Spillonomics: Underestimating Risk
漏油经济：低估风险
David Leonhardt
Published: June 1, 2010
[1] In retrospect, the pattern seems clear. Years before the Deepwater Horizon [həˈraɪzn] rig [rɪɡ] blew, BP was developing a reputation as an oil company that took safety risks to save money. An explosion at a Texas [ˈtɛksəs] refinery [rɪˈfaɪnəri] killed 15 workers in 2005, and federal regulators and a panel led by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state, said that cost cutting was partly to blame. The next year, a corroded [kəˈrəʊd] pipeline in Alaska poured oil into Prudhoe Bay, upbraided [ʌpˈbreɪd] BP managers for their “seeming indifference to safety and environmental issues. ['ɪʃju:z]”
[1] 回想起来，模式似乎很清楚。早在“深水地平线”钻机自爆前的很多年，BP石油公司为了省钱甘冒安全的风险就已经声名狼藉。2005年得克萨斯州炼油厂爆炸中有15名工人丧生。联邦监管机构和前国务卿詹姆斯·贝克三世领导的专门小组认为，削减成本是事故的部分原因。第
二年，阿拉斯加腐蚀的管道将石油漏入普拉德霍湾。就连乔·巴顿，对全球变暖持怀疑态度的来自得克萨斯州的共和党众议员，都谴责BP管理人员“对安全和环境问题表现得漠不关心”
[2] Much of this indifference stemmed from an obsession with profits, come what may. But there also appears to have been another factor, one more universally human, at work. The people running BP did a dreadful [ˈdrɛdfəl] job of estimating the true chances of events that seemed unlikely—but that would bring enormous costs.
[2]这种冷漠大部分源于对利润的过度追求，不管出现什么情况。但似乎也还有另一个因素在起作用，一个更普遍的人性的因素。BP的管理人员在估计似乎不太可能发生但一旦发生就会带来巨大损失的事件真正会发生的可能性时，犯了一个可怕的错误。
[3] Perhaps the easiest way to see this is to consider what BP executives [ɪgˈzekjətɪv] must be thinking today. Surely, given the expense of the clean-up and the hit to BP’s reputation, the executives wish they could go back and spend the extra money to make Deepwater Horizon safer. That they did not suggests that they figured the rig would be fine as it was.
[3]也许理解这一点最简单的方法就是思考一下BP高管们如今的想法。显然，考虑到清理费用和对BP声誉的影响，高管们真希望可以回到过去，多花些钱让“深水地平线”更安全。他们没有增加这笔费用就表明他们认为钻机在当时的状态下不会出问题。
[4] For all the criticism BP executives may deserve, they are far from the only people to struggle with such low-probability, high-cost events. Nearly everyone does. “These are precisely the kinds of events that are hard for us as humans to get our hands around and react to rationally ['ræʃnəlɪ],” Robert N. Stavins, an environmental economist at Harvard, says. We make two basic—and opposite—types of mistakes. When an event is difficult to imagine, we tend to underestimate its likelihood. This is the proverbial [prəˈvɜ:rbiəl] black swan. Most of the people running Deepwater Horizon probably never had a rig explode on them. So they assumed it would not happen, at least not to them.
[4]尽管针对BP高管的所有批评可能都是他们应得的，但是他们绝不是唯一艰难应对这种低概率、高成本事件的人。几乎每个人都会如此。“这些正是我们人类处理时很难做出合理反应的一类事件，”哈佛大学环境经济学家罗伯特·斯塔文斯说。我们经常犯两种基本且性质相反
的错误。当一件事情是很难想象的，我们往往会低估它的可能性。这就是众所周知的黑天鹅（稀有之物）现象。大多数在“深水地平线”工作的人可能从未经历过钻井平台爆炸。因此他们认为这不会发生，至少不会发生在他们身上。
[5] Similarly, Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan liked to argue, not so long ago, that the national real estate market was not in a bubble [ˈbʌbl] because it had never been in one before. Wall Street traders took the same view and built mathematical models that did not allow for the possibility that house prices would decline[dɪˈklaɪn]. And many home buyers signed up for unaffordable mortgages[ˈmɔ:rgɪdʒ], believing they could refinance or sell the house once its price rose. That’s what house prices did, it seemed.
[5]同样，不久以前，本·伯南克和艾伦·格林斯潘也喜欢称全国房地产市场没有泡沫，因为以前从未有过泡沫。华尔街交易员也持同样观点，他们建立的数学模型根本不存在房价下降的可能性。许多购房者签订了负担不起的抵押贷款，相信一旦其价格上涨，他们可以再融资或卖掉房子。看起来房价好像是在上涨。
[6] On the other hand, when an unlikely event is all too easy to imagine, we often go in the opposite direction and overestimate the odds. After the 9/11 attacks, Americans canceled plane trips and took to the road. There were no terrorist [ˈtɛrərɪst] attacks in this country in 2002, yet the additional driving apparently led to an increase in traffic fatalities. [fəˈtæləti]
[6]另一方面，当一个不太可能发生的事件是很容易想象的，我们经常会走向另一个方向，高估它的可能性。“9·11”后，美国人取消了飞机旅行，转而驾车上路。2002年在这个国家没有发生，但更多的驾车出行显然导致了交通死亡人数的增加。
[7] When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so. Yet in the case of Deepwater Horizon, government policy actually went the other way. It encouraged BP to underestimate the odds of a catastrophe.
[7]当风险非常高时，应该由政府负责以帮助避免这些完全人为的错误。如果让市场自行其是，往往做不到这一点。然而，在“深水地平线”这件事情上，政府的政策实际上起到了相反的作用。它助长BP低估了灾难的可能性。
[8] In a little-noticed provision [prəˈvɪʒən] in a 1990 law passed after the Exxon Valdez spill, Congress capped a spiller’s liability over and above cleanup costs at $75 million for a rig spill. Even if the economic damages—to tourism, fishing and the like—stretch into the billions, the responsible party is on the hook for only $75 million. (In this instance, BP has agreed to waireact to翻译
ve the cap for claims it deems legitimate.) Michael Greenstone, an M.ist who runs the Hamilton Project in Washington, says the law fundamentally distorts a company’s decision making. Without the cap, executives would have to weigh the possible revenue [ˈrevənju:] from a well against the cost of drilling there and the risk of damage. With the cap, they can largely ignore the potential damage beyond cleanup costs. So they end up drilling wells even in places where the damage can be horrific, like close to a shoreline. To put it another way, human frailty [ˈfrelti] helped BP’s executives underestimate the chance of a low-probability, high-cost event. Federal law helped them underestimate the costs.

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