2011经济学人
economist 20110813
Stories from Pakistan巴基斯坦的故事Old man’s tales老人的故事Aug 13th 2011 | from the print editionThe Wandering Falcon. By Jamil Ahmad. Hamish Hamilton; 180 pages; £16.99. To be published in America in October by Riverhead Books; $25.95. Buy from , 流浪的鹰。
贾米尔•艾哈迈德著。
哈密什·汉密尔顿出版公司；180页；16.99英镑。
里弗黑德图书公司将在美国十月出版；25.95美元。
可购于, 。
IN 1893 Sir Henry Mortimer Durand drew a line in the sand, marking a border between Afghanistan and north-west British India, now Pakistan. In doing so, he carelessly carved up the Pushtun homeland. That line runs like a thread through “The Wandering Falcon”, Jamil Ahmad’s finely crafted first novel of stories set amid the Pushtun and Baluchi tribes that make up Pakistan’s wild w est.1893年，英国亨利•莫蒂默•杜兰爵士在沙漠上划下了一条边界线，以此来分隔阿富汗和英属印度西北部（如今的巴基斯坦）之间的边界。
在划边界的过程中，他草率的把普什图的家园分隔开了，在《流浪的猎鹰》书中，这条边界是贯穿全文的主线。
经济学人》杂志原版英文(The_Economist整理版4-5)
Digest Of The. Economist. 2006(4-5)Hot to trotA new service hopes to do for texting what Skype did for voice callsTALK is cheap—particularly since the appearance of voice-over-internet services such as Skype. Such services, which make possible very cheap (or even free) calls by routing part or all of each call over the internet, have forced traditional telecoms firms to cut their prices. And now the same thing could be about to happen to mobilephone text messages, following the launch this week of Hotxt, a British start-up.Users download the Hotxt software to their handsets, just as they would a game or a ringtone. They choose a user name, and can then exchange as many messages as they like with other Hotxt users for £1 ($1.75) per week. The messages are sent as data packets across the internet, rather than being routed through operators' textmessaging infrastructure. As a result, users pay only a tiny data-transport charge, typically of a penny or so per message. Since text messages typically cost 10p, this is a big saving—particularly for the cost-conscious teenagers at whom the service is aimed.Most teenagers in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, pay for their mobile phones on a “pre-paid” basis, rather than having a monthly contract with a regular bill. Pre-paid tariffs are far more expensive: bundles of free texts and other special deals, which can reduce the cost of text messaging, are generally not available. For a teenager who sends seven messages a day, Hotxt can cut the cost of texting by 75%, saving £210 per year, says Doug Richard, the firm's co-founder. For really intensive text-messagers, the savings could be even bigger: Josh Dhaliwal of mobileYouth, a market-research firm, says that some teenagers—chiefly boys aged 15-16 and girls aged 14-15—are “supertexters” who send as many as 50 messages per day.While this sounds like good news for users, it could prove painful for mobile operators. Text-messaging accounts for around 20% of a typical operator's revenues. With margins on text messages in excess of 90%, texting also accounts for nearly half of an operator's profits. Mr Richard is confident that there is no legal way that operators can block his service; they could raisedata-transport costs, but that would undermine their own efforts to push new services. Hotxt plans to launch in other countries soon.“The challenge is getting that initial momentum,” says Mr Dhaliwal. Hotxt needs to persuade people to sign up, so that they will persuade their friends to sign up, and so on. Unlike Skype, Hotxt is not free, so users may be less inclined to give it a try. But as Skype has also shown, once a disruptive, low-cost communications service starts to spread, it can quickly become very big indeed. And that in turn can lead to lower prices, not just for its users, but for everyone.A discerning viewA new way of processing X-rays gives much clearer imagesX-RAYS are the mysterious phenomenon for which Wilhelm Röntgen was awarded the first Nobel prize in physics, in 1901. Since then, they have shed their mystery and found widespread use in medicine and industry, where they are used to revealthe inner properties of solid bodies.Some properties, however, are more easily discerned than others. Conventional Xray imaging relies on the fact that different materials absorb the radiation to different degrees. In a medical context, for example, bones absorb X-rays readily, and so show up white on an X-radiograph, which is a photographic negative. But Xrays are less good at discriminating between different forms of soft tissue, such as muscles, tendons, fat and blood vessels. That, however, could soon change. For Franz Pfeiffer of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen, Switzerland, and his colleagues report, in the April edition of Nature Physics, that they have manipulated standard X-ray imaging techniques to show many more details of the inner body.The trick needed to discern this fine detail, according to Dr Pfeiffer, is a simple one. The researchers took advantage not only of how tissues absorb X-rays but also of how much they slow their passage. This slowing can be seen as changes in the phase of the radiation that emerges—in other words of the relative positions of the peaks and troughs of the waves of which X-rays are composed.Subtle changes in phase are easily picked up, so doctors can detect even small variations in the composition of the tissue under investigation, such as might be caused by the early stages of breast cancer. Indeed, this trick—known as phase-contrast imaging—is already used routinely in optical microscopy and transmission electron microscopy. Until now, however, no one had thought to use it for medical X-radiography.To perform their trick, the researchers used a series of three devices called transmission gratings. They placed one between thesource of the X-rays and the body under examination, and two between the body and the X-ray detector that forms the image. The first grating gathers information on the phases of the X-rays passing through it. The second and third work together to produce the detailed phase-contrasted image. The approach generates two separate images—the classic X-ray image and the phase-contrasted image—which can then be combined to produce a high-resolution picture.The researchers tested their technique on a Cardinal tetra, a tiny iridescent fish commonly found in fish tanks and aquariums. The conventional X-ray image showed the bones and the gut of the fish, while the phase-contrasted image showed details of the fins, the ear and the eye.Dr Pfeiffer's technique would thus appear to offer a way to get much greater detail for the same amount of radiation exposure. Moreover, since it uses standard hospital equipment, it should be easy to introduce into medical practice. X-rays may no l onger be the stuff of Nobel prizes, but their usefulness may just have increased significantly.Here be dragonsWith luck, you may soon be able to buy a mythological petPAOLO FRIL, chairman and chief scientific officer of GeneDupe, based in San Melito, California, is a man with a dream. That dream is a dragon in every home.GeneDupe's business is biotech pets. Not for Dr Fril, though, the mundane cloning of dead moggies and pooches. He plans a range of entirely new animals—or, rather, of really quite old animals, with the twist that even when they did exist, it was only in the imagination.Making a mythical creature real is not easy. But GeneDupe's team of biologists and computer scientists reckon they are equal to the task. Their secret is a new field, which they call “virtual cell biology”.Biology and computing have a lot in common, since both are about processing information—in one case electronic; in the other, biochemical. Virtual cell biology aspires to make a software model of a cell that is accurate in every biochemical detail. That is possible because all animal cells use the same parts list—mitochondria for energy processing, the endoplasmic reticulum for making proteins, Golgi body for protein assembly, and so on.Armed with their virtual cell, GeneDupe's scientists can customise the result so that it belongs to a particular species, by loading it with a virtual copy of that animal's genome. Then, if the cell is also loaded with the right virtual molecules, it will behave like a fertilised egg, and start dividing and developing—first into an embryo, and ultimately into an adult.Because this “growth” is going on in a computer, it happens fast. Passing from egg to adult in one of GeneDupe's enormous Mythmaker computers takes less than a minute. And it is here that Charles Darwin gets a look in. With such a short generation time, GeneDupe's scientists can add a little evolution to their products.Each computer starts with a search image (dragon, unicorn, gryphon, etc), and the genome of the real animal most closely resembling it (a lizard for the dragon, a horse for the unicorn and, most taxingly, the spliced genomes of a lion and an eagle for the gryphon). The virtual genomes of these real animals are then tweaked by random electronic mutations. When they have matured, the virtual adults most closely resembling the targets are picked and cross-bred, while the others are culled.Using this rapid evolutionary process, GeneDupe's scientists have arrived at genomes for a range of mythological creatures—in a computer, at least. The next stage, on which they are just embarking, is to do it for real.This involves synthesising, with actual DNA, the genetic material that the computer models predict will produce the mythical creatures. The synthetic DNA is then inserted into a cell that has had its natural nucleus removed. The result, Dr Fril and his commercial backers hope, will be a real live dragon, unicorn or what have you.Tales of the unexpectedWhy a drug trial went so badly wrongIN ANY sort of test, not least a drugs trial, one should expect the unexpected. Even so, on March 13th, six volunteers taking part in a small clinical trial of a treatment known as TGN1412 got far more than they bargained for. All ended up seriously ill, with multiple organ failure, soon after being injected with the drug at a special testing unit at Northwick Park Hospital in London, run by a company called Parexel. One man remains ill in hospital.Small, preliminary trials of this sort are intended to find out whether a drug is toxic. Nevertheless, the mishap was so seri ous that Britain's Medic ines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), a government body, swiftly launched a full inquiry.On April 5th it announced its preliminary findings. These were that the trial was run correctly, doses of the drug were given as they were supposed to have been, and there was no contamination during manufacturing. In other words, it seems that despite extensive tests on animals and human-cell cultures, and despite the fact that the doses in the human trial were only a five-hundredth of those given to the animals, TGN1412 is toxic in people in a way that simply had not shown up.This is a difficult result for the drug business because it raises questions about the right way of testing medicines of this kind. TGN1412 is unusual in that it is an antibody. Most drugs are what are known as “small molecules”. Antibodies are big, powerful proteins that are the workhorses of the immune system. A mere 20 of them have been approved for human therapy, or are in latestage clinical trails, in America and Europe, but hundreds are in pre-clinical development, and will soon need to be tried out on people.Most antibody drugs are designed to work in one of three ways: by recruiting parts of the immune system to kill cancer cells; by delivering a small-molecule drug or a radioactive atom specifically to a cancer; or by blocking unwanted immune responses. In