首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Fifty years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebr
Fifty years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebr
admin
2017-03-15
68
问题
Fifty years ago, Robert Solow published the first of two papers on economic growth that eventually won him a Nobel prize. Celebrated and seasoned, he was thus a natural choice to serve on an independent "commission on growth" announced last month by the World Bank. (The commission will weigh and sift what is known about growth, and what might be done to boost it.)
Natural, that is, except for anyone who takes his 1956 contribution literally. For, according to the model he laid out in that article, the efforts of policymakers to raise the rate of growth per head are ultimately futile.
A government eager to force the pace of economic advance may be tempted by savings drives, tax cuts, investment subsidies or even population controls. As a result of these measures, each member of the labour force may enjoy more capital to work with. But this process of "capital deepening", as economists call it, eventually runs into diminishing returns. Giving a worker a second computer does not double his output.
Accumulation alone cannot yield lasting progress, Mr. Solow showed. What can? Anything that allows the economy to add to its output without necessarily adding more labour and capital. Mr. Solow labeled this font of wealth "technological progress" in 1956, and measured its importance in 1957. But in neither paper did he explain where it came from or how it could be accelerated. Invention, innovation and ingenuity were all "exogenous" influences, lying outside the remit of his theory. To practical men of action, Mr. Solow’s model was thus an impossible tease: what it illuminated did not ultimately matter; and what really mattered, it did little to illuminate.
The law of diminishing returns holds great sway over the economic imagination. But its writ has not gone unchallenged. A fascinating new book, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations by David Warsh, tells the story of the rebel economics of increasing returns. A veteran observer of dismal scientists at work, first at the Boston Globe and now in an online column called Economic Principals, Mr. Warsh has written the best book of its kind since Peter Bernstein’s Capital Ideas.
Diminishing returns ensure that firms cannot grow too big, preserving competition between them. This, in turn, allows the invisible hand of the market to perform its magic. But, as Mr. Warsh makes clear, the fealty economists show to this principle is as much mathematical as philosophical. The topology of diminishing returns is easy for economists to navigate: a landscape of declining gradients and single peaks, free of the treacherous craters and crevasses that might otherwise entrap them.
The hero of the second half of Mr. Warsh’s book is Paul Romer, of Stanford University, who took up the challenge ducked by Mr. Solow. If technological progress dictates economic growth, what kind of economics governs technological advance? In a series of papers, culminating in an article in the Journal of Political Economy in 1990, Mr. Romer tried to make technology "endogenous", to explain it within the terms of his model. In doing so, he steered growth theory out of the comfortable cul-de-sac in which Mr. Solow had so neatly parked it.
The escape required a three-point turn. First, Mr. Romer assumed that ideas were goods—of a particular kind. Ideas, unlike things, are "non-rival": Everyone can make use of a single design, recipe or blueprint at the same time. This turn in the argument led to a second: the fabrication of ideas enjoys increasing returns to scale. Expensive to produce, they are cheap, almost costless, to reproduce. Thus the total cost of a design does not change much, whether it is used by one person or by a million.
Blessed with increasing returns, the manufacture of ideas might seem like a good business to go into. Actually, the opposite is true. If the business is free to enter, it is not worth doing so, because competition pares the price of a design down to the negligible cost of reproducing it.
Unless idea factories can enjoy some measure of monopoly over their designs—by patenting them, copyrighting them, or just keeping them secret—they will not be able to cover the fixed cost of inventing them. That was the final turn in Mr. Romer’s new theory of growth.
How much guidance do these theories offer to policymakers, such as those sitting on the World Bank’s commission? In Mr. Solow’s model, according to a common caricature, technology falls like "manna from heaven", leaving the bank’s commissioners with little to do but pray. Mr. Romer’s theory, by contrast, calls for a more worldly response: educate people, subsidies their research, import ideas from abroad, carefully gauge the protection offered to intellectual property.
But did policymakers need Mr. Romer’s model to reveal the importance of such things? Mr. Solow has expressed doubts. Despite the caricature, he did not intend in his 1956 model to deny that innovation is often dearly bought and profit-driven. The question is whether anything useful can be said about that process at the level of the economy as a whole. That question has yet to be answered definitively. In particular, Mr. Solow worries that some of the "more powerful conclusions" of the new growth theory are unearned, flowing as they do from powerful assumptions.
