决战1010精英组Economist阅读汇——yuanlinqinggre 分贴

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The celebrity（名人） effect

The magical effect of putting a famous face on a company's board

Mar 30th 2010 | From The Economist online

IN MARCH 1998 the Coca-Cola Bottling Company announced the appointment of a most unlikely new director to its board: Evander Holyfield, a former heavyweight boxing champion (pictured above), best-known for having part of his ear bitten off in a bout by a fellow boxer, Mike Tyson. He was not the only top athlete at the time with a seat in the boardroom: Michael Jordan, a celebrated basketball player, was a director of Oakley, a sunglasses manufacturer. Other sports stars to try their hand at directing corporate America in the past 25 years include Billie Jean King, a tennis player appointed to the board of Altria (then called Philip Morris) in 1999 and Nancy Lopez, a golfer, who became a director of J.M. Smucker, a jam-maker, in 2006.

Boards have also recruited from（招募、征召） the ranks of Hollywood. Disney appointed Sidney Poitier to its board in 1994, for example. Deepak Chopra, an author and lifestyle guru（权威，教师）, was recruited to the board of Men’s Wearhouse, a suit retailer, in 2004. Stretching the definition of celebrity a bit, General “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf was appointed a director by the Home Shopping Network in 1996. And you can take your pick（挑选） from scores of（许多，大量[以后就不要用lot of 了]） politicians-turned-directors, including Al Gore, a former vice-president and a member of Apple’s board since 2003.

Gerald Ford was a particularly enthusiastic collector of boardroom seats after he left the White House. While on the board of American Express he stunned（使惊吓） his fellow directors by asking Harvey Golub, the chief executive at the time, to explain the difference between “equity” and “revenue”, according to Vicky Ward’s new book on Lehman Brothers, “The Devil’s Casino”.（According 的用法得到了充分的展示） This was perhaps not so surprising for a man Lyndon Johnson once said had “played too much football with his helmet off”. But it prompts a broader thought about why companies recruit celebrity directors.

Michael Eisner, the boss of Disney when Mr Poitier joined the board, may have been right to say that the actor’s “talent is more than screen deep,” and that his “election to our board brings us not only his exhaustive knowledge of the entertainment industry but the judgment and wisdom of an exceptional（出众的/英文原意是 not ordinary or average） man.” Even so, it would seem a reasonable assumption that the lack of business nous displayed by the late President Ford is more typical of the celebrity in the boardroom. So what is the point of having them?

Simply having a celebrity on board boosts(v.提高，增加) the share price for years

Because they increase the value of the firms whose boards they join, apparently. According to “Reaching for the Stars: The Appointment of Celebrities to Corporate Boards”, a new study by four American-based economists, simply announcing that a celebrity is joining a board gives the company’s share price a boost (n.可以和increase 等替换). Disney’s share price jumped（在这里可以理解为上升【ECO用此果然犀利】） by 4.2% on the day Mr Poitier was appointed. But, for the more than 700 celebrity director appointments (out of over 70,000 board appointments in all) that the study examines during 1985-2006, the firms’ shares continued to outperform（表现出色） significantly over the subsequent one, two and three years.

Why is this? In some cases—a former president, say—powerful connections and the ability to open the right doors were surely a factor. And, as Mr Eisner claimed of Mr Poitier, some celebrities may bring relevant experience (the study muddies the waters somewhat by including several famous business people, such as Rupert Murdoch and Martha Stewart, within its definition of celebrity). On average, the study found a bigger impact on share prices when celebrity directors had “related” experience than when they had none. Yet “unrelated” celebrity directors had a bigger impact on share prices than unrelated non-celebrities.

Institutional investors are especially prone to（prone 倾向于【与prostrate区分开】）the “visibility effect” a star brings

To explain this, the economists point to the “visibility effect”—that appointing a celebrity helps draw the attention of investors to a company which, all else being equal (可用于比较两件事物时) , increases demand for its shares and thus its share price.（increase … and thus …【筒子们可以把这个increase 换成其他的用在作文里】） Certainly, a celebrity director seems to increase the proportion of a firm’s shares bought by institutional investors (whom the economists think are especially prone to the visibility effect both directly and as a result of the greater attention paid by stock market analysts).

So, should companies respond to this study by picking a few directors at random from the pages of People magazine, or beating a path to Brangelina Towers? It might work, at least for a while. On the other hand, surely sooner or later investors will realize that(可用于描述迟早要发生的事。【以前一直用。。。will surely happen】) if the appointment of a director who has nothing to offer but a famous name boosts a firm’s share price, it delivers a damning verdict（判决，决定） on the value of the rest of the board. Rather than a reason to cheer, perhaps the celebrity effect on companies’ shares should be seen instead as an indicator that boards are failing to do their job properly and that（用于衔接两个句子十分的合适） they contribute little in return for their generous pay.（rather that a N to …, …should be seen/regarded/… instead as ……一件事应该被看做。。。而不不该被当做。。。） Or indeed those professional investors, who ought to know better, are as star struck (追星族) as the readers of gossip magazines.


文章观点如下：
招募名人进入董事会的确会对股价有着积极地影响，但是仅仅招募那些与公司所作业务无关的名人，那么只能说明董事会没有好好履行他的职责。


新手上路，多多指正。

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

悲剧了颜色都没了。。。晚上修改

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

World Wide Wait
The faster the internet becomes, the slower it loads pages
Feb 12th 2010 | From The Economist online


EVER noticed how long it takes for web pages to load these days? You click on a link and wait and wait, and then wait some more, for the content to trickle in. If nothing has happened after ten seconds or so, your impatient correspondent hits the browser’s stop button followed by the reload key. In desperation, he sometimes loads the link into a second or even a third browser tab as well, and bombards（炮轰【红宝里面是名词形式】） the website’s server with multiple requests for the page. If that fails, he gives up in disgust and reads a newspaper instead.

Back in the early days of the internet, when most web users relied on dial-up connections, browsers were crude（粗糙的） and web graphics were clumsy（笨拙的） GIF files, eight seconds was considered the maximum people would stick around for a page to load. To increase “stickiness”, web designers pared（削减） their HTML code to the bone, collated their style-sheet data and JavaScripts into single files for more efficient caching（原型应该是cache 储藏处，储藏
在这里是高速缓存之意） elsewhere on the web, used fewer graphics and embraced the PNG and JPEG picture formats, with their smaller file sizes, as soon as they became available.（只要。。。。） Compared with text, pictures really were the equivalent（等价物） of 1,000 words, at least when it came to the time taken to transmit them.（at least when it came to..至少在考虑到。。的时候）

Shutter stock When your correspondent hand-coded The Economist’s first website back in 1994, a typical web page was about 50 kilobytes in size and dial-up modems could transfer no more than three kilobytes a second. To stay under the “eight-second rule”, pictures were kept to a minimum, so no page took more than three or four seconds to begin loading and never longer than 20 seconds to complete. The irony is that, with broadband nowadays more or less everywhere, overall connection speeds have gone up by leaps and bounds, yet the time taken to load web pages seems only to have got longer.(the irony is that, with…(提供大背景)，…, yet….)

Your correspondent is admittedly（表让步） near the end of the road for a digital subscriber line (DSL) connection. But even at three miles (5km) from the local telephone exchange, the speed of his broadband connection has inched up over the past few years from 65 kilobytes a second to more than 90 kilobytes a second—as (providing) the local line has been tweaked（开足马力） and legacy equipment like echo-canceling coils removed from its junction boxes.

Sure, he could get 650 kilobytes a second or more from a cable connection. But that would mean ditching his otherwise excellent satellite-TV service. Besides, optical fibre（光纤） is slowly working its way up his hillside. He could soon have access to the internet at more than six megabytes a second—providing he is prepared to pay $140 a month instead of $21 for his existing DSL connection.(表前提条件，这种后置的条件可以放在Argument 里面吧)

A 70-fold increase in speed for a sevenfold increase in price would seem a bargain. But your correspondent is not sure that more raw speed will solve the glacial loading problem. Even with his wimpy（无用的） DSL connection, pages are rendered quickly enough once（只要，可以与providing/as 替换么？） the website’s servers (and all the other computers along the route, plus those used to host adverts, graphics and miscellaneous layout bits) start giving his browser’s request some attention. The trouble is getting their attention in the first place.

Before two computers can exchange information, they have to agree to talk to one another. Under normal conditions, this requires the user’s computer to send a request to the host computer, which then sends a response back to the user. Only after this “handshaking” is complete can the exchange of data commence.(only …. can…倒装)
The time taken for this round-trip of request and acknowledgment determines the network’s latency.

