决战1010精英组 Economist阅读汇—— shevava

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at the beginning...

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Summary
Defending the motion

Amar Bhidé   
Visiting Scholar, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
The techno-fetishist（恋物癖） view of innovation and the kind of government support it demands fails to appreciate the enormous variety of innovations that we need
Against the motion

David Sandalow   
Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs, US Department of Energy
Governments spur innovation. Governments shape innovation. Many of the most important innovations in recent decades grew from the work of governments.（表明自己的立场，政府对创新的影响）
About this debate
What is the right role for government in spurring innovation? The outlines of this age-old debate will be familiar to many. One side argues that governments inevitably get it wrong when they get too involved in innovation: picking the wrong technology winners, say, or ploughing subsidies into politically popular projects rather than the most deserving ones. The other rebuts that given the grave global challenges we face today—in the 1960s America thought it was the Soviet race into space, today many countries worry about climate change and pandemic threats—governments need to do much more to support innovation.

Background reading
Private-sector（私营机构） space flight
Moon dreams
The Americans may still go to the moon before the Chinese
Feb 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

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（星座） moon programme had ended any hopes of Americans returning to the Earth’s rocky satellite. The next footprints on the lunar regolith（表皮土） were therefore thought likely to be Chinese. Now, though, the private sector is arguing that the new spending plan actually makes it more likely America will return to the moon.
The new plan encourages firms to compete to provide transport to low Earth orbit (LEO). The budget proposes $6 billion over five years to spur the development of commercial crew and cargo services to the international space station. This money will be spent on “man-rating” existing rockets, such as Boeing’s Atlas V, and on developing new spacecraft that could be launched on many different rockets. The point of all this activity is to create healthy private-sector competition for transport to the space station—and in doing so to drive down the cost of getting into space.
Eric Anderson, the boss of a space-travel company called Space Adventures, is optimistic about the changes. They will, he says, build “railroads into space”. Space Adventures has already sent seven people to the space station, using Russian rockets. It would certainly benefit from a new generation of cheap launchers.
Another potential beneficiary—and advocate of private-sector transport—is Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who founded a hotel chain called Budget Suites of America. Mr Bigelow has so far spent $180m of his own money on space development—probably more than any other individual in history. He has been developing so-called expandable space habitats, a technology he bought from NASA a number of years ago.
These habitats, which are folded up for launch and then inflated in space, were designed as interplanetary vehicles for a trip to Mars, but they are also likely to be useful general-purpose accommodation. The company already has two scaled-down versions in orbit.
Mr Bigelow is preparing to build a space station that will offer cheap access to space to other governments—something he believes will generate a lot of interest. The current plan is to launch the first full-scale habitat (called Sundancer) in 2014. Further modules will be added to this over the course of a year, and the result will be a space station with more usable volume than the existing international one. Mr Bigelow’s price is just under $23m per astronaut. That is about half what Russia charges for a trip to the international station, a price that is likely to go up after the space shuttle retires later this year. He says he will be able to offer this price by bulk-buying（大量购买） launches on newly man-rated rockets. Since most of the cost of space travel is the launch, the price might come down even more if the private sector can lower the costs of getting into orbit.
The ultimate aim of all his investment, Mr Bigelow says, is to get to the moon. LEO is merely his proving ground. He says that if the technology does work in orbit, the habitats will be ideal for building bases on the moon. To go there, however, he will have to prove that the expandable habitat does indeed work, and also generate substantial returns on his investment in LEO, to provide the necessary cash.
If all goes well, the next target will be L1, the point 85% of the way to the moon where the gravitational pulls of moon and Earth balance. “It’s a terrific dumping off point,” he says. “We could transport a completed lunar base [to L1] and put it down on the lunar surface intact.”
There are others with lunar ambitions, too. Some 20 teams are competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, a purse of $30m that will be given to the first private mission which lands a robot on the moon, travels across the surface and sends pictures back to Earth. Space Adventures, meanwhile, is in discussions with almost a dozen potential clients about a circumlunar mission, costing $100m a head.
The original Apollo project was mainly a race to prove the superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism. Capitalism won—but at the cost of creating, in NASA, one of the largest bureaucracies in American history. If the United States is to return to the moon, it needs to do so in a way that is demonstrably superior to the first trip—for example, being led by business rather than government. Engaging in another government-driven spending battle, this time with the Chinese, will do nothing more than show that America has missed the point.

Climate-change politics
Cap-and-trade's（限额交易） last hurrah（最后的努力）
The decline of a once wildly popular idea
Mar 18th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
Gaia（盖亚，希腊神话中的大地之母） lent an unhelpful hand
IN THE 1990s cap-and-trade—the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by auctioning off a set number of pollution permits, which could then be traded in a market—was the darling of the green policy circuit. A similar approach to sulphur dioxide emissions, introduced under the 1990 Clean Air Act, was credited with having helped solve acid-rain problems quickly and cheaply. And its great advantage was that it hardly looked like a tax at all, though it would bring in a lot of money.
The cap-and-trade provision expected in the climate legislation that Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham have been working on, which may be unveiled shortly, will be a poor shadow of that once alluring idea. Cap-and-trade will not be the centrepiece of the legislation (as it was of last year’s House climate bill, Waxman-Markey), but is instead likely to apply only to electrical utilities, at least for the time being. 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 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, 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.
The public is, though, quite keen on new initiatives on energy, which any Senate bill will shower with（大量给与） incentives and subsidies whether the energy in question be renewable, nuclear, pumped out from beneath the seabed or still confined to research laboratories. So the bill will need to raise money, which is why cap-and-trade is likely to remain for the utilities, and revenues will be raised from transport fuels. A complex way of doing this, called a linked fee, would tie the revenues to the value of carbon in the utility market; a straightforward carbon tax may actually have a better chance of passing.
Energy bills have in the past garnered（获得） bipartisan（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 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.
He also thinks action on the issue would be good for his party. While short-term Republican interests call for opposition, the party’s long-term interests must include broadening its support. Among young people, for example, polling suggests that the environment, and the climate, matter a great deal.
Unfortunately for this argument, tactics matter, and young voters are unlikely to play a great role in the mid-term election. Other Republicans may think it better to wait before re-establishing the party’s green credentials. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, for example, is happy to talk about climate as a problem, and talks about the desirability of some sort of carbon restriction—perhaps a tax, or some version of Maria Cantwell’s “cap-and-dividend” scheme. But she expresses no great urgency about the subject. And she has introduced one of two measures intended to curtail the power the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) now has to regulate carbon, on the ground that that is a matter for legislation sometime in the future.
The EPA’s new powers undoubtedly make the charms of legislation greater. Some industrial lobbies may decide that the bill will provide the certainty they need to decide about future investment, and get behind it. The White House has been supportive of late, inviting senators over to talk. But it remains an uphill struggle, and the use of reconciliation（和解，调和） to pass health care could greatly increase the gradient（倾斜的）of the hill, as Mr Graham has made abundantly clear.
If the bill does not pass, it will change environmental politics in America and beyond. The large, comparatively business-friendly environmental groups that have been proponents（支持者，拥护者） of trading schemes will lose ground（退却）, with organisations closer to the grassroots（草根，基层）, and perhaps with a taste for civil disobedience（非暴力抵抗）, 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.（值得学习的开头方式） A new report (see article) shows that 25 countries now grow GM crops, with the total area under cultivation now larger than Peru. Three-quarters of the farmland used to grow soya（大豆，黄豆） is now sown with a genetically modified variant, and the figures for cotton are not that far behind, thanks to its success in India. China recently gave the safety go-ahead to its first GM rice variety and a new GM maize that should make better pig feed.（举例子） More and more plants are having their genomes sequenced（基因组序列）: a full sequence for maize was published late last year, the soya genome in January. Techniques for altering genomes are moving ahead almost as fast as the genomes themselves are stacking up, and new crops with more than one added trait are coming to market.
Such stories of success will strike fear into some hearts, and not only in GM-averse Europe; a GM backlash is under way in India, focused on insect-resistant aubergines（茄子，紫红色的）. Some of these fears are understandable, but lacking supporting evidence they have never been compelling. On safety, the fear which cuts closest to home, the record continues to look good. Governments need to keep testing and monitoring, but that may be becoming easier. More precise modifications, and better technologies for monitoring stray DNA both within plants and in the environment around them, mean that it is getting easier to be sure that nothing untoward is going on.
Then there is the worry that GM crops are a way for big companies to take over the livelihoods of small farmers and, in the end, a chunk of nature itself. Seen in this light the fact that 90% of the farmers growing GM crops are comparatively poor and in developing countries is sinister, not salutary; given Monsanto’s dominance in America’s soyabean market, it seems to suggest incipient world domination.（ex） It is certainly true that big firms make a lot of money selling GM seeds: the GM seed market was worth $10.5 billion in 2009, and the crops that grew from that seed were worth over $130 billion. But multinationals are not the only game in town. The governments of China (which has increased agricultural research across the board), India and Brazil are also developing new GM crops. In 2009 a GM version of an Indian cotton variety, developed in the public sector, came to market, and a variety engineered by a private Indian firm has been approved for commercialisation. Charities, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates（盖茨夫妇） Foundation, are also funding efforts in various countries to make crops more hardy or nutritious. GM seeds that come from government research bodies, or from local firms, may not arouse quite so much opposition as those from large foreign companies, especially when they provide characteristics that make crops better, not just easier to farm.
Moreover, where the seeds come from is a separate question from who should pay for them, as Mr Gates points out. As with drugs and vaccines, it is possible to get products that were developed with profit in mind to the people who need them using donor money and clever pricing and licensing deals. In the longer term, if the seeds deliver what the farmers require, the need for such special measures should diminish. After all, the whole idea is not that poor farmers should go on being poor. It is that poor farmers should get a bit richer, be able to invest a bit more, and thus increase the food available to a growing and predominantly urban population.
More than strange fruits
There is another worry about GM technology, though, that should be taken seriously. It is that its success and appeal to technophiles may, in the minds of those who pay for agricultural research, crowd out（挤出，挤出效应） other approaches to improving farming. Because it depends on intellectual property that can be protected, GM is ripe for（时机成熟） private investment. There is a lot of other agricultural research that is less amenable to（服从） corporate ownership but still needs doing. From soil management to weather forecasts to the preservation, study and use of agricultural biodiversity, there are many ways to improve the agricultural systems on which the world’s food supply depends, and make them more resilient as well as more profitable. A farm is not a just a clever crop: it is an ecosystem managed with intelligence. GM crops have a great role to play in that development, but they are only a part of the whole.

