见近代化以前的生活小景，如：水井，洗澡盆，蚊香，风铃，
煤炭炉，和服，塌塌米。但是奥运会一来，古老的一切都走了。我小时候，家里每年增
添新的电器、生活用品，如：电话、双门冰箱、彩电、热水器、空调、立体声音响组合
、微波炉。关起门来开冷气，在塌塌米上铺化纤地毯，放西式家具，穿着牛仔裤看美国
连续剧，或听英国摇滚乐，大家都觉得很先进、好酷，却甚少有人介意传统文化和街坊
生活同时被破坏。战后日本人的生活目的是赶快富起来跟美国人过一样的日子，祖先留
下的一切反而显得陈旧落后。之前严禁孩子们站着吃东西的父母，后来鼓励我们边走路
边嚼口香糖甚至吞下汉堡包；因为整个社会认为学美国人就不会错。

经济高度成长的时代，差不多每个家庭的收入都直线提高；不是一部分人发财，而是大
家一同富起来的。失业率几乎等于零，大企业的终身雇佣制给上班族保证了一辈子的铁
饭碗。能够毫无疑问地相信明天一定会更美好，社会风气相当好。我小时候父亲一个人
开办的印刷厂，没几年工夫就雇请很多员工了。对曾经贫穷的日本有记忆的，我们可以
说是最后一代。一九六八年出生的妹妹没有经历每年购买新一种电器那样的生活。她懂
事的时候，家里已经有录像机，或者说，连续剧中的美国家庭拥有的一切，我们家全有
了。

以奥运会为标志的近代化，不仅改变了市井生活，而且对整座城市的基本理念带来了根
本性的调整。比如说，为了赶上奥运会开幕而匆匆完成的首都高速公路网，主要建设在
旧水路上的。东京的前身江户曾是能跟苏州、威尼斯相比的美丽水城，市内交通以水上
航线为主，市民生活无论是交易还是娱乐都跟水路有很密切的关系。看江户时代的浮世
绘，很多都画着水景。然而，一八六八年的明治维新以后，铁路、公路运输代替了水路
的重要性，在市内四通八达的运河被放弃不用了。上世纪六十年代初，奉命设计高速公
路的一批工程师，发现有现成的交通网沦落为恶臭冲鼻的脏水沟，毫不犹豫地决定填平
起来了。他们千万没有想到，江户城的遗产其实对居民生活起着重要作用，即确保东京
湾刮来的海风经过的路。果然，四十年以后的温室效应成为全球性燃眉大问题时，东京
的气温上升幅度比全球平均高出两倍，简直呈热带化趋势，除非恢复绿地和水面，每年
中暑丧命的人数只会直线上升。

当然，不能把所有责任推到工程师的身上去。当年，高速公路上汽车疾驰的情境是进步
与未来的象征，在科学漫画家手冢治虫的作品中也常出现。人们只挂念经济发展，环保
意识尚未兴起的时期。东京的各条水路确实肮脏之极。我童年时代听父亲说过，他小时
候（一九四O左右）曾经在附近神田川游泳抓过鳗鱼，觉得难于置信，因为我认识的神
田川是发出恶臭，满处是废物的浑水坑。每年购买新电器的居民干脆把旧货推下河中去
。政府清洁部门开始回收大型废物是后来的事情。到了世纪末，市政府才通过景观条例
企图恢复水边生态。如今神田川的水质已经有了明显改善，周遭更修成了挺舒适的散步
路，似乎回到了我未曾见过的六十年前。难道我的孩提是日本社会的一场噩梦？

一九六八年，我上小学，日本的国民生产总值到了世界第三位的水准。同时国内纷纷发
生公害案件，经济高度成长的反面效应逐渐明显起来了。大学生共鸣全世界政治潮流，
“全共斗”学运达到高潮，学运分子与警察机动部队在东京大学安田礼堂展开了两天的
激烈斗争，最后三百七十五名学生遭逮捕。参加示威的人大喊的政治口号“安保反对”
（反对日美安全保障条约），连我们小孩子也耳熟了。虽然社会上有种种矛盾，但总体
来说，大家对未来还很乐观。那年另一个流行语是“昭和元禄”。江户时代元禄年间是
社会稳定、经济发达、消费生活烂熟的高峰期。战后二十多年的日本人自我感觉非常好
，竟想起元禄年间的繁荣了。街上走的年轻人，不分男女都留着长发，穿喇叭裤和高跟
靴，弹吉他唱反战歌曲，也就是日本版本嬉皮士。

两年以后，国际文坛上颇有名气的小说家三岛由纪夫，带领私家小军队冲进自卫队基地
，呼喊起义而失败，最后自行切腹并由徒弟砍掉脑袋的血腥案件发生了。他享年四十五
。那是我有明确印象的第一宗社会案件。有些报纸竟刊登了跟身体全然隔离的三岛头部
相片。周围的大人包括父亲和学校老师都不知道该怎样解释给孩子好，结果保持沉默了
。我当时根本不懂是怎么回事，只是非常惊愕，觉得特别可怕。长大以后开始看各种评
论才开始理解其所以然。总之，三岛对战后日本的美国化肤浅风气看不顺，非得纠正政
治方向不可。但是，他一类的极右派政治思想在七O年的日本完全得不到支持。社会上
基本认为三岛之死是一种文学理念或者艺术审美观的表现，如果不就是与众不同的性爱
趋向所致的越轨行为。毕竟，他的同性恋倾向是公开的秘密。文章里又多次提到过切腹
场面使他兴奋。（二OO五年，诺贝尔文学奖作家大江健三郎在长篇作品《告别了，我的
书》里探讨：如果三岛多活了十年或者三十年，会否拥有较大的影响力。结论还是否定
的。）

那年夏天，日本全国为大阪博览会（EXPO70）沸腾过一回。“你们好，你们好，从世界
各地来的朋友们！你们好，你们好，来樱花国的宾客们！”流行歌手三波春夫开朗做作
的歌声弥漫着东京的大街小道。社会风气确实肤浅得可以。当时，我家已经有了弟弟和
妹妹，母亲肚子里还有一个，即是年底要出生的小弟。父母决定暑假举家去大阪看博览
会，但是开支要尽量节约，坐新干线太贵，于是父亲开五百多公里的私家车去；小轿车
后座挤满了四个孩子，困了就要重叠地睡觉。住旅馆太贵，于是托亲戚定了某公司休养
所，但是一个在滋贺县琵琶湖边，另一个在神户六甲山顶，都离大阪相当远。酷热的夏
天在人山人海的博览会到底看见了什么，老实说我不太记得。美国馆展出阿波罗号从月
球带回来的石头，吸引最多人，但是排队好几个小时才能进去的，好像我们没有看到。
模糊地记得我和家人分开，单独进去了一个东欧国家的展览馆，似乎是匈牙利的，我买
票吃了一种当地食品：上面撒着酸酸的白色酱，不太合口，但是非常特别，而且是不折
不扣的异国风味。当时有个电视知识比赛节目送给冠军的奖品是夏威夷的团体旅行券。
我周围还没有人战后去过海外旅游。有个同学因父亲工作调职而搬去德国，叫我们羡慕
至极的。在博览会尝到的欧洲小吃让我长年忘不了。

一九七二年六月，国会议员田中角荣发表《日本列岛改造论》，七月被选上首相。他主
张：日本各地建设高速公路和新干线网络才是拉近城乡差距、解决公害的好方法。农民
出身，只有小学毕业，外号叫推土机的土木公司老板成为国家领袖，一时轰动了日本全
国，好比他体现了社会的民主化、公平化。媒体纷纷报道田中刻苦奋斗的经历，连儿童
出版社都推出了首相的半生记。我从图书馆借来看，被班主任嘲笑了。他是左派教员工
会的成员，一贯批判自民党政权的。田中角荣是名副其实的推土机，行动能力特别强。
上台两个月就飞往北京会见周恩来和毛泽东，迅速完成了两国建交的大事业。跟矮个田
中比较，中国领导人显得特别高大有风度；忽然间，日本社会掀起了中国热。我印象最
深刻的是那年十月到东京来的一对大熊猫兰兰和康康。我和一批同学们去上野动物园隔
着玻璃窗看了爱吃竹叶的中国大熊猫。当时它们在日本享有的名气非常大，大概仅次于
推土机首相本人。全国每个玩具店都推销布做的大熊猫，服装店则推出售大熊猫花样的
衣服，至于儿童用品，从笔记本到牛奶杯全部印有兰兰和康康了。

一九七三年，我小学六年级时，中东战争爆发，石油震撼发生了。记得有一天，卫生纸
卷开始从超市货架上消失，有风闻说是石油价格急升的缘故。大家半信半疑，但是没有
了卫生纸卷可怎么了得，于是每家主妇都争先恐后去抢购，没半天真的卖光了。当时六
十多岁的姥姥无所其事地说：没有了卫生纸卷可以用新闻纸吧。但是，我们一代的东京
小孩是从小用冲水马桶长大的，从来没有用硬硬的新闻纸擦过屁股（其实，下水道普及
的只是市中心而已。姥姥住在东京东部葛饰区，直到一九八六年去世，厕所里一直有个
大黑洞）。很快，卫生纸卷重新出现，但是比起以前贵多了。莫名其妙的卫生纸卷事件
预兆了将要来临的大变化。第二年，日本经济创下了战后头一次的“零下成长”记录，
从一九五六年开始的维持了十多年的高度经济成长到此结束了。

我家经济也到此直线上升，日后却是有起有落了。还清楚地记得，最后临坠落前，有一
段时间饭桌的情境特豪华起来，不是过年过节还天天摆着鸡腿什么的，叫我预感到不详
了。果然，初中二年级的一天，父亲的公司倒闭，听母亲说是买了太多太贵的印刷机。
父亲则认为上了坏律师的当。他要我长大以后学法律，替他跟不公平的社会算个账。父
母卖掉所有设备，解雇全部员工，把住家客厅改造成办公室，开始经营小出版社了。幸
亏，早几年经济还好的时候，买过一栋旧房子，虽然破旧但是有五间二厅，我们至少没
有失去窝。当年日本有个规则：经济越不好书卖得越好（社会进入后现代阶段后，则不
适用了），何况父母卖的是算盘、簿记学、会计学等的习题集，找工作的人很多都要买
的。他们年纪还轻，起死回生得相当快，但是那几年里，我平生第一次尝到了生活水准
下降的滋味。来帮忙的姥姥发现，晚饭吃的咖喱汁不含肉，我们小孩子早已司空见惯，
只要整个锅里有几片，就算是有肉了，即使没分到自己的盘子上来也不会埋怨。父母拼
命工作，拼命存钱，四年以后重新办起印刷厂了。同时改建住房，乃母亲的主意，她不
要丈夫把所有的钱都花在事业上，几年不停地挺身奋斗的结果，母亲得了胃溃疡。我高
中三年那年，她割掉了三分之二的胃。为了手术住院长达一整月。比我大两岁的哥哥高
中毕业后，只上了半年的职业培训，便开始帮父母工作。果然是当时的家计情况让他放
弃了升学的念头。

我小学、初中都上了家附近的公立学校，高中则考进了国立名校：东京教育大学（现筑
波大学）附属高中。同学们的父母亲几乎清一色是大学毕业生，其中不乏医生等社会地
位很高的人士，叫我心中很委屈。我父母都没有上过大学，高中毕业就在社会上做事的
人。父亲在爷爷创办的寿司店当厨师，白天有空时还做皮鞋卖过，母亲则当美容师。一
九四五年日本战败，他们分别为十岁和八岁的的小孩，均在政府命令下离开家人和老师
同学一起在外地农村过着避难生活，回到了东京，不仅自家的房子连带整个地区都在美
军空袭中早已化为灰烬。父母亲告诉我：在废墟般的东京成长的一代，先得考虑如何吃
饱穿暖，即使想读书也根本没有条件。但是，我上了国立名校就发现，其实跟他们同代
的日本人当中也有不少读过大学的。说实在，只有小学毕业搞土木的田中角荣当首相而
轰动全国，就是其他领导人全有大学文凭的缘故。看看在他前后掌权的佐藤荣作、大平
正芳、三木武夫、中曾根康弘等政治家，没有一个是例外的。推土机首相的好日子没有
维持很久，上台的两年以后发生的金钱丑闻迫他辞职，我还没上高中之前的一九七六年
，因贪污罪遭逮捕了。

七十年代的日本有个流行语叫“一亿总中流”。中央政府每年施行的舆论调查中，被问
“你家经济状态属于上层、中上、中中、中下，还是下层”，回答说是中上、中中、或
中下的比率，一九五八年有百分之七十二，到了一九七三年则超过了百分之九十。这十
五年里，国民平均收入上升的幅度为二点八倍，绝大多数日本人的生活确实改善了。同
时，随着都市化的进程，从前很明显的白领/蓝领区别不再容易看得出来了。穿着西装
系领带，开着私家车上班的公司职工了，到了职场就换穿工作服而从事生产线劳动，没
人觉得奇怪了。结果，很多其实属于蓝领—工人阶级的日本人，一厢情愿把自己划为“
中层”；我们家也不是例外。父亲虽然中学毕业，但是白手起家做了小公司老板，虽然
有起有落，从未穷到挨饿穿不暖的田地，自我感觉还不坏呢。谁敢说我们家属于下层？

然而，在高中同学们面前，我的自尊心受了严重的创伤。母亲受的打击好像比我还厉害
，陪我参加入学典礼后，她再也不肯来我学校了。主要不是人家有钱，而是文化根基之
厚压倒了我们的。比如说，我父母没有阅读的习惯，至多看看报纸翻杂志而已，当然没
有什么藏书可说；同学们家倒有高达天花板的书架，装满的东西名著是家庭成员聊家常
时候的话题。又比如说，我父母喜欢跟着爵士乐跳舞，哥哥则玩吉他、搞摇滚乐，在亲
戚朋友中，我们家算是有文化的，名校的同学却是从小听古典名曲长大的，个个都会弹
钢琴、拉小提琴，或者日本三弦，放学后的课外活动项目中，竟然有交响乐团、歌剧团
。我当时连一次古典音乐会都没有去过，更何况歌剧演出，听到从附小上来的名媛们哼
着意大利语歌曲，不能不受到极深刻的阶级震撼。要参加体育社团吧，骑马、帆船等专
门属于上流社会的项目可不少，叫我只好从远处向往而不敢插手。我十五岁就发现了日
本社会的establishment，也意识到难以跨越的阶级鸿沟。到底从哪里来的区别？恐怕
至少追溯到三代以前：人家的祖先不是武士就是富农，我祖先则是吃不到干饭的贫农。

日本所谓的名门中学，主要意味着升学成绩好，具体来说考上东京大学的人数多。同时
，越是程度高、难考进的学校，越有标榜自由主义的趋势。学校当局对学生的管理相当
松弛；没有制服、没什么校规，跟其他学校比较，自由得多了。我们是高中生，但是所
受到的待遇基本上跟大学生没有区别，一点不拘束地泡咖啡厅也去酒吧，尽情享受名门
生的特权。同班男同学们，一来出身不错，二来书念得也不差，即使没考进东大也都上
了好大学。几年以后毕业找工作时，他们的职业选择颇为保守，除了继承家业做医生的
少爷们外，很多要么做了高级官僚，或者加入了三井、三菱、住友等大财阀旗下的银行
、商社、制造业公司。女同学的选择当时还很有限，成绩最好的人都做了医生，其次则
做了学者，任职于普通企业的人一般就很快碰到了“玻璃花板”，即使没有很快被迫辞
职，也不能担任重要职务。等到一九八五年，即我们多数人毕业本科后的第二年，男女
雇佣平等法才施行，法律上保证两性就业机会该平等了。但是，法律归法律，现实是直
到今天，日本是女性社会地位在全世界最低的国家之一。

一九八一年，我上了私立早稻田大学政治经济学系。该系一年级共一千一百一十名学生
当中，女生只有七十多人，所占比率才百分之七，而且连一个女教授都没有。果然，政
经系校舍内没有女厕所，要解手一定得到院子里后来添盖的小屋子去，不方便极了。我
选的第二外语是当年算冷门的汉语，结果两班同学共一百名中，竟然仅有我一个女学生
（也就是百分之一整）。九十年代后，学汉语的日本人大幅度增加，除了英语以外，这
些年最多人学的外语就是中国话了。如今在早大政经系也有多半学生选修汉语。但是，
八十年代初期，日中经济交流还不太紧密，刚建交时期的中国热稍退了以后，只有少数
人在学习汉语的。作为惟一的女学生，我在汉语课堂上无法避开老师的视线，非得努力
学习不可了。好在我对这门课，一开始就特别喜欢。

当年我们系的汉语主任士著名的音韵学者滕堂明保老师；他是日本中国语文学界的泰斗
，本来做东京大学教授，却在一九六八年的学生运动中支持学生造反而辞职，转到早大
来当客座教授。后来回想，我深深感觉到，由滕堂老师亲自教一年级学生汉语是老天爷
给我送来的人生礼物。记得第一次上课时，他在桌上放下索尼录音机，一按扣子就传出
来充满异国情调的中国音乐，前奏完毕后，女高音开始唱：“北风那个吹……” 接着
，全体学生跟着老师练习四声：“妈、麻、马、骂”。那瞬间，好像一股电力通过了我
整个人，被雷劈了一般，从头到脚全身发抖。汉语美丽极了！说我对中国话是一见钟情
，一点儿也不夸张。滕堂老师看见我的表情，马上建议说：“你真要学好，光在大学每
星期上两堂课是完全不够的。去日中学院吧。上傍晚的课，每个星期三次，学费很便宜
，而且我当院长。”

我选修汉语，主要出于对远处的向往。在早大的入学申请书上填写“第二外语选择”时
，在“德、法、西、俄、中”共五种语言当中，对我最有“异国魅力”的就是中文。自
从在大阪博览会场尝到了东欧风味以后，我是一直憧憬远处的。小时候，接触到外国文
化的机会少之又少；偶尔被父母带去横滨中华街吃饭，我都兴奋至极。好热闹的大街小
巷边，挤满着大餐厅笑饭馆，大红大绿的招牌就是跟日本食肆的素淡颜色不一样，而且
门前挂有全鸡全鸭之类，有的更是扁制过的。哇，多么特别！可以说，横滨中华街食一
九六O，一九七O年代东京小孩唯一能踏足的外国领域。进入青春时期，别人大多热中于
英美文化，我却始终被稍微不一般的地方所吸引，十三岁，自己看书学过一点西班牙语
。十四岁，集中看了日本作家五木宽之以东欧、苏联为背景的小说。十六岁，在高中上
了两年的德语课，但被复杂的语法吓坏了也嫌语音不悦耳。当年，“汉文”还是日本高
中生必修课之一；把古汉语用古日语念下来，很不好啃。但是，我们满喜欢听老师讲有
关古代中国文人的种种插话，比方说，爱酒如命的大诗人李白晚上坐船要捕捉水面上的
月亮而不幸溺死等。另外，“国语”课本收录的鲁迅作品《故乡》（竹内好译），对我
们的影响也相当大，几乎每一个同学都能背诵最后两行，登场人物闰土又亲切得犹如住
在远处的老朋友。对我来说，中国文化一方面并不陌生，另一方面由于政治上的距离于
社会体制之不同而觉得非常遥远。两个相互矛盾的因素加起来就造成了很强烈的“异国
魅力”。

高中、大学时期，我经常因没赶上“火红的年代”而感到遗憾。七十年代末，八十年代
初的日本学生，早已失去了对政治的兴趣，连文学都开始受冷落，大家各管各的后现代
风气正在成气候。大学校园和平安静却充满着颓废的享乐主义。只有少数男同学认真上
课，其他人则从大白天起忙于打麻将，到了晚上就带着女校学生去迪斯科舞厅。她们打
扮得跟最新一起的时装杂志《JJ》一模一样，有时像冲浪族，有时像美国常春藤大学女
生，始终没有个性可说。因为政经系里的男女不平衡实在过头，我在大学总觉得不自在
。加上，早大学生多数来自外地，没见过世面，不懂得都会生活，和我那些潇洒成性的
高中同学比较，真是土得要命，羞死人了。

由于对早大环境的疏远感，我一方面去参加跨大学的文化活动，另一方面又相当积极地
上日中学院的课了。那里有不同年龄的学生们，小的跟我一样岁数，大的则跟我父母差
不多，平均年龄三十出头。有些人为了专业、工作的需要而来学中文，个多人纯粹出于
个人兴趣。他们的学习态度比我在大学的同学认真得不知多少倍。其中不乏当时三十多
岁，曾经经历过“火红的年代”的一代人。他们普遍崇拜毛泽东的新中国，有的在“文
革”时期作为日本学生代表团坐船去中国参加过交流活动。我开始学汉语时，中国已经
开过三中全会，早进入了改革开放阶段，但是在一衣带水对岸的中国话学校，清一色的
日本学生还在和声唱《不落的红太阳》，还有高年级同学们在联欢会上唱的一首歌给我
留下非常深刻的印象至今都忘不了，那竟然是《游击队之歌》！

我的大学时代正巧是东京学这一门学问兴起的时候。文学评论家矶田光一写的《作为思
想的东京》已在一九七八年问世。他在文中指出：东京不是一个地方而是概念，乃有作
为的年轻人从全国各地要“上”来的“中心”。就像田中角荣小学一毕业就离开冬天下
大雪的农村而到东京，从土木工人起一步一步爬上社会梯子，最后做了国家首相一样，
很多日本人都把东京当做拼搏一番的舞台。土生土长的东京人始终是少数，多数是从外
地来奋斗的新居民；他们对这座城市的感情自然不深，主要想好好利用她。这是经过明
治维新，江户城改名为东京市就开始的现象；连天皇家都是那时候从京都搬过来的异乡
人。战后复兴期，日本的政治、经济、文化都越来越集中于东京；相对而言，大阪、名
古屋等其他城市的地位低落了许多。日本没有上海之对于北京。洛杉矶之对于纽约，从
头到尾只有一个东京，使得这座城市的“概念化”特别严重。

这样想来，我在故乡东京感到异化，也许可以说是理所当然的事情。老东京作家谷崎润
一郎早在一九三四年发表的散文《思东京》里，慨叹过他曾经优美的故乡被乡下武士糟
蹋到底了；半世纪以后，我在早大教室被外地出身的同学们包围时候的感觉也有所类似
。外地人可以“上”东京，我作为东京人，却得另找个方向，就像谷崎润一郎中年以后
迁居京都、神户等地，沉浸在关西地区的精致传统文化中。从高中一年级起，每逢假期
我都一个人坐长途火车到各地旅行；魅力的小城市可多，如京都、金泽、弘前、仙台、
松江、但是，只要从东京往日本国内的其他地方去，那移动一定是 “下”去的；作为
胸怀大志的年轻人，我想要“上”去，或者找另一个坐标轴。

一九八二年，大学二年级的夏天，我平生第一次办护照，平生第一次坐飞机，平生第一
次从上空看见的万家灯火是上海的。我赴北京参加华侨补习学校为外国人举办的暑假汉
语进修班。中国民航班级入夜后才离开了成田机场，飞越东海后向北，于北京首都机场
落地时候，周围是一片漆黑。坐了一个多小时的巴士，忽然看见了天安门上亮堂堂的毛
泽东肖像。长安街上几乎看不到其他汽车的影子，深夜在暗淡的路灯下，竟有些年轻人
在踢足球。古老的北京城就像鲁迅所描述，也像我在东京看过的影片《城南旧事》、《
骆驼祥子》。那夏天，我终于发现了地球上日本以外的地方；北京对我成了世界的入口。

一九八三年，东京迪斯尼乐园隆重开幕了，不仅小朋友，连大人也争先恐后去享受美式
娱乐。大学生也不例外，男女双双约会去，有些人更购买了通年卡经常去。我自己却怎
么也兴奋不起来：一方面，始终不太欣赏美国的通俗文化，另一方面，有东京人的宝贵
记忆。迪斯尼乐园所在地东京湾北岸，我小时候曾经是每年春天全家一起去找蛤子的浅
滩。一手拿着小锹子，一手拿着塑料桶，在潮湿的沙滩上蹲下来挖洞，发现小小的贝儿
在喷出盐水，是多么令小孩子惊喜的经验！而且每次都一定是特别丰收，塞满了好几个
塑料桶的蛤子不容易吃完，还送给邻居朋友，场面真热闹愉快。跟美国公司携手的投资
商把那浅滩填平起来建设彻头彻底的美国式的主题公园，甚至禁止游客带饭团（即传统
日本食品）进场，由我看来岂有此理。

二十一岁的我对周遭现实感到疏远，宁愿被鲁迅、老舍、巴金等中国作家带到另一个世
界去。独自坐在白天都昏暗的咖啡馆里头，一个词儿一个词儿查着字典看五四小说，我
的心脏不由得扑通扑通跳起来。当初搞不明白是怎么回事，后来忽而想通：这难道不是
恋情么？那年年底，我平生第一次在家以外的地方迎接新年，乃在上海宾馆顶楼的迪斯
科。回东京后，马上申请去中国的公费留学，幸亏顺利通过了选拔考试，出发日期为一
九八四年八月底。我到中国，第一年在北京外语学院汉语进修班，第二年在广州中山大
学历史系上课；每次放假都背上背包跑去神州各地：从沿海到四川、云南、东北、内蒙
、新疆、青海、西藏、海南岛，越远的地方越值得去。我对中国的理解主要来自当年天
南地北的自由旅行。对中文的掌握则来自旅途中跟各地老百姓的交谈中，真得感谢中国
教育部每月二百七十块人民币的奖学金了。一离开家乡就不大想回去，多想看世界，恐
怕是很多人年轻时候的经验。为期两年的留学生活结束以后，我回国毕业当了记者，可
是老梦想这海外，不久就提出辞呈，订了飞往加拿大的飞机票。根本没有想到这一趟会
是从多伦多到香港长达十年的大漂流。

永远改变了日本社会的泡沫经济，是一九八五年由纽约广场饭店的国际金融协议开始的
。之前，一美元换二百四十日元，广场协议以后，则换一百二十日元了。日元的购买力
一夜之间翻了一倍。很多人赶紧跑到国外去抢买名牌皮包。回到国内炒股炒地了。本来
节约勤劳的日本民族，忽而全变成了投资家、投机家。我偶尔从国外回东京探亲，不管
是家人还是朋友，大家异口同声谈着股票、外汇、房价、银行、利率等。股票和地价都
越炒越热，东京旧市区的土地总价格竟等同于全美国了。在新宿等闹区，几乎每个行人
都穿着名牌服装、名牌鞋子，花大笔钱喝最高级的红酒、白兰地到酩酊大醉，然后不怕
车费多贵都要打的回郊区的住家去。那几年的日本，简直开着没完没了的嘉年华，或者
说是天天过年晚晚过节的全面性疯狂。

经济过热的副作用很快就明显了，本来一点不值钱的小块土地，在短短几年内升了几倍
，竟值几百万美元了：这么一来，传统的长子单独继承制行不通了，因为小弟弟小妹妹
都要分到一杯羹。我爷爷奶奶留下的寿司店，成了父亲兄弟姐妹八个人互相打官司争夺
的对象；姥姥留下的小公寓也成了母亲三姐妹互相打官司争夺的对象。官司总有一天要
打完，但是骨肉之间的感情，闹了彻底别扭以后，再也没有办法修复的。于是，我结束
十余年的海外生活回国时，父母双方亲戚之间的往来差不多都断绝了。可悲的是，我家
并不是例外，很多东京人的家庭在八十年代末的几年里都解体了。同时，传统习俗也在
那几年内消失了。比如说，元旦曾是全家老小团聚的场合：一月一日早晨大家一起去附
近的神社拜年，然后回家吃年饭。小孩子收到压岁钱，并用 “福笑”“羽子板”等只
有新年才看到的玩具玩耍，二日则去母亲娘家吃吉祥食物、年糕，并再一次领到压岁钱
。可是，泡沫以后，那些习惯一去就不回了，父母每年都参加旅行团到国外去过年，为
了休息，也为了省事。果然，更加合理化、计算化思考压倒了古来的生活文化。