The latency cannot be less than the distance the electromagnetic signal has to travel divided by the speed of light. For instance, your correspondent’s home in Los Angeles is 400 miles from a colleague’s in San Francisco. In theory, then, the shortest round-trip between the two locations is 4.3 milliseconds. But if you “ping” the other computer, you’ll get a round-trip time of typically 700 milliseconds. That is still pretty quick, but it shows just how much time is spent waiting around for the various servers involved to handle the request.

There are many places along the way where the message can get bogged down. Queues can build up at routing servers that switch data packages along different routes to their destinations depending on the traffic. Worst of all, the DNS (Domain Name Server) computers used by your ISP can be overwhelmed as（与when 相互替代） they try to translate the names of all the websites subscribers want to visit (say, www.economist.com) into their actual internet addresses (216.35.68.215). If you know it, try using the website’s numerical address rather than its verbose URL (Universal Resource Locator) name. That can sometimes halve the response time.

The bottlenecks—whether at the DNS translators, the routing computers or the host’s own servers—stem largely from the way the mix of internet traffic has changed faster than the infrastructure used to carry it. Websites that were once just 50 kilobytes of text and tiny pictures now come with music, video and animated graphics. YouTube, Hulu, iTunes and BitTorrent have much to answer for.

It is even worse on the mobile phone companies’ proprietary networks. Carriers are struggling to keep up with demand as subscribers use their smart-phones to check Facebook, stream videos from YouTube and play interactive games. Where a mid-range smart-phone would consume about 100 megabytes of data a month, more advanced models like the Apple iPhone or Motorola Droid, with fully fledged（羽翼丰满的） browsers and access to thousands of downloadable applications, tend to consume over 500 megabytes a month. With the imminent（即将来临的，可以和coming 替换） arrival of tablet computers like the iPad, which come with wireless modems, the appetite for downloadable data could hit（在这里可以和reach 替换【Eco的用词果然犀利啊】） a gigabyte a month (see the lead story in this week’s Business section).

And this is just the beginning. On the internet, the average latency for corporate websites in America is currently around 350ms, according to the Network Weather Report operated by the University of California, Los Angeles. Google’s latency is 150ms, Facebook’s 285ms and YouTube’s 515ms. Such latencies will have to come down considerably if the next generation of internet applications, such as telepresence, high-definition video streaming and remote surgery, are to fulfill their promise.

The future is beckoning.（未来是令人心动的/未来正在召唤） Net flix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound.

For the internet service providers, that means stepping up investment substantially. But adding a lot more routers to the internet would complicate matters hugely and do little to solve the latency problem. If anything, it would actually increase the number of potential bottlenecks.（。。。最多会有。。。效果）


A better solution might be to light up more of the “dark fibre” installed during the heady days of the dotcom boom, but left lying unused beneath the streets since the bubble burst nearly a decade ago. That is what a number of securities firms have been quietly doing. When shaving a millisecond off the time needed to execute automated trades can increase revenue by $100m, there is plenty of incentive to（十分有动机去做。。）build private optical networks with latencies approaching zero.

Indeed, Google said this week that it was not going to hang around waiting for the telecoms industry to build the new optical web. The company is planning a low-latency fibre network that will be capable of delivering speeds of over 100 megabytes a second for communities of 50,000-500,000 people. With luck, other internet service providers everywhere will get the message.


EVER noticed how long it takes for web pages to load these days? You click on a link and wait and wait, and then wait some more, for the content to trickle in. If nothing has happened after ten seconds or so, your impatient correspondent hits the browser’s stop button followed by the reload key. In desperation, he sometimes loads the link into a second or even a third browser tab as well, and bombards（炮轰【红宝里面是名词形式】） the website’s server with multiple requests for the page. If that fails, he gives up in disgust and reads a newspaper instead.

Back in the early days of the internet, when most web users relied on dial-up connections, browsers were crude（粗糙的） and web graphics were clumsy（笨拙的） GIF files, eight seconds was considered the maximum people would stick around for a page to load. To increase “stickiness”, web designers pared（削减） their HTML code to the bone, collated their style-sheet data and JavaScripts into single files for more efficient caching（原型应该是cache 储藏处，储藏
在这里是高速缓存之意） elsewhere on the web, used fewer graphics and embraced the PNG and JPEG picture formats, with their smaller file sizes, as soon as they became available.（只要。。。。） Compared with text, pictures really were the equivalent（等价物） of 1,000 words, at least when it came to the time taken to transmit them.（at least when it came to..至少在考虑到。。的时候）

Shutter stock When your correspondent hand-coded The Economist’s first website back in 1994, a typical web page was about 50 kilobytes in size and dial-up modems could transfer no more than three kilobytes a second. To stay under the “eight-second rule”, pictures were kept to a minimum, so no page took more than three or four seconds to begin loading and never longer than 20 seconds to complete. The irony is that, with broadband nowadays more or less everywhere, overall connection speeds have gone up by leaps and bounds, yet the time taken to load web pages seems only to have got longer.(the irony is that, with…(提供大背景)，…, yet….)

Your correspondent is admittedly（表让步） near the end of the road for a digital subscriber line (DSL) connection. But even at three miles (5km) from the local telephone exchange, the speed of his broadband connection has inched up over the past few years from 65 kilobytes a second to more than 90 kilobytes a second—as (providing) the local line has been tweaked（开足马力） and legacy equipment like echo-canceling coils removed from its junction boxes.

Sure, he could get 650 kilobytes a second or more from a cable connection. But that would mean ditching his otherwise excellent satellite-TV service. Besides, optical fibre（光纤） is slowly working its way up his hillside. He could soon have access to the internet at more than six megabytes a second—providing he is prepared to pay $140 a month instead of $21 for his existing DSL connection.(表前提条件，这种后置的条件可以放在Argument 里面吧)

A 70-fold increase in speed for a sevenfold increase in price would seem a bargain. But your correspondent is not sure that more raw speed will solve the glacial loading problem. Even with his wimpy（无用的） DSL connection, pages are rendered quickly enough once（只要，可以与providing/as 替换么？） the website’s servers (and all the other computers along the route, plus those used to host adverts, graphics and miscellaneous layout bits) start giving his browser’s request some attention. The trouble is getting their attention in the first place.

Before two computers can exchange information, they have to agree to talk to one another. Under normal conditions, this requires the user’s computer to send a request to the host computer, which then sends a response back to the user. Only after this “handshaking” is complete can the exchange of data commence.(only …. can…倒装)
The time taken for this round-trip of request and acknowledgment determines the network’s latency.

The latency cannot be less than the distance the electromagnetic signal has to travel divided by the speed of light. For instance, your correspondent’s home in Los Angeles is 400 miles from a colleague’s in San Francisco. In theory, then, the shortest round-trip between the two locations is 4.3 milliseconds. But if you “ping” the other computer, you’ll get a round-trip time of typically 700 milliseconds. That is still pretty quick, but it shows just how much time is spent waiting around for the various servers involved to handle the request.

There are many places along the way where the message can get bogged down. Queues can build up at routing servers that switch data packages along different routes to their destinations depending on the traffic. Worst of all, the DNS (Domain Name Server) computers used by your ISP can be overwhelmed as（与when 相互替代） they try to translate the names of all the websites subscribers want to visit (say, www.economist.com) into their actual internet addresses (216.35.68.215). If you know it, try using the website’s numerical address rather than its verbose URL (Universal Resource Locator) name. That can sometimes halve the response time.

The bottlenecks—whether at the DNS translators, the routing computers or the host’s own servers—stem(阻碍） largely from the way the mix of internet traffic has changed faster than the infrastructure used to carry it. Websites that were once just 50 kilobytes of text and tiny pictures now come with music, video and animated graphics. YouTube, Hulu, iTunes and BitTorrent have much to answer for.

It is even worse on the mobile phone companies’ proprietary networks. Carriers are struggling to keep up with demand as subscribers use their smart-phones to check Facebook, stream videos from YouTube and play interactive games. Where a mid-range smart-phone would consume about 100 megabytes of data a month, more advanced models like the Apple iPhone or Motorola Droid, with fully fledged（羽翼丰满的） browsers and access to thousands of downloadable applications, tend to consume over 500 megabytes a month. With the imminent（即将来临的，可以和coming 替换） arrival of tablet computers like the iPad, which come with wireless modems, the appetite for downloadable data could hit（在这里可以和reach 替换【Eco的用词果然犀利啊】） a gigabyte a month (see the lead story in this week’s Business section).

