Passage One

(1) Among the great cities of the world,Kolkata (formerly spelt as Calcutta),the capital of India’s West Bengal, and the home of nearly 15 million people, is often mentioned as the only one that still has a large fleet of hand-pulled rickshaws.

(2) Rickshaws are not there to haul around tourists. It’s the people in the lanes who most regularly use rickshaws—not the poor but people who are just a notch above the poor. They are people who tend to travel short distances, through lanes that are sometimes inaccessible to even the most daring taxi driver. An older woman with marketing to do, for instance, can arrive in a rickshaw, have the rickshaw puller wait until she comes back from various stalls to load her purchases, and then be taken home. People in the lanes use rickshaws as a 24-hour ambulance service. Proprietors of cafes or corner stores send rickshaws to collect their supplies. The rickshaw pullers told me their steadiest customers are school children. Middle-class families contract with a puller to take a child to school and pick him up; the puller essentially becomes a family retainer.

(3) From June to September Kolkata can get torrential rains. During my stay it once rained for about 48 hours. Entire neighborhoods couldn’t be reached by motorized vehicles, and the newspapers showed pictures of rickshaws being pulled through water that was up to the pullers’ waists. When it’s raining, the normal customer base for rickshaw pullers expands greatly, as does the price of a journey. A writer in Kolkata told me, “When it rains, even the governor takes rickshaws.”

(4) While I was in Kolkata, a magazine called India Today published its annual ranking of Indian states, according to such measurements as prosperity and infrastructure. Among India’s 20 largest states,Bihar finished dead last, as it has for four of the past five years. Bihar, a few hundred miles north of Kolkata, is where the vast majority of rickshaw pullers come from. Once in Kolkata, they sleep on the street or in their rickshaws or in a dera—a combination of garage and repair shop and dormitory managed by someone called a sardar. For sleeping privileges in a dera, pullers pay 100 rupees (about $2. 50) a month, which sounds like a pretty good deal until you’ve visited a dera.They gross between 100 and 150 rupees a day, out of which they have to pay 20 rupees for the use of the rickshaw and an occasional 75 or more for a payoff if a policeman stops them for, say, crossing a street where rickshaws are prohibited. A 2003 study found that rickshaw pullers are near the bottom of Kolkata occupations in income, doing better than only the beggars. For someone without land or education, that still beats trying to make a living in Bihar.

(5) There are people in Kolkata, particularly educated and politically aware people, who will not ride in a rickshaw, because they are offended by the idea of being pulled by another human being or because they consider it not the sort of thing people of their station do or because they regard the hand-pulled rickshaw as a relic of colonialism. Ironically, some of those people are not enthusiastic about banning rickshaws. The editor of the editorial pages of Kolkata’s Telegraph—Rudrangshu Mukherjee, a former academic who still writes history books—told me, for instance, that he sees humanitarian considerations as coming down on the side of keeping hand-pulled rickshaws on the road.“I refuse to be carried by another human being myself,” he said,“but I question whether we have the right to take away their livelihood. “Rickshaw supporters point out that when it comes to demeaning occupations, rickshaw pullers are hardly unique in Kolkata.

(6) When I asked one rickshaw puller if he thought the government’s plan to rid the city of rickshaws was based on a genuine interest in his welfare, he smiled, with a quick shake of his head—a gesture I interpreted to mean,“If you are so naive as to ask such a question, I will answer it, but it is not worth wasting words on.” Some rickshaw pullers I met were resigned to the imminent end of their livelihood and pin their hopes on being offered something in its place. As migrant workers, they don’t have the political clout enjoyed by, say,Kolkata’s sidewalk hawkers, who, after supposedly being scaled back at the beginning of the modernization drive, still clog the sidewalks, selling absolutely everything—or, as I found during the 48 hours of rain, absolutely everything but umbrellas. “ The government was the government of the poor people,” one sardar told me. “Now they shake hands with the capitalists and try to get rid of poor people. “

