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表层 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全体船员 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.用来递进的表达，
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.（先表明态度，optimistic about the change,再做解释）
Another potential beneficiary—and advocate G of private-sector transport—is Robert Bigelow后面是解释（这种句型比较好）, 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 太阳系内的，行星间的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 G will be added to this over the course of a year, and the result will be a space station with more usable volume 空间 （想到voluminous,长篇的）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. 句型好并列句。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. (在issue的论证中可以用：the ultimate aim of all his …..)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,”（excellent way to sell sth）
he says. “We could transport a completed lunar base [to L1] and put it down on the lunar surface intact未碰触的G.”
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. 这种带插入语的句子，自己要写出来很难的，但很地道
Climate-change politics
Cap-and-trade's last hurrah欢呼
The decline of a once wildly popular idea
Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Gaia （the primal Greek goddess of the Earth）大地之母
lent an unhelpful hand
IN THE 1990s cap-and-trade—the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by auctioning off拍卖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硫磺
dioxide emissions, introduced under the 1990 Clean Air Act, was credited with 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.可以用于论证长期和近期利益关系的论据和句子。
The cap-and-trade provision条款
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[attractive] idea.评价性句子
Cap-and-trade will not be the centrepiece 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城市管理服务行业，公共工程, at least for the time being. 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.
This composite复杂的 approach is necessary because the charms of economy-wide cap-and-trade have faded badly. 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递进 ,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. 言简意赅
The public is, though, quite keen on new initiatives on energy, which any Senate bill will shower with incentives刺激的，鼓励的 and subsidies补助金 whether the energy in question be renewable, nuclear, pumped out from beneath在…下面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积累 bipartisan两党的
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言语，修辞 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. 干嘛又怪中国，奇怪的老美
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. 【把两党换成其他要讨论的，句式不错】Among young people, for example, polling suggests that the environment, and the climate, matter a great deal.
Unfortunately for this argument, tactics战略 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国书，凭据. 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上坡的，艰难的struggle, and the use of reconciliation to pass health care could greatly increase the gradient倾斜度 of the hill, as Mr Graham has made abundantly clear.表达难度加大，暗喻用的很贴切
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支持者 of trading schemes will lose ground没有立足点, with organisations closer to the grassroots, 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.
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 crops were planted commercially, their descendants, relatives and remixes have gone forth and multiplied like profitable, high-tech pondweed 一种水草水池草(泛指多种淡水植物,如眼子菜,鸭子草等). A new report (see article) shows that 25 countries now grow GM crops转基因作物, with the total area under cultivation now larger than Peru 秘鲁. Three-quarters of the farmland used to grow soya dadou is now sown with
播种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 to its first GM rice variety and a new GM maize 玉米 that should make better pig feed. More and more plants are having their genomes 基因组，染色体组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（加起来）, and new crops with more than one added trait 特点 are coming to market.
Such stories of success will strike fear into some hearts, and not only in GM-averse Europe; a GM backlash 对抗性反应 is under way in India, focused on insect-resistant aubergines 茄子？. Some of these fears are understandable, but lacking supporting evidence they have never been compelling强迫，胁迫. 句式很好
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离散 DNA both within plants and in the environment around them, mean that it is getting easier to be sure that nothing untoward不顺利的 is going on.
Then there is the worry that GM crops are a way for big companies to take over the livelihoods生计 of small farmers and, in the end, a chunk of 一大块nature itself. Seen in this light the fact that 90% of the farmers growing GM crops are comparatively poor and in developing countries is sinister危险的, not salutary健康的; given Monsanto’s dominance in America’s soyabean market, it seems to suggest incipient 最开始的 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这句话怎么理解呢？. 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 commercialization. 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当讨论两个问题的地位的时候可以用, 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 fruits
There is another worry about GM technology, though, that should be taken seriously. 怎么样把插入语用的恰到好处？
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知识产权 that can be protected, GM is ripe for private investment. There is a lot of other agricultural research that is less amenable服从 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 有弹性的 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.
GM全称：Genetically Modified E.G转基因食品：genetically modified food 基因转换技术
China's currency
Bending, not bowing
The Chinese case for a stronger, suppler currency
Apr 7th 2010 | HONG KONG | From The Economist print edition
CHINA’S trade with America is notoriously臭名昭著的 skewed倾斜的. But diplomatic exchanges between the two countries are more finely balanced. On April 3rd Tim Geithner, America’s treasury secretary, tactfully老练的 postponed a report due this month that might have condemned China for manipulating its currency, keeping it weak to favour its exporters. Mr Geithner, who made an unscheduled trip to Beijing this week, said he would rather press America’s case at its regular “Strategic and Economic Dialogue” with China in May and at the G20 summit in Canada in June. The delay puts America’s diplomatic account with China briefly in surplus 剩余. What will China offer to clear the balance?
The immediate quid pro quo is the presence of China’s president, Hu Jintao, at a summit on nuclear proliferation 细胞分裂繁殖 in Washington, DC, on April 12th-13th. There is also talk of allowing the yuan to wobble 摇摆 a little more in daily trading with the dollar. In time it is expected to resume the slow crawl upwards 这是第二次遇到这样的表达了that ended in July 2008.
America’s Treasury is willing to bide its time. But its patience is not shared by members of Congress. Last month 130 of them wrote to Mr Geithner urging tougher action against China. After the currency report was postponed, Chuck Schumer, a New York senator, said he would push his bill to slap 还击 anti-dumping 反倾销 duties on some Chinese goods and countervailing tariffs on all of them if China does not allow its currency to strengthen. 在全球化过程中遇到的贸易纠纷的例子
The tussle 争论 in America between a cautious Treasury and slap-happy senators is mirrored by subtle divisions within China. Its policymakers and economists are, of course, united in their distaste for America’s tariff-talk. Many can scarcely believe that a country so indebted to China would try to intimidate恫吓 it. (Mr Schumer points out that if the Chinese were to dump their dollar holdings, they would only depress their value, thereby “cutting off their nose to spite their face”.) But the noisy dispute between the two countries is drowning out an interesting debate within China on the virtues of their inflexible currency.
On one side of the discussion is the People’s Bank of China (PBOC), the country’s central bank. Its chairman, Zhou Xiaochuan, suggested last month that keeping the yuan stable against the dollar保持人名币的坚挺was a crisis measure, which would be withdrawn “sooner or later”. With China’s recovery well advanced, the central bank is keen to get a grip on bank lending and keep a lid on inflationary pressures. A stronger yuan would cut import prices; a suppler one would give the central bank a freer hand to raise interest rates, without worrying about the capital inflows such rates might attract despite China’s capital controls.
On the other side of the debate is China’s Commerce Ministry and some members of its National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC),商务部和国家发改委 which formulates the country’s long-term economic strategy. Beyond the PBOC, Chinese policymakers do not see the yuan as a tool to manage inflation. They see it instead as a “tool” to “maximise export employment”, says Stephen Green of Standard Chartered Bank. And it is a tool they are not yet ready to relinquish废除. Although China’s output grew by over 10% in the year to the fourth quarter, its policymakers believe they have done a better job of shoring up GDP than of shoring up employment, according to Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. The World Bank says that rural wages (outside farms) fell by a fifth between 2007 and 2009 as migrant workers fled back to their villages in search of jobs.