And this is just the beginning. On the internet, the average latency for corporate websites in America is currently around 350ms, according to the Network Weather Report operated by the University of California, Los Angeles. Google’s latency is 150ms, Facebook’s 285ms and YouTube’s 515ms. Such latencies will have to come down considerably if the next generation of internet applications, such as telepresence, high-definition video streaming and remote surgery, are to fulfill their promise.

The future is beckoning.（未来是令人心动的/未来正在召唤） Net flix has just announced an on-demand video-streaming service offering full high-definition picture quality (so-called 1080p, which has 1,080 lines in its picture) with 5.1-channel surround sound. Each stream being watched will require a megabyte a second of bandwidth and a latency of less than 60ms if it is to deliver crisp, pin-sharp video and pristine sound.

For the internet service providers, that means stepping up investment substantially. But adding a lot more routers to the internet would complicate matters hugely and do little to solve the latency problem. If anything, it would actually increase the number of potential bottlenecks.（。。。最多会有。。。效果）


A better solution might be to light up more of the “dark fibre” installed during the heady days of the dotcom boom, but left lying unused beneath the streets since the bubble burst nearly a decade ago. That is what a number of securities firms have been quietly doing. When shaving a millisecond off the time needed to execute automated trades can increase revenue by $100m, there is plenty of incentive to（十分有动机去做。。）build private optical networks with latencies approaching zero.

Indeed, Google said this week that it was not going to hang around waiting for the telecoms industry to build the new optical web. The company is planning a low-latency fibre network that will be capable of delivering speeds of over 100 megabytes a second for communities of 50,000-500,000 people. With luck, other internet service providers everywhere will get the message.

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

A matter of life and death
Setbacks for opponents of capital punishment(极刑), but they are making more progress than meets the eye
Mar 25th 2010 | From The Economist print edition


BELIEVERS in “progress”, or at least those of a mutton-chopped, European variety, hold to a kind of ascent of man. First comes spreading prosperity. Then representative government replaces tyranny（暴政）. Finally, notions of human rights, social justice and the fallibility of the state extend even to death row, and the judicial terror of capital punishment is ditched(确立). Last year was the first in Europe’s recorded history in which not one person was executed.

On the face of it Asia stacks up not at all well against this achievement.（与。。争胜负） The region accounts for just over half the world’s population. Prosperity has spread, and representative government. But in its application of the death penalty, Asia leads the world. Some 95% of Asians live in jurisdictions that carry out capital punishment, and Asia accounts for over three-quarters of executions worldwide.

South Korea has not carried out a death sentence in 13 years. Yet in late February the Constitutional Court ruled that the death penalty as prescribed（规定） in the criminal code did not violate the constitution. This alarms the country’s legal scholars. The 110-odd crimes qualifying for the death penalty include corporate offences and “criminal ideological violations”—a throwback to South Korea’s dictatorial days.

And this month in Taiwan the justice minister, Wang Ching-feng, suddenly resigned. A Buddhist, she fiercely protected the lives of 44 death-row convicts. The president, Ma Ying-jeou, a former Harvard law student, was also thought to oppose capital punishment. But his party, the Kuomintang, is sagging(下降) in popularity before year-end elections. Miss Wang’ s stance cost her her job. On March 22nd a new justice minister was sworn in, hinting that the official killing would begin again.

Yet dig a little deeper, and the picture looks different, even hopeful. In December the UN General Assembly votes on calling for a global moratorium（暂停，中止） on capital punishment. Abolitionists lobbying（游说） Asian governments will find a better reception than you might think. Naturally, Asian statistics are skewed by China, alone accounting for over nine-tenths of all Asian executions. But even Chinese executions have seen a precipitous（急转直下的） fall. A best guess is that 5,000 were executed in 2008, giving a rate per head of population dozens of times higher than the United States. Yet this represents a drop of two-thirds from a decade earlier.

China’s penchant（倾向） for execution is explained by a dictatorship which has a low regard for citizens’ rights and uses violence as an instrument of state power. But an official policy of “kill less, kill carefully” is taking root. All capital cases now have to be reviewed by the Supreme Court, which is said to approve only a tenth of cases, a remarkable change, if true. So even in China development seems to have bred a less punitive（刑罚的） state. Perhaps a human-rights dialogue between China and the EU, long derided by liberal critics, is actually doing some good.

Another populous country, India, is also “retentionist”, but from 1999 to 2008 it executed just one man. For Asia as a whole, according to David Johnson and Franklin Zimring writing in the online Asia-Pacific Journal, 16 out of 29 jurisdictions have abolished the death penalty, either definitively or in fact, whereas 13 retain it.
（according to … , …,whereas…可以用于对比句型）
In January Mongolia, with a history of murky（阴郁的,黑暗的） executions, was the latest to declare a moratorium. The death penalty, said President Tsakhia Elbegdorj, was an act of state violence that ran the risk of irrevocable error, and neither deterred criminals nor restored justice to victims’ families.

Even in South Korea and Taiwan, there is probably no profound change of course. Both democracies emerged from mid-century authoritarian rule marked by an orgy of judicial and extra-judicial killings. These are now in the past: one democratic president of South Korea, the late Kim Dae-jung, was himself sentenced to death in 1980, before reprieve（缓刑）. NGOs now lobby for convicts’ rights, and lawyers argue that the issue is not between death-row convicts and the rest of the citizenry but of overweening state power over all.

Like nearly all countries considering abolition, in Taiwan people are overwhelmingly against it, but abolitionists, including Mr Ma’s former Harvard professors, hoped the president would lead from the front. Both countries are concerned about their international reputation, including among Europeans. And each is in soft-power competition for legitimacy with a bloody, authoritarian rival. Before too long, both may fall into the abolitionist camp.

Rich, plural（复数的） and cruel
Outliers remain. Until recently, rich, sophisticated, peaceable Singapore killed as high a proportion of its population as does China. And in Japan executions have risen sharply in recent years. Quite apart from（可用于是。。。而不是。。。） known miscarriages（处理不当） of justice, the country’s penal habits are chilling（令人恐惧的）. Its death-row inmates, in solitary confinement, are allowed few visits from family or lawyers. They must sit all day on their bed, with rules dictating even their postures, and may not look their guards in the eye. After waiting usually years, they are hung, always during a parliamentary recess（休息）, with only a couple of hours’ notice, with the family informed only when it is told to pick up the body. With high rates of mental illness from the stress, this is bureaucratic killing at its cruellest.

How to explain these exceptions to the model of “progress”? Perhaps, Mr Johnson and Mr Zimring argue, by realising that both countries, although structurally pluralistic democracies, have long been in practice under one-party rule. But recently executions in Singapore have fallen by nine-tenths. In Japan the fall from power last year of the Liberal Democratic Party may signal change. The new justice minister, for one, is an abolitionist and has signed no death warrants. Asia has yet to prove those old European dreamers wrong.

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

Tweets（消息，讯息） and sours
Rumours test the voters’ indifference to their leaders’ private lives
Apr 8th 2010 | PARIS | From The Economist print edition


IT ALL began on Twitter. Next, it appeared in a blog posting on a newspaper website. Now it has the makings of a mini-affair of state. A rumor about the presidential couple’s alleged extramarital（婚外的） romances has for weeks been met by（以。。。方式被对待） official silence and by disdain in France’s traditional media. This week, however, a presidential adviser talked of an “organised plot（阴谋）” to destabilize（使动摇） Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni. His lawyer said a judicial inquiry was looking into whether the original author had been “manipulated”. Even Ms Bruni chipped in（插嘴）, though to play down talk of a plot. At a stroke, parlous tittle-tattle(闲聊，杂谈) has become a legitimate news subject, testing the limits of privacy, free expression on the internet—and voters’ tradition of indifference to public figures’ private lives.

Denouncing（谴责） the stories as “totally unfounded”, Thierry Herzog, Mr Sarkozy’s lawyer, suggested that “somebody is behind the
propagation of these rumors”. It appears that they started as idle tweets that were picked up by the foreign press only after they were referred to in a blog on the Journal du Dimanche’s website. The Paris public prosecutor is now investigating, after the group that owns the newspaper filed a lawsuit for “fraudulent（欺骗性的） entry of information into a computer system”. Two people at the group’s website subsidiary have “resigned”.

Claims and counter-claims（反诉反索偿反要求） are flying. Pierre Charon, an adviser to Mr Sarkozy, hinted at “financial movements” behind the plot. One minister muttered（咕哝，低声抱怨） darkly about efforts to destabilize France ahead of its presidency of the G20 later this year. In an abrupt move, Rachida Dati, a former justice minister who fell out of favour with Mr Sarkozy, was deprived of (被夺去) the chauffeur-driven car she had hung on to despite leaving her job to become a member of the European Parliament. This week she described as “scandalous” reports that she might have been behind the rumors.

