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Economics is a notoriously imperialist discipline: economists are more prone to colonising other scholarly fields than to be colonised by them. The single biggest exception was Daniel Kahneman, the social psychologist who was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial prize in economic science for how he revolutionised the field.
经济学是一门以帝国主义著称的学科：经济学家更倾向于对其他学术领域进行“殖民”，而非被它们“殖民”。然而，社会心理学家丹尼尔•卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)是一个显著的例外，他因为对经济学领域的革命性改变而荣获2002年的诺贝尔经济学奖。
It was in the 1970s and early 1980s that Kahneman, who has died aged 90, carried out the path-breaking research in the psychology of decision-making that would upend economics, much of it with his collaborator Amos Tversky (who died in 1996). They showed that humans faced with uncertain situations tend to make judgments and take decisions based on systematic biases. People rely as much on flimsy as on solid evidence of what the probable outcomes are; they are guided less by probabilities than by how closely a situation represents preconceived ideas; they care about changes rather than absolute levels of, for example, wealth, and care more about losses than they do equally sized gains; they also have a propensity to stick with the status quo.
卡尼曼在1970年代和1980年代初进行了开创性的决策心理学研究，这些研究颠覆了经济学，大部分研究是与他的合作者阿莫斯•特沃斯基(Amos Tversky)共同完成的。他们揭示了人们在面对不确定情况时，往往会基于系统性偏见做出判断和决策。人们在预测可能的结果时，既依赖不稳定的证据，也依赖坚实的证据；他们的决策更多地受到先入为主的观念的影响，而非概率；他们更关心变化，而非例如财富的绝对水平，对损失的关注度超过同等大小的收益；他们也有保持现状的倾向。
These are just some of the patterns Kahneman and Tversky documented, several of which they incorporated into “prospect theory”, their model of how people make choices in the face of risk and uncertainty. This flew in the face of the theory of rational decision-making that was fundamental to economics. Kahneman later reminisced that they had not set out to challenge economists’ concept of rationality. “I realised only recently how fortunate we were not to have aimed deliberately at the large target we happened to hit. If we had intended [an influential 1974 article in Science] as a challenge to the rational model, we would have written it differently, and the challenge would have been less effective.”
这些只是卡尼曼和特沃斯基所记录的一些模式，他们将其中几个纳入了他们的“前景理论”，这是他们研究人们在面对风险和不确定性时如何做出选择的模型。这与经济学基础的理性决策理论形成了鲜明对比。卡尼曼后来回忆说，他们并没有打算挑战经济学家的理性概念。“我直到最近才意识到，我们是多么幸运，没有刻意瞄准我们碰巧击中的大目标。如果我们把[1974年发表在《科学》上的一篇颇具影响力的文章]作为对理性模型的挑战，我们就会以不同的方式来写，而挑战的效果也会大打折扣。”
Effective it certainly was. Kahneman and Tversky’s work caught the eye of Richard Thaler, then a young economist with a sceptical eye on his own field, who was the first to incorporate their insights into economic modelling. This quickly caught on, as their work helped explain behaviour that did not fit economists’ standard theory of consumer choice. In the ensuing decades, psychological biases were documented and used to explain a variety of economic topics, from consumer behaviour to development, to labour markets and financial market anomalies. The field of behavioural economics was born.
这确实非常有效。卡尼曼和特沃斯基的研究引起了理查德•塞勒(Richard Thaler)的关注，当时他还是一位对自己的领域持有怀疑态度的年轻经济学家，他是第一个将他们的洞见融入经济模型的人。这种理论很快得到了广泛的接受，因为他们的工作有助于解释那些不符合经济学家的标准消费者选择理论的行为。在接下来的几十年里，心理偏差被详细记录，并被用来解释各种经济主题，从消费者行为到发展，再到劳动力市场和金融市场的异常现象。行为经济学领域因此而诞生。
Kahneman and Tversky were “the founders of our field”, says Ulrike Malmendier, a behavioural economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Its success, she says, has been “overwhelming”. Malmendier, a member of the German official council of economic experts, points out that not only has the behavioural approach gained acceptance throughout most of economics, it is also appreciated by policymakers.
加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校的行为经济学家乌尔丽克•马尔门迪尔(Ulrike Malmendier)称，卡尼曼和特沃斯基是“我们领域的创始人”。她认为，这个领域的成功是“压倒性的”。作为德国官方经济专家委员会的成员，马尔门迪尔指出，行为经济学不仅在大部分经济学领域得到了认可，政策制定者也对其表示赞赏。
“Whenever I’m talking with the highest level of politicians, I can be sure to get a question asking ‘well, you as a behavioural economist, how would you think about such-and-such?’ People are aware that we have other tools than standard carrot-and-stick economic incentives.”
“每当我与最高级别的政治家交谈时，我总会被问到‘作为一名行为经济学家，你对某某问题有何看法？’人们明白，我们除了标准的奖惩经济激励手段外，还有其他工具可用。”
This interest can in part be credited to Kahneman himself, who popularised his research in the 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Yet he remained slightly bemused at the influence his work ended up having. When he received the Nobel Prize, he remarked that “I have been mostly cheering Thaler and behavioural economics from the sidelines”. The paper on prospect theory, he said, was influential only because it was published in the highly prestigious journal Econometrica — “What impresses me is how chancy this is, that is this is entirely accidental . . . if we’d published that word for word [elsewhere] there would have been no Nobel Prize for this work today.”
这种兴趣可以部分归功于卡尼曼本人，他在2011年出版的《思考，快与慢》一书中普及了他的研究。然而，他对自己的研究成果产生的影响仍然感到有些困惑。当他获得诺贝尔奖时，他说：“我主要是在场边为塞勒和行为经济学喝彩。”他说，关于前景理论的论文之所以有影响力，只是因为它发表在极具声望的《计量经济学》杂志上——“让我印象深刻的是，这是多么的偶然，这完全是偶然的……如果我们一字不差地在其他地方发表，今天就不会有这项工作的诺贝尔奖了。”
Those who knew Kahneman stress his unfailing interest in what other people thought. Younger scholars praise his lack of defensiveness about his work, and his eagerness to see it overtaken by new research. His list of co-authors is a who’s who of economics and other fields. He once told the FT that “everything I’ve done has been collaborative.”
了解卡尼曼的人都强调他对他人想法的持续兴趣。年轻的学者们赞扬他对自己的工作没有防御性，并且渴望看到新的研究超越他的工作。他的合著者名单是经济学和其他领域的名人录。他曾经告诉英国《金融时报》：“我所做的一切都是合作的。”
Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv and was based in Israel during the postwar decades before moving to the US later on. But he spent his childhood in Paris and Nazi-occupied France. He was seven or eight when he walked home from a friend after the curfew imposed on Jews and encountered an SS man. Despite young Daniel’s fear that his hidden yellow star would show, the Nazi lifted him up to hug him, then emotionally showed him a photo of a boy, and gave him some money. “I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.” Martin Sandbu
卡尼曼出生于特拉维夫(Tel Aviv)，战后的几十年里一直在以色列工作，后来移居美国。然而，他的童年是在巴黎和纳粹占领的法国度过的。在对犹太人实施宵禁后，他从朋友那里走回家，那时他只有七八岁，却遇到了一名党卫军。尽管小丹尼尔担心他隐藏的黄星会被发现，但纳粹还是把他抱了起来，然后动情地给他看了一张男孩的照片，并给了他一些钱。“回家后，我比以往任何时候都更加确信母亲是对的：人是无尽复杂而有趣的。”马丁•桑德布(Martin Sandbu)