★☆★Economist系列精读★☆★

zhtwdUID: 2319724

Buttonwood
Not so fast
Jun 18th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Appetite for risk may have returned, but the crisis is not over

LOW interest rates are intended to ease the burden on debtors, discourage saving, encourage spending and thereby revive the economy. But they also have a distorting effect on asset markets. By reducing the cost of speculation, they encourage bubbles.
So although it is good news that some indicators (such as the cost of bank borrowing) have improved, risk appetites also need monitoring closely. The “search for yield” which marked the boom of 2005, 2006 and early 2007 seems to have started again. Retail investors, disappointed with measly returns on savings accounts, are piling into corporate-bond funds. One British manager is reportedly raking in £1 billion (.6 billion) a month.

Those investors will have to hope that the managers choose their bonds wisely. Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency, reports that more companies have defaulted in 2009 than in the whole of last year, and expects the default rate, 7.29% in May, to hit 14.3% by next year. The agency’s “weakest link” category contains 290 firms, with nearly 0 billion of debt, that are deemed to be at risk of failure.
The banks are also rediscovering their willingness to take risks. In a review of the investment-banking sector on June 15th, JPMorgan said that rival banks, eager to rebuild market share, are offering to do deals at “irresponsible prices”.
The silver lining to this cloud is that large companies have been able to take advantage of investor enthusiasm to raise money in both the bond and equity markets. J. Sainsbury, a British supermarket group, launched a £445m rights issue on June 17th to fund expansion plans. The very idea would have been unimaginable three months ago.

All this is encouraging the feeling that the worst of the crisis is over. Equity markets enjoyed an almost uninterrupted rebound between March and mid-June; according to Société Générale, the MSCI World index rose in 13 out of the 14 weeks to June 12th, the best sequence since December 1999. This, in turn, was linked to the feeling that the worst of the recession was seen in the first quarter, and that the global economy could be rebounding by the second half of this year.

There is a kind of positive feedback loop here, in which confidence about the economy boosts the stockmarket and a rising market helps restore economic sentiment (indeed, share prices are included in leading indicators). As strategists at Citigroup remark, the world seems to have moved from worrying about the Great Depression to talking about the Great Escape.

But how real is this shift? Not all the recent economic data have been positive. The June Empire State survey of manufacturing activity in New York showed a retreat. German export figures for April showed a 4.8% month-on-month fall. The latest figures for American and euro-zone industrial production showed similar dips. American raw domestic steel production is down 47% year on year; railway traffic in May was almost a quarter below its level of a year earlier. Bankers say that chief executives seem a lot less confident about the existence of “green shoots” than markets are.

The danger is that policymakers have done more to revive the financial markets than they have to shore up the real economy. Tim Lee of pi Economics thinks the authorities are simply inflating another bubble. The carry trade (borrowing in low-yielding currencies to invest in higher-yielding ones) has returned, as shown by the strength of the Australian dollar.

This bubble may start to deflate. Investors are already rediscovering their appetite for government bonds: the yield on ten-year Treasuries had drifted back from a peak of 3.93% on June 10th to 3.67% a week later. Investors may be starting to realise that, even if the biggest falls in output have passed, the outlook for 2010 is still likely to be sluggish.

After all, the problems that existed at the start of this crisis have not gone away. Delinquencies on American mortgage loans are still rising: the seasonally adjusted rate in the first quarter was higher across all categories. European banks may still need to write down another 3 billion of assets this year and next, according to the European Central Bank. Worst of all, Capital Economics says American consumer debt is more than 130% of disposable income, double its level in the 1980s. Reducing this ratio will require widespread defaults, rapid inflation or a prolonged period of higher savings rates. None of those would be particularly good news for the markets. The crisis took a long time to build up. It will not disappear as a result of one good quarter.

gjwUID: 2512308

"地震预测仍然是世界难题，文中绿色标出的是现有的预测依据和方法。"
学习笔记～
wallop:   猛烈震动 a powerful blow
wedge：楔子，楔入to force (one's way) into or through
           eg.wedged his way into the crowd
derail:   脱轨 to cause to run off the rails
fault:   [地理]断层
nigh:   close,near
          eg,Understanding what is happening is nigh impossible
fluke:   侥幸 a stroke of luck
tip their hand: 举手示意，明确表示（英语中大量的拟任用法，值得学习，也是表达地道的关键）
primary wave steals across the threshold ：(很形象)
cross the threshold: （词组）跨进门内  
All to no avail:全都无济于事

GenevUID: 2543794

Google v Microsoft

Clash of the titans

Jul 8th 2009
From Economist.com

Google launches a direct assault on Microsoft with the promise of a new PC operating system

THE announcement came as a humble blog post on Google’s corporate website late on Tuesday July 7th, but it delivers what is likely to be a dramatic shake-up for the information-technology (IT) industry. By promising to release, at some point later this year, an operating system for personal computers the online giant is launching a direct attack on Microsoft, the world’s biggest software firm.