that sense, TGN1412 was unusual because it worked in a fourth way. It is what is called a “superagonistic” antibody, designed to increase the numbers of a type of immune cell known as regulatory T-cells.Reduced numbers, or impaired function, of regulatory T-cells has been implicated in a number of illnesses, such as type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis. Boosting the pool of these antibodies seemed like a good treatment strategy. Unfortunately, that strategy fell disastrously to pieces and it will take a little longer to find out why.The result highlights concerns raised in a paper just published by the Academy of Medical Sciences, a group of experts based in London. It says there are special risks associated with novel antibody therapies. For example, their chemical specificity means that they might not bind to their targets in humans as they do in other species.Accidence and substanceTwo possible explanations for the bulk of realityTHE unknown pervades the universe. That which people can see, with the aid of various sorts of telescope, accounts for just 4% of the total mass. The rest, however, must exist. Without it, galaxies would not survive and the universe would not be gently expanding, as witnessed by astronomers. What exactly constitutes this dark matter and dark energy remains mysterious, but physicists have recently uncovered some more clues, about the former, at least.One possible explanation for dark matter is a group of subatomic particles called neutrinos. These objects are so difficult to catch that a screen made of lead a light-year thick would stop only half the neutrinos beamed at it from getting through. Yet neutrinos are thought to be the most abundant particles in the universe. Some ten thousand trillion trillion—most of them produced by nuclear reactions in the sun—reach Earth every second. All but a handful pass straight through the planet as if it wasn't there.According to the Standard Model, the most successful description of particle physics to date, neutrinos come in three varieties, called “flavours”. These are known as electron neutrinos, tau neutrinos and muon neutrinos. Again, according to the Standard Model, they are point-like, electrically neutral and massless. But in recent years, this view has been challenged, as physicists realised that neutrinos might have mass.The first strong evidence came in 1998, when researchers at an experiment called SuperKamiokande, based at Kamioka, in Japan, showed that muon neutrinos produced by cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere had gone missing by the time they should have reached an underground detector. SuperKamiokande's operators suspect that the missing muon neutrinos had changed flavour, becoming electron neutrinos or—more likely—tau neutrinos. Theory suggests that this process, called oscillation, can happen only if neutrinos have mass.Since then, there have been other reports of oscillation. Results from the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada suggest that electron neutrinos produced by nuclear reactions in the sun change into either muon or tau neutrinos on their journey to Earth. Two other Japanese experiments, one conducted at Kamioka and one involving the KEK partic le-accelerator laboratory in Tsukuba, near Tokyo, also hint at oscillation.Last week, researchers working on the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, near Chicago, confirmed these results. Over the coming months and years, they hope to produce the most accurate measurements yet. The researchers created a beam of muon neutrinos by firing an intense stream of protons into a block of carbon. On the other side of the target sat a particle detector that monitored the number of muon neutrinos leaving the Fermilab site. The neutrinos then traveled 750km (450 miles) through the Earth to a detector in a former iron mine in Soudan, Minnesota.Myths and migrationDo immigrants really hurt American workers' wages?EVERY now and again America, a nation largely made up of immigrants and their descendants, is gripped by a furious political row over whether and how it should stem the flood of people wanting to enter the country. It is in the midst of just such a quarrel now. Congress is contemplating the erection of a wall along stretches of the Mexican border and a crackdown on illegal workers, as well as softer policies such as a guest-worker programme for illegal immigrants. Some of the arguments are plain silly. Immigration's defenders claim that foreigners come to do jobs that Americans won't—as if cities with few immigrants had no gardeners. Its opponents say that immigrants steal American jobs—succumbing to the fallacy that there are only a fixed number of jobs to go around.One common argument, though not silly, is often overstated: that immigration pushes down American workers' wages, especially among high-school dropouts. It isn't hard to see why this might be. Over the past 25 years American incomes have become less equally distributed, typical wages have grown surprisingly slowly for such a healthy economy and the real wages of the least skilled have actually fallen. It is plausible that immigration is at least partly to blame, especially because recent arrivals have disproportionately poor skills. In the 2000 census immigrants made up 13% of America's pool of workers, but 28% of those without a high-school education and over half of those with eight years' schooling or less.In fact, the relationship between immigration and wages is not clear-cut, even in theory. That is because wages depend on the supply of capital as well as labour. Alone, an influx of immigrants raises the supply of workers and hence reduces wages. But cheaper labour increases the potential return to employers of building new factories or opening new valet-parking companies. In so doing, they create extra demand for workers. Once capital has fully adjusted, the final impact on overall wages should be a wash, as long as the immigrants have not changed the productivity of the workforce as a whole.However, even if wages do not change on average, immigration can still shift the relative pay of workers of different types. A large inflow of low-skilled people could push down the relative wages of low-skilled natives, assuming that they compete for the same jobs. On the other hand, if the immigrants had complementary skills, natives would be relatively better off. To gauge the full effect of immigration on wages, therefore, you need to know how quickly capital adjusts and how far the newcomers are substitutes for local workers.Roaming holidayThe EU hopes to slash the price of cross-border mobile calls“TODAY it is only when using your mobile phone abroad that you realise there are still borders in Europe,” lamented Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for telecoms and media regulation, as she announced plans to slash the cost of mobile roaming last month. It is a laudable aim: European consumers typically pay €1.25 ($1.50) per minute to call home from another European country, and €1 per minute to receive calls from home while abroad. With roaming margins above 90%, European mobile operators make profits of around €10 billion a year from the trade, the commission estimates.Ms Reding's plan, unveiled on March 28th and up for discussion until May 12th, is to impose a “home pricing” scheme. Even while roaming, callers would be charged whatever they would normally pay to use their phones in their home countries; charges for incoming calls while roaming would be abolished. That may sound good. But, as the industry is understandably at pains to point out, it could have some curious knock-on effects.In particular, consumers could sign up with operators in foreign countries to take advantage of lower prices. Everyone would take out subscriptions to the cheapest supplier and bring them back home, says John Tysoe of the Mobile World, a consultancy. “You'd end up with a complete muddle. An operator might have a network, bu t no customers, because they've all migrated.”Another problem with Ms Reding's plan, he says, is that operators would compensate for the loss of roaming fees— thought to account for around 3% of their revenues and 5% of profits—by raising prices elsewhere. This would have the perverse effect of lowering prices for international business travellers, a big chunk of roaming traffic, while raising prices for most consumers.The commission's proposals are “economically incoherent”, says Richard Feasey of Vodafo ne, which operates mobile networks in many European countries. Imposing price caps on roaming is legally questionable, he says, and Vodafone has, in any case, been steadily reducing its roaming charges. (European regulators prevented it from doing so for three years on antitrust grounds after its takeover of Mannesmann in 2000.) Orange, another multinational operator, says it is planning to make price cuts,too. “Of course, now everybody's got price cuts,” says Stefano Nicoletti of Ovum, a consultancy.But perhaps Ms Reding's unspoken plan is to use the threat of regulation as a way to prompt action. Operators are right that her proposals make no sense, but they are charging too much all the same. So expect them to lobby hard against the proposals over the next couple of years, while quietly cutting their prices—an outcome that would, of course, allow both sides to claim victory.Devices and their desiresEngineers and chemists get togetherTHERE used to be a world of difference between treating a patient with a device—such as a fake hip or a pacemaker—and using biology and biochemistry. Different ailments required wholly different treatments, often with little in common. But that is changing as medical advances—such as those being trumpeted at the biotechnology industry's annual gathering this week in Chicago—foster combinations of surgical implants and other hardware with support from medicines. Drug-releasing stents were one of the first fruits of this trend, which increasingly requires vastly different sorts of health-care firms to mesh their research efforts.That will be a challenge. While pharmaceutical and biotech firms are always in search of the next big thing, devicemakers prefer gradual progress. Instead of hanging out with breathless entrepreneurs near America's east and west coasts, where most drug and biotechnology firms are based, many of the device-makers huddle in midwestern cities such as Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Kalamazoo. And unlike Big Pharma, which uses marketing blitzes to tell ailing consumers about its new drugs, medical-device sales teams act more as instructors, showing doctors how to install their latest creations.Several companies, however, are now trying to bring these two business cultures together. Earlier this year, for example, Angiotech Pharmaceuticals, a Canadian firm, bought American Medical Instruments (AMI). Angiotech's managers reckon their company has devised a good way to apply drug coatings to all sorts of medical paraphernalia, from sutures and syringes to catheters, in order to reduce the shock to the body. AMI makes just the sorts of medical supplies to which Angiotech hopes to apply its techniques.One of America's biggest makers of medical devices, Medtronic, has been doing joint research with Genzyme, a biotechnology company that is also keen on broader approaches to health care. Genzyme says that it was looking for better ways to treat ailments, such as coronary and kidney disease, and realised that it needed to understand better how electro-mechanical devices and information technology work. But combining its efforts with those of Medtronic “on a