Think Rationally

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for listening to my speech. I’m ZHENG Rui, for the School of Economics and Management. To begin with, I would like to invite you to take a moral test. A simple question, imagine, in a windy day you have just stepped out of the sixth teaching building. The wind is so strong that you are not surprised to see that several bicycles have fell down, one pinned by another, with your bicycle on the top. As a well educated and virtuous Tsinghua student, will you go up and uprear all the bicycles that have fell? Will you? Will you? All right, I do not want to count how many of us are immoral, but I would like to invite you to think it twice with me. So you think that to be virtuous, you should uprear all the bicycles, because you are doing things on others’ behalf using your own time and energy. Right? Over time we have being encouraged to risk ourselves for others’ behalf. I do not criticize this spirit but what I want to point out today is that in many cases we are not even doing the right things. Starting out to protect the inshore inhabitants, the closed-border policy of the Ming and Qing Dynasty has caused the isolation and falling behind of the neoteric China. What is wrong behind this good intend? We are not thinking rationally. Starting out to help tens of thousands of low income families, the minimal wage requirements has distorted the incentive of firms, discouraging them from hiring that many workers as without this decree, causing even more poor families to suffer. What is wrong behind this benevolent policy? We are not thinking rationally. Starting out to safeguard the dignity of our beloved motherland, the resistance toward the enterprises of certain foreign countries has caused great economic losses for China and threat to thousands of jobs of our compatriots. What is wrong behind this utter innocence? We are not thinking rationally. Think rationally; do not count for the sunk cost which has gone,...