(7) But others in Kolkata believe that rickshaws will simply be confined more strictly to certain neighborhoods, out of the view of World Bank traffic consultants and California investment delegations—or that they will be allowed to die out naturally as they’re supplanted by more modern conveyances. Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, after all, is not the first high West Bengal official to say that rickshaws would be off the streets of Kolkata in a matter of months. Similar statements have been made as far back as 1976. The ban decreed by Bhattacharjee has been delayed by a court case and by a widely held belief that some retraining or social security settlement ought to be offered to rickshaw drivers. It may also have been delayed by a quiet reluctance to give up something that has been part of the fabric of the city for more than a century.Kolkata, a resident told me,“has difficulty letting go. ” One day a city official handed me a report from the municipal government laying out options for how rickshaw pullers might be rehabilitated.

(8) “Which option has been chosen?” I asked, noting that the report was dated almost exactly a year before my visit.

(9) “That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

(10) “When will it be decided?”

(11) “That hasn’t been decided,” he said.

Passage Two

(1) Dating is a treacherous business. There may be plenty of fish in the sea, yet many are unhygienic, self-absorbed, disconcertingly attached to ex-fish, or fans of Donald Trump. Digital dating sites, including a growing array of matchmaking apps, are meant to help. Their design owes more to hard-nosed economics than it does to the mysteries of the heart.

(2) In a sense, searching for a mate is not so different from hunting for a job. Jobs, like prospective partners, have their strengths and weaknesses, which makes finding the right one a matter of complicated trade-offs. Such exchanges are different from other transactions, in that both parties must be enthusiastic about the match for it to happen. A supermarket, in contrast, does not particularly care whose wallet it is draining, nor does the power company agonise about whether a customer is worthy of its watts.

(3) Alvin Roth, who won a Nobel prize in economics for his work on market design, made a career of studying such “matching markets”, where supply and demand are not balanced by price. Instead, people transact based on information. An apple-seller can nudge down his prices until the whole cart is sold. Yet if Apple were looking to hire two workers, it would not set a salary so puny that only two people applied. The quality of new hires often matters at least as much as their salaries.

(4) Mr. Roth, who won the prize jointly with Lloyd Shapley in 2012, found that the structure of matching markets made a significant difference in determining who wound up with whom. Systems designed to elicit people’s true preferences generated better matches between hospitals and doctors, for example. But the entire medical profession has an interest in improving matches, and so can set up a national clearing house (信息搜集所) to do just that. The lovelorn (失恋的) must instead rely on an array of digital matchmakers.

(5) Good matches depend on good information. Even without digital help, people usually have some inkling of how much they have in common. Cosmopolitan strivers move to New York, say, rather than sleepier cities, in part because they will meet other ambitious types with similar interests. Within New York, the places people choose to spend their time—whether Yankee Stadium or a yoga studio—determine which sorts of people they come into contact with. Because it is expensive to live in New York, and to spend time sweating in a yoga studio or swearing in the stands, people in such settings can be reasonably confident those around them are in some sense like-minded.

(6) But one critical bit of information is missing: whether there is mutual interest. The act of asking someone out is fraught. In the non-digital world, approaching a potential partner brings the risk of awkwardness or humiliation. Digital dating reduces this cost dramatically. Apps like Tinder and Happn, for example, reveal that a user likes another only when the feeling is mutual.

(7) The best matching markets are those that are “thick”, with lots of participants. The more people there are seeking digital dates, the greater the chance of finding a good match. Odds improve that another person in the crowd also enjoys Wagner. Thai food, or discussions about the economics of matching markets.

(8) The wealth of information many dating sites request may help to home in on the perfect match, but if the effort involved is enough to deter potential mates from joining in the first place, then it does more harm than good. When Tinder first launched, largely to facilitate casual sex, users assessed one another based only on looks, age and gender. Simplicity worked wonders; there are 26m matches made between Tinder users each day.