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The moderator's opening remarks
What is the right role for government in spurring innovation? The outlines of this age-old debate will be familiar to many. One side argues that governments inevitably get it wrong when they get too involved in innovation: picking the wrong technology winners, say, or ploughing subsidies into politically popular projects rather than the most deserving ones. The other rebuts that given the grave global challenges we face today—in the 1960s America thought it was the Soviet race into space, today many countries worry about climate change and pandemic threats—governments need to do much more to support innovation.
Happily for us, gentle reader, the two sides in the Economist's latest debate are moving beyond such platitudes to novel arguments. Arguing in favour of the motion that innovation works best when government does least is Amar Bhide, a professor at Harvard and author of "The Venturesome Economy". His opening statement roundly denounces the visions of home-grown Silicon Valleys that dance in the heads of bureaucrats worldwide as "a dubious conception of paradise". California's bloated government is bankrupt and Japan's once formidable MITI agency is in tatters, he observes, but market-minded Hong Kong is flourishing (and its hyper-commercial denizens far richer than their coddled Japanese counterparts).
He adds for good measure that the "techno-fetishist" view of innovation represented by the top-heavy Japanese model pales in comparison with a robust, bottom-up version of innovation that harnesses the creativity and enterprise of the many, including the "venturesome consumers". He does acknowledge that governments have a role to play: "Doing the least doesn't mean doing nothing at all." However, his advocacy of a least is best policy, though conceptually elegant, seems a bit slippery and is probably unhelpful in practice. In future postings, perhaps he will explain how exactly governments should decide whether they are doing too little or too much to help innovation.
David Sandalow, author of "Freedom from Oil" and a senior official in America's Department of Energy, presents a robust defence of government. He does make the familiar points about the need for governments to invest in education and fundamental research. He also adds slightly more controversial arguments about why government policies are required to overcome market failures (such as the recent financial crisis, which unfairly sapped innovators of credit) and misaligned incentives that hold back the adoption of worthwhile innovations (like energy-saving technologies with speedy paybacks).
More striking is Mr Sandalow's linkage of the global trend towards open innovation, which means companies increasingly rely on ideas from outside their own research laboratories, with the need for greater government spending on innovation. He argues that open innovation will get technologies faster to market, but at the expense of fundamental research of the sort that AT&T Bell Labs or Xerox Parc used to do. He insists that "without government support for such research, the seed corn for future generations would be at risk". That is a clever point, but it does not answer the obvious rebuttal that governments would inevitably invest in the wrong sorts of research (think, to stick with his analogy, of the money spent by the American government subsidising corn ethanol, an environmentally questionable but politically popular fuel).
Are you waiting for further rounds of jousting to decide which side to support? Don't be a mugwump, sitting on the fence with your mug in one hand and your wump on the other. Cast your vote now.

The proposer's opening remarks
Innovation now attracts innumerable worshippers but their prayers are often quite narrow and sectarian. Silicon Valley or possibly the Israeli high-tech industry is the promised land: a wondrous combination of private high-tech enterprise underpinned by government-financed universities and research labs.
This is, alas, a dubious conception of paradise. For all the high-tech prowess of Silicon Valley, the economy of California is on the edge of disaster. Unemployment in eight counties now tops 20% and the government pays its bills in IOUs. And in spite of its extraordinary concentration of scientific and engineering talent and entrepreneurship, Israel's GDP per head in 2009 was lower than of Cyprus, Greece and Slovenia.
Or remember Japan's omnipotent, visionary MITI working hand and glove with the likes of NEC, Hitachi and Fujitsu? Put aside fiascos such as the ten-year Fifth Generation Computer Systems Project, by standard measures the overall level of Japanese engineering and scientific performance, either because of or in spite of government subsidies, is impressive. More tellingly, Hong Kong's GNP per head is nearly 30% higher than Japan's, 24% higher than Germany's and 505% higher than Israel's. Yet Hong Kong's government and private businesses pay scant attention to cutting-edge scientific and technological research.
The techno-fetishist view of innovation and the kind of government support it demands fails to appreciate the enormous variety of innovations that we need.
The measure of a good economy lies in the satisfaction it provides to the many, not a few, not in the wealth or accomplishment of a few individuals or organisations. And these satisfactions go beyond the material or pecuniary rewards earned: they include, for instance, the exhilaration of overcoming challenges. Indeed they go hand in hand: a good economy cannot provide widespread prosperity without harnessing the creativity and enterprise of the many. All must have the opportunity to innovate, to try out new things: not just scientists and engineers but also graphic artists, shopfloor workers, salespersons and advertising agencies; not just the developers of new products but their venturesome consumers. The exceptional performance of a few high-tech businesses, as the Silicon Valley and Israeli examples show, is just not enough.
This widely diffused, multifaceted form of innovation entails a circumscribed role for governments: they should not to put their finger on the scale bribing people to do basic research instead of, say, the kind of graphics design that has made Apple such an iconic company. Mandating more math and science in high schools when most of us never use trigonometry or calculus in our working lives takes away time from learning skills that are crucial in an innovative economy: how to listen and persuade, think independently and work collaboratively, for instance.
Yes, there is a problem with global warming, but that is best solved by innumerable tinkerers taking their chances with renewable energy and resourceful conservation, not by throwing money at projects that a few savants have determined to be the most promising. The apparent duplication of autonomous initiative isn't a waste: no one can foretell what is going to work. Even the most successful venture-capital companies have more misses than hits. Therefore putting many independent experiments in play raises the odds that one will work. When government gets into the game of placing bets, for instance, on new battery technologies, innovators who don't have the savvy, credentials and connections with politicians or the scientific establishment are at a severe disadvantage. Yet history shows that it is often the nonconformist outsiders who play a pivotal role. Would Ed Roberts have been able to secure a government grant to build the world's first personal computer, a virtually useless toy when it was introduced in 1974?
Of course a government doing the least doesn't mean a government doing nothing at all. Moreover, the least is a moving and ever expanding target. The invention of the automobile, for example, necessitated driving rules and a system of vehicle inspections. The growth of air travel required a system to control traffic and certify the airworthiness of aircraft. Similarly, radio and television required a system to regulate the use of the airwaves.
Modern technology created new forms of pollution that did not exist in agrarian economies. Governments had to step in, in one way or the other, to make it unrewarding to pollute. Likewise, antitrust laws to control commercial interactions and conduct emerged after new technologies created opportunities to realise economies of scale and scope—and realise oligopoly or monopoly profits. These opportunities were largely absent in pre-industrial economies.
But the principle of the least is best remains a true compass. New technologies not only create the need for desirable new rules, they but also generate more opportunities for unwarranted meddling and a cover for rent-seeking. It is one thing for the Federal Aviation Administration to manage the air traffic control system, quite another for the Civil Aeronautics Board (b. 1938, d. 1985) to regulate airfares, routes and schedules. The construction of the interstate highway system may have been a great boon to the US economy, for example, but it did not take long for Congress to start appropriating funds for bridges to nowhere.
Entrepreneurial leaps into the dark are best sustained by great caution in expanding the scope of government intervention; the private virtue of daring can be a public vice. The US chief justice has often repeated the maxim: "If it is not necessary to decide an issue to resolve a case, then it is necessary not to decide that issue." Similarly, if it is not necessary to intervene to promote innovation, it should be considered necessary not to intervene. The government should focus on things that private enterprise simply cannot provide and stay away from promoting activities that would allegedly be undersupplied. If nothing, this maxim frees up resources for crucial public goods. So traffic police, emission rules and carbon taxes: absolutely. Subsidising networks of hydrogen pumps and new engine or battery technologies: no thanks.