The confrontation is likely to be momentous. Microsoft’s PC operating system, Windows, boasts a market share of nearly 90%. Although the firm’s empire has been showing signs of decline, it remains a dominant power. Yet industry watchers see a huge threat as the mighty internet company moves into new territory. TechCrunch, a leading technology blog, made it clear how vulnerable it believes Microsoft to be, reporting the news as “Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft”.

In reality it will be more of a slow explosion. At first Google’s Chrome OS, as the new software is called, will be targeted only at netbooks, the cheap and smallish laptops that are proving popular. The idea is to provide a compact operating system with a simple user interface that boots up in a few seconds and allows users to work securely and easily with web-based applications, such as e-mail and social networks. This is why the software is based on a stripped-down version of Linux, the popular open-source operating system, and comes with Chrome, the browser that Google released late last year.
And it will take a while for the program to be ready for prime time. “We have a lot of work to do, and we’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open-source community”, writes Sundar Pichai, the Google executive in charge of the project, in the blog post announcing the new product. The first netbooks running Chrome OS, he explains, will not be available for consumers before the second half of next year.

Yet Google’s intention is clear. It plans to do what the now-defunct Netscape attempted when it launched its first browser in the mid-1990s: to make Windows obsolete and turn the browser into the dominant computing platform. Eventually Chrome OS will be used to power full-fledged PCs. All applications written for the software will be web-based and will work with other browsers that are compliant with the latest web standards (even those running on Windows). Chrome OS would also allow users to work offline and synchronise changes later.
Microsoft has not offered an official reaction yet. But the firm must have anticipated such a move. Google’s assault comes when the once almighty software giant is vulnerable. Windows Vista, the latest version of its operating system, has not been a success. Its forays into Google’s main territory, web search and online advertising, have not brought big gains. European antitrust authorities are also still pursuing Microsoft, which limits its ability to strike back at Google.

Yet it is much too early to count Microsoft out. It recently launched Bing, a new search service, which has taken some market share from Google. In October, roughly when Google will make Chrome OS available, Microsoft will release the next iteration of its operating system, Windows 7, a version of which is supposed to run well on netbooks. And the firm is spending billions on a “cloud”, a global network of huge data centres, which will rival Google’s infrastructure and allow Microsoft to offer all kinds of web-based applications.

Will there be a clear winner? Probably not in the foreseeable future. The pockets of both firms are simply too deep. And that is a good thing: the epic fight between the two giants promises to speed up innovation. And that is what the IT industry needs to overcome the recession.

wooothUID: 2534678

这个，我现在就是这么做的。不过，效果估计要较长时间的积累才能显现出来

GenevUID: 2543794

19# woooth
放心，稳打稳扎是正道。

IthakaUID: 2511650

good，大家一起来读
这个帖子就变成我们的英语学习帖吧

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Of mice and monkeys
Jul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition

And men?

MOST people accept that death and taxes are inevitable. But that doesn’t mean you should not try to postpone them. A good accountant can help with the latter, but the usual prescription for the former is a way of life that avoids excess.开头写的真好！

That advice might be even truer than many of its proponents realise, for it has long been known that restricting the diets of several species of laboratory animal seems to slow down the process of ageing. This is a question not just of avoiding obesity, but of reducing an individual’s intake of calories to a point significantly below normal consumption—almost, but not quite, to the point of malnutrition. At the same time, some drugs are also known to have anti-ageing properties—again, in “lower” animals. It is therefore good news for potential Methuselahs 啥意思！that both these approaches have now been brought closer, phylogenetically speaking, to humanity.