What accounts for this jobless recovery? Much of China’s epic
stimulus was channelled through its banks. But in doling out credit Chinese banks still follow a “political pecking order”, as Yasheng Huang of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has put it. They reserve the first and biggest bites for large state-owned enterprises. These firms in turn favour capital-intensive investment projects, which add more to the output figures than to the payrolls. As a result China’s policymakers still count on the country’s exporters to create jobs, Mr Prasad argues. They are reluctant不情愿的 to do anything to jeopardize 使。。。陷入危险 their prospects.
How much damage might a stronger yuan inflict? Several studies suggest that China’s exports fall by about 1.5% when its trade-weighted exchange rate, adjusted for inflation, strengthens by 1%. 用作例子But if the yuan did move against the dollar, the currencies of China’s neighbours and rivals might rise in sympathy, limiting the damage to its competitiveness. And China’s coastal workshops have staged an impressive recovery from the worst days of the crisis, when factories closed and container ships idled闲置 in the ports. Exports in February were 8% higher than two years earlier. A few more months of robust figures may reassure policymakers that the country’s exporters are back on their feet.
Some of China’s rulers, it is true, see no benefit to China from a stronger yuan. But they are also the ones most determined to resist foreign pressure. They would, therefore, back down only if American tariffs inflicted real pain. And theirs are not the only voices in the government. The PBOC recently appointed three scholars to advise it, two of whom, David Daokui Li and Xia Bin, have advocated currency reform. Whether they can overcome the Commerce Ministry and its allies remains to be seen. But their efforts to sell their ideas will come to nought （=nothing） if they are crowded out by imported arguments from America.
好久没来啦，加紧哦~~
Flash in the pan
As Apple flexes its mobile muscles【显示力量】, it is changing the appearance of video on the web
Apr 16th 2010 | From The Economist online
GIVE Steve Jobs his due. 【和Steve Jobs的预想一样】Apple’s charismatic 【有魅力的】boss is, without question, the most strategic thinker in the business. He appreciates better than anyone that computing is in transition. As it evolves 【发展为】from being predominantly a stationary activity to becoming increasingly (exclusively?) a mobile one, the roles of the industry’s leading participants are changing fast.
很好的句式， evolves from doing sth to doing sth
When Microsoft ruled the realm of personal computers, Apple was little more than a niche player. But in mobile phones, Microsoft is the one left scrambling 【攀爬】 for a piece of the action. And although Google may own 65% of the search business on the desktop, the 85m wireless devices Apple has sold (iPhones, iPods and now iPads) account for 64% of America’s mobile browsing, Mr Jobs said this month.
The success of Apple’s mobile devices gives the firm an opportunity to capture【好词，比用play，account 都好】 a goodly chunk of the emerging mobile-advertising market. Indeed, that is the reason why Apple recently acquired Quattro Wireless, a mobile advertising agency. Becoming an advertising powerhouse【one having great power】 is certainly attractive. But Mr Jobs has far bigger fish to fry. The biggest of them all is turning Apple into the Microsoft of mobility. But first there is a little matter of locking as many software developers as possible into the Apple ecosystem. 人才战略If the applications are there, so the argument goes, users will follow in droves【成群结队】.
It has been done before. What gave Microsoft the keys to the kingdom was partly the way it embraced an open platform based on the Intel processor plus slots for other manufacturers’ components to plug into. Even more important, though, was the vast number of applications written by independent programmers that worked exclusively with Microsoft’s operating systems.
Mr Jobs has no intention of ever opening Apple’s hardware for others to mess with. But software that meets a minimum standard is a different matter. At the last count, the App Store (Apple’s online outlet for iPhone software) listed 185,000 applications for users to choose from. So far, some 4 billion software utilities, games, maps and music tracks have been downloaded by owners of iPhones, iPods and lately iPads—all of which share the same operating system and can therefore use many of the same applications. The App Store offers Mr Jobs his best chance yet of creating a global franchise on a par with 【与。。。等价的】Microsoft’s Windows. From Apple’s perspective【可以代替aspect，point of view，standpoint】, the last thing it should therefore do is allow that unique source of customer satisfaction to be threatened in any way.
No surprise, then, that Mr Jobs has banned programmers from writing iPhone apps【自动化应用程序】 using cross-platform programming tools like Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s .NET, which make it easy to write an app for many different devices and operating systems at once. Flash plug-ins, running inside web browsers, can be found in Macintosh computers, but in none of Apple’s mobile toys.
Were Flash ever to find its way in through the back door to the iPhone operating system, Apple’s armlock on its customers would be severely weakened. If most apps are built to run on Android and BlackBerry phones, as well as iPhones, then Apple would lose the advantage of being able to offer the widest choice of apps. With all smart phones able to do similar tricks these days, there would be less compulsion to buy an iPhone in the first place.
But there is a big problem with banning Flash: without it, people cannot play most of the videos, animation and games encoded on websites using the industry’s most popular tool. Adobe’s Flash software powers the vast majority of multimedia clips seen on the web—from YouTube videos to the simplest animated chart or advertisement. Apple’s devices include software that can play YouTube videos when needed. But apart from that they are incompatible 【两难的，矛盾的】with content built in Flash. (Bad luck, Farmville fans.)
Still, Mr Jobs remains adamant【坚定地，坚决的】. In his view, Flash is a rat’s nest of buggy software that hogs processor cycles, drains battery life and causes needless crashes. 【jobs的理由】That is why he has just blocked an end-run Adobe was planning around his ban on mobile Flash. Henceforth,【这个递进关系的词很好】 developers creating applications for the iPhone and its ilk will have to sign a revised agreement that forbids them from using any programming tools other than Apple’s approved set.
The move was prompted by the arrival of Adobe’s latest programming aid, Flash Pro CS 5. This threatened to turn Flash applications of the kind seen on the web into stand-alone iPhone apps capable of slipping onto the App Store undetected. Adobe even boasted—rather rashly, as it turned out—that over 100 such programs had already done just that.
Does Apple’s latest clamp down
【压制】on Flash mean that people who have bought iPhones, iPods and iPads are now stuck with a crippled version of the web? For the time being, yes—though there are partial workarounds that might yet help. Eventually, though, a technology known as HTML5, which has been in the works for the past six years, promises to render Flash largely irrelevant. Among other things, the attraction of HTML5 is that it is designed to handle audio and video internally, without the need for browser plug-ins such as Adobe’s Flash (or others like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Oracle’s JavaFX).
Unfortunately, HTML5 remains a work in progress. Where, today, Flash can seamlessly【无处不在的】 handle a variety of “codecs” for compressing and decompressing【压缩和解压】 the video’s data stream between the web server and the viewer, HTML5 is experimenting with two distinctly different codecs for video playback: one, called H.264, is used in Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s forthcoming IE9 browsers, while the other, known as Ogg Theora, has been adopted by the Firefox and Opera browsers; Google’s Chrome has embraced both.
Experts agree that the H.264 algorithm produces a superior picture, but it is a proprietary technology—though free to license, at least for the time being. For internet purists, Ogg Theora’s attraction is that it is open source. A religious war has broken out between the two camps over which codec to standardise on.
The good news is that a solution may yet be in sight. By all accounts, Google is poised to open-source its highly regarded VP8 video codec. The search giant has hinted as much ever since acquiring the codec’s maker, On2 Technologies, earlier this year. Insiders reckon VP8 uses only half the bandwidth of H.264 while delivering an even better picture. Mozilla, the open-source organisation behind Firefox, would welcome VP8 into the fold.
