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Thomas Schelling, economist and nuclear strategist, died on December 13th, aged 95
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经济学家、核战略家托马斯·谢林于2016年12月13日辞世，享年95岁
WITHIN half an hour of waking up on October 10th 2005, Thomas Schelling received four phone calls. The first was from the secretary of the Nobel Committee, with news that he and Robert Aumann had jointly won that year’s prize for economics. During the fourth call, when asked how winning felt, he answered: “Well, it feels busy.” He was nothing if not truthful. He also confessed to feeling confused about which bit of his work had won the prize.
2005年10月10日，托马斯·谢林(Thomas Schelling)在醒来后的半小时内接了四个电话。第一个是诺贝尔奖委员会的秘书打来的，告知他和罗伯特·奥曼(Robert Aumann)共同获得了该年的诺贝尔经济学奖。到了第四个电话，当被问到获奖有何感受时，谢林答道：“哦，觉得挺忙的”。他再坦率不过了。他还坦言觉得纳闷，不知道自己因为哪部分成果拿了这个奖。
It might have been his work on addiction—flicked off like ash from his own struggles with smoking. Economists must understand, he wrote, the man who swears “never again to risk orphaning his children with lung cancer”, yet is scouring the streets three hours later for an open shop selling cigarettes. Mr Schelling’s work laid (largely unacknowledged) foundations for future behavioural economists. In his thinking, addicts have two selves, one keen for healthy lungs and another craving a smoke. Self-control strategies involve drawing battle lines between them.
有可能是因为他对上瘾的研究——从他自己与烟瘾的苦战中引发的思索。他写道：经济学家得理解，一个发誓“再也不冒得肺癌而让孩子成为孤儿之险”的人，三个小时后就会满大街找卖烟的小店。谢林的研究为未来行为经济学家的工作奠定了基础(这一点很大程度上未得到承认)。他认为，瘾君子都有两个自我，一个想要健康的肺，另一个惦记着那根烟。有效的自我控制策略需要在两者间做出非此即彼的明确选择。
The prize could also have been for his work on segregation, showing how mild individual preferences could lead to extreme group outcomes. Even if people do not mind living in a mixed community but have just a slight inclination to live near others like themselves, that could lead to deep racial segregation.
这个奖项也有可能是为了表彰他在隔离方面的研究。他论证了温和的个人偏好会导致极端的群体结果。即便人们并不介意住在一个混合社区，但哪怕他们有一点轻微的偏向，想住在和自己类似的人附近，也会导致严重的种族隔离。
By the time Mr Schelling arrived in Sweden in December 2005, he had worked out what the prize was for. His acceptance speech observed that “the most spectacular event of the past half century is one that did not occur. We have enjoyed 60 years without nuclear weapons exploded in anger…what a stunning achievement—or, if not achievement, what stunning good fortune!” If achievement was the word, the credit was partly his.
到了2005年12月谢林抵达瑞典的时候，他已经弄清了获奖的原因。他在获奖感言里说道：“过去50年里最了不起的事是一件没有发生的事。，如果这并不算成就，那是多么惊人的好运啊!”如果这算成就，那么有一部分要归功于他。
Like so many of his generation, Mr Schelling was drawn to economics by the horrors of the Depression in the 1930s. By the time he had finished his PhD in 1948, the agenda had changed. With the wounds of the second world war still fresh, the priority was to prevent a third. He dipped into government, gaining first-hand experience of negotiations, such as those that established NATO. Then in the 1950s he began publishing academic work on bargaining, using his crystal-clear prose to formalise concepts that gifted negotiators knew instinctively, and shunning what Richard Zeckhauser, a colleague, called the “Journal of Advanced Economic Gobbledygook”.
和他那一代的很多人一样，谢林被经济学吸引是缘于对上世纪30年代大萧条的恐慌。到1948年他获得经济学博士学位时，形势已经发生了变化。二战新伤未愈，。他曾在政府里短暂就职，获得了关于谈判的第一手经验，例如建立北约时的磋商。50年代他开始发表关于谈判的学术著作，用他非常清晰明了的行文将一些有天赋的谈判者凭直觉就知道的概念表述出来，避免成为同事理查德·泽克豪斯(Richard Zeckhauser)所说的“《高级经济学天书期刊》”。
The conflicts Mr Schelling considered transcended the case of two parties scrapping for a bigger slice of a fixed pie. The richness of his subject lay in the truth that “in international affairs, there is mutual dependence as well as opposition.” As neither America nor the Soviet Union wanted to be engulfed in a nuclear mushroom cloud, there was scope for military strategy involving wit, not weaponry. In 1960 he set out his ideas in a book, “The Strategy of Conflict”, which showed how the advantages of co-operation could overcome antagonism, even without a formal bargain.