cultural level is very hard”, the company says. Biotechnology firms are used to much more risky projects and far longer development cycles.Another difference is that device-makers know that if a problem emerges with their hardware, the engineers will tinker around and try to resolve the glitch. Biotech and pharmaceutical firms have no such option. If a difficulty emerges after years of developing and testing a new pill, as with Merck's Vioxx, there may be little they can do about it. “You can't futz with a molecule”, says Debbie Wang, a health-care industry analyst.Strangely, says Ms Wang, some of the most promising engineering outfits were once divisions of pharmaceutical andhealth-care companies, which got rid of them precisely because they did not appear to offer the rapid growth that managers saw in prescription drugs. Guidant, a maker of various cardiovascular devices, was spun off by Eli Lilly in 1994 and a decade later became the prize in a bidding war between Johnson & Johnson and Boston Scientific, which Boston won earlier this year.Pfizer sold Howmedica, which makes joint replacements and prosthetics, to Kalamazoo-based Stryker in 1998. Anotherjoint-replacement maker, Zimmer, was spun off from Bristol-Myers Squibb in 2001. Now both those companies are looking for ways to add “anti-interactive coatings”—ie, drugs—to their business. One of the most troublesome complications in joint replacement is infection.The big drug companies might be tempted to reacquire the firms that they let go. But, given the potential for cultural and strategic clashes, it may make more sense for a few big and broad medical-device makers, such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific and St Jude Medical, to continue consolidating their own industry while co-operating, along the lines of the Medtronic-Genzyme venture, with biotech and pharmaceutical firms as they see fit. There would still be irritation; but probably less risk of wholesale rejection.Eat less, live moreHow to live longer—maybeDIETING, according to an old joke, may not actually make you live longer, but it sure feels that way. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating since the 1930s that calorie restriction—reducing an animal's energy intake below its energy expenditure—extends lifespan and delays the onset of age-related diseases in rats, dogs, fish and monkeys. Such results have inspired thousands of people to put up with constant hunger in the hope of living longer, healthier lives. They have also led to a search for drugs that mimic the effects of calorie restriction without the pain of going on an actual diet.Amid the hype, it is easy to forget that no one has until now shown that calorie restriction works in humans. That omission, however, changed this month, with the publication of the initial results of the first systematic investigation into the matter. This study, known as CALERIE (Comprehensive Assessment of Long-term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy), was sponsored by America's National Institutes of Health. It took 48 men and women aged between 25 and 50 and assigned them randomly to either a control group or a calorie-restriction regime. Those in the second group were required to cut their calorie intake for six months to 75% of that needed to maintain their weight.The CALERIE study is a landmark in the history of the field, because its subjects were either of normal weight or only slightly overweight. Previous projects have used individuals who were clinically obese, thus confusing the unquestionable benefits to health of reducing obesity with the possible advantages of calorie restriction to the otherwise healthy.At a molecular level, CALERIE suggests these advantages are real. For example, those on restricted diets had lower insulin resistance (high resistance is a risk factor for type 2 diabetes) and lower levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (high levels are a risk factor for heart disease). They showed drops in body temperature and blood-insulin levels—both phenomena that have been seen in long-lived, calorie-restricted animals. They also suffered less oxidative damage to their DNA.Eric Ravussin, of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, who is one of the study's authors, says that such results provide support for the theory that calorie restriction produces a metabolic adaptation over and above that which would be expected from weight loss alone. (He also points out that it will be a long time before such work reveals whether calorie restriction actually extends life.) Nevertheless, such metabolic adaptation could be the reason why calorie restriction is associated with longer lifespans in other animals—and that is certainly the hope of those who, for the past 15 years, have been searching for ways of triggering that metabolic adaptation by means other than semi-starvation.The search for a drug that will stave off old age is itself as old as the hills—as is the wishful thinking of the suckers who finance such efforts. Those who hope to find it by mimicking the effect of calorie restriction are not, however, complete snake-oil salesmen, for there is known to be a family of enzymes called sirtuins, which act both as sensors of nutrient availability and as regulators of metabolic rate. These might provide the necessary biochemical link between starving and living longer.Universal service?Proponents of “software as a service” say it will wipe out traditional softwareSOMETHING momentous is happening in the software business. Bill Gates of Mi crosoft calls it “the next sea change”. Analysts call it a “tectonic shift” in the industry. Trade publications hail it as “the next big thing”. It is software-as-a-service (SaaS)—the delivery of software as an internet-based service via a web browser, rather than as a product that must be purchased, installed and maintained. The appeal is obvious: SaaS is quicker, easier and cheaper to deploy than traditional software, which means technology budgets can be focused on providing competitive advantage, rather than maintenance.This has prompted an outbreak of iconoclasm. “Traditional software is dead,” says Jason Maynard, an analyst at Credit Suisse. Just as most firms do not own generators, but buy electricity from the grid, so in future they will buy software on the hoof, he says. “It's the end of software as we know it. All software is becoming a service,” declares Marc Benioff of , thebest-known proponent of the idea. But while SaaS is growing fast, it still represents only a tiny fraction of the overall software industry—a mere $3.35 billion last year, estimates Mr Maynard. Most observers expect it to be worth around $12 billion by 2010—but even that is equal only to Microsoft's quarterly sales today. There is no denying that SaaS is coming. But there is much debate, even among its advocates, about how quickly it will grow, and how widely it will be adopted.At the moment, small and medium-sized businesses are the most enthusiastic adopters of SaaS, since it is cheaper and simpler than maintaining rooms of server computers and employing staff to keep them running. Unlike the market for desktop software,。
《The Economist》《经济学人》中文版2009年12月
全国气候：政治搭台，科学唱戏Climate change 气候变化heated debate 激辩Nov 26th 2009From The Economist print editionWhy political orthodoxy must not silence scientific argument为何有了政治说法，还应有科学的辩论？Illustration by Claudio Munoz“WHAT is truth?” That was Pontius Pilate’s answer to Jesus’s assertion that “Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice.” It sounds suspiciously like the modern argument over climate change.“真理是什么？”耶稣说完“相信真理的人都能听到我”之后，彼拉多随即如此问道。
听起来耳熟？在当代，气候变化引起的争辩就与此有相似之处。
A majority of the world’s climate sc ientists have convinced themselves, and also a lot of laymen, some of whom have political power, that the Earth’s climate is changing; that the change, from humanity’s point of view, is for the worse; and that the cause is human activity, in the form of excessive emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.国际上，大多数气候科学家不但说服了自己，也说服了很多门外汉（其中包括一些有政治影响力的人）--地球的气候正在改变；这种改变，从人道主义角度来看，是消极的；这种改变的始作俑者是人类，是他们通过排放超量的诸如二氧化碳的温室气体而造成的。
《经济学人》杂志若干篇文章
城市土地空间和都市Urban land城市土地Space and the city空间和都市Poor land use in the world's greatest cities carries a huge cost糟糕的土地利用方式已经成为世界大都市不能承受之重BUY land, advised Mark Twain; they're not making it any more. In fact, land is not really scarce: the entire population of America could fit into Texas with more than an acre for each household to enjoy. What drives prices skyward is a collision between rampant demand and limited supply in the great metropolises like London, Mumbai and New York. In the past ten years real prices in Hong Kong have risen by 150%. Residential property in Mayfair, in central London, can go for as much as 55,000 (82,000) per square metre. A square mile of Manhattan residential property costs 16.5 billion.马克吐温曾建议说“都去买地吧”，但现在他们已经不这么做了。
事实上，土地并非真的如此稀缺：仅一个德克萨斯州就能容纳整个美国人口，而且每户能有一英亩之多。
在伦敦、孟买、纽约这种大都市里，地价飞涨的现实是疯狂的需求和有限的供给共同作用的结果。
《经济学人》杂志原版英文(整理完整版)之欧阳学创编
Digest Of The. Economist.2006(6-7)Hard to digestA wealth of genetic information is to be found in the human gutBACTERIA, like people, can be divided into friend and foe. Inspired by evidence that the friendly sort may help with a range of ailments, many people consume bacteria in the form of yogurts and dietary supplements. Such a smattering of artificial additions, however, represents but a drop in the ocean. There are at least 800 types of bacteria living in the human gut. And research by Steven Gill of the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, and his colleagues, published in this week's Science, suggests that the collective genome of these organisms is so large that it contains 100 times as many genes as the human genome itself.Dr Gill and his team were able to come to this conclusion by extracting bacterial DNA from the faeces of two volunteers. Because of the complexity of the samples, they were not able to reconstruct the entire genomes of each of the gut bacteria,just the individual genes. But that allowed them to make an estimate of numbers.What all these bacteria are doing is tricky to identify—the bacteria themselves are difficult to cultivate. So the researchers guessed at what they might be up to by comparing the genes they discovered with published databases of genes whose functions are already known.This comparison helped Dr Gill identify for the first time the probable enzymatic processes by which bacteria help humans to digest the complex carbohydrates in plants. The bacteria also contain a plentiful supply of genes involved in the synthesis of chemicals essential to human life—including two B vitamins and certain essential amino acids—although the team merely showed that these metabolic pathways exist rather than proving that they are used. Nevertheless, the pathways they found leave humans looking more like ruminants: animals such as goats and sheep that use bacteria to break down otherwise indigestible matter in the plants they eat.The broader conclusion Dr Gill draws is that people are superorganisms whose metabolism represents an amalgamation of human and microbial attributes. The notionof a superorganism has emerged before, as researchers in otherfields have come to view humans as having a diverse internal ecosystem. This, suggest some, will be crucial to the successof personalised medicine, as different people will have different responses to drugs, depending on their microbial flora. Accordingly, the next step, says Dr Gill, is to see how microbial populations vary between people of different ages, backgrounds and diets.Another area of research is the process by which