But would Apple, after having backed H.264 so enthusiastically? If it promised a quick and certain death for Flash, Mr Jobs would doubtless be delighted to go along. For deprived iPhone users, the crippled web might then be a thing of the past.
GDP 一个广受好评的debate （上个debate做的很失败，学到的很少）
目的：地道表达，词汇，行文安排
About this debate
When economists want to compare living standards in one country with those in another, or to track how much richer a country has become over time, they usually look at gross domestic product (GDP). The growth of GDP, adjusted for changes in population and prices, is the commonest measure of changes in living standards. But is it a good one?
GDP was designed to estimate the value of goods and services produced in a country. Critics say that as a measure of living standards it misses out too much, such as the state of the environment, people's health, leisure and the distribution of income. Does a rising GDP mean that people are happier as well as richer? Is it time, as a Nobel economics laureate has said, for an end to "GDP fetishism"? Or is GDP, for all its flaws, a good enough estimate of society's material well-being? Should GDP be ditched【被抛弃】, or is the search for better measures afool's errand【差事】?
Defending the motion
Andrew Oswald
Professor of economics, University of Warwick
GDP is a gravely dated pursuit.
【这句怎么理解？】The first reason is the Easterlin Paradox(the empirical finding that countries do not become happier as they grow wealthier); the second is that global warming means it is necessary for Homo sapiens 【现代人】to make fewer things, to travel less, and to lean on the direct energy of the sun and water.这种段落是典型的TS+扩展（用到了相对论和现实例子）
Against the motion
Steve Landefeld
Director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis
GDP is a key measure of a country's economic activity—the purpose for which it was designed.这个句子的转化很好It was not designed to be, nor should be regarded as, a comprehensive measure of society's well-being. Nonetheless, it has also proven useful as a gauge 【测量器】of an economy's capacity to improve living standards.
如此鲜艳的一个开头，为什么弄上来是这死样子，烦躁~~~
The moderator's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Patrick Lane
Finding ways to improve humanity's living standards is the point of economics. 【可以用在解释一个事物是由多种事物导致的】Having a good measure of living standards, you may think, is therefore pretty fundamental to the discipline. For decades economists have turned to gross domestic product (GDP) when they want an estimate of how well off people are. By how much are Americans better off than Indians, or than their parents' generation?[用于illustrated GDP的实际用途] Chances are the answer will start with GDP.
GDP is really a measure of an economy's output, valued at market prices (to the extent that you have them). As societies produce more, and therefore earn more, their material well-being rises. So it is no surprise that so many economists and official statisticians broadly accept GDP as a measure of living standards.
It isn't the only measure. Even before the recent recession, a lot of debate over American living standards was based not on GDP, which was growing healthily¬, but on median incomes, which were not: the point was that national output was growing, but that its fruits were not being evenly shared. It doesn't cover everything: not all the things that we value are bought and sold in the marketplace. But when economists want to measure the living standards of whole societies, GDP is where they usually start.
That said, economists and statisticians have been debating for years whether GDP measures what truly matters. It may capture material wealth, broadly, but is that enough? If it is not enough, with what should it be replaced—or, more likely, supplemented? With assessments of the environment? Measures of people's health? Estimates of their happiness? And how might all these different aspects be combined? If some new measure is closely correlated with GDP, then GDP, though imperfect, may be good enough. If it is not, then focusing on GDP could be an error of more than just measurement: governments that pursue GDP growth may be making their citizens worse off than they might be.
The Economist's latest online debate is intended to wrestle with these questions. Andrew Oswald, of the University of Warwick, is proposing the motion that "GDP growth is a poor measure of improving living standards". Opposing him is Steven Landefeld, director of the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which produces America's national income and product accounts, of which GDP is a prominent feature.
Mr Oswald's starting point is a report published last year by a commission chaired by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel economics laureate【获奖者】. The Stiglitz commission (of which Mr Oswald was a member, and which was written about in The Economist last September argued that official statistics should shift away from measuring production to measuring "well-being". Mr Oswald points to two pieces of evidence in particular: 【用于引出例子】the Easterlin Paradox, the finding that increasing wealth does not make countries happier; and global warming, which is a sign that people should produce less and enjoy the planet more.
Mr Landefeld remarks that GDP was not intended to be a comprehensive measure of society's well-being. Even so, he says, it has stood up well as a measure of living standards. Nothing has bettered it yet. That isn't to say that GDP can't be improved, though—and Mr Landefeld points to ways in which the BEA has been trying to bring that about. He too notes the conclusions of Mr Stiglitz's commission.
This promises to be a lively and enjoyable 【用于argu结尾处的展望】debate on an important subject: how much use is GDP in measuring how well off people are? Mr Oswald and Mr Landefeld have set out what they think. I'm glad that we have two such prominent people to lead the debate. And I'm looking forward to the next round of arguments and to what you, on the floor of our online chamber, have to say.
The proposer's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Andrew Oswald
"A … key message, and unifying theme of the report, is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being." 【这里的well being 想到了昨天eleven bs里关于question authority里对 well-being的分类，物质的和精神的】
(Executive Summary: Stiglitz Commission Report)
GDP is a gravely dated pursuit.这个怎么理解？ It is time to listen to the Stiglitz Report.
The first reason is the evidence known as the Easterlin Paradox (the empirical finding that countries do not become happier as they grow wealthier). The second reason is that global warming means it is necessary for Homo sapiens to make fewer things rather than more, to travel less except on their feet, to lean on the direct energy of the sun and water rather than on the smashed fuel of buried trees, to value tranquil beauty more and 160mph motor cars less.
These arguments are key parts of the recent Stiglitz Report.
1.
Life is now more complex and services dominate ("The time has come to adapt our system of measurement … to better reflect the structural changes which have characterised the evolution of modern economies.")
2.
We, as a society, need to measure well-being per se. ("A … unifying theme of the report is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being.")
3.
Official government statistics should
blend objective and subjective well-being data. 【blend 要比combine好听】("Statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people's life evaluations, hedonic【享乐的】 experiences and priorities in their own survey.")
4.
Sustainability must be a criterion. ("Sustainability assessment requires a well-identified dashboard of indicators … the components of this dashboard should be … interpretable as variations of some underlying "stocks".)
I am optimistic. Eventually the green movement will discover the data of the Easterlin Paradox, named after Richard Easterlin, a famous Californian economist, and also become aware of the statistical evidence on declining emotional prosperity that I describe below. Although fine young scholars like Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers doubt the veracity 【正确性】of it【对于argu提供的数据可以用这个表达】, they are heavily outnumbered: the weight of published evidence is in line with 【和。。。符合一致】Mr Easterlin's paradox. Moreover, Ms Stevenson and Mr Wolfers themselves agree that America, perhaps the iconic GDP-chasing nation, is not becoming happier through time.
If we look at broader measures of psychological well-being, the newest longitudinal 【纵向的】research suggests there are reasons to be more pessimistic 【悲观的】than Easterlin. Although further research evidence needs to be collected, this is what we currently know.
