Adeline的economist阅读分析帖

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AGAINST：


Moreover, it is inaccurate to assume that free trade is rejected by the majority of people in many countries. The polls in the United States, even in the middle of the current crisis, did not shift a majority against free trade. In today's interdependent world economy, many seem to understand that exports sustain their jobs and that protectionism may save a few thousand jobs in terms of its direct impact on the protected activity but, when retaliation kicks in, the country could lose hundreds of thousands of jobs instead. It would be a policy of "penny wise and pound foolish". When my team and I recently debated three of America's staunchest protectionists, with hundreds in the audience, I had been persuaded by pessimistic statements such as that by Professor Woods that we would lose 55:45%. But the vote went 80:20% in our favour.

In essence, she produces three arguments. First, that (again quoting Oxfam) the "rules of the trading system" are "rigged" against the developing countries. Second, the rules of the trading system are made by the developed and not by the developing countries. Third, the distribution of the gains from trade is skewed against the poor countries.

On the first argument, let me briefly say that "Part II and Special & Differential Treatment" have long been applied to the developing countries at the GATT. Little was demanded by way of reciprocal trade concessions. This is also why the frequent allegation that trade barriers are higher on the average in the developed than in the developing countries is incorrect for manufactures, which were the principal focus of GATT until 1995, since agriculture was excluded by the 1955 waiver.

On the second argument, I certainly agree that several institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank, need more voice from the developing countries. It is scandalous that Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Robert Zoellick were more or less nominated by the EU and the United States respectively. By contrast, the WTO smells like roses. Pascal Lamy had to fight hard to gain his first term. Also, the WTO works by consensus; there is almost no voting by financial contribution. In fact, it is the free trade agreements with hegemonic powers that Professor Woods seems to celebrate, which are the vehicle for the asymmetric exploitation of the developing countries. All kinds of trade-unrelated demands, driven by lobbies in the hegemonic power, are imposed on the developing countries in one-on-one negotiations, under the cynical pretence that these demands are good for them: see my 2009 book, "Termites in the Trading System: How Preferential Agreements Undermine Free Trade".

For the third argument, Professor Woods turns to Oxfam again, citing its assertion  that the gains from trade had accrued almost entirely to the developed and middle-income developing countries. But the middle-income developing countries often ceased to be "poor" countries because of changed policies that exploited trade better, among other reforms. Oxfam created a "stir", according to Professor Woods, maybe among other British charities and the singing troubadours whose electric guitars seem to drown out the voices of scholars effectively in Britain. But elsewhere, the 2002 Oxfam report is seen to be the rank nonsense that it is.

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43# AdelineShen[size=14.1667px]

"turning down this global air conditioner"
赞一下

AdelineShenUID：2630498

啊 a week
我要深深地反省+检讨+补作业
好好学英语是我接下来的主要任务... 50 percent的

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A special report on banking in emerging markets
They might be giants
Emerging-market banks have raced ahead despite the financial crisis as their Western colleagues have languished. Patrick Foulis (interviewed here) asks how they will use their new-found strengthMay 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

ALONG the breezy three-kilometre stretch of Mumbai’s Marine Drive you pass cricket pitches, destitute people, luxury hotels, plump joggers and advertisements for Indian multinational companies, but almost no bank branches or cash machines. That absence, suggests O.P. Bhatt, chairman of State Bank of India, the country’s biggest lender, gives the visitor a hint of the potential for the banking industry. Marine Drive has been underbanked since it was built in the 1930s. But now there is a palpable sense in India, as in most other emerging economies, that banking is thriving—just as it has fallen into disrepute in many Western countries.

The emerging world has a history of volatility and of bad-debt problems—indeed China is grappling with(抓住) such a problem at the moment. But developing-country banks now have got things right on a number of fronts. Anti-poverty campaigners can admire their efforts to offer banking services to the illiterate. Technology gurus can see new mobile applications and low-cost IT platforms, and industrialists can count on banks that actually want to lend to their firms. Regulation buffs see an industry that is both armour-plated and wrapped in cotton wool after the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. In most emerging economies banks are viewed as engines of development rather than as rent-seeking parasites.

