Day 12: What do you do with the money
（Tuesday）
各位书友，今天我们一起阅读《Zero to One》第六章YOU ARE NOT A LOTTERY TICKET的70-76页。
What do you do with the money?
如何支配金钱
OUR INDEFINITELY OPTIMISTIC WORLD
当今的世界——对未来不明确却很乐观
01 Indefinite Finance
不明确的金融
While a definitely optimistic future would need engineers to design underwater cities and settlements in space, an indefinitely optimistic future calls for more bankers and lawyers. Finance epitomizes indefinite thinking because it’s the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.
在一个明确乐观的未来中，会有工程师设计水下城市和太空定居地，而在一个不明确的乐观未来中，会有更多的银行家和律师。金融其实是不明确思想的集中体现，因为只有人们不知如何赚钱时，才会想到去搞金融。
The fundamental tenet is that the market is random; you can’t know anything specific or substantive; diversification becomes supremely important.
根本问题在于市场具有随机性。你无法明确地或实质地了解任何事情，而且多样化变得极其重要。
The indefiniteness of finance can be bizarre. Think about what happens when successful entrepreneurs sell their company. What do they do with the money? Maybe it unfolds like this:
不确定性可能很诡异。想想当那些成功的企业家卖了他们的公司时会发生什么？他们拿钱来做什么？大概是这样的：
· The founders don’t know what to do with it, so they give it to a large bank.
· The bankers don’t know what to do with it, so they diversify by spreading it across a portfolio of institutional investors.
· Institutional investors don’t know what to do with their managed capital, so they diversify by amassing a portfolio of stocks.
· Companies try to increase their share price by generating free cash flows. If they do, they issue dividends or buy back shares and the cycle repeats.
企业家不知道拿钱做什么，所以存在银行里了。
银行家不知道拿钱做什么，所以他们把钱交给不同的机构投资人，用于不同方向的投资。
机构投资人不知道拿钱做什么，于是他们投资到了股票。
公司试图产生自由现金流来提升股票价格，做法是发放股息，或是回购股份，然后周而复始。
At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy.
在这样的循环中，人们都不知道拿钱在实体经济中做什么。
But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself.
但是在一个未来不明确的世界中，人们就是喜欢无限的可选择性；钱比其他任何用钱能得到的东西更有价值。只有在一个明确的未来中，钱才是达到最终目的的手段，而非最终目的。
02 Indefinite Politics
不明确的政治
Politicians have always been officially accountable to the public at election time, but today they are attuned to what the public thinks at every moment. Modern polling enables politicians to tailor their image to match preexisting public opinion exactly, so for the most part, they do.
西方国家的政客总是在选举期间才会对民众负责，而现在他们已经调整到时时刻刻都会留意民众的意见。现代的投票制度促使政客把自己的形象裁剪得与民众所希望的一样，而在多数情况下，他们确实做到了。
Nate Silver’s election predictions are remarkably accurate, but even more remarkable is how big a story they become every four years. We are more fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20 years from now.
统计学家纳特.希尔弗对选举结果预测的准确度令人惊讶，但是更让人注目的是每四年一次的预测造成的话题有多大。现在让我们更着迷的是利用统计学预测未来几周国民的想法，而不是10年或20年后的国家蓝图。
And it’s not just the electoral process—the very character of government has become indefinite, too. The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance.
不单单是选举过程——政府的性质也已经变得不明确了。政府过去有能力协调解决复杂的问题，如原子能武器和月球探索。而经过40年目的不明的缓慢前行，政府现在的作用只是提供保险。
03 Indefinite Philosophy
不明确的哲学
You can see the shift to an indefinite attitude not just in politics but in the political philosophers whose ideas underpin both left and right.
你不仅能在政治学领域看到这种不明确的态度，在保持着左右两派不同理念的政治哲学家身上也能看到。
The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential. The only question was how best to cope with our tragic fate. Modern philosophers have been mostly optimistic. From Herbert Spencer on the right and Hegel in the center to Marx on the left, the 19th century shared a belief in progress. (Remember Marx and Engels’s encomium to the technological triumphs of capitalism from this page.) These thinkers expected material advances to fundamentally change human life for the better: they were definite optimists.