Worryingly, emotional prosperity and mental health appear from the latest data to be getting worse through time. This disturbing conclusion emerges from these seven studies:
·
Sacker and Wiggins (2002)
·
Hodiamont et al. (2005)
·
Verhaak et al. (2005)
·
Green and Tsitsianis (2005)
·
Wauterickx and Bracke (2005)
·
Oswald and Powdthavee (2007)
·
Sweeting et al. (2009)
Why? We are not yet certain. But, first, humans are animals of comparison (some of the newest evidence, from brain scans, is reported in Fliessbach et al., 2007). What I want subconsciously is to have three zoomy BMWs and for my colleagues in the office corridor at work to have mere rusting, spluttering Fords. Unfortunately, the tide of economic growth lifts all boats, so where having three glamorous cars was unusual, eventually it becomes the norm, and any relative gains are thereby neutralised. Second, people choose things—such as high-pressure kinds of work and long commutes away from their families and their dogs and their fishing buddies—that, despite what they think, will often not make them happier. Economists have ignored the research on "affective forecasting mistakes" by psychologists like Daniel Gilbert; they need to wake up to it.
Unsurprisingly, the citizens of the rich nations find it difficult to grasp that higher gross domestic product from this point onwards will not make society happier. Like people in earlier times who could not conceive of themselves as creatures glued by gravity onto a spherical planet, they trust their intuitions (because as individuals they like to become richer and assume whole countries must be the same). One cannot blame them. But the evidence shows they are wrong.
As an undergraduate, I was taught that economics is a social science concerned with the efficient allocation of scarce resources. In 2010, a better definition is needed. Economics is a social science concerned with the way to allocate plentiful resources to maximise a society's emotional prosperity and mental health.
The opposition's opening remarks
Apr 20th 2010 | Steve Landefeld
Gross domestic product (GDP) is a key measure of a country's economic activity—the purpose for which it was designed. It was not designed to be, nor should be regarded as, a comprehensive measure of society's well-being. Nonetheless, 不过it has also proven useful as a gauge of an economy's capacity to improve living standards. It was a catastrophic【悲惨结局的】 decline in living standards that prompted the development of national, or GDP, accounts. Trying to design policies in the 1930s to combat the Great Depression, President Roosevelt had only such sketchy 【粗略的】data as stock prices, freight car loadings and incomplete indices of industrial production on which to rely. In response, the US Department of Commerce developed a set of national economic accounts that for the first time provided a comprehensive framework to guide policy decisions to assist the millions of people who were out of work.
GDP, and the broader set of national income, product and wealth accounts, has stood the test time and no other measure has proven a worthy alternative. Simon Kuznets, one of the early architects of the accounts, in 1941 recognised the limitations of focusing on market activities and excluding household production and a broad range of other non-market activities and assets that have productive value or yield satisfaction. Yet 75 years and lots of research later, there is no broader social measurement tool that officials would agree is valid and useful.
It would, therefore, seem irresponsible to abandon the most comprehensive and reliable system currently available to tell us how a society is faring economically. GDP may not be a complete measure of improving living standards, but that does not make it a poor one, especially when considering what could possibly replace it today.
There is, of course, room to improve GDP through better measuring of the distribution of the gains from economic growth and the sustainability of that growth, and selected measures of non-market activities that affect the economy—and these concepts have merit. Rather than replacing GDP, the goal might be extending and supplementing GDP and the national accounts, rather than their replacement.
Over time the national accounts have been constantly updated and extended to address changes in the economy and to keep them relevant, and many of the measurement issues raised in the current debate can be addressed within the context of these accounts. Yet extensions of the national accounts cannot be allowed to subject a critical tool for economic policy to uncertainty. Past efforts to expand conventional GDP have foundered on the inevitable problems of subjectivity and uncertainty inherent in measuring happiness, household work and other non-market activities. Critics rightly fear that the inclusion of such uncertain and subjective values in GDP will seriously diminish the essential role of the national accounts to financial markets, central banks, tax authorities and governments worldwide in measuring and managing the market economy.
Much work has focused on how to successfully broaden the utility of GDP, while preserving its core integrity. Several National Academy of Sciences studies on accounting for the environment (Nordhaus and Kokkelenberg, eds, 1999) and non-market production (Abraham and Mackie, eds, 2005), as well as the System of National Accounts (1993) guidelines for compiling GDP, have concluded that an expansion of the GDP accounts should take place in supplemental, or satellite, accounts that extend their scope without reducing the usefulness of the core GDP accounts. They also conclude that such an expansion should focus on economic aspects of non-market and near-market activities—such as energy and the economy's use of natural resources, the impact of investments in research and development (R&D), health care, or education—and not attempt to measure the welfare effect of such interactions.
Recognising the concerns of subjectivity and uncertainty, the focus should remain on creating "new" estimates within the framework of the existing accounts. For example, the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009), which explored expanded welfare measures, has suggested a number of ways that "classical GDP issues" can be addressed within existing GDP accounts or through an extension and improvement of measures included in existing accounts.
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis focuses on just such improvements, and President Obama this year proposed extensions within the scope of the existing accounts that would provide new measures of:
·
how growth in income is distributed across households, other sectors and regions;
·
the sustainability of trends in saving, investment, asset prices and other key variables important to understanding business cycles, economic growth and living standards.
There are, however, limits to what can reasonably be included in GDP. For many years the problem has not been with GDP, but rather the singular focus on GDP alone as a measure of society's welfare. Many non-market measures of welfare may be better included in such measures as the newly authorised US National Academies Key National Indicators System.
These and other efforts in the coming years will lead to a more inclusive set of measurement tools that will enhance our understanding of countries' standards of living. This progress is inevitable, but it does not render current GDP data inadequate. GDP will continue to play a crucial role in measuring social progress in and among countries.
The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Apr 23rd 2010 | Patrick Lane
Welcome to the second, "rebuttal" stage of the debate. From what both Andrew Oswald and Steve Landefeld say, and from the comments from the floor, it's clear that whether you support or reject the motion depends to a large extent on how you define "living standards". Are they limited to material comfort, or do they cover broader, less tangible concepts, not least happiness? This difference of view emerged in the first few online remarks, and it's been a constant theme. Pythian Legume, for instance, is "relatively certain that a claim that it [ie, GDP] does not measure national happiness is off point". Belfast citizen argues: "It is quite true for Mr Landefeld to say that GDP was not designed to be a well-being measure—though that concedes Prof Oswald's case at the outset—but it is treated by most OECD governments as if it were a proxy for well-being."
Here's another dividing line, not yet obvious on the floor but plain between the protagonists【主角】: is GDP simply out of date, or can it be improved or supplemented by other measures of living standards, however defined? Mr Oswald says that, given the apparent decline in psychological measures of well-being in rich nations, GDP has not (as Mr Landefeld believes) "stood the test of time". It is too narrow an indicator of things that matter to remain a valuable indicator today. Mr Landefeld remarks that if measures of happiness have not moved much over time, their merits as measures of living standards are in question. Better, he says, to augment GDP with other measures on an economic "dashboard". He suggests that GDP will remain the most closely watched.
On the floor, other themes have emerged.【突然发现是个好词】 One is perhaps best illustrated by KCCM, who believes that the debate "exemplifies【举例解释】
the economic and attitudinal gulf 【深渊】between developed and developing economies". GDP may seem out of date in the rich world, he says, where most people have satisfactory food and shelter, but in poorer countries, "quantity reigns supreme because many simply do not yet have enough". High GDP growth numbers are a symbol of rising living standards—or, as KCCM puts it, of "ability to provide more of what their growing populations really need and, eventually, want". 严重同意此观点
Another topic is the tension between living standards of whole societies and those of individuals or households. A related subject is the distribution of income. Plainly, GDP can capture only aggregates or (if you divide by population) averages. It won't tell you about the living standards of individuals, the gap between rich and poor, or the concentration of riches at the top. It's not supposed to, some may say—GDP per person is a measure of central tendency, not dispersion—but for many participants that's not the point.
