读economist 【dies in flames】by winning1030

hustly0415UID: 2407456

顶~~
发现自己很难坚持下来。。。

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16# hustly0415
一样。。。看我更新的速度就知道了。。。特别是这几周，很忙，想哭。。。
我看eco又慢。。。whatever,挺下来！

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Pandemics
The pandemic threat
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
It’s deadly serious; so even if the current threat fades, the world needs to be better armed

Illustration by KAL
IT IS said that no battle-plan survives contact with the enemy. This was certainly true of the plan drawn up over the past few years to combat an influenza （流行性感冒）pandemic. The generals of global health assumed that the enemy would be avian （鸟类的）flu, probably passed from hens to humans, and that it would strike first in southern China or South-East Asia. In fact, the flu started in an unknown pig, and the attack came in Mexico, not Asia.
The hens, though, deserve some credit. The world has not had a pandemic (a global epidemic) of influenza since 1968. Four decades are long enough to forget that something is dangerous, and people might have done so had they not spent the past ten years considering the possibility that a form of bird flu which emerged in Hong Kong in 1997 might be one mutation away from going worldwide.




The new epidemic (see article) was raised on April 29th to just one notch below （仅次于）the level of a certified （被鉴定的）pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In an effort to halt the spread of the disease, Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, has announced that non-essential services should close down between May 1st and 5th, and people should stay at home. Part of the reason for worry is that, unlike ordinary flu, which mostly carries off the old, the victims of this disease are mostly young and otherwise healthy.
Still, this epidemic has not actually killed many people yet. That there have been a mere handful of confirmed deaths is probably the result of a lack of proper tests. But even if all the possibles are counted in, a couple of hundred fatalities cannot compare with the 30,000 deaths caused in America each year by seasonal influenza. So how scared should we be?
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
As far as this epidemic is concerned, it’s too early to tell. One unknown is how widespread the virus is in Mexico. If it is ubiquitous, and had not been noticed earlier because it emerged during the normal flu season, then this epidemic may turn out to be insignificant, at least to start with. No flu death is welcome, but in this case the new disease might not increase the immediate burden greatly. But if the new strain （品种）is relatively rare, or what is being seen now is a more dangerous mutation of what had once been a mild virus, then the proportion of infected people dying may already be high. The death-toll, then, will rise sharply as the disease spreads.
Either way, the authorities were right to hit red alert. Influenza pandemics seem to strike every few decades and to kill by the million—at least 1m in 1968; perhaps 100m in the “Spanish” flu of 1918-19. And even those that start mild can turn dangerous. That is because new viral diseases generally happen when a virus mutates in a way that allows it to jump species, and then continues to evolve to exploit its new host. If that evolution makes the virus more virulent, so much the worse for the host. HIV, the AIDS-causing virus, lived happily and benignly in chimpanzees（黑猩猩） before it became a scourge （灾祸）of people. In Mexico, the early indications are that two pig viruses that can infect people but rarely pass from person to person recombined with each other to create a virus which does so easily.
Changes in virulence have certainly happened before in influenza epidemics, which have struck in successive waves of different severity. The message is that it makes sense to put money and effort into containing the new infection even if it does turn out to be relatively harmless today. The more people who have the virus, the more virus particles（微粒） there are for that one, fatal mutation to appear in.这其中包含的经验教训是即便眼下的疾病结果确实被证明相对来说危害性不大，也应该投入资金和精力来遏制这场新的传染病。感染该病毒的人数越多，就会有越多的病毒颗粒，它们累积在一起引发最后那次致命变异的几率也就越大。——可以做长期与近期的材料