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

Why is government important to innovation?
First, because the private sector underinvests in fundamental research. That is natural. Time horizons in many businesses are short. Few companies are in a position to capture benefits from fundamental research they might fund on their own. In many fields, fundamental research requires resources available only to governments and the largest companies. As Professor Henry Chesbrough documents in his book "Open Innovation", the big corporate research labs of decades past have given way to more distributed approaches to innovation. That gets many technologies to market faster, but at the expense of fundamental research. Without government support for such research, the seed corn for future generations would be at risk.
Second, because innovation depends on an educated workforce, which is a job for governments. Biomedical research requires medical technicians. Energy research requires engineers. Computer research requires programmers. Although private companies often provide specialised training, an educated workforce is the essential starting point. Primary and secondary education is a vital precursor to much innovation. That is a job for governments everywhere. And universities play a central role, with training of promising young innovators often made possible by government funding.
Third, because market failures stifle innovative technologies. The recent financial crisis choked off capital for innovators. Without governments stepping in to provide backstop support, thousands of promising innovations would have been lost due to the unrelated vagaries of failing financial markets. There are many other examples. Lack of capital and information prevents homeowners from investing in energy-saving technologies with very short payback periods. Split incentives between architects, builders, landlords and tenants prevent widespread adoption of similar technologies in commercial buildings. Governments have a central role in overcoming these barriers, and more.
Fourth, because government policies and standards can lay a strong foundation for innovation. Last century, the United States benefited from government policies requiring near universal access to electricity and telephone services, laying the groundwork for a vibrant consumer electronics industry. This century, Finland and Korea (among others) are benefiting from government policies to promote broadband access, helping position each country for global leadership in a vast global market. New technologies require standards that allow them to operate within larger systems. The NTSC television broadcast standard, 110V AC current and FHA housing loans, to pick just three examples, each helped market actors coordinate, encouraging innovation. Or consider Israel, which has a teeming innovation culture in which the Israeli government plays a central role, providing the foundation for startups that commercialise civilian uses of military technologies in materials, semiconductors, medical devices and communications.
Finally, because governments help make sure innovation delivers public benefits. Not all innovation is good. Collateralised debt obligations were an important financial innovation. Yet as the recent financial crisis demonstrated, financial markets cannot be relied upon to self-regulate innovation. As government encourages and promotes innovation, it also has a role in guiding it.
In the academic literature on innovation, the number of patents issued in a country is often used as a proxy for the rate of innovation. Patents are, of course, issued by governments. As this suggests, governments play a central role in innovation.
In his inaugural address, President Obama said, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works…" That should guide us in thinking about this motion. The notion that "Innovation works best when government does least" is simplistic and wrong. There may be instances in which government meddling chokes off innovation. (Past US government restrictions on stem cell research come to mind.) Yet governments can and do play a central role in spurring innovation and making sure innovation delivers benefits. We should embrace government's role in innovation, always seeking to refine and improve it, not diminish it with broad generalities.

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Featured guest
John Kao   

The proposition on the table carries for me some of the flavour of a medieval theological（神学的） debate. On the one extreme are those who invoke an invisible market hand that should rule and generate innovations free of interference from government. On the other hand are those who look to knowledgeable, action-oriented government stakeholders to address every one of society's ills.
The truth as always lies somewhere in the middle. And to get at the truth, it is important to distinguish between what I would call a dictionary or enterprise definition of innovation, creativity applied to a purpose to realise value, and what I have recently taken to call "large-scale" innovation, new sources of societal value that emerge from the blended capabilities of public, private and NGO sectors as well as civil society.
We would not want government telling the inventor in their garage what to do (the enterprise model of innovation). However, in my view, government cannot help being involved in innovation at a large scale. In every country I am aware of, government regulates health care, provides for the national defence, influences education policy and pursues societal moonshots—both literally and figuratively（象征性的）.
As an example, a national security agenda taken as a whole requires continuous innovation (we need to be smarter/faster than the other guy). Yet simply picking over the fruits of invisible-hand, market-driven innovation might not have led to the development of stealth technology（隐形技术）, Kevlar or even the internet, all fruits from the efforts of DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The case of DARPA, which is a part of the US federal government, is instructive because its purpose is to champion the kind of long-range, higher-risk innovation initiatives that might lead to game-changers. One assumption at the heart of DARPA's raison d'etre（存在的目的或理由） is that the government mainstream, left entirely to its own devices, might not generate relevant innovation for a variety of reasons (bureaucracy, speed or lack thereof, lack of early-stage funding, inability to go outside its own mindset). The other guiding assumption behind DARPA is that some kind of transmission system with seed investment and talent-scouting capability is needed to identify and bridge with promising technologies and talents outside the national security community.
My larger point should now be clear. Government has an inevitable role in shaping innovation. At the same time, we would be right not to trust omniscient（无所不知的） technocrats（技术专家） who believe they are the sole arbiters of what is worth putting on the agenda. Top-down（自顶向下；组织管理严密的）, ivory-tower（象牙塔的） government is not what I am talking about: it is government's role in innovation. Modern history is replete with expensive examples of how governments have got it wrong. Think Japan and supercomputers, for example.
I believe that government's appropriate role in innovation is rather as a catalyst（催化剂）, a platform and a convener（会议召集人）to enable collaboration among a range of stakeholders from the public, private, NGO and societal sectors. The advent of web 2.0 is a great enabler in fostering such collaboration with multiple vectors: bottom up, top down, inside out, outside in. Government also has a role in identifying the purposes to which innovation should be applied, creating the strategy for addressing them and providing resources as needed. And this, parenthetically（顺便说一句）, is why it is important for America to have a national innovation strategy, not as a warmed up, top-down version of industrial policy, but as a living, breathing strategic conversation among stakeholders to determine priorities, generate road maps and requirements, and create accountability.
The final point about government's inevitable role in innovation again returns to the optics of the large scale. Many of today's emerging waves of innovation—synthetic biology, alternative energy, health care informatics—will not be addressed by a few Silicon Valley venture capitalists making a few $5 million investments in the ventures of a few passionate entrepreneurs. Rather, they require bets of considerable size across a spectrum of（连续的，连串的） opportunity. This is particularly true when one thinks about a next generation of societal services—health care and education, for example—that consume a significant portion of GDP and that require societal capabilities for prototyping and experimentation, research funding, large amounts of risk capital, human capital strategies and an enabling regulatory environment to progress. Government is everywhere to be seen in this picture, but as a partner, not a dictator.

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The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Our online debate on the role of government in fostering innovation is off to a fiery(热烈的) start. Both sides are now offering their rebuttals, and, despite minor gestures of conciliation, it is clear that neither debater is really willing to concede much ground.
Amar Bhidé, arguing in favour of the proposition, takes on the favourite example offered up in defence of government funding of innovation: the creation of ARPAnet, the precursor to today's internet. Yes, he accepts, government funding did play an essential role in this example. But he then points to Minitel, a French government network that also had grand ambitions, cost billions but ultimately proved a turkey（失败之作）. Indeed, it held France back from embracing the internet, the obvious winner of that technology race. "Should we have a few decision makers with no skin in the game placing bets on their favoured technologies rather than many independent innovators staking their time and money?", he asks.
Arguing against the proposition, David Sandalow offers a robust defence of government's role in fostering innovation. It is not only classical governmental functions such as patent protection, education and basic research that he defends. He takes on the charge that government must not pick technology winners, insisting that the American government's efforts to spur investments in battery technology are justified in part because of the externalities associated with energy use are not recognised by the market framework. Not only is government intervention required to internalise（使成为主观） those social costs, he insists, but only can the wise hand of the state "guide innovation toward socially beneficial purposes".
The battle lines are drawn. Our combatants are intellectually clear on their differences, and not afraid to attack the other side's weaknesses. Which side do you believe has the upper hand? Cast your vote now.