Mehmet Asici suggests that GDP may be a fair measure of living standards in fairly equal societies with strong welfare states, but not in places where the distribution of income is highly skewed【歪斜的，像中国】. Several participants have said that the answer is not to measure GDP alone, but to have lots of indicators of material and psychological well-being. That in turn raises another question: can these meaningfully be combined into a single measure, or does it make more sense to look at several (back to the "dashboard"), sometimes paying more attention to one indicator and sometimes to another? Quite a few people mentioned the UN Human Development Index. One speaker, haripolit, said flatly that it was pointless to look any farther. Others thought the answer was more complicated.
Before we hear Mr Oswald's and Mr Landefeld's closing statements, we'll have contributions from guest speakers. The first of these will be Enrico Giovannini, formerly chief statistician of the OECD and now head of the Italian national statistical agency. The rebuttals and the guests' statements will, I'm sure, provoke more debate.
读到现在发现 not to…but to …的句型用的很广泛。
The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Apr 23rd 2010 | Andrew Oswald
GDP is too narrow a measure of the things that truly matter to humans to be viewed as a valuable indicator in developed nations like ours in 2010.可以改写为 argu中很多结果只理解为某一因素所导致的问题
Steve Landefeld presents his view cogently, but he proposes an old-fashioned vision that is driven by conventional ways of thinking rather than modern evidence, and he makes no mention of green issues or sustainability.
Here is an example:
It was a catastrophic decline in living standards that prompted the development of national, or GDP, accounts. Trying to design policies in the 1930s….
I agree with this assessment about the origins of GDP measurement. But of course such days are long, long gone. This is not an issue relevant to the case for or against GDP in 2010。
用于描写时间变化而导致的观点变化
Here is a further example:用于举第二个例子
GDP, and the broader set of national income, product and wealth accounts, has stood the test [of] time and no other measure has proven a worthy alternative.
This is an assertion for which Mr Landefeld gives no evidence. On some measures of mental health, for example, as I tried to explain in the first stage of the debate, there is research evidence that levels of psychological well-being in rich nations are worsening through time. If so, it would seem to me, and I presume to other observers, that the "test" has been failed.
Mr Landefeld also argues that:
There is no broader social measurement tool that officials would agree is valid and useful.
This is not true: see the Stiglitz report.
Mr Landefeld suggests that it would seem irresponsible 【不负责任的】to abandon what he sees as the most comprehensive and reliable system currently available. Readers will have to judge for themselves. In my opinion, this takes us back to the kind of status-quo 【现状】positions adopted in debates since at least the Middle Ages when it was proposed to give up the view that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Presumably we should choose our intellectual positions on the basis of modern data and not because ideas are familiar to us or previously long-accepted.
Mr Landefeld says that the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi Commission (2009), which explored expanded welfare measures, has suggested a number of ways that "classical GDP issues" can be addressed within existing GDP accounts or through an extension and improvement of measures included in existing accounts. Yet, as a read of the report on the web will make clear, his is not in an obvious way an even-handed assessment of the Commission (on which I served). For example, he does not mention the central recommendations in the Stiglitz Report about the need to measure human well-being rather than GDP.
Mr Landefeld believes that alternatives to GDP have…"foundered on the inevitable problems of subjectivity and uncertainty inherent in measuring happiness, household work and other non-market activities". Unfortunately, this is an assertion without data to support it. More important, it is time to think about what economists would call the right maximand.
Consider this possibility. 在考虑多因素是用One of Mr Landefeld's close relatives or friends comes to him and says: "Steve, confidentially, I am really hating my job and my marriage isn't working and I am feeling deeply depressed." Surely he would not say to his relative: "Not interested. Don't give me your subjectivity. Go home and count dollars."
The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Apr 23rd 2010 | Steve Landefeld
If the motion were about measuring welfare, the answer might be that GDP is a poor measure. However, as a measure of standards of living—that is, a measure of the level of comfort provided by privately purchased and publicly provided goods and services—GDP is a pretty good measure of living standards. While it may need to be supplemented by distribution of income and other information, it is a concrete measure of the economic output and incomes available to meet the material needs of society and advance standards of living.
I will concede that GDP is an imperfect measure of living standards, but as an objective measure of the contributions of the economy to living standards, it is a better measure than gross national happiness or any of the other measures that have been proposed. 这种长句很有感觉The question of whether it is a poor measure is directly related to the quality of alternatives.
I am reminded in this debate on GDP and standards of living of the debates on democracy as a form of government and Winston Churchill's famous words: "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
GDP may not (yet) measure the distribution of incomes, the effect of the economy on the environment, or the happiness of society, but it is an objective and measureable index of what the economy can contribute to standards of living. 对GDP的定性Taxes, public spending and transfer programmes play an important role in determining how GDP is distributed. But it is the level and growth of GDP that determine how much a nation can afford to spend on such things as housing, medical care, food, and other goods and services, as well as the alleviation 【缓和，减轻】of poverty, better schools, transport and pollution abatement【减轻缓和】.
Consider the alternatives. What would be the result of America and other developed economies following Bhutan and replacing GDP with gross national happiness? The main result would be a set of measures that do not change over time and thus are of little value in assessing the effect of specific events or policies.
Existing measures of happiness for the developed economies in Europe, America and Japan are virtually flat over the entire post-second-world-war era, with no significant increase over time despite real GDP per head in these countries more than tripling over this period (Landefeld and Villones, 2009). Except for the richest and poorest countries, there is little difference in recorded happiness. There is almost no variation to reflect wars, recessions, or natural disasters—each of which clearly has a material affect on these countries and their living standards. Yet they barely register on the existing happiness indices【index的负数】. The reality, as Mr Oswald pointed out, is that individuals adapt to changes in their circumstances and register little change in their happiness when their incomes or circumstances change—up or down【这种语言习惯o(╯□╰)o】. Or as one of the online "comments from the floor" points out, "our troglodyte forebears were doubtless just as happy as we are". Yet I feel certain that few Economist readers would choose to return to the standard of living, as measured by the level of goods and services, including medical care, available in the Cro-Magnon era. Interesting stuff, but not a tool that is likely to be helpful in guiding economic or other policies.
Other alternatives to GDP, such as the genuine progress indicator, suffer from the second fatal deficiency of subjective measures: the absence of an objective set of weights for aggregating and comparing the various indicators included in such measures. Without a widely accepted and objective means of weighting, it is impossible to provide an overall measure of a nation's progress in raising living standards. 用作对survey的批判中，很直接Without objective weights it is also not possible to compare the value of cleaning up the environment with the value of investments in early childhood education. Subjective weights from some new welfare-based index cannot take the place of the public debate and legislative processes necessary to the evaluation of such complex, multifaceted issues.
As an economist, and head of a statistical agency, I suggest that we in the field have no special expertise in developing subjective social weights, and that such weights would not be accepted by the public or legislative bodies as a reasonable substitute for political decision-making.