泡沫经济只维持了五年左右，一九八九年达高峰，一九九O就破裂。看最后决算，虽然
有些人在炒买炒卖中发了大财，但也有不少人高利率借来的钱没来得及还清，结果破产
或背上重债了。本来经营寿司店的我四叔，就是在投机游戏中抽了大王吃大亏，最后失
踪的。此间媒体把九十年代称作“失落的十年”。在广大世界，一九八九年冷战结束，
开始了国际政治经济秩序以及价值观念的大调整；然而，当时的日本人还在泡沫中集体
跳着疯狂舞；第二年，泡沫破裂后则茫然若失好几年，没有及时去对应外面发生的重大
变化。结果，国民经济长期停留在低迷状态。九十年代末，一些评论家开始用“第二次
战败”这个词，中国，美国等国家的经济很活跃，相对而言，日本的国际地位下降得很
厉害，有必要重新复兴了。几乎同时普及的“全球化”一词实际上意味着“美国化”，
让日本人更加感到失意。各大企业进行裁员，一些银行差不多倒闭而被国有化，客观情
况非常严重，但是，很多人还忘不了八十年代的陶醉感。只有自己的银行户头里还有储
蓄，不想认真去考虑国家财政面临的危机多么大。

我对泡沫时期的社会风气非常反感，当初以为经济冷却一阵会是好事情，若迫使大家冷
静下楼重新过朴素踏实生活的话。可是，后来的发展却不如我所愿。进入了二十一世纪
，世界受了“9·11”的大冲击，日本则在小泉纯一郎领导下越走越非理性。社会上，
泛滥于各媒体的流行语是“赢组VS输组”。在新的经济环境里，不是大家一起过朴素踏
实的生活，也不是全民协力复兴国家，而是两极分化日趋悬殊，不属于“赢组”就属于
“输组”的弱肉强食时代已经开始了。日本人不可能再做“一亿总中流”的美梦，即使
只是梦；二OO五年的一本畅销书就叫做《下流社会》，消费市场分析家三浦在文中预测
，今后的日本人，人口的百分之十五属于上层，百分之四十五属于中层，百分之四十属
于下层，而越年轻的一代越有可能从中层滑到下层去。

前些时，我参加了高中毕业二十五周年的校友会，甚有三十年河东三十年河西之感。上
层阶级出身，名牌大学毕业，任职于第一流公司的同学们，几乎无例外地对自己的未来
感到悲观。有一个人，东京大学经济学系毕业后加入了大银行，在当时看来是保证高收
入的稳定选择。谁料到，十多年以后，一些大银行消灭，一些互相合并，一些竟被外资
收买。他很尴尬地报告近况说“我已经在第三家银行做事了”，但是在座的人听了那家
银行的名字都很陌生，让人家更加尴尬。他是很典型的例子。在其他公司工作的朋友们
，处境也好不哪里去。对自己的职业最满意的似乎是东京大学法律系毕业后供职于大藏
省（现财务省）的一个同学。最保守的选择，获利最多；这是低成长社会的悲哀。

不过，从另一个角度看，大多同学们今天失意的原因，就是他们一贯太保守了。最近常
在经济新闻上曝光的市场强人呢，如Livedoor的崛江贵文，乐天公司（网上购物中心）
的三木谷浩史，村上基金的村上世彰，虽然都是东京大学、一桥大学等名门的校友，而
且三木谷和村上两人也分别在日本兴业银行和政府通产省做过事，但是都是中途离开了
既定的人生道路而投入互联网等新兴产业的。我们一届刚超过了日本人的平均年龄；那
么市场强人多数比我们小（三木谷一九六五年生，崛江则一九七二年生）也不足为怪。
非得指出的是，在这些市场强人当中，没有一个是东京人，他们要么在关西或者在九州
长大，十八岁单兵独马“上”来东京，气势劲头之大是东京少爷们学也学不到的。谷崎
润一郎在《思东京》一文中，把自己家人骂为“败北的江户儿”；他们有都会人的潇洒
，但是缺乏奋斗的力气，于是在社会大转变的时刻，总是跟不上潮流，必定为败者。一
百年前的江户儿是，现在的东京人是也。

崛江，三木谷、村上，三位强人的办公室都设在东京西南部，六本木HILLS森塔里。二
OO三年完成的五十四层综合大楼是“赢组”公司的根据地，老板们又集中住在邻近的住
宅塔。用大众媒体的说法，“HILLS”是“赢组”中的“赢组”。二次大战后的六本木
，因为曾经有美军基地，附近出没的洋人挺多，失意西式食肆、酒吧等夜生活场所特别
繁荣，东京第一家汉堡包店、比萨店都开在六本木（于是日本人习惯性地把香港兰桂坊
形容为当地六本木）。高中时候的我，有一次被富裕女同学带去白人顾客占半的高级俱
乐部，在充满异国情调的薄荷色灯光下目眩过。八十年代，六本木的迪斯科倒成了人人
皆去的消费大众圣地；在泡沫经济时期，其热闹庸俗的程度，称得上是大人的迪斯尼乐
园了。后来，一时落为满街都是东欧妓女的低级红灯区。谁料到，进入了二十一世纪，
六本木竟会起死回生为东京的新经济中心。

我回国定居已有八年多，这些人一直住在东京西郊，到六本木要一个多小时的地方。但
是，心里上的距离则远多了。是我年纪大了？还是属于“输组”了？不能否定的一点是
：我也甩不掉的“败北的江户儿”属性。

附记：二OO六年一月，Livedoor（活力门）公司得总经理崛江贵文（俗称 Horlemon）
因违反证券交易法而遭逮捕。几乎同时，他头号手下的遗体在冲绳县饭店客房里被发现
，令人怀疑该案件有相当复杂的背景。才半年前，崛江在执政党推荐下参过选，给捧为
新一代年轻人得榜样，然而，情况一变，落水狗被打得可惨。他曾发出的一句话“金钱
能够买一切”成了道德观念败坏到底的铁证据，这回被形容为二十一世纪初日本社会风
气堕落的象征了。在拘留所蹲了九十多天后，崛江付三亿日元（约合两千万元人民币）
的保释金而重新获得了自由。三个月内，他瘦了八公斤，读了两百本书，看起来并没有
憔悴，精神好焕发的样子。虽然失去了公司的经营权和大部分财产（因股价猛跌），他
还是拥有六本木HILL的豪宅；大概正在俯瞰整个东京而思考下一个棋子该在哪里放

A Quote and my version

2007-03-18T00:43:00.000-07:00

Agatha Christie (1890-1976) says:

An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her.

But what if another woman is even older?

I figure an economist may be the best husband; he gets the highest marginal utility from his first spouse because marginal utility diminishes.

不能盲目相信法律的公正：与贺梅案有关的链接

2007-01-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

中国尊严VS美国优越贺梅父母细谈心路历程

岳东晓: 欲加之罪，何患无词？！贺梅案给中国人敲响警钟

贺绍强活捉美国大法官，后者面临严厉处分

岳东晓：贺梅案背后的故事

Chinese Couple Appeal After Losing Child Custody Battle in Tennessee

Jack and Casey He Family

美国的案例——和这次朱令的纪录片以及诉讼时效有关

2007-01-26T22:17:00.001-08:00

1979年，一个兼职旅馆职员的大学女生在MI被谋杀。起初怀疑为抢劫但没有定案。直到
2004年，他母校的一位传播学教授听说了这个案子，便决定和学生一起做一部关于此案
的纪录片。这部片子最初在校内放映，后来不久在公共电视台播出。最后使得警方决定
重新调查此案。一共四位侦探花了两年时间，到2006底逮捕了6名嫌疑人。五男一女。
其中的女嫌疑人，是被害人当年的室友和她打工的旅馆的经理。现在48岁，当时21岁。

事情的起因，据说是当时一批保安暂住在这家旅馆，他们与旅馆里的女职员之间的纠葛
使得被害人成为嫉妒和愤怒的对象。在出事之前，被害人被叫去参加一个surprise
party。她随后被绑架并遭到轮奸。在她被杀之后，嫌疑人向警方报告了抢劫以及一名
职员失踪的故事。

详细的案情在这里。
http://www.crimelibrary.com/news/original/0906/2701_janet_chandler.html

下边一段摘自wiki上被害人母校的介绍。

Janet Chandler murder

In 1979, hotel clerk and Hope College senior Janet Chandler was found raped
and murdered in a snowbank along Interstate 196 near Holland, Michigan.
Initially treated as a robbery, the case remained unsolved until a
documentary class, led by Dr. David Schock and Professor Phil Blauw,
produced a documentary in 2004, interviewing, among others, Chandler's
parents and the police that were originally on the case. The documentary
prompted a reopening of the case and, in 2006, the arrests of five security
guards and a hotel supervisor who was Chandler's roommate, all believed to
have had a hand in the kidnapping, torture, rape, and subsequent murder.

唐太宗和所罗门

2007-01-24T23:43:00.000-08:00

历史记载，唐太宗派人暗中贿赂官员来检验官员的廉洁。有人中了圈套。唐太宗为自己的计谋得意，讲给魏征听；却被魏征教训一顿，说你当皇上的都不讲真话，就不要指望大臣不说假话。唐太宗据说听了很惭愧。

大家都知道另一个犹太国王所罗门断案的故事：两个妇女争夺一个孩子；所罗门说把孩子一分二，一人半个。结果舍不得砍的是真妈妈，同意国王的是假妈妈。这个故事据说体现了所罗门王的智慧。

两人都为了正确的目的耍手段，为什么唐太宗挨骂，所罗门被称赞？是不是因为所罗门的办法比较需要IQ，而唐太宗的办法比较下三烂。或者因为不同的道德观？

A very touching music video.

2007-01-17T23:08:00.000-08:00

A comment by a viewer:

"Some time, it is hard to be a adult."

A Quote by Jean-Jacques Laffont

2006-11-18T23:09:00.000-08:00

Neoclassical (economic) theory can be described as systematic exploration of the implications of rational behavior in economics. Situations of uncertainty sometimes take the neoclassical paradigm of rationality to the limits of acceptability as a description of economic behavior. Nevertheless, if we consider neoclassical theory as an approximation to be tested empirically, it continues to have descriptive power. Indeed, the potential for falsification, which distinguishes neoclassical theory from some quasi-metaphysical theories, is its major asset. The neoclassical paradigm also leads to the construction of a relatively simple normative theory, which provides amode of thought for political economics.

by Jean-Jacques Laffont in The Economics of Uncertainty and Information

Unawareness is related to

2006-11-08T08:12:00.000-08:00

Blind spots.

Read more!

波士顿，缅因三日游计划草案

2006-07-24T18:34:00.000-07:00

出发地：Stony Brook.

目的地：Boston, MA. and Bar Harbor, ME.

第一天: 周五, 早晨8点取车出发，中午1-2点到Boston. 吃午饭。

下午见陈瑶。买螃蟹。看风景。晚上吃螃蟹。

第二天：周六，早晨8点出发，中午1-2点到Bar Harbor. 吃午饭。
下午拿地图，开车绕圈。晚上吃龙虾。

第三天：周日，一早看日出。游山。中午吃饭后出发。沿原路回Boston。
夜里住在Boston motel.

第四天：周一，上午回Stony Brook.

参考资料：bluewoods

Read more!

[转载]朱令律师对网友为朱令呼吁的建议-兼论证据制度改革

2006-06-02T19:00:00.000-07:00

朱令律师对网友为朱令呼吁的建议-兼论证据制度改革

近来广大网友不断的为朱令所遭受的不公进行呼吁，我们是非常感谢的，但对于其中的问题我们希望网友能够注意，以期达到更好的效果和不被一些别有用心的人利用。

网友们对于凶手的凶残和没有人性的发自内心的憎恨，是我们都理解的，我们也是一样的，但是过于使用不文明语言，反而会授人以柄，使铊们有在舆论上封杀我们的借口，所以在语言措辞的选择上，要多分析、多讲道理，以理服人，争取各方面的支持。

铊们指责我们网友的主要论点就是我们的证据问题，就是要“疑罪从无”，我们推动案件深入的关键也是证据问题，这个案件目前公安机关掌握最多的证据，我们律师也有部分证据，而网友就只能知晓网络上已经公开的事实，如果网友没有直接证据在手，说话不当就会被扣上疑人偷斧的帽子，尤其是我们针对高层领导、人大和政协的代表时更为如此，因为铊们与这些掌握中国命运的人对话比咱们更加方便，而我们和网友只能是反映情况，缺乏对话和解释的机会。

但网友们就真的没有工作可以做了吗？我们仔细分析了案件的证据潜在问题，发现并不是这样的，我们认为网友工作的重点应当在推动国家的法制建设，完善证据制度方面，在制度层面上解决这个案件的问题。

我们的法律体系从有罪推定到无罪推定，并且禁止了刑讯逼供，现在还有很多人在推动审讯中的嫌疑人沉默权，这些都是我国法制不断进步的表现，我们还要看到在法制建设的过程中还要有很多配套的制度到完善和建立，嫌疑人不被刑讯逼供，甚至还有权沉默，那么我们指望嫌疑人能够在审讯中主动认罪那是非常幼稚的，这就必须要求能够在零口供同时无罪推定的情况下能够给罪犯定罪，如果没有合理的证据制度进行配套，使零口供定罪仅仅存在理论上的可能，那么就是要么按照潜规则进行变相逼供，要么就是放纵罪犯。

现在我们看一看熟人间的投毒的一类案件的证据问题，对于这一类案件，带毒器物上的指纹是不能成为证据的，因为熟人拿一下很正常；有人看见铊下毒是不能成为证据的，因为铊加入的东西是毒药吗？那需要化验证明的；一个人看见是不能成为证据的，因为是一对一证明力相等，需要二个以上同时看见！如此想一想，对于这类投毒的案件，没有口供如何能够破案？这种条件下没有口供取得充分的证据仅仅是理论上的可能！

这个问题在国外是解决得很好的，方法就是采取陪审团的心证制度，只要是陪审团内心确信了，就是足够的证据！所以网络上有很多网友列举出比朱令案证据少得多的国外判例，在那里没有人能够怀疑陪审团的判断，陪审团的判断就是最充分的证据，在国外司法界有一句很强的话：陪审团已经做出决定！

举个例子说明这种差别，例如大家知道的泰森的强奸案，二人在屋子里谁也不知道发生了什么，是强迫还是自愿，这情况在美国就是上法庭，由陪审团内心去判断，泰森就是被陪审团确认有罪的！而在中国的司法界如果审判这个案件会怎样的呢？如果泰森的名气大，就会直接告诉受害人证据不足啊，受害人和公安是无法找到强迫的人证和物证的；但是如果有领导批示了，必须要破案了，就会要千方百计利用中国公安破案的潜规则获得泰森的口供，但是光有口供是不行的，可是泰森的口供如果能够与受害人的控诉细节相吻合，就能够定罪了，当然如果没有人刻意陷害进行提示性审讯，口供能够与受害人的控诉细节相吻合是不可能的，冤枉的情况是不会发生的，但是口供怎样取得呢？我不说这里的网友心里也都明白。这里请广大网友体会朱令案在对待嫌疑人和证据等问题上与上面的例子的异同。

而本案还非常巧合的是，恰恰有相对充分的证据，按照铊的声明，清华大学提供了铊是唯一的接触者，如果只有一个人有投毒条件，那么这就是一个充分的证据，其后由铊的近亲属提供的可能存在编导、剪辑和特技的视听资料作为反证，其证明效力低下不说，即使有人可以盗取，这种可能性的存在又有多大呢？所以本案在证据规则确立的情况下实际已经是证据充分了。可能有人会认为这种证据链条不强，事实也确实没有取得口供的情况强，但我们不能把问题绝对化，我们从小在政治课上就学习真理是相对的道理，把问题绝对化是形而上学的错误。进一步举例说明这个问题，例如：嫌疑人如果有二个人目击铊作案，我们就可以给他定罪了，但是在事实上也是存在这两个人同时诬陷铊的可能；再进一步讲即使有十个人目击铊作案，也是可能这十个人同时诬陷铊，所以如果把问题绝对化，那将是对于罪犯的极大纵容。

作者：朱令律师 2006-6-2 18:16 　回复此发言

2 朱令律师对网友为朱令呼吁的建议

本案中的绝大多数网友，在此之前都不认识朱令和孙维以及清华92级物化班的学生，为什么能够通过网络的分析，内心确信凶手是谁，这个过程和陪审团的内心确信的形成过程是一致的，这就已经说明本案具有在陪审团制度下给铊定罪的充分证据，但是在中国的体系下，我们现在需要的是一套证据标准，在此标准下能够达到破获大多数案件的目的，按照日前公安部门的说法，对于重大案件的破案率要达到85%。

时至今日，中国的证据立法进程还没有开始，中国还没有一部《证据法》，在没有《证据法》的情况下如何能够不刑讯又无罪推定？本案在有罪推定时是很容易给嫌疑人定罪的，到了无罪推定关键是怎样建立我们的证据制度保证将绝大多数的罪犯绳之以法。按照我前面提到的情况，对于整个投毒的一类案件，实证是非常困难的，不能片面强调不能有冤案的可能而放纵绝大多数的罪犯。

按照嫌疑人的马甲所说：有99%的可能性是铊，而1%的可能性不是就不能冤枉一个人。对于这种观点，我们以统计的观点来看，在类似案件足够多的时候，这种情况就是在100个案件里为了不冤枉一个好人而放纵99个坏蛋，这些坏蛋被放纵后可能要残害几百个好人，如果情况是这样，我们就要问一句：这种制度是好制度吗？

制度出了问题，就要改进制度，在法制先进的国家，采取陪审团制度，陪审团的判断错误率也是很大的，但是没有人能够说陪审团有错案，原因陪审团成员是由双方一致挑选的随机社会人员，虽有错案但是保证了公平。同时这些国家对于重大的问题，都是采取的有罪推定的，比如说反恐，比如说金融案件，比如说公共安全案件等等，有谁见过中央情报局说案犯有权保持沉默了？朱令案件，如果能够进行公平公开的审理，能够采取与其它案件同样的标准，那么就是谁也不能指责的。

我们朱令这个案件，现在就要宣传让世人明白，按照目前的证据制度缺失的情况，投毒案件的破案是很难不违规违法进行的，北大投毒的罪犯在法庭上还公开说过他们打他的话，如果其他案件均是按照潜规则进行操作，就本案例外，那么对于朱令来说就是极大的不公平！我们不能要求违法的进行刑讯或按照当前的潜规则办理，但是我们可以提出完善中国证据制度的要求，可以提出按照当前制度，对于整个投毒的一类案件不刑讯获得口供，就基本没有破案可能的实际问题，让领导和社会明白我们的证据制度的问题所在，促进中国证据制度的建立，使破案均不需要使用潜规则，这才是广大网友为朱令呼吁奔走更深层次的社会意义和价值的体现。

案件95年发生被拖延到97年无罪推定的确立才审讯嫌疑人，让嫌疑人享受到了本来不应享受的无罪推定，但是事实不能抹杀，我们一定会有无罪推定下如何将罪犯绳之以法的证据规则，这种必须依靠口供否则只有理论上的破案可能的情况不会持续太久的，铊们可以通过自己的政治影响阻碍一个案件的进程，但是如果想以此阻碍中国司法制度的发展，那就只能是自不量力的螳臂挡车。

所以我们网友要认识到这个案件深层次的证据制度问题，呼吁有关领导和立法机关考虑如何建立零口供的证据标准，如何尽早的进行《证据法》的立法工作，使得各类案件在不刑讯取得口供的情况下能够保持较高的破案率，维护绝大多数公民的人权，这么做我们网友就是在推动中国的进步，任何人也没有理由干涉，就不存在所谓的“证据不足、网络暴民等等”问题，铊们也就失去了封杀我们能够采取的冠冕堂皇的理由。

投毒的嫌疑人依靠不正常的拖延等到了无罪推定，我们朱令一定能够等到中国证据制度的建立把罪犯绳之以法，这一天早晚一定会到来，罪犯等死的日子并不好过。为了这一天的早日到来，需要大家的共同努力，这是我们每一个人的社会责任！大家一起共同奋斗吧！！

张捷律师李海霞律师

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[转载] 由小破猫的赌局想到的

2006-05-24T08:04:00.000-07:00

发信人: yaz (柏林低温武警), 信区: Soccer

我并不是要对赌局的内容作足球方面的分析，因为已经很久没有关注球队和球员的细节了，没有这方面的发言权。在看到小破猫的第一个赌局（德甲亚军）后我就对赌庄和赔率的机制产生了好奇心，于是就自己做了一点分析。这赌博和赌庄的历史悠久，毫无疑问，其机制早就被人研究透了。但可能也不是所有同学都对此了解的很清楚，特别是没有赌过球的，比如我这样的，所以我把我的分析写出来可能有一点点意义。以下完全是我闭门造车的理论，现实中的赌庄是不是这么回事，我不知道。如有错误，请不吝指正。

关键词：赌庄，赌客，赔率，期望收益，名义概率分布，实际概率分布，信息对称，信息不对称

一、赌庄的实质

赌庄是利用赌客的侥幸心理牟利的商业机构。赌庄和赌客之间的生意是一个零和游戏，赌庄的盈利就是赌客的亏损，反之亦然，因为在这个生意中钱的数量是守恒的。赌庄是要盈利的，它靠的不是侥幸心理而是规则的设计。如果规则的设计使赌庄从统计意义上讲要输钱，那它是慈善机构；如果规则的设计使赌庄从统计意义上讲不亏不盈，那它是二百五（还得承担维持运营的成本）。规则，必须使赌庄对赌客占有优势，而规则的核心是“赔率”。

所谓赔率，就是赌客押注押对后获得的回报比例。赌博的基本模式是这样的：在一轮赌博开始前理论上有N个可能结果，赌庄分别给每个可能的结果指定一个赔率，然后赌客押注。赌博结束后这N个结果中的一个或多个成为现实，这时赌庄就根据赔率对押对的赌注给予回报，而押错的赌注就被赌庄收为己有。比如赔率R=3, 如果赌客押对了，那么他连本带利拿回300%，净获利200%。因此，如果赌客押对，他的净获利比例是(R-1)。

那么，赌庄具体是怎么靠赔率的设定来盈利的呢？这就涉及到了“期望收益”的概念。我们这里说的期望收益是一个比例，它的数学定义是指同样的赌博重复无穷多次后，赌庄或赌客的平均收益比例（总收益和总赌注的比例）。具体计算公式，以赌客的期望收益G为例是: G=p(R-1)-q(100%), 其中R是赔率，p是赌客押对的概率，q是押错的概率。因为不是押对就是押错，所以p+q=1，于是我们就得到G=(pR-1). 期望收益是一个统计理论值，这意味着两点：一，在很多情况下这个值可以预先计算或估算；二，这个期望收益和实际收益是两码事。

如果赌客的期望收益是负的，赌庄就对赌客占有优势，就能期望盈利。因为赌庄是长期经营，所以期望收益基本上能够成为现实。看一个特定赌博对谁有利不能只看一轮或几轮的实际结果，甚至不能看谁在赌博中获胜的概率大，而要根据期望收益作判断。为了更清楚地说明这一点我们来看一个特殊的例子。比如甲乙二人玩掷骰子（只有一个骰子）的游戏，甲做庄家，规定：每一轮游戏乙可以从6个可能的点数中选出4个，如果掷出这4个中的1个就算乙赢，赔率为1.2。显然，乙押对的概率是2/3，大于押错的概率1/3。这个游戏就玩了一轮，乙押100元，结果赢了，获利20元。但是，在这个游戏中乙的期望收益是(2/3)(1.2)-1= -20%。于是，尽管乙押对的概率比押错的大，尽管实际上乙也赢了钱，我们必须说，这个游戏从规则上讲是对甲有利的。如果这个游戏玩的次数非常巨大的话，甲大致上会赢得乙所押总赌注的20%。从这个例子也可以看出，因为赌博是一个持续性的生意，决定赌庄业绩的就是他的期望收益，只要这个数字好它就可以高枕无忧地赚钱，而绝不用在乎一城一地、一时之得失。

我看到过赌庄“抽头”的说法，好像是指赌客赢钱后交一定比例给赌庄。其实同样的效果可以通过对赔率作调整实现。比如掷骰子押大小，赔率为1.8，赌庄另外抽头5%。于是，赌客如果押对就净赢赌注的71%，而这和赔率为1.71、赌庄不抽头的效果是一样的。所以，在我们的分析中可以不必考虑“抽头”的情况。

为了更进一步分析赌庄指定赔率的机制，我们分别考虑赌庄与赌客之间信息对称和不对称的情况。

二、信息对称的情况

这种情况是指赌庄和赌客对赌博的内容掌握同样的信息，因此对各种可能结果出现的概率分布有一致的认识。为简单明确起见，我们假定：一、赌庄和赌客掌握着完善的信息，他们对概率分布的判断是正确的、符合实际的概率分布的。二、赌客都是理智的，在赌博中会做对自己最有利的选择。

其实这种信息对称的情况是很普遍的，赌场里的大部分赌博就是这样的。比如“骰宝”，“轮盘赌”等，各种可能结果出现的概率分布是可以准确计算的，并无任何秘密可言。当然，我们最关心的赌球就不是这样的，那属于更复杂的信息不对称的情况。但是，研究较简单的信息对称的情况可以使我们了解赌博机制中的几个重要方面，从而能够进一步理解
信息不对称的情况。

在信息对称的情况下，我们有一个根本性的原理。

期望收益一致原理：赌庄设定赔率的理智选择是使赌客的各种押注选项的期望收益相等。

这是因为，如果不同押注选项的期望收益有高有低，那么赌客就只会选最高的期望收益押注，其他期望收益较低的押注选项等于作废。仍然以掷骰子押大小为例，因为大小出现的概率相等，为了使期望收益一致，大小的赔率应该等。如果赌庄偏偏规定大点数的赔率是1.9，小点数的赔率是1.7，那么理智的赌客只会押大不押小。当然，在这种情况下赌庄仍然能期待5%的收益，可是这种导致部分押注选项形同虚设的赔率设定岂不荒唐可笑？这等于是一种行为艺术，在有不同赌庄可选的情况下，很多赌客大概不会去搞这种行为艺术的赌庄玩。实际上，赌庄把大小的赔率都设为1.9同样能期待5%的收益，一点都不会少赚。

有了这个原理，我们就能从赔率反推出赌庄所判断的概率分布。比如在一个赌博中可能出现N个不同的结果，为了简单明确起见，我们假设这N个结果是互相排斥的，实际只能出现一个。假定赌庄给出的赔率分别是R1, R2,…RN，而赌庄对这N个结果出现的概率分布的判断是p1, p2,…pN。根据期望一致原理和我们前面得到的期望受益的计算公式，我们有(p1)(R1)-1=(p2)(R2)-1=…=(pN)(RN)-1。这是(N-1)个方程，再加上概率分布本身满足的方程p1+p2+…+pN=1 总共N个线性方程正好可以确定N个未知数p1, p2,…pN。