these helpful bacteria first colonise the digestive tract. Babies acquire their gut flora as they pass down the birth canal and take a gene-filled gulp of their mother's vaginal and faecal flora. It might not be the most delicious of first meals, but it could well be an important one.Zapping the bluesThe rebirth of electric-shock treatmentELECTRICITY has long been used to treat medical disorders. As early as the second century AD, Galen, a Greek physician, recommended the use of electric eels for treating headaches and facial pain. In the 1930s Ugo Cerletti and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, used electroconvulsive therapy to treat schizophrenia. These days, such rigorous techniques are practised less widely. But researchers are still investigatinghow a gentler electric therapy appears to treat depression.Vagus-nerve stimulation, to give it its proper name, was originally developed to treat severe epilepsy. It requires a pacemaker-like device to be implanted in a patient's chest and wires from it threaded up to the vagus nerve on the left side of his neck. In the normal course of events, this provides an electrical pulse to the vagus nerve for 30 seconds every five minutes.This treatment does not always work, but in some cases where it failed (the number of epileptic seizures experienced by a patient remaining the same), that patient nevertheless reported feeling much better after receiving the implant. This secondary effect led to trials for treating depression and, in 2005, America's Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy for depression that fails to respond to all conventional treatments, including drugs and psychotherapy.Not only does the treatment work, but its effects appear to be long lasting. A study led by Charles Conway of Saint Louis University in Missouri, and presented to a recent meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, has found that 70% of patients who are better after one year stay better after two years as well.The technique builds on a procedure called deep-brain stimulation, in which electrodes are implanted deep into the white matter of patients' brains and used to “reboot” faulty neural circuitry. Such an operation is a big undertaking, requiring a full day of surgery and carrying a risk of the patient suffering a stroke. Only a small number of people have been treated this way. In contrast, the device that stimulates the vagus nerve can be implanted in 45 minutes without a stay in hospital.The trouble is that vagus-nerve stimulation can take a long time to produce its full beneficial effect. According to Dr Conway, scans taken using a technique called positron-emission tomography show significant changes in brain activity starting three months after treatment begins. The changes are similar to the improvements seen in patients who undergo other forms of antidepression treatment. The brain continues to change over the following 21 months. Dr Conway says that patients should be told that the antidepressant effects could be slow in coming.However, Richard Selway of King's College Hospital, London, found that his patients' moods improved just weeks after the implant. Although brain scans are useful indetermining the longevity of the treatment, Mr Selway notes that visible changes in the brain do not necessarily correlate perfectly with changes in mood.Nobody knows why stimulating the vagus nerve improves the mood of depressed patients, but Mr Selway has a theory. He believes that the electrical stimulation causes a region in the brain stem called the locus caeruleus (Latin, ironically, for “blue place”) to flood the brain with norepinephrine, a neurotransmitter implicated in alertness, concentration and motivation—that is, the mood states missing in depressed patients. Whatever the mechanism, for the depressed a therapy that is relatively safe and long lasting is rare cause for cheer. The shape of things to comeHow tomorrow's nuclear power stations will differ from today'sTHE agency in charge of promoting nuclear power in America describes a new generation of reactors that will be “highly economical” with “enhanced safety”, that “minimise wastes” and will prove “proliferation resistant”. No doubt they will bake a mean apple pie, too.Unfortunately, in the world of nuclear energy, fine words are not enough. America got away lightly with its nuclearaccident. When the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania overheated in 1979 very little radiation leaked, and there were no injuries. Europe was not so lucky. The accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 killed dozens immediately and has affected (sometimes fatally) the health of tens of thousands at the least. Even discounting the association of nuclear power with nuclear weaponry, people have good reason to be suspicious of claims that reactors are safe.Yet political interest in nuclear power is reviving across the world, thanks in part to concerns about global warming and energy security. Already, some 441 commercial reactors operate in 31 countries and provide 17% of the planet's electricity, according to America's Department of Energy. Until recently, the talk was of how to retire these reactors gracefully. Now it is of how to extend their lives. In addition, another 32 reactors are being built, mostly in India, China and their neighbours. These new power stations belong to what has been called the third generation of reactors, designs that have been informed by experience and that are considered by their creators to be advanced. But will these new stations really be safer than their predecessors?Clearly, modern designs need to be less accident prone.The most important feature of a safe design is that it “fails safe”. Fo r a reactor, this means that if its control systems stop working it shuts down automatically, safely dissipates the heat produced by the reactions in its core, and stops both the fuel and the radioactive waste produced by nuclear reactions from escaping by keeping them within some sort of containment vessel. Reactors that follow such rules are called “passive”. Most modern designs are passive to some extent and some newer ones are truly so. However, some of the genuinely passive reactors are also likely to be more expensive to run.Nuclear energy is produced by atomic fission. A large atom (usually uranium or plutonium) breaks into two smaller ones, releasing energy and neutrons. The neutrons then trigger further break-ups. And so on. If this “chain reaction” can be controlled, the energy released can be used to boil water, produce steam and drive a turbine that generates electricity. If it runs away, the result is a meltdown and an accident (or, in extreme circumstances, a nuclear explosion—though circumstances are never that extreme in a reactor because the fuel is less fissile than the material in a bomb). In many new designs the neutrons, and thus the chain reaction, are kept under control by passing them through water to slow themdown. (Slow neutrons trigger more break ups than fast ones.) This water is exposed to a pressure of about 150 atmospheres—a pressure that means it remains liquid even at high temperatures. When nuclear reactions warm the water, its density drops, and the neutrons passing through it are no longer slowed enough to trigger further reactions. That negative feedback stabilises the reaction rate.Can business be cool?Why a growing number of firms are taking global warming seriouslyRUPERT MURDOCH is no green activist. But in Pebble Beach later this summer, the annual gathering of executivesof Mr Murdoch's News Corporation—which last year led to a dramatic shift in the media conglomerate's attitude tothe internet—will be addressed by several leading environmentalists, including a vice-president turned climatechangemovie star. Last month BSkyB, a British satellite-television company chaired by Mr Murdoch and run by hisson, James, declared itself “carbon-neutral”, having taken various steps to cut or offset its discharges of carboninto the atmosphere.The army of corporate greens is growing fast. Late lastyear HSBC became the first big bank to announce that itwas carbon-neutral, joining other financial institutions, including Swiss Re, a reinsurer, and Goldman Sachs, aninvestment bank, in waging war on climate-warming gases (of which carbon dioxide is the main culprit). Last yearGeneral Electric (GE), an industrial powerhouse, launched its “Ecomagination” strategy, aiming to cut its output ofgreenhouse gases and to invest heavily in clean (ie, carbon-free) technologies. In October Wal-Mart announced aseries of environmental schemes, including doubling the fuel-efficiency of its fleet of vehicles within a decade.Tesco and Sainsbury, two of Britain's biggest retailers, are competing fiercely to be the greenest. And on June 7thsome leading British bosses lobbied Tony Blair for a more ambitious policy on climate change, even if that involvesharsher regulation.The greening of business is by no means universal, however. Money from Exxon Mobil, Ford and General Motorshelped pay for television advertisements aired recently in America by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, with thedaft slogan “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution; we call it life”. Besides, environmentalist critics say, some firmsa re engaged in superficial “greenwash” to boost the image ofessentially climate-hurting businesses. Take BP, themost prominent corporate advocate of action on climate change, with its “Beyond Petroleum” ad campaign, highprofileinvestments in green energy, and even a “carbon calculator” on its website that helps consumers measuretheir personal “carbon footprint”, or overall emissions of carbon. Yet, critics complain, BP's recent record profits arelargely thanks to sales of huge amounts of carbon-packed oil and gas.On the other hand, some free-market thinkers see the support of firms for regulation of carbon as the latestattempt at “regulatory capture”, by those who stand to profit from new rules. Max Schulz of the ManhattanInstitute, a conservative think tan k, notes darkly that “Enron was into pushing the idea of climate change, becauseit was good for its business”.Others argue that climate change has no more place in corporate boardrooms than do discussions of other partisanpolitical issues, such as Darfur or gay marriage. That criticism, at least, is surely wrong. Most of the corporateconverts say they are acting not out of some vague sense of social responsibility, or even personal angst, butbecause climate change creates real business risks and opportunities—from regulatory compliance to insuringclientson flood plains. And although these concerns vary hugely from one company to the next, few firms can besure of remaining unaffected.Testing timesResearchers are working on ways to reduce the need for animal experiments, but new laws mayincrease the number of experiments neededIN AN ideal world, people would not perform experiments on animals. For the people, they are expensive. For theanimals, they are stressful and often painful.That ideal world, sadly, is still some way away. People need new drugs and vaccines. They want protection fromthe toxicity of chemicals. The search for basic scientific answers goes on. Indeed, the European Commission isforging ahead with proposals that will increase the number of animal experiments carried out in the EuropeanUnion, by requiring toxicity tests on every chemical approved for use within the union's borders in the past 25years.Already, the commission has identified 140,000 chemicals that have not yet been tested. It wants 30,000 of theseto be examined right away, and plans