Caloric restriction, as the dietary method is properly known, was tested by Richard Weindruch and his team at the University of Wisconsin using rhesus monkeys— the workhorses是实验品的意思吗 (to mix literal and metaphorical livestock) of laboratory studies on non-human primates. Previously, the nearest species to a human for which caloric restriction had been proved to work was a mouse. Dr Weindruch’s results are published in this week’s edition of Science.
Meanwhile that publication’s rival, Nature, has a report by David Harrison of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine and his colleagues on the life-prolonging effects of a drug called rapamycin. In this case the experiment was done on mice. But that is much closer to humans than the nematode worms and fruit flies which were the subjects of previous successful experiments on drug-induced life extension.
No pain, no gainOne reason why primates have not been the subject of anti-ageing studies until now is that they live so long anyway. Dr Weindruch’s paper is the result of 20 years of work. Over the course of that period he and his team have looked at 76 monkeys (30 males to start with and, since 1994, another 16 males and 30 females). Half these animals were kept as controls, with no changes in their diet, and the other half experimented upon.
Each animal in the experimental group was observed for up to six months to find out how much it ate when food was freely available. It then had the calorific value of this baseline diet cut, in three monthly tranches, until it had been reduced by a total of 30%.
The upshot is that, so far, 14 of the 38 control animals have died of age-related illnesses such as type II (late onset) diabetes, cancer and heart disease. Only five of the experimental animals so succumbed. A statistical analysis showed that, at any given time during the study, an animal in the control group was three times as likely to die from an age-related cause as one in the experimental group.有点意思
Not all of the animals that died did so from age-related conditions. Some succumbed to injury, infection and even complications from anaesthesia. But when it came to these more random deaths, both groups suffered almost equally. Seven went down in the control group, and nine in the experimental one. An apparent win, then, for caloric restriction—though it will not be possible to say for sure until all members of both groups have died and the extra years of life (if any) of the experimental subjects can be known precisely.
Semi-starvation is not, however, a course of action most people would be willing to undertake in the hope that it might prolong their lives. But they might be willing to take a pill. Indeed, a company called Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is already running trials of drugs that affect proteins called sirtuins—a group of enzymes which experiments on invertebrates have shown to be involved in extending lifespan.
Dr Harrison and his colleagues picked a different molecule that has been seen to work on invertebrates: rapamycin. This substance, isolated originally from a strain of bacterium found on Easter Island—or Rapa Nui as it is known to the locals—acts by suppressing a particular signalling mechanism inside cells, called the TOR pathway. The TOR pathway, in turn, promotes protein production and inhibits the active destruction of parts of cells that are no longer needed. Slowing down all this molecular turnover seems to slow ageing, at least in worms and flies. So Dr Harrison’s team decided to give it a go in mice.
Easter eggsLaboratory mice, which have no predators other than the white-coated variety, live for a maximum of just over 1,000 days. The researchers started feeding them with rapamycin at the age of 600 days—about the same point in their lives as a 60-year-old human has reached. The results were impressive. Maximum female lifespan increased from 1,094 days to 1,245, though males did somewhat less well, going from 1,078 days to 1,179. Measured from the time the drugs were first administered in early old age, these figures translate into a 38% increase in life expectancy for females and 28% for males.1/3的寿命阿！强！
What is equally interesting is that both the TOR pathway and the one controlled by sirtuins are also affected by caloric restriction. 哈哈哈说来说去还是要少吃啊！It looks, in other words, as if the drug-based and diet-based approaches are acting in similar ways. That is not to recommend people take doses of rapamycin. Its main medical use is to suppress the immune system, so anyone consuming it casually would open himself to serious infection. But it does hold out the tantalising hope that, at some point in the future, it might be possible to pop a pill and put an extra decade or two on your life.
看完这个就一句话：少吃能减肥还能长寿！

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Google v MicrosoftClash of the titansJul 8th 2009
From Economist.com Google launches a direct assault on Microsoft with the promise of a new PC operating system  THE announcement came as a humble blo ...
Genev 发表于 2009-7-9 09:19

看完变形金刚再看这个文章，感觉GOOGLE跟微软就跟那个crazy machine大战一样呵呵。。。

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

China's future
Enter the dragonJul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integration will turn China into a gentle giant. A new book argues that this is a delusion

When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World.好尖锐的话！ By Martin Jacques. Allen Lane; 592 pages; £25. To be published in America by Penguin Press in November. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

THERE have been many rivals for America’s crown as the world’s greatest power. In the 1950s the Soviet Union threatened its military hegemony; in the 1980s Japan challenged its economic might. These days the pretender is China. The evidence of America’s decline seems obvious. The limits of its military power were exposed after the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the flaws of its capitalist system were revealed by the global financial crisis that started on Wall Street. The West now looks to China to prop up its financial system, and to the Chinese consumer to stimulate the global economy. 开头写的真的是太好了！最喜欢这样排比的叙述犀利和有阵势！

Is the long era of Western dominance, first by European powers and then by America, finally coming to an end? For Martin Jacques, a British commentator and recently a visiting professor at universities in China, Japan and Singapore, the answer is clear. The title of his book says it all: “When China Rules the World”.