French tradition, combined with the country’s strong privacy laws, once dictated that the public interest stopped at the bedroom door—even when newsrooms were in the know（知情的）. François Mitterrand kept secret for years a daughter he had out of wedlock（已婚状况） and then lodged at the state’s expense. Today, however, those rules have been thrown out. The growth of an American-style celebrity culture has raised the pressure to publish first and pay the penalty later. With tight privacy laws, public figures often sue even when a story is true. François Baroin, the new budget minister, is suing Paris Match for splashing a picture of him and an actress on a recent cover. Celebrity magazines, says one editor, simply build the (relatively low) cost of fines into their budgets.

Unlike Mr Baroin, Mr Sarkozy has blurred the line between his public and private lives. He campaigned for election with photos of himself and his then wife, Cécilia, jogging on the beach and playing football with their son. It is hard for him to ask for privacy as he did when divorcing and remarrying while in office. Bloggers and tweeters, who tend to disregard such niceties as proof or accuracy, make enforcement of the privacy laws harder.

As French journalists agonize, does the public care? Perhaps not; as many as 92% of respondents to one poll said that Mr Sarkozy’s divorce made no difference to their opinion of him. And 79% said it was of no importance to political life.

我觉得这篇文章可以很好的应用的PRIVACY 有关的那篇ISSUE里面去。
通过阅读本文，我对Celebrity Privacy 有以下看法：
1. 每个人的隐私都是神圣不可侵犯的，但是这是在不违反相关法律的情况下才成立。同样，对于公众人物来说也是如此。他们的隐私同样需要被保护，与此同时，因为他们自身的公众影响力，他们也应该受到公众的监督。
1) 人的隐私是需要被保护（-）
2）公众人物的隐私同样不可侵犯，这是人与生俱来的权利，不能因为他是公众人物，其隐私就能够被践踏。 可举出：法国有严格保护人隐私的例子。以及François Baroin, the new budget minister, is suing Paris Match for splashing a picture of him and an actress on a recent cover. Celebrity magazines, says one editor, simply build the (relatively low) cost of fines into their budgets.（-）名人们是可以索赔或者提起诉讼（claim/prosecute）
3）然而，鉴于公众人物的社会影响力，他们的行为同样需要受到社会舆论的监督，当然这是在法律允许的范围内的。例如，一个明星会对青少年的行为起到关键性的影响。如果他们吸食毒品以及生活不检点的话，孩子们也会学会这些不良行为。又例如，政治家利用自己的职位之便牟取私利是同样不受到法律保护的。（+）

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A for effort, C for attainment
Labour’s record on schools and universities is patchy. The opposition has promising, though unproven, plans
Apr 7th 2010 | From The Economist print edition


AFTER the economy, education will be one of the fiercest battlegrounds of the coming election. Tony Blair gave it top billing when his party came to power in 1997. Thirteen years later, despite the Labour government pumping money into schools and constantly changing the way they are run, British children remain ill-educated compared with their counterparts elsewhere, the poorest in particular.

Though British children of all ages now do better in national exams than they used to, much of that progress is illusory, the result of rampant（猖獗的，蔓延的） grade inflation and relentless（不懈的，无情的） drill（钻研） in exam technique by schools that are judged on their pupils’ performance. Independent analyses and international comparisons are less flattering（奉承的）. A team at Durham University gives randomly selected children the same test each year—and finds little evidence that today’s know more than their predecessors. In studies by the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, British 15-year-olds came well above the average in 2000, at eighth in mathematics and seventh in reading out of 27 countries. In 2006 they scored below the average in both, at joint 18th and 13th respectively. In science, at least, they remained above-average—but fell from fourth to ninth. The 2009 data are unlikely to buck the trend.

These disappointing results have come at（得到） considerable cost. Education is the third-largest area of government spending, with the lion’s（名人） share going to schools (running education is devolved（转移，移交） to the governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the money comes from central government). The amount spent per pupil is now ￡5,850, twice what it was in 1997 even after taking inflation into account.

Some of the extra cash went on grandiose（宏伟的，过分华丽的）school buildings; more went on raising teachers’ salaries and giving them all a half-day a week away from the classroom. A cannier（canny 为其原型，精明的，敏锐的） government would have demanded reforms in return: summer tuition for stragglers（流浪者）, say, or an end to national pay bargaining. But Labour missed its chance. As with the bungled contracts struck with family doctors in 2003, costs soared（猛增，飞速增长）
without the taxpayer getting much in return.

Higher pay and the recession（经济不景气） have made teaching more attractive: severe shortages, apart from in a few subjects such as physics, are now a thing of the past（成为一种过去的东西）. But with teachers’ pay still set nationally, better-off（情况较好的，较富裕的） children in comfortable suburbs have benefited most. Tough schools stuffed with hard-to-teach children still struggle to find well-qualified teachers, one reason for a shameful gulf in attainment（成就，成绩） between the best- and worst-off.

Expensive too has been the mass hiring of classroom assistants: over 180,000 of them now grace （使优美，点缀）the nation’s schools, three times as many as in 1997. A recent study suggests this mums’ army has been worse than a flop（失败）. Peter Blatchford of the Institute of Education in London found that these less-qualified staff work mostly with children who are already struggling, depriving them of teachers’ attention, which means that they fall even further behind.

Able pupils have also been shortchanged. Labour has started and then wound down(慢慢中止) three schemes to stretch students in the top 5%, whether academically (“gifted”, in the parlance) or in music or sport (“talented”). Attempts to find some sort of talent in everyone, and teachers opposed to giving anything extra to those already doing well, scuppered each in turn.

Labour says that, should it form the next government, it would protect the schools budget.（虚拟语态倒装 should it …. , it would ….） That will feel like famine after a decade-long splurge. So its new pledges(保证) are modest: individual tuition for children who fall far behind their peers in primary school, for example, and a guaranteed college or training place for every youngster who has been seeking work for six months. There is woolly stuff, too: Ed Balls, the schools secretary, says he will “ensure there is strong discipline and good behavior in every school” and repeats his promise to rebuild or refurbish all secondary schools and half of all primary schools “in the coming years” (before the recession, this was meant to happen by 2020).

The academies programme, begun under Mr. Blair to create a tier of well-resourced schools with some independence from local government, has proven popular, if pricey(高价的). Labour has exceeded its original goal of setting up 200 by 2011 (by contrast, there are 3,300 secondary schools in all in England). All three main parties promise to expand academies, though the Liberal Democrats would tinker with how they are run, and the Conservatives claim they would be truer to the original vision than Labour, which has recently removed some of academies’ freedoms. And all three stand behind state-funded religious schools, though these are frequent flashpoints in Britain’s various multicultural battles.

There is also broad agreement over directing more money towards the pupils most likely to do badly. In theory that happens now: money flows from central government to schools through formulae intended, for example, to recognise that poor children are tougher to teach. But these formulae are complex, and as the money passes through town halls some gets siphoned off to pay for school buses and the like. The result is a system in which schools in Leicestershire get half as much per child as schools in the City of London.

The academies programme has proven popular, if pricey. Mr. Balls acknowledges that the current system “is largely based on historical allocations rather than present need” and says he would improve it. The Lib Dems and the Tories both talk of a clearer, fairer “pupil premium”: extra per-capita cash for schools that take poor children. But with no more money in the kitty that could mean schools in rich areas getting less. That would be fair, but the articulate middle classes are unlikely to be impressed.

The Conservatives’ plans to shake up schooling, presented by Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary(保守党教育大臣), are perhaps the most innovative of their policies. If they win, they promise to remove the decision on who gets to open new schools from the dead hand of local government. Parents, charities and other not-for-profit groups will be encouraged to create new schools that could be open by September. Funded by the state according to the number of children who attend, they will stand or fall according to their popularity with parents.

A similar scheme in Sweden appears to be working: results have improved more in places with lots of new schools—not only in those schools, but also in the state-run ones that had to raise their game to survive. And Swedish parents like choosing where to educate their little darlings. But in Sweden firms are allowed to run schools for profit; in Britain they will not be profit-making, at least at first. That could put a damper on things.（起抑制作用？？）

There are costs to the Tory scheme. If parents are to have genuine choice there must be excess capacity（容量）, and this is expensive. If many pupils leave mainstream state schools, more of the latter will become unsustainable as their rolls fall. That will be tough on those who remain to the bitter end—and the resulting job cuts and school closures will rile the powerful teaching unions. And though Mr Gove plans a vetting process（审查过程） to stop extremist organizations or people with “a dark agenda” from running schools, discouraging the well-intentioned-but-wacky will be harder.