Resistance is another reason to try to contain an epidemic early. New antiviral drugs that were not around during past epidemics seem to be effective against the current outbreak. But natural selection is a powerful force, and if the spread of the disease means they have to be used widely, a resistant strain of the virus could easily evolve.
Don’t wait till winter
Now is the time to prepare for the worst. Flu—including pandemic flu—tends to be seasonal. The infection will probably tail off（变得越来越小） in the north over the next few months and head south as winter gets a grip on the Earth’s less populated hemisphere. It would make sense, therefore, to put the antiviral factories on overtime（加班） immediately, and try to develop, manufacture and distribute a vaccine.
Crash vaccine programmes pose their own risks. In 1976 flu vaccines killed a lot of people in America. But the growth of biotechnology means there are new ways of making vaccines and new types of vaccine to make. Mostly, these have been aimed at the threat of bird flu. But laboratories will already be clearing the decks to receive their first samples of the new swine（猪） flu, and getting to work on countermeasures.
And there is one further lesson. The system of checking for new diseases also needs to be improved. Partly because everyone was looking at Asia, no one was concentrating on Mexico. But as genetic sequencing becomes cheap and routine, it ought to be possible to pick dangerous mutations up quickly.
还有另外一个经验教训。搜寻新型疾病的系统也需要得到改善。这部分是因为大家都紧盯着亚洲，却没有人关注墨西哥。

That would mean sending samples from doctors’ surgeries to a central laboratory dedicated to sequencing, even when nothing strange was suspected. And that would require organisation and money. Not every person with a sniffle （抽鼻涕）need be tested—only a small, representative sample. But if this had happened in Mexico over the past few months, the generals of global health would have seen that something was coming down from the hills and they could have mobilised（准备行动） sooner.
Active caution, then, is what is called for. The world’s policymakers, most of whom live in the northern hemisphere, should not be fooled into thinking the new virus is going away for long, even if it declines over the next few months. Instead, as in any phoney war, they should use the time they have been granted to reinforce the world’s defences by stocking up （囤积）with antiviral medicine and making vaccines. They should also remember that, even if this flu turns out to be less frightening than feared, it is only a matter of time before a deadlier one comes along. A drill today will help to spare millions of lives in the future.即便新病毒在未来几个月内威力减弱，世界各国的政策制定者们——他们大多数来自北半球——也不应该愚蠢地认为它在很长一段时间内都不会卷土重来。相反，就像在任何一场静坐战争中一样，他们应该利用获得的宝贵时间通过贮存抗病毒药物和研发疫苗来加固全球卫生的防御。他们还应该牢记，即便这场流感不如人们之前害怕的那样令人恐惧，一场更加致命的流感迟早会来。今天的厉兵秣马将在未来挽救数百万人的生命

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Impressionist painting
Manet, Monet, money
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
IN THE early 1870s a new school of painting was exhibited in Paris. Its exponents were known in its early days as Naturalists or even Intransigents, before settling into the label by which they have become known today: Impressionists.By attempting a new way of painting light and its effects, so that it “palpitates（ （指人或身体某部分）颤抖, 颤动）with movement, light and life”, Stéphane Mallarmé, a 19th-century French poet, explained that Impressionism boldly turned its face away from the precise photographic finish of French academic art of the second half of the 19th century.