这个从赔率计算出的概率分布称为“名义概率分布”，它是赌庄通过公布赔率而名义上宣布的自己对概率分布的判断。在信息对称的情况下，这个被声称的判断和赌客们的判断是一致的，也是准确的。赌庄确定赔率的过程是和上面的计算过程相反的，它先通过自己判断的概率分布计算出各押注选项之间的赔率比例，然后根据自己想要的期望收益决定赔率的具体数值。举个例子，在一个特殊的轮盘赌的游戏中，转盘被分为3个面积不等的扇区，涂着3种不同的颜色。赌庄给这三种颜色指定的赔率分别是2，3，4。这样，赌庄相当于宣布说“我赌庄认为这三种颜色被指针选中的概率分别是6/13，4/13，3/13，我赌庄之所以这么认为是因为这三个扇区的面积之比是6:4:3，这一点你们也知道。我赌庄根据概率分布给出的赔率是2，3，4，所以不管你押哪一种颜色，你的期望收益都是-1/13=-7.7%，如果你想碰碰运气就请随意挑一种颜色下注，而我赌庄就打算盈利7.7%。”在这个游戏中，如果赌庄想盈利26.2%，那么只要把赔率设为1.6，2.4，3.2就可以了。这个新的赔率对应的仍然是原来那个概率分布。

三、信息不对称的情况

这种情况是指赌庄和赌客对赌博的内容掌握的信息不同，因而对概率分布的判断也不同。赌球正是这样一种情况。这种情况相当复杂，因为很难对各方掌握的信息乃至他们对概率分布的判断做出精确的评估，而且赌客的下注选择还受到心理因素的影响。一般来说，赌庄掌握着比赌客多得多的资源，能够获得更详尽更准确的信息，因此能够比大多数赌客更准确地判断概率分布（操纵比赛结果的非法行为我们就不考虑了）。这里我们不打算对非对称信息的情况作详细的分析，因为那过于复杂了。我们要分析的是，赌庄利用信息上的优势获得比“名义期望收益”（用名义概率分布和赔率算出的期望收益）更大收益的基本机制。

仍然为简单明确起见，我们做一些理想化的假设。我们假设赌庄掌握着完善的信息，能够准确地计算出实际的概率分布。我们还假设不同的个体赌客掌握着相同的信息，对概率分布有着同样的判断，而赌庄也知道赌客们的这个判断。最后我们要假设赌庄给出的名义期望收益是一个规定的数值，比如说10%。这是一个合理的假设，因为不同的赌庄之间会有竞争，最后就会形成规范，名义期望收益趋于一致，否则那些把名义期望收益定的较高的赌庄就会失去生意；这个机制和不同押注选项的期望收益一致的原理是相似的。

我们通过一个例子来看看赌庄能搞什么名堂。比如甲乙两队将争夺某锦标赛冠军，这两个队势均力敌，赌客们认为两队得冠军的概率是五五开。但是实际上甲队放了烟幕弹，他们声称受伤不能出场的主力得分手其实早已伤愈，比赛开始时就会出现在先发阵容里。而赌庄暗中掌握了这个情况，从而准确地计算出了甲队夺冠的概率是60%。我们来分析一下这时候赌庄采取不同行动带来的效果。不管赌庄怎么设定赔率，必须满足名义期望收益是10%（对赌客来说是-10%）。

1. 按照赌客的判断确定名义概率分布。这个概率分布是50%，50%，再加上名义期望收益等于10%的条件，甲乙两队夺冠的赔率设定为1.8，1.8。那么实际的期望收益是多少呢？押甲队夺冠的真正期望收益是G1=(1.8)(60%)-1=8%，押乙队夺冠的真正期望收益是G2=(1.8)(40%)-1=-28%。因为赌客认为两队机会是五五开，而且赌庄给出的名义概率分布也是这样的，所以最后押甲队的赌注和押乙队的赌注大致相等（现实中下注的赌客很多，偶然性比较小，反之如果只有两三个人下注这个结论就不成立了），这样一来赌庄的实际期望收益是(-8%+28%)/2=10%，和名义期望收益相等，没有更多的好处。

2. 使名义概率分布等于实际概率分布。这个概率分布是60%，40%，再加上名义期望收益等于10%的条件，甲乙两队夺冠的赔率设定为1.5，2.25。在这种情况下，因为赌庄是诚实的，所以实际期望收益和名义期望收益是相等的，都是10%，赌庄也没有更多的好处。当然，在这种情况下有些赌客会产生想法，他们想，两队势均力敌，而乙队的赔率高，押乙队有利！可是这些对赌庄都无所谓，因为甲乙两队的实际期望收益相等，不管分别有多少比例的赌注押在甲队和乙队上，赌庄的实际期望收益都是10%。

3. 使名义概率分布介于赌客的判断和实际概率分布之间，比如定为55%，45%，再加上名义期望收益等于10%的条件，甲乙两队夺冠的赔率设定为1.636，2。押甲队夺冠的真正期望收益是G1=(1.636)(60%)-1=-1.84%，押乙队夺冠的真正期望收益是G2=(2)(40%)-1=-20%。在这种情况下，如果所有的赌客完全信任赌庄，放弃自己的判断（有的赌客可能本来就没有什么主见）从而认为甲乙夺冠的概率分别为55%，45%，而且两队的期望收益相等，那么它们的赌注也会在两队之间平均分配，于是赌庄的实际期望收益是(1.84%+20%)/2=10.92%。这已经好于名义期望收益了。如果所有的赌客都坚持自己的看法，那么他们就会认为押乙队有利，从而把赌注都押在乙队上，这样赌庄的实际期望收益就是20%，大大好于名义期望收益。如果所有的赌客都认为赌庄是做了手脚，引诱自己去押对自己不利的乙队，那么他们就会把赌注都押在甲队上，从而使赌庄的实际期望收益只有1.84%。在现实中这三种赌客都存在，如果他们的人数（以及赌注）各占1/3，那么赌庄的实际期望收益是10.92%，略好于名义期望收益。但是我估计第三种赌客的人数（以及赌注）会比较少，所以赌庄的实际期望收益可以比名义期望收益高出可观的一块。

总而言之，赌庄掌握着更好的信息，这就是优势，通过在赔率上做文章还可以把这个优势转化为更多的利润。我可以想象在现实中赌庄有很多手段可以使用，尽量提高自己的实际期望收益。比如雇用民意测验公司调查球迷的判断，根据自己信息的更新和公开出现的各种相关新闻（对赌客的判断有影响）来随时调整赔率，等等等。

但是话又说回来，赌庄盈利从根本讲是要靠名义期望收益，就是公开的、大大方方理直气壮对赌客们宣布的那部分收益，而在赔率上做文章只能是锦上添花。这是因为赌庄在信息方面的优势不是绝对的，有专门的赌博咨询公司，他们雇佣专家给赌客下注提供建议，收取一定费用。因此在信息方面赌庄和赌客之间进行着“军备竞赛”。如果没有制度上的名义期望收益打底，那么赌庄本身和一个碰运气的赌徒无异，尽管他可能是一个高明的赌徒。

四、小破猫的赌局

我们先分析其中一个比较简单的：世界杯成绩最差的国家。其他两个复杂一些，以后再另文分析。我们根据小破猫给出的赔率算出名义概率分布和名义期望收益，你猜怎么着，赌客的名义期望收益是+15.92%！也就是说小破猫的名义期望收益是-15.92%，打算做慈善机构了。具体数字粘贴不方便，也放到以后的文章里。

Read more!

A new question about modeling information

2006-05-05T00:47:00.000-07:00

I read a graduate economics textbook by Jehle and Reny tonight. The generalization of utility theory based on preference relations makes me think about such a question:

Can interactive information modeling be generalized similarly. Savage has done a job of using preference relations to understand beliefs. But there is no interation among decision makers.

Is belief similar to utility in the sense that it can be generalized? what can we learn from such generalization? what can be the role of multidimentionality (awareness) of information in this research?

So here are many abstract questions to address. It may be a nice topic to study for a long term in the future, if there is a chance.

河南农民十年自费拚环保获中国环保最高奖

2006-04-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

2006-04-28

据中国时报报道，河南农民宋克明一九九六年因怀疑父亲胃癌与当地环境污染有关，开始走上自费调查污染之路，十年间散尽家财，以致家庭贫困、儿子辍学、房屋破旧，但他仍矢志不渝。而这只执着的小虾米竟然扳倒了一群大鲸鱼，有关部门以他的调查为线索，关闭了上百家造纸厂、小水泥厂、冶炼厂等重污染企业。本月二十一日，宋克明前往北京获颁中国环保单项个人最高奖「地球奖」。

《郑州晚报》报导，宋克明是河南省新乡市长垣县农民，十年间为环保花费十余万元人民币，至今其环保工作不仅于其家乡，已扩大至黄河流域。「地球奖」是由中国环境新闻工作者协会等单位共同设立，旨在表彰社会各界人士在保护环境突出贡献，今年大陆共有九人获奖。

获奖后，河南媒体到他家采访，屋内一个标有「地球奖」字样的奖杯与杂物一起摆在正中间的桌子上。他说，「真不好意思，不像一个家的样子。没有办法，钱都用到环保上了，只能这样」。

疑父胃癌与污染有关散尽家财调查

住在吕楼村的宋克明没有钱盖新房，村里头最破旧的房子就是宋家，而村里很多人家都盖起了楼房，与这些新房子相比，宋家显得更加破旧，低矮的院墙，裂缝的房屋、折断的电视天线。唯一反映主人身分的是，这个家庭对垃圾进行了分类。

宋克明长期担任吕楼村村委会主任，直到二○○五年才退下来。一九九三年，宋克明所在的村庄受到当地一家冶炼厂的粉尘污染，一些村民因此患上了疾病。宋的父亲罹患癌症死亡。父亲的去世对宋克明的打击很大，他发誓一定不能再因为环境恶化危害村民的身体健康。

为了改变家乡污染环境，宋克明踏上了污染调查之路，在他的不断努力下最终迫使这家冶炼厂关闭。

宋克明不仅关心工厂污染问题。他还把目光投向河流污染问题，二○○二年，宋克明对家乡附近的天然文岩渠进行历时十天、行程二百余公里的调查取证，取得了大量的证据，并向有关部门进行反映。

迫冶炼厂关门让河渠变清鱼虾重现

天然文岩渠是河南省污染最严重的河流之一，属于黄河下游的支流，由于污染严重，渠边的野草枯黄，岸边的农民用水困难，农作因为缺水而乾旱。为结合更多环保力量，宋克明个人创办了全大陆县级第一家、黄河流域第一家民间环保组织─长垣县绿色未来环境保护协会。并在二○○二年时自费召开「环境保护与可持续发展」万人环保大会，那次会议上共发放「保护母亲河」倡议书一万多份，他请人大代表递交的五份议案也受到政府有关部门重视。

二○○三年，宋克明在黄河滩区湿地和国家级豫北黄河故道鸟类湿地保护区开展了大规模的保护鸟类活动。二○○四年，宋克明联合有关部门开展了「保护黄河、爱心传递」活动。今年宋克明个人筹建了全大陆第一家民间组织「黄河民间监护站」。如今，其家乡的河渠变清，鱼虾也重新出现，宋克明的环保工作没白做。

虽有得奖，但由于仍受资金之困，宋克明的环保协会目前仍与卖书画的小商家挤在一起办公。

2005-09-18T06:43:00.000-07:00

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Friedman's Suggestions (from mit.bbs)

2005-04-28T22:26:00.000-07:00

PRINCIPLES OF ECONOMICS

Contents

Have An Agenda, and Know Why It's Important

Be Awake; Look Around

Be Ambitious, But Not Too Ambitions

Have Staying Power

Decide Who Is the Audience, and Learn How to Reach It

Keep Things in Perspective

Most kinds of intellectual endeavor hold out the prospect of a particular satisfaction, that associated with expanding the possibilities for thinking about ourselves and the world in which we live. Economics is no exception. To be sure, economics does have its particularities--an idiosyncratic mixture of a priori theorizing and data-based empiricism, a commitment to apply the scientific method despite the inability to carry out replicable or even controlled experiments, a closeness to certain contentious political issues, and so on--and as economists we are rightly aware of them. But in the end it is the similarity to other avenues of the intellectual enterprise that is more compelling, including not just the physical sciences but history, philosophy, and even literature and the arts. As a consequence, the core principles of what makes for good economics are probably pretty similar to the route to finding satisfaction in most other intellectual pursuits: Have an agenda, and know why it's important. Be awake; look around. Be ambitious but not over-ambitious. Have staying power. Decide who is the audience, and learn how to reach it. Keep things in perspective.

These principles may sound obvious, or empty, or both, but I doubt that when I first became an economist I understood them in the way I do now, and I certainly don't pretend that I have unfailingly adhered to them at every point since. Economics, again in common with so many other endeavors, is very much a matter of learning by doing. I think I have learned, along the way, about what the satisfactions of doing economics are and what general working principles are helpful for achieving them. My object here is therefore not so much to report what I have done, or even what I always now do, but to extract from both what I believe works best.

Have An Agenda, and Know Why It's Important

The agenda of economics is to understand an important aspect of the human experience: why we behave as we do in certain contexts, both individually and collectively; what consequences follow from the fact that we behave in this way; and in light of this behavior and its predictable consequences, what we might do, either individually or collectively, to improve our lot in this world. Saying this, especially to trained professionals, may seem either trivial or trite. But it is surely not trivial, and if it is trite it is also very often forgotten.

A distinction between empirical and axiomatic approaches to the questions at hand is familiar in many sciences, and economics is again no exception. In my own work I have always felt more comfortable following an empirical approach, by which I mean starting with some aspect of economic behavior that we actually observe and seeking an explanation. Why do aggregate production and income grow faster at some times than others, and sometimes not at all? Why do interest rates vary, and why do they covary among one another, as they do? How do businesses decide how much to borrow, and in what form? The axiomatic approach, starting with a few first principles and logically determining what consequences follow from specific additional assumptions, has been just as central to economic inquiry if not more so. But the greater risk, I usually think, is that of applying impeccable logic to proceed from assumption to conclusion when neither bears much actual connection to the behavior of the real people and institutions, and hence the real economies, that I regard as our subject's proper object of study.

Under either approach, however, it is essential to be able to say why the effort is worth while in the first place. The initial question I try to answer for myself whenever I embark on a fresh project--when I begin a new (at least for me) line of research, or pursue an intriguing loose end left by work I have been doing, or offer a new course for students--is "Why am I doing this?" What can I learn, and why might that be valuable? Is the behavior I want to examine important in its own right? Or is the knowledge to be gained important because it might shed light on some related question? In that case, why is this other question important? The main reason I find it more comfortable to begin work from an empirical direction is that that way I find it easier to answer these questions--and they can often be hard questions--about what I am doing and why.

By contrast, setting out to do research without thinking through why it is otentially worth doing is like trying archery in the dark. There is some small probability that any randomly directed arrow will reach the target, and with enough bowmen taking enough blind shots, inevitably some will. Similarly, some few economists who are entirely unaware of the broader context that might make others value their findings will probably hit the bull's eye anyway. But the likelihood of doing so is far greater if a keen sensitivity to just that broader context shapes not only the selection of the question to be attacked but also the means of investigating it. Some empirical findings, and some theorems, become important because they give answers to questions people genuinely want answered; others don't because they don't.

The immediate implication of this seemingly obvious point is that, with limited time to spend, not everything that is doable is worth doing. Specifically, not every extension to a theorem is worth proving, nor is every empirical observation worth explaining. Even more to the point, especially for purposes of younger researchers, the mere fact that so-and-so has published a paper on some subject or other does not by itself make that subject worth further investigation. (It may not have merited so-and-so's original paper either, but that's a different matter.) Reading the journals is an excellent way to learn research methods; it's a poor way to choose research topics.

What does lead to good research questions? Here too, I have usually found the attractions of the empirical approach compelling. If the object of economics in the first place is to understand certain aspects of behavior by individuals and institutions, or its consequences for whole economies, then the most straightforward way to find simulating topics is to observe that behavior. For behavior in the aggregate, that mostly means listening to the questions concerned people are asking. For individual behavior, just watch. For behavior by institutions, find a way to watch.

When I was a graduate student, I took on a series of either part-time or limited-term assignments for various components of the Federal Reserve System. One was to study the conceptual structure underlying the Board staff's presentation of information to the Federal Open Market Committee. (The key question was how to structure the conditionality of future economic outcomes on the Committee's own monetary policy decisions.) Another was to serve on a committee. made up of representatives from the Board and some of the regional Banks, to recommend how best to introduce money growth targets into the Open Market Committee's policy decisions. (In those days--as is the case again today--the Federal Reserve didn't use money growth targets.) The first job I took after finishing my formal education was working at a New York investment banking firm. I wasn't in the economics department (the firm didn't have one at the time) but rather divided my time between the part of the business that worked with corporate clients on their bond issues and the part that sold the securities to institutional investors. Much of my subsequent research--on the theory of economic policy, on targets and instruments of monetary policy, on corporate borrowing decisions, on portfolio behavior and the determination of interest rates, on the role of credit markets in influencing macroeconomic activity--grew out of these early first-hand exposures to actual economic behavior. For just the same reason, in more recent years I have valued highly the opportunity to work with some financial institutions on the kind of sustained basis over time that has let me watch, and ask questions about, how they conduct their business. (By contrast, I rarely accept one-shot assignments.)

Regardless of whether research is empirical or axiomatic, however, the question of importance remains essential. The value to me of those early opportunities to see some interesting institutions at close hand was not just in suggesting research questions but in showing me who wanted to know the answers to what questions, and why. The object--the source of satisfaction from the enterprise as a whole--is not to maximize the number of published papers to one's credit but to shed as much useful light on the subject as possible. If the first question I ask myself is why I think a potential topic is important, the second is who will be interested, or better yet surprised--or even better still, discoretired--by the potential findings. In much of my work on monetary policy, for example, the objective has been to show that key aspects of behavior in the economy in which we happen to live make mechanistic rules for central bank conduct unhelpful. I thought that work was worth doing (and I still think so) not just because the subject is inherently important but also because so many people prefer to think the opposite. The ultimate question for any researcher is always how people will see that particular slice of the subject differently because he or she has worked on it.

Be Awake; Look Around

If the objective is to shape one's own research agenda in light of the actual behavior we observe and seek to explain, it helps to pay attention. New phenomena--the corporate debt explosion of the 1980s, for example, or the OPEC oil price increases in the 1970s--are especially interesting, either because they represent a new form of behavior or because they provide a new window for analyzing aspects of economic behavior that are already familiar but only from other lights. But it is striking how much there is to learn from simply watching people and institutions do what they have always done, or from listening to people describe what they do.

One reason this kind of observation of the ordinary is so important is that economic thinking (that is, the thinking of professional economists) is so often blinkered by the assumptions we impose and, moreover, that those assumptions are themselves so arbitrary. Aspects of everyday behavior that do not fit conveniently within the framework determined by whatever assumptions are fashionable at the moment remain, for all practical purposes, invisible. An example on which I worked for a while, alas in the days before doing so was fully respectable, is credit rationing. It is embarrassing today to recall the air of derisive ridicule with which distinguished economists not long ago dismissed even the possibility that lenders might adopt any strategy other than raising the interest rates they charged so as to bring loan demand into equality with loan supply. The fact that almost everybody who knew at close hand about loan markets thought bankers did sometimes ration credit, and said so, was simply no match for the fact that there was no formal maximizing model capable of rationalizing such behavior. But as soon as someone thought to bring to bear in a formal way such notions as asymmetric information, adverse selection and moral hazard, then of course credit rationing might occur, and a subject once better ignored in polite professional company became open game for accepted scientific investigation.

The point is not that simplifying assumptions (in this case, perfect information) are not useful--indeed, they are necessary to carry out any serious analysis--but that the conventionally accepted simplifying assumptions of the day are often highly arbitrary and hence subject to change, and therefore that there is no shame in choosing new ones when observed behavior doesn't fit snugly within the usuals. Just as for a long time the prevailing theoretically correct thinking rejected even the possibility of credit rationing, for a time (mercifully brief) the prevailing theoretically correct opinion took on faith that because people's expectations were rational, pre-announced monetary policy actions simply couldn't affect output or employment. In this case it wasn't long before numerous economists pointed out that the models that gave rise to this conclusion rested not only on a quite specific (and, on reflection, perhaps unsuitable) notion of "rationality" but also on a host of other questionable assumptions like frictionless adjustment of prices and wages. Even so, for some years every conference on macroeconomics was forced to listen to the repeated assertion that economists would have to proceed as if this model were a good characterization of the world because "it's the only well worked out model we've got." Here again, the presumption was that behavior simply could not exist because there was (as yet) no maximizing model to account for it.

For purposes of doing theoretical economics, the antidote to such wrong-headedness is to look for new assumptions. As in the credit rationing example, maybe information isn't perfect. As in the monetary policy example, maybe markets don't adjust frictionlessly. The range of conventional assumptions subject to challenge is enormous. Maybe personal utilities aren't independent. Maybe aggregation does matter. Maybe the dependence of this on that isn't linear. (Much interesting literature in recent years has usefully explored conditions that give rise to multiple equilibria, but of course that possibility follows immediately when the relevant behavioral relationships are nonlinear.)

For purposes of empirical work, the message is that an observed phenomenon is no less interesting to study just because nobody has written down a maximizing model to explain it. Indeed, in that case empirical findings may be the best clue to what assumptions need changing in order to deliver just such a model. As I have listened over time to the questions that my friends in public policy institutions and in private business firms ask, I am often struck by how little we--economists--have to say about what they want to know. (Sometimes I am struck by how much we know, but here my point is different.) In part, these lacunae persist because it is genuinely hard to learn about some kinds of behavior and their consequences. But in some cases we have just not asked the right questions.

A whole other reason for paying attention to what is happening, and to what people are saying, is that the behavior we study changes. Not behavior in the sense of the ultimate underlying "meta-model," of course; but what economists actually study is not the meta-model but behavior in one usually tiny piece of it that takes the rest as given. For just this reason, institutions--legal arrangements, business practices, social mores, and so on--matter importantly for many aspects of economic behavior. And when those institutions change, economic relationships that depend on them, in ways either obvious or subtle, change as well. There is a tautological sense in which it must be true that inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," but that is not the sense in which many people in the United States understood this notion a couple of decades ago, before observed inflation and the conventional M's began to go their separate ways. Simply to assume that answers to important questions derived from past experience remain right answers is to miss much of what is interesting and important about our subject.

Finally, yet another reason why it helps to look around is that the questions people ask change too. To be sure, issues like the real costs of disinflation, or the value of creating a market for price-indexed securities, or the gain in efficiency from indexing the tax code, are always valid subjects for economic research. But it is hardly surprising that more people want to pay attention to the findings of research on those questions when prices are rising rapidly than when prices are more nearly stable. For the same reason, whether government budget deficits in a fully employed economy crowd out private capital formation, or under what circumstances a deficit would have to be monetized, was not much of an issue in the United States before the 1980s. This did not mean that there was no point in addressing such questions before then. But the context that determines whether any specific piece of research speaks to a matter of broad concern, and hence has the potential ability to have significant impact on widespread thinking, clearly changed. People who don't look around don't notice.

Be Ambitious, But Not Too Ambitions

Rabbi Tarphon, a noted sage of the first century, declared that "You are not required to finish the task, but neither are you free to neglect it altogether." Tarphon's injunction has always seemed to me a useful beacon for researchers, especially in economics. The part about not neglecting the task is obvious enough, but I think the idea that finishing it is not required is useful, indeed important, for maintaining a sense of purpose.

A curious outsider, taking a fresh look at economics, is less likely to be struck by how much we know than how much we don't. Few established empirical findings are genuinely stable across time and space. Most theoretical results depend on a vast array of simplifying assumptions. Many of these assumptions--atomistic competitors, independent utilities, linear functional relationships, identical "representative" agents, and so on--have over time become sufficiently conventional in the eyes of practicing researchers that they seem to require no justification (indeed, they are often taken for granted without even an explicit mention); but to the thoughtful outsider they may seem not just strange but factually wrong (as, of course, they are). Especially for someone newly beginning a research career, the resulting temptation can be to reject the entire working apparatus of modern economics as epistemologically flawed, and set out to erect a whole new edifice in its place.

That strategy is a recipe for failure. Discontent with the artificiality of whatever set of arbitrary assumptions is in fashion at the moment is a healthy motivation for making progress. Seeking to abandon useful workaday assumptions whosesale is a bar to making any progress whatever. There is tension but not conflict in wanting to change many aspects of how economists think yet actually investigating only one such change at a time. There is conflict but not fundamental inconsistency in attacking one unappealing assumption in one line of research while going ahead to use that same assumption, unappealing though it may be, in another line of research where the focus is different. The history of our subject shows that progress comes incrementally, in the middle ground between finishing the task and neglecting it altogether. Economics is a task that no one is required to finish, not even in one lifetime much less in one paper. The practical consequences of trying to finish this particular task are often indistinguishable from those of simply neglecting it.

A different form of over-ambition in economic research is the Icarus problem: trying to fly too close to the universal sun, in the sense of supposing that a particular piece of research comes closer to the ultimate meta-model than it (or anything else that is really feasible) can. The meta-model by definition takes all factors into account. It doesn't change with circumstances not controlled for, because it controls for all relevant circumstances. By contrast, fruitful economic research focuses on only a few key variables at a time, leaving the rest aside. This is not a flaw to be endlessly lamented but a fact to be usefully remembered.

In particular, this means that the universality to which we might like to pretend for our findings, because we appropriately aspire to it, just isn't there. Our results are local results. As environments and institutions change, so will even our favorite empirical relationships, and even our favorite theorems depend on more assumptions than we usually enumerate. This does not make our work valueless, just limited. By now many of the empirical relationships describing credit market behavior (and especially the borrowing behavior of firms) that I labored to investigate some years ago no longer correspond to current data. I may be sorry about that, but l do not have to regard the basic lessons of that work as worthless. The models I used were at best only small pieces of the meta-model, and as factors that I omitted from my analysis changed, so did the observed behavior.

A closely related temptation, also to be avoided, is the monocular syndrome--that is, the tendency of economists to assert monocausal explanations for complex phenomena. For many if not most problems, the most effective research strategy is not only to work on explaining one aspect of economic behavior at a time but also to focus on only one part of the explanation at a time. Not infrequently, a useful exercise is even to see how far it is possible to go in explaining the behavior in question on the basis of the one causal factor under investigation at the moment. All this makes for good economics. But it is important not to take such exercises too seriously, and so conclude that some important aspect of economic behavior really does have only one causal force behind it.

For reasons that are closely related to both the Icarus problem and the monocular syndrome, I have always been reluctant to extrapolate what we know from one context to others where essential aspects of the environment are different. A useful example is the study of hyperinflation (about which I too once wrote a paper). Hyperinflations are certainly interesting phenomena in their own right, not least because of their sometimes powerful political consequences. But can we apply the lessons drawn from examining the demand for money during hyperinflations, when one influence on portfolio choice is enlarged to a magnitude such that it actually does dwarf all others, to draw inferences about money demand under more ordinary circumstances? Can the experience of ending hyperinflations usefully inform our estimate of the likely costs of a transition from moderate but persistent inflation to price stability? I am usually inclined to be skeptical of such extrapolations. Instead, if I want to learn about a question, I try to study it in its own context. (For just the same reason, I almost always disappoint foreign journalists who ask me what advice I would give their own governments. I'm not being either politically careful or overly polite; I just don't think I know.)