The Lib Dems also say they are keen on supply-side reforms(供给方面的改革). But since they would leave local authorities in charge, that means little. They want to cut class sizes, which their schools spokesman, David Laws, thinks would take an extra ￡2.5 billion a year, and to get teachers to spend more time in the classroom and give after-school lessons to laggards. Persuading teachers without the usual inducement（引诱物） of higher pay will be a tall order.

Labour’s education record is brightest when it comes to universities. Britain lures（【ECO用词十分犀利】 引诱）
more overseas students than any other country except America. And British universities are the only European ones near the top of the two main international league tables. This is hardly Labour’s doing: Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial College and a handful of others have long been world-famous. Some people in government, not least Gordon Brown, have indulged in sporadic populist rumblings over such institutions’ supposed elitism. But Labour deserves credit for largely leaving universities to run themselves.

The government has also given universities lots more money, ending a long-standing tendency to stuff more students into lecture halls without providing extra cash. Its target of getting half of all young people to university by 2010 was missed, but not by a mile（【个人猜测】 。。。目标没有达成，而且相差了还不止一点点）. And it has treated science well, spending on both high-quality facilities and the research that is done in them.

Some of the new money came from taxpayers, but some came from students themselves. Just weeks after Mr Blair entered Downing Street, a review of university funding commissioned by the previous Tory government recommended introducing university-tuition fees. He agreed, and six years later, though vehemently（激烈地） opposed by the left wing of his own party, let fees rise to a maximum of ￡3,000 a year. Another review will report soon after the election and is likely to recommend lifting that cap, probably to at least ￡5,000 a year.

Both Labour and the Tories are likely to support the move, though they are wary of saying so in the run-up to the election. Even the Lib Dems have postponed their once-totemic plans to scrap fees altogether, citing the parlous state of public finances.

Even so, higher education’s fat years are about to be followed by a period of lean ones. Though boom and bust is no rational way to run laboratories or train scientists, any cuts to education will be felt mostly by universities, since schools are politically far more sensitive. And no party is likely to allow universities to recruit lots more students, even though more young people than ever want to go, rather than sit out the downturn on the dole. It would cost taxpayers a lot, even with higher fees, because students can borrow their tuition fees from the state on easy terms.

In February Gordon Brown described education as “a ladder to social mobility”.（可以用于论述对EDUCATION的解读）That used to be true. But under Labour schools have failed to narrow the gap between Britain’s haves and have-nots. Liberating more schools from state control could lift Britain from the educational doldrums. It certainly needs a boost.

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Revise and resubmit
The crisis is changing how macroeconomics is taught
Mar 31st 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IN MORE than 30 years of teaching introductory macroeconomics, says Alan Blinder of Princeton University, he has never seen interest as high as it was last year. At Harvard, says David Laibson, students in his undergraduate macroeconomics course are “chomping at the bit”. At elite（精英） American universities, where endowments have shrivelled and hiring is down, increased interest in economics is among the most benign of the recession’s effects.
Yet the crisis has also highlighted flaws in the existing macroeconomics curriculum. Greg Mankiw, a Harvard economist and the author of a bestselling textbook, points out that students can hardly be expected to make sense of(懂得，了解) the crisis if they know virtually nothing about things like the role of financial institutions. Yet if there is a “financial system” in most introductory texts, Mr Blinder observes, it usually focuses on the demand and supply functions for money. “The current curriculum fails to give students even imperfect answers” to their legitimate questions about recent economic events, he says.
Changes are coming. Mr Blinder is one of the authors of another popular undergraduate textbook, which he is now revising. In the process, he is having to think long and hard about how to balance the need for more detail about things like finance with the constraints under which introductory macroeconomic courses are taught. The new edition is likely to have a prominent place for the idea of leverage and how it contributed to the crisis. That is fairly simply explained. But some additional complexity will be unavoidable.
For instance, the convenient fiction of a model of the economy with a single interest rate was defensible（可辩护的） as long as different rates moved in concert（一致）. This, Mr Blinder says, is no longer something that students can be told “with a straight face（绷着脸）”. Some discussion of the role of securitisation and systemic risk is essential, even if it feels like a lot of detail for beginners to grasp. Mr Blinder, with a nod to Albert Einstein, says that economists need to remember that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.
Revised textbooks will soon find their way into bookshops. Charles Jones of Stanford University has put out an update of his textbook with two new chapters designed to help students think through（彻底想清楚） the crisis, and is now working on incorporating these ideas into the body of the book. A new edition of Mr Mankiw’s book should be out in about a year. And Mr Blinder’s publishers aim to have his revised text on sale by June.
Courses in many leading universities are already being amended. Mr Laibson says he has chosen to teach his course without leaning on（与rely on / base on 可同义替换） any standard texts. Francesco Giavazzi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is now devoting about two-fifths of the semester’s classes to talking about how things are different during a crisis, and how the effects of policy differ when the economy hits boundaries like zero interest rates. Discussion of the “liquidity trap”, in which standard easing of monetary policy may cease to have any effect, had fallen out of vogue（落伍） in undergraduate courses but seems to be back with a vengeance. Asset-price bubbles are also gaining more prominence.
Will these changes in the way macroeconomics is taught really stick? The rewriting of widely used texts should ensure that some of the ideas that have helped explain the crisis become part of the future curriculum. Mr Jones says it will be instructive to compare the bestselling textbook in ten years’ time with the pre-crisis version of Mr Mankiw’s book. He thinks they will differ substantially.

我从这篇文章中提炼出了一个关于课程设置的例子，这篇文章可以很好的去例证大学中的课程在广泛介绍的同时也需要介绍这一科目的细节内容。只有在学习了细节内容后，学生们才能够充分利用自己所学习到的知识去分析显示中的问题。至少，这一趋势是存在的。Eg. 国外大学课改的例子。
我对爱因斯坦的这句话“economists need to remember that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” 有着如下理解。经济学家应该能够将事物或者问题简化以使其他人理解这个问题，同时也需要注意与保持这个问题的复杂性。

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一个星期分析一个DEBATE，一个DEBATE包含三篇以上背景文章以及三到四个COMMENTARY

DEBATE 1


In 2009 China was the world's top exporter of goods but Germany, with less than a tenth of China's population and much higher wages, is the leading challenger. Exports are the main driver of Germany's economic growth. Its current-account surplus will exceed China's as a share of GDP this year. This makes Germany vulnerable: its economy was hit harder by the global slump than those less reliant on trade. But that is a small price to pay, most Germans think, for a vibrant manufacturing sector and the skilled, high-wage jobs that go with it.

But is export-led growth sustainable? Germany's current-account surplus contributes to the strains that threaten the stability of the euro. France's finance minister, Christine Lagarde, recently suggested that Germany cut taxes or raise wages to stimulate imports. If deficit-ridden countries in Europe and elsewhere are to export their way out of trouble, surpluses somewhere will have to fall. Germany, the world's fourth largest economy, looks like a prime candidate. Does Germany have to rethink its economic model?

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悲剧啊。。为啥传文章只能穿到一半？？

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A special report on Germany

Inside the miracle
How Germany weathered the recession
Mar 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition


“THIS is what we love,” exclaims Jan Stefan Roell, presenting an intricately（复杂地） worked ingot（铸块） of gleaming（闪闪发亮的） steel as though it were a piece of jewellery（珠宝）. It belongs somewhere in the innards（内部结构）
of a testing machine made by Zwick Roell, the firm he owns. One model rips the eyes off teddy bears (to see if children can), another pokes computer keyboards. Mr Roell wants the visitor first to admire the part, next the Swabian craftsmen who fashioned it and then the German genius for making expensive and indispensable things. His customers expect German thoroughness, he says.