What would be helpful to public policy would be an extension of the existing GDP accounts to measure the economic effects of pollution control, health and other public programmes. An extension of the national accounts would use proxies 【代理】for market prices—the avoided costs of medical treatment associated with child health and environmental problems, the avoided work loss days from illness, and so on—to compare and aggregate. Such measures would be limited to the market effects of non-market programmes, and would need to be supplemented by explicit social and legislative judgments. But they would provide a consistent means of comparing the economic effects of such programmes. This is the appropriate contribution for economics to make.
A useful analogy 【类似的】for economic indicators is that of a car's dashboard. The speedometer, tachometer and fuel gauges are all important. Other dials tell you the temperature, how far you've travelled and how much oil you have. At any given time, these separate dials give you much of the information you need to drive your car, but you would never want to add up the readings on all the indicators and put them on one gauge. That would make no sense.
【很赞的例子，简单明了】
GDP is the economy's speedometer, measuring the growth rate of the economy. It's only one of several indicators. And other components of the GDP accounts represent many of the other dials.
To address some of the gaps in the existing dashboard, BEA is looking at adding new gauges to improve the existing dashboard, rather than developing a single new index that attempts to measure concepts as diverse as the distribution of income and sustainability. These plans are laid out in the paper "GDP and Beyond: Measuring Economic Progress and Sustainability" included in the background reading section of this debate site.
GDP may be an imperfect measure of living standards, but it is not a poor one, at least not in comparison to the alternatives.
Oh, and by the way—which dial on your car's dashboard do you look at the most?
Featured guest
As the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen said, "to discuss about indicators is a way to discuss about the ultimate goals of a society". This is why this debate is so important and can lead to a change in the way our societies work. We value what we measure and we measure what we value. For 50 years we have been focusing on GDP and several countries have been able to increase it and improve the living conditions of millions of people. More recently this process has interested billions of people.【在论述了成就之后转折】 But, at the same time, we know that the consumption patterns followed by developed countries cannot be replicated by the rest of the world, because of ecological limits that we had forgotten. We observe in several developed countries that the correlation between GDP and life satisfaction decreases or disappears beyond a certain level of income, but we also see how the current economic crisis hits millions of people around the world, showing that a decrease in GDP does not necessarily make people happier. So, what should we conclude?
Since 2003, as chief statistician at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), I have been involved in the debate on how to measure well-being and sustainability. After organising the first OECD World Forum on "Statistics, Knowledge and Policy" I established the Global Project on "Measuring the Progress of Societies" (see www.oecd.org/progress). Lastly, as a member of the Stiglitz Commission, I tried to contribute to this debate, stressing the need to measure societal progress going beyond GDP. But what does "societal progress" mean? And can we reach a consensual view of what constitutes progress?
On the first point, at the OECD we have defined "societal progress" as 【用于开头对概念的解释，可以是自己的】an increase in what we call "equitable and sustainable well-being". In our view, the principal dimensions of what, according to the most recent academic research, constitutes well-being (health, knowledge, material well-being, environment, personal relationships, and so on) need to be integrated with two cross-cutting dimensions: the first is intra-generational (equity); the second is inter-generational (sustainability). If we believe that all these dimensions matter for a good life, at individual and societal levels, it is clear that GDP cannot measure all of this. Fortunately, GDP is positively correlated with several good things, but not necessarily with all of them; in some cases, the correlation can be absent or negative. Furthermore, we have to recognise that it is not possible to aggregate all the necessary indicators to measure these dimensions into a single measure, expressed in monetary terms. Therefore, we can only conclude that measures of economic well-being (like GDP) should be complemented by other measures, which should be communicated to people as frequently and widely as GDP.
Unfortunately, for many years official statisticians have been investing their limited resources to refine GDP and other similar measures, instead of paying attention to the other dimensions of well-being. So, what we need is a reorientation of the research efforts towards these other measures, to rebalance the picture that official statistics provide. And media should do the same, to change the culture and focus of political discourse.
Fortunately, there is good news that make me optimistic. 【很好的开头】First, in several countries, a lot of good statistics on the other dimensions of well-being already exist; so these countries could do much better right now to inform citizens about the overall progress (or regress) of their communities and societies. Second, we discovered that there are hundreds of initiatives around the world, in developed and developing countries, where communities try to use the debate about indicators to develop a shared view of what to do to improve their societies, assembling indicators and communicating them to citizens. This is emerging as a possible new governance model for democracy in the "information age" and confirms the importance of this debate for our future. Third, there is a growing consensus among political leaders that a new model for the prosperity of our societies is needed therefore, we need better indicators to drive new policies and to make policymakers accountable.
All these elements show how this debate goes well beyond statistical issues and touches upon the demand for a future different from the one that the current crisis is stimulating. It is the perfect time to provide a concrete answer to this need and I believe that with a joint effort of statisticians and other scientists, media, civil society and policymakers we could improve the understanding of our world and, in doing that, contribute to improving it. 感觉很大众
The moderator's closing remarks
Apr 28th 2010 | Patrick Lane
We've nearly reached the end of this online debate. 【做结尾】The closing statements from both sides are in. During the rebuttal phase, we've had remarks from two guests: Enrico Giovannini, of Istat, and Michael Boskin, of the Hoover Institution. We'll hear from another guest, Keith Hennessey, who was director of the National Economic Council under George Bush, before we finish.
From the outset【开端】, a lot of the debate—especially on the floor—has centred on the meaning of two words in the motion: "living standards". In the rebuttal stage Aaron Goh put it this way: "The way the debate motion has been framed is not conducive for discussion. Whilst most of us (as shown by poll numbers) believe that the GDP is a poor measure of living standards, this does not detract from the fact that it does indeed do the job it was made to do—measure the growth in economic output in a country." XzvmSnMTef wrote: "Before trying to change the GDP indicator, it may be useful to discuss the very concept？
of ‘living standards' and well-being. If we don't know what it is, we can hardly measure it."
This focus on definition, I think, can be either a strength or a weakness in a debate. In this debate it's been a strength, on balance, because it invites us to think about what, exactly, we mean by living standards and hence what it is we are trying to measure. The obvious starting point is material. And because output, income and consumption are three points on the same circle of economic activity,【这个数据可以用】 GDP—an estimate of the output of the economy—is an obvious measure. If we stop there, the chief question is how well GDP captures material living standards.
As we've said before, we know GDP (or GDP per head) captures averages. Criticising it for not measuring the distribution of income is, depending on your point of view, either a killer point (of course distribution matters!) or beside the point (yes, distribution matters, but don't ditch GDP; add the Gini coefficient or the ratio of the 90th percentile of the income distribution to the 10th). Perhaps, if we limit ourselves to material living standards, the main omissions that should worry us are things not reflected in GDP that make us materially poorer or richer: a cleaner or dirtier environment, better or worse provision of public goods, and so forth. Important policy questions follow: does the pursuit of GDP growth lead not to higher living standards but to lower ones, because it comes at the expense of things we do not measure?
But should we stop there? Australian Actuary thinks we should, urging me to "get the debate back on track" and arguing that living standards and well-being are not the same thing. Many of you plainly think we shouldn't. We certainly get into deeper waters once we ask what the point of higher material living standards is. If the point is not to make us happy, or to improve our well-being, then what is it?
We're then asking a different question: does GDP make us better off, not just materially but in some broader sense? Many of you argue that this is all very well, but believe that happiness cannot be measured, or can be measured only subjectively. 【agree】Andrew Oswald disagrees, vigorously—and moreover, says that happiness and GDP do not walk hand in hand. He points to evidence that in rich countries GDP growth does not do those things: wealth makes us no happier. Few of you want to do away with GDP altogether. Just about all of you seem to think it should be supplemented. So does Steve Landefeld—although GDP would continue to get most of his attention.