to spend between €4 billion-8 billion ($5 billion-10 billion) doing so. Thenumberof animals used for toxicity testing in Europe will thus, experts reckon, quintuple from just over 1m a yearto about 5m, unless they are saved by some dramatic advances in non-animal testing technology. At the moment,roughly 10% of European animal tests are for general toxicity, 35% for basic research, 45% for drugs andvaccines, and the remaining 10% a varietyof uses such as diagnosing diseases.Animal experimentation will therefore be around for some time yet. But the hunt for substitutes continues, and lastweekend the Middle European Society for Alternative Methods to Animal Testing met in Linz, Austria, to reviewprogress.A good place to start finding alternatives for toxicity tests is the liver—the organ responsible for breaking toxicchemicals down into safer molecules that can then be excreted. Two firms, one large and one small, told themeeting how they were using human liver cells removed incidentally during surgery to test various substances forlong-term toxic effects.PrimeCyte, the small firm, grows its cells in cultures over a few weeks and doses them regularly with the substanceunder investigation. The characteristics of the cells are carefully monitored, to look for changes in theirmicroanatomy.Pfizer,the big firm, also doses its cultures regularly, but rather than studying individual cells in detail, it counts cellnumbers. If the number of cells in a culture changes after a sample is added, that suggests the chemical inquestion is bad for the liver.In principle, these techniques could be applied to any chemical. In practice, drugs (and, in the case of PrimeCyte,food supplements) are top of the list. But that might change if the commission has its way: those 140,000screenings look like a lucrative market, although nobody knows whether the new tests will be ready for use by2009, when the commission proposes that testing should start.Other tissues, too, can be tested independently of animals. Epithelix, a small firm in Geneva, has developed anartificial version of the lining of the lungs. According to Huang Song, one of Epithelix's researchers, the firm'scultured cells have similar microanatomy to those found in natural lung linings, and respond in the same way tovarious chemical messengers. Dr Huang says that they could be used in long-term toxicity tests of airbornechemicals and could also help identify treatments for lung diseases.The immune system can be mimicked and tested, too. ProBioGen, a company based in Berlin, is developinganartificial human lymph node which, it reckons, could have prevented the near-disastrous consequences of a drugtrial held in Britain three months ago, in which (despite the drug having passed animal tests) six men sufferedmultiple organ failure and nearly died. The drug the men were given made their immune systems hyperactive.Such a response would, the firm's scientists reckon, have been identified by their lymph node, which is made fromcells that provoke the immune system into a response. ProBioGen's lymph node could thus work better than animaltesting.Another way of cutting the number of animal experiments would be tochange the way that vaccines are tested, according to CoenraadHendriksen of the Netherlands Vaccine Institute. At the moment, allbatches of vaccine are subject to the same battery of tests. DrHendriksen argues that this is over-rigorous. When new vaccine culturesare made, belt-and-braces tests obviously need to be applied. But if abatch of vaccine is derived from an existing culture, he suggests that itneed be tested only to make sure it is identical to the batch from which itis derived. That would require fewer test animals.All this suggests that though there is still some way to go before drugs,vaccines and other substances can be tested routinely oncells ratherthan live animals, useful progress is being made. What is harder to see ishow the use of animals might be banished from fundamental research.Anger managementTo one emotion, men are more sensitive than womenMEN are notoriously insensitive to the emotional world around them. At least, that is the stereotype peddled by athousand women's magazines. And a study by two researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia,confirms that men are, indeed, less sensitive to emotion than women, with one important and suggestiveexception. Men are acutely sensitive to the anger of other men.Mark Williams and Jason Mattingley, whose study has just been published in Current Biology, looked at the way aperson's sex affects his or her response to emotionally charged facial expressions. People from all cultures agreeon what six basic expressions of emotion look like. Whether the face before you is expressing anger, disgust, fear,joy, sadness or surprise seems to be recognised universally—which suggests that the expressions involved areinnate, rather than learned.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley showed the participants intheir study photographs of these emotional expressions inmixed sets of either four or eight. They asked the participants to look for a particular sort of expression, andmeasured the amount of time it took them to find it. The researchers found, in agreement with previous studies,that both men and women identified angry expressions most quickly. But they also found that anger was morequickly identified on a male face than a female one.Moreover, most participants could find an angry face just as quickly when it was mixed in a group of eightphotographs as when it was part of a group of four. That was in stark contrast to the other five sorts of expression,which took more time to find when they had to be sorted from a larger group. This suggests that something in thebrain is attuned to picking out angry expressions, and that it is especially concerned about angry men. Also, thishighly tuned ability seems more important to males than females, since the two researchers found that men pickedout the angry expressions faster than women did, even though women were usually quicker than men to recognizeevery other sort of facial expression.Dr Williams and Dr Mattingley suspect the reason for this is that being able to spot an angry individual quickly hasasurvival advantage—and, since anger is more likely to turn into lethal violence in men than in women, the abilityto spot angry males quickly is particularly valuable.As to why men are more sensitive to anger than women, it is presumably because they are far more likely to getkilled by it. Most murders involve men killing other men—even today the context of homicide is usually aspontaneous dispute over status or sex.The ability to spot quickly that an alpha male is in a foul mood would thus have great survival value. It would allowthe sharp-witted time to choose appeasement, defence or possibly even pre-emptive attack. And, if it is right, thisstudy also confirms a lesson learned by generations of bar-room tough guys and schoolyard bullies: if you wantattention, get angry. The shareholders' revoltA turning point in relations between company owners and bosses?SOMETHING strange has been happening this year at company annual meetings in America:shareholders have been voting decisively against the recommendations of managers. Until now, mostshareholders have, like so many sheep, routinely voted in accordance with the advice of the peopletheyemploy to run the company. This year managers have already been defeated at some 32 companies,including household names such as Boeing, ExxonMobil and General Motors.This shareholders' revolt has focused entirely on one issue: the method by which members of the boardof directors are elected. Shareholder resolutions on other subjects have mostly been defeated, as usual.The successful resolutions called for directors to be elected by majority voting, instead of by thetraditional method of “plurality”—which in practice meant that only votes cast in favour were counted,and that a single vote for a candidate would be enough to get him elected.Several companies, led by Pfizer, a drug giant, saw defeat looming and pre-emptively adopted a formalmajority-voting policy that was weaker than in the shareholder resolution. This required any director whofailed to secure a majority of votes to tender his resignation to the board, which would then be free todecide whether or not to accept it. Under the shareholder resolution, any candidate failing to secure amajority of the votes cast simply would not be elected. Intriguingly, the shareholder resolution wasdefeated at four-fifths of the firms that adopted a Pfizer-style majority voting rule, whereas itsucceedednearly nine times out of ten at firms retaining the plurality rule.Unfortunately for shareholders, their victories may prove illusory, as the successful resolutions were all“precatory”—meaning that they merely advised management on the course of action preferred byshareholders, but did not force managers to do anything. Several resolutions that tried to imposemajority voting on firms by changing their bylaws failed this year.Even so, wise managers should voluntarily adopt majority voting, according to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen &Katz, a Wall Street law firm that has generally helped managers resist increases in shareholder power butnow expects majority voting eventually to “become universal”. It advises th at, at the very least,managers should adopt the Pfizer model, if only to avoid becoming the subject of even greater scrutinyfrom corporate-governance activists. Some firms might choose to go further, as Dell and Intel have donethis year, and adopt bylaws requiring majority voting.Shareholders may have been radicalised by the success last year of a lobbying effort by managersagainst a proposal from regulators to make it easier for shareholders to put up candidates in boardelections. It remains to be seen if they willbe back for more in 2007. Certainly, some of the activistshareholders behind this year's resolutions have big plans. Where new voting rules are in place, they plancampaigns to vote out the chairman of the compensation committee at any firm that they think overpaysthe boss. If the 2006 annual meeting was unpleasant for managers, next year's could be far worse.Intangible opportunitiesCompanies are borrowing against their copyrights, trademarks and patentsNOT long ago, the value of companies resided mostly in things you could see and touch. Today it liesincreasingly in intangible assets such as the McDonald's name, the patent for Viagra and the rights toSpiderman. Baruch Lev, a finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, puts theimplied value of intangibles on American companies' balance sheets at about $6 trillion, or two-thirds ofthe total. Much of this consists of intellectual property, the collective name for copyrights, trademarksand patents. Increasingly, companies and their clever bankers are using these assets to raise cash.The method of choice is securitisation, the issuing ofbonds based on the various revenues thrown off byintellectual property. Late last month Dunkin' Brands, owner of Dunkin' Donuts, a snack-bar chain, raised$1.7 billion by selling bonds backed by, among other things, the royalties it will receive from itsfranchisees. The three private-equity firms that acquired Dunkin' Brands a few months ago have used thecash to repay the money they borrowed to buy the chain. This is the biggest intellectual-propertysecuritisation by far, says Jordan Yarett of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, a law firm that hasworked on many such deals.Securitisations of intellectual property can be based on revenues from