Name: 経済学入門 (Introduction to Economics)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T07:31:29.000Z
Duration: 3 min 32 s

- [Professor Tyler Cowen] I love economics. I began studying economics when I was 13 and I

程度の副詞

haven't stopped yet. Economics really has changed my life and the whole way I see

the world. What's so powerful about the discipline is just how much it shapes how

13の時からずっと勉強している

経済学は私の世界に対する見方を変えた

- [Professor Alex Tabarrok] But perhaps you're asking, what's my incentive to learn

economics? Well, that's a great question. You've already hit on a key economic

insight, incentives. For example, why is the service at a local restaurant

typically so much better than from the cable company?

良い質問だ　そこにもう経済学がある

- Or why do laws which supposedly protect endangered species,

sometimes end up with more of those animals being killed?

- Or why do big toy companies sometimes advocate for

regulations which raise their costs? Incentives are the key.

テレビ局のサービスよりいいのか？

- Another example might help us explain. Way back in 1787, the British

なぜ動物を保護するための法律は

government hired sea captains to ship convicted felons to Australia.

かえって多くの動物を殺すのか？

The conditions on those ships were just awful. On one voyage, more than one-third of the

men died and the rest arrived beaten, starved and sick. The public was outraged,

コストの上がる規制を歓迎するのか？

newspapers called for better conditions, the clergy appealed to the captain's sense

of humanity, and British Parliament passed regulations requiring better treatment of

these prisoners. Unfortunately, those attempted solutions simply didn't work.

18世紀 イギリス政府は船を使い

重罪犯をオーストラリアに送っていたが

- So Tyler, as a good economist. How would you solve this problem?

- Well, there was one economist at the time who came up with a

novel solution. It was implemented and it basically worked. Instead of paying the

captains for each prisoner who embarked to Australia, the government would pay the

社会問題となり 改善が求められた

captains only for the prisoners who arrived alive. Overnight, the incentives

of the sea captains changed. The survival rate of the prisoners shot up to 99%.

議会は囚人の扱いに規制を設けた

As one observer put it, economy beat sentiment and benevolence.

だがこの策は意味をなさなかった

- So what's your incentive to learn economics? People hear that I'm

an economist and they ask me about managing their money. And economics does

経済学者ならこれを解決できるね

have some lessons for investing in the stock market, but economics is much

当時の一流経済学者ノーベルは

broader than that. It's the study of human action, how people make choices and how

they should make choices under scarcity. Economics will help you with your choices,

whether picking a career, parenting a child, or deciding how much education is a

乗せる囚人の数に応じて払うのではなく

truly worthwhile investment. Overall, economics will give you a deeper

生きて到着した囚人の数に応じて

understanding of the key issues of our time.

- Economics can be hard. Retraining your brain to look at the world

これで船長のインセンティブが変わった

囚人の生存率は99％まで上がった

- But the reward is a new set of eyes to see the world.