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The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Mr Sandalow's assertion that Google's search engine "grew directly from government funding" is puzzling. I was once a satisfied user of Alta Vista search. In 1999 I switched to Google mainly because its interface was much cleaner and to some degree its results were better related to my queries. In what way did the government fund the idea of the cleaner interface? And as my friend Jim Manzi, a contributing editor at National Review, and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute puts it, which Federal Department of Critical Insight caused Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin to think about the "page rank" algorithm?
The Google case in fact underlines the importance of decentralised（分权，分散） innovation that is not directed by the government. Alta Vista was on the surface a perfectly satisfactory search engine. Two graduate students figured out on their own how to make it better in aesthetic and non-technical ways without having to curry favour with（拍马屁，奉承） funding agencies.
Mr Sandalow is on firmer ground in pointing out that the internet evolved from the Pentagon（五角大楼）-funded ARPAnet. But think of France's grand Minitel scheme. Starting in 1982, the state-owned telephone company gave away millions of free Minitel terminals, which could be used to make online purchases and train reservations, trade stocks, look up phone numbers and chat. Just like the internet. Except it wasn't quite as good or versatile（通用的，多才多艺的）. Worse, Minitel held back the adoption of the internet and France's entry into the information age, as Lionel Jospin, French prime minister, pointed out in 1997. Yet by then Minitel had acquired a life of its own: in 2000 France Telecom poured money as never before into a publicity campaign to promote a service widely recognised to be obsolete.
What accounts for the difference between the success of the internet and the failure of Minitel? It seems unlikely that it is because the French are worse at managing large publicly funded projects. Compared with the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV), Amtrak's Acela is a bad dream.
It could be bad luck, since all innovative projects are a gamble. But then do we want the government to be gambling with taxpayers' money? Should we have a few decision-makers with no skin in the game placing bets on their favoured technologies rather than many independent innovators staking their time and money on a chance that their offering will beat the status quo?（通过反问提出问题，问题一针见血）
The difference between ARPAnet's and Minitel's ambitions also is noteworthy（显著地，值得注意的）. ARPAnet was not a grandiose scheme to create a ubiquitous（普遍存在的） national network. Rather the project involved a small number of players and was undertaken to advance the Pentagon's mission. Very likely this helped limit the risks of overreach.
Now of course the Pentagon's mission of ensuring national security is vital and cannot be outsourced to private enterprise. And technology is a paramount ingredient of modern defence. It is inevitable, therefore, that the Pentagon is an important high-tech buyer and (like any large customer) helps shape the new technologies it wants. Which is as it should be, and not at all inconsistent with the principle of limited government. Conversely debacles like Minitel are likely to occur when governmental bodies go beyond their assigned, essential roles.
And although ARPAnet's contribution was valuable, it is far from certain that without Pentagon funding, there would have been no internet. The telephone network was in its time every bit as revolutionary. Yet Alexander Bell invented the telephone and Theodore Vail created a nearly universal nationwide network with no military or other developmental grants. Similarly Thomas Edison became the most prodigious inventor in American history without a receiving penny in research subsidies.
History also shows that unlike say national defence or air traffic control, a significant governmental role is not essential even for fundamental research. Revolutionary advances occurred even when government funding for scientific research was minimal. Darwin's research on evolution, Michael Faraday's work on electromagnetism and electro-chemistry, Newton's discoveries of calculus and the laws of motion were all done without government grants. In 1905 Albert Einstein produced four path-breaking papers—on the photoelectric effect（光电效应）, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of matter and energy—while employed as an examiner at the Swiss patent office.
A common argument made in favour of government subsidies for fundamental research is that contributions that the likes or Darwin, Faraday, Newton and Einstein might make on their own are not enough（从对方的立场进行反驳）. Mr Sandalow asserts, for instance, that the private sector naturally under-invests in fundamental research because profit-seeking businesses cannot fully capture the returns. First off, the private sector is not all for-profit. A great deal of basic research is done through private resources (such as foundations) that do not seek to maximise financial return.
And who is to say how much and what kind of investment in basic research is right? There is a vast range of valuable knowledge whose returns accrue more to society as a whole than to the producers of the knowledge. In medicine, creating routines to ensure that surgeons wash their hands before they operate is no less valuable a public good than decoding the genome. IBM's development of a professional sales process, which was then adopted throughout the high-tech industry, was as vital to the diffusion of information technology as the discovery of the transistor principle. Virtually every day I turn to the internet to learn about how to solve computer problems that other users have discovered and share it at no charge.
Of course these different kinds of knowledge are rarely perfectly in balance. Sometimes fundamental science runs ahead of concrete user-generated knowledge, for instance, and sometimes it is the other way round. But that is not an argument for turning to government. If the brightest and the best economists at the Fed continue to assert that a large nationwide housing bubble was unrecognisable, which government agency can we charge with identifying and correcting these subtle knowledge imbalances? Why not trust the autonomous, competing judgements of for- and not-for profit innovators seeking fame, fortune or excitement while the government focuses on those activities that only it can perform?

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The opposition's rebuttal remarks
In his defence of the notion that government should do "least", Amar Bhidé states his support for carbon taxes（烟尘排放税）, emissions rules, pollution rules more broadly, vehicle inspections（车辆检验）, air traffic control, aircraft certification, spectrum regulation and antitrust laws（反垄断法）. He notes that construction of the US interstate highway system (one of the largest government projects of modern times by some metrics) was a boon to the US economy.
Professor Bhidé and I have common ground.
We have disagreements, to be sure, which I will come to in a moment. But before doing so, it is worth pausing for a moment on the motion, which asks whether "innovation works best when government does least". I applaud Professor Bhidé's recognition of the many benefits government provides, yet note that this might be seen to sit oddly with his call for minimal government.
In fact this is quite typical. Words criticising government seem often to be combined with grateful acceptance of government services. In the United States, this regular part of the political dialogue may have reached its zenith last summer when a man at a town hall meeting in South Carolina told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare". Now to be 100% clear, I am not ascribing such views or confusion to Professor Bhidé. But I note that—especially in the United States—there is a deep cultural tendency to denigrate（诋毁，玷污） government even as government's many benefits are routinely enjoyed.
This is not harmless. When government is repeatedly cast as the problem without celebrating its many contributions, support for government erodes. Over time, the ability of government to deliver benefits withers. Services that are best or even uniquely provided by government are abandoned. California's public schools, for example, have slid in the past several decades from one of the nation's best to among its worst, the victim of severe limits on the ability of local governments in the state to raise funds for this classic governmental function.
This brings us to Professor Bhidé's argument. He notes that, despite Silicon Valley's high-tech prowess, "the State of California pays its bills in IOUs.". Well, yes, but not because Silicon Valley entrepreneurs failed to create jobs or improve the quality of life, but because state laws limiting the ability of the people of California to fund their government collided with a deep recession and expectations from those same people for continued government services.
Professor Bhidé is on equally shaky ground in his assertions regarding Israel (often praised for its innovation culture) and neighbouring countries. He is wrong in asserting that GDP per head in Israel is lower than in Cyprus or Slovenia, at least according to WTO figures. But more to the point, innovation is of course just one determinant of GDP.
Countries have different comparative advantages, including location, resource wealth and stable legal systems. They may (and often do) adopt growth-limiting policies unrelated to innovation. After flourishing in the 1980s thanks in part to innovations in its manufacturing sector, Japan floundered in the 1990s due in part to problems in its financial sector. Yet the benefits of those innovations were still very real.
A substantial body of economic literature demonstrates that innovation is correlated with GDP growth. Indeed for his work on this topic, Robert Solow won the Nobel Prize. Solow's work suggests that innovation is more important to GDP growth than capital accumulation or increases in the labour market. If governments have it within their power to enhance the rate of innovation, the benefits of doing so would be huge.
And they do. Classic government functions such as basic research, education and patent protection are central to innovation. Would innovation "work best" with less of such things? Quite the contrary.
Government funding of basic research led to the creation of the internet, one of the greatest sources of innovation of all time. Government funding led to DNA mapping, a breakthrough revolutionising medicine. Government funding led to countless other advances in decades past, and could lead to many more in decades to come. Yet that will depend on adequate budgets. It will depend, crucially, on political support. It will depend on government doing more than the "least" to support innovation.
In his essay, Professor Bhidé takes particular aim at government funding for batteries. In one respect, this is tangential to the main argument. One could easily believe that government programmes to promote development and deployment of advanced batteries are misguided, yet agree that innovation overall deserves strong government support. But I happen to believe there is a strong case for government work on batteries, so will take this opportunity to explain why.
Modern energy systems are in many ways a marvel. Yet they impose social costs, which could be reduced by cutting pollution from electricity generation and diversifying the fuel mix in vehicles. Better energy storage technologies would help with both objectives.
Solar and wind power, for example, can help cut pollution. Yet those technologies are limited by their intermittency: they produce no power when the wind stops blowing or day turns to night. Advances in energy storage could help overcome these problems.
Electric vehicles can help diversify the fuel mix in transport. Yet their advance is limited by high costs and short driving range. Better batteries are the solution.
Government could simply stand back, letting the market decide whether to invest in advances in energy storage. But the market does not recognise the social costs from pollution. It won't fund basic research in adequate amounts. It won't educate children and university students, who form the next generation of innovators. Government is essential to overcome these problems—and more.
What is government's role? To fund basic research. To educate the citizenry. To establish patent protection, helping ensure adequate incentives for invention. To set the regulatory framework, so externalities such as those created by pollution are incorporated into market decisions. To help technologies facing sunk-cost competitors get to market. To guide innovation toward socially beneficial purposes.
For innovation to work best, government needs to do much more than the "least". It must bring its many strengths to the field of play. We should recognise and embrace government's role in innovation.

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Green jobs
This house believes that creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments.

Defending the motion
Van Jones

Author, "The Green-Collar Economy"
The private sector—not the government—can and must be the main driver in creating green jobs. The scale of the transition to cleaner, lower-carbon energy sources is simply too large for the public sector to tackle alone.

Against the motion
Andrew P. Morriss
H. Ross and Helen Workman Prof. of Law and Prof. of Business, University of Illinois College of Law
Governments should not try to choose technological winners and losers and so they should not promote "green" (or "red" or "purple") jobs. Instead, we should leave that to the marketplace.

About this debate
Fighting climate change means transforming the energy infrastructure; transforming such a huge infrastructure requires the labour of a great many people; new sources of employment are particularly appealing in a recession. Bringing together climate policy and employment policy seems to some to offer a double whammy（祸不单行）, with more green jobs in a cleaner economy. But is this more than a cynical attempt to repackage climate measures that on their own do not appeal to voters and businesses by constraining business and distorting labour markets? Can the interests of labour, capital and the environment ever really come together?

The moderator's opening remarks

Given the long-term and in some cases rather intangible benefits of environmental prudence, people arguing for measures that will reduce global warming and bring about other desirable but distant ends tend to look for near-term benefits, too. Unsurprisingly, in a recession and its aftermath（余波，后果）, jobs have recently had pride of place on that benefit list. As Nancy Pelosi put it when defending the cap-and-trade（总量管制与交易制度；限额交易） bill on greenhouse emissions which passed the House of Representatives last year, the American people should be glad of such legislation for four reasons: "jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs".

Leaving aside the possibility that some Americans might be glad of such legislation because it stands a chance of（很有可能，有……的希望） reducing carbon-dioxide emissions, how much of a real reason for joy are those green jobs?（great！可用于argument中，排除一种可能性，说另外的原因）

That government investment, subsidy and regulation can produce green jobs is not in any doubt. No one would have built a solar power industry in Germany on the basis of its sizzling（极热的） noon-day sun. The fact that Germany now has such an industry, with tens of thousands of people employed in it, is an act of fiat（命令；许可；政法）. So is most, though not all, of the rest of Germany's renewable energy sector, which now employs more than a quarter of a million people. A similar story can be told about Spanish renewable energy. The American renewables energy lobby is endlessly（无穷尽地；不断地） keen to point out how many jobs rely on its turbines, ethanol refineries and the like.