But it is by the hard stuff, money, that banks in the developing world now measure up. Not only are they well capitalised and well funded, they are really big—and are enjoying rapid growth. By profits, Tier-1 capital, dividends and market value they now account for a quarter to half of the global banking industry. China’s lenders head the list of banks by market value, and Brazilian and Russian banks are among the world’s top 25. At current growth rates India’s banks will catch up in a decade. The crisis in Western banking, still reverberating in southern Europe, seems to have accelerated the shift in banking muscle from rich countries to the developing world.

This special report will argue that most of that muscle will be needed at home. To support the fast credit growth their populations and politicians demand, and the bad debts it may cause, emerging-market banks will need more capital than they can generate from retained profits. They are the pre-eminent gatherers of savings in the world, a mirror image of Western banks that became huge borrowers. But they will struggle to use those excess deposits abroad without taking dangerous currency risks, so the job of recycling excess savings abroad will remain with central banks and sovereign-wealth funds. The managers of emerging-market banks have plenty to do as it is. Some of them already run organisations that are far bigger than the biggest Western banks. Most also expect to lose corporate customers to local bond markets and to have to build up their consumer- and investment-banking operations to compensate. Many, too, are finding innovative ways to offer banking services to poor people without losing money.
If the crisis has transformed the status of emerging-market banks, it has also transformed the role of the state in banking. In China, which had been relaxing its grip on the industry for a decade, the government directed the banks to continue lending during 2008 and 2009—the main reason why the economy continued to grow fast. In Brazil, India and Russia the state banks have seen a sharp improvement in their fortunes, gaining market share at the expense of private banks. Some Western banks operating in developing countries have lived up to their reputation as unreliable partners. That is likely to have long-term consequences. The banking system most emerging economies now want is a mix of entrepreneurial private firms and state banks, with a few well-run foreign ones to keep the locals honest.

That has big implications for the long list of Western firms desperate to gain more exposure to emerging economies. The crisis has underscored the attractions of two business models. The network banks, such as Citigroup or HSBC, have a presence in lots of countries to make life easier for their customers. The “gone native” ones, such as Santander, have big retail operations with large market shares in just a few countries where they act like, and by and large are treated as, local firms. Both these models involve gathering deposits and operating branches on a large scale. The big investment banks are also active in emerging economies but may find the going increasingly tough as local banks get better.

Both those models are almost impossible to replicate now. The network banks are the products of a century of expansion. They are sufficiently entrenched for Citigroup’s near-collapse in New York, for instance, to cause minimal damage to its emerging-market business. The “gone native” banks seized unique opportunities in the 1990s and early 2000s as Latin America sold off banks after bad-debt crises and eastern Europe privatised after communism’s fall. No such sell-off looks remotely likely soon in China, India or Russia. Even the traditional last-resort technique for banks that want to become more international—setting up a few branches overseas and borrowing from headquarters or wholesale markets to fund lending there—has become much harder as regulators are clamping down on(压制，取缔) it.

The difficulty is mutualThe only consolation for Western firms that cannot get in is that emerging-market banks are facing exactly the same set of problems as they try to expand abroad. For them the crisis came too soon. With another decade under their belt they might have had the size, excess capital and skills to seize the moment and buy big bombed-out banks at the peak of the crisis. As it is, most are having to embrace gradualist strategies. All are building “strings of pearls”—branches in big partner countries to help service customers at home. Some are also offering banking services to diaspora populations in rich countries.

The Western banks have found that establishing a light presence in lots of countries is a great way to lose money. The same is likely to be true for emerging-market banks, so the smarter firms are trying to develop a competitive advantage that they can export. For the Indians that may be low-cost technology; for the Brazilians, investment-banking savvy. Some of the biggest emerging-market banks are experimenting with small acquisitions in their “near abroad”. Going global requires the successful integration of lots of acquisitions, which Western banks have found hard to do.

This special report will show that the globalisation of banking, which has driven the industry for two decades, is in many ways on hold(暂缓，推迟). If emerging economies are much more sceptical about unfettered finance and the role of foreign banks, Western societies are much more hostile to banks in general, let alone those run by foreigners or, worse still, foreign governments. Although emerging-market banks have far healthier business models than Western firms do, many of them will face a difficult trade-off. They will need access to foreign countries in order to build the sort of large-scale operations that make money. To get it, they may have to show that they are at arm’s length, or even entirely detached, from their governments. Yet the crisis has pushed most banks in the developing world the other way.

