TE||The billionaires and the Falcon Heavy
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导读
中国和美国的慈善机制不同
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The billionaires and the Falcon Heavy
亿万富翁和“重型猎鹰”运载火箭
本文英文部分选自经济学人Leaders版块
The mega-rich have ambitious plans to improve the world
超级富豪们雄心勃勃，企图让世界变得更好
Should that be a cause for celebration or concern?
世界应该为此庆祝还是担忧呢？
NOTHING declares world-changing ambition like a space rocket. This week’s spectacular test confirmed the Falcon Heavy as the planet’s most powerful operational launch vehicle. It also testified to the outsized vision of Elon Musk, its creator. To ensure humanity’s long-term survival he wants both to colonise Mars and to wean the Earth off fossil fuels.
最能展示人类雄心壮志莫过于航天火箭。2月6日（本周），世界现役最强运载火箭“重型猎鹰”成功试飞震撼全球。这也证明了它的缔造者埃隆·马斯克超大的愿景：为了确保人类长期生存，他既要殖民火星，也要让地球脱离化石燃料。
wean off: to make someone or something stop doing or using something
Mr Musk is not the only billionaire entrepreneur with grand ambitions to improve the future of mankind. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, wants to “cure, prevent or manage” all diseases by the end of the century. Bill Gates, having made his fortune at Microsoft, wants to eradicate polio and malaria, as part of a broader goal of improving health and alleviating poverty. Both are among a number of philanthropists who plan to remake education—Mr Zuckerberg’s other goal is for children to “learn 100 times more than we learn today”.
马斯克并不是唯一一个雄心勃勃想要改善人类未来的亿万富翁，Facebook的创始人马克·扎克伯格计划在本世界末“治愈、预防或管控”所有疾病。比尔·盖茨因创立微软发家致富，他希望根除小儿麻痹症和疟疾，这是改善人类健康和减轻贫困的更广泛目标一部分。盖茨和扎克伯格也和别的慈善家一样，计划重塑教育模式，扎尔伯格的另一个目标是让孩子们未来的学习内容比我们现在多100倍。
As the Falcon Heavy soared above the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, one question was over what Mr Musk’s dreams mean for business (see Briefing). The other was what to make of this desire to save humanity, in pursuit of which Mr Musk and his fellow billionaires have been strikingly innovative.
当“重型猎鹰”运载火箭在佛罗里达州肯尼迪航天中心一跃升空时，随之而来的一个问题是，马斯克的梦想对商业意味着什么？（见简报）。另一个问题则是，为了拯救人类，马斯克和他的富翁同伴们一直在矢志创新，他们的动力又从何而来？
Billionaire
亿万富翁
A century ago John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford ruthlessly made fortunes and then established foundations to enlighten the masses and ensure world peace long after their death. Mr Gates and others, having seen how foundations can eventually become cautious and conventional, favour a “sunset philanthropy” model, aiming to spend their riches before they die. (Warren Buffett, now 87, is donating most of his fortune to Mr Gates’s foundation, to dispense on his behalf.) Such tycoons also pride themselves on measuring impacts and outcomes, applying the same rigorous scrutiny to their charitable activities as they did in their business.
一百年前，约翰·D·洛克菲勒、安德鲁·卡内基和亨利·福特大发横财，并建立了慈善基金会，以启迪大众，并确保在他们死后，世界仍然保持长久和平。盖茨先生和其他人则看到，慈善基金会终会发展成谨小慎微的钱袋子，他们偏好于“日落慈善”模式，旨在把自己的钱财在死前用掉。（股神华伦·巴菲特，现年87岁，正将自己的大部分财产捐赠给盖茨基金会，以他的名义使用。）这些巨头通常最自豪的衡量影响和结果，对慈善活动的审查和他们在商业上的做法一样。
sunset philanthropy：日落慈善，即许多富人在作遗产安排时，都要求继承人在其死后一定时间内捐出全部财产用于慈善事业
From Rockefeller to Rocket-fella
从洛克菲勒到火箭小子
In the latest twist younger billionaires like Mr Zuckerberg, who made their fortunes in their 20s or 30s, have switched from a serial model of philanthropy, in which you make money first and then retire and give it away, to a parallel one, where you start giving the money away while it is still coming in. Mr Musk has gone further still. Rather than using his business wealth to support philanthropy in an unrelated area, he runs two giant companies, Tesla (a clean-energy firm that sells electric cars) and SpaceX (which builds the Falcon rockets), that further his ambitious goals directly. Both companies sell something that people happen to want now—cars and satellite launches—as a way of hastening Mr Musk’s dreams.