He begins by citing the latest study by Goldman Sachs, which projects that China’s economy will be bigger than America’s by 2027, and nearly twice as large by 2050 (though individual Chinese will still be poorer than Americans哎！). Economic power being the foundation of the political, military and cultural kind, Mr Jacques describes a world under a Pax Sinica.这个是什么 The renminbi will displace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency; Shanghai will overshadow New York and London as the centre of finance; 真是这样上海人高兴死了！European countries will become quaint relics of a glorious past, rather like Athens and Rome today; global citizens will use Mandarin as much as, if not more than, English; the thoughts of Confucius will become as familiar as those of Plato; and so on.这段的例子流畅而不堆砌，真是的是喜欢死了！
All this makes for an interesting parlour game. Yet there is something too deterministic about Mr Jacques’s economic and political extrapolations. The author does not allow for uncertainty, chaos and error. He predicts that history is about to restore China to its ancient position of global power. But might it not equally push China back into self-destructive upheavals such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution? After all, the same Communist Party remains in power and, as Mr Jacques puts it, the Chinese state has never shared authority with anyone. He accords little importance to the thousands of protests in China, most of them against corruption and the loss of land. In his dense recitation of data, there is hardly a mention of the demographic crisis facing China, which means that the country could well become old before it becomes rich. He sees little risk of instability from ethnic unrest in Tibet or Xinjiang.
For Mr Jacques (the last editor of a defunct British magazine called Marxism Today), the Communist Party is a benign force, guiding the country through its spectacular boom while avoiding the collapse that afflicted the Soviet Union. He has little truck with没看明白 the notion that free markets can only work, in the long term, in free societies; that liberty of thought leads more easily to innovation; that democratic states correct their mistakes more easily than authoritarian ones.
All this is a Western conceit, says Mr Jacques. Democracy and rule of law were not a precondition for the West’s economic power, but a coincidence. This argument is the most interesting (and contentious) part of Mr Jacques’s book, rather than his workaday account of Chinese history or the overlong prose about China being a “civilisation state” rather than a “nation state”.
The parting of ways between Europe and China came, in his view, not with the Renaissance or the Enlightenment but with the industrial revolution. Even so, the West’s success was not preordained. Until 1800, Mr Jacques argues, the most advanced parts of China and Europe had reached comparable levels of development. Indeed, China had built a form of steam engine before James Watt. So why did the industrial revolution begin in Britain and not along the Yangzi river? In large part, it was an accident of history.
Britain, like China then, suffered from a shortage of land. But Britain had coal, which replaced firewood as a fuel, and colonies with slaves providing plenty of farmland and cheap labour. The habit of war 这个好讽刺，好象美国就不是habit of war 了哈哈“helped to hone the European nation states into veritable fighting machines” and the incorporation of merchant classes into the elites encouraged European rulers to promote capitalism. By contrast, claims Mr Jacques, imperial China’s attachment to Confucian values of harmony meant its main concern was to keep order and social equality within its domains. So it was not the West’s superior values that allowed it to rule the world, but rather its flaws.
儒家思想也是有害人之处啊～
If colonisation assisted Western hegemony, the end of the colonial era after the second world war set the stage for the rise of China. Its economic development from 1978 has been “the most extraordinary in human history”, more rapid than that of Europe or America, faster even than that of Japan, South Korea and the other Asian miracles. Conflict of the sort that accompanied the rise of Germany and Japan cannot be ruled out, says Mr Jacques, but there is a good chance that it can be avoided. “China does not aspire to run the world because it believes itself to be the centre of the world,” he writes. Perhaps so. For now China is developing in collaboration with the West. It relies on Western investment and markets, and seeks stability abroad.
The West hopes that wealth, globalisation and political integration will turn China into a gentle giant, a panda rather than a dragon. George Bush senior declared in 1999: “Trade freely with China and time is on our side.” But Mr Jacques says this is a delusion. Time will not make China more Western; it will make the West, and the world, more Chinese.

