2011诺贝尔奖得主托马斯•萨金特加州大学伯克利分校毕业演讲

University of California at Berkeley graduation speech
托马斯·萨金特加州大学伯克利分校毕业演讲

I remember how happy I felt when I graduated from Berkeley many years ago. But I thought the graduation speeches were long. I will economize on words.
我现在依然记得许多年前我从伯克利毕业时自己开心的样子。不过我觉得毕业演讲都太过冗长，这次我会言简意赅。

Economics is organized common sense. Here is a short list of valuable lessons that our beautiful subject teaches.
经济学是常识的集合体。下面是这门美丽的学科教会我们的一些珍贵课程：

1. Many things that are desirable are not feasible.
许多事情可遇而不可求。

2. Individuals and communities face trade-offs.
个人和集体会面临权衡取舍。

3. Other people have more information about their abilities, their efforts, and their preferences than you do.
别人对自己的能力、努力和喜好比你了解的要多。

4. Everyone responds to incentives, including people you want to help. That is why social safety nets don’t always end up working as intended.
每个人都会对激励做出反应（小编注：people respond to incentives 曼昆十大经济学原理之四），包括你想帮助的人。这也是为什么社会保障体系最后没能发挥预期的作用。

5. There are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.
平等和效率之间也面临权衡取舍。

6. In an equilibrium of a game or an economy, people are satisfied with their choices. That is why it is difficult for well meaning outsiders to change things for better or worse.
在游戏或者经济的均衡状态中，人们会满意于自己的选择，所以好心的局外人不管怎样都很难改变事态的发展。

7. In the future, you too will respond to incentives. That is why there are some promises that you’d like to make but can’t. No one will believe those promises because they know that later it will not be in your interest to deliver. The lesson here is this: before you make a promise, think about whether you will want to keep it if and when your circumstances change. This is how you earn a reputation.
在未来你也会对激励做出反应，这也是为什么有些承诺你想遵守可是却没办法做到。没人会相信你的那些承诺，因为人们都了解，以后履行这些承诺不会符合你的利益。我们要学会的是：在承诺别人之前，想想如果自己情况有所转变，还会不会坚持承诺？这是你为自己赢得好名声的办法。

8. Governments and voters respond to incentives too. That is why governments sometimes default on loans and other promises that they have made.
政府和选举人也会对激励做出反应，所以政府有时候会拖欠债务或拖延履行承诺。

9. It is feasible for one generation to shift costs to subsequent ones. That is what national government debts and the U.S. social security system do (but not the social security system of Singapore).
一代人把开支费用转嫁给下一代人，这个办法是可行的，政府债务和美国社会保障体系就是这么做的。（也有例外：新加坡的社会保障体系就非如此。）

10. When a government spends, its citizens eventually pay, either today or tomorrow, either through explicit taxes or implicit ones like inflation.
政府花钱人民买单，现在和将来都是这样，直接征税的方式也好，通货膨胀这样的隐形方式也好，这是不变的惯例。

11. Most people want other people to pay for public goods and government transfers (especially transfers to themselves).
大部分人都想让别人为公共事务或者政府转移性支出买单（特别当这些转移性支出的对象是他们自己时）。

12. Because market prices aggregate traders’ information, it is difficult to forecast stock prices and interest rates and exchange rates.
因为市场价格集合了所有交易者的信息，所以很难预测股价、利率和汇率等。

托马斯·萨金特：美国经济学家，擅长于总体经济学、货币经济学、时间序列等领域。1943年生于美国加利福尼亚州帕萨迪纳。现为斯坦福大学胡佛研究所资深研究员。萨金特于1964年获伯克利加州大学文学学位。1968年获哈佛大学哲学博士学位。曾执教于明尼苏达大学、芝加哥大学和哈佛大学，2003年任教于纽约大学至今。萨金特是理性预期学派的领袖人物，为新古典宏观经济学体系的建立和发展作出了杰出贡献，对宏观经济模型中预期的作用、动态经济理论与时间序列分析的关系等方面作出了开创性的工作。