The question is whether those jobs represent a net benefit, or whether they are being created at the expense of other jobs elsewhere in the economy. （点名关键问题，可用于argument，说主要错误）Green jobs created by government intervention have opportunity costs（argument错误原因的一种）, in that some part of the money used to provide or promote them might otherwise have created jobs in some other sector. There is also the risk of jobs being counted as created by government intervention when they would have been created anyway, thus inflating assessments of the effectiveness of the policy.

These problems should not lead to the conclusion that a green jobs policy is necessarily foolish. It is quite possible for policies to serve different ends at the same time: the creation of the US freeway system in the 1950s and 1960s was to some extent seen as a case in point, providing economic benefits and defence benefits—the ability to move equipment quickly and easily—at the same time (the programme is still known officially as the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways)（举例的模范用法）. Synergies
and possibilities for leverage do exist in the world, and policymakers may be able to spot and use them. But those who claim to be doing so have an obligation to explain carefully the evidence for believing that their approach really will produce net benefits.（argument 总结中可用，需要作者提供更多的证据，以证明结论的正确性）

It is not for moderators to specify too closely the terms of the debate, but it may be useful to point out that the motion, and in particular its key word "sensible", can be read in a more economic context or a more political context. In terms of economics, the key issue is efficiency: do the policies increase net employment at justifiable costs? Politically, things may be a little less well defined.

Does green investment allow specific sorts of jobs to be created in a way that has social value, for example, in a particular area? Is it right to allow employment outcomes to influence the choice between types of green policy? It would hardly be unreasonable if, given two policy options with equivalent environmental benefits, it might make political sense to go with the one that had clearly defined employment benefits too. But what about the risk that the green jobs associated with a programme might in time come to outweigh its actual greenery?（先说好处，转折说其中的缺陷，欲扬先抑，狠！） In such cases you can end up with a non-green jobs programme benefiting from unjustified subsidies that are hard to get rid of.

These are some of the issues that I look forward to hearing our debaters, and you their audience, weigh in on over the next few days.

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The proposer's opening remarks

The private sector—not the government—can and must be the main driver in creating green jobs. The scale of the transition to cleaner, lower-carbon energy sources is simply too large for public-sector resources and programmes to tackle alone. Only a tidal wave of private investment, innovation, invention and entrepreneurship can get the job done.

But that wave will never rise unless the government becomes a constructive partner in the effort. Therefore, it is perfectly sensible for national governments to aspire to create policies that produce green jobs.（转折，提出观点）

After all, John Doerr, a leading light of Silicon Valley who knows a thing or two about innovation and technology, having placed early bets on Sun Microsystems and a little company called Google, has gone so far as to call clean energy "the largest economic opportunity of the 21st century".

The benefits of moving toward clean energy are potentially sweeping: helping to restore infrastructure, rebuild neighbourhoods, retool factories and ignite innovation. Additionally, energy security, climate stabilisation, pollution reduction and expanded economic opportunity are all legitimate aims for policymakers to pursue.

Critics of green jobs recoil at the notion that governments might somehow tamper with（干预，损害） the natural energy market to promote renewables. They sniff（嗤之以鼻） and generate a host of objections to market-distorting mandates and wasteful subsidies. But energy markets are already the product of policy, mainly those that support incumbent（现任的；依靠的；负有职责的） energy sources like coal, oil and nuclear power. These incumbent technologies benefit from subsidies, regulatory structures that shut out distributed generation of renewable power and pricing schemes（价格实施方案） that undervalue the economic contributions of energy efficiency.

The critics conveniently ignore the truth that all forms of energy are heavily regulated and often subsidised. This is because energy is the lifeblood of the economy. The precise mix of energy sources being developed and deployed（展开，部署）
within a country is never the result of pure market forces, but always a result of both private and public choices. It reflects a mix of innovation and investment on the one side, and of regulation, taxation and subsidy on the other.

Because we place no value on our atmosphere, the market acting alone cannot achieve the public interest in a stable climate and human health. Therefore, the question is not whether we will pursue policies to shape energy markets, but what sort of energy markets we want to achieve. It is sensible for governments to enact policies that will maximise the use of clean, renewable and low-carbon energy sources within and beyond their borders.

Public policies are now necessary to correct existing market failures and put clean energy on an even playing field with fossil fuels; to establish the market certainty that businesses need to make long-term investment decisions; and to provide stable, long-term support for clean-energy research, development and deployment, just as they have done in the past for the medical, aeronautical and information technology sectors.

Public investment is also required to bring the ageing electrical and transportation infrastructure that powers our industries and facilitates commerce into the 21st century, and to ramp up（增加，上升） workforce and manufacturing infrastructure to meet the enormous new demands for goods and services that will result from new clean-energy markets.

Furthermore, governments will need to go beyond（超出，胜过） a simple cap-and-trade system for global warming pollution. Renewable energy standards and codes for energy efficiency will help build markets. Green banks and new financing tools will use public underwriting（保险业；证券包销） to help unleash private capital. And public investments in infrastructure will create a platform for innovative businesses to thrive and hire more workers.

In this context, policy is not a restraint on trade. It is a driver of innovation.

Fortunately, this approach has a proud and successful history. We can look to the history of the United States for good examples of what is possible. From the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electrification, to the interstate highway system, to the telecom revolution, new investments in transformative infrastructure have consistently opened up access and opportunity, and brought more people into the middle class. The internet didn't just create jobs for software engineers; it created work installing fibre optic cable. It created new office jobs in information technology and new career ladders into skilled professions.

Given this aspect of American history, it is ironic that the United States is falling behind in the global race for clean energy. Doubly so, given that the United States invented many of the key technologies that will power future growth, from solar panels, to advanced lithium ion batteries（锂离子电池）, to the modern wind turbine.

America's economic competitors in Asia and Europe see the opportunity and are driving hard to secure competitive advantage. China by some estimates invested $400 billion of public and private capital in clean energy just last year.

Given the global competition to dominate clean energy production, one need not believe that green jobs are a panacea（万能药；灵丹妙药） to believe that pursuing them is smart and sensible.

After all, practically everything that is good for energy independence or the environment will create a job—a green job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Homes don't retrofit（更新；改进；式样翻新） or upgrade themselves. The smart grid won't install itself, nor will bullet trains lay their own tracks. In many places, trees don't even plant themselves any more.

To argue against green jobs is to argue for government inaction or abdication on some of the biggest challenges of our time. That is not acceptable.

Great and mighty labours are required of humanity in the new century. To mitigate climate chaos and avoid economy-wrecking energy shortages, workers must repower, rewire and retrofit whole nations. As men and women step forward to achieve these ends and accomplish these tasks, their hard-hats（[美国俚语]保守的，顽固不化的；保守反动的）—in many cases—will be green.

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The opposition's opening remarks

Governments should not try to choose technological winners and losers and so they should not promote "green" (or "red" or "purple") jobs. Instead, we should leave that to the marketplace. Here's why.（先陈述观点，最后一举引出下面要说原因）

No clear definition of "green"

While the phrase "green jobs" evokes organic farmers and wind turbine repairmen, there is no clear, common definition of what a "green" job is. Without one, special-interest lobbying will transform even well-intentioned programmes. Consider corn-based ethanol, a technology with no redeeming features. Corn-based ethanol is bad for the environment, placing unsustainable demands on water supplies and increasing harmful farming practices. It is bad for people, raising corn prices for some of the world's poorest people. It provides little, if any, environmental benefit, with a net energy gain often close to or even below zero (the exact amount depends on the weather during the growing season, among other things). Yet corn-based ethanol has received billions in taxpayer support and continues to be favoured in so-called "green" energy legislation.

The ethanol problem is no accident. Such programmes draw special interests as picnics draw ants. Beneficiaries（受益者） of federal largesse, such as Archers Daniels Midland, lobby to divert public money for their benefit while Iowa corn interests ensure that presidential candidates pledge（保证） fealty（忠诚） to ethanol before the Iowa caucuses. This support comes at a high price for ordinary Americans: a Cato Institute study found that every dollar of ADM's ethanol profits costs taxpayers $30. Despite these problems, federal policy has promoted ethanol as a "green" technology for years. Many environmentalists now disclaim corn-based ethanol but, because it has been promoted as an example of the federal government's ability to pick green technology, they bear the burden of showing why their current proposals will not yield the same results. Before we can be sure that a "green" jobs proposal is going to improve environmental quality, we need to know how those promoting it plan to avoid the problem of politics diverting public resources into corporate welfare.

There are also deep disagreements over definitions that need to be settled in order to have a rational allocation of public resources. For example, is nuclear power "green"? If you care about greenhouse gas emissions, it is one of the best technologies available for power generation. If you worry about the long-term disposal of radioactive waste, it isn't. Which concern is more important? Who decides? Green jobs proponents（支持者） are all over the map on this. The Obama administration is currently promoting certain nuclear subsidies as a "green" investment; the US Conference of Mayors counts existing nuclear facilities as "green" but not new ones; most environmental groups do not consider nuclear power "green" at all. These questions are not just theoretical. Proponents want to allocate billions in public resources based on someone's categorization（分门别类） of some things as "green" and some as not. The most basic principles of transparency（透明度） in government, a theme in Barack Obama's campaign for president, require that we settle such issues before we turn over the keys to the Treasury（财政部）.