现在事情有了变化，像扎克伯格这样在二、三十岁就发财了的亿万富翁，他们已经改变慈善事业的模式，即可以先从慈善事业中赚钱，然后退休，再把钱送出去，同时在另一个慈善基金中，他一边捐钱，一边赚钱。马斯克在这方面走的更远，他并没有将钱财在无关领域施展慈善，他经营的两家公司，特斯拉（出售电动汽车的清洁能源公司）和SpaceX（制造猎鹰火箭），更直接推进了他雄心勃勃的慈善计划。这两家公司都在销售人们感兴趣的东西—汽车和卫星—加速了Musk用慈善拯救人类的心愿。
The grand schemes of the mega-rich provoke excitement in some quarters and unease in others. One complaint involves accountability. Billionaire philanthropists do not answer to voters. Their spending power gives them the ability to do great good, but what if they prefer to act more like Blofeld-style Bond villains than Iron Man-style superheroes? Wealth also grants the mega-rich special access to policymakers and elected officials. Shovelling your fortune into a charitable foundation has the happy side-effect of reducing tax bills, too—meaning that billionaires’ schemes can leave poorer taxpayers to fill in the gaps in public spending.
超级富豪们的伟大计划在某些领域让人们兴奋不已，而在有些领域却引起了人们的担忧。呼声最响的是其中的权责问题。富豪慈善家们并不用对选民负责。其巨大的消费能力使得他们能够行大善。但是，如果富豪们都更倾向于扮演类似邦德电影中布洛菲德式的反派角色，而非像钢铁侠这样的超级英雄，这又该如何是好？再者，亿万富豪们凭借其巨大的财力能够轻易地接近决策者和民选官员。同时，将大笔财富挪进慈善基金会还有一个好处——减少纳税。这意味着在富豪们的精心安排下，普通纳税人们不得不去填满政府在公共支出上的缺口。
Given that so many of today’s billionaires are geeks, there is also a danger of techno-solutionism. The idea that problems in health, education and so on can be solved with whatever technology is in vogue (today’s favourite is the blockchain) has usually proved naive. Deep change generally requires co-operation with governments and social mobilisation. Recognising such things is hard for techies used to seeing politicians as clue less and regulation as something to be innovated around.
此外还有另外一个风险，因为当代很多亿万富豪都为“极客”，这样便有可能会催生“技术解决主义”。人们总认为只要利用当下流行的技术（区块链技术为时下的技术宠儿）便可以解决卫生、教育及其他领域的各种难题，但过去的经验告诉我们这种想法往往过于天真。深刻的变革离不开联合政府之力，动员社会全体。但要让 “技术宅”们认识到这一点并非易事。他们过往总认为政客们愚昧无能，各种规则有待创新。
Geek：a person with an unusual or odd personality；You can refer to someone who is skilled with computers, and who seems more interested in them than in people, as a geek.（by Collins Dictionary）
And yet these reservations are surely outweighed by the billionaires’ scope for good. The would-be world-changers are applying innovative and evidence-based approaches in clinics and classrooms, where elected politicians are often too timid to risk failure, captured by entrenched interests or unwilling to spend public money on experimentation. For all their wealth, the billionaires would struggle to force change upon society. Although today’s philanthropists are more visible than those of previous generations, they account for less than a quarter of all charitable giving in America—which has remained roughly constant, at around 2% of GDP, for decades, according to David Callahan of Inside Philanthropy, a specialist website.
这些保留意见当然无法和亿万富翁们的深思熟虑抗衡。想要改变世界的人们立足事实，力求创新，并希望把该方法运用于医院和学校，而当选的政客们太过小心，不敢冒失败的风险，怕伤害既得利益者，又怕被人抓住把柄说拿着公共资金去搞实验。有了大笔财富，亿万富翁们将努力推动社会变革。据专业网站”慈善内幕“（Inside Philanthropy）的David Callahan所说，数十年来，美国全部慈善额大约保持在GDP的2%不变，尽管如今的慈善家们比前一代露面更多，他们捐献额却不足全部慈善额的四分之一。
The billionaires’ most useful function, then, is not to bring about change themselves, but to explore and test new models and methods for others to emulate. Using their access to policymakers, they encourage the adoption of the ideas that work. Even an Avengers-style coalition of billionaires, like the one assembled by Mr Gates and Mr Buffett under the “Giving Pledge” banner, could not solve really big problems like infectious diseases, colonising Mars and climate change without the co-operation of governments, industry and voters.