The proposer's closing remarks
Apr 28th 2010 | Andrew Oswald
Steve Landefeld has not mentioned the modern research evidence that, in the first round, I listed for Economist readers. Moreover, most of the points made in Mr Landefeld's rebuttal are factually incorrect.
It may be useful to begin more broadly. My unspoken assumption, which it seems I will have to make explicit, has been that this debate is not about about whether GDP is a measure of GDP. Truisms do not need to be debated. Yet I feel that a lot of Mr Landefeld's arguments, and those of a few web commentators, have come close to that. We are instead debating something important—something that our grandchildren and great grandchildren will have to face.
The first reason to doubt that GDP is a useful measure is the evidence known as the Easterlin paradox (the empirical finding that countries do not become happier as they grow wealthier). Large numbers of researchers have doubted this, then looked at the data, then beaten the data, and then, often through gritted teeth, ended up accepting that Richard Easterlin's paradox really does show up in the numbers. A good example of such a study is that in the Journal of Development Economics by two distinguished researchers, Rafael Di Tella of Harvard and Robert MacCulloch of Imperial College London. The second reason is that global warming means it is necessary for homo sapiens to make fewer things rather than more, and to burn fewer of the fossil fuels that have fuelled, literally, the GDP race. I do find it frustrating that Mr Landefeld has not offered us an opinion on this. The third reason, and a twist in the intellectual story that is Mr Easterlin's work, is that, as I explained in the opening round—with listed references for anyone who does not know the modern literature—there is evidence that mental health and emotional prosperity are declining. 【真是长啊】The fourth reason is that the recent Stiglitz Commission has produced a weighty report saying: "A … unifying theme of the report is that the time is ripe for our measurement system to shift emphasis from measuring economic production to measuring people's well-being."
Let me try to swallow some of the medicine I recommended to my colleague—and address key points explicitly.
Point 1. "What would be the result of America and other developed economies following Bhutan and replacing GDP with gross national happiness? The main result would be a set of measures that do not change over time and thus are of little value in assessing the effect of specific events or policies."
I have not mentioned Bhutan. But it is simply false to say that the result would be a set of measures that do not change over time. Although Mr Landefeld appears not to have the read the research literature, we know that, for example, there are strong business cycle movements in nations' happiness and mental-health data. Read Justin Wolfers (2003) and Rafael Di Tella et al. (2001) and the ensuing literature. When unemployment rises, happiness falls. When inflation drops, happiness increases. And much else.
Point 2. "Except for the richest and poorest countries, there is little difference in recorded happiness."
This statement seems a strange one to me (except for the tallest people and the smallest people, humans are about the same height?) but insofar as it makes logical sense it is incorrect.
There are large differences in recorded happiness and life satisfaction across countries. Read the literature. Look at the scatter 【分散的】plots in the work of Betsey Stevenson and Mr Wolfers and a psychology literature going back decades. It would be amazing if this were not true; rich countries have democracy, public education systems, good public health systems, and so on. But the issue is whether AFTER a nation has those there is any real point in pushing up GDP.
Point 3. "… individuals adapt to changes in their circumstances and register little change in their happiness when their incomes or circumstances change—up or down. Or as one of the online ‘comments from the floor' points out, ‘our troglodyte forebears were doubtless just as happy as we are'."
The first of these is wrong; the second is somewhere between unknown and surely ridiculous. The new research literature on longitudinal data does not show that happiness is barely affected by changes. And the idea that cavemen and cavewomen were as happy as we are is silly and not consistent with any research evidence, known to me, on poor societies.
Point 4. "Subjective weights from some new welfare-based index cannot take the place of the public debate and legislative processes necessary to the evaluation of such complex, multifaceted issues."
By subjective I assume Mr Landefeld means human. Well, human weights are just what we do need. Moreover, Mr Landefeld does not appear to notice that GDP itself does not take the place of public debate and the legislative process; nor should it. So this is a red herring.
Point 5. "By the way—which dial on your car's dashboard do you look at the most?"
The milometer. I want to know whether I am going forward.
Western society is not.
Financial markets
Doing the hokey-cokey
Financial markets have been shaking it all about so far this year
May 13th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
TWO steps forward, two steps back. The financial markets have been conducting a strange dance so far in 2010. And after all that effort, by May 12th the MSCI index of global equities was virtually back where it had started the year.
The past two weeks have provided a perfect illustration of the markets’ frantic footwork. An astonishingly volatile session on Wall Street on May 6th saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunge by nearly 1,000 points at one stage (see article). But the announcement of the euro-zone bail-out package in the early hours of May 10th saw a violent rally, albeit one that only lasted 24 hours.
The markets’ stuttering performance reflects continuing confusion about the economic environment. On the positive side, the American economy appears to be recovering well and the first-quarter results season has showed rapid profits growth. Very low short-term interest rates also encourage investors to seek higher returns by moving into risky assets such as equities and corporate bonds.
There are negatives to set against this picture. European economies have been disappointing (first-quarter GDP growth was just 0.2% in the euro zone). Wall Street has become more jittery战战兢兢
thanks to the SEC’s fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and the likely shape of the financial-reform bill. And there are worries about how the steady tightening of Chinese monetary policy will affect the world’s fastest-growing big economy 这个怎么理解？经济体？.
Investors are also in two minds about fiscal policy. They would like governments to cut their deficits and they feared, before the European rescue package was revealed, that contagion from Greece would cause a financial crisis across the euro zone and even beyond.
But if investors want individual countries to tighten fiscal policy, they also worry about the impact of many developed countries doing so at once. As Greg Gibbs of the Royal Bank of Scotland wrote in a research note this week: “Imagine the carnage if major economies were forced from double-digit deficits to surplus, you are talking a Great Depression-type scenario or worse. Even getting close to that outcome is too bad to consider, so when borrowing costs start to rise, as they did recently in the euro-zone periphery, making borrowing difficult, the contagion spreads to equities and global asset markets.”
This debate highlights a tension at the heart of the rally that started in early 2009. The economy has been bolstered by government-stimulus programmes, packages that are enormous in scope but must be temporary in nature. If the economy is rebounding as normal, is all this official support really needed? And if the support is withdrawn, how will the economy cope?
As investors have grappled with this problem, there have been days when a bunch of assets known as the “risk trade” (equities, commodities, the Australian dollar) have gone up, and other days when risk-averse investors have bought a separate basket including government bonds and the American dollar. Over the past two weeks, the risk-trade basket has had the worst of it: the Australian dollar, for example, fell by 6% against the yen in the course of just four days.
Asset-allocation decisions are becoming more complex, too. In 2008 and 2009 investors earned big money if they made the correct calls on buying equities versus corporate bonds, or on favouring mining shares, say, over financial stocks. The euro-zone crisis has emphasised that they now also need to worry more about country and currency risk.
The clearest measure of recent investor uncertainty is the VIX or volatility index, traded on the Chicago Board Options Exchange. In effect, this index shows the price investors are willing to pay to insure themselves against substantial market moves. Having declined pretty steadily since the middle of 2009, the index more than doubled in early May (see chart).