copyrights, trademarks (such aslogos) or patents. The best-known copyright deal was the issue in 1997 of $55m-worth of “Bowie Bonds”supported by the future sales of music by David Bowie, a British rock star. Bonds based on the films ofDreamWorks, Marvel comic books and the stories of John Steinbeck have also been sold. As well asDunkin' Brands, several restaurant chains and fashion firms have issued bonds backed by logos andbrands.Intellectual-property deals belong to a class known as operating-asset securitisations. These differ fromstandard securitisations of future revenues, such as bonds backed by thepayments on a 30-yearmortgage or a car loan, in that the borrower has to make his asset work. If investors are to recoup theirmoney, the assets being securitised must be “actively exploited”, says Mr Yarett: DreamWorks mustcontinue to churn out box-office hits.The market for such securitisations is still small. Jay Eisbruck, of Moody's, a rating agency, reckons thataround $10 billion-worth of bonds ar e outstanding. But there is “big potential,” he says, pointing out thatlicensing patented technology generates $100 billion a year and involves thousands of companies.Raising money this way can make sense not only for clever private-equity firms, but also for companieswith low (or no) credit ratings that cannot easily tap the capital markets or with few tangible assets ascollateral for bank loans. Some universities have joined in, too. Yale built a new medical complex withsome of the roughly $100m it raised securitising patent royalties from Zerit, an anti-HIV drug.It may be harder for investors to decide whether such deals are worth their while. They are, after all,highly complex and riskier than standard securitisations. The most obvious risk is that the investorscannot be sure that the assets will yield。
2011年考研英语二text4
2011年英语二阅读text4Will the European Union make it? The question would have sounded strange not long ago.Now even the project’s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent facing a “Bermuda triangle” of debt, population decline and lower growth.As well as those chronic problems, the EU faces an acute crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone’s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation.Yet the debate about how to save Europe’s single currency from disintegration is stuck. It is stuck because the euro zone’s dominant powers, France and Germ any, agree on the need for greater harmonization within the euro zone, but disagree about what to harmonise.Germany thinks the euro must be saved by stricter rules on borrowing, spending and competitiveness, backed by quasi-automatic sanctions for governments that do not obey. These might include threats to freeze EU funds for poorer regions and EU mega-projects, and even the suspension of a country’s voting rights in EU ministerial councils. It insists that economicco-ordination should involve all 27 members of the EU club, among whom there is a small majority for free - market liberalism and economic rigour; in the inner core alone, Germany fears,7a small majority favour French interference.A “southern” camp headed by France wants something different: “European economic government” within an inner core of euro-zone members. Translated, that means politicians intervening in monetary policy and a system of redistribution from richer to poorer members, via cheaper borrowing for governments through common Eurobonds or complete fiscal transfers. Finally, figures close to the French government have murmured, euro-zone members should agree to some fiscal and social harmonization: e.g., curbing competition in corporate-tax rates or labour costs.It is too soon to write off the EU. It remains the world’s largest trading block. At its best, the European project is remarkably liberal: built around a single market of 27 rich and poor countries, its internal borders are far more open to goods, capital and labour than any comparable trading area. It is an ambitious attempt to blunt the sharpest edges of globalization, and make capitalism benign.36. The EU is faced with so many problems that ________.[A] it has more or less lost faith in markets[B] even its supporters begin to feel concerned[C] some of its member countries plan to abandon euro[D] it intends to deny the possibility of devaluation37. The debate over the EU’s single currency is stuck because the dominant powers ________.[A] are competing for the leading position[B] are busy handling their own crises[C] fail to reach an agreement on harmonisation[D] disagree on the steps towards disintegration38. To solve the euro problem, Germany proposed that ________.[A] EU funds for poor regions be increased[B] stricter regulations be imposed[C] only core members be involved in economic co-ordination[D] voting rights of the EU members be guaranteed39. The French proposal of handling the crisis implies that ________.[A] poor countries are more likely to get funds[B] strict monetary policy will be applied to poor countries[C] loans will be readily available to rich countries[D] rich countries will basically control Eurobonds40. Regarding the future of the EU, the author seems to feel ________.[A] pessimistic[B] desperate[C] conceited[D] hopeful答案及解析：36. 【答案】B【解析】具体信息题。
经济学人双语版1
Europe's debt crisis欧洲债务危机Spot the pattern看变化模式Jul 5th 2011, 18:55 by R.A. | WASHINGTON2011年7月5日18：55 R.A./华盛顿HERE'S a chart showing the yields on 10-year Greek debt over the past three months. See the pattern?本图显示的是在过去3个月10年期希腊债券的收益率。
变化模式看清楚了吧？There's a spike, followed by a decline, followed by a higher spike, followed by a decline to a higher trough, and so on. European leaders keep taking steps to avert disaster, and each time markets are less assuaged.有个尖峰，接着是下跌，然后又是稍高一些的尖峰，接着跌入一个较高的波谷，如此反复。
欧洲国家的领导人一直在采取措施避免灾难，而每一次市场都没有大的起色。
The latest spike corresponds to the stalemate over the IMF's willingness to continue making bail-out payments without a new, long-term rescue package in place (and the corresponding disagreement over how to rollover Greek debt, plus the drama surrounding the passage of Greece's new austerity plan). The IMF agreed to keep paying, French and German banks seemed willing to sign on to a rollover plan, and Greece got its new austerity programme through parliament. But it wasn't long before trouble kicked up again.最近的尖峰反映了这样一个困境：国际货币基金组织愿意继续救助，但又没有制定出一个长期的一揽子救助计划（同时也反映出如何缓解希腊债务各方存在分歧，以及希腊的新紧缩计划能否通过依然有变数）。
2011经济学人财经版块精选文章
Economics focusBringing down the house拉低房价The effect of ageing on asset prices may make the rich world’s problems worse 老龄化对于资产价格的影响可能导致富裕世界的问题恶化。
SINCE the bursting of Japan’s asset bubbles in the early 1990s, the country has undergone a long and deflationary process of debt reduction. During this period, Japanese policymakers have attracted criticism from (among others) Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, for their gradualist approach to reflating the economy. The critics’ charge is this: that although the Bank of Japan (BoJ) pioneered many of the policies that the Fed and others have since followed—such as committing to zero interest rates and increasing bank reserves by the alchemy of quantitative easing—the Japanese central bank still did too little, too late.日本从1990年代初的资产泡沫破灭伊始，就进入了一个冗长的通货紧缩、降低负债的过程。
赏析版2011年1-3月经济学人文章（英汉双语对照）汇集
赏析版2011年1-3⽉经济学⼈⽂章（英汉双语对照）汇集2011年1-3⽉赏析帖汇集[2011.03.31]They’re bust. Admit it. 他们破产了，接受这个现实吧！ 1[2011.03.31]Everybody needs good neighbours给⼒莫如好邻居 3[2011.03.31]Raging bulls 愤怒的“公⽜” 9[2011.03.24]When the steam clears 烟雾消散之后 11[2010.03.24]Libya campaign: Into the unknown利⽐亚之战⾛向未知 22[2011.03.24]Another year of living dangerously ⼜⼀个危险年份 30[2011.03.24]Worst-case scenarios: Fat-tail attraction 肥尾诱惑 32[2011.03.24]An audacious merger with a poor reception 联姻⼤胆,反响不佳 35[2011.03.17]The Arab press: Read all about it 洞悉⼀切 40[2011.03.17]Future of the state:Enemies of progress进步之敌：⼯会 43[2011.03.17]Japan's hydra-headed disaster 难以灭绝的灾难 46[2011.03.17]Future of the state:Patient, heal thyself患者，请⾃愈 50[2011.03.17]Stopped in their tracks ⽹络追踪，戛然⽽⽌ 53[2011.03.17]Japan and the uses of adversity⽇本之灾,焉知⾮福? 55[2011.03.12]Oh, Mr Porter - 哦，波特先⽣ 58[2011.03.11]Regional disparities 地区差距 62[2011.03.10]Throwing money at the street 挥⾦街头 65[2011.03.10]Held in reserve 握紧储备 68[2011.03.10]Alienated ⾮主流 69[2011.03.10]Rebooting their systems 重启系统 71[2011.03.08]A shapely future for circuits 电路的美好前景 78[2011.03.05]Sun,salaries and public servants阳光,薪⽔与公务员 86[2011.03.03]Prime numbers 顶级商业房产，如质数般稀少 87[2011.03.03]When the roof fell in压顶 96[2011.03.03]Bricks and slaughter 实体房地产业屠⼑在⼿ 106[2011.03.03]The old and the new 新与旧 115[2011.03.03]Building excitement 造屋兴奋 117[2011.03.03]Don't let him linger 别让他再赖着不⾛了 123[2011.03.03]The second coming “基督”再临 125[2011.03.03]A world apart 风景独好 128[2011.02.24]The 9 billion-people question 喂饱90亿⼈的问题 130[2011.02.24]Plagued by politics 被政治所困扰 137[2011.02.24]The canon of economics 经济学经典 139[2011.02.24]Hand to hand combat ⼿搏战 143[2011.02.19]A market for computing power 计算⼒市场 146[2011.02.17]New world order 新世界秩序 148[2011.02.17]Learning to like inflation 学会喜欢通胀 149[2011.02.10]Shifting sands 流沙 153[2011.02.10]The anti-Nokia 诺基亚的反例 156[2011.02.10]Blazing platforms 平台着⽕ 157[2011.02.05]Parsing prices 价格分析 163[2011.02.03]Dancing with bears 与“熊”共舞 165[2011.02.03]Worried Israel 忧⼼仲仲的以⾊列 169[2011.02.03]Protests and the pump 抗议与⽯油 171[2011.01.29]The scent of jasmine spreads 茉莉花⾹弥漫 175[2011.01.27]A waxing crescent 新⽉渐盈 178[2011.01.27]Identifying a billion Indians 识别⼗亿印度⼈ 181[2011.01.20]The world's water-coolers 世界的开⽔间 185[2011.01.20]The world's water-coolers 世界的开⽔间 189[2011.01.20]Tribes still matter 族群依旧重要 194[2011.01.20]Canada's tar sands 加拿⼤的油砂 198[2011.01.20]A risk too far 太远的风险 208[2011.01.20]Fluid logic 液体逻辑 210[2011.01.20]Unloading the loaded ⼤宰有钱⼈ 212[2011.01.20]More millionaires than Australians 215[2011.01.20]Asian medical innovation 亚洲医疗改⾰ 219[2011.01.20]Asia's new aristocrats 亚洲新贵 221[2011.01.13]In praise of Wikipedia 维基百科颂 226[2011.01.13]Awaken the giant within 唤醒⼼中的巨⼈ 229[2011.01.13]Wikipleadia 维基百辩 233[2011.01.13]Macrobatics 宏蝠 236[2011.01.08]The public sector unions 公共部门的⼯会 239[2011.01.06]The big mo⼤态势 242[2011.01.06]The lion kings? 狮⼦王？ 245[2011.01.06]The lion kings? 狮王时代即将来临？ 249[2011.03.31]They’re bust. Admit it. 他们破产了，接受这个现实吧！The euro zone's periphery欧元区的外围成员国They’re bust. Admit it.他们破产了，接受这个现实吧！Greece, Ireland and Portugal should restructure their debts now希腊、爱尔兰和葡萄⽛现在应该进⾏债务重组。
赏析版2011年1-3月经济学人文章(英汉双语对照)汇集
[2011.03.31]They’re bust. Admit it. 他们破产了，接受这个现实吧！ 1
[2011.03.31]Everybody needs good neighbours给力莫如好邻居 3
[2011.03.31]Raging bulls 愤怒的“公牛” 9
[2011.02.17]New world order 新世界秩序 148
[2011.02.17]Learning to like inflation 学会喜欢通胀 149
[2011.02.10]Shifting sands 流沙 153
[2011.02.10]The anti-Nokia 诺基亚的反例 156
[2011.03.17]Stopped in their tracks 网络追踪，戛然而止 53
[2011.03.17]Japan and the uses of adversity日本之灾,焉知非福? 55
[2011.03.12]Oh, Mr Porter - 哦，波特先生 58
[2011.03.11]Regional disparities 地区差距 62
[2011.01.20]The world's water-coolers 世界的开水间 185
[2011.01.20]The world's water-coolers 世界的开水间 189
[2011.01.20]Tribes still matter 族群依旧重要 194
[2011.01.20]Canada's tar sands 加拿大的油砂 198
Portugal’s prime minister resigned on March 23rd after failing to win support for the fourth austerity package in a year. The country’s credit rating was slashed to near-junk status on March 29th, while ten-year bond yields have risen above 8% as investors fear Portugal will have to turn to the European Union and the IMF for loans. The economies of both Greece and Ireland, Europe’s two “rescued” countries, are shrinking faster than expected, and bond yields, at almost 13% for Greece and over 10% for Ireland, remain stubbornly high. Investors plainly don’t believe the rescues will work.