古代世界的哲学是悲观的：柏拉图、亚里士多德、伊壁鸠鲁和卢克莱修都接受任性潜力应该受到严格限制之说。唯一的问题是怎样坦然接受我们的悲剧命运。而现代大多数哲学家都变得乐观了。19世纪的哲学家从思想右倾的赫伯特.斯宾塞到保持中立的黑格尔，再到左倾的马克思，都相信进步的力量。（想想前文中马克思和恩格斯对资本主义科技胜利的赞扬。）这些思想家们期待物质进步能够极大地改变人类生活，使其向更好的方向转变：他们是明确的乐观主义者。
In the late 20th century, indefinite philosophies came to the fore. The two dominant political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, are usually seen as stark opposites:
在20世纪后半叶，迷茫的哲学成为前沿思潮。两大杰出的政治思想家——约翰.罗尔斯和罗伯特.诺齐克，看上去站在两个截然相反的对立面：
On the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of fairness and distribution; on the libertarian right, Nozick focused on maximizing individual freedom. They both believed that people could get along with each other peacefully, so unlike the ancients, they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer or Marx, Rawls and Nozick were indefinite optimists: they didn’t have any specific vision of the future.
在平等主义的左倾思想上，罗尔斯关注的问题是公平和分配：在自由主义的右倾思想上，诺齐克关注的是个人自由最大化。他们都相信人类可以和平相处，因此与古代哲学家的悲观思想不同，他们都是乐观主义者。然后，与斯宾塞或马克思不同，罗尔斯和诺齐克都是不明确的乐观主义者：他们对未来没有任何具体的规划。
04 Indefinite Life
不明确的人生
Our ancestors sought to understand and extend the human lifespan. In the 16th century, conquistadors searched the jungles of Florida for a Fountain of Youth. Francis Bacon wrote that “the prolongation of life” should be considered its own branch of medicine—and the noblest. In the 1660s, Robert Boyle placed life extension (along with “the Recovery of Youth”) atop his famous wish list for the future of science. Whether through geographic exploration or laboratory research, the best minds of the Renaissance thought of death as something to defeat.
我们的祖先曾研究过人的寿命，并企图延长人的寿命。在16世纪，西班牙政府这门曾在佛罗里达的丛林中寻找不老泉。弗朗西斯.培根写道，“生命的延长”应该考虑用医学来实现——这种医学技术将会是最高尚的。在17世纪60年代，罗伯特.波义耳把延长生命（和“重拾青春”）放在未来科学愿望单的第一位。不管是通过地理探索，还是实验研究，文艺复兴时期最杰出的科学家都认为死亡是可以战胜的。
Some resisters were killed in action: Bacon caught pneumonia and died in 1626 while experimenting to see if he could extend a chicken’s life by freezing it in the snow.
而这些抗拒死亡的人中有一些在挑战死亡的行动中阵亡了——培根换上了肺炎，与1626年去世，当时他还在进行实验研究：如果把一只鸡冻在雪里，它的寿命是否会延长。）
We haven’t yet uncovered the secrets of life, but insurers and statisticians in the 19th century successfully revealed a secret about death that still governs our thinking today:
they discovered how to reduce it to a mathematical probability.
“Life tables” tell us our chances of dying in any given year, something previous generations didn’t know. However, in exchange for better insurance contracts, we seem to have given up the search for secrets about longevity. Systematic knowledge of the current range of human lifespans has made that range seem natural.
我们让没有解开生命之谜，但是19世纪的保险公司和数据统计学家成功地揭示了一个关于死亡的秘密，而且这个秘密直到今天还占据着我们的思想：
他们发现了把死亡简化成数学概率的方法。
“生命表”告诉了我们在每个年级我们死亡的概率，这些都是前辈人不知道的。但是，为了得到更有利的保险合同，我们似乎已经放弃了对长寿秘密的研究。目前有关人类寿命的知识已经使人们意识到生死是自然的事情。
Today our society is permeated by the twin ideas that death is both inevitable and random.
时下，社会中流传着以下两点看法：死亡不可避免，而且随机发生。
The Truth We Should Know Life is a horse, and either you ride it or it rides you.
人生像一匹马，你不驾驭它,它便驾驭你。
☞ 领读达人：刘亚南
☞ 主播：Sophie，闷骚但不腹黑的逗比天蝎座女生，至死不渝的Jay迷，美利坚研二学生Dog，欢迎志同道合的小伙伴来骚扰～
☞ 设计：刘莹
☞ 编校：陈珺洁