These banks have been pitched into the big league rather suddenly, helped by the woes of Western banks and the continued strong growth in their own economies. It seems inevitable that Mumbai’s Marine Drive will soon be decked with ATM machines, its joggers will be stabbing mobile-banking screens, the firms on the billboards will be going on buying sprees overseas and even the destitute will have some access to finance. Whether emerging-market banks will soon punch their weight in global banking, let alone dominate it, is another question.

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上面这篇看不大懂，来一篇debate吧

This house believes innovation works best when government does least.

About this debateWhat is the right role for government in spurring innovation? The outlines of this age-old debate will be familiar to many. One side argues that governments inevitably get it wrong when they get too involved in innovation: picking the wrong technology winners, say, or ploughing subsidies into(plough into...对...进行投资.) politically popular projects rather than the most deserving ones. The other rebuts that given the grave(严重的) global challenges we face today—in the 1960s America thought it was the Soviet race into space, today many countries worry about climate change and pandemic threats—governments need to do much more to support innovation.

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Private-sector space flight
Moon dreams
The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese
Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
AP
Can you direct me to reception, please?

WHEN America’s space agency, NASA, announced its spending plans in February, some people worried that its cancellation of the Constellation moon programme had ended any hopes of Americans returning to the Earth’s rocky satellite. The next footprints on the lunar regolith were therefore thought likely to be Chinese. Now, though, the private sector is arguing that the new spending plan actually makes it more likely America will return to the moon.

The new plan encourages firms to compete to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO). The budget proposes $6 billion over five years to spur the development of commercial crew and cargo services to the international space station. This money will be spent on “man-rating” existing rockets, such as Boeing’s Atlas V, and on developing new spacecraft that could be launched on many different rockets. The point of all this activity is to create healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station—and in doing so to drive down the cost of getting into space.

Eric Anderson, the boss of a space-travel company called Space Adventures, is optimistic about the changes. They will, he says, build “railroads into space”. Space Adventures has already sent seven people to the space station, using Russian rockets. It would certainly benefit from a new generation of cheap launchers.

Another potential beneficiary—and advocate of private-sector transport—is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded a hotel chain called Budget Suites of America. Mr Bigelow has so far spent $180m of his own money on space development—probably more than any other individual in history. He has been developing so-called expandable space habitats, a technology he bought from NASA a number of years ago.
These habitats, which are folded up for launch and then inflated in space, were designed as interplanetary vehicles for a trip to Mars, but they are also likely to be useful general-purpose accommodation. The company already has two scaled-down versions in orbit.

Mr Bigelow is preparing to build a space station that will offer cheap access to space to other governments—something he believes will generate a lot of interest. The current plan is to launch the first full-scale habitat (called Sundancer) in 2014. Further modules will be added to this over the course of a year, and the result will be a space station with more usable volume than the existing international one. Mr Bigelow’s price is just under $23m per astronaut. That is about half what Russia charges for a trip to the international station, a price that is likely to go up after the space shuttle retires later this year. He says he will be able to offer this price by bulk-buying launches on newly man-rated rockets. Since most of the cost of space travel is the launch, the price might come down even more if the private sector can lower the costs of getting into orbit.

The ultimate aim of all his investment, Mr Bigelow says, is to get to the moon. LEO is merely his proving ground. He says that if the technology does work in orbit, the habitats will be ideal for building bases on the moon. To go there, however, he will have to prove that the expandable habitat does indeed work, and also generate substantial returns on his investment in LEO, to provide the necessary cash.

If all goes well, the next target will be L1, the point 85% of the way to the moon where the gravitational pulls of moon and Earth balance. “It’s a terrific dumping off point,” he says. “We could transport a completed lunar base [to L1] and put it down on the lunar surface intact.”

There are others with lunar ambitions, too. Some 20 teams are competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, a purse of $30m that will be given to the first private mission which lands a robot on the moon, travels across the surface and sends pictures back to Earth. Space Adventures, meanwhile, is in discussions with almost a dozen potential clients about a circumlunar mission, costing $100m a head.

