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  3. Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession? People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the Oct

admin2013-07-11  52
问题                 Can Talk of a Depression Lead to Recession?
    People everywhere are talking about the Great Depression, which followed the October 1929 stock market crash and lasted until the United States entered World War II. It is a vivid story of year upon year of despair. This Depression narrative, however, is not merely a story about the past: it has started to inform our current expectations .
    According to the Reuters—University of Michigan Survey of Consumers earlier this month, nearly two-thirds of consumers expected that the present downturn would last for five more years. President Obama, in his first press conference, evoked the Depression in warning of a "negative spiral" that "becomes difficult for us to get out of" and suggested the possibility of a " lost decade" as in Japan in the1990s. He said Congress needed to pass an economic stimulus package.
    The attention paid to the Depression story may seem a logical consequence of our economic situation. But the retelling, in fact, is a cause of the current situation—because the Great Depression serves as a model for our expectations, damping what John Maynard Keynes called our "animal spirits" reducing consumers’ willingness to spend and businesses’ willingness to hire and expand. The Depression narrative could easily end up as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The popular response to vivid accounts of past depressions is partly psychological, but it has a rational base. We have to look at past episodes because economic theory, lacking the physical constants of the hard sciences, has never offered a complete account of the mechanics of depressions.
    To understand the story’s significance in driving our thinking, it is important to recognize that the Great Depression itself was partly driven by the retelling of earlier depression stories. In the 1930s, there was incessant talk about the depressions of the 1870s and 1890s: each of those downturns lasted for the better part of a decade.
    In his influential 1909 book, "Forty Years of American Finance," Alexander Dana Noyes argued that the depressions of the 1870s and the 1890s might have lasted much longer, except for accidents of history—a " European famine and a bumper crop at home " which stimulated the domestic economy through its agricultural sector. Early in the Depression, Forrest Davis worried in "What Price Wall Street?" that weakness after the panic of 1907 might have led to a prolonged depression if not for the accident of the World War. In 1932, a review of this book in The Times mourned that Mr. Davis had given us "no especial assurance that any of the traditional accidents can save us once more. The last war showed how terrible the next war will he."
    Should President Obama have reinforced the Great Depression story? Perhaps he had to take that risk to promote the economic stimulus plan, and not just hope for some accident to save us. The story was already embedded in our consciousness, and will be with us until we see a real, solid boost from the stimulus package and its likely successors.
According to the author, Depression talks may ______ .
选项 A、hinder people from understanding economic policies
B、worsen the current economic situation
C、help to relieve people’s insecurity
D、inspire the development of economic theories
答案B
解析 本题考查因果细节。文章第三段对于人们谈论大萧条这一现象进行评论。分析谈论大萧条怎样影响人们的经济行为，从而使大萧条的局面成为自然会实现的预言，并进一步分析人们对于大萧条的谈论会产生这种反应的原因。前两句指出谈论大萧条是造成目前严峻形势的原因之一。接下来阐述这么说的理由：大萧条充当了人们所预想的范例，削弱了人们的“信心"，致使消费者不愿消费，企业不敢雇用人才、扩大规模。。这样大萧条的传言很容易就成了自然会实现的预言。也就是说人们无形中会以大萧条为范例，使经济形势进一步恶化，[B]正确。文章第一段末尾提到美国计划推行经济刺激方案，但文中并未涉及谈论大萧条和理解经济政策之间的关系，[A]错误。第三段第二句的后半句提到讲述大萧条会削弱(damping)人们的“animal spirits”(动物精神)，对于这个经济学术语，作者进一步解释了它的含义：减少(reducing．．．)消费者的购买意愿和企业雇佣人才扩大规模的意愿。这样只会更加重人们的不安全感，而不是缓解，[C]反向干扰。文中提到谈论大萧条的现实原因是经济理论未对经济萧条的内在机制加以说明，但并未提到人们谈论大萧条会启迪经济理论的发展，[D]错误。
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