谢林所考虑的冲突超越了“从固定大小的馅饼中抢夺更大块”的情形。他立论的丰富是基于这样一个事实：“在国际事务中，既有相互依赖，也有对立。”无论是美国还是前苏联都不想被核爆炸蘑菇云吞没，那么就有了空间来施展依赖智慧而非武器的军事策略。1960年他在《冲突的战略》(The Strategy of Conflict)一书中阐述了自己的观点，证明合作的好处如何能够消减对立，甚至不需要一场正式的谈判。
“Any time somebody talks about deterrence, they’re influenced by Schelling,” says Lawrence Freedman, author of “Strategy: A History”. This deterrence could take several forms. Counter-intuitively, limiting your options can strengthen your hand, by convincing the enemy of your seriousness. Applied to nuclear strategy, Mr Schelling saw that it was important to persuade the opposition that in the event of a nuclear attack, there would be a counter-strike. Weapons that would retaliate automatically if the country was attacked could deter nuclear aggression in the first place, so defending such weapons was the best way of defending civilian lives. The important thing was to avoid a situation in which one side attacked so as to offset the other’s perceived first-mover advantage.
“任何时候若有人谈到威慑，就一定受到了谢林的影响。”《战略的历史》(Strategy: A Freedman)说道。这种威慑可能有多种表现形式。与我们的直觉恰恰相反的是，限制你的选择能够增强你的威慑力，因为这让敌人确信你是认真的。运用到核战略上，谢林认为重要的是要让对方相信，自己在遭到核攻击时会发起反击。当国家受到袭击时会自动实施报复的武器能在一开始就阻遏核侵略，因此支持使用这类武器是保卫国民生命的最佳方式。重要的是避免一种情况，即一方为了抵消它认为对方所具有的先发优势而袭击对方。
Mr Schelling also promoted the importance of reputation as a useful deterrent. Richard Nixon understood this with what he called his “madman theory”: the idea of making the North Vietnamese enemy believe he was capable of anything, including pressing the nuclear button. But consistent behaviour can have as deterrent an effect as erratic unpredictability: if your adversaries believe that you will keep your word, then your word can shape their actions. The danger of this approach, however, is that it could lead to perseverance with a stupid strategy, just to save face.
谢林还推崇名声的重要性，认为这是一种有用的威慑力。尼克松很明白这一点，他有一套“疯汉理论”：让北越敌人相信他什么事都干得出来，包括按下核按钮。然而始终一致的行为和古怪的不可预测性具有同样的威慑力：如果你的对手相信你会说到做到，那么你的话语会塑造他们的行为。不过，这种方法的危险之处是它可能导致咬定一个愚蠢的战略不放，仅仅是为了保全面子。
United we stand
Mr Schelling was often referred to as a game theorist, despite not calling himself one. His methods marked him apart. Mathematical minds had proven elegantly that Mr Schelling’s games would always have solutions. There would always be at least one set of strategies where each side was playing its best possible response to the other. When whittling down the number of options, however, the mathematical approach was to chuck more assumptions and equations at the problem. Mr Schelling, in contrast, thought that just as one could not deduce logically whether any given joke will make people laugh, so it was ludicrous to deduce what people might think in a nuclear war from logic alone.
团结一致
谢林常被人称作博弈理论家，尽管他自己从不这么自称。他的方法独树一帜。数学大师们已经很好地证明了谢林的博弈总是有其解决办法，总会至少有一套战略让一方在应对另一方时发挥到最好。不过当要减少选项数量时，数学上的方法是给这个问题更多的假设、列更多方程式。与之相反的是，谢林认为正如无法从逻辑上推断任何一个给定的笑话能否让人发笑一样，只从逻辑出发推断人们在核战争中可能有怎样的想法实在是荒唐可笑。
Mr Schelling looked to the real world for help, and argued that shared norms were the answer. When he asked his students to pick a meeting place in New York, unco-ordinated, most would settle on the clock at Grand Central station. In his prize lecture, Mr Schelling used this idea to help explain why nuclear weapons had not been used on the battlefield for so long: their use was a taboo, so the world could settle on a focal point.
谢林向现实世界寻求帮助，他认为答案在于共同的规范。当他让他的学生们在纽约挑一个集会地点时，。在他的获奖演说中，：它们的使用是一种禁忌，因而这个世界会在一个焦点上妥协。
On that busy morning of October 10th, when pressed by the third journalist of the morning, Mr Schelling refrained from advising young people. “I wouldn’t necessarily try to talk somebody into…becoming an economist.” Instead of being confined by any academic discipline, he led by example, tackling some of the world’s most worrying—and most intractable—problems.
10月10日那个忙碌的早晨，尽管第三个打来电话的记者一再追问，他仍然不愿给年轻人什么忠告。“我不一定会劝谁……当经济学家。”他没有局限于任何学科，而是以身作则，对付世界上最让人担忧也最为棘手的一些问题。