Proponents haven't done their homework

Physicians follow a principle of "First, do no harm". Governments would do well to follow the same. Before governments act on the scale that green jobs proponents propose, we need evidence that the action at least won't hurt the economy. I'd give an "F" mark to all of the major studies supporting green jobs programmes if a student turned them in for an undergraduate economics class. They do not conform to the basic principles of policy analysis.

First, virtually none of the analyses supporting green jobs programmes make calculations of net jobs. Shifting power generation from coal to solar undoubtedly boosts employment in solar energy but it also reduces employment in coal industries. Since solar power is more costly than coal power, the increase in energy prices wipes out jobs in other industries. If their employment effects are a reason to support these programmes, we need to know that the expenditures will actually create more new jobs than they destroy.（举例）

Second, most proponents use a technique called input-output analysis. This technique requires three assumptions: (1) constant factor prices; (2) constant coefficients production; and (3) a jobs multiplier greater than one. Neither of the first two applies to disruptive（捣乱的） technological changes like shifting the mix of energy production and radically（根本的，完全的） changing energy prices. There is almost no evidence to support the third and many reasons to doubt its validity. I have written at length（详细地，终于） elsewhere about these methodological flaws（方法上的缺陷）, but the point is essentially "garbage in, garbage out". We cannot trust the estimates of the benefits because they were done incorrectly. Just as you would not make an investment based on the calculations of an accountant（会计人员）
who cannot add, we should not spend billions of dollars based on economic predictions from forecasters who do not know their craft or practise it with sleights（巧方法） of hand.（借喻）

Let the market decide

We know how to improve energy efficiency, develop new technologies and create new jobs: unleash entrepreneurs and take advantage of markets to solve what the Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich Hayek called "the knowledge problem". Put simply, Hayek's point, on this issue, is that we do not know enough to plan on the grand scale green jobs that proponents propose.

Consider energy.（能源的举例） In 1870, coal heated people's homes, natural gas provided light, electricity had little practical application and gasoline was a waste product from kerosene（煤油） refining. The great energy policy debates of that era were concerned with whether the world would run short of coal. No one in 1870 would have predicted that coal would become almost entirely an industrial fuel in plentiful supply, that natural gas would be used primarily to generate electricity and provide residential heat, that electricity would be in widespread use in homes and industry, or that gasoline would become an expensive commodity. We know as little about our energy future as our predecessors did about theirs and so we must put a premium on strategies that can adapt to new information, circumstances and ideas. That is what entrepreneurs do best. We should let them do it.

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Featured guest
Robert N. Stavins

In the January 12th 2009 issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an article called "Greening the Ghetto（少数民族聚居区，贫民区，犹太人区）: Can a Remedy Serve for Both Global Warming and Poverty?
"  The following passage appeared in the article:

When I presented [Van] Jones's arguments to Robert Stavins, a professor of business and government at Harvard who studies the economics of environmental regulation, he offered the following analogy: "Let's say I want to have a dinner party. It's important that I cook dinner, and I'd also like to take a shower before the guests arrive. You might think, well, it would be really efficient for me to cook dinner in the shower. But it turns out that if I try that I'm not going to get very clean and it's not going to be a very good dinner. And that is an illustration of the fact that it is not always best to try to address two challenges with what in the policy world we call a single policy instrument.

That brief quote generated a considerable amount of commentary on the internet, much of it negative and some of it downright hostile（彻头彻尾的敌意）. This surprised me, because I didn't consider the proposition to be controversial, and I had chosen my words carefully, simply stating that "it is not always best to try to address two challenges with … a single policy instrument". Two activities, each with a sensible purpose, can be very effective if done separately, but sometimes combining them means that one does a poor job with one, the other, or even both.

In the policy world, such dual-purpose policy instruments are sometimes a good, even great idea (gasoline/petrol taxes are an example), but other times, they are not. Whether trying to kill two birds with one stone makes sense depends upon the proximity of the birds, the weapon being used and the accuracy of the stoner. In the real world of important policy challenges, such as environmental degradation and economic recession, these are empirical questions and need to be examined case by case, which was my point in the brief quote above.

In 1990, when the US Congress sought to cut sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions from coal-fired power plants by 50% to reduce acid rain, Senator Robert Byrd (West Virginia) argued against the proposal for a national cap-and-trade system, because it would displace Appalachian coal-mining jobs through reduced demand for high-sulphur coal. He recommended instead a national requirement for all plants to install scrubbers（清洗器）, which would have increased costs nationally by $1 billion per year in perpetuity（永恒，永久）.

Fortunately, the late Senator Ted Kennedy (Massachusetts) recognised that these two problems (acid rain and displaced miners) called for two separate policy instruments. Simultaneous with the passage of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which established the path-breaking（划时代的，先锋的，开创性） SO2 allowance trading programme, Congress passed a job training and compensation initiative for Appalachian coal miners, at a one-time cost of $250 million. Acid rain was cut by 50%, $1 billion per year in perpetuity was saved for the economy, and sensible and meaningful aid was provided to the displaced miners. Two different policies were used to address two different purposes. Sometimes that is the wisest course.

What about two current challenges: concern about the environment, in particular global climate change, on the one hand, and the need to revitalise economies, on the other hand? Can "green jobs" be the answer to both?

Will economic stimulus packages, properly designed, lead to job creation in the short term? Yes, but to some degree this will be by moving forward in time the date of job creation, as opposed to creating additional jobs in the long run. Of course, at a time of recession and high unemployment, that can be a sensible thing to do. So, by expanding economic activity, an economic stimulus package can surely create jobs, green or otherwise, in the short term.

But will a stimulus package, such as subsidies for renewable energy, create net jobs from the change in the nature of economic activity? The key question here is whether the encouraged economic activities in green sectors are more labour-intensive than the discouraged economic activities in other sectors, such as with a shift to renewables from fossil fuels.

This is considerably less clear, but there are cases where it is likely to be valid. Solar rooftop installation, for example, is labour-intensive. And the greatest consistency between economic stimulus and greening the economy is within the energy-efficiency realm, in particular, activities such as the weatherization of homes and businesses (President Obama's cash-for-caulkers initiative comes to mind). Such projects are highly labour-intensive, can be done relatively quickly and will save energy. (Note, however, that the US Department of Energy is having considerable trouble spending the stimulus money fast enough.) And, importantly, they will reduce the long-term cost of meeting climate objectives.

But some other areas, such as new green infrastructure, will happen much more slowly, partly because of NIMBY ("not in my backyard（不在我家后院）") problems, and so are much less consistent with the purpose of economic stimulus. An example of the challenge is presented by the current interest in expanding and improving the US electricity grid.

A more interlinked and better grid is needed for increased reliance on renewable energy sources, which will be needed to address climate change. First, greater use of renewable resources will require an expanded grid just to transmit electricity from wind-power sources in the Great Plains, for example, to cities with high demand for power. And, second, this will also require the use of a so-called "smart grid", so that greater reliance on intermittent（间歇的，断断续续的） sources of electricity, such as from wind farms, can be balanced with cuts in consumer demand when power is scarce.

But the timing of grid expansion, important for the use of renewables and achieving climate goals, is not coincident with the appropriate timing of the economic stimulus. As was reported in an article last year in the New York Times ("Hurdles (Not Financial Ones) Await Electric Grid Update," January 7th 2009, p. A11), the CEO of the American Transmission Company, which operates in four Midwestern states, said that the firm's most recent major project, a 200-mile transmission line from Minnesota to Wisconsin, took two years to build, but eight years prior to that to win the necessary permits.

Likewise, an article by Peter Behr in Climate Wire ("Green Power Express line gets derailed by patchwork grid rules", February 12th 2009, p. 1) focused on the dilemma facing ITC Holdings（国贸中心控股）, the nation's largest independent electric transmission company, which has been seeking permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to build a line to bring wind power from the Great Plains to the Midwest and East. The company's chairman and CEO, Joseph Welch, indicated that a greater hurdle than the necessary money or "even the ever-present citizen opposition to new transmission projects" is a set of rules for interstate transmission lines that effectively prohibits projects that are not immediately required to maintain the grid's reliability. A project intended to provide future green power does not meet the test.

These are just two examples of the unpleasant reality of the pace of investment and change in this important category of green infrastructure frequently talked about in the context of quick economic stimulus. Surely, economic recovery, increased reliance on renewable sources of energy and a smarter, interconnected grid are all important. But that does not mean they are best addressed with a single policy instrument: the economic stimulus package.

So, the strongest support for green job creation is with regard to economic expansion, as opposed to changes in the economy (which is why China is able to "green its economy" as it rapidly expands). Of course, the key economic question remains whether even more jobs would be created with a different sort of expansion. In any event, while we seek to expand economic activity through economic stimulus, it can make sense to try to reduce any tendency to lock in new capital stock that would make it more difficult and costly to achieve long-term environmental goals. But that is very different from claiming that all substitution of green activities for brown activities creates jobs in the long term.

As governments use economic stimulus to expand economic activity, they can and should tilt the expansion in a green direction. But rather than a "broad-brush green painting of the stimulus", this may call for some careful, selective, and well thought through "green tinting".