Yet a different form of over-ambition in economic research is to require too much of a model, and in particular to strive for false depth. Here the example that comes most readily to mind is the treatment of the demand for money. Some years ago it became fashionable to argue that it is illegitimate to draw inferences about monetary policy from any model that lacks an internal explanation for why people hold money. (For reasons that I never understood, in much of this literature it was further regarded as bad form to acknowledge that the reason for holding money might have something to do with its usefulness in effecting transactions.) Why people hold money is surely a useful and important question for economic research to address. But it is also surely useful to do different research on the basis of assuming that people in fact do hold money and proceeding on from there. Insisting that both efforts must cohabit within the same model is a bit like wanting the driver's manual to contain a chapter on the origins of the convention that cars go on green and stop on red, or on why different countries opt for the right or the left side of the road. Division of labor does have its uses.

Have Staying Power

One of the hardest things to decide in pursing any agenda, including an intellectual one, is how long to stay the course. Nobody wants to give up too easily, just because people are initially resistant to a seemingly worthwhile idea, or because a few pieces of partial evidence point the other way. At the same time, nobody wants to hold onto an idea long after overwhelming evidence has contradicted it. Resolving this tension is rarely easy.

On balance, though, I'm usually inclined to stay the course more persistently than not. One reason is that much of economics suffers deeply from the short sample problem. It is not just that we can't conduct replicated experiments to address most economic questions, or that the one history we have does not represent a controlled experiment. The added difficulty is that for purposes of many of the questions we want to ask, that history is short. It is short in part because environments and institutions matter, and they change. We may have data on the volume of bank loans extending back into the nineteenth century, but the loan market today differs from the markets of earlier eras in so many ways--loan securitization, hedging capabilities, and competition from the commercial paper market as well as from abroad come immediately to mind--that the relevance of data from decades ago is of limited value for many research purposes. Our one history is short also because observations are not independent across either time or space. Regardless of whether we divide the data yearly, quarterly or monthly, how many genuinely independent observations does the post-war rise and then decline of inflation contain? How many independent observations does the growth experience of twenty-four OECD countries contain? While this line of thinking is certainly not ground for despairing of ever learning from empirical analysis, it does make me pause before too quickly changing my mind because I have seen one new set of regressions.

The continually shifting tide of fashion in acceptable assumptions provides yet another reason for resisting pressure to abandon an idea that usefully seems to explain the behavior we observe. As the example of credit rationing shows, what respectable opinion deems impossible can become part of what "everybody knows" with astonishing suddenness. I sometimes wonder whether I should have continued doing research on credit rationing, since I have always believed it is an important aspect of bank behavior. I know I would not have worked out the crucial maximizing model based on asymmetric information and adverse selection--my personal toolkit is not well designed for that particular task--but I am at least curious about what evidence and insights a sustained program of empirical research on just this aspect of financial behavior might have produced.

But saying that one should stay the course despite opposition and even some contrary evidence is not to say never to change one's mind. The object, after all, is to learn. Sometimes observed behavior actually does present pretty dramatic statements one way or the other. For example, I used to be receptive to the idea that saving is positively interest elastic, and I therefore was sympathetic to the general class of policy proposals for stimulating private saving to which a positive elasticity gives rise. After the decline in U.S. saving rates in the 1980s, in the face of truly extraordinary increases in real after-tax returns, I have changed my view. (I think the same decline in saving, in the face of record government deficits at full employment, was likewise pretty devastating to the notion of Ricardian equivalence; but on that one I was a disbeliever much earlier on.)

I have also learned over time that the United States is much more of an open economy that I used to think. The biggest mistake I made in thinking about the policy issues of the last decade and a half was to under-estimate how much the U.S. Government's budget deficit would affect the country's net export balance (and thereby change the direction of capital flows), and correspondingly over-estimate how much it would effect our domestic investment. The standard closed-economy model that shapes my most basic economic intuitions just wasn't adequate. I've also learned over time that price inflation is a much more serious problem than I used to believe--even though I still don't think our profession (me included) has much understanding of why.

So, changing one's mind is important too. But on balance, when the issue is in doubt, I'm inclined to stay the course and wait for others to change theirs. Most of the pictures on the walls in my study are portraits. The largest by far is of Winston Churchill, a man of determinedly held views if there ever was one. From the late 1920s on, Churchill was not just out of office but without real influence, his views rejected and ultimately ridiculed by the conventional wisdom of the time. He did not hold public office again until the fact of the opening of the war made it obvious that he had been right all along, and he became prime minister just nine months later. He was then sixty-five years old.

Decide Who Is the Audience, and Learn How to Reach It

I occasionally hear it said of some economist or other that he would be happiest just writing papers and putting them in his desk drawer, deriving ample satisfaction from the repeated act of analytical creation without ever showing its fruits to other people. I have never met such an economist. In a very few instances I have heard an economist I knew described in this way, but in each case I knew the person well enough to realize that what was said about him wasn't true.

Most economists, perhaps all of us, want not only to do interesting thinking but to communicate it to others. More than that, most of us want to persuade other people to accept our thinking. The principal means of communication are talking and writing. Of the two, writing is what lasts.

In our era writing by academics in general, and by economists in particular, has become the standard butt of stock jokes. I think that's unfair. To be sure, much writing by economists is simply bad. But much is quite good, and many economists write extremely well. Making younger economists think that they have somehow inherited a generic professional disability, a kind of congenital handicap against which they will have to contend for the entirety of their careers, does no one a service. The point is simply that writing well is an important part of communicating effectively, and an especially important part of persuading effectively, and that this is true for economists in the same way it is true for people who seek to communicate and persuade in countless other professions. As with anything else, the main secret to success is working hard at it. In the case of writing, this mostly means going back to it again and again and again--to find just the right word, to restructure a sentence or a paragraph, to insert a new thought, and sometimes even to change around the whole logical flow. My colleague John Kenneth Galbraith once referred to "the appearance of effortless ease that creeps into my (Ken's) prose on about the eighth draft." He was indirectly offering me advice, and I've tried to take it seriously.

Some dimensions of the matter, however, probably are harder for economists. The one I think is especially important is that many economists want-- appropriately-- to communicate with several different audiences who happen to use different languages. We want, in the first instance, to speak among ourselves. But academic economists also need to speak to their students, and business economists need to speak to others in their firm or to their customers. Many economists also want to speak to policy makers from time to time. Some occasionally want to address a more general public.

The problem of different languages is real. My first exposure to the Federal Reserve System was a summer job in the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. By then I had studied economics for four years in college and two more in graduate school. Although most of the people I talked with at the bank that summer were professional economists, I quickly realized that I just didn't understand what they were saying. (I don't mean that I didn't understand why the theory underlying what they said was valid; I literally did not understand many of the conversations taking place.) As I eventually discovered, they were in fact talking about things I had learned about. But they used a different vocabulary than I knew, and they left much of the context implicit.

Vocabulary and context are crucial to communicating effectively, and it makes little sense to address an audience in anything other than its own vocabulary or without providing the right context. I think much of the usual popular derision of academic writing stems from the reaction of one audience, either practitioners or perhaps even interested laymen, to material written for research professionals who constitute a wholly different audience. The vocabulary is strange, and even the words that should be familiar lack the context to give them genuine meaning.

American populism has always exhibited an antiIntellectual strain, and so the Congressman who wants to score points by making fun of the silly professors can easily draw laughs by reading selected passages from the professional journals in just about any academic discipline. While few layman are inclined to think they should be able to understand astrophysics or Byzantine theology, however, many non-economists do think they should be able to understand matters of economics. More importantly, citizens in a democratic republic have not only a right but, indeed, an obligation to understand major issues of economic policy. While I am often struck by how little economists know about the questions that interested laymen or public policy officials or business executives ask, in many cases I think we do know much that is useful. But it remains to communicate what we know to them. I think it is to our credit that so many economists want to address these nonprofessional audiences. But we can do so effectively only if we use a vocabulary that they can understand and if we provide the context that makes what we say meaningful.

Here too, what makes this kind of communication succeed is largely putting effort into it. If I think Congressmen, or bankers, or businessmen may be interested in the findings of the research I have been doing, I have to accept the fact that simply sending around reprints of my latest journal articles won't do. I have to decide whether I want to convey my ideas to those audiences or not. And if I do, then I know I have to write an account of those ideas directed at the audience I want to reach.

Some of my academic colleagues who read my Day of Reckoning book, as well as some friends in the financial community, told me they would have found the book easier to follow--not mention a lot shorter--if I had included some tables and time series plots to exhibit the most important trends and relationships in the data. They were right. (One person, whom I didn't know, sent me a letter saying he assumed I must have been writing from a set of tables, and asking if I could provide him with a copy.) But I didn't write that particular book for them. I deliberately chose a purely literary presentation--no tables, no data plots, no diagrams, and certainly no equations--because I wanted people to read it who would simply have put it down if they had paged through it and spotted any of these devices. I knew that once people actually decided to read the book, some well chosen tables and plots would have made it easier for many if not most. But I decided that for this particular effort at communication, the audience I wanted to reach included large numbers of people who, if they saw tables and data plots, would probably never read it at all.

Writing a book this way--producing a purely literary presentation of a subject we economists usually discuss among ourselves using both short-hand and short cuts--was, of course, time consuming. It took away from research I otherwise could have done. (That book was not research; I like to think of it as high-class journalism.) But I took the time because I thought that that particular effort at communicating, and persuading, was important. I felt about it, in some ways, a sense of moral obligation.

Keep Things in Perspective

One of our Presidents once remarked that a major personal challenge for people charged with public responsibility, especially at high levels, is to take their decisions appropriately seriously yet not take themselves too seriously. I think scholars face the same tension. We devote our lives to research and teaching on issues that we deem important. We take these issues and our work on them very seriously, and we are right to do so. But we do ourselves--and others too--a disservice if we fall into the trap of also taking ourselves too seriously.

Steering clear of this particular temptation is no doubt a matter of many dimensions, but in my own experience two especially stand out. First, some of the friendships I have valued most over the years have been (and still are) with economists whose views often directly contradict my own. We disagree with each other in our papers, we debate each other at conferences, and we argue with each other when we get together just to enjoy each other's company. I admire these friends, and I have learned from them. But more important, in the end, they are my friends and I value them simply for that. Another eminent sage, Isi ben Judah, asked "Why do scholars die prematurely?" His answer? "Because they abuse one another." Taking ourselves less seriously than we take the ideas on which we work may or may not enable us to live longer, but I think it does help to keep our work from obstructing personal relationships that can be deeply satisfying.

The other sense in which trying not to take ourselves too seriously has been important to me reflects a lesson I learned in a vivid way years ago when I worked in investment banking. I not infrequently worked on assignments with Robert Baldwin, a quite senior partner who soon afterward became head of the firm. I remember especially clearly the experience, on several occasions, of sitting in his office with a team of other partners and staff members, trying to schedule an important meeting with one major client or other. Somebody would suggest a date, everybody in the room would agree, and then Bob would check his calendar and declare that that was impossible because it was the day of his son's school play (or hockey game, or whatever was the particular event that time). Everybody else would exchange knowing glances, as if to say "This guy is nuts but we have to humor him," and eventually somebody would go on to suggest a new date. In the meanwhile, my own (silent) reaction was more along the lines of "This guy is the only one here who understands what's important."

Balancing our personal and our professional involvements is a tension that we all face. As is usually the case with such tensions, having a clear sense of priorities helps. I've always had mine pretty clear. My wife and sons come first.

But all this brings me back to where I began: Having an agenda is crucial. So is knowing why it's important.

~~~~~~~~

By Benjamin M. Friedman

William Joseph Maier Professor of Political Economy, Harvard University. This paper will appear in Michael Szenberg, ed. Passion and Craft, Economists at Work. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press

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Mankiw's research experience (from mit.bbs)

2005-04-28T22:24:00.000-07:00

MY RULES OF THUMB

Contents Rule No. 1: Learn from the Right Mentors Rule No. 2: Work With Good Co-authors Rule No. 3: Have Broad Interests Rule No. 4: Allocate Time with Care Rule No. 5: Write Well Rule No. 6: Have Fun

My assignment is to describe how I work. I take on this task with mixed feelings. One can easily become vain in the process of public introspection, and vanity is a trait best left private. It is not entirely clear to me why anyone should care about my idiosyncrasies--except, perhaps, for my colleagues, students, and family, who have no choice but to live with them.

Yet when other economists write essays of this sort, I enjoy reading them. I like to think that these essays edify me in some way, but at the very least they appeal to the voyeur in me. So, I figured, others may learn from a brief essay about how I work. Or, at least, they may be amused by it.

I have organized this essay around six rules of thumb that I follow as I go about my working life. I have chosen these rules largely for their positive value--they describe my behavior. I do not pretend that the way I work necessarily holds any prescriptive value for anyone else. But it may. If these rules of thumb ring true to others and help them to run their lives, so much the better.

Rule No. 1: Learn from the Right Mentors I learned how to practice my trade from four distinguished economists. Perhaps the reason was good career planning on my part. More likely, it was just good luck.

In the spring of 1977, as a freshman at Princeton, I took Principles of Microeconomics from Harvey Rosen. Harvey was an excellent teacher. I remember finding the material easy and, at the same time, feeling that I was learning a tremendous amount. Each lecture was filled with insights that were novel, profound, and so stunningly obvious that it seemed I should have known them all my life. But, of course, I didn't. Principles of microeconomics was the most eye-opening course I have ever taken. All subsequent courses in economics have exhibited the property of diminishing returns.

For reasons that are a mystery to me now, Harvey hired me as a research assistant for the summer after my freshman year. I knew very little economics, for I had taken only the two principles courses. I did know something about computer programming (a fact that surprises my own research assistants, for changes in technology have made this human capital long obsolete). For whatever reason, Harvey did hire me, and the experience proved invaluable. I knew so little that Harvey had to teach me whatever he needed me to know. Spending a summer being tutored by a top teacher and scholar is the best learning experience I can imagine. To this day, I have never learned so much in so short a period of time.

Eventually, my interests drifted toward macroeconomics. As a senior at Princeton, I took graduate macroeconomics from Alan Blinder, another excellent teacher. At the same time, I wrote my senior thesis under Alan's supervision. In the thesis, I tried to make sense of the cyclical behavior of the real wage, which has puzzled macroeconomists at least since the publication of Keynes's General Theory. Part of my senior thesis became a paper co-authored with Alan, which we later published in the Journal of Monetary Economics. More important, as I worked on the thesis, I became convinced that imperfections in goods markets were at least as important as imperfections in labor markets for understanding the business cycle. This conviction eventually led to my involvement in a line of research now called New Keynesian Economics.

When I entered MIT's graduate program in the fall of 1980, Larry Summers was a young assistant professor. Larry's enthusiasm, breadth of knowledge, and quick mind attracted me, and we spoke together at MIT during the year and at the NBER during the following summer. When Martin Feldstein brought Larry to work at the Council of Economic Advisers in September 1982, Larry brought me along with him. I was fortunate to be able to work closely with Larry during the brief period when he was already a great economist but not yet a famous one.

When I returned to MIT, Stanley Fischer served as my dissertation adviser, as he did for a remarkable number of students in my class. Stan was a model of professorial balance. As a lecturer, he gave clear and even-handed presentations in a field that can be confusing and divisive. As an adviser, he encouraged students to pursue their interests with the highest standards of rigor without imposing his own intellectual agenda on them. My dissertation, like most in recent years, was a collection of loosely related papers bound together for the sole purpose of getting a degree. It bore the soporific title "Essays on Consumption."

When I look back at these four mentors--Rosen, Blinder, Summers, and Fischer--I see in them various characteristics that I have developed over time. They are prolific writers. Their research tends to be empirical and policy-oriented. They take teaching seriously.

All of my mentors have shown interest in reaching a broader audience than can be found writing in academic journals. All four of them have taken time away from academia to work in policy jobs in Washington. Three out of four have written textbooks, and two of them have written more than one textbook.

It is easy to see why mentors matter. Mentors determine your professional outlook in much the way that parents determine your personal outlook. Mentors, like parents, give you your values. They teach you what kind of behavior to respect and what kind to avoid. And they teach these lessons indirectly, more often through their actions than through their words.

The major difference is that your parents are predetermined. You get to choose your mentors.

Rule No. 2: Work With Good Co-authors I have been lucky to be able to work with many talented co-authors. In approximate order of appearance, they include Alan Blinder, Bryan Boulier, Larry Summers, Julio Rotemberg, Matthew Shapiro, David Runkle, Avery Katz, Bob Barsky, Steve Zeldes, Jeff Miron, Mike Whinston, John Campbell, Andy Abel, Richard Zeckhauser, David Romer, Larry Ball, Miles Kimball, David Weil, Olivier Blanchard, Su-santo Basu, Robert Barro, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Bob Hall, Niko Canner, and Doug Elmendorf. Some of these co-authors were my mentors, others were my contemporaries (often fellow students at MIT), and still others were students of mine at Harvard. In recent years, I have done most of my research with these co-authors.

Why are co-authors so important for the way I work? One reason is found in Adam Smith's famous story of the pin factory. Smith observed that the pin factory was so productive because it allowed workers to specialize. Research is no different--it is just another form of production, Doing research takes various skills: identifying questions, developing models, proving theorems, finding data, analyzing data, expositing results. Because few economists excel at all these tasks, collaborating authors can together do things that each author could not do as easily on his own. In manufacturing knowledge, as in manufacturing pins, specialization raises productivity. (The puzzle is why Adam Smith chose to ignore his own analysis and write The Wealth of Nations without the benefit of a co-author.)

The second reason I work with co-authors is that it makes my job less solitary. Research and writing can be a lonely activity. It is easy to spend endless hours with pad and pencil or in front of a computer without human contact. Some people may like that kind of work, but not me. Arguing with my co-authors makes my day more fun.

The third reason I work with co-authors is the most important: a good co-author improves you forever. In the most successful collaborations, both co-authors learn from the experience. A co-author can help you expand your knowledge, improve your skills, and expose your biases. Even after the collaboration is over, you take these benefits with you to future projects. To a large extent, as I have grown older, my co-authors have become my mentors.

Rule No. 3: Have Broad Interests Throughout my life, I have been blessed with broad interests. (Or, perhaps, I have been cursed with a short attention span.)

As a child, I had numerous hobbies. I collected coins, stamps, shells, rocks, marbles, baseball cards, and campaign buttons. For pets, I had turtles, snakes, mice, fish, salamanders, chameleons, ducks, and, finally, a cocker spaniel. In high school, I spent my time playing chess, fencing, and sailing. I have long since given up all these activities (although I do have a border terrier named Keynes).

As a college student, I committed myself to a new major several times each semester, alternating most often among physics, philosophy, statistics, mathematics, and economics. After college my path was indirect and largely unplanned. In chronological order, I spent a summer working at the Congressional Budget Office, a year studying at the MIT economics department, a year studying at Harvard Law School, a summer working at a law firm, a year working at the Council of Economic Advisers, a second year at MIT finishing my PhD, another semester studying at Harvard Law School, and then another semester at MIT, this time as an instructor teaching statistics and microeconomics. In 1985, I gave up my studies in law and became an assistant professor at the Harvard economics department, where in my first year I taught principles of economics and graduate macroeconomics.

Remarkably, I have been at Harvard now for about a decade. Harvard is a wonderful place to work. Yet I often get the itch to leave, just for the sake of doing something different. One thing that keeps me at Harvard is the proximity of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Every year the NBER holds dozens of conferences on various topics with prominent economists from around the word. Having an office at the NBER is a bit like moving to a new university every few days.

My broad interests (short attention span) help to explain my diverse (incoherent) body of work. My research spans across much of economics. Within macroeconomics, I have published papers on price adjustment, consumer behavior, asset pricing, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and economic growth. I have even ventured outside of macroeconmics and published papers on fertility with imperfect birth control, the taxation of fringe benefits, entry into imperfectly competitive markets, and the demographic determinants of housing demand. None of this is part of a grand plan. At any moment, I work on whatever then interests me most.

Coming up with ideas is the hardest and least controllable part of the research process. It is somewhat easier if you have broad interests. Most obviously, broad interests give you more opportunities for success. A miner is more likely to strike gold if he looks over a large field than over the same small field over and over again. More important, thinking about one topic can generate ideas about other topics. I started thinking about menu costs and macroeconomic price adjustment, for instance, as I sat in a law school seminar that was discussing monopoly pricing and antitrust policy. Research ideas pop up in unexpected places.

Of course, breadth has its costs. One is that it makes writing grant proposals more difficult. I am always tempted to write, "I want to spend the next few years doing whatever I feel like doing. Please send me money so I can do so." Yet, in most cases, those giving out grant money want at least the pretense of a long-term research plan.

The greatest cost of breadth, however, is lack of depth. I sometimes fear that because I work in so many different areas, each line of work is more superficial than it otherwise would be. Careful choice of co-authors can solve this problem to some extent, but not completely. I am always certain that whatever topic I am working on at that moment, someone else has spent many more hours thinking about it than I have. There is something to be said for devoting a lifetime to mastering a single subject.

But it won't be my lifetime. I just don't have the temperament for it.

Rule No. 4: Allocate Time with Care This is a rule of thumb I have been slow to learn. I used to go to every school that invited me to give a seminar, comment on every paper that a conference organizer asked me to discuss, referee every paper that a journal editor sent me, write every letter of recommendation that a department chairman requested of me, and sit on every committee that a dean asked me to attend.

But no more. Over time, the number of such requests has increased exponentially. Within a few years of going on the Harvard payroll, the cost of saying yes became intolerable. I came to realize that too much professional responsibility can be irresponsible, for it takes time away from the most important tasks--teaching and research. I now turn down the overwhelming majority of offers from seminar organizers, conference organizers, journal editors, department chairmen, and deans.

Deciding which research projects to pursue is the most difficult problem I face in allocating my time. I find it almost impossible to predict how any project will turn out before it is done. And even when I have finished one of my papers, I cannot predict with much accuracy how other people (such as editors and referees) will react to it. My strategy, therefore, is to choose research topics based- on what interests me most and, to some extent, on whether I have a good co-author who shares my enthusiasm. Sometimes I work on a topic for a while and decide that I have nothing new to say. I then force myself to remember the irrelevance of sunk costs and move on to another topic.

One way that I spend quite a bit of time is writing textbooks. I have written an intermediate-level textbook on macroeconomics, which is now in its second edition, and I am now in the process of writing a textbook on the principles of economics. Writing a textbook is a lot of work, and I am sometimes asked why I choose to spend my time this way. So let me explain.

Textbook writing is a form of teaching. As such, it has all the pluses and minuses of teaching. The major minus is that it takes time. And time is an academic's most valuable resource.

Despite the cost, I view textbook writing, like classroom teaching, as a good use of my time. One benefit is pecuniary. Few people in the world earn a living just creating knowledge. Most academics spend some of their time imparting knowledge as well. Giving lectures is one way of imparting knowledge; writing textbooks is another. So far, I have been able to make enough money imparting knowledge to students that I have not had to spend time on other activities, such as paid consulting, to put food on the table.

Of course, the most immediate benefit of classroom teaching and textbook writing is that they allow you to mold the minds of students. Economics is not a straightforward discipline like Newtonian mechanics or Euclidean geometry. Whenever you teach economics, you have wide latitude in choosing what material to include and how to present it. In making these choices, you give your own "spin" to the subject and help determine the views of your students. Although classroom teachers and textbook writers share this responsibility, textbook writers reach a larger audience. For those who want to bequeath their view of economics to the next generation, textbooks are the most efficient medium. Indeed, because textbooks are so important in shaping the field, many of the most prolific writers in academic journals are also textbook authors: Samuelson, Baumol, Blinder, Stiglitz, Barro, Dombusch, Fischer, and on and on,

A less obvious benefit of classroom teaching and textbook writing is that they stimulate ideas for research. Whenever you have to explain something to someone, either in person or on a printed page, you have to think it through more thoroughly than you otherwise would. Preparing a lecture or drafting a textbook chapter reveals holes in your understanding. And, sometimes, as you try to fill these holes, you get ideas for research. Put simply, imparting knowledge and creating knowledge are complementary activities. That is why these two forms of production take place in the same firms, called universities.

The final benefit to spending time writing textbooks is that it makes you a better writer. But that brings me to my next topic.

Rule No. 5: Write Well I think of myself as a mediocre writer. I do not come by my mediocrity naturally. It is the result of hard work and determination. This may seem like a small accomplishment, but I reassure myself with the fact that most economists do not live up to this standard.

Economists tend to underestimate the value of good writing. The reason, I believe, is that we like to think of ourselves as scientists. Scientific truths are as valid in run-on sentences as in well-written prose, so why bother trying to write well? Of course, no one would actually endorse bad writing, but this subconscious attitude pervades the profession and explains why economics is a more dismal science than it needs to be.

Despite our profession's bad attitude toward writing, good writing is in fact extraordinarily helpful to achieving success. Everyone knows that Robert Solow and Robert Lucas are important economists. But they are also superb writers, and this fact helps explain their prominence.

Whenever a person sits down to write something about economics, he is engaged in a form of joint production. Each article has two key attributes: style and substance. For producers of articles, style and substance are substitutes. The more time is spent avoiding the passive voice and replacing a "which" with a "that," the less time is left to spend thinking new thoughts about the economy. But if you want to succeed as a producer, you have to think about your consumers. For consumers of articles, style and substance are complements. When I see an article by Solow or Lucas, I want to read it, not just because I will learn something about economics, but also because I will have fun doing so. An article that offers both style and substance is far more appealing than an article that offers one without the other. So if you want to sell your substance, you have to worry about your style. In other words, if you want to be read widely, you have to write well.

Writing is a craft, like carpentry. Some people are naturally better at it than others. But anyone can get better at it by devoting enough time and effort.

The first step to writing better is deciding to write better. After that, it is like acquiring any skill. Just as you can learn how to run regressions by reading a RATS manual, you can learn how to write better by reading books on style. I often recommend Strunk and White's The Elements of Style to my students, and I am surprised at how many have never heard of it. (It is the perfect book to leave in the bathroom. Whenever you have a spare minute, open it to a random page and start reading.) I also recommend that students read William Zinsser;s On Writing Well to learn how to write and Donald McCloskey's The Rhetoric of Economics to learn how to persuade.

Becoming a good writer also takes practice. Reading the RATS manual will tell you how to run a regression, but you cannot easily run a regression after just reading about it. You have to turn on the computer and try it several times. You see what mistakes you make, what bugs show up unexpectedly, what things the manual forgot to tell you. The same is true with writing. The more you write, the better you get. When I look back on my own education, one thing that stands out is how often I had to write in the (private) high school I attended. I always had some writing assignment hanging over my head. At the time the school's policy seemed oppressive, but now I am grateful for the oppression. It prepared me perfectly for my current job.

Writing well is hard work. It requires that you revise, revise, and revise. Then, when you think you are done, you should revise again. Good writing is fun to read, but it is often not fun to do. (I once asked John Kenneth Galbraith the secret to his success as a popular writer. He said that he revises everything many times. Around the fifth draft, he manages to work in the touch of spontaneity that everyone likes.)

Fortunately, modem technology has made writing much easier. I write directly in Wordperfect. Pen, paper, and secretary are not necessary, which surely makes me more productive. But modem technology has also made it easier for people to produce bad writing. The supply of good writing and the supply of bad writing have both increased over time. The demand for bad writing remains low, however, so in equilibrium there is not much reward for producing it.

By contrast, good writing has substantial rewards. Writing something well attracts readers and gives your ideas a better chance to be heard. But there is also another payoff: good writing brings personal satisfaction. An author should get pleasure from looking back and finding that he has presented his ideas well. I do not like writing, but I do like having written.

Rule No. 6: Have Fun A book I read long ago revealed to me the secret to a happy life: find out what you like to do, and then find someone who will pay you to do it.

I learned this secret as a teenager. At the time, I liked racing small sailboats. So, when I looked for my first summer job, I found one giving sailing lessons. (My employer charged $15 for a one-hour lesson and paid me the minimum wage of $2.25. This was my first lesson in the economics of monopolistic competition.) Yet I knew that this advice would not always be easy to follow. I had no idea how to find someone to pay- me to race sailboats for the rest of my life, and this was a source of some adolescent distress. Luckily, my tastes changed as I aged.

I now keep the secret to a happy life in mind when selecting topics for research. Editors and conference organizers often invite me to write papers on specific topics of their choosing. I turn down most of these offers. (This essay is one of the few exceptions.) Unless the editor happens to propose a topic in which I am already interested, I will not enjoy writing the paper and, most likely, will not do a good job. My approach to research is to decide first what I want to think about. I then see if I can get someone to publish the result. If my current interests happen to coincide with a conference someone is organizing, that's great, for the conference is a convenient outlet. And a conference invitation might help me to choose among-several projects that I have in the back of my mind. But the most important question for me when beginning any project is whether the topic gets me excited.

Graduate students starting work on their dissertations often ask me for strategic advice. What are the hot research areas? What topics will get them jobs at the top universities? It is easy to understand why students ask these questions, but these are the wrong questions for someone embarking on a research career. I tell students that they should be asking themselves more personal questions. What would they like to learn about? What do they observe in the world and find puzzling? What topics get them excited?

Doing research is not like digging a ditch. A person can dig a perfectly fine ditch without enjoying his job for a Minute. By contrast, research requires a certain passion about the topic being studied. Passion goes hand in hand with creativity. No one can manufacture this passion for strategic reasons of career advancement.

Most people who pursue an academic career do so because they are fascinated by their subject. It is for this reason that professors report among the highest rates of job satisfaction of all professions. Professors have found what they like to do, and they have found someone to pay them to do it.