GenevUID: 2543794

Pax Sinica 一开始“Pax Americana”代表的是“美国主导的世界秩序”，现在“Pax Sinica”可代表“中国主导的世界秩序”，把他翻译成为“中华帝国”也是合理的，大概就是这么一个意思。

have no truck with
与…无关；与…无往来；不跟…做生意

如果地球人都跟米国人一样物质生活水平，那就要有三个地球- Three planet living。

So it was not the West’s superior values that allowed it to rule the world, but rather its flaws.
——西方这种二元对立、扩张精神对资本主义是有利的，参阅《新教伦理和资本主义精神》。
中国这种value of harmony不仅属于儒家，道家思想体现得更深刻，天人合一正是最早和最好的环保思想。

看了Jacque同学的背景，不难理解他对PRC的affection。

另外他对2050的展望没有建立在人口-环境-资源的全面outlook上，最近南周报道Greenlan冰川融化。任何对未来的预测，不能回避《增长的极限》提出的困境。

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

25# Genev
强，真受教! 文章强，回复更强！

以后准备每天两篇ECONOMIST，白白嫩嫩！
^_^

dafeileiUID: 2525704

问问，为何不直接把文章的链接给出来呢。
或者直接到网站上看岂不是更好？？？！！！

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

这个问题你可以问问建楼的人..

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Are we nearly there yet?Jul 10th 2009
From Economist.com
Motorists could learn a thing or two from ants
WITH more Americans than ever economising by driving, rather than flying, to visit friends and family for last weekend’s Independence Day celebrations, the long, winding lines of bumper-to-bumper traffic must have made more than a few turn around and miss the food and fireworks. When stuck in traffic, your correspondent is tempted to compare the competitive nature of motorists (himself included) with the co-operative behaviour of ants. He is intrigued by the way ants manage to avoid traffic jams. The first thing you notice when you watch an ant trail is the way the convoy never comes to a halt, no matter how busy the traffic.

The ants don’t even slow down. As the traffic density builds at junctions where ant trails converge, they continue to maintain the same steady speed as they do on quieter stretches. More intriguing still, they exhibit none of the mutual blocking behaviour 这个说的真好，在中国塞车都是 mutual blocking 哈哈哈found on crowded roads—where motorists prevent others from squeezing in and, in so doing, hinder their own progress as well.
Alamy
There is a world of difference, of course, between ants genetically programmed over millions of years to follow pheromone trails in the best interest of the colony, and motorists constrained to follow the rules of the road, yet determined to demonstrate their free will and to maximise their personal gain. In short, for ants fetching food from a distant source, an efficient transport system is essential for the colony’s survival. For motorists, it is merely a means to get from one place to another while struggling to retain their freedom and individuality.

Yet, despite the differences, your correspondent 这个倒是是什么意思啊？感觉是个口头禅believes there are lessons motorists can learn from the collective march of ants. For one thing, there is a lot of communication going on between individual ants on a trail, as they broadcast their presence and their intentions chemically to one another. That clearly helps them regulate their distance apart (headway). In so doing, they maintain an optimum speed for a maximum volume of traffic.

One day cars will likewise be able to communicate with one another. It would be preferable if they did so without their owners’ involvement, otherwise there would be even more scope for abuse than at present. However, given the interactive cruise-control 实时监测系统？systems being incorporated into inter-vehicular communication equipment, it ought to be possible to optimise the space between cars so they can collectively maintain the best speed for a maximum throughput of traffic.

Saying this is one thing; doing it is another. Over the past 50 years researchers have made little progress in developing a general theory of traffic flow. That is because the whole messy business involves elements of behavioural psychology as well as the laws of mechanics, control theory and fluid dynamics. In short, traffic patterns are invariably far too complex to be modelled mathematically.
As a result, today’s traffic models rely heavily on empirical data from surveys and road sensors to plug the holes in the theory. At best, they work only with the uninterrupted traffic flows found on motorways and the like. In America, the optimum density for the best use of road space is around 50 vehicles per lane-mile. In other words, vehicles need a headway of around six lengths for the traffic to flow smoothly.

If the traffic density increases much above that, the flow pattern begins to become unstable. Unlike convoys of ants, road traffic behaves in a highly non-linear fashion. Even minor disturbances—caused by, say, a driver touching the brakes a shade 刹车片？too hard—can then create ripples of slowing traffic spreading back upstream and bringing everything ultimately to a halt. Such “phantom jams” occur when there is no obvious obstruction.

One of the latest suggestions is that such rippling disturbances are rather like shock waves spreading out from an explosion. Mathematicians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology call them “jamitons” and have used shock-wave theory to help engineers minimise their impact on traffic.

Leaving aside roadworks, traffic jams are ultimately caused by drivers doing something stupid—taking unnecessary risks, misjudging distances, over-estimating their own skill or simply driving too fast. Don’t expect that to change much. In fact, as cars get safer, drivers seem to compensate by taking even bigger risks.