Ulm-based Zwick Roell, which has 950 employees and sales of 150 M a year, is a typical Mittelstand（中小型企业） firm. Until the 1930s it made buttons from cow horn imported from Argentina, but when plastic took over it switched to testing machines. Like many Mittelstand enterprises Zwick works backstage, making things that are used in making other things. The thousands of Zwick-like firms that constitute the engineering sector are a cornerstone（基础，奠基石） of Germany’s industrial economy. They employ nearly 1m workers, more than any other industry, and export almost 80% of their production. Often the product is not merely a machine, but also a panoply（【我在这里认为是】全套） of services that go with it.
【许多德国的中小型企业都在进行加工，即从国外进口，加工后在出口。这是德国工业的基石。】

Last year they took a beating. Sales plunged by a fifth to 160 billion; Zwick fared(经营) no better. The wonder was that engineering firms shed（解雇） a mere 40,000 jobs. “In narrow commercial terms we can’t justify that,” says Hannes Hesse, head of the Association of German Machine Builders in Frankfurt. His members are betting that demand will bounce back, but it is a gamble. Three possible misfortunes could scupper（阻碍） recovery, he reckons: another terrorist attack, another tremor in the banking system and a failure by banks to supply enough credit to his members or their customers. The jobs miracle could yet（可能） falter（蹒跚）.
【德国机械厂只解雇了40000个人，即使整体的销量减少了20%至160M 欧元。机械制造联盟的成员正在打赌，他们认为经济能够回升】

The last time Zwick made a regular employee redundant（过剩的） was in 1992. That is because the workforce reacts to economic shocks like a well-engineered suspension system. When the crisis hit, Mr Roell shed some workers on temporary contracts and cut the working hours and pay of regular employees. When such a deal is negotiated with the works council it is binding on the workforce, a “huge advantage”, he says. He invites the council’s chairman to every management meeting.
【他很少解雇职员】

This symbiosis(共生) owes something to the intimate（亲密的）
scale of a Mittelstand enterprise, but it also relies on an institutional machine as intricate as one of Zwick’s testing contraptions（奇妙的装置）. Mr Roell recruits（招募） skilled workers through an apprentice system with roots in medieval guilds（工会）. He manages labour relations within a framework set by negotiations between employers’ associations and trade unions. This arrangement survives because Germans have a knack for changing the way something works yet keeping its basic structure intact.
【这种职员与雇主的共生关系不仅仅是由于中小型行业的intimate scale,还来自于一种学徒系统，它源自于中世纪的工会】

Slowly but surely
Twenty years ago it was a byword（格言） for rigidity. Wages and working conditions were set in sector-wide negotiations that allowed individual firms little scope for variation, tying employers’ hands. Outwardly（表面上） little has changed, but the contracts have changed character. In the 1980s “they were like the Bible,” says Martin Wansleben, chief executive of the German Chambers of Industry and Commerce. “Now they provide important guidance.”
【之前，工资以及工作环境受合同束缚，在当时它就像圣经。然而现在，它只是一种指导】

This was not a bloodless coup（极为成功的一举）. Many East German enterprises, caught between low productivity and paying D-mark wages, shunned（避免） sector-wide labour contracts. High unemployment, the threat of production moving to central Europe and Mr Schr?der’s reforms cranked up（开动） the pressure. As unions lost members, employers defected from the industry federations. Only half of west German private-sector workers are covered by sector-wide contracts, against two-thirds in 1998, says Reinhard Bispinck of the Hans-B?ckler-Stiftung, a think-tank close to the trade unions.
【然而现在这种良好的共生关系并不是没有任何牺牲就达成的】

Give and take
And even when they do, the contracts are riddled with “opening clauses”. At firm level bosses and works councils formed “alliances for jobs” under which workers sacrificed pay to secure employment. Working-hours accounts allow companies to adjust the amount of work done to peaks and troughs（低谷期） in production without paying overtime. This flexibility powered exports, lifted economic growth and fattened profits. It enriched everyone, the unions grumble（抱怨）, except workers. Wage rises have lagged behind productivity gains and inflation since 2000, driving down（压低） unit labour costs relative to those of Germany’s competitors (see chart 3).
【工会与雇主们达成了共识，形成了就业联盟。工人们牺牲自己的收入去保持就业，就业时间可以随生产的高峰与低谷而调整。这刺激了出口，但是，工人们得利并不多。】


Though bosses readjusted the settings in their favour, they did not smash the machine. In some ways Mitbestimmung（共同决定）, workers’ rights to influence decision-making, was strengthened. Job alliances, for example, draw works councils into company strategy. In December workers at Mercedes’s Sindelfingen factory near Stuttgart went on strike after the company said it would shift production of its C-Class cars to Alabama, so Mercedes promised to maintain employment at the plant until 2020. That pledge “would be worth nothing without new products and investments”, points out J?rg Hofmann, head of the Baden-Württemberg branch of IG Metall, the trade union for the industry. Top of the reformers’ hit list is Germany’s rigid regime for protecting workers from dismissal（解雇）. But without that protection workers would not allow hours to pile up in working-time accounts, says Alexander Herzog-Stein, also of the Hans-B?ckler-Stiftung.
【老板们之后把工人们也纳入了公司的决策管理。】

The crisis has drawn the two sides closer together. Both are determined to defend Germany’s export success. It helps that they can blame the recession on outsiders and bankers rather than on each other. More important, employers have so far kept their side of the flexibility bargain by keeping up employment.
【在金融危机时，两方的关系更加近了】

Much of the credit for Germany’s jobs miracle goes to Kurzarbeit（缩时工作制）, a scheme under which government hands out subsidies（津贴） to firms that retain surplus workers, but there is more to it. Joachim M?ller, head of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), part of the Federal Employment Agency, argues that flexible working hours have been an important factor in holding up employment. When the recession hit, workers had built up a large number of extra hours in their working-time accounts that could be wound down as work dried up（紧缩）. But firms were also looking ahead to a prospective（未来的） scarcity of labour.

In 2009 the number of people of working age in western Germany shrank(萎缩) for the first time. The firms hit hardest by the crisis were precisely those that had the biggest problems recruiting skilled labour before it. “Most companies will see a significant impact” from a shortage of qualified labour by 2014 or 2015, says Harald Krüger, head of personnel at BMW, a Munich-based carmarker. Despite the crisis, BMW was careful not to cut its annual intake of 1,000 apprentices.
【处在工作年龄的人的数量在2009年第一次下滑】

All this provides a perfect setting for Mr Roell to indulge his passion for profitable perfectionism. His machines are four times as expensive as competing testers made in China, his second-biggest market. The company actually makes its own boxes so that the gear arrives in perfect condition. Although Mr Roell has competitors, he acknowledges no peers（【自己猜测】
认为自己无人能敌？）. Where his main American rival prefers standard solutions, Zwick’s engineers go for a tailor-made approach（量身定做的解决方案）. The complexity-loving culture on the factory floor is shaped by Germany’s “dual system” of vocational training, which combines classroom learning with hands-on experience. At Zwick Roell it is reinforced by a Swabian passion for inventive tinkering, or tüfteln. “I can delegate things that in other countries need supervision,” he says.
【所有的这些形式，对像R这样的中小型企业有着很大的帮助。他们追求着有利可图的完美主义】

It is a pact that depends partly on the owner not appearing to be too greedy. Mr Roell reinvests two-thirds of the firm’s profits. The Mittelstand survives “because families don’t want the money”, he says. “They want the business to continue.” And they are not easily put off: “If people tell you tax is a big issue they haven’t done their homework.” Bureaucracy is a bigger problem. Mr Roell grumbles that he has to install internal safety doors on his lifts, “ridiculous stuff which keeps me from doing my job”. All in all, though, he feels that Germany’s skilled workers and its infrastructure make it “a wonderful place to do business”.
【虽然官僚也是一个问题，但是只要雇主不要太贪婪，公司的境况不会太差。毕竟，德国的训练有素的工人和良好的设施有利于做生意】

But the success of firms like Zwick Roell is not synonymous with(…与…是不同的) Germany’s. Manufacturing’s share of output and employment has dropped, though it remains larger than in most competitor countries (see chart 3, above). Workers with permanent factory jobs have done relatively well recently. Since 2005 the pay of IG Metall’s members went up by a total of 14%, says Mr Hofmann—less than the rise in productivity, but still “satisfactory”. The price of flexibility was higher for workers in weaker sectors or with “atypical” contracts. Schlecker, a chain of discount chemists, recently shut down some shops and sacked the workers, but at the same time opened bigger ones with temporary staff at lower pay. Public outrage forced a retreat.
【类似于R的成功与德国的成功是两码事】

Let’s have a party
Stagnant(停滞的，不景气的) pay and domestic consumption have increased Germany’s dependence on exports. Between 2004 and 2008 its net exports accounted for nearly 40% of GDP growth. Its trade surpluses are the mirror image of deficits run by countries now no longer able to afford them, including several of its partners in the euro zone. Germany may not have been responsible for the headlong rush into consumption that caused the imbalances but, says Thomas Mayer, Deutsche Bank’s chief economist, “we were caterers to the party.” It is still in progress. Between the mid-1990s and 2007 current-account imbalances rose from 2% of global GDP to 6%. They have since eased back to 4%, but with public rather than private spending fuelling demand. That cannot last, Mr Mayer thinks.
【经济的不景气使德国更加依赖于出口】