~~~~~~~~

By N. Gregory Mankiw
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Research Experiance of Dixit (from mit.bbs)

2005-04-28T22:11:00.000-07:00

MY SYSTEM OF WORK (NOT!)

Contents My Own Experience of Research On Choice of Topics On Habits of Work On Writing A Concluding Word Notes

Among the signals of approaching senility, few can be clearer than being asked to write an article on one's methods of work. The profession's implied judgment is that one's time is better spent giving helpful tips to younger researchers than doing new work oneself. But of all the lessons I have learnt during a quarter century of research, the one I have found most valuable is always to work as if one were still twenty-three. From such a young perspective, I find it difficult to give advice to anyone. The reason why I agreed to write this piece will appear later. I hope readers will take it for what it is--scattered and brash remarks of someone who pretends to have a perpetually juvenile mind, and not the distilled wisdom of a middle-aged has-been.

Writing such a piece poses a basic problem at any age. There are no sure-fire rules for doing good research, and no routes that clearly lead to failure. Ask any six economists and you will get six dozen recipes for success. Each of the six will flatly contradict one or more of the others. And all of them may be right--for some readers and at some times. So you should take all such suggestions with skepticism. Give a good try to any that appeal to you, but don't fear to disregard all the rest.

There is also the problem of judging the target audience. What works for academic research is not best suited for policy or consulting research, and the right strategy for advancing the frontier of research is not the same as that for later work of consolidation or synthesis. I will assume that the readers of these essays are actual or potential academic economists with high ambition; they aim to excel in whatever area of research they choose, and are looking for good habits to speed their journey. In short, I am assuming that the readers hope for success at the top levels of the research community.

These general difficulties are compounded by my own limitations. First, I am a theorist, albeit of a relatively applied kind. That is to say, I build mathematical models to address specific issues and contexts of economic interest, rather than abstract systems of general and overarching significance. And I try to get specific results from the models (What cause has what effect?) rather than prove theorems (Does equilibrium exist, and is it unique?). What works for me is governed by what I am trying to accomplish; the same approaches and techniques may not suit the more abstract theorists or the empirical economists.

My second limitation is even more severe. I have always worked on the next problem that grabbed my interest, and tackled it using whatever approaches and techniques seemed suitable, never giving a thought to how it might fit into an overall world-view or methodology. It is hard for me to evaluate such an unsystematic and unphilosophical approach, and even harder to give any advice based on it. But I shall try.

My Own Experience of Research Readers of these essays are surely not too interested in the drab and dreary lives of economists for their own sake; they are in search of research methods they can emulate. But one's advice is colored by one's experiences, and I owe the reader a brief statement of the reasons for my biases.

Most of us spend hours discussing at which restaurant to have dinner, and make decisions like what career to pursue and whom to marry instinctively in an instant. So it was with my entry into economics. I got my first degree in mathematics, and had just started a Master's in Operations Research, when I was converted to economics by a chance conversation with Frank Fisher. He should get all the credit, or the blame.

I started on my research career in 1968, at a time of turmoil in the academic world of Europe and the US. The prevailing atmosphere was decidedly left-wing and anti-establishment, and research was almost required to be "relevant." Most theorists were affected by this atmosphere, and I was no exception. Important topics included problems of less developed countries, urban problems, and environmental problems.[1] I dabbled in all of these.

Looking back on those years, much of the "relevant" research in economics left little lasting mark on the subject. Problems of less developed countries and urban areas proved so decidedly political that good economic advice would have achieved nothing even if we had been able to give it. No, the topics that proved to have lasting value in economics were quite different, for example the theory of rational expectations, the role of information and incentives, and later in this period, game theory. In the early 1970s much of this work seemed abstract and irrelevant, and would have been called "politically incorrect" had that phrase existed in those days.

My own work also met the same fate. My "relevant" work is mostly and justly forgotten.[2] What has come to be regarded as a success--for example the theory of product diversity in monopolistic competition, the theory of entry-deterrence in oligopoly, a reformulation of the theory of international trade, and some recent work on irreversible investment--was not motivated by any sense of relevance, or any high-minded desire to do good. It is almost embarrassing to think back on how I came to work on some of these topics.

The book on international trade grew out of a lunchtime conversation with Victor Norman. He knew a fair bit about the subject, I knew almost nothing, but both of us knew a lot of duality theory and had a sense it might be useful in simplifying some of trade theory. We decided to learn by doing, and spent so long at it that we had to write a book. As we went along, more than half of the time we found that someone else had been there before. But it was much more fun to do it ourselves.

The model of entry deterrence in oligopoly came from an uneasy feeling that the accepted theories--Bain-Sylos, and even Spence--were not doing it right. At the time subgame perfectness had just made its appearance in the game theory literature, but I was in rural England, far removed from the centers of game theory like Stanford, and had never heard of the concept. So I had to work it out from scratch, and that took a surprisingly long time. The breakthrough came when I had by mistake gone to the airport far too early, and had to kill a couple of hours. Once the right idea came, everything worked out really fast. Since then I have often deliberately got to airports too early, but alas, with no success.

Much of this work was received favorably by some existing specialists in the fields, but got puzzled and negative reactions from others: "Optimum product diversity? Surely the market finds the optimum. Monopolistic competition? That's a dead end." "Duality? What's wrong with the way we have always done things?" For years Ron Jones dismissively referred to the group working on oligopoly in international trade as "imperfect competitors." By now I expect a "long and variable lag" between the time I work on something and the time enough others find interest or use in it. But I have learnt the importance of trying to shorten the lag by conveying my ideas simply and clearly.

In this I am but one minor member of an extremely distinguished group. For example, William Sharpe straggled to get his now-famous CAPM paper published, and recalls the reaction even after its appearance in print: "I knew . . . [t]he phone would start ringing any moment. After one year, total silence. Nobody cared. It took quite a while."[3]

As you can see, my approach to research is too opportunistic to have a constant direction. But taking stock of it for the purpose of writing this piece, I could see a recurrent if not dominant theme. Scale economies and sunk costs keep appearing in my papers with great regularity. Imperfect competition is the norm, and market equilibria are not socially optimal (but government interventions have more subtle effects than naive intuition would suggest, and may actually make matters worse). And therein lies an irony. The left-wing critics of the late 1960s and 1970s, who influenced many youngsters when I started out, reserved their strongest criticism for the perfectly competitive equilibrium of the neoclassical system. Of course they did little by the way of offering a viable alternative. It has been the unexciting incremental work, to which I have contributed a little, that has built into a major shift in our understanding of how the economic system operates when the assumptions of neoclassical economics fail.

That is enough autobiography, and more than enough self-justification. For the rest of the article, I shall elaborate and paraphrase my experience into statements of what I have found to be good work habits. I will find it convenient to express these as items of advice, but let me repeat my earlier caution to the readers--be skeptical, pick what you think might suit you, and discard the rest.

On Choice of Topics * My most important advice here is stark and politically very incorrect: Don't give too much weight to the social importance of the issue; instead, do what captures your intellectual interest and creative imagination. This is not to deny the importance of paying attention to the real world. Nor is it to say that abstract theory is necessarily more valuable than applied work. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But I do believe that mere relevance of an issue will not guarantee good research unless you have a genuine drive to work on it. If not, leave it to someone else. Good work on an apparently unimportant problem will have more long-run value than mediocre work on one of greater intrinsic importance. And one's judgment of importance can always be wrong; concepts of relevance can change over time.

Of course if you find genuine passion for an issue of real social importance, count yourself twice blessed.

* How can you know if you do have the real drive to do research on a particular topic? Perhaps the surest sign is that the work is fun. Richard Feynman, in a wonderful collection of anecdotes from his life ("not an autobiography," he insisted) gives a classic example of this.[4] Some students in the cafeteria were tossing around a dinner plate like a frisbee. It was wobbling, and the red Cornell medallion on the plate seemed to be revolving faster than the wobble. Feynman set out to calculate the relation between the two rates and found a remarkably simple two-to-one ratio. He showed his work to a senior colleague.

'He says, "Feynman, that's pretty interesting, but what's the importance of it? Why are you doing it?"

"There's no importance whatsoever. I'm just doing it for the fun of it." . . . And before I knew it . . . I was "playing"-working, really. . . . It was effortless.

There was no importance to what I was doing, but ultimately there was. The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate.'

Feynman uses a very revealing word: "playing." If your work is as enjoyable to you as play, that is a good sign that the topic suits you.

Looking over what I have just said, I realize that I am advocating something very radical: not only a non-system, but also a non-system for non-work. But what did you expect from someone of twenty-three?

* Every bright student who passes his/her general examinations sets out to revolutionize the subject. But revolutions are not best made by setting out to make them. In Thomas Kuhn's terminology, scientific revolutions are the consequences of attempts to resolve anomalies that are observed in the course of normal science. And the best way to notice anomalies is to do normal research.

* Discover your best "distance." Some people are good sprinters in research. They can very quickly spot and make a neat point; they do this frequently, and in many different areas and issues. Hal Varian and Barry Nalebuff are two of the best sprinters I know. In the same metaphor, others are middle-distance runners. In fact most economists are at some point in this broad category. A few, for example Robert Lucas and James Mirrlees, are marathoners; they run only a small number of races, but those are epics, and they get the most (and fully deserved) awe and respect. In contrast, the profession seems to undervalue sprinters. But each kind of work has its own value, and the different types are complements in the overall scheme of things. Progress of the subject as a whole is a relay race, where different stretches are of different lengths and are optimally run by different people. Find out where your comparative advantage lies.

* Many ideas, and techniques for theorizing, will come to you by accident. But don't wait for such accidents to happen; encourage them. Always be on the lookout for examples, questions etc that relate to what you are doing, or something you worked on once but set aside. A newspaper article or a current affairs program or a chance remark by a colleague can get you started. A totally unrelated theoretical article may use a technique that proves useful for your problem, and gets you re-started on something that had stalled. Seemingly far-fetched analogies turn out to have some deep basis. Therefore you should keep all of your work in your semi-active memory all of the time--the work in progress as well as that not making progress.

* Learn to manage your time. When asked to contribute to a collective volume, or present a paper at a conference, unless the assigned topic happens to coincide exactly with your interests, follow the Nancy Reagan strategy: "Just say no." You will invariably find the demands of such assignments crowding out the time that you could have spent on ideas of much greater intellectual interest to you. (In fact I took on the task of writing this article just to get that out.) Stick to what you would best like to do; if you are successful, some years later people will be holding conferences on your topic. (Of course by then you will be interested in something else.) In the meantime, you will have much more fun working on something that you really like. And even the material rewards of a successful frontier research article easily exceed the honoraria of ten conference articles of topical interest.

There are people who can turn a conference assignment into real research. Or to be accurate, there is one such person--Paul Krugman. Unless you have that very rare skill, get your priorities straight.

On Habits of Work * Management of your time is again of paramount importance. This is especially true when on occasion you are forced (or just irresistibly tempted) to violate the Nancy Reagan Strategy and take on a conference-type assignment. Then I recommend the Nike strategy: "Just do it." Don't procrastinate to the deadline. If you do, you will waste a great deal of time all the while, thinking about the assignment and its impending deadline. You will also expend a lot of mental energy feeling weighed down by the task. Much better to get it out of the way as quickly and effortlessly as possible, and get back to the real stuff.[5]

* On the other hand, when doing frontier research of real intellectual importance and challenge, do not be afraid to spend a lot of time thinking vaguely, or even "day-dreaming" around the subject. This time is not wasted. All the associations you ponder, and all the calculations you try for a few lines and abandon, will prove a useful input to the process that ultimately leads to the answer.

* Having posed the question and worked on it for a while, give the subconscious a chance. Perhaps the best advice on this comes from the mathematician J. E. Littlewood, in his lovely article, "The Mathematician's Art of Work."[6] He distinguishes four phases in creative work: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. "In preparation, [t]he essential problem has to be stripped of accidentals and brought clearly into view; all relevant knowledge surveyed; possible analogues pondered. It should be kept constantly before the mind during intervals of other work. . . Incubation is the work of the subconscious. . . Illumination, which can happen in a fraction of a second. . . . almost always occurs when the mind is in a state of relaxation, and engaged lightly with ordinary matters." Littlewood recommends "the relaxed activity of shaving" as a fruitful time for illumination; I shudder to think how much more David Kreps and Paul Krugman would have accomplished if they had known this.

* In our profession it is customary to stress the importance of economic intuition, and deride abstract or formal thinking. I have found this to be right on balance, but not to the point of dogma. People and problems vary in the kind of thinking that suits them best. For example, it appears that John yon Neumann had a very abstract kind of mind. He once advised a co-worker: "Oh no, no, you are not seeing it. Your kind of visualizing mind is not right for seeing this. Think of it abstractly. What is happening [on a photograph of an explosion] is that the first differential coefficient vanishes identically, and that is why what becomes visible is the trace of the second differential coefficient."[7] How many of us, heating such an explanation from a colleague or a student, would have admonished them to "be more intuitive?"

* Keep a "portfolio" of problems to work on. If you are not making progress on one, switch to another. You will not only diversify your risks, but also increase your chances of success on each, because your mind will stay fresher and you will feel less depressed about the lack of progress on one problem. But don't switch too rapidly; if a problem is at all challenging, less than a month's concentrated thinking about it may not be good enough.

* Joint research is becoming more common in economics, and that is a good thing. A good research collaborator is worth any number of casually interested readers of your papers. The close but sympathetic criticism at an early stage that comes from a fellow worker helps you avoid many blind alleys, or wrong tacks from which you might otherwise never recover. As Francis Crick put it, "The advantage of intellectual collaboration is that it helps jolt one out of false assumptions."[8] You and your ideal co-author will have enough overlap to give both a common frame of reference and language for thinking, but enough difference to generate real synergy and complementarity rather than mere duplication.

* Reserve your best and most alert period of the day for real research, and use your tired, dull or slack stretches for correspondence, meetings, administrative chores etc. Alas, this is often not possible. Keep in mind, too, the possibility that your best period changes with the seasons, age, etc. I have heard Paul Samuelson claim that for most people a switch occurs at around 35 years of age: morning becomes a better time for research instead of late at night. My own experience confirms this.

* Continue revising your papers to improve them, but not forever. The Austrian capital theory that you learnt as a dry textbook model has practical application. Papers should he improved only to the point where the rate of improvement equals the rate of interest. The latter rate will vary over your life-cycle, but striving for absolute perfection is wrong for most people at most times. From a private perspective, it will delay the spread and impact of your work too much, and risk pre-emption. From a social perspective, public release of something that is less than perfect has value; it may be someone else's comparative advantage to contribute the next step of improvement.

* Read other people's papers either seriously,or not at all. When you read them seriously, read them as you read papers when you were a graduate student, checking all the details and questioning everything. This is a good way to get new research ideas of your own. I owe my own understanding of the importance of this principle to Richard Feynman. He describes how he came to discover the law of beta decay.[9]

'At that particular time I was not really quite up to things. Everybody seemed to be smart, and I didn't feel I was keeping up. . . . At one point there was a meeting in Rochester, . . . and Lee was giving his paper on the violation of parity. . . . I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, "I can't understand these things Lee and Yang are saying. It's all so complicated." "No," she said, "what you mean is not that you can't understand it, but that you didn't invent it. You didn't figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you're a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you'll understand it very easily." '

She was right. Not only did Feynman understand the paper, but he remembered something he had done a while ago, used that method to simplify Lee's solution, and forged ahead to develop the whole new theory.

Oddly enough, when I read this I was in a somewhat similar state of mind with regard to the literature on trade policy with asymmetric information, and the same recipe worked for me.[10]

On Writing * My first suggestion is: Keep it simple. The temptation to show one's technical wizardry is overwhelming, particularly for the fresh Ph.D. Resist it. It will only make your paper less easy to read, and reduce its impact. If an idea can be conveyed in a simpler way, without spelling out every epsilon and delta, do so. Littlewood says of Jordan that if he wrote an article with only four symbols they would be called a, M'3, epsilon2, and II"1, 2 instead of a, b, c, d; don't be like that.[11] If needed for completeness, put the more formal proof in an appendix. However, I find totally unacceptable the current and growing practice of many papers in economic theory, which merely state the results in the text without any explanation at all, and then relegate the proofs to an appendix.

I said earlier that pure economic intuition may or may not be the right way to think in research. Its importance increases when one writes research results, and even more when one talks about them, particularly if the intended audience is larger than that of specialists in a very narrow area. (Many fresh Ph.D.'s giving job talks do not realize the importance of a simple and intuitive exposition, and this costs them dearly.)

* My second suggestion is: Keep it short. In this I agree with Piet Hein, the Danish scientist turned poet who wrote aphoristic verses called Grooks. He preferred writers

'who find their writing such a chore they only write what matters.'

But this seems a lost cause. Over the last two decades the average length of economics papers has increased quite a lot. Advances in word-processing technology have greatly reduced the cost of producing words, but not the cost of producing ideas, with the result economists should expect--massive substitution.

My ideal is neatly captured in a question Frank Hahn posed to an author. As an editor of the Review of Economic Studies, Hahn asked the author to cut down his paper from 40 pages to its essential core of three pages. When the author wrote a long and indignant letter, Hahn responded in two sentences: "Crick and Watson described the structure of DNA in three pages. Kindly explain why your idea deserves more space." An ideal that, alas, neither I nor Frank Hahn nor anyone else seems to come close to.

* Listen to referees: Referees may be prejudiced, they may be hurried, but they are almost never stupid. If you are doing innovative work, be prepared to meet bias, and be prepared to meet careless dismissal. Give such reports due consideration--even they may contain useful tips for revision--but if you have basic confidence in what you are doing, press on. If you meet sheer incomprehension, however, take that as a sign that your writing has failed. Clarify, if necessary overhaul the whole notation of your formal model, and try new drafts on colleagues and students, until you communicate better. I come across many economists who constantly complain that "referees don't under-stand them." My inner response is the same as Tom Lehrer's: "If a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up."

* There are conflicting considerations on how hard to sell your work. On the one hand, if you don't sell your own work, the chances are that no one else will. Littlewood has the mot juste once again:[12] "He that bloweth not his own trumpet, his trumpet shall not be blown." On the other hand, excessive claims about the importance of your work will get you a bad reputation in the profession, and will jeopardize the reception of your future work. I prefer to claim a little less for my work than I feel it deserves.

If you must exaggerate, do so in a skillful way. Joseph Schumpeter claimed that he set out to become the best horseman in Vienna, the best lover in Europe, and the best economist in the world, and had achieved two out of the three. This is brilliant exaggeration--anyone who actually knew Schumpeter's prowess in one of the three things would give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he had excelled in the other two.

A Concluding Word I have saved for the end the most important lesson I have learned from my experience, and which I believe has very general validity. Maintain a youthful sense of freedom to choose problems and the directions of work on them. Imagine yourself at twenty-three, not yet labelled or confined to a particular "field," and not yet pressured to produce something quickly for the approaching tenure review. Try to preserve this mental frame in your research, even as your body, and the part of your mind dealing with other matters, continue to age and decay.

Unfortunately, in the US most academics do not regain this freedom until they are thirty-five, by which time it is too late for many of them to be twenty-three. Their research brain is beyond rejuvenation, and it is time for them to leave the research frontier and join the conference circuit or the policy community. My reaction as a theorist echoes what Clemenceau said on heating that the famous pianist Paderewski had become the President of the newly founded Polish Republic: "What a come-down!"

Notes 1. And for reasons that escape me, quite abstruse arguments in capital theory that acquired inexplicable ideological significance. But that fashion died, as it richly deserved to.

2. I wrote one paper in urban economics--a model of the optimum size of a city trading off scale economies in production and congestion diseconomies in transport--that achieved some success. I like to think that even now, when theoretical urban economists meet for a beer at a conference, someone might remark: "Wonder what became of that guy Dixit. He wrote one paper that wasn't bad, and was never heard from again. I guess some people just don't have staying power."

3. Quoted in Peter Bernstein, Capital Ideas, The Free Press, 1992, p. 199.

4. Richard Feynman, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!", New York: Norton, 1985, pp. 157-8.

5. I have to confess that I have not optimized my own time as I advise you to, and that I have too often violated both the Nancy Reagan Strategy and the Nike Strategy. These are merely what in the light of hindsight I wish I had done consistently.

6. Rockefeller University Review, 1967, reprinted in Littlewood's Miscellany, ed. Bela Bollobas, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

7. Norman Macrae, John yon Neumann, New York: Pantheon Books, p. 211.

8. Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery, London: Penguin Books, 1990, p. 70.

9. Feynman, op. cit., pp. 227-8.

10. But, as with the Nancy Reagan and Nike strategies above, I must confess that I have not followed my own advice on serious reading as consistently as I should have.

11. P. 60 of the Bollobas (ed) book cited above. Incidentally, on pp. 49-53 of the same book, Littlewood gives a beautiful example of how not to, and how to, write up a mathematical argument; I urge every young theorist to read it and absorb its lesson.