At first few understood what Edouard Manet, an Impressionist artist, and his followers were trying to do. Emile Zola in his 1886 novel, “The Masterpiece”, described the horror felt by much of the general public when they saw the pictures in the first avant-garde exhibitions. “That novel rendering （描绘）of light seemed an insult to them. Some old gentlemen shook their sticks.”
In this delightfully readable book, Philip Hook, Sotheby’s senior director of Impressionist and modern art, analyses how the rebellion took different forms in different countries. But what it had in common everywhere was the younger generation’s desire to cleanse artistic vision by painting only what they saw about them, with broad brushstrokes and brighter, simpler colours. Many of the Impressionists eschewed （避开，戒绝）black, for example, conscious that shadow was actually composed of other colours, mostly purples and blues.
Impressionism’s dissolution （瓦解）of form into colour and atmosphere was an alarming development for the conservative bourgeoisie(中产阶级). The earliest buyers tended to be the artists’ friends, men of modest means such as Paul Gachet, Vincent van Gogh’s homeopathic doctor, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s friendly customs officer, Victor Choquet. But what began as rebellion soon became the new fashion. Those who bought Impressionist works directly from the artists were crushed by a stampede（ (人群的)蜂拥）of American millionaires and the new industrial aristocracy from France, Britain, Germany and Russia. On hand to reassure the newly moneyed about their purchases was a creature that had not been seen before, the art dealer—men such as Paul Durand-Ruel, who helped turn the patronage（赞助） of artists into the commercialised market familiar today. 不久就出现了一种新职业来让那些暴富们确信自己买的东西物有所值，就是艺术经纪人——像保罗•杜兰•鲁埃，这些人将买画卖画从资助艺术家的行为变成今天所熟悉的商业化市场化运作。AP This one went to Brunei
Rich industrialists gave way in the 1950s to such buyers as Stavros Niarchos, a Greek shipowner, and William Somerset Maugham, a British novelist and short-story writer then at the height of his fame, and in later decades to the Japanese and now the Qataris. Mr Hook is especially good at describing how the post-war directors of Sotheby’s (the less stuffy（古板的） of the two big auction houses) used a mix of public relations, celebrity journalism and naked opportunism to bring old collections to the market and to the attention of a whole new world of rich buyers. Ten van Goghs appeared in a 1956 biopic （传记片）of the artist’s brief unhappy existence, “Lust for Life”, starring Kirk Douglas. Two years later stills from the film were so successful in publicising the sale of the pictures that even the queen herself came to view them at Sotheby’s Bond Street saleroom.
Through two successive bull markets Impressionism has been the currency of new money, the gold standard of oligarchs and the international petrocracy who wanted instantly recognisable affirmation of their new enhanced status in the world. The big auctions in New York next week may be quieter than last year’s, but demand for the Impressionists will return. Of that Mr Hook is quite certain. 经过两轮持续的牛市烘托之后，印象派已经俨然成了一种新货币，并且还是判断世界寡头富豪和石油富豪的黄金标准——这些暴富之人想要立即得到看得见的，对自己新阶地位的肯定。

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Evolution
Unfinished business
Feb 5th 2009
From The Economist print edition
Charles Darwin’s ideas have spread widely, but his revolution is not yet complete
Bridgeman Art Library

THE miracles of nature are everywhere: on landing, a beetle(甲虫) folds its wings like an origami （折纸手工）master; a lotus（莲花） leaf sheds muddy water as if it were quicksilver（水银）; a spider spins a web to entrap her prey, but somehow evades（避开） entrapment herself. Since the beginning of time, people who have thought about such things have seen these marvels as examples of the wisdom of God; even as evidence for his existence. But 200 years ago, on February 12th 1809, a man was born who would challenge all that. [color=DeepSkyBlueThe book that issued the challenge, published half a century later, in 1859, offered a radical new view of the living world and, most radical of all, of humanity’s origins. The man was Charles Robert Darwin. The book was “On the Origin of Species”. And the challenge was the theory of evolution by natural selection.
Since Darwin’s birth, the natural world has changed beyond recognition. Then, the modern theory of atoms was scarcely（刚刚） six years old and the Earth was thought to be 6,000. There was no inkling （暗示，细微的迹象）of the size of the universe beyond the Milky Way（银河）, and radioactivity, relativity and quantum theory were unimaginable. Yet of all the discoveries of 19th- and early 20th-century science—invisible atoms, infinite space, the inconstancy of time and the mutability of matter—only evolution has failed to find general acceptance outside the scientific world. Few laymen would claim they did not believe Einstein. Yet many seem proud not to believe Darwin. Even for those who do accept his line of thought his ideas often seem as difficult today as they were 150 years ago.