Germany, he feels, should therefore throw its own party by rebalancing growth away from exports and towards domestic demand. Unusually, this puts the Deutsche Bank economist in the same camp as the trade unions, though their remedies differ. The unions want higher wages, backed by a statutory（法定的） minimum wage, which would boost domestic demand and suck in more imports. Mr Mayer would encourage more low-wage jobs, which would beef up（加强）
Germany’s services（【在这里应该解释为】.服务行业）
【经济学家认为德国应该减少其出口去平衡增长，并去迎合国内需求】

But not that many Germans are worried about the current-account（经常项目） surpluses. The country is getting older, so it makes sense for it to accumulate investments in more youthful places. The surpluses could be smaller, perhaps, but the main concern is keeping Germany in medal position among world exporters. If America and Europe buy less, China, India and Brazil will buy more. The next generation of export blockbusters is already coming up, as the next section will show.
【德国人并不担心他们在经常项目上的剩余，他们也有自己的理由】

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COMMENT:

It is really a wonder that Mittelstand in Germany only shed 40,000 jobs after the recession. Success achieved by Mittelstand is attributable to the symbiosis between employers and employees who made compromise that working hours and wages can be adjusted so that a employment can be retained. However, the Mittelstand's success is not synonymous with Germany's, in which case Germany's economy depends greatly on exports, according to the statistic fact that net exports accounts for 40% of its GDP. As the union grumbles about the workers' wages which do not rise as rapidly as the revenue of the firms, some economists also suggest that Germany has to rebalance its growth away from exports. Despite different kinds of worries, it is also necessary for Germany to accumulate investment in more youthful places when considering the fact that Germany is becoming older.

好句积累：
1.
Its trade surpluses are the mirror image of deficits run by countries now no longer able to afford them, including several of its partners in the euro zone.
Mirror image of 用的十分好 我觉得这种句型可以用在讨论一种东西在给一方带来好处的同时会给另一方带来伤害。
…. is the mirror image of …. faced by B.
2.
Three possible misfortunes could scupper recovery, he reckons: another terrorist attack, another tremor in the banking system and a failure by banks to supply enough credit to his members or their customers. The jobs miracle could yet falter.
….could yet … 这句话虽然很短，但是跟前面的前提配合起来就十分的好了。可用于一种不太可能发生的情况的描述

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

Europe's engine
Why Germany needs to change, both for its own sake and for others
Mar 11th 2010 | From The Economist print edition


ELSEWHERE in the world, Europe is widely regarded as a continent whose economy is rigid(严格的) and sclerotic（硬化的）, whose people are work-shy and welfare-dependent, and whose industrial base is antiquated and declining—the broken cogs and levers that condemn the old world to a gloomy future. As with most clichés（陈词滥调）, there is some truth in it. Yet as our special report in this week’s issue shows, the achievements of Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, tell a rather different story.

A decade ago Germany was the sick man of Europe, plagued by slow growth and high unemployment, with big manufacturers moving out in a desperate search for lower costs. Now, despite the recession, unemployment is lower than it was five years ago. Although Germany recently ceded（割让） its place as the world’s biggest exporter to China, its exporting prowess remains undimmed. As a share of GDP, its current-account surplus this year will be bigger than China’s.

This feat gives the lie to（揭穿谎言） the picture, common in America and Asia, of Europe as a washed-up（疲倦了的，不行了的） continent incapable of change. And, for the rest of Europe, there is a lot to be said for having a strong economy at the continent’s geographical and political centre. Yet Germany’s success is paradoxically（似非而是地，出乎意料地） also causing problems for its neighbours—problems which they, and Germany, need to address.

The old and the new
Germany’s impressive flexibility is the consequence of old virtues combined with new ones. The old consensus-building management system helped employers keep unions on side when costs needed to be held down. The famous Mittelstand (small and medium-sized firms, often family-owned) went through its operations, step by step, judging what to do in Germany, what to send abroad and what to outsource.

At the same time, economic policy took a new, liberalising, direction. The Schr?der government introduced reforms to the labour market and welfare systems in 2003-04; spurred on（刺激，激励）
by those, and by competitive pressures from Europe’s single currency, German business ruthlessly（无情的） held down real wages. Unit labour costs fell by an annual average of 1.4% in 2000-08 in Germany, compared with a decline of 0.7% in America and rises of 0.8% and 0.9% in France and Britain respectively. Although last year’s recession hit Germany hard, its economy is in much better shape now than it was a decade ago—a point that should be noted in France, where President Nicolas Sarkozy has taken to railing against outsourcing, and in southern Europe, which bends over backwards to preserve overgenerous wages and restricted labour markets.

Germany is rightly proud of its ability to control costs and keep on exporting. But it also needs to recognise that its success has been won in part（在某种程度上）
at the expense of its European neighbours. Germans like to believe that they made a huge sacrifice in giving up their beloved D-mark ten years ago, but they have in truth benefited more than anyone else from the euro. Almost half of Germany’s exports go to other euro-area countries that can no longer resort to devaluation to counter German competitiveness.

While Anglo-Saxons（安德鲁萨克逊体系） were throwing money around, Germans kept saving. Domestic investment has not kept pace. The result of Germans’ prowess at exporting, combined with their reluctance to spend and invest, has been huge trade surpluses. Germany’s excess savings have been funnelled（汇聚） abroad—often into subprime（次级的，准贷款利率的） assets in America and government bonds in such countries as Greece. It would be absurd to maintain that a prudent Germany is responsible for Greece’s profligacy or Spain’s property bubble (though a few heroic economists have argued this). But it is true that, within a single-currency zone, habitual surplus countries tend to be matched by habitual deficit ones.

Give spending a chance
Imbalances cannot be sustained for ever, whether they are deficits or surpluses. Yet surplus countries tend to see themselves as virtuous and deficit countries as venal—the implication being that the burden of adjustment should fall on the borrowers. Germany’s response to the troubles of Greece, Spain and other euro-area countries has followed just such a line. A bail-out for Greece, once taboo, is now being debated—and German ministers have even come out in favour of a putative（公认的） European Monetary Fund (see article). But the idea that Germany should itself seek to adjust, through lower saving and higher consumption and investment, still seems unacceptable to Angela Merkel’s government.

It is certainly true that Germany’s neighbours have a great deal of work to do. France, Italy and Spain need to follow Germany in loosening up their labour markets; Italy, Spain and Greece need to tighten their public finances. But Germany also needs to push ahead with liberalisation. Its web of regulations is too constricting; its job protection is too rigid; its health, welfare and education systems still need big doses of change; its service sector is underdeveloped. You do not have to be a free-market zealot to think that it is too hard to start a new business in Germany, or to worry that a fat tax “wedge”（楔子【经济学中把税收比作打入供求的楔子】） to pay for health care and welfare reduces low-paid service jobs. Nor do all the changes Germany needs to make mean cutting government back. Too few women are in full-time work, partly because child-care support is lacking. The country’s demographic prospects (人口前景) are dire（惨淡的）.

A bold programme of German structural reforms would do much to boost consumption and investment—and, in turn（反过来）, to raise Germany’s GDP growth, which remains disturbingly feeble. Germany can also afford growth-boosting tax cuts without ruining its public finances. If only Germany would lift its head, it would see that this is in its own wider interest, both because it would be good for German consumers and because it would help the euro area to which it is hitched. Europe’s single currency, like the European Union itself, owes much to past German leadership. When that goes missing, both the currency and the club tend to suffer—and Germany is foremost among the losers.

comment 随后补上

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

May the best man share
What the Germans see as economic virtue, some of its partners see as vice
Mar 31st 2010 | BERLIN | From The Economist print edition

Angela prepares for battle
IT WAS Greece that let public spending rip, lied about it and is now trying to stave off default. But the Greek crisis has somehow morphed into the German problem. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor（总理，大臣）, led resistance to a bail-out（应急措施） of Greece. For her pains, she was lionised at home (Bild, a tabloid（小报）, depicted her as a sword-bearing reincarnation（再生） of Bismarck) but denounced by her neighbours. “Angela, have a little courage,” pleaded（辩护） Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission. Other countries see Germany’s huge current-account surpluses as almost as big a problem as Greece’s deficits. They keep expecting a history-chastened（受到历史磨练的） Germany to contribute generously to the European project and to demand less than its due. Now it stands accused of turning away.

On March 25th European leaders patched up（凑平） their differences over Greece. Under a deal cooked up（想出） by Mrs Merkel and the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, Greece’s euro partners will come to its aid as a last resort (see article). That would be the bail-out that Mrs Merkel wanted to avoid, but it may never happen. Any help will require the unanimous（完全一致的） approval of the 16 euro-area members, giving Germany a veto（否决）. IMF involvement will shield Germany from blame for imposing tough conditions. The hope is that the mere talk of a rescue will be enough to ease speculative attacks on Greece.