The only asset that has steadily inched higher in price this year has been gold, which reached a record closing price of $1,237 an ounce on May 12th. Bullion is seen as a two-way bet. It acts as a haven for risk-averse investors and as a hedge against the risk that governments will be tempted to inflate away their debts, a risk that is perceived to have increased after the European Central Bank agreed to buy euro-zone government bonds as part of this week’s rescue package.
In a sense, this period of market consolidation was inevitable. Stockmarkets rose in almost a straight line from March 2009, as fears of a further meltdown in the financial sector receded and the global economy hit bottom. As a result, share-price valuations moved from being slightly cheap on the best long-term measure (the cyclically-adjusted price-earnings ratio) to expensive. The spread (excess interest rate) on high-yield corporate bonds has fallen from more than 16 percentage points at the start of 2009 to less than six points. The Economist’s own commodity-price index rose by 54% between its low at the end of 2008 and late April. Such prolonged rallies do not continue indefinitely.
Chris Watling of Longview Economics says that this is a classic “phase two” of a cyclical bull market, in which investors take stock after an initial rally. Much remains unclear about the economic and political outlook, from the likely direction of monetary and fiscal policy to the impact of additional government regulation on economic growth and profits. The slowdown in quantitative-easing programmes (under which central banks created money to buy assets) may also have deprived the markets of crucial liquidity support. It would have been more surprising if the markets had not paused for breath.
conducting a strange dance
Fair trade or free trade
This house believes that making trade fairer is more important than making it freer.
About this debate
Driven in part by a progressive lowering of barriers to trade in both rich and developing countries, global trade expanded faster in the decades leading up to the crisis than the global economy grew. Economists argue that free trade makes everyone better off, allowing more, and more varied, goods, and lower prices, than would otherwise be possible. Some also argue that it leads to faster economic growth and less poverty.
Some critics of free trade argue, however, that its supposed benefits for poor people and developing countries are illusory. [用来表示不切实际]Trade, they say, benefits rich countries at the expense of poor ones, increasing inequality between nations. Others say that it hurts rich-country workers, particularly the less skilled, thus increasing economic equality within rich countries. All would rather that the world concentrate its efforts on making trade "fairer" rather than further attempt to reduce trade barriers.
What does the balance of the evidence say? What does it actually mean to make trade fairer? Fairer for whom? Must the two goals be mutually exclusive? These are some of the questions this debate will tackle.
Fare well, free trade
With the global economy facing its worst recession in decades, protectionism is a growing risk
Dec 18th 2008 | From The Economist print edition
Illustration by David Simonds
THIS Christmas the world economy offers few reasons for good cheer. As credit contracts and asset prices plunge, demand across the globe is shrivelling. Rich countries collectively face the severest recession since the second world war: this week’s cut in the target for the federal funds rate to between zero and 0.25% (see article) shows how fearful America’s policymakers are. And conditions are deteriorating fast too in emerging economies, which have been whacked by tumbling exports and the drying-up of foreign finance.
This news is bad enough in itself; but it also poses the biggest threat to open markets in the modern era of globalisation. For the first time in more than a generation, two of the engines of global integration—trade and capital flows—are simultaneously shifting into reverse. The World Bank says that net private capital flows to emerging economies in 2009 are likely to be only half the record $1 trillion of 2007, while global trade volumes will shrink for the first time since 1982 (see article).
This twin shift will force wrenching adjustments. Countries that have relied on exports to drive growth, from China to Germany, will slump unless they can boost domestic demand quickly. The flight of private capital means emerging economies with current-account deficits face a drought of financing as well as export earnings. There is a risk that in their discomfort governments turn to an old, but false, friend: protectionism. Integration has less appeal when pain rather than prosperity is ricocheting across borders. It will be tempting to prop up domestic jobs and incomes by diverting demand from abroad with export subsidies, tariffs and cheaper currencies.
The lessons of history, though, are clear. The economic isolationism of the 1930s, epitomised by America’s Smoot-Hawley tariff (see article), cruelly intensified the Depression. To be sure, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and its multilateral trading rules are a bulwark against protection on that scale. But today’s globalised economy, with far-flung supply chains and just-in-time delivery, could be disrupted by policies much less dramatic than the Smoot-Hawley act. A modest shift away from openness—well within the WTO’s rules—would be enough to turn the recession of 2009 much nastier. Incremental protection of that sort is, alas, all too plausible.
Fair-weather free-traders
In many countries politicians’ fealty to open markets is already more rhetorical than real. In November the leaders of the G20 group of big rich and emerging economies promised to eschew any new trade barriers for a year and to work hard for agreement on the Doha round of trade talks by the end of December. Within days, two of the G20 countries, Russia and India, raised tariffs on cars and steel respectively. And the year is ending with no Doha breakthrough in sight.
As economies weaken, popular skepticism of open markets will surely grow. Among rich countries, that danger is greatest in America, where grumbles were heard long before recession set in. The new Congress, with bigger Democratic majorities, has a decidedly less trade-friendly hue. Barack Obama’s campaign rhetoric left an impression of a man in two minds about trade, which he has since done nothing to dispel.
Now that their exports are faltering, emerging economies too may become less keen on trade. The WTO’s rules allow them plenty of scope: after two decades of unilateral tariff-cutting most of their tariffs are well below their “bound” rates, the ceilings agreed in the trade club. On average they could triple their import levies without breaking the rules.
Handouts to the ready
Politicians from Washington to Beijing are being pressed to help troubled industries, regardless of the consequences for trade. A bail-out of Detroit’s carmakers, whatever its final extent, will be a discriminatory subsidy. As China’s exporters go bust by the thousand, industries from textiles to steel have been promised handouts and rebates. Subsidies will beget more subsidies: Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, says that Europe will turn into an “industrial wasteland” if it too does not prop up its manufacturers. They will also invite retaliation. With China’s bilateral trade surplus at a record high even as America’s economy slumps, Congress will not take kindly to Beijing’s bolstering of its exporters.
Exchange-rate movements could also prompt protectionist responses. Chinese officials have said publicly that they will not push down the yuan, and their currency has risen in trade-weighted terms. However, it did slip against the dollar in late November. Viewed from America, China still seems to be following a cheap-yuan policy. A Sino-American trade spat is all too plausible.
Add all this together and it is hard for a free-trader not to worry. So what is to be done? The first requirement is political leadership, especially from America and China. At a minimum, both must avoid beggar-thy-neighbour policies. Second, a conclusion of the Doha round would help. A deal would reduce the risk of broader backsliding by cutting many countries’ bound tariffs—and it would establish Mr Obama’s multilateral credentials. Third—Doha deal or not—is greater transparency. A good recent idea is that the WTO publicise any new barriers, whether or not they are allowed by its rules.
The best insurance against protectionism, however, is macroeconomic stimulus. Boosting demand at home will reduce the temptation to divert it from abroad. By historical standards policymakers are acting aggressively, as the Federal Reserve did this week. But the effort is unevenly, and poorly, distributed. Emerging economies from which capital is fleeing have little room to boost spending. Some creditor countries (notably Germany) are holding back on fiscal stimulus, while the world’s biggest borrower (America) is acting the most boldly. A bigger push to boost domestic demand in creditor countries coupled with more help, through the IMF, to cushion cash-strapped emerging economies would ease the world economy’s adjustment and brighten the prospects for free trade. In the 1930s protectionism flourished largely because of macroeconomic failures. That must not happen this time.
表程度增加减少是词~~~
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