The origin of the Origin
The idea of evolution by natural selection is not hard to grasp. It just requires connecting some uncontentious propositions. These are that organisms vary from one another, even within a species, and that new variation can arise from time to time; that some of this variation is passed from parent to offspring; and that more individuals are born than can exist in the available space (or be sustained by the available resources). The consequence is what Darwin described in his book as a “struggle for existence”. The weakest are eliminated in this struggle. The fit survive. The survivors pass on their traits to their offspring. Over enough time, this differential transmission of characters will lead to the formation of a new species.
Darwin was neither the first to recognise these simple ideas nor to put them together. Thinkers as far back as Empedocles, a Greek philosopher born in 490BC, are known to have suggested that natural selection might explain why animals were adapted to their surroundings. The idea of the struggle for existence has been traced as far back as al-Jahiz, a Muslim theologian and scholar born in Basra around 776. And the idea crops up被提到again in the works of Thomas Hobbes, a 17th-century philosopher, and Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s grandfather), who lived in the 18th.
By the beginning of the 19th century, the idea of evolution was in the air. There was an emerging acceptance that species were unstable. The botanists could see it in their hybrids. But what was missing was the mechanism. At the start of the 19th century Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, thought he had found it. He recognised that species were mutable, and he also proposed that traits could be inherited. His error was to suppose that individuals lost characteristics that they did not need in life and developed ones that they did—and that it was these changes that were passed to their offspring. A giraffe长颈鹿, for example, might grow a longer neck because it was useful for eating food that other giraffes could not reach. Its progeny would then inherit the attribute. It was a nice idea, but Lamarck was wrong. Acquired characteristics cannot be transmitted in this way.
对于进化机制的解答并非来自与生物学而是来自于经济学
In the end, the answer came not from biology but from economics. In 1798 Thomas Malthus wrote “An Essay on the Principle of Population”. Malthus argued that natural populations grow at an exponential（指数的） rate, whereas the increase in food supply is linear. In other words, more individuals are born than can possibly survive. His book popularised what was, in fact, an old idea, at just the right time for biology. After reading Malthus, both Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, a British naturalist, independently put the pieces of the puzzle together and dreamed up evolution by natural selection.
They both saw what Lamarck had failed to, that the struggle for existence in a crowded world, with its winners and losers, was the force that would ensure the survival of the plants and animals carrying the best traits. Darwin’s autobiography records his eureka moment: “I happened to read for amusement Malthus on population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence…it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”

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Psychology
Cleanliness is next to godlessness
Nov 20th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Soaping away your outer dirt may lead to inner evil

PUBLIC displays of untidiness, such as graffiti（涂鸦）, may promote bad behaviour (see article), but when it comes to personal cleanliness the opposite appears to be true. A study just published in Psychological Science by Simone Schnall of the University of Plymouth and her colleagues shows that washing with soap and water makes people view unethical（无原则的（尤指业务或职业道德方面））activities as more acceptable and reasonable than they would if they had not washed themselves.
Dr Schnall’s study was inspired by some previous work of her own. She had found that when feelings of disgust are instilled in them beforehand(预先), people make decisions which are more ethical than would otherwise be expected. She speculates that the reason for this is that feeling morally unclean (ie, disgusted) leads to feelings of moral wrongness and thus triggers increased ethical behaviour by instilling a desire to right the wrong. However, as the cleanliness and purification rituals found in many religions suggest, physical cleanliness, too, is linked to moral behaviour, so she decided to investigate this as well.

To do so, she conducted two experiments. The first asked 40 volunteers to unscramble（整理） sentences. Half were given sentences containing words associated with purity and cleanliness, such as “pure”, “washed”, “clean”, “immaculate” and “pristine（纯洁的）”. Those given to the other half contained only neutral words. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate a series of acts on an ethical scale ranging from zero (perfectly okay) to nine (very wrong). These varied from taking money found in a lost wallet, via eating a family’s dead dog to avoid starvation, to using a kitten for sexual arousal.
The second experiment exposed 44 volunteers to a three-minute clip （电影的片段）from “Trainspotting”, a film that is well known for eliciting feelings of disgust, to make them all feel unclean. The volunteers were then asked to describe how they would rate the same series of acts as in the first experiment. However, after watching the clip and before being exposed to the ethical questions, half of the participants were told that the room in which they were to do the rating was a sterile（无菌的） staff space that needed to be kept clean. They were therefore asked, please, to wash their hands with soap and water when entering.
The researchers report that those who were given the “clean” words or who washed themselves rated the acts they were asked to consider as ethically more acceptable than the control groups did. Among the volunteers who unscrambled the sentences, those exposed to ideas of cleanliness rated eating the family dog at 5.7, on average, on the wrongness scale whereas the control group rated it as 6.6. Their score for using a kitten in sexual play was 6.7; the control group individuals gave it 8.3. Similar results arose from the handwashing experiment.
Physical purification, in other words, produces a more relaxed attitude to morality. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Pontius Pilate is portrayed in the Bible as washing his hands of the decision to crucify （在十字架上钉死）Jesus. Something to think about for those who feel that purification rituals bring them closer to God.

