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
Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for econom
Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for econom
admin
2011-03-10
52
问题
Born in the trough of the Great Depression, Edmund Phelps, a professor at Columbia University who won the Nobel Prize for economics, has spent much of his intellectual life studying slumps of a different kind. The Depression, which cost both of his parents their jobs, was exacerbated by the monetary, authorities, who kept too tight a grip on the money supply. Mr. Phelps is interested in unemployment that even open-handed central bankers cannot cure.
Most scholars stand on the shoulders of giants. But Mr. Phelps won his laurels in part tar kicking the feet from under his intellectual forerunners. In 1958 William Phillips, of the London School of Economics, showed that for much of the previous hundred years, unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high, and high when inflation was low. Economists were too quick to conclude that policy makers therefore faced a grand, macroeconomic trade-off, embodied in the so-called "Phillips curve". They could settle for unemployment of, say, 6% and an inflation rate of 1%—as prevailed in America at the start of the 1960s—or they could quicken the economy, cutting unemployment by a couple of percentage points at the expense of inflation of 3% or so—which is roughly how things stood in America when Mr. Phelps published his first paper on the subject in 1967.
In such a tight lab our market, companies appease workers by offering higher wages. They then pass on the cost in the form of dearer prices, cheating workers of a higher real wage. Thus policymakers can engineer lower unemployment only through deception. But "man is a thinking, expectant being,"as Mr. Phelps has put it. Eventually workers will cotton on, demanding still higher wages to offset the rising cost of living. They can be duped for as long as inflation stays one step ahead of their rising expectations of what it will be.
The stable trade-off depicted by the Phillips curve is thus a dangerous mirage. The economy will recover its equilibrium only when workers’ expectations are fulfilled, prices turn out as anticipated, and they no longer sell their labour under false pretences. But equilibrium does not, sadly, imply full employment. Mr. Phelps argued that inflation will not settle until unemployment rises to its "natural rate", leaving some workers moldering on the shelf. Given economists’ almost theological commitment to the notion that markets clear, the presence of unemployment in the world requires a theodicy to explain it. Mr. Phelps is willing to entertain several. But in much of his work he contends that unemployment is necessary to cow workers, ensuring their loyalty to the company and their diligence on the job, at a wage the company can afford to pay.
"Natural" does not mean optimal. Nor, Mr. Phelps has written, does it mean "a pristine element of nature not susceptible to intervention by man. " Natural simply means impervious to central bankers’ efforts to change it, how much money they print.
Economists, including some of his own students, commonly take this natural rate to be slow moving, if not constant, and devote a great deal of effort to estimating it. Mr. Phelps, by contrast, has been more anxious to explain its fluctuations, and to recommend measures to lower it. His book Structural Slumps, published in 1994, is an ambitious attempt to provide a general theory of how the natural rate of unemployment evolves. Some of the factors that he considered important--unemployment benefits or payroll taxes, for example—are widely accepted parts of the story. Others are more idiosyncratic. He and his French collaborator, Jean-Paul Fitoussi, have, for example, blamed Europe’s mounting unemployment in the 1980s in part on Ronald Reagan’s budget deficits, which were expansionary at home, but squeezed employment in the rest of the world.
A few years ago David Walsh, an economic journalist, lamented that the glare of the Nobel Prize left other equally deserving economists, such as Mr. Phelps, languishing "in the half-lit penumbra of the shortlist". After an unaccountably long lag, professional acclaim for this bold, purposeful theorist finally converged on its natural rate.
According to "Phillips curve", unemployment is ______ wage inflation.
选项
A、irrelevant to
B、positively correlated with
C、negatively correlated with
D、affected solely by
答案
C
解析
推断题。由题干中的“Phillips curve”定位至第二段。第三句指出William Phillips的观点:unemployment was low in Britain when wage inflation was high,and high when inflation was low。由此经济学家们总结出“Phillips curve”是宏观经济平衡的具体表现形式,之后用数据举例说明,其中多次提到unemployment和inflation rate。可见这里说的Phillips curve就是指前面提到的Phillips的观点,unemployment和inflation之间为负相关关系,[C]为答案。[B]和[A]与之矛盾,排除;[D]为绝对项,排除。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/KJYO777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
A、sufferedseverecasualtiesB、wereontherecentlyissuedlistofterroristsC、foughtwithSaudipoliceforcesD、werethoughtt
A、Policeheadquarter.B、Hospital.C、Gasstation.D、Powerstation.B
Rabiesisanordinarilyinfectiousdiseaseofthecentralnervoussystem,causedbyavirusand,asarule,spreadchieflybydo
Skeletalremainswithanimalbonebladestiedtothefeettestifytoskating’sexistenceasearlyas10,000BC.Theseremainsw
A、Thisattackhappened10daysafterthesuicidesbombingsinLondon.B、Allthevictimsinjuredweresenttothenearbyhospital
A、dentaltreatmentB、casualtytreatmentC、emergencytreatmentD、allthetreatmentatapublichospitalA
CrypticColoringCrypticcoloringisbyfarthecommonestuseofcolorinthestruggleforexistence.Itisemployedforthe
Likeallanimalspecies,plantspeciesmustspreadtheiroffspringtosuitableareaswheretheycangrowandpassontheirparen
Sternrecountsherfour-yearodysseyintotheheartsandmindsofreligiousterrorists.ShetalkstoChristian,JewishandMusli
外来移民难道真的是欧洲社会难以摆脱的失业和高犯罪率的罪魁祸首吗?今天的欧洲或许算是一方乐土,吸引着非洲、亚洲、南美洲的许多年轻人背井离乡到这里来谋生求发展。更重要的是,西欧今天已经离不开移民。移民的到来对欧洲的经济社会发展,甚至改善欧洲人口年龄结构,起着不
随机试题
台式卧式铣镗床的镗轴直径为()mm。
动作电位到达突触前膜引起递质释放与哪种离子的跨膜移动有关
某公司违反《中华人民共和国证券法》的规定,应同时承担缴纳罚款、罚金和民事赔偿责任,如公司全部财产不足以全部支付的,应当()。
甲网站与乙唱片公司签订录音制品的信息网络传播权许可使用合同,按约定支付报酬后,即开展了网上原版音乐下载业务。对甲网站的行为应如何定性?
路边停车带是指设在车行道旁或路边的地面停车设施,它的特点有()。
单位从事内幕交易的,除对单位进行处罚外。还应当对直接负责的主管人员和其他直接责任人员给予警告,并处()的罚款。
缺乏工作文献时,()的优势尤为明显。
公共关系危机的特征不包括()。
关于法治,下列表述不正确的是()
A、Havingselectedfoodtypes.B、Eatingvegetablesandfruits.C、Eatingasmuchaspossible.D、Havingallfoodtypesinproperpr
最新回复
(
0
)