Yet the contradictions that caused the crisis, which go back to the euro’s birth in 1999, remain unresolved. Germany greeted the single currency as a levelling of the commercial playing-field and has been honing its competitiveness ever since. Greece and other Mediterranean countries saw the euro as an opportunity to engage in business as usual, but with the benefit of lower interest rates. There is broad agreement that Greece and the rest must change. The question is, must Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, change too?

To most Germans the idea verges on（趋向） the ridiculous. Germany entered the single currency handicapped, they say, by a strong D-mark and the cost of unification. Employers and trade unions co-operated to keep a lid（限制，盖） on labour costs. The government contributed by liberalising the jobs market. It also cut social-security contributions, partly making up the shortfall（差额） with higher value-added tax. Between 2000 and 2008 unit labour costs declined by 1.4% a year in Germany while rising by nearly 1% a year in France and Britain. Germany breached（打破）
the euro’s budget-deficit ceiling of 3% of GDP, but eliminated its deficit by the eve（前夕） of the crisis.

But this abundance of virtue（美德） looks like vice（恶习） to several of Germany’s EU partners. Germany’s duel（决斗） with China to be the world’s top exporter demands that it suppress incomes and so Germans’ ability to consume. Its current-account surpluses—and the mirror-image deficits of others—are a prime cause of instability. When France’s finance minister, Christine Lagarde, recently called for surplus countries to “do a little something” to promote European growth, she was casting doubt on Germany’s export-driven model.


She did not explicitly propose France as a role model but IMK, a German research institute close to the unions, does. France’s wage growth has kept up with productivity and inflation. Its exports have grown more slowly than Germany’s, but private consumption has advanced（increase 的替代） at almost triple the rate. Between 1999 and 2007 French GDP grew a third faster and employment twice as fast as Germany’s. Gustav Horn of IMK reckons（估计） that Germany’s focus on exports created 400,000 jobs, but weak demand cost another 1 million.

Many Germans detect a plot to nobble their exporters. A sprinter should not have to “put lead weights in his shorts”, snarled(纠缠不清的) the economy minister, Rainer Brüderle. The idea of imitating France, with its budget deficits and sickly manufacturing sector, seems bizarre. German officials reject the most obvious ways of shrinking the current-account surplus. Markets, not governments, set wages, they say. To push them up artificially would merely raise unemployment, which would depress consumption and imports still further.

One answer, Mrs Lagarde argues, would be to cut taxes, an idea supposedly（按照推测，恐怕） favoured by Germany’s coalition government, which combines Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union with the Free Democratic Party. But a new balanced-budget amendment（修正） to the constitution（宪法） will force Germany to slash（大幅度消减） spending or raise taxes next year—the opposite of what is needed to correct Europe’s imbalances and shore up（支撑住）
growth.

There are other ways to shrink the gap between Germany’s high savings rate and relatively low investment, the underlying（根本的） reason for its current-account surplus. A new OECD survey of Germany says the key is to boost investment, for example by encouraging innovation, which Mrs Merkel is keen to do; and by liberalising entry into professions such as law and accounting, which she may not want. But these are not quick fixes. Europe will be stuck with Germany’s surpluses for years to come.

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

When it comes to the surplus in the German current-account, diverse opinion shows out. Other countries think that Germany should do something for his surplus is the mirror image of deficit faced by other countries, while Germany insists on its dependence on exports. However, measures are to be carry out to help countries which are plagued by the crisis since members of Euro reach unanimous agreement. Because of the change in the constitution, Germany will no longer remain surplus in its current-account which shore up the growth of Euro after the recession.

好句积累：
1 Any help will require the unanimous（完全一致的） approval of the 16 euro-area members, giving Germany a veto（否决）.
2 Other countries see Germany’s huge current-account surpluses as almost as big a problem as Greece’s deficits.
3 To most Germans the idea verges on（趋向） the ridiculous.
4 Between 2000 and 2008 unit labour costs declined by 1.4% a year in Germany while rising by nearly 1% a year in France and Britain.
5 Germany breached（打破）
the euro’s budget-deficit ceiling of 3% of GDP, but eliminated its deficit by the eve（前夕） of the crisis.
6 She did not explicitly propose France as a role model but IMK, a German research institute close to the unions, does.
7 There are other ways to shrink the gap between Germany’s high savings rate and relatively low investment, the underlying（根本的） reason for its current-account surplus.

yuanlinqinggreUID: 2755904

新一轮的DEBATE:是关于GDP能否衡量人们幸福感的讨论。首先，放上一片综述性质的文章：
Welcome to the second, "rebuttal（反驳，辩驳）" stage of the debate. Fromwhat both Andrew Oswald and Steve Landefeld say, and from the comments from thefloor, it's clear that whether you support or reject the motion depends to alarge extent on how you define "living standards". Are they limitedto material comfort, or do they cover broader, less tangible concepts, notleast happiness? This difference of view emerged in the first few onlineremarks, and it's been a constant theme. Pythian Legume, for instance, is"relatively certain that a claim that it [ie, GDP] does not measurenational happiness is off point（离题，不着边际）". Belfastcitizen argues: "It is quite true for Mr Landefeld to say that GDP was notdesigned to be a well-being measure—though that concedes Prof Oswald's case atthe outset—but it is treated by most OECD governments as if it were a proxy（代用品） for well-being（幸福）."

Here's another dividing line, not yetobvious on the floor but plain between the protagonists（倡导者，支持者）: if GDP issimply out of date, or can it be improved or supplemented by other measures ofliving standards, however defined? Mr Oswald says that, given the apparentdecline 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 toremain a valuable indicator today. Mr Landefeld remarks that if measuresof happiness have not moved much over time, their merits as measures of livingstandards are in question. Better, he says, to augment GDP with other measureson an economic "dashboard(仪表板)". He suggests that GDP will remain the most closely watched.

On the floor, other themes have emerged.One is perhaps best illustrated by KCCM, whobelieves that the debate "exemplifies the economic and attitudinal gulfbetween developed and developing economies". GDP may seem out of date inthe rich world, he says, where most people have satisfactory food and shelter,but in poorer countries, "quantity reigns supreme because many simply donot yet have enough". High GDP growth numbers is a symbol of rising livingstandards—or, as KCCM puts it, of "ability to provide more of what theirgrowing populations really need and, eventually, want".

Another topic is the tension between livingstandards of whole societies and those of individuals or households. A relatedsubject is the distribution of income. Plainly,GDP can capture only aggregates or (if you divide by population) averages. Itwon't tell you about the living standards of individuals, the gap between richand poor, or the concentration of riches at the top. It's not supposed to, somemay say—GDP per person is a measure of central tendency, not dispersion—but formany participants that's not the point.

Mehmet Asici suggests that GDP may be afair measure of living standards in fairly equal societies with strong welfarestates, but not in places where the distribution of income is highly skewed（倾斜）. Several participants have said that the answer is not to measureGDP alone, but to have lots of indicators of material and psychological well-being（心理幸福感/心理健康）. That in turnraises another question: can these meaningfully be combined into a singlemeasure, or does it make more sense to look at several (back to the"dashboard"), sometimes paying more attention to one indicator andsometimes to another? Quite a few people mentioned the UN Human DevelopmentIndex. One speaker, haripolit, said flatly（直截了当的） that it waspointless to look any farther. Others thought the answer was more complicated.

Before we hear Mr Oswald's and MrLandefeld's closing statements, we'll have contributions from guest speakers.The first of these will be Enrico Giovannini, formerly chief statistician ofthe OECD and now head of the Italian national statistical agency. The rebuttalsand the guests' statements will, I'm sure, provoke （煽动，引起）more debates.


Commentary:

When it comes to the effectiveness of GDP,an indicator used to measure the value produced by individuals in a certaincountry, to measure the happiness of people, diverse opinions, which can generallydivided into two groups, show up. One the one hand, some people advocate thatGDP is treated by most OECD countries as if it is a proxy of well-being,whereas some other people cite the fact that happiness of people in richcompany do not fit with its GDP. Admittedly, GDP, in some rich countries, wherepeople have already achieve material comfort, can no longer measure thehappiness of people for GDP is more a indicator used to measure materialcomfort in people’s life, it is still helpful in poor countries, where quantityreigns supreme because many simply do not yet have enough. Moreover, it isnecessary for us to use other indicators with GDP to measure the happiness, forGDP places no emphasis on individuals.