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Guinea's new leader
He sounds modest. But for how long?
May 7th 2009 | CONAKRY
From The Economist print edition
Don’t expect the latest coup-leader to bow out in a hurry

Reuters Big Dadis
ONLY its third fully-fledged head of state since it became independent half a century ago, Guinea’s Moussa Dadis Camara is not the shy type. Having taken power in a bloodless coup(意外而成功的行为) after Lansana Conté died in December, he says he will organise elections and has rejected the temptation to promote himself from captain to general. But there the modesty ends and the Dadis Show, as Guineans call it, begins.
A cavalcade（一系列） of cars and military vehicles, sometimes topped off by a helicopter, accompanies his every movement. Most strikingly, the captain personally interviews alleged （声称的，所谓的）drug dealers and corrupt politicians of the old regime, live on television. Ousmane Conté, a son of the previous president, was viewed confessing that he had been part of a drug-smuggling ring. Several former ministers and a prime minister have agreed to pay back money that went missing when they were in office.
These public grillings（拷问） have made Dadis, as he is widely known, very popular. Recordings of his television triumphs are sold in markets. Transparency International, a Berlin-based lobby, deems Guinea one of the world’s ten most corrupt countries; it is also one of the poorest. So graft-bashing gestures go down well.

When the captain seized power at the head of a scrum of soldiers, it was not immediately clear who was calling the shots(操纵）. But he has begun impressively to fulfil his promises to clean up public life. “Corruption is widespread in Guinea, and in Conté’s time we knew it started in the president’s office,” says Bakary Fofana, a civic leader. “And people at the very top（以后对国家领导人可以用这个称呼） were involved in the drug-trafficking （贩毒）too. Ousmane Conté’s arrest showed that Dadis has the freedom to take on anyone.”
Still, the actual figures of the dirty money due to be repaid （应该要赔偿的）have not been revealed; Mr Conté and others have yet to be tried in court. The junta（军人集团） arrested a handful of（少量的） soldiers last month, accusing them of preparing a counter-coup（反政变）. Divisions in the army present the biggest threat to stability.
Most Guineans seem to welcome the dynamic new regime. But life is still hard. After years of misrule, even basic necessities such as electricity and water are luxuries in Conakry, the capital. “Anyone who brings us regular power and water will be president for life,” says Sekou Ahmed Cissokho, a journalist. “It’s that simple!”（也许可以用到有效的领导是否需要最高的道德伦理道义上）Dadis has promised proper elections, for the first time ever, by the end of the year. A transitional government has been appointed. But many of the ministers are in uniform, and the prime minister did not even have the privilege of announcing his cabinet; the names came straight from the armed forces. So far civil society, trade unions and a bevy of（一群） opposition parties say they are happy with the map charting the way towards elections, though some doubt the timetable can be met.
Foreign governments and international bodies will be expected to pay for the polls, an expensive business. Whether the captain will run is another hot issue. Apparently off the cuff（未准备的，即席的）, he recently said he was a citizen like any other and could take off his uniform to stand for election. He retracted the remark after a public outcry（强烈的抗议） made it clear that Guineans do not fancy another long spell （一段时间）of military rule following 24 years of Lansana Conté. But the captain was plainly floating his balloon.

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Italy
Regrettable Berlusconi
Apr 30th 2009
From The Economist print edition
What a pity Italy’s prime minister does not use his political muscle to reform his country

EPA
THIS newspaper has never thought much of Italy’s prime minister. In 1994, during Silvio Berlusconi’s first brief stint in the job, we called on him to resign. In 2001, before his second, we declared that his frequent brushes with （与。。。有冲突）the law and the conflict of interest inherent in his ownership of almost all the country’s commercial television channels made him unfit to lead Italy (see article). A year ago, as he campaigned for the job of prime minister for a third time, we advised Italian voters to back（支持） his main opponent, Walter Veltroni (see article). Yet Mr Berlusconi has gone from strength to strength（不断强大）, even as his country has not.For the leader of a country in a dire（可怕的） recession, his popularity is startlingly high. Enough Italians appear to forgive, or at least overlook, his innumerable gaffes（出丑，失态）—whether on television talk-shows or at international summits. He has won plaudits for his energetic response to the earthquake in L’Aquila. His political grip（掌握） is secure. On the right he is unchallenged, even though he will turn 73 in September. The centre-left opposition, which recently dumped Mr Veltroni, is making little headway（没有取得什么进展.）. In short, Mr Berlusconi is more dominant than ever—indeed, disturbingly so (see article).