因此，亿万富翁最有用的功能不是他们自己带来改变，而是去试水新的模式和方法让他人努力赶上。通过他们对政策制定者的影响，亿万富翁们可以鼓励有用的想法得到采纳。即使是一个复仇者联盟式的亿万富翁联盟，像比尔盖茨和巴菲特等支持的“捐赠誓言”那样，也不能在没有政府、行业和选民的合作下，真正地解决传染性疾病，殖民火星和气候变化等等这些重大问题。
The Giving Pledge is a campaign to encourage wealthy people to contribute a majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes. As of 2017, the pledge has 158 signatories, either individuals or couples; some of the 158 have since died. Most of the signatories of the pledge are billionaires, and their pledges total over $365 billion. It does not actually dictate that the money is spent in any certain way or towards any particular charity or cause, and there is no legal obligation to actually donate any money.（by Wikipedia）
So, as the Tesla car sent skywards by the Falcon Heavy begins its trip around the sun, salute the billionaires for their ambition. Raise your eyebrows, in some cases, at their hubris and political naivety. But applaud their role as public-policy trailblazers, opening up paths to a better future.
因此，随着特斯拉电动汽车乘着猎鹰重型火箭直达太空，开始了它的环日旅行，向这些亿万富翁的雄心壮志致敬吧。有时候我们惊讶于他们的骄傲自大和政治天真，但也要为他们作为国家政策的先驱者而喝彩，开疆破土，使人们通向更美好的未来。
翻译组：
Cece，女，消防工作者，CATTI三笔
Neil，男，外贸民工，经济学人镀锌粉
Cyrus，男， 口译民工，经济学人爱好者
Wesley, 男，自由职业，经济学人爱好者
校核组：
Samantha，女，外企低管，邓伦未婚妻
Evelyn，女，英专研究生，经济学人爱好者
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观点 |评论|思考
本次观点由Alieen独家奉献
Alieen，女，大四数学狗，经济学人爱好者
“一个企业家的最高境界是慈善家。”----邵逸夫
在猎鹰火箭上天的那一天，小编的朋友圈被如下标题刷屏：“Space X 发个猎鹰火箭，中国立刻有人就跪了！”。由于某种不便言说的心理，小编一直没有去看这篇文章，直到经济学人又从一个新的角度来讨论这件科学技术进程中的大事。提炼一下关键词：大企业家，慈善，科技。
本文从猎鹰火箭“改变世界”的志向说起，又向我们展示了其它亿万富翁们对改变人类生活的雄心壮志; “裸捐”、“平行式捐款”等都向世人展示了他们的决心与行动力，但本文也提出对这些科技怪咖们的质疑：选民权责、捐款避税的问题以及这种危险的“技术解决主义”潮流。 本文最后提出亿万富翁们最大的功能不是成为变革本身，而是探索检测新技术模型为社会的变革铺路。
于我，读完文章的最大的感触就在于此：国外众人从心底接受“取之于民，用之于民”的观念，企业家们把从创业中对自身行业的热爱转变为了成功后对人类社会的责任; 然而尽管中国也有这样的慈善家，但国民却总对他们嗤之以鼻，觉得本国人有沽名钓誉的嫌疑。中国富豪遭遇道德审判已不是新鲜事，虽然其中有财富观的差异，但重要的是中国慈善环境和私人行善制度的不完善。其实任何行为都禁不起质疑，慈善之所以称之为慈善，就是要相信那份包含在行为里的爱。再来个高中作文式名言结尾：
“Love begins at home, and it is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.”— Mother Teresa, Charity Worker
「爱始于家里，而且它不是我们做了多少，而是我们在所做的行为里放进了多少爱。」– 德蕾莎修女 (慈善工作者)
ps:关于慈善，可以看看这一篇文章TE||Donate，or else
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