Addressing the worst economic recession in generations calls for the most effective economic stimulus that can be devised, not some stimulus that is diminished in effectiveness through excessive bells and whistles meant to address a myriad of other (legitimate) social concerns.
And, likewise, getting serious about global climate change will require the enactment and implementation of meaningful, dedicated climate policies. These are two serious but different policy problems, and they call for two serious, carefully crafted policy responses.

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World economy
Fear returns

Governments were the solution to the economic crisis. Now they are the problem

May 27th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

IT’S not quite a Lehman moment, but financial markets are more anxious today than at any time since the global recovery took hold almost a year ago. The MSCI index of global stocks has fallen by over 15% since mid-April. Treasury yields have tumbled（暴跌）
as investors have fled（逃走） to the relative safety of American government bonds(债券). The three-month inter-bank borrowing rate is at a ten-month high. Gone is the exuberance that greeted the return to growth (see article). Investors are on edge（紧张不安，烦躁）.

What lies behind these jitters? New nervousness about geopolitical（地理政治学） risk, with tensions rising in the Korean peninsula, has not helped. But that comes on top of two wider worries.

One is about the underlying health of the world economy. Fears are growing that the global recovery will falter as Europe’s debt crisis spreads, China’s property bubble（房地产泡沫） bursts and America’s stimulus-fuelled rebound peters out. The other concerns government policy. From America’s overhaul of financial regulation to Germany’s restrictions on short-selling, politicians are changing the rules in unpredictable ways (see article). And the scale of sovereign debts has left governments with less room to counter any new downturn; indeed, many of them are being forced into austerity.

The danger is that these fears reinforce each other in a pernicious reversal（致命的；颠倒，翻转） of the dynamics of 2008-09. Then, co-ordinated government action on a grand scale stopped the global financial crisis from turning into a depression. Now, thanks to incompetence and impotence, governments may become the problem that will drag the world economy down.

Don’t panic

That is far from inevitable（这绝非必然）. Fears about the fragility of the global recovery are exaggerated. Led by big emerging economies, the world’s output is probably growing at an annual rate of more than 5%, far swifter than most seers（观看者，
预言者，先知，占卜者） expected.

This pace will, and should, slow, not least（尤其） because the big emerging economies need to tackle rising inflation and possible asset bubbles. China is in obvious danger, which is why its government has tried to constrain loans and property prices. Pricking asset bubbles is never easy, but there is scant evidence that its efforts are too heavy-handed（笨手笨脚的） (see article).

America’s growth may also slow as firms stop rebuilding their stocks and the government’s stimulus tapers off（逐渐减少）. But the world’s biggest economy does not seem on the verge of a second recession. For all their heavy debts, American consumers have returned to the shops. Their confidence is rising as the economy is producing jobs (albeit not enough of them). And Congress seems likely to slow the pace of fiscal tightening（财政紧缩） with a new “mini-stimulus” of temporary spending（临时开支） (see article).

Growth prospects look grimmest in Europe. Yet even there the likely immediate outcome of the euro zone’s crisis is the enfeeblement of an already weak recovery, rather than a sudden slump（暴跌，意气消沉，(土地)下沉）. The region’s profligate（a.挥金如土的  n.挥霍者）
economies will struggle for longer as austerity kicks in. But waning confidence will be mitigated by the boost that exports receive from the euro’s plunge（v./ n.(纵身)投入(水)；猛冲；猛跌，骤降）.

Look only at those probable short-term prospects and it is hard to see why financial markets are suddenly in such a lather（n. (肥皂水的)泡沫）. The reason is that the risks of a far worse outcome have risen, and those risks lie mainly with governments.

Grading the governments

The place with the wobbliest（adj. 摆动的，不稳定的）
policy is Europe. For the euro to survive, Europeans need to be prepared not just for painful fiscal adjustment but for profound structural reform as well. Profligate governments, mostly in southern Europe, must become more prudent. Uncompetitive economies must shake up（使改组，使重组；使震惊，使不安） their labour and product markets. Countries that are running current-account surpluses（n.过剩，剩余，盈余）, mainly in the north, must help, by avoiding overzealous（过分热心的） belt-tightening（强制性节约） and introducing reforms to encourage private spending. And the European Central Bank (ECB) should counter the fiscal austerity with a looser monetary policy. Reducing real wages in Spain would be easier if euro-zone inflation were higher.
Unfortunately, Germany’s government seems to be drawing exactly the opposite conclusions, promising to set an example with tough cuts when it should be helping to stimulate growth. The worry is that, under German pressure, the ECB will have the same misguided tendency to toughness, condemning the euro area to years of stagnation

（n.停滞）.
Governments outside the euro zone are also at risk of drawing flawed conclusions, especially on exchange rates and fiscal policy. China seems to think that the euro’s decline makes it less urgent to allow the yuan to appreciate（vt.赏识；为…表示感激;领会 vi.增值）. The opposite is true. With its biggest export market in a funk（畏缩，害怕）, China needs to accelerate the rebalancing of its economy towards domestic consumption, with the help of a stronger currency.

For much of the rich world, however, the most important consequences of Europe’s mess will be fiscal. Governments must steer between imposing premature austerity（过早紧缩） (in a bid to avoid becoming Greece) and allowing their public finances to deteriorate for too long. In some countries with big deficits, the fear of a bond-market rout（债券市场大跌） is forcing rapid action. Britain’s new government spelled out useful initial spending cuts this week. But the emergency budget promised for June 22nd will be trickier（adj. 狡猾的，欺骗的，棘手的）: it needs to show resolve on the deficit without sending the country back into recession.

In America, paradoxically, the Greek crisis has, if anything, removed the pressure for deficit reduction, by reducing bond yields（债券收益率降低）. America’s structural budget deficit will soon be bigger than that of any other OECD（经济合作和发展组织） member, and the country badly needs a plan to deal with it. But for now, lower bond yields and a stronger dollar are the route through which American spending will rise to counter European austerity. Thanks to its population growth and the dollar’s role as a global currency, America has more fiscal room than any other big-deficit country. It has been right to use it.

The world is nervous for good reason. Although the fundamentals（a.基本(础)的 n.[ pl.]基本原则(法则)） are reasonably good, the judgment of politicians is often unreasonably bad. Right now that is what poses the biggest risk to the world economy.

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...

shevavaUID：2574709

Gay rights in developing countries

A well-locked closet

Gays are under attack in poor countries—and not just because of “local culture”

May 27th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Militancy（n. 战斗性，交战状态） in Mauritius（毛里求斯）

THEIR crimes were “gross indecency”([法] 严重猥亵) and “unnatural acts”. Their sentence was 14 years’ hard labour: one intended, said the judge, to scare others. He has succeeded. A court in Malawi(马拉威(非洲东南部国家，旧称Nyasaland)) last week horrified（vt.使震惊，使毛骨悚然） many with its treatment of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a gay couple engaged（订婚） to be married. The two men are the latest victims of a crackdown（n. 压迫，镇压，痛击） on gay rights in much of the developing world, particularly Africa.
Some 80 countries criminalise consensual（adj. 在两愿下成立的，交感性的） homosexual sex. Over half rely on “sodomy（鸡奸）” laws left over from British colonialism. But many are trying to make their laws even more repressive. Last year, Burundi’s president, Pierre Nkurunziza, signed a law criminalising consensual gay sex, despite the Senate’s overwhelming rejection of the bill. A draconian bill proposed in Uganda would dole out（少量地发放） jail sentences for failing to report gay people to the police and could impose the death penalty for gay sex if one of the participants is HIV-positive. In March Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, who once described gay people as worse than dogs or pigs, ruled out constitutional（a.法治的；体质的） changes outlawing（n.歹徒，亡命之徒 vt.宣布…为不合法） discrimination based on sexual orientation.
In many former colonies, denouncing homosexuality as an “unAfrican” Western import（vt./ n.进口，输入[ pl.]进口商品；意义） has become an easy way for politicians to boost both their popularity and their nationalist credentials. But Peter Tatchell, a veteran gay-rights campaigner, says the real import into Africa is not homosexuality but politicised homophobia（政治化的同性恋恐惧症）.

This has, he argues, coincided with an influx of conservative Christians, mainly from America, who are eager to engage African clergy（clergy） in their own domestic battle against homosexuality. David Bahati, the Ugandan MP who proposed its horrid bill, is a member of the Fellowship, a conservative American religious and political organisation. “Africa must seem an exciting place for evangelical（n. 信福音主义者adj. 福音(书), 新教会的） Christians from places like America,” says Marc Epprecht, a Canadian academic who studies homosexuality in Africa. “They can make much bigger gains in their culture wars there than they can in their own countries.” Their ideas have found fertile ground. In May this year, George Kunda, Zambia’s vice-president, lambasted gay people, saying they undermined the country’s Christian values and that sadism（n. 虐待狂，性施虐狂） and Satanism（n. 恶魔崇拜, 恶魔般的行为） could be the result.

Discrimination against gays, in Africa in particular, risks undermining（vt.暗中破坏，逐渐削弱；侵蚀…的基础） the fight against HIV/AIDS. In February, those suspected of being gay were targeted in Kenya in mob violence（暴徒的暴力） at a government health centre providing HIV/AIDS services. Bishop Joshua Banda, chairman of Zambia’s National AIDS Council, said that donor countries’ efforts to speak out against（大声疾呼反对） violations of gay rights（同性恋权利的侵犯）
were against Zambia’s “traditional values”. The increasing crackdown on gay rights in Africa will be a disaster for public health, according to Mr Epprecht, as gay people go underground and do not get treatment for HIV/AIDS.