The original Apollo project was mainly a race to prove the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism. Capitalism won—but at the cost of creating, in NASA, one of the largest bureaucracies in American history. If the United States is to return to the moon, it needs to do so in a way that is demonstrably superior to the first trip—for example, being led by business rather than government. Engaging in another government-driven spending battle, this time with the Chinese, will do nothing more than show that America has missed the point.

对比了Apollo project和美国现在的plan to return to the moon, 前者只是为了prove the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism, 而现在美国要do so in a new way that is demonstrably superior to the first trip, say, being led by business rather than government. 这跟中国政府是完全不同的。

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Climate-change politics
Cap-and-trade's last hurrah
The decline of a once wildly popular idea
Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Gaia lent an unhelpful hand
IN THE 1990s cap-and-trade—the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by auctioning off a set number of pollution permits, which could then be traded in a market—was the darling of the green policy circuit. A similar approach to sulphur dioxide emissions, introduced under the 1990 Clean Air Act, was credited with（相信，认为某人有某种业绩、优点） having helped solve acid-rain problems quickly and cheaply. And its great advantage was that it hardly looked like a tax at all, though it would bring in a lot of money.

The cap-and-trade provision expected in the climate legislation that Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham have been working on, which may be unveiled shortly, will be a poor shadow of that once alluring idea. Cap-and-trade will not be the centrepiece（最引人注目的部分） of the legislation (as it was of last year’s House climate bill, Waxman-Markey), but is instead likely to apply only to electrical utilities, at least for the time being（暂且）. Transport fuels will probably be approached with some sort of tax or fee; industrial emissions will be tackled with regulation and possibly, later on, carbon trading. The hope will be to cobble together cuts in emissions similar in scope to those foreseen under the House bill, in which the vast majority of domestic cuts in emissions came from utilities（公用工程）.

This composite（混合的，综合成的） approach is necessary because the charms of economy-wide cap-and-trade have faded badly（注意badly这个词的用法）. The ability to raise money from industry is not so attractive in a downturn. Market mechanisms have lost their appeal as a result of the financial crisis. More generally, climate is not something the public seems to feel strongly about at the moment, in part because of that recession, in part perhaps because they have worries about the science (see article), in part, it appears, because the winter has been a snowy one.（点出了climate change不是现在公众主要关注点的三个原因）

The public is, though, quite keen on new initiatives on energy, which any Senate bill will shower with（大量地给予） incentives and subsidies whether the energy in question be renewable, nuclear, pumped out from beneath the seabed or still confined to research laboratories. So the bill will need to raise money, which is why cap-and-trade is likely to remain for the utilities, and revenues will be raised from transport fuels. A complex way of doing this, called a linked fee, would tie the revenues to the value of carbon in the utility market; a straightforward carbon tax may actually have a better chance of passing.

Energy bills have in the past garnered（获得） bipartisan support, and this one also needs to. That is why Senator Graham matters. He could bring on board both Democrats and Republicans. Mr Graham’s contribution has been to focus the rhetoric not just on near-term jobs, but also on longer-term competitiveness. Every day America does not have climate legislation, he argues, is a day that China’s grip on the global green economy gets tighter（good expression）.

He also thinks action on the issue would be good for his party. While short-term Republican interests call for opposition, the party’s long-term interests must include broadening its support. Among young people, for example, polling suggests that the environment, and the climate, matter a great deal.

Unfortunately for this argument, tactics matter, and young voters are unlikely to play a great role in the mid-term election. Other Republicans may think it better to wait before re-establishing the party’s green credentials. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, is happy to talk about climate as a problem, and talks about the desirability of some sort of carbon restriction—perhaps a tax, or some version of Maria Cantwell’s “cap-and-dividend” scheme. But she expresses no great urgency about the subject. And she has introduced one of two measures intended to curtail the power the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now has to regulate carbon, on the ground that that is a matter for legislation sometime in the future.

The EPA’s new powers undoubtedly make the charms of legislation greater. Some industrial lobbies may decide that the bill will provide the certainty they need to decide about future investment, and get behind it. The White House has been supportive of late, inviting senators over to talk. But it remains an uphill struggle, and the use of reconciliation to pass health care could greatly increase the gradient of the hill（good expression）, as Mr Graham has made abundantly clear.