It is not just a question of worrying about one man’s power. Italy’s problems are also as daunting （令人畏惧的）as ever. In a global crisis, its performance looks better, but only because other economies have fallen so fast. The IMF forecasts that GDP will shrink by 4.4% this year, less than in Germany but more than in Britain, France and Spain. Unemployment is still under 7%, but that partly reflects dreadful （可怕的）productivity, measured in output per person. Indeed, Italy is the only G7 rich country in which productivity has fallen in the past ten years. With real wages rising despite this, Italy is becoming less and less able to compete with other euro-area countries such as Germany.
Italy desperately needs more reform. According to the OECD, its product market is the most highly regulated in Europe. It has one of the worst records of implementing EU internal-market directives. Its labour market is sharply divided between protected, well-paid insiders and unprotected, temporary workers—one reason why youth unemployment is high. Educational standards are poor, research spending is low. The public finances remain a mess: although the budget deficit（赤字）, at around 5% of GDP, is no longer exceptional（异常的）, the public debt will rise above 120% of GDP in the next two years.
A cavaliere’s chance
This should be a golden opportunity for Mr Berlusconi. He surely cannot hope to become prime minister again in 2013. If he ever wants to reform Italy, now is the time. His government, which marks its first anniversary next week, has done some good things. It helped to fix the Naples rubbish crisis. It is shaking up public administration and the education system. It has even begun judicial reform, though here more than elsewhere the prime minister’s motives are suspect. Yet the overall record suggests that Mr Berlusconi is neither a liberal reformer nor a genuine believer in competition, but a businessman who went into politics principally to protect his own affairs, not to advance the cause of Italian business in general.
Italy has huge potential. Public debt may be high, but private debt is low. The banks are exposed to eastern Europe, but so far none has had to be rescued. The turnaround of Fiat, which may now take over Chrysler, has been remarkable. The small exporting firms in the north have proved admirably nimble（精明的）. If Mr Berlusconi would only do more to loosen the shackles on the country’s entrepreneurs, the results could be sensational（轰动的，极好的）. But Italians will probably have to wait till they see the back of him before that happens.

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Education reforms
Out the window
Apr 23rd 2009
From The Economist print edition
Never properly implemented and too timid in the first place: Labour’s policies for improving schools have failed

Illustration by S. Kambayashi
NO ONE knows children better, or has their interests more at heart. So education reforms that put power in the hands of parents have an obvious appeal. Arm them with hard facts about how schools are doing; allow schools to diversify and compete to attract parents; allow parents to choose the ones they like best—and watch the power of competition drive up standards for all. This, in a nutshell（简而言之）, has been Labour’s prescription for education since it came to power in 1997, and, with minor variations, that of the Conservative government before them.
That it hasn’t worked is now clear. Literacy（读写能力） and numeracy （计算能力）standards in primary schools, which improved during Labour’s first term, are flattening out—and independent observers agree that much of the initial rise was illusory, a consequence of teaching to the test. The results of the GCSEs and A-levels taken by 16- and 18-year-olds are still rising. Grade inflation and savvy schools pushing children towards easier subjects is the consensus, again denied by the government. The gap between the exam results of rich and poor children shows no sign of narrowing. And now all three tactics—information, diversity and choice—are looking shaky.

