TED英语演讲：你为什么穷
    贫穷的根源在哪里? 有的人在于性格问题，有的人在于教育缺失，也有的人源于工作......Rutger Bregman先生将和大家探讨和分享他对贫穷的见解。
  你为什么穷
  演讲者：Rutger Bregman
  I’d like to start with a simple question: Why do the poor make so many poor decisions? I know it’s a harsh question, but take a look at the data. The poor borrow more, save less, smoke more, exercise less, drink more and eat less healthfully. Why?
  我想用一个简单的问题开始今天的话题，为什么穷人会做出这么差劲的决定，我知道这是个尖锐的问题，让我们来看一下数据，穷人借钱更多，储蓄更少，抽烟更多，饮酒更多，锻炼更少，而且饮食更为不健康，这是为什么呢?
  Well, the standard explanation was once summed up by the British Prime Minister, Margar
et Thatcher. And she called poverty a personality defect. A lack of character, basically.
  标准的解释是英国首相撒切尔夫人曾经总结过的，她把贫穷称之为个性缺陷，基本上就是缺乏某种个性。
  Now, I’m sure not many of you would be so blunt. But the idea that there’s something wrong with the poor themselves is not restricted to Mrs. Thatcher. Some of you may believe that the poor should be held responsible for their own mistakes. And others may argue that we should help them to make better decisions. But the underlying assumption is the same: there’s something wrong with them. If we could just change them, if we could just teach them how to live their lives, if they would only listen.
  我相信在座各位可能不会有很多人这么大胆的说，但是穷人自身有问题这个概念，不单是撒切尔夫人提出的，有人可能会认为穷人应该对自己犯的错负责，另一些人可能会说我们应该帮他们做出更好的决定，但是这两种观点背后的假设都是一样的，就是他们是有问题的，如果我们可以改造他们，如果我们可以教导他们如何生活，如果他们能听从教导的话。
  And to be honest,this was what I thought for a long time. It was only a few years ago that I discovered that everything I thought I knew about poverty was  all started when I accidentally stumbled upon a paper by a few American psychologists. They had traveled 8,000 miles, all the way to India, for a fascinating study. And it was an experiment with sugarcane  should know that these farmers collect about 60 percent of their annual ine all at once, right after the harvest. This means that they’re relatively poor one part of the year and rich the other.
  老实说，有很长一段时间，我也是这么想的，几年前，我才发现，我之前自以为对贫穷的所有了解都是错的。一次我无意中看到几个美国心理学家的论文，才恍然大悟。为了一个异想天开的研究，他们不远万里去到印度，他们用蔗糖农民做了一个实验。请大家了解这些农民年收入的百分之六十是一次性获得的，就在收割季之后，也就是说在一年中的一段时间，他们会比较贫困。
  The researchers asked them to do an IQ test before and after the harvest. What they subsequently discovered pletely blew my mind. The farmers scored much worse on the te
st before the harvest. The effects of living in poverty, it turns out, correspond to losing 14 points of IQ. Now, to give you an idea, that’s parable to losing a night’s sleep or the effects of alcoholism.
  研究人员请他们在收割前后分别做一次智商测试，他们的发现完全颠覆了我的三观，在收割前农民们的智商测试得分要低得多，结果显示，生活贫困的影响会反映为智商测试得分平均低了14分，为了让大家对这个分数有个概念，这就相当于失眠一整夜或酒精的影响。
  A few months later, I heard that Eldar Shafir, a professor at Princeton University and one of the authors of this study, was ing over to Holland, where I live. So we met up in Amsterdam to talk about his revolutionary new theory of poverty. And I can sum it up in just two words: scarcity mentality. It turns out that people behave differently when they perceive a thing to be scarce. And what that thing is doesn’t much matter --whether it’s not enough time, money or food.
  几个月后，我听说，普林斯顿大学教授以及本研究的作者之一，艾尔达夏菲尔要来我住的荷兰了，于是我们在阿姆斯特丹见了面，讨论了他关于贫穷的革命性的新理论，我可以用
两个字总结，稀缺性心态，结果显示，当人们认为某个东西稀缺的话，行为方式就会改变，这个东西是什么并不重要，有可能是时间金钱或食物。
leftist  You all know this feeling, when you’ve got too much to do, or when you’ve put off breaking for lunch and your blood sugar takes a pe. This narrows your focus to your immediate lack -- to the sandwich you’ve got to have now, the meeting that’s starting in five minutes or the bills that have to be paid tomorrow. So the long-term perspective goes out the window.
  大家都知道这种感觉，如果你手上有太多事情要做，或是你吃午餐时间推迟了血糖水平急剧下降，这会让你的注意力集中在最直接的缺乏上，一定要立刻吃到三明治，五分钟后就要开的会或是明天必须付清的账单，看的长远此刻早已在九霄云外了。
  You could pare it to a new puter that’s running 10 heavy programs at once. It gets slower and slower, making errors. Eventually, it freezes -- not because it’s a bad puter, but because it has too much to do at once. The poor have the same problem. They’re not making dumb decisions because they are dumb, but because they’re living in a context in
which anyone would make dumb decisions.
  可以把这种情况比作一台新电脑，同时运行十个繁重的程序，电脑就会变的越来越慢，会出错，最终会死机，不是因为这台电脑不好，而是因为他一次性要处理太多内容了。穷人的问题是一样的，他们不是因为愚蠢 做出了愚蠢的决定，而是因为在他们生活的那种环境下，任何人都有可能做出愚蠢的决定。
  So suddenly I understood why so many of our anti-poverty programs don’t work. Investments in education, for example, are often pletely ineffective. Poverty is not a lack of knowledge. A recent analysis of 201 studies on the effectiveness of money-management training came to the conclusion that it has almost no effect at all.
  因此我突然能够理解，为什么现在很多扶贫项目都没用，例如很多教育投入都是完全无效的，贫穷并不是缺少知识。最近一个关于财富管理训练有效性的201项研究的分析，得到了一个结论，即训练几乎完全无效。
  Now, don’t get me wrong -- this is not to say the poor don’t learn anything -- they can e o
ut wiser for sure. But it’s not enough. Or as Professor Shafir told me, It’s like teaching someone to swim and then throwing them in a stormy sea.

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