If the bill does not pass, it will change environmental politics in America and beyond. The large, comparatively business-friendly environmental groups that have been proponents of trading schemes will lose ground, with organisations closer to the grassroots（基层民众）, and perhaps with a taste for civil disobedience, gaining power. Carbon-trading schemes elsewhere in the world have already been deprived of a vast new market—Waxman-Markey, now dead, would have seen a great many carbon credits bought in from overseas—and if America turned away from cap-and-trade altogether they would look even less transformative than they do today. And as market-based approaches lose relevance, what climate action continues may come to lean more heavily on the command-and-control techniques they were intended to replace.

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Genetically modified food
Attack of the really quite likeable tomatoes
The success of genetically modified crops provides opportunities to win over their critics
Feb 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN THE 14 years since the first genetically modified（转基因的） crops were planted commercially, their descendants, relatives and remixes have gone forth and multiplied like profitable, high-tech pondweed. A new report (see article) shows that 25 countries now grow GM crops, with the total area under cultivation now larger than Peru. Three-quarters of the farmland used to grow soya is now sown with a genetically modified variant, and the figures for cotton are not that far behind, thanks to its success in India. China recently gave the safety go-ahead（good expression） to its first GM rice variety and a new GM maize that should make better pig feed. More and more plants are having their genomes sequenced: a full sequence for maize was published late last year, the soya genome in January. Techniques for altering genomes are moving ahead almost as fast as the genomes themselves are stacking up, and new crops with more than one added trait are coming to market.

Such stories of success will strike fear into some hearts, and not only in GM-averse Europe; a GM backlash（对抗反应） is under way（已经开始，起航） in India, focused on insect-resistant aubergines. Some of these fears are understandable, but lacking supporting evidence they have never been compelling. On safety, the fear which cuts closest to home, the record continues to look good. Governments need to keep testing and monitoring, but that may be becoming easier. More precise modifications, and better technologies for monitoring stray DNA both within plants and in the environment around them, mean that it is getting easier to be sure that nothing untoward（不幸的，难对付的） is going on.
（说明转基因食品到目前看来还是非常安全的）

Then there is the worry that GM crops are a way for big companies to take over the livelihoods of small farmers and, in the end, a chunk of nature itself. Seen in this light the fact that（good expression) 90% of the farmers growing GM crops are comparatively poor and in developing countries is sinister（危险的）, not salutary（有益的，效果好的）; given Monsanto’s dominance in America’s soyabean market, it seems to suggest incipient world domination. It is certainly true that big firms make a lot of money selling GM seeds: the GM seed market was worth $10.5 billion in 2009, and the crops that grew from that seed were worth over $130 billion. But multinationals are not the only game in town. The governments of China (which has increased agricultural research across the board), India and Brazil are also developing new GM crops. In 2009 a GM version of an Indian cotton variety, developed in the public sector, came to market, and a variety engineered by a private Indian firm has been approved for commercialisation. Charities, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are also funding efforts in various countries to make crops more hardy or nutritious. GM seeds that come from government research bodies, or from local firms, may not arouse quite so much opposition as those from large foreign companies, especially when they provide characteristics that make crops better, not just easier to farm.

Moreover, where the seeds come from is a separate question from who should pay for them, as Mr Gates points out. As with drugs and vaccines, it is possible to get products that were developed with profit in mind to the people who need them using donor money and clever pricing and licensing deals. In the longer term, if the seeds deliver what the farmers require, the need for such special measures should diminish. After all, the whole idea is not that poor farmers should go on being poor. It is that poor farmers should get a bit richer, be able to invest a bit more, and thus increase the food available to a growing and predominantly urban population.

More than strange fruitsThere is another worry about GM technology, though, that should be taken seriously. It is that its success and appeal to technophiles may, in the minds of those who pay for agricultural research, crowd out other approaches to improving farming. Because it depends on intellectual property that can be protected, GM is ripe for private investment. There is a lot of other agricultural research that is less amenable to corporate ownership but still needs doing. From soil management to weather forecasts to the preservation, study and use of agricultural biodiversity, there are many ways to improve the agricultural systems on which the world’s food supply depends, and make them more resilient as well as more profitable. A farm is not a just a clever crop: it is an ecosystem managed with intelligence. GM crops have a great role to play in that development, but they are only a part of the whole.