12. In ed. Bollobas, op. cit., p. 158.

~~~~~~~~

By Avinash Dixit[*]

Professor of Economics, Princeton University.

Read more!

关于国内公民维权案件的一篇文章，转自mit

2005-04-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

县委书记该有什么名誉权

时间:08-11 09:02 作者: 何兵新闻来源:检察日报

我的家乡安徽，新近发生了一起万人瞩目的诉讼案。原告张西德系安徽临泉县委前任书记。被告陈桂棣、春桃是安徽学界名人，他俩花费数年心血完成的《中国农民调查》一书第四章讲述了临泉县白庙镇王营村村民因农民负担过重多次集体上访，与地方政府发生激烈冲突事件的来龙去脉。作者认为，时任临泉县县委书记的张西德，“负有不可推卸的责任，扮演了极不光彩的角色”。

张西德同志当然不这么看。他义愤填膺地说，相关内容“不仅严重失实、胡编捏造，而且指名道姓地对原告的人格、形象进行丑化，对原告的名誉进行百般损害”。张西德同志决心拿起法律武器，为自己，为临泉县委、县政府及相关机关讨回公道。

张西德同志能够为县委、县政府和他本人讨回公道吗？这是一个非常有意义的案件。我们可以将这个案件的法律问题分解成两部分。其一是，县委、县政府以及其他国家机关有无名誉权？其二，张西德同志能够因为别人批评他的执政能力、措施以及个人品行，而主张个人名誉受损吗？我认为，不能。

首先，国家机关没有名誉权。民法上的名誉权是保护公民、法人在民事活动中的民事权益，而县委、政府的公共管理活动不是民事活动，是党务和政务活动，因此，不受民法上的名誉权保护。其背后的道理在于，在法制社会里，批评政府是人民的基本权利和神圣义务。只有让人民毫无顾忌地批评政府，才可能将政府牢牢地置于人民的监督之下，使人民的政府真正成为为人民的政府。

由于人民对政府的信息掌握不可能完整无缺，由于人民对政府的指责不可能完全客观公正，因此，法律必须容忍人民对政府错误的、不公正的批评。如果法律对人民进行苛求，如果一旦人民的指控出现事实错误和判断错误，就要被追究民事责任，人民将噤若寒蝉；人民纵使对政府不满，也只能张口结舌，望政府而兴叹。正是基于对人民批评政府的权力充分保护，我国宪法规定：“中华人民共和国公民对于任何国家机关和国家工作人员，有提出批评和建议的权利；对于任何国家机关和国家工作人员的违法失职行为，有向有关国家机关提出申诉、控告或者检举的权利，但是不得捏造或者歪曲事实进行诬告陷害。”如果本案中，张西德同志胜诉，这意味着什么呢？这意味着法院在修改宪法，将宪法规定的“有提出批评和建议的权利”修改为“有提出正确的批评和建议的权利”。法院有这个权利吗？没有！

深入研究之后，我们还会发现，即使县委和县政府有名誉权，作为前任县委书记的张西德同志也没有这个诉权，这个诉权归属于县委、县政府，而不归属于张西德同志个人，毕竟个人不代表党和政府。

本案原告张西德强调：“我虽然是一名政府官员，但我有权维护自己的名誉权不受侵害。”这涉及到本案的第二个问题，即人民对官员个人的执政行为提出批评，官员可以主张个人名誉损失吗？答案是，很难。在给出我的理由之前，请看看美国法官是如何分析这个道理的。

案件是这样的。《纽约时报》刊登付费广告，呼吁各界支持马丁.路德.金和南方民权运动，其中有抨击警察局不当行为的言论，部分言论与事实有所出入。当地警察局长沙利文以名誉受损为由提起诉讼。州法院判决原告胜诉，被告赔偿５０万元。联邦最高法院在上诉审中一致同意推翻原判，认定公共官员如果不能证明其职务行为的批评者之批评出诸实际恶意，则不能获得损害赔偿。所谓实际恶意即明知为非或不顾事实真实与否之轻率心理状态。

美国布伦南大法官主笔的判决书宣示，宪法第一修正案的核心宗旨，即是使公共官员执行公共权力的行为，接受人民最广泛的批评，而批评政府是公民的一项崇高义务。判决书表示，对于公共问题作无约束力、强而有力、公开的讨论是国家对人民所承诺的一项基本原则。另有三名大法官发有协同意见，主张对公众言论予以绝对的宪法保障。法官布莱克认为：“第一和第四修正案不只是限制各州许可政府官员起诉批评赔偿的权力，而是根本上禁止各州行使这种权力。”法官戈登堡说：“依我之见，宪法第一和第十四修正案赋予公民和报业一种批评官员职务行为的绝对、无条件的特权，而不管这种特权的滥用和过分行使可能带来什么危害。这并不是说宪法保护针对政府官员和普通公民的私人行为的侵害名誉言论。纯粹针对私人行为的侵害名誉言论与一个自治社会的政治目的没有关系。”

这一判决阐明这样一个基本的道理，即人民批评政府官员，即使出现错误，即使官员的名誉事实上受到损害，法律也不保护官员的名誉权??除非有人故意陷害。法律对官员为何如此不公？法律在捍卫什么？法律捍卫的是人民对公共事务不受限制的批评权利，而这一权利能否得到保护，直接关系到国家的安危，法律在“丢卒保车”：为了保护公民的言论自由这个“车”，法律必须丢弃了官员名誉权这个“卒”。

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How to publish in top journals? (zz)

2005-04-12T20:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ555/choi/
发信人: srrbyes (out+of+date), 信区: Economics
标　题: How to publish at top journals, by Choi
发信站: Unknown Space - 未名空间 (Wed Feb 23 12:09:53 2005) WWW-POST

How to publish in top journals?

Kwan Choi

In response to popular demand, this brief note is provided for the benefit
of all academic authors. The original intent was to produce a book of advice,
but time is a scarce commodity and you may have to wait indefinitely for a
book-length summary.
This brief manual provides some useful suggestions for today’s
authors. The goal is to "foster the greatest good to the greatest number of
people."1 If this note is useful to you, please tell your friends about it. If
you follow most of these rules, the probability of obtaining tenure or
promotion may increase significantly. If most authors acquired the basic
skills mentioned here, they would then be competing in terms of the truth,
goodness, and beauty of their ideas, not in terms of cosmetic skills.
Disclaimer
Please note that the advice contained here may not necessarily
improve the chances that your research papers will be published. By
downloading or acquiring a copy of this guide, you agree that:
In no event shall the author be liable for any indirect, incidental,
collateral, exemplary, consequential, or special damages or losses arising out
of your use of rules suggested in this guide.
Note
1. The Urantia Book (p. 1488)
________________________________________
Introduction
Publishing technology has changed drastically in recent years. The
advent of the personal computers and laser printers has lowered the technical
barriers of publication. Economists are now producing more papers than they
were a couple of decades ago. Consequently, top journals are being inundated
with manuscripts.
Journal editors have become extremely risk averse; they are more
concerned with the risk of accepting low-quality articles than with the
possibility of rejecting good articles.

Purpose of this Manual
Ideally, the decision to publish should be based solely on the ideas
contained in the papers. In practice, the decision is affected by other
nonsubstantive and cosmetic factors. If all authors were equally skillful in
presenting their ideas, they would be competing essentially in terms of the
merit of ideas, rather than the art of presentation.
This manual will advise authors on how to prepare papers to improve
their chances for acceptance in top journals.
Why is the journal acceptance rate so low?
• Among the papers submitted to ranking journals, 1/3 or less receive
mildly favorable reports. (This generally depends on the quality of the
journal and the referees.) The rest do not receive favorable recommendations.
• If two referees are employed, the chance that a typical paper of
average quality will get a favorable recommendation from both referees is
about 11% (= 1/9).
• There is no such thing as good luck in publication. Painstaking work,
coupled with careful risk taking, is required for success.
All referees are not equal. Comments of a well-known referee weigh
more heavily than those of a lesser-known referee. You should be aware of
which referee is more important.
When a paper is rejected, the editors paid more attention to the
negative than the positive aspects of your paper.
If you eliminate or reduce the negative elements, the good ideas in
the paper will far overshadow the shortcomings and your paper is more likely
to be accepted.
Why is your acceptance rate lower than others?
• You may lack experience. However, this can be remedied.
• You may need to submit more papers. Volume also increases the
acceptance rate because of learning by doing.
• Identify the cause and act accordingly. There might be biases against
you based on race, sex, nationality, or schooling. For instance, if a
university journal has a reported acceptance rate of 10% but pre-allocates
half the space to its faculty and immediate students, your acceptance rate is
20% if you are in the preferred class, and 5% or lower if you are not.
• You may not be able to eliminate existing biases, but you can avoid
them.
________________________________________
References
The Chicago Manual of Style, The University of Chicago Press, 1982.
Holub, Hans Werner, Gottfried Tappeiner, and Veronika Eberharter,
"The Iron Law of Important Articles," Southern Economic Journal 58 (1991),
317-28.
Horowitz, Ira, "How to Publish Well and Often When You are Unlikely
to Contend for a Nobel Prize," Research Bulletin, Chinese University of Hong
Kong, Issue 3, November 1995.
Hudson, John, “Trends in Multi-Authored Papers in Economics,” Journal of
Economic Perspectives 10 (1996), 153-9.
Laband, David N. and Michael J. Piette, “Favoritism versus Search for Good
Papers: Empirical Evidence Regarding the Behavior of Journal Editors,”
Journal of Political Economy 102 (1994), 194-203.
Liebowitz, S. J. and J. P. Palmer, "Assessing the Relative Impacts
of Economic Journals," Journal of Economic Literature 22 (1984), 77-88.
McCloskey, Donald, The Writing of Economics, Macmillan Publishing
Company, New York, 1987.
Nyaw, M. K. and Eden Yu, "Professor Douglas North's Research
Experience and Advice," Research Bulletin, Chinese University of Hong Kong,
Issue 2, April 1995.
Urantia Foundation, The Urantia Book, 1955, Chicago.
________________________________________
General Publication Strategies
1. Diversify your research portfolio
o Average wait for an acceptance decision = 3 years.
o Average wait for a rejection = 6 to 8 months.
o Survival is more important than glory in the early stages of your career.
o Diversifying the research portfolio is particularly important during the
first five or six years of your teaching career when each publication counts
heavily. Diversify research topics for possible publication.
o If you have a solid hit in one area, then redouble your effort to establish
your name as an expert in that field before you move into another field.
o Writing several papers in a very narrow area is risky. It is like putting
all your eggs in one basket.
o Continuing to write papers in the same narrow area without clear evidence of
success is risky.
2. Concentrate on one or two fields
o Normally, you should not select more than two fields of specialization.
Research economies of scale often may require your undiluted attention in a
single field.
o Choose, at most, two or three focused areas within your field of
specialization. Then pursue those topics until you produce a couple of
publications.
o If you have published no papers in one area for three years, then consider
switching to another topic.
3. Generate one or two papers from your thesis
o You invested two or more years writing your thesis.
o Try to generate a couple of papers from the most important chapters of the
thesis. This is easier than writing a totally new paper from scratch.
o Work jointly with your advisor to help market your papers.
4. Maintain a stock of papers under review constantly
o If the acceptance rate of the top-ranking journals is 15%, one needs about 7
papers under review at all times to have one paper accepted per year at the
targeted journals.
o If your goal is to get 10 papers accepted in the first 5 years of your
career, you need about a dozen papers under review at all times.
o Half a dozen papers should be under review at all times for untenured
authors. This does not mean that you should write 7 new papers each year.
5. Don't put two good ideas in one paper
o Separate them into two papers.
o Do not try to put down everything you know about the subject in one paper.
What will you do next?
o As the paper's length increases beyond 15 pages, the chance of acceptance
shrinks geometrically.
o When a topic is appropriately split into two papers, the probability of
getting at least one of them accepted more than doubles.
o You also will get a paper accepted sooner.
o If x = original length, and p = probability of acceptance, then
p(x/2) = 2p(x) + , where  > 0 and x > 15 pages.
The alpha () factor:
 Editors like short papers.
 The chance that a referee will detect a mathematical error declines.
 Referees will return the report faster.
 The chance that a referee will misunderstand the paper also
decreases.
6. Approach different types of journals
o Sending all papers to top journals is risky.
o Sending all papers to low-quality journals also is unsatisfactory. You will
regret it when the papers are accepted!
o Your curriculum vitae should contain some publications in the top journals.
o Quantity of publications also is important.
o Having three papers in different journals is better than three in one
journal, if the relative quality of the journals is the same.
7. Write clearly
o The main assumptions and results should be explained clearly. If there are
many assumptions, present them together in one place. Do not bury them in long
paragraphs.
o Define every symbol when it is first introduced. Otherwise, the referees
will be frustrated, and you won't get a favorable report.
o If many symbols are introduced to present your model, it is a good idea to
define all symbols together and display them in one place so that the referees
would not waste time hunting for them.
o Clearly state the contributions of the paper, relative to the literature, in
the concluding remarks.
8. Learn word processing skills and master other relevant software
programs
o Be independent of secretaries. They do not work 24 hours a day.
o Word processing skills are particularly helpful when the amount of revision
is minimal.
o Researchers without computer skills will be an endangered species in this
century.
9. Scan current journals
o Keep up with the current literature (e.g., EconLit).
o Using the potential key words, search to see if others have written papers
on the same or similar subjects.
o By not duplicating what others have done, you will save time and effort.
o Subscribe to a couple of journals in your field of interest, rather than
general journals.
o General journals are not cost effective as a source of research information.
Fewer and fewer articles in general journals are relevant for your research.
o Utilize the libraries for other journals.
o Social Science Research Network features news about papers as soon as they
are accepted; you can have the latest information about publications in your
field.
10. Present papers at conferences before submission
o Present your papers at regional, national, or international conferences. You
may get surprisingly valuable feedback.
o This also is an important way for you to become familiar with others working
in the same area.
o Presenting papers within one's department is not effective. Except in top
schools, most of the faculty in a typical department with 20 or fewer members
are not familiar with the subject, and with due respect to their expertise,
they generally are not qualified to make substantive comments on your topic.
11. Do not distribute unpublished papers to strangers (at big conferences)
o If you do, your desire to become well-known may be temporarily gratified,
but the penalty can be harsh later.
o Some people might steal your idea and submit a closely related paper sooner
than you do.
o You get no credit.
o Distributing papers is okay in a closed circle of researchers, where
everybody knows each other.
12. Only the tough get going
o One gets rejection letters more often than not. This is inevitable!
o Develop a thick skin and be a good loser. This game is not for the
faint-hearted. If you cannot swallow rejection easily, don't submit papers.
o A good paper deserves at least three chances at publication in ranking
journals.
o If you ignore a rejected paper more than one month, you are likely to lose
interest. Do something about it.
o Bad luck eventually comes to an end.
13. Get to know one hundred people active in your field
o There are about a hundred people in your field who are likely to be referees
of your papers.
o Prepare a list of one hundred active people in your main research areas. Try
to meet them within a five-year period.
o Present papers at, or at least attend, two professional meetings a year.
o When presenting papers or attending regional, national, or international
meetings, try to get to know these people. How? (Think!) This is your best
opportunity for networking.
14. Maintain contacts
o Maintain contacts with other economists via telephone, fax, or e-mail. Do
not send copies of your papers to them unless requested to do so.
o What to do when they don't respond? Think!
o You also need these contacts later: they can write letters of recommendation
when you seek promotion and tenure.
________________________________________
Articles and Books
15. A journal article is preferable to a book
o Don't publish a book, at least not before getting tenure.
o Readers find it easy to remember if your papers were published in journals
because they are often abbreviated like AER, JPE, RIE, etc. They might even
remember the years of publication.
o They won't remember your books, unless the titles are extremely short and
sexy.
Life of a publication
o The life of a book is about 1 to 2 years.
o The life of a journal article is about 10 years.
o Publishers will not spend much money to advertise your book because profit
margins are small.
o Accordingly, most economists do not know whether you published a book, let
alone know the title.
o Bragging to your colleagues about your recent book is like introducing
yourself by long names with 10 or more words.
o Authors who have published an article in the same journal feel friendly
toward you. It creates a bond among the authors.
o Book authors operate alone.
o Researchers know that books do not go through the refereeing process.
Weight of a publication
o Your department or division may not clearly specify quantified weights to
evaluate your research.
o But rest assured that they are there; a given number of papers in certain
journals or certain ranks, etc. These standards are developed by consensus,
and you can find these standards by checking the records of those who received
tenure recently.
o Journal rankings often are used to evaluate the quality of your research.
o All things considered, the following weights could be used:
 1 = an article in a good journal
 0.5 - 1 = a whole book, maybe 2 if it is very popular.
 0.1 = a chapter in a book someone else edited.
o Textbooks do not count.
o Handbooks and some special series might be treated like a journal because of
their long shelf life (10 + years).
o Do not give away your precious paper as a chapter of a regular book, unless
it appeals to your altruistic desire to help others.
16. A journal article first
o First, publish your original idea in an article.
o Then maybe in a book, not vice versa.
o Journals will not knowingly publish an article if the substance was
published in a book previously.
________________________________________
Collaboration
________________________________________
17. Cultivate coauthors
o Find seasoned coauthors with publication experience and share the glory.
o Working with your advisors is a good idea, at least for the first few years
after receiving a Ph.D.
o You have to become independent at some point, though.
o Acting alone is a risky strategy, especially for those just out of graduate
school.
o With seasoned coauthors, the probability of acceptance will likely more than
double.
o Through your coauthors, you may be introduced to an established group of
economists.
o You also may learn how to write better papers.
Weight of coauthored articles
o Whatever rankings are used, given the quality, the following weights may be
used more or less as a guide to estimate the overall impact of joint articles:

 1 = an article (sole author).
 0.75 = first author in a joint paper.
 0.7 = second author in a joint paper.
 0.5 = an author in a paper with three authors.
 1/n = four or more authors. (Don't do this, except in certain fields
[e.g., agricultural economics], where it is more acceptable. You will be
included in "et al.")
18. Make an agreement with coauthors ex ante
o It is best to divide up the work with coauthors ex ante. This minimizes the
chance of free riding when the paper is complete or accepted.
o Be considerate when determining the order of authors.
o To assure a long-term relationship, alternate the order of appearance,
especially when the contributions are roughly equal.
o If you insist on alphabetical order just because your name precedes the
others, they may not come back to you for further collaboration.
o Another practical idea: flip a coin.
19. Maintain collaboration
o If a personality conflict develops, collaboration does not work.
o It takes time and effort to cultivate relationship with coworkers. If you
have found a good working relationship, don't tamper with it to obtain small
gains.
o If you do seek small gains, it is difficult to restore a good relationship
should you change your mind later.
20. Be patient with inactive coauthors
o Be tolerant of your coauthors.
o Remember that the sum of subjective contributions of coauthors of a paper
always exceeds 100%.
o Removing an inactive coauthor from the paper may not give you peace of mind,
especially if it is done insensitively.
o Keep pace with your coauthors. If a coauthor does not contribute anything,
caution must be exercised. Often the animosity generated is not worth the
gain.
o If a joint work is being terminated because of unforeseen developments, make
it clear who holds the ownership of the disputed papers. This eliminates
untold misery later.
________________________________________
Choosing Topics
21. Do not waste time on dead or dying topics
o If your most recent references in a projected paper are ten years old, it
will be difficult to publish it. It is a dead issue. Do not start such a paper
(until you get tenure)!
o If the most recent references closely related to your paper are 5 years old,
it is a dying issue. Editors are reluctant to accept such papers, even if the
referees recommend publication.
o It is difficult for the editor to find suitable referees for outdated
topics.
o Your inability to find sufficient references indicates
 You have not read the literature.
 Others are not interested in the topic, hence, it is unlikely to get
published.
 No problem! Dig further.
o If the work is completed already, cite some papers that are more recent.
22. Do not write papers with breakthrough ideas at first
o Avoid writing about your breakthrough ideas, at least in the early stage of
your career, unless your mentor is the editor of a major journal.
o Papers with breakthrough ideas are not often published.
o Wait until you get tenure to tackle breakthrough ideas.
o "I told my own young colleagues that they should preferably start off with
the received wisdom with some changes until they get their tenure." -Douglas
North, 1993 Nobel Laureate in Economic Science (see Nyaw and Yu, 1995).
o If you do advance breakthrough ideas your papers will be rejected, and they
might reappear in a modified, clearly written paper by someone else later.
o After you are established, perhaps you can tackle breakthrough ideas, and
become better known, instead of publishing many papers with minor ideas.
o Or as you gain more experience, you may find that the ideas turn out to be
trivial.
23. Extend existing literature
o The bulk of papers published today are modifications of the existing
literature or tests of existing theories.
o Something in the paper must be original.
o Duplication is not an extension of knowledge.
24. Write something creative
o A journal's primary goal is to publish original ideas.
o A good journal is interested in disseminating new ideas, not in publishing
papers that elaborate some existing ideas or examine the implications of a
minor change in assumptions.
o These papers only show that some results do not necessarily hold. Such
efforts are basically a comment on someone else's paper.
25. Mix ingredients of other papers
How does one extend the literature? Suppose there are two important papers in
the literature,
p1 = {A, B, C, and D}, p2 = {C, D, and E}
where A, B, ... are ingredients.
Let pnew = {A, B, E} be a new paper.
o Does the new combination make sense? Does it describe an important economic
phenomenon in a certain country or does it capture an interesting situation?
o If pnew = {A, C, X} where X is totally new, and if it makes sense, it may be
an original idea.
o Original papers add something new and dare to eliminate some old notions. Do
not worry about compatibility with old papers.
26. Write on interesting subjects
o There must be an interesting story, a story that nonexperts?who would skip
all the equations?would find intriguing.
o Equations should not dominate the paper. People lose interest.
o Controversies and debates stimulate reader interest.
o Before writing, answer the question: what new ideas or results does this
paper offer?
o You have to demonstrate that there is some interest in the topic on which
you are working.
________________________________________
Comments or Notes
27. Avoid writing comments on other papers
o Writing comments is risky because you are at the mercy of the original
author.
o If a comment or note is rejected, you cannot send it anywhere without
substantial rewriting; it is too short.
o When a comment or note is rejected, abandon the note or expand it to a
full-blown paper.
o If you add something new while making the original author shine, you might
succeed. For instance, if you name the result after the original author, it
makes everybody happy.
o If you point out errors in the original paper, your referee (the original
author) will find something wrong in your comments also, whether they are
real, imaginary, or spurious.
o Occasionally, writing comments is okay (once every few years). But do it
quickly, while the editor's memory is still fresh.
o A safer approach is to write an independent paper.
o AER has a standing policy not publishing comments, even to correct errors.
Remember Robert Fulghum’s advice “Clean up your mess”?
o Do not develop a habit of writing comments on others' work.
28. Do not correct small errors others make
o It is dangerous. This practice rarely earns you respect.
o You may not be right. As you rush to prove your points, you may not have
grasped all the fine points of the original paper.
o Even if you are right, the original author may lurk in the trenches where
he/she can stage a counterattack and damage your credibility in the future.
o You also don’t like to have your errors pointed out.
o Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest
not the beam that is in thine own eye? (Matthew 7:3)
o The referee may then be negative toward all your future papers.
o Communicate with the original author before you submit your comment. If you
are diplomatic and fortunate, you might acquire a friend who would look at
your papers with favor in the future. On the other hand, you may find an enemy
who will always find fault with your future papers.
o
Writing Strategies
Cover Page and Cover Letter
1. Prepare a perfect cover page and an abstract
o The cover page should contain complete correspondence information about the
submitting author:
 postal address
 telephone and fax numbers
 e-mail address
o If you move, give your new address to the editorial office.
o If updating a paper, give the current date (or month and year).
o Do not mention when a paper was first written and when it was revised. The
editor can tell how often the paper has been rejected, and may erroneously
conclude that it should receive the same treatment. If you really need the
information for yourself, you can add such things as a non-printing comment.
It is probably more convenient to maintain a separate record that shows the
status of all your unpublished papers.
o If the referee figures out that the paper has been rejected more than once,
he/she is more likely to recommend rejection.
o The abstract and the paper should be prepared together.
o When the paper is finally accepted, the abstract has to be written, but your
memory is hazy. It is better to do it when your memory is fresh.
o The abstract should appear on the second page. Then if the editor rips off
the cover page, the abstract will still reach the referee.
o Eliminate typographical errors in the cover page and the abstract. This is
an absolute minimum courtesy. If there is an error, it is a sign of gross
neglect.
o Of course, you have to check the spelling for the entire paper, and you
should do that every time you revise the paper.
2. Don't explain how important the paper is in the cover letter
o Editors do not read it.
o Maybe the secretaries do.
o This is a signal that you lack experience and that you are not confident.
o One or two explanatory sentences may not hurt. (You may pass the initial
screening.)
________________________________________
Introduction
3. Devote half the writing time to the introduction and conclusion
o Once the ideas of a publishable paper are roughly formulated, writing should
be done within a month. Otherwise, you lose interest. You may even forget
about the entire paper.
o About half of your writing time should be devoted to writing the main body
of the paper, which should be done first.
o The remainder of your effort should be devoted to writing the introduction
and conclusion.
4. Get their attention early
o Provide evidence of why it is interesting (i.e., why it should be published)
in the introduction.
o If an apple does not taste good at the first bite, one simply throws it away
without giving any thought on the nutritional value hidden in the apple.
o Likewise, most referees make up their mind at the first bite, i.e., within
15 minutes of reading a paper.
o If the referees don't like a paper, they begin to look for reasons to
justify why the paper should be rejected.
o If the referee loses interest from reading the introduction, he/she might
postpone reading the paper.
o If a paper is set aside, it could be several months later when the referee
picks up the paper again, probably if and when he/she receives a reminder
about the review. This is one of the major reasons why it takes a long time to
get a report.
o Do not repeat the concluding remarks in the introduction.
5. The introduction should be two pages or less
o If the introduction is more than two pages, it is too long.
o Shorten it to 2 pages or 1/6 of the paper, whichever is less.
o If you write more than two pages, then either
 you are discoursing a lot about other people, in which case you are
sending a signal that your contribution is minor, relative to the literature,
or
 you are discussing too many technical details, which do not belong in
the introduction.
6. Discuss real world examples
o Pass the relevance test by providing citations, statistics, or anecdotes of
real world examples.
o Then the referee cannot say the paper is uninteresting, the most common
reason for rejection.
o If the referee says it is not interesting, it is a value judgment and there
is no appeal! No editors will publish an uninteresting paper.
o One important purpose of the introduction is to prevent the referees from
making that disparaging remark.
o Without this sound footing in the real world, your paper may give the
impression to readers that it provides a profound solution to nonexistent
problems.
7. Imitate skillful writers
o Observe how other successful writers introduce their topic, cite literature,
and get on with their task.
o Imitate their words and phrases, and modify them to suit your purpose.
o It is easier to imitate what someone else has written than to create a
totally new paragraph.
8. Do not plagiarize
o The word “plagiarize” means to “steal and pass off as one’s own (the
ideas or words of another).” (Webster’s Third International Dictionary,
1986)
o Remember Robert Fulghum’s advice “Don’t take things that aren’t yours.”

o If you do, you will pay dearly later when your work is published. You are
lucky if the paper is not published!
o If you are quoting statements made by another writer, use identifying
quotation marks.
o Some people suggest that one should not copy more than three consecutive
words without identifying quotation marks. This is extreme advice that no one
can follow.
o Do not copy, but summarize the contributions of other writers in your own
words to the extent that they are related to the subject of your paper.
o Mention the cited author with year of publication in the text and give the
exact source in the reference section.
9. Do not use I
o Some authors do get away with I.
o Referees are generally biased against egocentric persons.
o Take the writing task seriously, not yourself.
o "The paper achieves...." sounds softer and more humble than "I did this."
o Avoid starting a paragraph with I.
10. Create a packet of related articles for each paper
o All cited and other related papers must be at hand.
o This practice saves time, especially when writing the introduction and
conclusion, and when you revise the paper.
o If you maintain the background packet, you do not have to go to the library
every time you revise the paper.
11. Treat others generously
o Emphasize the importance of the paper being written, but not at the expense
of others. They are probably your referees and they are sensitive.
o Don’t hit people (Robert Fulghum). Do not hurt their feelings.
o When mentioning the works of other persons, avoid using negative terms.
o Examples:
 "The deficiency of Smith's approach is..."
 "The problems of these papers..."
o Papers that attack others are likely to be rejected, especially when the
authors or their friends become your referees.
12. Avoid predominantly citing your own works
o The referees may think you are a self-centered clod. There are others who
have contributed to the literature.
o If the first page only mentions your past work, and not that of others, it
means either
 you are probably digging into an area in which no one else is
interested?this implication is bad?or
 you are an egotist who disregards the contributions of others, which
is even worse.
13. Cite the papers of potential referees in the introduction
o In many situations, whether your paper is accepted or not primarily depends
on who referees it.
o If you offend the referee by your thoughtless comments, this paper and many
of your future papers will have no place to go.
o Important references should be mentioned in the first page.
o Hopefully, the editor will read the first page (or the next) when choosing
the referees.
o The editor may choose referees from those mentioned in the introduction and
references.
o Works of potential referees should be mentioned in the introduction, rather
than buried deep in footnotes or the main body.
14. Give (accurate) credit generously to the most likely referees
o Be generous to all authors cited, but particularly to those who are likely
to be referees.
o Explain why their works are significant for your analysis.
o Write one or two sentences about the contributions of each of the most
likely referees and how their works are related to yours.
o This takes up less than 1% of the space, but it can affect the probability
of acceptance significantly.
15. Find quotations from well-known authors
o This strategy increases the credibility of the paper.
o For instance, if John Maynard Keynes or Kenneth Arrow said something about
the topic, it is difficult for the referee to argue that your paper is
uninteresting.
o Quoting a live, famous person is more effective; his or her students might
be referees.
o Do not quote dead people too often; they won't be your referees. (No pun
intended.)
o Do not quote yourself. This implies narcissism or lack of exposure to the
thinking of other economists.
16. Do not be apologetic
o You may acknowledge the limitations of the approach only once in the
conclusion.
o But do not apologize for what the paper cannot do.
o The more you mention to the referees what the paper does not do, the less
contribution it seems to make to the literature.
Preparing the Main Body

17. Prepare a rough outline before writing
o Sketch briefly the content of each section. Then generate the text. Smooth
out the connections. Without this rough blueprint, the paper often evolves in
a different direction than you intended.
o This blueprint reduces the chances that you will lose direction and dwell
too much upon minor points.
o This sketch needs to be changed as you go.
18. Start writing before the paper is finished in your head
o The precise connection of words from beginning to end cannot be done in your
head, except by a few geniuses like Shakespeare.
o A 15-page paper may contain about 4 - 5,000 words. Writing a paper is like
stringing pearls to make a necklace. There is an optimum order for these
pearls to form a paper, and some pearls are better left out.
o Begin the main body of the paper with empirical or theoretical results. Then
create the introduction and conclusion.
o Tables and references may be added as needed.
19. Do not read too much
o Do not read too much before you begin to write. It can interfere with your
own thinking and writing.
o Imagine how much time a prolific writer would spend reading the
contributions of other people.
o It is impossible to read every paper ever written on a subject.
o Remember your goal is to write and publish a paper, not to read everything.
o You have other important things to do (e.g., taking care of spouse and
children)!
o If your family is neglected, what good is your paper?
o If you read a dozen papers on a topic, you should have enough material to
write a paper. Now add your own ideas to this base of knowledge.
20. Develop consistent and simple notations
o Invest enough time to design efficient notations for your papers.
o Do this not just for one paper, but for most of your papers. This helps you
remember when you revise a paper.
o If the notations are confusing, the paper cannot be very illuminating.
o Each paper may have some notations that are specifically tailored for the
task. But the variables should come from a well-designed and consistent set of