economist（经济学人）精品文章中英对照（合集五篇）
economist（经济学人）精品文章中英对照（合集五篇）第一篇：economist(经济学人)精品文章中英对照Whopper to go 至尊汉堡，打包带走Will Burger King be gobbled up by private equity? 汉堡王是否会被私人股本吞并？Sep 2nd 2010 | NEW YORKSHARES in Burger King(BK)soared on September 1st on reports that the fast-food company was talking to several private-equity firms interested in buying it.How much beef was behind these stories was unclear.But lately the company famous for the slogan “Have It Your Way” has certainly not been having it its own way.There may be arguments about whether BK or McDonald’s serves the best fries, but there is no doubt which is more popular with stockmarket investors: the maker of the Big Mac has supersized its lead in the past two years.有报道披露，快餐企业汉堡王（BK）正在与数个有收购意向的私人股本接洽，9月1日，汉堡王的股值随之飙升。
这些报道究竟有多少真材实料不得而知。
汉堡王的著名口号是“我选我味”，但如今显然它身不由己，心中五味杂陈。
汉堡王和麦当劳哪家薯条最好吃，食客们一直争论不休，但股票投资人更喜欢哪家股票，却一目了然：过去两年里，巨无霸麦当劳一直在扩大自己的优势。
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）
经济学人文章摘录32篇（中英对照）第一篇：经济学人文章摘录32篇(中英对照)【经济学人】双语阅读：律师事务所标价更高收益更少Business 商业报道Law firms 律师事务所Charging more, getting less 标价更高，收益更少Lawyers' biggest customers are discovering that they can haggle 律师的最大客户们发现他们能与律师还价THERE were groans in big companies' legal departments in the mid-2000s, when the fees of America's priciest lawyers first hit 1,000 an hour.当美国最高的律师酬金达到每小时1000美元，20世纪中期，一些大公司的法律部门里开始抱怨连连。
Such rates have since become common at firms with prestige.自此以后，这样的价格在名企变得普遍。
A survey published this week by the National Law Journal found that they now go as high as 1,800.美国法律期刊刊登的一项调查表明，现在的律师费用已经高达1800美元/时，But the general counsels of large businesses are increasingly finding that they can ignore these extravagant rates, and insist on big discounts.但是那些为大公司效力的法律顾问却逐渐发现，他们忽视高额酬金，并坚持较大折扣。
Price-discounting tends to be associated more with used-car lots than with posh law firms.There was a time when a lawyer could submit his bill and be confident of receiving a cheque for the same amount.价格折扣渐渐常见于二手车交易，并非光鲜的律师律师事务所。
2011年考研英语二真题全文翻译答案超详解析
2011 年全国硕士研究生入学统一考试英语（二）试题答案与解析Section I Use of English一、文章题材结构分析本文是一篇说明性的文章，主要讨论了互联网上的身份验证问题。
作者首先提出，由于网络用户的匿名现象带来的隐私泄露和网络犯罪问题，然后针对这些问题介绍了一种称为“自愿信任身份识别”系统的解决方法，并对这种方法做了评述。
二、试题解析1.【答案】A【解析】本题目考生需要关注两点：（1）空格前的主语（2）空格后的介词短语。
鉴于此，考生需要从四个选项中选出一个不及物动词，能与空格前的主语that（指代the explosion of cyber crime 网络犯罪的激增）构成主谓逻辑，并与空格后的介词短语across the Web 构成动宾逻辑。
A 项swept（打扫，席卷）可以做不及物动词，并能与空前的主语和空后的介词短语构成顺畅的逻辑关系，即在文中表示“匿名制是造成网络犯罪席卷互联网的原因”，故A为正确答案。
B 项skip 意为“跳过，掠过”；C 项walk 意为“走，步行”；D 项ride 意为“骑，乘，驾”虽可做不及物动词，但与空前主语和空后介词短语不构成完整的主谓搭配和动宾搭配，都是干扰项。
2.【答案】C【解析】本题目考生需要重点关注空格后的状语从句，状语从句引导词的选择主要考虑从句与主句之间的语意关系。
空格所在句子的主句是privacy be preserved（隐私得以保护），从句是省略了主语和助动词的bringing safety andsecurity to the world（带来网络世界的安全），由此可以推断本句是要表达“在给世界带来安全保障的同时，隐私是否能够得以保护呢？”，C 项while 意为“在……的同时，当……的时候”，可以表示伴随关系，故为正确答案。
A 项for 表示因果关系；B 项within 表示“在……里面，不超出”；D 项though 表示让步关系；在搭配上与doing并无典型用法，此外带入空格，整个句子逻辑也很不通顺，故为干扰选项。
2011年英语二阅读text4
2011年英语二阅读text4一、文章题材结构分析本文选自The Economist ( 《经济学人》) 2010年7月8日一篇题为《Staring into the abyss》的文章。
本文是一篇说明文，说明欧盟统一的货币体系，它的现状，各国对其看法以及评价。
第一段段讲述欧盟今非昔比，问题严重。
第二段重点指出其面临的迫切问题，以及使用统一的货币带来的影响。
第三段指出问题的解决停滞不前的原因。
第四、五段分别介绍了德国和法国在欧盟统一货币方面方面的不同态度。
最后一段总结:现在为欧盟下定论. 还为时过早。
二、全文翻译Text 4Will the European Union make it（成功，固定词组）? The question would have sounded strange not long ago. Now even the project’s greatest cheerleaders talk of a continent（洲，大陆）facing a “Bermuda triangle” of debt, population decline and lower growth.欧盟会成功吗?若在不久之前有人提这样的问题，人们会感到奇怪。
但是现在即使是欧盟最有力的支持者们也都在谈论欧洲大陆所面临的“百慕大三角”一一债务、人口下降和低速增长。
As well as those chronic（长期的，慢性的）problems, the EU faces an acute（严重的，急性的；激烈的；敏锐的；尖声的）crisis in its economic core, the 16 countries that use the single currency. Markets have lost faith that the euro zone’s economies, weaker or stronger, will one day converge thanks to（汇聚到）the discipline of sharing a single currency, which denies uncompetitive members the quick fix of devaluation（货币贬值）.译文:市场已经失去信心，不再相信欧元区的经济体，无论强弱，终有一天都会因遵循使用统一货币一，这可以阻止缺乏竞争力的成员国利用货币贬值快速解决经济问题一而走向融合。
Economist(经济学人)
What's wrong with America's economy?Its politicians are failing to tackle the country’s real problems. Believe it or not, they could learn from EuropeApr 28th 2011 | from the EconomistPESSIMISM about the United States rarely pays off in the long run. Time and again, when Americans have felt particularly glum, their economy has been on the brink of a revival. Think of Jimmy Carter’s cardigan-clad gloom in the inflation-ridden late 1970s, or the fear of competition from Japan that marked the “jobless recovery” of the early 1990s. Both times the United States bounced back, boosted on the first occasion by Paul V olcker’s conquest of inflation and on the second by a productivity spurt that sent growth rates soaring in the mid-1990s even as Japan stalled.That record is worth bearing in mind today. Americans are unhappy, and becoming more so, about their country’s prospects and politicians’ efforts to improve them. In a new New York Times/CBS News poll, seven out of ten respondents said America is on the wrong track. Almost 60% of Americans disapprove of Barack Obama’s handling of the economy, and three out of four think Congress is doing a lousy job.This malaise partly reflects the sluggishness of the recovery. Though unemployment has been falling and share prices are close to a three-year high, house prices are still in the dumps and the price of petrol has soared to levels not seen since the summer of 2008. But it’s not all about oil or indeed the short term. A careful reading of the polls suggests that Ameri cans’ worries stretch well beyond the next couple of years: about stagnating living standards and a dark future in an economy slow to create jobs, saddled with big government deficits and under threat from China. Tellingly, a majority now regard China, not America, as the world’s leading economy.Are these worries justified? On the plus side, it is hard to think of any large country with as many inherent long-term advantages as America: what would China give to have a Silicon Valley? Or Germany an Ivy League? But it is also plain that the United States does indeed have long-term economic weaknesses—and ones that will take time to fix. The real worry for Americans should be that their politicians, not least their president, are doing so little to tackle these underlying problems. Three failings stand out.The competitiveness canardThe first failing, of which Mr Obama in particular is guilty, is misstating the problem. He likes to frame America’s challenges in terms of “competitiveness”, particularly versus China. America’s prosperity, he argues, depends on “out-innovating, out-educating and out-building” China. This is mostly nonsense. America’s prosperity depends not on other countries’ productivity growth, but on its own (actually pretty fast) pace. Ideas spill over from one economy to another: when China innovates Americans benefit.Of course, plenty more could be done to spur innovation. The system of corporate taxation is a mess and deters domestic investment. Mr. Obama is right that America’s infrastru cture is creaking. But the solution there has as much to do with reforming Neanderthal funding systems as it does with the greater public spending he advocates. Too much of the “competitiveness” talk is a canard—one that justifies misguided policies, such as subsidies for green technology, and diverts attention from the country’s real to-do list.High on that list is sorting out America’s public finances. The budget deficit is huge and public debt, at over 90% of GDP when measured in an internationally comparable manner, is high and rising fast. Apart from Japan, America is the only big rich economy that does not have a plan for getting its public finances under control. The good news is that politicians are at last paying attention: deficit reduction is just about all anybody talks about in Washington, DC, these days. The bad news—and the second reason for gloom about what the politicians are up to—is that neither party is prepared to make the basic compromises that are essential to a deal. Republicans refu se to accept that taxes will have to rise, Democrats that spending on “entitlements” such as health care and pensions must fall. No real progress is likely until after the 2012 presidential election. And the antagonism of today’s deficit debate may even ha rm the economy, as Republicans push for excessive cuts in next year’s budget.When growth doesn’t bring jobsMeanwhile, the biggest dangers lie in an area that politicians barely mention: the labour market. The recent decline in the jobless rate has been misleading, the result of a surprisingly small growth in the workforce (as discouraged workers drop out) as much as fast job creation. A stubborn 46% of America’s jobless, some 6m people, have been out of work for more than six months. The weakness of the recovery is mostly to blame, but there are signs that America may be developing a distinctly European disease: structural unemployment.Youth unemployment is especially high, and joblessness among the young leaves lasting scars. Strong productivity growth has been achieved partly through the elimination of many mid-skilled jobs. And what makes this all the more worrying is that, below the radar screen, America had employment problems long before the recession, particularly for lesser-skilled men. These were caused not only by sweeping changes from technology and globalisation, which affect all countries, but also by America’s habit of locking up large numbers of young black men, which drastically diminishes their future employment prospects. America has a smaller fraction of prime-age men in work and in the labour force than any other G7 economy. Some 25% of men aged 25-54 with no college degree, 35% of high-school dropouts and