The problem goes beyond Africa and is more than one of state-sponsored homophobia. In Iraq, for example, homosexuality is legal. But in 2009 Human Rights Watch described the persecution（n.迫害） that men suspected of being gay there face, including kidnappings, rape, torture and extrajudicial killings（法外处决）. In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion, there has been a growing fear of the “feminisation”（ n. 女性化） of Iraqi men. The Mahdi Army, a Shia militia（什叶派民兵）, has played on these fears and, claiming to uphold religious values and morality（坚持宗教价值观和道德）, offered violent “solutions”. Members of the Iraqi security forces have also been accused of colluding（v.串通，共谋） in the violence.

South Africa was the first country anywhere to ban homophobic discrimination in its constitution. It is the only country in Africa to allow gay marriage. In formal legal terms, it is a beacon（n. 烟火，灯塔） for gay rights, says Mr Tatchell. But the growing phenomenon of “corrective rape”（
纠正强奸） both there and in Zimbabwe, where women are assaulted in an attempt to “cure” them of lesbianism, suggests these laws often fail on the ground. As worrying to campaigners as the violence itself is a reluctance by the authorities to acknowledge that the attacks are motivated by homophobia. In April 2008 Eudy Simelane, a South African football player who was a lesbian, was gang-raped and stabbed to death. Two men were convicted of her murder but, in his sentencing, the judge denied that Ms Simelane’s sexuality played a part in the crime.

Hopes rose a little in June 2009 when India overturned its 149-year-old sodomy law but since then the global trend seems to have been in the opposite direction. Campaigners argue the proposed laws have implications beyond gay rights. How countries treat one particularly vulnerable group is a good measure of how they will act towards the rest of their citizens.

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China's property market

Home truths

China’s economic boom can survive a property bust

May 27th 2010 | BEIJING AND HONG KONG | From The Economist print edition

A DISCARDED toilet bowl（n. 抽水马桶）lies on a pile of rubble in Tongzhou, a Beijing suburb which is busily remodelling itself as a “modern” and “international” city. On one side of the railway, a string of single-storey dwellings, built of brick and tile(砖瓦), have yet to be demolished(vt.拆毁，毁坏；驳倒(论点等)，推翻). Their occupants make the most of the surrounding debris(n. 碎片，残骸), loading bent window frames onto the back of bicycles to be sold as scrap. On the other side of the tracks tower new blocks of flats(n. 平原，公寓), more than 20 storeys high, waiting for their first residents.
Tongzhou’s new flats are one example of the property boom in China, where 1.87 billion square metres of living space were under construction in the first quarter of this year, 36% more than a year earlier. The boom has resonated(vi. 共鸣，回响) widely. Banks have expanded their mortgage(n. 按揭，抵押贷款)-books briskly(adv. 活泼地，精神勃勃地); local governments are filling their coffers(n.保险箱) by selling land to developers or to the “urban investment vehicles” they sponsor. Property and construction represent about 10% of China’s GDP, not counting the consumer goods that home buying inspires(购房激励), such as the quilts(n.被子) and curtain rails on sale in Tongzhou’s market.

Home prices in 70 Chinese cities rose by 12.8% in the year to April, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. That was a record, and probably an understatement. The bureau also counts the total sales value of homes—384.6 billion yuan ($56.3 billion) in April—and the floor space(n. 房屋面积，建坪) sold (72.4m square metres). Dividing one by the other gives an alternative gauge(给出了一个另类评估) of prices, which increased by almost 18% nationally in the year to April and by over 95% in Beijing (see chart 1).

But China’s policymakers seem determined to disappoint fortune-hunters. In April they imposed new curbs on housing speculation(住房投机), raising down-payment requirements and mortgage rates(首期付款的要求和抵押贷款利率). In some property hotspots, out-of-towners cannot get a mortgage until they have paid local taxes for at least a year. Buyers must make at least a 50% down payment on a second home, even if it is their first mortgage. In Beijing they cannot buy a third home, even with their own money.

The measures seem to be working. Stephen Green of Standard Chartered reckons that prices of new homes fell by over 20% on average in the first week of May in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, although he cautions that this may reflect the mix of homes on offer(<英>供出售的), as developers keep their best properties off the market for now. In Tongzhou, prices have fallen by 13.4% since mid-April, according to the Beijing Times. The worry now is that a bursting property bubble(楼市泡沫爆破) might do damage to China’s lenders, ruin local exchequers(破坏当地小金库) and cast a pall over its economy(经济蒙上了阴影)—and the countries which sell to it.

In China’s biggest cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, prices did rise too far and too fast. To buy a 100-square-metre home in the capital, the average Beijing household must now spend 17 years’ income.

Across the country as a whole, home prices are nine times the average income of urban households. But China’s property market does not yet serve the average household, as Tao Wang of UBS(abbr. 瑞士联合银行(总部所在地瑞士，主要经营银行)(=United Bank of Switzerland)) points out. Many city-dwellers live in dormitories provided by their companies or flats obtained from their state-owned employers after a 1998 reform, which privatized(vt. 使归私有，使私人化) much of the housing stock. Since then, only 48m homes have been sold on the market, Ms Wang estimates, in a country with 215m urban households. If the first customers were also the richest, then China’s property market has so far served only the top 20-30% of households.

China’s homebuyers also include a younger generation who missed out on the 1998 windfall (described by Andy Rothman of CLSA, a brokerage(n.经纪人(或中间人)业务；佣金，回扣), as the “largest one-time transfer of wealth in the history of the world”). But thanks to China’s “one-child” policy, a newly married couple can count on the undivided support of their parents to buy a new flat. That makes China’s home prices look more affordable.

Cash in hand

It is true that China’s households are increasingly turning to the banks, as well as relatives, to help them buy a home. Mortgages grew by 53% in the year to March(在今年3月). But the boom has not lasted long enough to leave too much debt in its wake(在其醒来). The ratio of housing loans(对住房贷款的比例) to GDP is still only 15.3%, compared with a peak of 79% in America (see chart 2).

Prices would have to fall a long way to push borrowers “under water”, owing more than the value of their house. The average mortgage is for less than 50% of the value of a home, Ms Wang reckons. In Hong Kong, where regulators bar mortgages of more than 70% of a home’s value, prices fell by almost half in the three years after the Asian financial crisis, yet mortgage delinquencies(按揭贷款拖欠) peaked at 1.4%.

If mortgages did turn sour(发酸，(计划)出岔，(建议)不再受欢迎), how badly would China’s banks suffer? China Merchants Bank’s mortgage book grew by 70% in 2009. But mortgages still amounted to only 23% of its total loans. In China’s other big banks, the share is less than 20%. Loans to property developers account for another 8% or so, according to Mr Rothman.

Local governments may be more exposed. They suffer from a chronic shortfall of tax revenues, which they partly fill by expropriating(v.充公，没收) land from farmers and selling it to developers at a hefty(a.强壮的，笨重的) markup(n. 涨价，利润，成本加价，毛利). Their dependence on property for income(财产收入) is often overstated, however. They are counting on land sales and property taxes for less than 17% of their revenues this year, according to Vincent Chan of Credit Suisse, once fiscal transfers from the central government are taken into account.

More concerning is the effect on their assets and liabilities(资产与负债). Local governments cannot borrow directly so they borrow through investment vehicles instead. These vehicles take loans, issue bonds or pool capital(发行债券或合股) with private firms to fund infrastructure projects, including housing.

How much they have borrowed is a matter of fierce debate. The China Banking Regulatory Commission(在中国银行业监督管理委员会) says their debts amounted to 7.4 trillion yuan at the end of last year. Victor Shih of Northwestern University, in Illinois, thinks they could already be as high as 11.4 trillion yuan (with another 12.7 trillion in untapped(adj. 塞子未开的，未使用的) lines of bank credit(银行信贷)).

The projects financed by these loans make fiscal sense as long as they add enough to the local tax base to cover their costs. A property slowdown might endanger some projects by this yardstick(n. 码尺，衡量的标准). It might also hurt the value of the land that local governments have offered as collateral(n  担保物（作为抵押或担保的财产）) for their borrowings.

Mr Shih’s estimate (not counting the untapped credit lines) would add another 34 percentage points to China’s ratio of public debt to GDP. But even then the burden would be little more than 50% in an economy growing at over 10% in nominal terms(名义). China’s local governments are no doubt wasting a lot of money. But China’s government has a lot of money to waste.

Pessimists compare China to Japan in the 1990s, when a rising economic power, gaining ground(抬头) on America, suffered an asset bust that has haunted it ever since. A recent study by the Bank of Japan concludes that China does indeed resemble its eastern neighbour—but in the 1970s, not the 1990s. Like Japan then, China today has a strong demand for housing, fuelled(vt.加燃料(油)；刺激) by fast growth and rapid urbanisation, and a tolerable exposure to debt.

Mr Rothman and his team surveyed over 350 middle-class households outside China’s biggest cities, where prices are at least 60% cheaper. They found a taxi driver in Zibo who had saved enough to buy his home without a mortgage, and a professor in Wuhan who owned a flat close to each of the two universities he taught at. Half of the households had paid cash, although many had borrowed from friends and family. Of the others, 86% spent less than 30% of their income on mortgage repayments. Mr Rothman reckons that three-quarters of China’s homeowners remain stuck in cramped(a.狭窄的，挤在一起的), shoddy(n.劣质的，冒充好货的) flats received a decade ago from the government. They are keen to cross the tracks to a new home.