雅思阅读 30: The Gentle Push（温柔的一推）

改编自 Thaler & Sunstein "Nudge" 及后续研究综述。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://decodethefuture.org/en/save-more-tomorrow-explained/

Reading Passage

A. When economics was formalised in the twentieth century, it built on a fiction. The fiction was homo economicus — the rational, self-interested, far-sighted calculator who weighs costs and benefits, discounts the future correctly, and never does something tomorrow what he can do the day after. Real people, as Richard Thaler never tired of pointing out, are not like that. We join the gym and stop going after three weeks. We save less for retirement than we intend. We eat the cake even though we know it is bad for us. We mean well, and we fail. Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017, did not argue that this failure should be punished by nannying regulation. He argued, with legal scholar Cass Sunstein, that the choice architecture around people could be rearranged so that the easy option — the option most people take by default — is the one they would have chosen had they had the time, the attention and the willpower. They called the idea a nudge: any aspect of the choice environment that alters behaviour predictably without forbidding any option or significantly changing economic incentives.

B. The most studied nudge is the default. When a company enrols new employees in a pension plan automatically, unless they actively choose to opt out, participation rates jump from around 40 per cent to over 90 per cent, even though the employee is free to withdraw at any time. The same trick works for organ donation: countries where donors opt out by default have donation rates of 90 per cent or more; countries where they opt in start from around 10 per cent. The mechanism is not that people suddenly care more about retirement or transplantation. It is that choosing, actively, costs effort, and most people — busy, tired, distracted — accept the option already selected for them. The default, in other words, does not change preferences; it changes the cost of stating them. Policy-makers, employers and designers discovered, to their surprise, that they could move behaviour by tens of percentage points without spending a penny on subsidies or threats. The finding was so powerful that it was soon criticised for being too powerful: if a default could nudge people toward saving, it could just as easily nudge them toward over-insurance, over-borrowing or junk food, depending on who set the default.

C. Thaler and his collaborator Shlomo Benartzi turned the default into a savings machine. Their "Save More Tomorrow" plan, first tested at a midwestern manufacturing company in 1998, asked workers to commit in advance to increasing their retirement contribution by a few percentage points each time they received a pay rise. Because the increase was tied to future raises, workers never saw their take-home pay fall — a trick that bypassed the loss-aversion that makes people refuse pay cuts. Over forty months, participants' average savings rate rose from 3.5 per cent to 13.6 per cent, and 78 per cent were still enrolled after four pay rises. The plan did not force anyone to do anything; it did not ban spending; it did not tax luxury goods. It simply asked people to decide, in a calm moment, about a future decision they would otherwise put off. Within a decade, versions of Save More Tomorrow had been adopted by companies employing tens of millions of workers, and in several countries it became the legal default for workplace pensions.

D. Nudging, however, has attracted critics, and the criticisms are not trivial. One line of attack questions the durability of the effect. Many nudges, it turns out, work in the laboratory and fade in the field, or work for a few weeks and then evaporate as people learn to ignore the nudge. Another line questions the ethics. A nudge, by definition, steers people without their full awareness, and critics ask who decides which way the nudge points: is the employer designing a savings plan, or is the social media platform designing a screen-time default that keeps you scrolling? The same tools that help people save for retirement can be used to keep them watching advertisements. A third line points out that nudges work best on people who are already disposed to change. They do not help the person who cannot afford to save, or who does not have a pension to enrol in. Nudging, in other words, can be an elegant solution for the comfortable and a cruel distraction for the desperate. A third line of criticism, raised by behavioural scientists themselves, points out that many nudge effects are small in absolute terms — a few percentage points here, a few there — and that stacking several small nudges rarely produces the large behaviour change that their enthusiastic advocates claim.

E. The evidence, as so often, is in the middle. Nudges are not a substitute for regulation, taxation or public investment; they are a cheap, flexible complement that works when the problem is one of attention and willpower rather than material constraint. The best nudges are transparent, reversible and aimed at outcomes the people being nudged say they want. The worst are invisible, exploitative and aimed at outcomes they do not. Thaler and Sunstein called their philosophy "libertarian paternalism" — libertarian because no option is removed, paternalistic because the architect of the choice is allowed to steer gently. Whether the label is too comfortable for what is, in the end, a form of social engineering is a question that has only grown sharper as algorithms, rather than human designers, have begun to set the defaults. A nudge from a pension plan is one thing. A nudge from an algorithm that knows more about you than you know about yourself is another.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The default effect and how it works ii. The Save More Tomorrow experiment iii. Criticisms: durability, ethics and inequality iv. The rational economic man and why he is wrong v. The philosophy behind the nudge and its digital future vi. Why pensions are a bad investment vii. The history of behavioural economics

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. According to the passage, what is a nudge? A. A legal ban on unhealthy choices. B. An aspect of the choice environment that alters behaviour without removing options. C. A financial penalty for bad decisions. D. A tax on luxury goods.

6. What happens when pension enrolment is opt-out by default? A. Participation falls to 10 per cent. B. Participation rises to over 90 per cent. C. It has no effect. D. Workers retire earlier.

7. Why did Save More Tomorrow tie contribution increases to future pay rises? A. Because workers never want more money. B. So workers never experienced a fall in take-home pay. C. Because pay rises are guaranteed. D. To trick employers.

8. What is one criticism of nudges mentioned in the passage? A. They are always too expensive. B. They may not be durable and can be used exploitatively. C. They only work in laboratories. D. They are illegal in most countries.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Thaler won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017.
10. Opt-out organ donation systems have higher donation rates than opt-in systems.
11. Save More Tomorrow was first tested in a Japanese company.
12. Nudges work equally well for rich and poor people.
13. The authors call their philosophy "libertarian paternalism".

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The default effect works because actively choosing costs (14) __________; the best nudges are transparent, reversible and aimed at outcomes people themselves say they (15) __________.

答案与解析

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