At one point in Mr. Warsh’s book, Mr. Romer is quoted comparing the building of economic models to writing poetry. It is a triumph of form as much as content. This creative economist did not discover anything new about the world with his 1990 paper on growth. Rather, he extended the metre and rhyme-scheme of economics to capture a world—the knowledge economy—expressed until then only in the loosest kind of doggerel. That is how economics makes progress. Sadly, it does not, in and of itself, help economies make progress.
The sentence "Giving a worker a second computer does not double his output." (Para. 3) can be best interpreted as______.
选项
A、the measures adopted by the government are not effective at all
B、having more capital to work with is not necessarily effective
C、workers needs more than computers to achieve productivity
D、capital deepening leads to efficiency
答案
B
解析
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/EuSO777K
本试题收录于:
NAETI高级口译笔试题库外语翻译证书(NAETI)分类
0
NAETI高级口译笔试
外语翻译证书(NAETI)
相关试题推荐
Whenyoulookup,howfarbackintimedoyousee?Oursensesare【C1】________inthepast.There’saflashoflightning,and
U.S.jobgrowthwassurprisinglystrongin2018,butdon’texpectthattohappenagainthisyear,witheconomicheadwindsintens
Howmuchphysicalactivityshouldteenagersdo,andhowcantheygetenough?Manyteenagersspendalotoftimebeingsedent
Howmuchphysicalactivityshouldteenagersdo,andhowcantheygetenough?Manyteenagersspendalotoftimebeingsedent
Itishopedthatrelevantpartieskeepcalm,________restraintandrefrainfromanyactionsthatmightescalatethesituation.
Itwouldbewrongto________someoneforerroneousremarksbecauseitisimpossibleforpeopletogeteverythingrightwhenthey
我国金融改革的不断深化将为外资银行与中资银行的合作带来新的机遇。银监会鼓励外资银行通过参股中资银行,在业务、客户和市场方面获得突破;同时,在公司治理、内控、风险管理和经营理念方面带来先进的经验和做法,使中、外资银行在合作中共同获得发展。作为深化金
《北京2008》和大家见面了!在对这份精美的杂志表示衷心祝贺的同时,希望它更好地反映2008年北京奥运会的筹备情况,展示北京东方文明故都的城市风貌、厚重的历史、灿烂的文化和充满生机的现代气息,使这份刊物成为增强我们同国际奥林匹克大家庭之间联系的桥梁和纽带。
A、Efficiencyofgovernment.B、Environmentalprotection.C、Decentralization.D、Trafficconcerns.C根据题干要求找寻到有关韩国总统的说法,发现原文第三段“hes
Whoweretakenhostageinthereportedkidnapping?
随机试题
肾虚水泛证的表现可见()(2009年第140题)
Accordingtopsychologists(心理学家),anemotionisarousedwhenamanoranimalviewssomethingaseitherbadorgood.Whenaper
患者男性,68岁,2年前诊断肺心病。1周来咳嗽、咳痰、喘息加重伴双下肢水肿。查体:神志清,双肺可闻及湿啰音,心率100次/分,律齐。肝肋下2.5cm,质软。双下肢水肿。血常规:白细胞计数及中性粒细胞分类均增高。血气分析:pH7.335,PaO250mm
A、收敛止血,消肿生肌B、收敛止血,截疟,杀虫C、收敛止血,清热解毒D、收敛止血,化瘀利尿E、收敛止血藕节的功效是
根据“资产=负债+所有者权益”这一会计平衡公式,一项会计要素的变动,必然会引起另一项会计要素的等额变动。()
乡、民族乡、镇政府预算的调整方案必须提请本级人民代表大会常务委员会的审查和批准。()
F公司为一上市公司,有关资料如下。资料一:(1)2008年度的营业收入为10000万元,营业成本为7000万元。2009年的目标营业收入增长率为100%,且营业净利率和股利支付率保持不变。适用的企业所得税税率为25%。(2)2008年度相关财务指标数
教师以“渔人甚异之,复前行,欲穷其林……”一句中的“异”为例,引导学生了解词类活用现象,下列划横线字用法与其相同的是()。
树:树梢()
Wemustkeepthegroup______knowingaboutthematter.
最新回复
(
0
)