In a classic study done over a decade ago, Norwegian researchers looked at the way taxi drivers in Oslo behaved with and without airbags and anti-skid braking systems fitted to their vehicles. Drivers with the better brakes tended to travel closer to the vehicle ahead; those with airbags often failed to buckle their seat-belts.

The question that was never resolved was whether drivers respond more positively to measures that reduce accidents (anti-skid brakes) or to those that reduce injuries (airbags). Researchers are still not sure which is better. What they do know, though, is that technology aimed at improving safety does not always have the intended effect. And, as other studies have shown, people drive more carefully—and have fewer accidents—when many of the safety measures are removed.

So is the answer tougher traffic laws, rather than more safety engineering? That’s a difficult one. Here’s the conundrum: traffic laws are ostensibly there for road-users’ own safety; yet people flout them more than any other laws of the land. Perhaps drivers do so because they perceive them to be concerned, first and foremost, with allocating blame after an accident, rather than with helping prevent accidents happening in the first place.写的好！

Your correspondent thinks there are other reasons as well. Having to comply with seat-belt rules, heed traffic signs and watch speed limits all the time while driving means that traffic laws of one sort or another play a far bigger part in people’s daily lives than any other set of rules. And because they are ubiquitous, the opportunity to violate them is far greater.

Compounding matters, many traffic laws can be broken just a little—say, driving a few miles per hour faster than the speed limit, or rolling slowly past a stop sign instead of coming to a halt. With other laws, you either abide by them completely or break them and suffer the consequences.

Motorists seem to feel they can violate traffic laws a little without damaging their self-image as law-abiding citizens. That is why speeding violations, in particular, are the most common breaches of the law known to man—and, for similar reasons, why traffic jams are a daily occurrence. Being a bit short of self-awareness and free will, ants don’t have such problems. And they travel smarter as a result.

gdreamer9UID: 2542678

Psyched outJul 9th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The fewer the competitors, the harder they try
AlamyCalculate the answer when n approaches infinity
WHAT relationship there is between the number of participants in a competition and the motivation of the competitors has long eluded researchers. Does the presence of a lot of rivals stimulate action or lead someone to give up hope? It is more than an academic question. Or, rather, it is a very academic question indeed, for it may affect the way that examinations are conducted if they are to be a fair test for all.

To investigate the matter two behavioural researchers, Stephen Garcia at the University of Michigan and Avishalom Tor at the University of Haifa in Israel, looked at the results of the SAT university entrance examination in America in 2005. This test generates a score supposedly based on the test-taker’s verbal and analytical prowess.

The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased. And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.

These results are intriguing, but lend themselves to more than one explanation. To find out whether they were caused by a psychological effect related to the number of perceived competitors, or were merely a consequence of the greater distraction produced by crowding more people together, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor conducted an experiment. They asked 74 university students to take a timed, easy general-knowledge quiz which they were asked to finish as quickly as possible without compromising accuracy. Each student completed the test alone, but half were told they were competing against ten other people and the other half that they were competing against 100. All were informed that those whose completion times were in the top 20% would receive $5.

The results backed up the psychological hypothesis. Students who believed they were competing against only ten people finished in an average of 28.95 seconds. Those who believed they were competing against 100 averaged 33.15 seconds.看来考G到小教室好些！

Curious as to why mere belief that he was facing more competitors would alter an individual’s performance, the two researchers ran a second experiment. They asked students to imagine they were running a five-kilometre race against 50 people and then against 500 (or, in half of the cases, the other way round). In both notional races the top 10% of competitors would get a $1,000 prize. The researchers told the students to rate, on a seven-point scale, how much faster than normal they would run in each notional race, with a one being slightly faster than normal and a seven being the fastest of their lives. The average value in the competition against 50 others was 5.43; in the competition against 500 it was 4.89—a result consistent with the other two parts of the study.

When that bit of the test was over, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor then asked the participants a series of questions commonly used by psychologists to evaluate an individual’s tendency to compare himself with others in a social environment. They found that those with the highest tendency to make such comparisons had the lowest scores in the notional race against 500 others. These socially aware individuals are, as it were, looking around, assessing the situation and thinking that it is not worth trying too hard.

In their report on the matter in Psychological Science, Dr Garcia and Dr Tor dub their discovery the “n-effect” since “n” represents any numerical value in mathematics. If confirmed, it may mean not only that examination halls should be kept small— or, at least, the same size for all participants so that the playing field is level—but also that other competitive activities should be scaled down for best results.