(9) The advantages of thick markets are lost, however, if they become too “congested”, with users overwhelmed by the number of participants and unable to locate a good match among them. One response is to specialise. JSwipe, for instance, caters to Jewish singles while Bumble, an app where women must initiate contact, is meant to attract feminists.

(10) But the most popular apps seek to help their users filter possible mates using clever technology. Tinder, for example, only provides users with profiles of fellow Tinderites who are nearby, to make it that much easier to meet in person. It has also introduced a “super like” feature, which can be deployed only once a day, to allow smitten users to signal heightened interest in someone. In addition, last year it started allowing people to list their jobs and education, to help users to sort through the crowds. Users get the benefits both of a big pool of potential partners and various tools to winnow them.

Sex and the city

(11) The emergence of matching apps, for those seeking love or theatre tickets or a lift, has certainly made once-onerous tasks more convenient. They may also contribute to more profound economic change. Dating apps could strengthen the trend toward “assortative mating (选型交配)”, whereby people choose to couple with those of similar income and skills. By one estimate, the trend accounts for about 18% of the rise in income inequality in America between 1960 and 2005. A recent study of online dating in South Korea found that it boosted sorting among couples by education.

(12) Better matching may also mean bigger cities. Metropolitan goliaths have long been melting-pots, within which those early on in their adult lives link up with jobs, friends and mates. Matching apps, romantic or not, make it easier to navigate the urban sprawl and sample all it has to offer. That, in turn, should make the biggest cities relatively more attractive to young people.

(13) Apps cannot yet make break-ups less painful. And love remains mysterious enough that even the most refined algorithms (算法) cannot predict mutual attraction with confidence. But they clearly help, judging by their legions of users. After all, it is better to have super-liked and lost than never to have super-liked at all.

Passage Three

(1) To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind is prone, no superhuman genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.

(2) If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. Aristotle could have avoided the mistake of thinking that women have fewer teeth than men, by the simple device of asking Mrs. Aristotle to keep her mouth open while he counted. He did not do so because he thought he knew. Thinking that you know when in fact you don’t is a fatal mistake, to which we are all prone. I believe myself that hedgehogs eat black beetles, because I have been told that they do; but if I were writing a book on the habits of hedgehogs. I should not commit myself until I had seen one enjoying this unappetizing diet. Aristotle, however, was less cautious. Ancient and medieval authors knew all about unicorns and salamanders; not one of them thought it necessary to avoid dogmatic statements about them because he had never seen one of them.

(3) Many matters, however, are less easily brought to the test of experience. If, like most of mankind, you have passionate convictions on many such matters, there are ways in which you can make yourself aware of your own bias. If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. If someone maintains that two and two are five, or that Iceland is on the equator, you feel pity rather than anger, unless you know so little of arithmetic or geography that his opinion shakes your own contrary conviction. The most savage controversies are those about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way. Persecution is used in theology, not in arithmetic, because in arithmetic there is knowledge, but in theology there is only opinion. So whenever you find yourself getting angry about a difference of opinion, be on your guard; you will probably find, on examination, that your belief is going beyond what the evidence warrants.

(4) A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. When I was young, I lived much outside my own country—in France, Germany. Italy, and the United States. I found this very profitable in diminishing the intensity of insular prejudice. If you cannot travel, seek out people with whom you disagree, and read a newspaper belonging to a party that is not yours. If the people and the newspaper seem mad, perverse, and wicked, remind yourself that you seem so to them. In this opinion both parties may be right, but they cannot both be wrong. This reflection should generate a certain caution.