almost 70% of black high-school dropouts are not working.Beyond the toll to individuals, the lack of work among less-skilled men could have huge fiscal and social consequences. The cost of disability payments is some $120 billion (almost 1% of GDP) and rising fast. Male worklessness has been linked with lower marriage rates and weakening family bonds.All this means that grappling with entrenched joblessness deserves to be far higher on America’s policy agenda. Unfortunately, the few (leftish) politicians who acknowledge the problem tend to have misguided solutions, such as trade barri ers or industrial policy to prop up yesterday’s jobs or to spot tomorrow’s. That won’t work: government has a terrible record at picking winners. Instead, America needs to get its macro-medicine right, in particular by committing itself to medium-term fiscal and monetary stability without excessive short-term tightening. But it also needs job-marketreforms, from streamlining and upgrading training to increasing employers’ incentives to hire the low-skilled. And there, strange as it may seem, America could learn from Europe: the Netherlands, for instance, is a good model for how to overhaul disability insurance. Stemming the decline in low-skilled men’s work will also demand more education reform to boost skills, as well as a saner approach to drugs and imprisonment.Technology and globalisation are remaking labour markets across the rich world, to the relative detriment of the lower-skilled. That’s why a rosier outlook for America’s economy does not necessarily mean a rosy future for all Americans. Mr Obama and his opponents can help to shape the process. Sadly, they are doing so for the worse rather than the better.美国的经济怎么了？——它的政客们都未能解决国家的真正的问题。
经济学人2011.5.28
Hail the useful chief向干练的总理致敬To thrive, Nigerians need strong medicine. They may at last be about to get it為了繁荣发展，尼日利亚需要一剂强心剂。
它们或许最终能够实现这一目标BACKHANDERS are so common in Nigeria that they feature in the countrys unofficial anthem, ''International Thief Thief''. Its author, Fela Kuti, the late father of the Afrobeat genre, sang in 1980, To become of high position here / Him go bribe some thousand naira bread / To become one useless chief. When a Broadway musical based on Kuti’s life premiered in Lagos r ecently, fans shouted out the names of today’s leaders over the first few bars. Little has changed since the song was written. When The Economist requested an interview with the president, we were asked whether we would contribute to his election campaign---or whether the president should pay us受贿在尼日利亚司空见惯,从这个国家的民谣“国际小偷”中可见一斑。
经济学人20110330
《经济学人》:日本的灾难,也是领导力的危机时间:2011-3-30 10:58:10 来源:可可英语A crisis of leadership, too也是领导力的危机The many-headed catastrophe points to deeper-seated problems in governing Japan棘手的灾祸背后，日本政府深层次的弊病显露出来SINCE the lives of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Japanese were turned upside down by earthquake, tsunami, fire and looming nuclear threat, people around the globe have watched, amazed, at the survivors’ composure—“stoicism” is the word they most often reach for. There have been few complaints, just civic-minded initiative. All along the coast, the urgent talk is not just about survival in the face of shortages of food, water and fuel. Stricken communities are desperate to start rebuilding their towns.地震，海啸，大火以及日益严重的核辐射把日本人的生活搅得翻天覆地，几十万日本人受到影响。
而此时此刻，全世界都将目光聚焦日本，惊叹于幸存者的沉着淡定。
而“坚忍克己”是他们嘴边形容日本最常用的词。
日本人很少抱怨什么，有的只是互帮互助。
目前，震区食物，水源以及燃料短缺，对于灾区人民来说，最迫切的不仅仅是如何活下去，还是重建家园Stoicism is an admirable response to what fate deals you. It also serves as a coping mechanism in the face of incomprehension. And the Japanese no longer just find it hard to understand how nature could deal such a blow; increasingly, they want to know why the government of a rich and orderly land should be taking so long to tame an overheating nuclear plant and get help to communities ravaged by the tsunami. A lack of water, food and warmth are a fresh and acute source of suffering. Despite the scale of the humanitarian disaster, some of the suffering is avoidable. The system is letting citizens down.面对自然的“摧残”，“坚忍克己”是多么的令人敬佩。
经济学人文本
The joys of parenthood身为人父的喜悦Father’s day父亲节Having children really does make a man more content with life拥有自己的孩子的确会让男人更热爱自己的生活。
May 19th 2012 | from the print editionWILL fatherhood make me happy? That is a question many men have found themselves asking, and the scientific evidence is equivocal. A lot of studies have linked parenthood—particularly fatherhood—with lower levels of marital satisfaction and higher rates of depression than are found among non-parents.当爸爸会让我开心么？这是一个许多男人都会问自己的问题，然而科学家们对此的措辞却含糊不清。
许多研究项目将双亲的身份——尤其是父亲——和低满足感与高压抑感联系起来，而且认为那些没有为人父母的人则要逍遥许多。
Biologically speaking, that looks odd. Natural selection might be expected to favour the progeny of men who enjoy bringing them up. On the other hand, the countervailing pressure to have other children, by other women, may leave the man who is already encumbered by a set of offspring dissatisfied.从生物学的角度来说，以上的观点其实很滑稽。
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Economics focusBringing down the house拉低房价The effect of ageing on asset prices may make the rich world’s problems worse 老龄化对于资产价格的影响可能导致富裕世界的问题恶化。
SINCE the bursting of Japan’s asset bubbles in the early 1990s, the country has undergone a long and deflationary process of debt reduction. During this period, Japanese policymakers have attracted criticism from (among others) Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, for their gradualist approach to reflating the economy. The critics’ charge is this: that although the Bank of Japan (BoJ) pioneered many of the policies that the Fed and others have since followed—such as committing to zero interest rates and increasing bank reserves by the alchemy of quantitative easing—the Japanese central bank still did too little, too late.日本从1990年代初的资产泡沫破灭伊始，就进入了一个冗长的通货紧缩、降低负债的过程。
在此时期之内，日本的政策制定者们受到了众多批评，批评者中就包括美联储主席伯南克在内，他指责日本在对经济的渐进主义者式的通货再膨胀。
批评者们的主要指责在于：虽然日本银行（BoJ）作为先锋提出了很多美联储和其他银行效仿的政策——例如制定零利率和通过量化宽松提高银行准备金——如今的日本银行仍然做的太少，也太晚了。
Things look rather different in Japan itself, where some say the problem lies in a lack of demand for loans from the debt-strapped private sector, rather than a lack of supply. This is the hallmark of a “balance-sheet recession”, a term coined by Richard Koo of the Nomura Research Insti tute to describe the process whereby households and companies pay down debts rather than embark on new spending.在日本，事情的发展方向并非看起来那样。
有人说问题在于那些被负债弄得伤痕累累的私营成分借贷需求的不足，而不是供给不足。
这是所谓“资产负债表衰退”的特点，一个由野村综合研究所的Richard Koo创造的称谓，它描述了家庭和公司先付清欠款，而不是开始新消费的过程。
In two speeches* this year, Kiyohiko Nishimura, deputy governor of the BoJ, has developed this line of thinking to help expl ain why Japan’s balance-sheet adjustment has taken so long. Mr Nishimura blames the prolonged slump on ageing, which is furthest advanced in Japan, but is also occurring in many of the world’s biggest economies. His central argument is that ageing depresse s asset prices. That in turn makes deleveraging tougher because debt used to finance assets is harder to pay off without incurring losses. This, he says, may have grim repercussions for America and Europe.Kiyohiko Nishimura是日本银行的副行长。
在今年的两次演讲中，他阐述了为何日本的资产负债表调整用了这么长时间。
Nishimura说这次持续时间很长的衰退过程的罪魁祸首是老龄化。
在世界范围内，日本的老龄化也是首屈一指的，当然，世界上很多其他的大型经济体也存在老龄化现象。
他的主要论点是老龄化降低了资产价格。
而这又使得去杠杆化更困难，因为一度用来供给资产的负债在不遭受损失的情况下，变得更难以付清。
他说，这一事实对于欧美也有糟糕的影响。
The theory behind the link between ageing and asset prices is outlined in a recent working paper by Elod Takats of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). In simple terms, the young and middle-aged save for old age by buying assets, often with borrowed money; the old sell them to pay for retirement. As the working-age population rises—as it did, for instance, after the baby boom—asset prices rocket because of increased demand. As baby-boomers reach retirement, the reverse may happen.在最近的一篇论文中，国际清算银行的Elod Takats概述了老龄化和资产价格联系背后的理论。
简单的说，年轻人和中年人购买资产为了老了以后的日子，此过程常常涉及贷款；而老人则常常出售资产用来支付退休后的开销。
如果工作年龄的人口增长——例如在婴儿潮之后发生的——资产价格就会飙升，因为需求扩大了。
当婴儿潮出生的人接近退休，那么结果就可能是反过来的。
In his paper Mr Takats seeks to quantify this effect. He prefers to look at an international sample rather than data on single countries, because that enables more robust identification of the impact of ageing. He also focuses on house prices rather than financial assets, because they are less likely to be influenced by cross-border capital flows. Mr Takats applies two aspects of demography to BIS house-price data from 22 advanced economies: first, total population; second, the ratio of old people to the working-age population, or the old-age dependency ratio. Between 1970 and 2009, he finds that a 1% rise in GDP per person and a 1% rise in the total population each corresponded to about a 1% rise in real house prices. But a 1% increase in the old-age dependency ratio was associated with a 0.66% drop in real house prices.Takats在他的论文中试图量化这一效应。
他更愿意考察国际样本而不仅是一个国家的数据，因为这样就可以更可靠的识别老龄化的影响。
同时他也更着重考察房地产的价格而不是金融产品的价格，因为前者不容易受到跨境现金流的影响。
Takats将人口学的两个方面应用于国际清算银行关于22个发达国家的房屋价格数据：首先是人口总量；其次是退休年龄人数与工作年龄人数的比值。
在1970年到2009年的数据中，他发现人均GDP 1%的增长，和总人口数1%的增长分别贡献了房屋价格约1%的增长。
然而，养老抚养率1%的上升却和房屋价格0.66%的下降联系在一起。
Using United Nations projections, his analysis suggests that house prices will face strong headwinds in the next 40 years as populations age. American house prices, for example, will rise by about 80 basis points a year less than they would do if you strip out demographic factors, he reckons. For faster-ageing countries such as Japan, Germany and Italy, prices would fall by more than 1% a year, though he notes that other factors may offset the demographic effects and he does not expect a meltdown in prices.根据联合国的预测，他的分析意味着在未来40年里，由于人口老龄化，房屋价格将受到强大阻击。