|
|
发表于 2006-1-20 09:14:25
|
显示全部楼层
引用第0楼Flysky于2006-01-19 21:14发表的“请翻译这句话，还看看我翻译的对不对。”:
Has there ever been another art so devoutly converted into a science as the art of parenting?
Super Freak
by Cass R. Sunstein 1 | 2 | 3
Post date 07.21.05 | Issue date 07.25.05 Printer friendly
E-mail this article
evitt likes to puncture myths. Turning from crime to democracy, he finds that campaign expenditures do not much affect elections. True, victorious candidates tend to raise a lot of money; but maybe they raise money because they are popular, rather than the other way around. To test this hypothesis, Levitt examines what happens when the same two candidates run against each other in consecutive elections, as has happened in almost a thousand congressional races since 1972. "Here's the surprise; the amount of money spent by the candidates hardly matters at all," he writes. "A winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote." In Levitt's view, what matters is who the candidate is, not how much money he spends.
Levitt thinks also that myths pervade the topic of parenthood. For one thing, parents are scared of the wrong things. Most parents are unwilling to keep a gun in their house, believing that guns impose a significant fatality risk. But the same parents are also entirely willing to have a swimming pool in the backyard. In Levitt's view, this disparity makes little sense. For every 11,000 residential pools in the United States, one child dies--meaning that about 550 children drown each year in pools. By contrast, only one child is "killed by a gun for every 1 million-plus guns." Hence any particular child is more than 100 times more likely to die in a pool than to be killed by a gun.
Emphasizing that people fear guns far more than they fear pools, Levitt concludes that most people are "terrible risk assessors." People fear flying more than they fear driving, but the per-hour death rates of driving and flying are about equal--an impressive point in favor of flying, because you can get a lot farther in an hour in an airplane. And when a risk produces outrage, people's concern is greatly heightened, whatever the statistics show. Levitt believes that this creates genuine problems both for individuals and for governments as they respond to short-term scares. Far more lives would be saved by some modest precautions for swimming pools than are now saved by flame-retardant pajamas and child-resistant packaging.
Can parents do anything to promote academic success? Levitt finds that high test scores are not correlated with having an intact family, having a mother who worked while the child was between birth and kindergarten age, or having attended Head Start. None of these factors matters. What does matter is whether the parents are highly educated, whether the mother was thirty or older when her first child was born, whether there are many books in the home, and whether the parents have a high socioeconomic status. It follows that for purposes of producing high academic achievement, child-rearing techniques are greatly overrated. Of course parents count. But "by the time most people pick up a parenting book, it is far too late. Most of the things that matter were decided long ago--who you are, whom you married, what kind of life you lead." Children are more likely to succeed if their parents are well-educated and well-paid. "It isn't so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it's who you are."
Continuing his focus on parenting, Levitt also offers an extended and entertaining (and somewhat obsessive) discussion of children's names. He is particularly interested in the difference between the naming decisions of African Americans and those of whites. Before the 1970s, black and white names overlapped far more than they do today. Now, more than 40 percent of African American girls born in California receive a name that is shared by none of the 100,000 white girls born in the same year. Distinctly black names are most likely to be given by "an unmarried, low-income, undereducated teenage mother from a black neighborhood who has a distinctively black name herself." The "whitest" names include Molly, Amy, Claire, Jake, Connor, and Tanner; the "blackest" names include Imani, Ebony, Shanice, DeShawn, DeAndre, and Marquis. Moving beyond race, Levitt finds that there is a strong correlation between babies' names and the socioeconomic status of parents. Wealthy white families are especially likely to select such names as Alexandra, Lauren, Katherine, Benjamin, Samuel, Jonathan, and Andrew; poorer white families favor such names as Amber, Heather, Kayla, Cody, Brandon, and Anthony. Highly educated parents show systematically different naming patterns from those of parents with little education.