Most of the information for parents on schools’ performance comes from the standard-assessment tests (SATs) in English, maths and science that children used to take at seven, 11 and 14. These are imperfect: raw results reflect a school’s social mix, adjusted versions are hard to understand, and the tests’ troubled recent history means they may not be long for this world.
Last summer the company hired to mark the SATs made a mess of the job and was sacked（解雇）. The government dropped the tests for 14-year-olds and found someone else to mark the others. Seizing its moment, the National Union of Teachers, the most militant （激进的）of the teaching unions and one that had been against the tests from the start, decided at its annual conference in March to ballot（投票）its members on boycotting those that remain. The head-teachers’ union will decide whether to follow suit at its own conference next month.
Both unions will be emboldened（鼓励） by a growing political row. On April 22nd the head of the exams regulator, who had resigned after the fiasco, told MPs that ministers had made him the fall guy. They had made statements, he said, that were “flawed”, “sexed-up”, “fiction” and “totally false”. (He declined, when asked directly, to say they lied.)
As for the diversity of Britain’s state schools, parents have long known it to be largely illusory. Most secondaries are labelled “specialist” in one of a dozen fields, from mathematics to music to media studies, but this is mere flim-flam. Parents hardly care; schools can “specialise” in whatever they like, as long as they teach the standard subjects well and crack down on （对。。。采取严厉措施）misbehaviour and bullying.
But the fact that choice is turning out not to mean much bothers parents a lot. As teachers—never keen on parental choice—and Labour’s old guard like to point out, parents do not have the right to choose a school, but merely to “express a preference”. If too many express the same preference, some will be disappointed—and each year, around a fifth of parents are. All that changes is the number who go on to appeal (up each year), and the number of appeals that succeed (down).
Parent power
Real choice for parents would mean real consequences for schools, of the sort that businesses experience in a marketplace. Good ones would grow. Bad ones would close. But the government has refused to take its reforms to their logical conclusion. Instead, it has tried to use the tools supposedly intended for parents to mimic the effects of the market, compiling hit lists of schools with poor exam results. Some of these are to be given school-improvement partners to chivvy （不断催促某人干某事）them into raising their game, some taken over by better-performing neighbours, and some closed forthwith（立刻） and replaced by “academies”—state-funded independent schools that are overseen directly from Whitehall.
But these half-measures do not seem to have done even half the job. Research by the Institute of Education published on April 21st looks at those corners of the state-education system where some parental choice does exist. Even there, it turns out to be neither unleashing competition nor raising standards.
Unlike most other state-funded schools, religious ones select pupils according to their parents’ devoutness, rather than their proximity to the school. This means that religious families have a wider choice of school than most: they are given preference by distant religious schools and can still apply to secular ones nearby.
The study looked at GCSE results in both sorts of schools. “We could have found that faith schools benefited all parents, including those who didn’t, or couldn’t, choose them, if other schools improved in an attempt to hang on to （紧紧抓住）pupils,” says Anna Vignoles, one of the researchers. But they came across no such benign competitive effects—indeed, they found no effects at all. Children at religious schools made no more progress than those at secular ones, and areas where there were many religious schools did no better than those where there were few. “What is described as a quasi-market clearly is not working,” concludes Ms Vignoles.
That might be because religious schools in fact pose little threat to secular ones. The latter may know that a limited supply of faith-school places means many parents will have to settle for a secular alternative whether they want to or not.
Or it could be that, by giving religious people more choice than other parents, the government has weakened competitive pressures in another way. The researchers checked which schools had the most students with the best prospects for academic success in their neighbourhoods. Most religious schools turned out to have more than their fair share of bright, well-off kids, and correspondingly fewer stragglers（流浪者，落后者） and poor ones. If secular schools with religious neighbours know that whatever they do they will get lumbered with the hardest pupils to teach, they may resign themselves to being at the bottom of discerning parents’ wish lists and give up trying.（resign oneself to sth/doing sth听任; 顺从）Choice, then, is unlikely to have any impact on standards unless it affects the supply of places. Both of the main opposition parties recognise that. The Tories would allow charities, churches and groups of parents to open schools, even where existing ones have plenty of capacity. They cite free-market reforms in Sweden, where new schools have, in a little over a decade, captured a tenth of the market. The Liberal Democrats, Britain’s third party, have similar plans, with the addition of a “pupil premium”—extra cash for each poor child a school admits. Either scheme would give more power to parents than the government has managed to do in 12 years.