notations so that you may readily remember what they stand for.
21. Strike a balance between theory and applications
o A theoretical paper should say something about policies, applications, or
empirical work.
o An empirical paper should say something about the theory that led to the
empirical work.
o Check the preferences of the journals that you are considering.
22. Divide long paragraphs
o If there are two or more ideas in a single paragraph, split them up.
o Break up long paragraphs even if they contain a single idea.
o Readers tend to skip long paragraphs. They discourage referees and readers
from reading the paper.
o The eyes of readers are subconsciously looking for open space. This is why
important equations should be displayed, rather than buried in the text.
o No paragraph should be longer than half a page.
o As a general rule, a paragraph should have more than two sentences.
23. Each full page should have more than two paragraphs
o A paragraph extending over a page indicates that you are not an experienced
writer.
o Referees and readers skip long paragraphs.
o When there are many equations, it is easy to forget to control the length of
a paragraph.
24. Summarize theoretical findings in propositions
o If you do not want the referees to miss important results, repeat them in
propositions.
o The referees do not read every word you write. They are more likely to read
the displayed items.
o Minimize the number of words in a given proposition.
25. Use tables to summarize results or to compare with the literature
o Tables provide another way to catch the attention of referees.
o Avoid too many numbers in one table.
o Do not present more than three tables, except in empirically oriented
papers.
o Do not present more than six tables even in empirical papers.
26. Minimize numbered equations
o There should be some equations. Otherwise, the referees might think that it
is a purely descriptive paper.
o But do not include too many equations. A paper with more than 30 equations
seems difficult to read.
o Do not display every equation. Less important equations can be buried in the
text.
o Not all equations need to be numbered.
o Use primes or other variations such as (3') or (7a), (7b), etc. to group
related equations.
o If there are more than a score of equations, move long derivations to the
Appendix.
27. Simplify figures
o A (good) figure is worth a thousand words.
o Do not use too many curves, lines, or labels.
o Ten years after publication, readers may not remember anything about a
paper, not equations nor derivations. But they may recall a figure.
o As a general rule, a paper should not contain more than two figures and
rarely more than three.
o Too many figures suggest that the paper represents a low-tech research
effort.
________________________________________
Conclusion
28. Summarize the contribution briefly in the conclusion
o A paper needs a concluding remark. A note does not, but it may include such
a remark.
o Mention the limitations of the results (without being negative).
o Discuss how the theory may be extended in certain areas.
o The referees may be interested in writing a related paper. If they are
honest, they would need your paper as a basis, and hence are likely to
recommend acceptance. That?stimulating a reader to extend your research?is
your contribution.
o Compare your results to those in the current literature.
o If the literature does not have comparable results, discuss how your paper
is related to the literature.
o Do not repeat some portion of the introduction in the conclusion.
29. Discuss policy implications
o Explain how the theory applies to real world examples.
o Example: In practice, A is used, but you recommend B, etc.
o Do not rehash what you already said in the main body of the paper.
Especially, do not copy and paste it in the conclusion.
o If you do, the referees will know you are not articulate.
o Present the bottom line. Mention the implications for policy makers,
practitioners, or other researchers.
________________________________________
Abstract and Title
30. Write a provokative abstract
o Write the abstract only after the conclusion is written.
o The referees read it more often than any other paragraph in the paper.
o In 15 seconds, you have to convince the referees (and readers) that they
should proceed with the rest of the paper.
o So do an excellent job here.
o If it is boring, your paper is hopeless.
31. Choose an interesting title
o Give the paper an eye-catching title.
o If the title is boring, readers will avoid your paper even when it is
published. The paper won't generate many citations.
o Never try to squeeze the content of the paper in the title.
o Giving a title to a paper is like naming your child. The title should be
short.
o One line is best. Never use more than two lines.
o Avoid "On the...". It implies that the paper is actually a note. Because it
is on a well-known subject, the editors are led to believe that the paper
probably contains little that is new.
________________________________________
References
32. Minimize references
o An inexperienced writer rarely resists the temptation to cite all papers
that have ever been written on the subject.
o This practice may be appropriate for a doctoral dissertation, but not for a
journal paper.
o An ideal number of references is one dozen. A practical upper limit is
twenty.
o For all papers, follow the reference style of a well-known journal in the
field.
o Do not revise the reference style each time you submit the paper. The
acceptance decision is not based on the style of your references.
o After the paper is accepted, you can use the style of the journal in
question.
33. Include references to authors who are known to like your papers
o Perhaps they might become referees.
o Include references to people with whom you have had favorable
correspondence.
o This is not to bias opinions, but to get a fair hearing.
o Referees have to make a conscious effort and must be alert in order to be
fair to unknown authors.
o Include liberal references to famous economists, dead or alive, who are
unlikely to be your referees.
34. Delete or hide the references to undesirable potential referees
o Even with double blind reviews, one can often guess the identity of the
referee from the report because of references and writing style, etc.
o Editors often select referees from your references.
o If some referees consistently recommend rejection of your papers, drop their
papers from your references (in the initial submission).
o You can add them later (after the paper is accepted).
o This may require rewriting the introduction with a somewhat different
perspective, but it is probably worth the effort.
o Depending on the journal, you may ask the editor to eliminate some persons
from the pool of referees. But you should ask informally (e.g., via e-mail) in
advance if it is okay.
35. Cite your own articles
o An article is considered "important" if it is cited 30 times or more by
others.
o Cite your own related papers, provided that they were published or are
forthcoming in a prestigious journal. Others may look up your other papers and
cite them.
o But do not cite too many.
o If you have a good reputation, this practice can be useful because the
referee may figure out that it is your paper.
o Do not cite your own unpublished papers or publications in an obscure
journal. The editors and referees may conclude that the current paper also
should be published in such journals.
o Do not cite your dissertation. The referees will know you are inexperienced.

o Do not cite someone else's dissertation. The referees may erroneously
conclude that you are him or her or a close associate, all of whom are
inexperienced.
________________________________________
Endnotes and Appendix
36. Put technical, detailed comments in notes
o Combined endnotes, tables, references, and appendix or appendices should be
smaller than the main body of the paper. Otherwise, readers wonder “where is
the beef?”
o The main text should be free from technical details, and the major ideas
should emerge from reading it.
o Intellectual clutter should be relegated to closets, i.e., notes.
o Use notes to insert references and to make points that do not distract
typical readers.
o No more than 10 endnotes should be provided. Avoid them like the plague
(Horowitz, 1995).
o Notes should be short, not exceeding a page and never more than two pages.
37. Put long derivations in an extended note or an appendix.
o Long derivations of an essential result or an equation which may be over
half a page can be included in an extended footnote, if there is risk of
boring readers.
o If there are two or more extended notes, they should be converted to an
appendix.
o If the derivation is purely mathematical without apparent insight, it should
be in an appendix.
38. Notes intended for referees should not be in the appendix.
o Anything intended for referees' eyes only should be explained in the notes.
o Do not detach such notes from the paper, but write "Not for Publication" on
them. If you detach the notes from the paper, they may not reach the referees.

39. Your paper should not exceed 25 pages
o If this is difficult, at least keep the text within 20 pages (Horowitz,
1995). This is the amount the referees would read.
o As the length of the paper increases, the probability of acceptance
decreases. The referees are more likely to find something wrong.
o As the length of the paper increases,
 You are more likely to make mathematical errors.
 The chance that the referee thinks you made a mistake increases (even
when you are right).
 You are more likely to make statements that will offend referees.
Preparation and Submission
Preparation for Submission
1. Sit on the finished version for one week
o After the paper is completed, do not immediately submit it to a journal. (It
is not finished yet.)
o You invariably will find many small errors in text, notations, explanations,
or missing references, etc. in your finished paper.
2. Reread the introduction, conclusion, and abstract before submission
o Reread these three parts carefully before you submit the paper to a journal
and eliminate all typographical errors and other embarrassing mistakes.
o A typographical error on the first page of introduction or abstract
indicates that the author is careless.
o Such errors tend to lead referees and editors, rightly or wrongly, to
conclude that the paper should be rejected. They conclude that the author is
likely to be sloppy in substance as well. And they might be right.
o If you don't proofread your own introduction, why expect the referees to
spot and correct all the errors?
3. Use, but do not rely totally on spelling checkers
o One should always check spelling before submission. But there are no
substitutes for reading the papers personally.
o Spelling checkers do not check word meanings.
4. Do not arouse envy
o Do not use fancy fonts or expensive bond paper.
o Do not cite too many of your own papers.
 The referees might feel that you have published too many papers.
 The referees might feel justified to recommend rejection of your
paper.
 Especially when he/she received one recently.
o Do not thank famous people in the acknowledgment, at least not in the first
submission. The referee's contacts may not be as good as yours.
o Do not thank family members. This is understandable, but it is
unprofessional.
5. Use common sense
o It is not a good idea to send a hand-written submission letter. The
submission letter contains critical information about the author (address,
telephone number, e-mail address, etc.) Your scribbling may be a challenge to
the deciphering ability of the editors or their assistants. A small
typographical error in the address might make a letter to the author
undeliberable. Here is an example:

o Use a sturdy envelope, especially, if you are sending a manuscript to a
foreign country. An enclosed check might be missing from the package by the
time it reaches the editorial office.
o You do not want your package to arrive at the editorial office looking like
these:

6. Consider electronic submission if allowed by journals
o Journal offices increasingly are more willing to receive electronic
submissions.
o Electronic submissions are faster and safer.
o Word processor files can damage the hard disk of the journal office. For
this reasons, they prefer PDF files.
o When submitting to journals that adopt double-blind refereeing process,
submit the cover page and the main body separately. Remove your name in the
document property (Your computer may record it automatically.)
o Experienced people report that Acrobat PDF Writer does not always produce
dependable PDF files.
o Use the dependable Acrobat Distiller. For instance, after the Acrobat is
installed, you can print a Word document using Acrobat Distiller and save it
at a desired drive. You can then e-mail the file.
o After a PDF file is produced, go over it to see if all symbols are properly
represented. If a symbol is not properly converted by Adobe Distiller, try
retyping it using another font. Avoid using nonstandard symbols, because
Acrobat Distiller may not convert them properly.
o Visit the NSF site concerning problems you encounter when creating PDF
files, http://www.fastlane.nsf.gov/a1/pdfcreat.htm.
________________________________________
Working Papers
7. Present an early version as a working paper
o If a paper contains enough substance of a roughly sketched idea, you may
offer it as a working paper, just for the record.
o Distribute it to a dozen trusted friends in your field to get feedback.
o But do not distribute it widely.
o Working papers can attract coauthors, and a revised version may be published
later. When you are up for promotion and tenure, the working papers provide
evidence that you have started the work.
8. Do not submit your working paper to an electronic journal
o Get ready for the future of publishing. Most journals will become available
electronically over the coming years. Hard copies may still be available, but
they will be expensive because of limited print runs.
o You may submit abstracts to journals on the Internet, but it is not
advisable to post the actual articles.
o For legal purposes, the electronic publications may be treated as
publications. But for tenure and promotion purposes, they do not count as
publications. This is a problem.
o It is easy for someone to manipulate the electronic copy (even PDF or PS
files), modify it a little, and submit it to another journal under a different
title.
________________________________________
Acknowledgment
9. Remove negative clues from acknowledgment
o In the acknowledgment, remove any reference to when the paper was conceived
or written.
o Editors of journals that adopt the double-blind review procedure are not
likely to send papers to persons mentioned in the acknowledgment.
o Do not thank in the acknowledgment the people whom you would like to serve
as referees. Acknowledge them after the paper is accepted. Otherwise, they are
likely to be left out of the review process.
o Once you receive an invitation to publish, include an acknowledgment to the
referees, whether anonymous or not.
________________________________________
Submission
10. Eliminate any trace of prior rejections
o Do not indicate when the paper was first written. If the original version
was written a few years earlier, the editors and the referees clearly see that
it has been rejected a few times.
o Do not indicate how often the paper has been revised. This suggests you do
not listen and properly modify the paper to make it more publishable.
o In the references, eliminate any references to papers that were
"forthcoming" a few years back. This not only indicates that your paper was
previously rejected a few times, but also that you are sloppy in updating the
references.
11. Submit your paper to a rising journal
o Good specialty journals are rising.
o The acceptance rate may be higher. Payoff is greater later.
o Identify and avoid the declining journals whose acceptance rate is low with
a diminishing payoff later.
o General journals, except for a few at the top, are expected to decline
because of increased specialization and the resulting drop in demand for them.
In general journals, "readers are confronted with a decreasing probability of
finding at least one important article" (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter,
1991) in their field.
o In the 1970s, the top ten journals were general journals.
o In the 1990s, half of the top ten journals were field journals.
o As you become more specialized, an increasingly smaller fraction of papers
in general journals become relevant to your research. Accordingly, demand for
general journals is likely to decline.
o Increased specialization is more likely in the future.
12. Keep a log of research papers
o In the first two or three years when the number of articles under review is
small, it is easy to remember the status of your papers. Later, as the number
of articles increases, a log will prove invaluable.
o The purpose of a log is to
 know when to send a reminder to the editor,
 prevent resubmission of a rejected paper to the same journal, unless
of course, it is your intention to resubmit the rejected paper to the same
journal (after a change of editors), and
 avoid multiple submission of several papers to the same journal
within a short period of time.
o For each paper, note the pool of potential journals.
o When a paper is rejected, do not lose time resubmitting the paper to another
journal.
o Keep a log of the life history of each paper.
13. Do not submit two papers to the same journal in two months
o Especially if the two articles are related.
o Other things being equal, editors prefer to publish two articles by
different authors, rather than two articles by the same author.
o You may submit more papers to the same journal simultaneously if there is
more than one editor. They do not often communicate with one another. In this
instance, acceptance of one article by one editor does not adversely affect
the chance of another being accepted by a different editor.
14. Check for related articles in the journal being considered
o Try to find some related articles in the journal to which you wish to submit
your paper.
o Authors who published a paper on a related subject are likely to be
referees. The editor's memory is still fresh.
o Obviously, you need to say something about, or at least cite, their papers.
o Even if they are marginally related, try to incorporate their references.
Make some effort to explain how your work is related.
15. Avoid the journals which consistently reject your papers
o Haven't you learned your lesson yet?
o Avoid (temporarily) the journals which have rejected your papers
consistently, say three times in a row.
o The editor still remembers all those bad remarks about your papers.
o Wait until a new editor is appointed.
o First and middle names, as well as last name, often reveal the sex, race, or
nationality of the authors.
o If you have reason to believe that you are being discriminated against on
the basis of sex, race, or nationality, you may consider using initials
instead of spelling out the first and middle names.
o You may reveal your full name after the paper is accepted.
16. Use professional editorial assistance
o Particularly if you are not a native English speaker
o Editors will not publish papers with grammatical errors.
o It is safe to assume that referees are biased; they have an excuse to
recommend rejection when grammatical errors are detected.
o You can easily find a copy editor who charges a reasonable fee.
o Editorial help is available in the English department of any university in
the United States or the United Kingdom. If you live elsewhere, you need to
invest some time to develop friends located there. You may be able to check
and expedite the editing process through them.
17. Know the preferences or biases of journals
o If a journal rarely publishes empirical papers, do not send one there.
o Similarly, if a journal rarely publishes theory papers, do not submit one
there.
o If you suspect discrimination, check the past issues of the journal in
question. This will reveal surprising insights.
o Preferences are known; biases are difficult to detect.
o There are three types of journals:
 Association journals (AER, Econometrica, etc.)
 University journals, managed and edited by university faculty (QJE,
JPE, etc.)
 Journals published by commercial publishers (Blackwell,
North-Holland, etc.)
Problems of Journals
o Association journals: Editors change every few years, and they tend to
accept more papers by colleagues and friends while they are at the helm. Since
the editors are chosen from among a few major institutions, they tend to get a
larger share of publications than under ideal academic conditions. Subsidized
by associations.
o University journals: Promoting truth and knowledge is not necessarily the
primary concern of these journals. The universities need to protect their own
interests. They should set a good example by announcing that their editorial
standards are not compromised to protect their own interests, but do they have
the courage? Subsidized by universities.
o Commercial journals: To maximize profits they are least likely to have
preferences or biases. However, they cannot survive without reader
subscriptions.
Clan Power and Publication
o Roughly half of the papers published in some 40 high-ranked economic
journals are never cited by others (Holub, Tappeiner, and Eberharter, SEJ
1991). Journals included in their studies were: AER, CJE, EJ, EER, IER, JDE,
JEL, JET, JMCB, JPE, JPubE, OEP, QJE, RES, REStat, SEJ, Econometrica,
Economica, and Economic Inquiry among others.
o Even their referees would not cite these papers. This indicates that they
did not place a high value on the papers. Why would these referees then
recommend their publication?
o This finding suggests that in each field there may be small groups that
exert some influence by recommending publication of the papers by their clan
members.
o The clan members, implicit or explicit, are rent seekers. They recommend
publication of their own papers at the expense of nonmembers.
o An effective way for a newcomer to beat the clans is to join them by
collaborating with a clan member.
o The double-blind review process tends to reduce the power of clan members.
o Even with the double-blind review process, referees often know or guess the
identity of authors because papers are circulated prior to submission.
o Circulation of working papers prior to acceptance effectively reveals the
identity of the author and increases the rent that accrues to clan members.
How long to wait for results
18. Contact the editor after six months
o Editors do not have an alarm clock that goes off for each paper after a
certain period of time has elapsed.
o If it has been six months from the date of acknowledgment, you should
contact the editor.
o If you are counting from the date of your submission, allow seven months.
o Remember that the editors of many top journals are older and lack computer
skills. So e-mail is not an option. If this is the case, write a polite
letter.
o If you do not get a response within two months, send a second inquiry.
o Call the editorial office or inquire via fax.
o If you still get no reply after a third inquiry, you should not submit a
paper to such a journal again.
o An e-mail inquiry is okay, if the editorial office is so equipped.
o Note that e-mail inquiry is less formal and e-mail traffic is increasing.
o E-mail messages are less reliable; they may not reach the editorial office.
Rejection and Revision
Rejection
1. When rejected, try again
o Even Nobel Laureates get rejection letters.
o Papers lying dormant in the file drawer do not bring any good news!
o Submit the paper to another journal within one month. But wait!
o If a referee points out a major problem, you need to address it.
o You do not have to revise a paper every time it is rejected.
o But if a paper is rejected 4 times, there is a serious flaw in the paper.
Find and fix the problem.
o Make a modest effort to incorporate the valuable suggestions of the referee
before submitting to another journal.
o Why? The same referee might get it again.
o Do whatever possible to make sure the negative referee does not get the
paper again. You are entitled to new referee reports.
2. If a "stupid" referee misunderstood your paper, it is your fault
o Truth hurts sometimes, but listen anyway.
o Some referees spend as little as 15 minutes reading your paper. Your paper
should be clearly presented, and it should be comprehensible by such referees.

o The typical referee spends two hours or more on your paper. Moreover, he/she
is an expert in the field. Find out why such an expert has trouble
understanding your paper and correct the problems.
o This "stupid" referee problem will not disappear until you correct it.
o There must be something valuable in those reports. Salvage and incorporate
them freely in your paper. (And you do not have to thank them.) This is not
plagiarism.
3. Do not get angry
o Do not brood over ways to get even with the referees or the editor. Your
energy then would be devoted to a counterproductive and unhappy task.
o Writing a rebuttal letter to the editor rarely reverses the decision. The
referee has to defend it, even if it was a bad report.
o The editor already has a stack of such complaints. One more is not likely
to change the editor’s decision, albeit there are exceptions.
o When the referee successfully defends the report (in the eyes of the
editor), you lose any capital you may have accumulated.
o Write only if it is a simple matter.
o Instead of trying to prove that the referee is wrong on several points,
explain why you might deserve a second or third opinion.
o Example: argue that there is no mathematical error, contrary to the report.
________________________________________
Revision
o There might be a time limit for resubmission, usually six months to a year
from the date of the invitation letter.
o If you do not intend to revise and resubmit the paper for whatever reason,
let the editorial office know of your intention (via e-mail/fax).
o Remember that for all practical purposes this is probably your last chance
to revise the paper. The probability that you will succeed is about 50%,
depending on the journals. Sloppy, rough revisions will surely result in
rejection. The editorial office will not continue to provide mediation between
the referees and authors because there are other papers demanding attention.
o You received an invitation to revise the paper because it might contain a
publishable idea. However, papers will not be accepted unless they are
presentable and polished enough for publication.
4. Be optimistic and get excited
o Don't blow it. (If you do, you may wait three more years to get another
favorable letter.)
o Take the time to do a good job. The goal is to ensure acceptance, not to
minimize the effort.
o Do not save your effort. Go the extra mile. You have a chance (about 50%).
5. Write a detailed response to individual referees
o Take every comment of the referee seriously.
o In a note to be transmitted to the referee, first thank him or her.
o Number all relevant comments and respond to those (explain what you did in
the revised paper).
o Indicate that you are doing everything possible and more.
o If you cannot accommodate the demands, thank the referee for the suggestion,
but offer explanations why they are beyond the scope of the paper or why it is
not possible at the time.
6. Do not attack referees
o Generally, it is not a good idea to berate the reviewers. Don’t lash out at
the referees.
o Although they may not have a favorable opinion of your paper, they took the
time to read your paper!
o Do not say: "The referee's idea is bad, but mine is good."
o Better to say, the referee has an interesting notion, but the proposed idea
is also good, particularly in light of this or that fact.
o If the referee makes a valid point (you can almost always find conditions
under which the referee's points are valid), explain why, due to this or that
difficulty, you are not pursuing that course in the paper.
7. Resubmit the revised paper within three months
o Remember that this invitation is based on reports by some referees who had
good first impressions about your paper. Do not wait until that positive aura
vanishes.
o Do not resubmit the revised version in one month, even if you worked on it
full time.
o If you do, the editor may think that you have not devoted a sufficient
amount of time to the revision.
8. Write just one paragraph a day if you hate to revise
o The referees or editors have asked you to do an impossible or dreadful task.
Then just write one paragraph a day. You can do that!
o This works when you know you can do it, you should do it, but you cannot get
excited. The situation requires careful self-inducement.
o As you write a little bit at a time, before you know it, you get fired up.
9. Listen to what the editor says
o It is important to glean the true message from the editor's letter.
o Do not try to bargain with the editor (unless he/she starts it).
o Share the editor's letter and referee reports with experienced colleagues.
They may have surprisingly different interpretations.
________________________________________
Resubmission
When your revision is completed, you should send the following to the editor:
o copies of the paper (as many as requested)
o cover letter
o packet for each referee.
10. Check the Revised Paper
o The cover page should contain complete contact information about the author:
(i) address, (ii) telephone and fax numbers, and (iii) e-mail address. This
allows the editorial office to contact you quickly should the need arise. If
you anticipate moving, provide your forwarding postal and e-mail addresses.
o The cover page of the revised paper should include the current date (or
month and year) of revision; you do not want the office to send an old version
to the referees by mistake.
o If there were any complaints about the writing style, try to get some
editorial assistance. Remember that many papers are rejected because of
writing style problems.
o Eliminate typographical errors in the cover page and the abstract. This is
an absolute minimum courtesy.
o Last, but not least, make sure that there are no pages missing in any of the
copies.
Cover Letter
11. Explain succinctly how you revised the paper
o The purpose is to convince the editor that he or she should not send the
paper back to the referees.
o If the editor already indicated that he or she would send the paper back to
the referees, then your letter also should explain how well you followed the
suggestions of the referees.
Referee's Packet
12. Prepare a packet for each referee
o Regardless of whether the editorial office is well-managed or not, you
should prepare a packet for each referee. Each packet must include everything
a referee might possibly need. Specifically,
 A copy of the original (or latest) report. The referee might have
lost the file or might not remember even vaguely what he/she asked you to do.
A copy of the report not only helps the referee remember what he/she said
about your paper, but it also constrains the referee not to deviate too much
from the earlier report. The editorial office also has copies, but you want to
ensure acceptance even when the office is not well staffed.
 A copy of the revised version. Make sure you have responded to every
comment of the referee.
 A response to the referee's report. Do not forget to thank the
referee. Explain what you did or did not do in response to every comment.
 If the referee said something which you and the other referee did not
agree on, include a common response to the referees. This might calm down the
problem referee.
Being a Good Referee
General Guidelines
• You are performing a valuable service to the profession. It is worth
doing well. It also is good for your spirit when you have done something
worthwhile for society.
• As soon as you receive a manuscript, make sure it is something you are
qualified to judge. If you had agreed to review because of a misleading title
and you are not qualified to do the job, return the paper to the editor as
soon as possible.
• A referee report consists of two parts:
o a cover letter with the manuscript number/title and your opinion, and
o the report itself intended to be transmitted to the author(s).
• E-mail reports are acceptable to most journals. If the editorial
office is modern and the journal is well-managed, e-mail reports should be
preferred to reports by fax or snail (regular) mail, because snail mail often
unduly retards the editorial process and fax reports often are difficult to
read because of low resolution and small letters.
• Consider sending the report via e-mail or fax particularly when the
editor is on a different continent. International mail is generally less
reliable than its domestic counterpart.
• To expedite the refereeing process, you may fax your cover letter and
comments. Use high resolution mode, if possible. Just in case, also mail the
report.
• If regular mail is chosen, include two or three copies of the report.
Lost the manuscript?
• If you lose the manuscript, apologize and ask the editor to send you
another copy. Editors understand that referees who travel frequently lose
manuscripts occasionally.
• Do not wait six months to ask for a replacement copy or to tell you
never received the manuscript.
If you do not receive the manuscript
• If within four weeks (six weeks for international mail) you do not get
the manuscript you agreed to referee, contact the editor. The manuscript is
either lost or has not been sent out.
How Does One Become A Referee?
Here is a brief answer in response to this frequently asked
question. If you are well established, you will probably get a fair share of
articles to referee. If not, there are two ways to become a referee:
• Submit articles to journals. If you write an article on a given
subject, editors often assume you are an expert in that area. You might become
a referee for papers on similar topics.
• Write a letter to the editors. You can express your willingness to
serve as a referee in the areas of your choice. It is a good idea to enclose
your curriculum vitae.
________________________________________
1. Do it promptly
o Nothing is more appreciated by the editor and the authors than a prompt
referee report. The future career of the author depends on your timely
service.
o Do it in 4 to 6 weeks.
o Don't be too prompt! Otherwise, you may get too many requests.
o Prompt and sincere reports are your line of credit. You may need it when you
submit a paper to that journal.
o Hard copies are acceptable, but you may e-mail the report.
o If it would take you more than three months to complete the review, inform
the editor about the delay.
2. Be a fair and constructive referee
o Do not react even if the author attacks your previous contributions.
o Remember the days when you were a tadpole and the referees were gentle to
you.
o Focus on the merits, not on the immaturity of the writer. Science advances
because the next generation is immature and willing to experiment.
o If you are unfair or sloppy in a referee report, the authors may strike
back. The editor will remember the incident, even if the decision is not
reversed.
o If it is outside your area of expertise, promptly return the paper.
o If the topic is in your area, studying the paper carefully may lead you to
write another paper.
3. Do not plagiarize
o Make sure that you do not plagiarize and steal the ideas in the paper,
either consciously or subconsciously.
o For instance, examine the motive of a referee who says to himself: "Hm.... I
can do better than this author without making all these stupid mistakes. In
fact, I am going to do it."
o If you want to borrow some ideas from the paper, even if it is badly
written, make sure you recommend its publication and explain how to revise it.
If the author gave enough ideas to you to write a related paper, perhaps you
should recommend its publication. Ask the editor when the paper will be
published so you can cite it.
o It is unethical to recommend rejection of a paper which gives you creative
ideas to write another paper.