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The moderator's opening remarks

What is the right role for government in spurring innovation? The outlines of this age-old debate will be familiar to many. One side argues that governments inevitably get it wrong when they get too involved in innovation: picking the wrong technology winners, say, or ploughing subsidies into politically popular projects rather than the most deserving ones. The other rebuts that given the grave global challenges we face today—in the 1960s America thought it was the Soviet race into space, today many countries worry about climate change and pandemic threats—governments need to do much more to support innovation.

Happily for us, gentle reader, the two sides in the Economist's latest debate are moving beyond such platitudes to novel arguments. Arguing in favour of the motion that innovation works best when government does least is Amar Bhide, a professor at Harvard and author of "The Venturesome Economy". His opening statement roundly denounces the visions of home-grown Silicon Valleys that dance in the heads of bureaucrats worldwide as "a dubious conception of paradise". California's bloated government is bankrupt and Japan's once formidable MITI agency is in tatters, he observes, but market-minded Hong Kong is flourishing (and its hyper-commercial denizens far richer than their coddled Japanese counterparts).

He adds for good measure that the "techno-fetishist" view of innovation represented by the top-heavy Japanese model pales in comparison with a robust, bottom-up version of innovation that harnesses the creativity and enterprise of the many, including the "venturesome consumers". He does acknowledge that governments have a role to play: "Doing the least doesn't mean doing nothing at all." However, his advocacy of a least is best policy, though conceptually elegant, seems a bit slippery and is probably unhelpful in practice. In future postings, perhaps he will explain how exactly governments should decide whether they are doing too little or too much to help innovation.

David Sandalow, author of "Freedom from Oil" and a senior official in America's Department of Energy, presents a robust defence of government. He does make the familiar points about the need for governments to invest in education and fundamental research. He also adds slightly more controversial arguments about why government policies are required to overcome market failures (such as the recent financial crisis, which unfairly sapped innovators of credit) and misaligned incentives that hold back the adoption of worthwhile innovations (like energy-saving technologies with speedy paybacks).

More striking is Mr Sandalow's linkage of the global trend towards open innovation, which means companies increasingly rely on ideas from outside their own research laboratories, with the need for greater government spending on innovation. He argues that open innovation will get technologies faster to market, but at the expense of fundamental research of the sort that AT&T Bell Labs or Xerox Parc used to do. He insists that "without government support for such research, the seed corn for future generations would be at risk". That is a clever point, but it does not answer the obvious rebuttal that governments would inevitably invest in the wrong sorts of research (think, to stick with his analogy, of the money spent by the American government subsidising corn ethanol, an environmentally questionable but politically popular fuel).

Are you waiting for further rounds of jousting to decide which side to support? Don't be a mugwump, sitting on the fence with your mug in one hand and your wump on the other. Cast your vote now.

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The opposition's opening remarks

Governments spur innovation. Governments shape innovation. Many of the most important innovations in recent decades grew from the work of governments.
In 1965, a US government employee named Bob Taylor（一个不错的例子） had an idea about how computers could communicate. He took the idea to his boss Charles Herzfeld, head of the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), who invested government funds in exploring it. That investment led to the ARPAnet and, in turn, to the internet, without which so many things (including this online debate) would not be possible.
An isolated example? Hardly. Among the innovations that grew directly from government funding are the Google search engine, GPS devices, DNA mapping, inexpensive mass data storage and even Teflon.

Why is government important to innovation?
First, because the private sector underinvests（投资不足） in fundamental research. That is natural. Time horizons in many businesses are short. Few companies are in a position to capture benefits from fundamental research they might fund on their own. In many fields, fundamental research requires resources available only to governments and the largest companies. As Professor Henry Chesbrough documents in his book "Open Innovation", the big corporate research labs of decades past have given way to more distributed approaches to innovation. That gets many technologies to market faster, but at the expense of fundamental research. Without government support for such research, the seed corn for future generations would be at risk.（good expression)

Second, because innovation depends on an educated workforce, which is a job for governments. Biomedical research requires medical technicians. Energy research requires engineers. Computer research requires programmers. Although private companies often provide specialised training, an educated workforce is the essential starting point. Primary and secondary education is a vital precursor to much innovation. That is a job for governments everywhere. And universities play a central role, with training of promising young innovators often made possible by government funding.

