Mind the Gap
May 2004 When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else.
2004 年 5 月 当人们足够关心某件事并把它做好时，那些做得最好的人往往会比其他人做得更好。
There's a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone.
列奥纳多与博尔戈尼奥内等二流同时代人之间存在巨大差距。
You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels.
你可以看到雷蒙德·钱德勒和一般侦探小说作家之间存在着同样的差距。
A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player
一名顶级职业棋手可以与一名普通俱乐部棋手对弈一万盘
without losing once.
没有失去一次。
Like chess or painting or writing novels, making money is a very specialized skill.
就像下棋、绘画或写小说一样，赚钱是一项非常专业的技能。
But for some reason we treat this skill differently.
但由于某种原因，我们以不同的方式对待这项技能。
No one complains when a few people surpass all the rest at playing chess or writing novels, but when a few people make more money than the rest, we get editorials saying this is wrong.
当少数人在下棋或写小说方面超越其他人时，没有人会抱怨，但当少数人比其他人赚更多钱时，我们会收到社论说这是错误的。
Why?
为什么？
The pattern of variation seems no different than for any other
变化的模式似乎与其他任何变化的模式没有什么不同
skill.
技能。
What causes people to react so strongly when the skill is making money?
当这项技能赚钱时，是什么导致人们反应如此强烈？
I think there are three reasons we treat making money as different: the misleading model of wealth we learn as children; the disreputable way in which, till recently, most fortunes were accumulated; and the worry that great variations in income are somehow bad for society.
我认为我们对赚钱有不同的看法有三个原因：我们小时候学到的误导性的财富模式；直到最近，大多数财富都是以这种不光彩的方式积累起来的；以及担心收入的巨大差异在某种程度上对社会不利。
As far as I can tell, the first is mistaken, the second
据我所知，第一个是错误的，第二个是错误的
outdated, and the third empirically false.
已经过时了，第三个在经验上是错误的。
Could it be that, in a modern democracy, variation in income is actually a sign of health?
难道在现代民主国家中，收入的差异实际上是健康的标志吗？
The Daddy Model of Wealth When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets.
爸爸的财富模式 当我五岁的时候，我认为电力是由电源插座产生的。
I didn't realize there were power plants out there generating it.
我没有意识到那里有发电厂发电。
Likewise, it doesn't occur to most kids that wealth is something that has to be generated.
同样，大多数孩子也没有意识到财富是必须创造的东西。
It seems to be something
似乎有什么
that flows from parents.
来自父母的。
Because of the circumstances in which they encounter it, children tend to misunderstand wealth.
由于所处的环境，孩子们容易对财富产生误解。
They confuse it with money.
他们将其与金钱混淆了。
They think that there is a fixed amount of it.
他们认为它的数量是固定的。
And they think of it as something that's distributed by authorities (and so should be distributed equally), rather than something that has to be created (and might be created unequally).
他们认为它是由当局分配的东西（因此应该平等分配），而不是必须创建的东西（并且可能会不平等地创建）。
In fact, wealth is not money.
事实上，财富并不是金钱。
Money is just a convenient way of
金钱只是一种便捷的方式
trading one form of wealth for another.
用一种形式的财富换取另一种形式的财富。
Wealth is the underlying stuff—the goods and services we buy.
财富是底层的东西——我们购买的商品和服务。
When you travel to a rich or poor country, you don't have to look at people's bank accounts to tell which kind you're in.
当你去富裕国家或贫穷国家旅行时，你不必查看人们的银行账户来判断你属于哪一类。
You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health of the people.
你可以在建筑物和街道、人们的衣服和健康中看到财富。
Where does wealth come from?
财富从哪里来？
People make it.
人们做到了。
This was easier to grasp when most people lived on farms, and made many of the things
当大多数人生活在农场并制造了许多东西时，这一点更容易理解
they wanted with their own hands.
他们想要用自己的双手。
Then you could see in the house, the herds, and the granary the wealth that each family created.
然后你就可以在房子里、牛群里、粮仓里看到每个家庭创造的财富。
It was obvious then too that the wealth of the world was not a fixed quantity that had to be shared out, like slices of a pie.
很明显，世界财富并不是像馅饼一样必须分配的固定数量。
If you wanted more wealth, you could make it.
如果你想要更多的财富，你就能做到。
This is just as true today, though few of us create wealth directly for ourselves (except for a few vestigial domestic tasks).
今天也是如此，尽管我们很少有人直接为自己创造财富（除了一些残留的家务劳动）。
Mostly
大部分是
we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we want.
我们为他人创造财富以换取金钱，然后我们用金钱换取我们想要的财富形式。
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