________________________________________
Cover Letter
You can reduce untold amounts of frustration you may impose upon authors and
help the profession immensely if your cover letter includes:
o the manuscript number (it takes extra time to locate the manuscript without
it).
o the title (in case there is an error in the manuscript number, this ensures
that the editorial office locates the manuscript).
o your postal address
o your permanent e-mail address
o your summary opinion
 A. Accept in present form or with slight changes.
 B. Accept for publication after minor revision, with a suggestion
about the length.
 C. Reconsider for publication after extensive revision.
 D. Reject, with suggestions for possible submission elsewhere.
o If you did not recommend one of the above, your letter is not well written.
4. Cover letter should be brief, not technical
o Explain the reasons why you recommend that the paper be accepted, rejected,
or revised.
o If you would like the editor to accept the paper, your recommendation must
be strong.
o If you consistently recommend rejection, then the editor recognizes you are
a stingy, overly critical person. Do not assume that the editor will not
reveal your identity to the authors. In the long run, there are no secrets.
o If you recommend acceptance of all papers, then the editor knows you are not
a discriminating referee.
________________________________________
Report
o Prepare your comments that include your reasons, suggestions, and concerns.
o Comment on the manuscript's originality, clarity, contribution to the
literature, and relevance to real world problems.
o Make suggestions about its length, organization, tables, and figures.
o The bottom line is this: If there is an important idea in the paper, make
constructive comments (e.g., how to streamline the arguments, what parts
should be cut) and help the authors publish the paper.
o If not, say so frankly. There is no point in beating about the bush. If the
paper is clearly below the journal standards, detailed comments are
unnecessary.
o If you e-mail your report, go to Document Property and delete your name.
Your computer may automatically record your name as the author of the report,
which may be accidentally transmitted to the author.
5. When you write a negative report, avoid citing your own papers
o Like animals, referees often leave their marks in their reports.
o If you vote against publication, do not cite your papers. Someday the author
will become a referee and return the "favor" in the next round.
o The paradox of refereeing is this: When you are a referee, you are the
expert. When the other person becomes a referee of your paper, he or she
becomes the expert. Circumstances can change.
o Do not say in the report whether the paper should be accepted or rejected.
This belongs in the cover letter.
o Be careful with your negative reports. Do not demoralize the authors.
o If you consistently recommend rejection of all papers in your area, people
will stop doing research in your area. Soon the topic becomes obsolete and so
do you.
o Moreover, soon the negative word gets around and people in the profession
might figure out who you are.
o If your published paper is relevant, you may cite it, but it should be done
without hinting at the identity of the referee. Do not cite your unpublished
papers.
6. Write more than one paragraph
o If you do not, you are not a sincere referee, whether you are famous or not.
You should have given the job to others who would devote more time and care to
the review.
o Remember the authors have spent several months to years to complete the
paper. They deserve more attention.
o Remember the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

7. If there is a new important idea, help the author to publish it
o Your recommendation should be independent of whether the authors have cited
your papers or not.
o Do not use the report as an opportunity to force the author to cite your
paper if it is tangentially related. This is unethical.
o Divine beings don’t write papers (What would be the point?) All papers
written by mortals have problems. Your role is not in finding all the faults
in the paper.
o If the author can fix the problems with reasonable effort, do not
overemphasize the faults. Then recommend publication (in the letter).
8. Write something good, something bad
o Mortals cannot write “perfect” papers. Even the best paper has some
problems, and you can ask the author to make improvements.
o You also can say something nice about the worst paper. Remember you are
dealing with a person, and your report should not inordinately demoralize the
author.
o Remember the days when you were a tadpole before you write a nasty report.
o You can recommend rejection for good reasons and still be kind to the
author.
9. Reports should be based on the ideas in the paper
o The first paragraph should be a summary of the contribution. The editor is
not knowledgeable in all areas.
o Your evaluation should be based solely on the merit or ideas contained in
the paper,
o And not on who wrote the paper.
o Do not make comments demoralizing the author in the report. Thomas Edison’s
mother was reportedly told by his teacher that Thomas was “addled” and will
never amount to anything.
o If there is a writing problem, it should be noted.
o Remember that English is spoken by only 8% of the world population.
o A righteous referee shows no favoritism. There is no justification for
favoritism.
10. Avoid pointing out mathematical errors
o Unless you are absolutely sure.
o If you are wrong, the author will protest, and the second referee might
agree.
o If you lose credibility, your future papers also are suspect.
o Instead of saying the authors made a mistake, you can say you cannot obtain
the same result.
o But if you are certain, say so and explain why.
11. If it is hopeless, say so, and save the authors from further misery
o Don't try to be too nice in order to salvage an unpublishable idea.
o Being a good referee does not mean you try to help everybody publish in that
journal.
o Inherent capacities cannot be exceeded. Regardless of your suggestions, the
author cannot improve the quality of the paper more than 50%. Remember this
when you recommend revision.
o Positive recommendations should be based on the quality of an anticipated
revision.
Qustions and Answers
If you have comments or questions, please contact Kwan Choi at
kchoi@iastate.edu.
1. The corresponding editor resigned. What should I do with the revised paper?

o While I was preparing a revised version, I noticed that the co-editor who
oversaw my submission is no longer a co-editor of that journal. In this case,
how would this affect the status of my paper in the near future? Is it
possible to go through a new round with another editor and his/her own choice
of referees? (Jaejoon Woo, OECD)
o Usually the corresponding editor is responsible for editorial decisions for
papers he or she received for about a year. Submit the revised version to the
editor who made the initial editorial decision.
o The resigning editor still wants to relinquish his responsibility quickly.
The revised version should be submitted within a few months.
o Otherwise, the editorial decision may be delegated to a new editor who may
not be as favorable toward your paper as the first editor.
2. Professional technical editors are helpful
o I have found that a professional technical editor is also very helpful for
struggling beginning writers who have English as a first language (Bob
Coleman).
o Professional technical editors can make many useful suggestions. You can
accept some or all of their suggestions. It does not really matter whether
English is one's first language or not.
3. Where do I find a copy editor?
o Since I am not a native speaker, I want somebody to help me to check the
grammar and polish the paper. I understand that the service is not free, and I
am willing to pay. In fact, I am willing to pay a premium, if the work can be
finished before Thanksgiving. (Xioayan Zhang).
o Contact the English department of your institution to locate copy editors.
There should be many editors who can help you. They usually charge $10 - 20
per hour. Even graduate students in English department are very good.
Sometimes retired professors are willing to copyedit papers or theses.

Read more!

Charles Jones on writing a thesis(zz)

2005-04-12T20:34:00.000-07:00

On Writing a Thesis:

Keep a journal of ideas: whenever you have a research idea, jot it down. I
still keep one of these (online as a web page) and find it to be very helpful.

Reading papers when you are formulating a topic is important but dangerous.
DO NOT just casually read papers that are closely related to your topic. The
danger is that you will have a half-baked idea, read a paper superficially,
and decide your topic has already been fully researched.

Instead, when you read a paper close to your topic, you must read it
thoroughly: take pencil and paper in hand, derive every equation and
theoretical result. Get the data the authors are using and reproduce every
empirical result. Researchers always want to make their results looks as good
as possible, so they tend to hide or shade the big problems with their
research. If you only read a paper casually, you will miss these, but if you
derive every result yourself, the problems will jump out at you. I find this
can sometimes be a useful way to generate a topic: if you are struggling,
pick a couple of key papers related to your interests and read them this way.

Of course, remember that you do not want to write a paper that is "A Small
Variation on X's Work." However, sometimes you can find big holes that others
haven't seen by understanding X's work very well.

Finally, I personally like papers with the following structure: Here is a
stylized fact that everyone will accept as roughly true. Here is something
puzzling or interesting that one gets from this fact. Here is a model that we
can use to try to understand that fact. Here is a simulation of the model
that reproduces the fact. This is a good outline for many (but of course not
all!) good macro papers.

Read more!

A post regarding fighting the trend in the stock market from Yahoo board

2005-04-11T18:13:00.000-07:00

Re: the only reason (if there is any) ..
by: turnipfarmer99 (41/M/Georgia)
Long-Term Sentiment: Buy 04/11/05 05:36 pm
Msg: 37416 of 37434

"makes me think that cyd may go down is that too many are expecting it to go up. usually, the stock price goes against the majority's expection. "

This statement of yours is in many heads of new investors/traders. The flaw of it is extremely harmful to average investors. The statement is trying to say is that "The crowd is usually wrong, or wrong most of time". It is also trying to say that "only a few wise heads can make money in the markets".

Let me quote a successful trader, Shawn Andrew(Ricercar Fund)'s experience as a correction of yours(belief).

"The CROWD is always wrong at market turning points but not often times right once a trend sets in. The reason many market fighters go broke is they believe the CROWD is always wrong. There is nothing further from the truth. Unless volatility is extremely low or very high one should think twice before betting against the CROWD."---2001.

I have nothing to add if you understand plain English.

A post about internet auction spam from mit.bbs

2005-04-03T18:53:00.000-07:00

发信人: gourmand (食客), 信区: shopping
标　题: Re: 玉门
发信站: The unknown SPACE (Sun Apr 2 17:05:31 2000), 转信
You can cancel the bidder if you don't want sell the item
to that bidder.

Some prof. auctioners paly a trick on your auction.
The most ordinary situation is one prof. guy selling the same
item as you but ending in little later time than you. He use a fake
id to raise your price. It usually happens in last 2 minutes.
There are two 2 advantages for him:
1. He get a customer, the second higher bidder will bid on his
auction.
2. He raise the price.
In chinese, it is called "放鸽子"

When I am selling some expensive items, I met 3 such situations.
One guy raise my palm to $310.00, another raise the c2020 to $710.00.
On the last time, I canceled the fake id without any hesiate and
successful sold my item, although at a lower price. It's better than
wait another week.

So, watching your bidder carefully. Anylsis any abnormal price.

Good lucky.

【在 jjmm (Yes, I love Claire.) 的大作中提到: 】
: 放在ebay上的三个item都被一个 -2 rating 的家伙排了去。前面两个受害者都
: 说这小子不付钱。那家伙bidding price奇高无比，ebay又要charge偶好多好多
: 的钱。估计那小子在ebay上亏了钱，正伺机报复。怎么就让我给碰上了呢？

How can I create expandable post summaries?

2005-04-03T00:37:00.000-08:00

With this trick, you can choose to display an arbitrary amount of text from the beginning of each post, as a teaser for the whole thing. Then users who want to read the rest of the post can click a link to see the full text. This is handy if you have lots of long articles all on one page. Note that you'll need to have post pages enabled in order to make this feature work.

There are three ingredients that go into this feature: conditional CSS, a "read more" link for each post, and a modification for the posts that use this feature. So let's go through it step by step.

We're going to use conditional tags to change how posts display on different pages. Add the following code to your style sheet:

<MainOrArchivePage> 
   span.fullpost {display:none;}
</MainOrArchivePage>
<ItemPage> 
   span.fullpost {display:block;} 
</ItemPage>
.more {display: none;}
span.fullpost+span.more {display: block; margin-bottom: 10px;}

Your style sheet is usually near the top of your template, between the <style> and </style> tags. If you have your style sheet in a separate file, you'll still need to add these lines in your template, so the conditional tags will work. Just make sure you add in the <style> </style> tags around them.

What we did here was to define a class called "fullpost" that will appear only on post pages (permalinks). Part of each post will use this class, as we'll see later.
"Continue..." Links

Add the following code to your template, somewhere after the <$BlogItemBody> tag:

<div class="post-body">
   <p>
      <$BlogItemBody$>
      <MainOrArchivePage>
        <span class="more"><br>
          <a href="<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>">Continue...</a>
        </span>
      </MainOrArchivePage>
   </p>
</div>

This link will only appear on the main page and archive pages, and it will redirect your reader to the post page containing the full text of your post. You can replace the "Read more!" text with whatever you like, of course.
Post Modifications

The final piece that we need is a little bit of code in your actual post. Each post that you want to use this feature on will need this code:

<span class="fullpost"></span>

This part can actually go in the post template, if you don't want to have to type it for each post. You'll enter the summary text outside the span tags and the remainder inside, like so:

Here is the beginning of my post. <span class="fullpost"> And here is the rest of it.</span >

Now, when a reader visits your blog, this post will appear like this:

Here is the beginning of my post.
Continue...

When they click the link, they'll go to the post page where they'll see the whole thing:

Here is the beginning of my post. And here is the rest of it.

Notes:

* As with any template modifications, you should be sure to save a backup copy of your template before you start. Just copy and paste all your code to a text file on your hard drive, so you'll have it there as a replacement in case anything goes wrong.
* An alternative to creating post excerpts like this is to use the show/hide method on entire posts. Each method has its own advantages and disadvantages.
* Advantages to this method: Customizable summaries, rather than titles only. Can be applied to some posts and not others (for instance, you might only want this for your longer posts).
* Disadvantages: Requires changes to the posts themselves, rather than to the template only. However, the "read more" link is in the template, so it will appear regardless of whether a post has been truncated or not. (Modifying this feature is left as an exercise for the reader.)

See: http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=898

and

http://mentoliptus.blogspot.com/2005/02/resumen-expandible-inteligente_04.html

WHY CURIOSITY DRIVEN RESEARCH?

2005-04-02T22:07:00.000-08:00

This is an edited version of the presentation made by Dr. R. V. Moody to the Visiting Committee to the Faculty of Sciences of University of Alberta, on February 17, 1995. This was a non-academic audience consisting of professionals and business people from the Edmonton area.

Robert V. Moody
Department of Mathemmatical Sciences, University of Alberta

``It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.'' -Robert Oppenheimer

Why curiosity driven research? Let me begin with a rather extended example. In 1980 Philips and SONY jointly set out to develop what has rapidly become a fantastic success story - the CD player. This was an example of targeted research pure and simple: research directed at a realizable goal that has a direct application to our economic and social well-being. The magnitude of the task is indicated by the fact that Philips wanted to control 50%of the record industry before they began this project. The technical problems, of course, were immense.

What is far less visible, but was absolutely crucial to the developers of the CD, was that before they began, the BASIC science was already in place. This is the perhaps the most important point that I would like to make today:

1. Basic research is the foundation of targeted research

We could imagine asking a group of engineers of 125 years ago to create this same device, which can reproduce music in high fidelity, the music stored in digital form on small disks that are robust and cheap to make, that are not affected by dust and small scratches, and that are never physically touched by the device that reads them. But this was completely beyond the science and technology of the times. In fact the CD player is an absolutely amazing testament to twentieth century science, bristling with lasers, microchip computers and utilizing error correcting codes, digital wave sampling, the physiology of the ear, the technology of plastics, semiconductors, and so on.

But the fact is that virtually none of these wonders of science was developed as a result of targeted research. A substantial amount of it came out of the universities.

Listen to the words of Hendrick Casimir. Casimir made his name in mathematical physics but when he wrote these he was the Director of Research of Philips.

`` I have often heard statements that the role of academic research in innovation is slight. It is about the most blatant piece of nonsense that it has been my fortune to stumble upon.''

The fundamental importance of curiosity based research is what the history of science teaches us over and over again, but it is hard sometimes to truly appreciate it. I want to illustrate the point by looking at two crucial pieces of science that make the CD player possible.

Here is photograph of the surface of a compact disc showing the pits and lands which are the digital information which a CD player reads. Some idea of the size here: the lands are around 1 micron (one millionth of a meter). For comparison a human hair is about 75 microns thick. In each second your CD player reads in about 4.3 million bits of information which occupy just over a meter of track on the disc.

A laser beam forms a spot that is focussed on the track. Laser light has two key features: it is of one wave length, or one colour, and the waves that make up the light are synchronized - what is called coherent light. Thsee two properties of laser light, which could not be produced before the laser, are utilized in some very clever ways in the CD. The pits are 1/4 of a wavelength deeper than the lands. The lightwaves reflected from the pits come back 1/2 a wavelength out of phase.This phase difference can be detected and this is in fact how the information is read.

The inventors of the CD knew that they could never hope to have some 10 billion of these lands and pits perfectly reproduced on each plastic disc and even if they did, the slightest spec of dust and each little scratch could wipe out thousands of digits of the disc. That is why there is a second important feature: error correcting coding. This is something wonderful about CD's. If you scratch a record you destroy information on your record forever. If you scratch a CD the chances are that you will never hear the difference.

The stories behind the development of these two key features, lasers and error correcting codes are fascinating in their own right, but more importantly for our purposes they also raise a number of points about curiosity research that illustrate how it works.

The actual physics behind the production of coherent waves was suggested by Einstein in 1917. But no one could think of a way to implement this into practice. It took 40 years before researchers at Columbia and Maryland Universities produced the first such device: the maser, but it emitted radio- waves, not light.

The inventor of the ruby laser was Theodore Maiman . He had a Ph.D. in Physics from Stanford and was at the Research Division of Hughes Aircraft in 1960. His starting point was the maser.

Maiman wanted a solid-state device that produced light. He decided to try and base his device on the crystal, ruby. Now the current of opinion was that the whole idea of the production of coherent light was impossible by the means Maiman had in mind, and his colleagues told him so. Obviously Maiman felt very weighed down by this: here are Maiman's own words:

``The pressures were intense. The people I worked with told me it would not work. I kept imagining the reactions that would occur if I went ahead and built the equipment and it failed. I could have done it in a month or two after my [first] experiments .... but I did not want to look foolish. I proceded with extreme caution.''

In fact he proceded with such caution that his equipment worked the very first time he turned it on!

Now there are several lessons here: not just the obvious one that our hero came through in spite of all!

2. Curiosity driven reasearch is directed research

Maiman was NOT doing what we commonly call ``targeted research''. Maiman knew that coherent light would be wonderful stuff to have from a scientific point of view, but he could hardly have imagined all its uses from attaching retinas, laser surgery, the assembly of cameras, determining vast distances accurately, CD players and CD Roms, and so on. Yet his research was not aimless. It was ``targeted'' but it was targeted towards a purely scientific aim: of producing light that was coherent in wavelength and phase.

Curiosity based research is just as oriented as any other kind of research.

3. Peer review and peer pressure

Although Maiman had to struggle alone he was not doing research in a vacuum. His colleagues knew what his research was about and gave their estimations of its chance of success. They were wrong, but nine times out of ten they would have been be right. This is an important aspect of research. Every researcher works in a world-wide community of co-workers whose collective wisdom serves as a guide to what is and what is not reasonable research. Proposals for research funding are reviewed by other experts in closely related areas. Their opinion carries great weight in deciding the feasability of the research. This always needs to be balanced with the possibility that conventional wisdom may be wrong, as it was in Maiman's case. We obviously need to have faith in people who have good credentials and good track records to leave them the freedom to explore their ideas. Every research director knows difficulties of balancing these two sides of scientific exploration.

Of course if we had known that lasers could be made and all their wonderful uses, all of us would have given Maiman carte blanche and all the time and funds he wanted.

Here is a question. How much would you think it would be worth investing to invent the laser if it did not yet exist but we knew it could be done and we knew all of its psssible uses? It is an interesting thought when you start to question the cost of curiostity research. The fact is that a single piece of curiosity driven research can translate into billions of dollars in the long run.

4. Curiosity driven research makes economic sense

Let's go on to error correction. Remember that we said this is a crucial feature of the CD technology. Even on a brand new disc a CD player is correcting on the order of 10 mistakes a second. Without error correction, CD's would sound at best like scratchy LP's.

The idea behind error correcting is simple. The basic units of information on a CD are arranged in 32 bit words. There are some 4 billion possible such words. But we select only a small number of these as LEGAL code words - about a quarter of a billion). This is like the English language where only a small fraction of possible words are legitimate parts of the language. Think of the legal code words as the ones in the CD dictionary. Unlike in English, which evolved through time in a haphazard way, the legal code words are carefully chosen to be as different as possible from one another. Say each one differs from each other in at least 5 binary bits. Now the music is encoded using only legal code words, so when a word is read off the disc it is suppposed to be a legal code word. As it is read off it is essentially looked up in the dictionary. If it does not match a legal code word then there is a mistake in it - for whatever reason it is corrupted, be it from dust scratches, improper printing on the disc, etc. The processor then looks for the closest matching legal code word and replaces it with this match. This is a bit like replacing the non-word unibersity with a legal close word like university.

This is all very straightforward. The catch is this. If a word is received, we have to locate the nearest match very very fast. Don't forget the data flow of 4 million bits a second. This is far too fast to be looking up words in the huge dictionary of legal code words and then trying fo find good matches for words that are corrupted.

In fact the error correcting codes used in the CD system are wonderful mathematical codes for which no dictionary is needed and incorrect words are corrected in a few simple calculations on the word itself!

The mathematics behind the design of error correcting codes involves an area of abstract algebra called finite field theory that was first discovered by Evaste Galois around 1830. Galois is a romantic figure because he died at the age of 20 in a politically motivated duel. You might expect to hear now that Galois was into secret codes or something like that, but in fact his discoveries on finite fields were made as a result of his thinking about something entirely different: some purely mathematical problems on the roots of polynomials. It doesn't matter what polynomials are for this talk though you may remember solving quadratic equations in high shcool. The main point is that some purely mathemaical questions led him to discover some totally new an unexpected finite algebraic systems. These systems have been extensively studied by mathematicians ever since and are a part of the undergraduate curriculum of every mathematics program. Their use in error correcting coding came only in the late 1950's. In 1960 Reed and Solomon wrote a purely mathematical paper: ``Polynomial codes over certain finite fields.''These Reed-Solomon codes are the ones used in a CD player. Would targeted research towards error correcting codes have produced these finite fields? Very unlikely. There are a number of good coding schemes known now, and every single one of them depends on hard mathematics that was invented for completely different reasons.

As a matter of interest, the error correcting on a CD player is so good that it can fully correct an error bursts of well over 1000 consecutive bits.

One of the lessons that we can draw from this and countless other examples in modern technology and science is

5. The unpredictability and unexpectedness of science

Einstein could hardly have known that his observation aobut how photons interact with electron shells of atoms would translate into the laser, nor could Galois have even remotely imagined a compact disc player. It is a source of enormous difficulty in science that we cannot predict what science is going to be the really important science for the future.

But let's get closer to home. What does a mathematician of today do? Some of you will have seen Dr. Swaters demonstration on the mathematics of ocean waves. Dr. Riemenschneider and his group work on wavelets, a new branch of mathematics that has its origins in Fourier analysis and has key applications in signal and image processing. As a pure research mathematician at the University of Alberta what do I do?

Here is a picture which illustrates the typical structure of a crystal. This conception of the crystal as a repetitive motif of atoms is really a product of this century and needed two basic scientific advances before it could be discovered. One was the atomic theory of matter and the second was the discovery of x-rays that allowed us to ``see'' things at the atomic scale. When a crystal is illuminated with x-rays and a photographic image is taken a beautiful regular pattern of bright dots emerges. In contrast, non-crystals produce formless fuzzy patches of light and dark. This picture of dots is not, as one might first suppose the atomic structure itself. Rather is it diffraction pattern, a picture of the the interference patterns caused by x-rays being scattered by the regular array of atoms. Each bright dot is formed by the additive effect of reflected x-rays from hundreds of atoms. The diffraction pattern is in fact an indication of the fantastic spacial order of the atoms. The mathematics of this was all worked out in the early part of the century and the basic equation crystal = diffraction pattern of bright spots became a basic understanding in science. But in fact it was wrong!

Here is another diffraction pattern taken in 1984 by Schectman and his colleagues of a metallic compound that they had made by incredibly rapid cooling. It looks just the same but it caused a minor sensation when it first appeared. You will notice that there are 10 dots in the first ring, and indeed the whole structure has 10-fold rotational symmetry. This seems nice, but no reason to make it to the New York Times! Well the reason it caused so much fuss is that 10-fold symmetry cannot possibly appear in crystals. This is a simple piece of mathematics that has been known for ages. You will never see a pentagonal floor tiling; triangular, square, hexagonal yes; pentagonal no. So Schechtman was not looking at a cyrstal. But then what was he looking at? Well, it is a new class of substances that are appropriately called quasicrystals or now aperiodic crystals.

The illustration shows a computer generated 2-dimensional toy quasicrystal which you will see has a strong resemblence to the Schectman image though there is much more of the pattern now showing. You can sense the underlying symmetry of this pattern, but believe it or not it really has no repetitive (crystal-like) symmetry at all. I use the word ``toy'' here because real quasicrystals are three dimensional and the symmetry that we are interested in is a three dimensional analogue of 5-fold symmetry called icosahedral symmetry. But the main point is the same. The big puzzle is this: if there is no repetition, how does nature build these things? How does nature know that an atom should go here but not there so that in the end the stucure is so perfect that the thousands of atoms affecting the x-ray scattering conspire to produce bright dots?

No one really knows, and it reinforces the fact that we probably do not how even ordinary regular cyrstals grow.

My research over the past 3 years has been directed to trying to create a mathematics that can adequately express these new sructures and provide clues for the mechanisms by which nature can actually create them.

Who knows, a hundred years from now we may be spraying cars with quasicrystal paints to keep off the rust! But for me this is a curiosity problem pure and simple. We have difficulty studying these structures because we don't have the right mathematical formalism. Wherever there is wonderful structure, there is wonderful mathematics. There are a lot of things to learn here.

And the marvellous thing about knowledge, especially mathematical knowledge, is that it is accumulative.

6. Knowledge and research is accumulative

Knowledge that is sound and correct has lasting value. The theory of optics, that has been developed without interruption from the time of Newton over 300 years ago, was an understood prerequisite for Maiman's work on lasers. He could not have looked for coherent light if there was no theory that led one to speculate tha coeherent light could exist. No theory of light, no lasers, It is as simple as that! Mathematics of 2500 years (plane and 3-dimensional geometry) was a prerequisite for the invention of calculus of 300 years ago, the calculus was a prerequisite for the work of mathematical theory of electro-magnetic and light waves first formulated by Maxwell in the 1860's. You begin to feel how scientific knowledge blends into a vast continuum.

Let me close with a different perspective on curiosity driven research.

Some 65 million years ago the Cretaceous era ended with what the latest theories indicate may well have been a catatrophic meeting of the Earth with an astroid. Whatever happened the dinosaurs were devestated and the great Age of Reptiles was over. The fact that I can even say this is a example of wonderful insights of curiosity based research but off hand I can think no economic use of this knowledge (Steven Spielberg excepted). But I think that almost everyone finds this kind of thing fascinating. It is a brilliant coalesence of a couple of hundred years of knowledge slowly and patiently acuumulated by geologists, paleontologists, biologists, astronomers, chemists, and physicists.

Well, the hard luck of one kind of life form means new possibilities for others. Among the amimals to cross the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary were little rodent like mammals. If present mammals are anything to go by they were scurrying around poking their noses into every nook and cranny exploring their surroundings: Early Curiosity Reseach!. These were the ancestors of all mammals. These were OUR ancestors.

7. Curiosity is part of our nature

You probably heard of the amazing discoveries on Christmas day of last year of new caves in France containing hundreds of pictures drawn by men some 10,000 years ago. And all of us have gazed in wonder and admiration at photogrphs of the pictures in the famous Lascaux Caves, recognizing in our human ancestors that common need to express and understand the world around them. Would we not be poor indeed if we were to take no further interest in past civilizations, if Greek were to be forgotten by all the world, if the heroic efforts to crack the enigma of the heiroglyphics or the study the origins of man and indeed of the universe itself, were to be abandoned because no one cared any more about the ideas and customs of other times or because they don't make economic sense? This is self-evident.

The need to know and define ourselve is an unending one. The University of Alberta cannot of course, maintain programs or expertise in all these things, but the knowledge world is a global one and each university in its own way must carry its share.

We do curiosity based research because it is in our nature to be curious, because economically and socially it provides us with enormous benefits that far outweigh the costs of doing it, and because if we are to survive as creatures of this universe then we will need to have as deep an understanding as possible of the forces, living and otherwise, that shape it.