Third, because market failures stifle innovative technologies. The recent financial crisis choked off（批评，责备） capital for innovators. Without governments stepping in to provide backstop support, thousands of promising innovations would have been lost due to the unrelated vagaries of failing financial markets. There are many other examples. Lack of capital and information prevents homeowners from investing in energy-saving technologies with very short payback periods. Split incentives between architects, builders, landlords and tenants prevent widespread adoption of similar technologies in commercial buildings. Governments have a central role in overcoming these barriers, and more.

Fourth, because government policies and standards can lay a strong foundation for innovation. Last century, the United States benefited from government policies requiring near universal access to electricity and telephone services, laying the groundwork for a vibrant consumer electronics industry. This century, Finland and Korea (among others) are benefiting from government policies to promote broadband access, helping position each country for global leadership in a vast global market. New technologies require standards that allow them to operate within larger systems. The NTSC television broadcast standard, 110V AC current and FHA housing loans, to pick just three examples, each helped market actors coordinate, encouraging innovation. Or consider Israel, which has a teeming（丰富的） innovation culture in which the Israeli government plays a central role, providing the foundation for startups that commercialise civilian uses of military technologies in materials, semiconductors, medical devices and communications.
（政府投资是innovation的基础，这里举了好几个government policy的例子，很有用！）

Finally, because governments help make sure innovation delivers public benefits. Not all innovation is good. Collateralised debt obligations were an important financial innovation. Yet as the recent financial crisis demonstrated, financial markets cannot be relied upon to self-regulate innovation. As government encourages and promotes innovation, it also has a role in guiding it.
（通过经济危机说明government能引导innovation朝着正确的方向发展）

In the academic literature on innovation, the number of patents issued in a country is often used as a proxy for the rate of innovation. Patents are, of course, issued by governments. As this suggests, governments play a central role in innovation.
（通过专利授予权说明government在innovation中的作用，比较少见的例子）

In his inaugural address, President Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…" That should guide us in thinking about this motion. The notion that "Innovation works best when government does least" is simplistic and wrong. There may be instances in which government meddling chokes off innovation. (Past US government restrictions on stem cell research come to mind.) Yet governments can and do play a central role in spurring innovation and making sure innovation delivers benefits. We should embrace government's role in innovation, always seeking to refine and improve it, not diminish it with broad generalities.

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The proposer's opening remarks

Innovation now attracts innumerable worshippers but their prayers are often quite narrow and sectarian(宗派的，派系的）. Silicon Valley or possibly the Israeli high-tech industry is the promised land: a wondrous combination of private high-tech enterprise underpinned by government-financed universities and research labs.（very good expressions)

This is, alas, a dubious conception of paradise. For all the high-tech prowess of Silicon Valley, the economy of California is on the edge of disaster. Unemployment in eight counties now tops 20% and the government pays its bills in IOUs. And in spite of its extraordinary concentration of scientific and engineering talent and entrepreneurship, Israel's GDP per head in 2009 was lower than of Cyprus, Greece and Slovenia.

Or remember Japan's omnipotent(全能的）, visionary MITI working hand and glove with the likes of NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu? Put aside fiascos such as the ten-year Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, by standard measures the overall level of Japanese engineering and scientific performance, either because of or in spite of government subsidies, is impressive. More tellingly, Hong Kong's GNP per head is nearly 30% higher than Japan's, 24% higher than Germany's and 505% higher than Israel's. Yet Hong Kong's government and private businesses pay scant attention to cutting-edge scientific and technological research.
（通过日本和香港的对比来证明）

The techno-fetishist view of innovation and the kind of government support it demands fails to appreciate the enormous variety of innovations that we need.