But Levitt isn't really interested in providing answers to trivia contests. He also wants to know whether names matter to economic success. As he is aware, some impressive studies show that people with distinctly black names tend to receive fewer callbacks from employers than otherwise identical people with distinctively white names. The economists Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent out numerous resumés and found that employers were far more interested in people with such names as Emily and Greg than in those with such names as Lakisha and Jamal. Consistent with this evidence, Levitt finds that "on average, a person with a distinctively black name--whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn--does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake." But unlike Bertrand and Mullainathan, Levitt's evidence suggests that the name is not the source of the problem. What matters is the family and economic circumstances, not the name itself: "If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes."
What accounts for the differences in names over time? Levitt does not have a complete answer, but he does demonstrate that "once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder." The most popular names of any given year were particularly popular among high-end families of fifteen years prior. Levitt thus predicts that in 2015 we will find more girls with such names as Annika, Emma, Fiona, Grace, and Kate, while more boys will be called Aidan, Asher, Beckett, Carter, and Liam. Levitt concludes that "an overwhelming number of parents use a name to signal their own expectations of how successful their children will be." While names are not "likely to make a shard of difference," parents appear to "feel better knowing that, from the very outset, they tried their best."
eaders of Freakonomics should not be misled by the book's slick packaging and stupid title. Every one of the chapters is embarrassingly prefaced by an excerpt from Dubner's Times profile, often congratulating Levitt for his wonderfulness and sometimes depicting him as a demigod. (I am not exaggerating. One chapter is introduced thus: "[Levitt] has shown other economists just how well their tools can make sense of the real world. 'Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,' says Colin F. Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology.") The authors seem to fear that their substantive material might be boring, and they try too hard to create major drama, cuteness, or perhaps a reality television show, with one- or two-sentence paragraphs. Here's one paragraph: "Was Temptress actually 'living out her name' ...? Or would she have wound up in trouble even if her mother had called her Chastity?" Another paragraph: "Has there ever been another art so devoutly converted into a science as the art of parenting?" Another paragraph: "Right?"
There is no such thing as freakonomics. Nor is there anything remotely freaky about Levitt's approach. In assuming that people are rationally responsive to incentives, he is a perfectly conventional man of his trade. Levitt stands out not because of any large claims about human motivations, but because of his remarkable ingenuity, creativity, and sheer doggedness in investigating empirical questions about which no one seems to know much at all. Unfortunately, some of his findings are not terribly exciting. Are you amazed to learn that well-educated parents produce children with high test scores? Are you stunned to hear that many parents give their children names that they consider to signify high status?
But some of Levitt's inquiries do illuminate important problems. We now know, for example, that economic growth does little or nothing to reduce violent crime; that innovative policing strategies haven't much mattered; and that if states really want to reduce crime rates, they will put a lot more police on the street. But these points do not entirely explain the excitement generated by Levitt's book. (The New York Times Magazine has just introduced a regular freakonomical column by Dubner and Levitt.) One factor, I think, is that the book cleverly combines Dubner's journalistic gushing with Levitt's academic findings, thus encouraging the reader to gush along with Dubner even before the findings are presented and assessed. More charitably, it is fun and even exhilarating to see how a real social scientist goes about testing competing hypotheses. Some of Levitt's inquiries read like good detective stories. With respect to many urgent social questions, people engage in noisy and vehement debates without a sense that helpful illumination is available, in principle and maybe even in practice, by means of a careful investigation of the facts. Many of the issues that sharply divide us are, after all, empirical matters, and it is real progress simply to recognize them as such. And Levitt does far more than that.
Next: Levitt has been severely attacked for his most notorious claim, which is that the legalization of abortion significantly contributed to the decrease in violent crime in the 1990s. Liberals fear that the claim is racist, and conservatives despise the idea that abortion might be an effective crime-control strategy.
楼主的句子出自上面的文章。想请教一下版主或其他同学，“Parenting”在此如何翻译更恰当？育儿的说法似乎不妥。 |
|
发表于 2006-1-19 21:14:06