(5) For those who have enough psychological imagination, it is a good plan to imagine an argument with a person having a different bias. This has one advantage, and only one, as compared with actual conversation with opponents; this one advantage is that the method is not subject to the same limitations of time and space. Mahatma Gandhi deplored railways and steamboats and machinery; he would have liked to undo the whole of the industrial revolution. You may never have an opportunity of actually meeting any one who holds this opinion, because in Western countries most people take the advantages of modern technique for granted. But if you want to make sure that you are right in agreeing with the prevailing opinion, you will find it a good plan to test the arguments that occur to you by considering what Gandhi might have said in refutation of them. I have sometimes been led actually to change my mind as a result of this kind of imaginary dialogue, and, short of this, I have frequently found myself growing less dogmatic and cocksure through realizing the possible reasonableness of a hypothetical opponent.

(6) Be very wary of opinions that flatter your self-esteem. Both men and women, nine times out of ten, are firmly convinced of the superior excellence of their own sex. There is abundant evidence on both sides. If you are a man, you can point out that most poets and men of science are male; if you are a women, you can retort that so are most criminals. We are all, whatever part of the world we come from, persuaded that our own nation is superior to all others. Seeing that each nation has its characteristic merits and demerits, we adjust our standard of values so as to make out that the merits possessed by our nation are the really important ones, while its demerits are comparatively trivial. Here, again, the rational man will admit that the question is one to which there is no demonstrably right answer. It is more difficult to deal with the self-esteem of man as man, because we cannot argue out the matter with some non-human mind. The only way I know of dealing with this general human conceit is to remind ourselves that man is a brief episode in the life of a small planet in a little corner of the universe, and that for aught we know, other parts of the cosmos may contain beings as superior to ourselves as we are to jellyfish.

Passage Four

(1) My car’s gear lever does more than dispense transmission rations. It panders to me. It cajoles and beckons. It wears out its chrome heart to make my life easier, for—as its manufacturers are quick to claim—the company devotes hundreds of man-hours to testing and retesting each possible design and configuration to see which does the job best. Which shape fits most naturally into a human hand? Which covering is most pleasing? And which overall look makes your fingers tremble with anticipation?

(2) This curious pursuit, reputedly espoused by and entrenched within all of today’s major manufacturing firms, is called ergonomics, defined as “the degree to which the system has been developed with the human user in mind”. Personally, I like the sound of the word. I wish only that the results lived up to the hype.

(3) Recently, for example, I purchased a rowing machine for home exercise. Within minutes of unwrapping my booty, I realized the unit I was so cautiously dissecting did not in any way match the color picture on the box. The assembly instructions hinted darkly that putting the contraption together would be only slightly less complex than building a nuclear reactor. Perseverance paid off, however. After applying equal amounts of time and luck, I was finally able to make my rower. But the only cogent ergonomic thought that went into the design of this product was the shape of the cardboard container it was packed in. That’s ergonomics in the real world.

(4) Take videocassette recorders: VCRs are like snowflakes—no two are quite alike. While all are intended to do more or less the same things—play, record now, record later—the actual designs are about as consistent and predictable as a roulette wheel. If you lose or misplace the manual, you end up with little more than a digital clock.

(5) And then there is the ubiquitous microwave oven. What do those “low”“medium” and “high” settings really hint at? Show me a consumer sufficiently schooled in the effect of microwave transmissions on food molecules to properly—and intuitively—select the optimal setting! Only small children, bless then, seem to know how to make these machines bend to their wills. “Put it on high and blast it,” says my nine-year-old niece. I do. It works.

(6) Can anyone truly say the modern car is designed with the human user in mind? Recall the last time you plopped behind the wheel of your neighbor’s new vehicle. How quickly did you find the knob that popped open the bonnet or the hood? Were you able to adjust the left-side mirror without adjusting the right-side mirror, activating the headlight washers or wipers, or possibly lowering the convertible top? Did you know which lever to push or pull to slide the seat forward without simultaneously upsetting the angle of the seat back or exploding the pneumatically pressured back-support?

(7) As with most of today’s products, the only thing we really know about car seats is that, given the correct incentive, they will move. Beyond that, you—and your economically inspired intuition—are completely on vour own.

Passage Three

Passage Four