The measure of a good economy lies in the satisfaction it provides to the many, not a few, not in the wealth or accomplishment of a few individuals or organisations. And these satisfactions go beyond the material or pecuniary（金钱上的） rewards earned: they include, for instance, the exhilaration of overcoming challenges. Indeed they go hand in hand: a good economy cannot provide widespread prosperity without harnessing the creativity and enterprise of the many. All must have the opportunity to innovate, to try out new things: not just scientists and engineers but also graphic artists, shopfloor workers, salespersons and advertising agencies; not just the developers of new products but their venturesome consumers. The exceptional performance of a few high-tech businesses, as the Silicon Valley and Israeli examples show, is just not enough.
（从innovation应该体现在社会各个阶层人们的方方面面，硅谷等高科技园对于innovation的贡献是远远不够的，这个角度来证明。）

This widely diffused, multifaceted（多方面的，多才多艺的） form of innovation entails a circumscribed role for governments: they should not to put their finger on the scale bribing people to do basic research instead of, say, the kind of graphics design that has made Apple such an iconic company. Mandating more math and science in high schools when most of us never use trigonometry or calculus in our working lives takes away time from learning skills that are crucial in an innovative economy: how to listen and persuade, think independently and work collaboratively, for instance.

Yes, there is a problem with global warming, but that is best solved by innumerable tinkerers taking their chances with renewable energy and resourceful conservation, not by throwing money at projects that a few savants have determined to be the most promising. The apparent duplication of autonomous initiative isn't a waste: no one can foretell what is going to work. Even the most successful venture-capital companies have more misses than hits. Therefore putting many independent experiments in play raises the odds that one will work. When government gets into the game of placing bets, for instance, on new battery technologies, innovators who don't have the savvy, credentials and connections with politicians or the scientific establishment are at a severe disadvantage. Yet history shows that it is often the nonconformist outsiders who play a pivotal role. Would Ed Roberts have been able to secure a government grant to build the world's first personal computer, a virtually useless toy when it was introduced in 1974?

Of course a government doing the least doesn't mean a government doing nothing at all. Moreover, the least is a moving and ever expanding target. The invention of the automobile, for example, necessitated driving rules and a system of vehicle inspections. The growth of air travel required a system to control traffic and certify the airworthiness of aircraft. Similarly, radio and television required a system to regulate the use of the airwaves.

Modern technology created new forms of pollution that did not exist in agrarian economies. Governments had to step in, in one way or the other, to make it unrewarding to pollute. Likewise, antitrust laws（反托拉斯法） to control commercial interactions and conduct emerged after new technologies created opportunities to realise economies of scale（规模经济） and scope—and realise oligopoly or monopoly profits（垄断利润）. These opportunities were largely absent in pre-industrial economies.
(指出政府给予必要干预的重要性）

But the principle of the least is best remains a true compass. New technologies not only create the need for desirable new rules, they but also generate more opportunities for unwarranted meddling and a cover for rent-seeking. It is one thing for the Federal Aviation Administration to manage the air traffic control system, quite another for the Civil Aeronautics Board (b. 1938, d. 1985) to regulate airfares, routes and schedules. The construction of the interstate highway system may have been a great boon to the US economy, for example, but it did not take long for Congress to start appropriating funds for bridges to nowhere.
（指出new technology有时候导致政府不得不出面干涉）

Entrepreneurial leaps into the dark are best sustained by great caution in expanding the scope of government intervention; the private virtue of daring can be a public vice. The US chief justice has often repeated the maxim: "If it is not necessary to decide an issue to resolve a case, then it is necessary not to decide that issue." Similarly, if it is not necessary to intervene to promote innovation, it should be considered necessary not to intervene. The government should focus on things that private enterprise simply cannot provide and stay away from promoting activities that would allegedly be undersupplied. If nothing, this maxim frees up resources for crucial public goods. So traffic police, emission rules and carbon taxes: absolutely. Subsidising networks of hydrogen pumps and new engine or battery technologies: no thanks.

AdelineShenUID：2630498

这个debate可以适用于一类aw题目。。。

先上课去，回来慢慢看。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

汗啊。。。从六点睡到了现在，好吧，开始干活。。。什么诡异的作息啊。。。

AdelineShenUID：2630498

useful words and expressions:

spur innovation
plough subsidies into... 对...进行投资
grave challenges 严重的挑战

AdelineShenUID：2630498

Economist的debate真的很赞，我要好好挖掘一下。。。