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
Passage Two (1) It’s a golden age for studying inequality. Thomas Piketty, a French economist, set the benchmark in 2014 wh
Passage Two (1) It’s a golden age for studying inequality. Thomas Piketty, a French economist, set the benchmark in 2014 wh
admin
2022-09-07
53
问题
Passage Two
(1) It’s a golden age for studying inequality. Thomas Piketty, a French economist, set the benchmark in 2014 when his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, was published in English and became a bestseller. The book mapped the contours of the crisis with a sweeping theory of economic history. Inequality, which had been on the wane from the 1930s until the 1970s, had risen sharply back toward the high levels of the Industrial Revolution, he argued. Now Branko Milanovic, an economist at the Luxembourg Income Study Centre and the City University of New York, has written a comprehensive follow-up. It reinforces how little is really known about economic forces of long duration.
(2) In some ways Global Inequality is a less ambitious book than Capital. It is shorter, and written more like an academic working paper than a work of substantial scholarship for a wider readership.
(3) Like Mr. Piketty, he begins with piles of data assembled over years of research. He sets the trends of different individual countries in a global context. Over the past 30 years the incomes of workers in the middle of the global income distribution have soared, as has pay for the richest 1 %. At the same time, incomes of the working class in advanced economies have stagnated. This dynamic helped create a global middle class. It also caused global economic inequality to plateau, and perhaps even decline, for the first time since industrialisation began.
(4) To help interpret these facts, Mr. Milanovic provides the readers with a series of neat mental models. He muses, for instance, that at the dawn of industrialisation, inequality within countries (or class-based inequality) was responsible for the largest gaps between rich people and poor. After industrialisation, inequality across countries (or location-based inequality) became more important. But as gaps between countries become ever more narrow, class-based inequality will become more important as most of the differences in incomes between rich people and poor people will once again be due to gaps within countries. He seasons the discussion with interesting comments, such as how incomes and inequality fell over the course of the Roman Empire.
(5) Mr. Milanovic’s boldest contribution is about "Kuznets waves", which he offers as an alternative to two other prevailing theories of inequality. Simon Kuznets, a 20th-century economist, argued that inequality is low at low levels of development, rises during industrialisation and falls as countries reach economic maturity; high inequality is the temporary side-effect of the developmental process. Mr. Piketty offered an alternative explanation; that high levels of inequality are the natural state of modern economies. Only unusual events, like the two world wars and the Depression of the 1930s, disrupt that normal equilibrium.
(6) Mr. Milanovic suggests that both are mistaken. Across history, he reckons, inequality has tended to flow in cycles; Kuznets waves. In the pre-industrial period, these waves were governed by Malthusian dynamics: inequality would rise as countries enjoyed a spell of good fortune and high incomes, then fall as war or famine dragged average income back to subsistence level. With industrialisation, the forces creating Kuznets waves changed: to technology, openness and policy (TOP, as he shortens it). In the 19th century technological advance, globalisation and policy shifts all worked together in mutually reinforcing ways to produce dramatic economic change. Workers were reallocated from farms to factories, average incomes and inequality soared and the world became unprecedentedly interconnected. Then a combination of forces, some malign (war and political upheaval) and some benign (increased education) squeezed inequality to the lows of the 1970s.
(7) Since then, the rich world has been riding a new Kuznets wave, propelled by another era of economic change. Technological progress and trade work together to squeeze workers, he says; cheap technology made in foreign economies undermines the bargaining power of rich-world workers directly, and makes it easier for firms to replace people with machines. Workers’ declining economic power is compounded by lost political power as the very rich use their fortunes to influence candidates and elections.
(8) This diagnosis carries with it a predictive element. Mr. Milanovic expects rich-world inequality to keep rising, in America especially, before eventually declining. Importantly, he argues that the downswing in inequality that occurs on the backside of a Kuznets wave is an inevitable result of the preceding rise. Where Mr. Piketty sees the inequality-compressing historical events of the early 20th century as an accident, Mr. Milanovic believes them to be the direct result of soaring inequality. The search for foreign investment opportunities engendered imperialism and set the stage for war. There are parallels, if imperfect ones, to the modern economy; rich economies seem to be stagnating as the very rich struggle to find places to earn good returns on their piles of wealth.
(9) Mr. Milanovic’s analysis leads him to consider some dark possibilities as he looks ahead. America looks to be falling into the grips of an undemocratic plutocracy (富豪统治阶级), he says, which is dependent on an expanding security state. In Europe right-wing nativism (本土主义) is on the rise. The good news is that emerging economies will probably continue on their path toward rich-world incomes—though that, he allows, is not guaranteed, and could be threatened by political crisis in other markets.
(10) The book’s conclusion is a little unsatisfying. A theory in which rising inequality eventually triggers countervailing social dislocations feels intuitively right, but it also leaves many important questions unanswered. When is war, rather than revolution, the probable outcome of inequality? Are governments at the mercy of the cycle, or can they act pre-emptively to flatten out the waves and avoid crises of high inequality? Mr. Milanovic’s contributions are ultimately similar to those made by Mr. Piketty. The data he provides offer a clearer picture of great economic puzzles, and his bold theorising chips away at tired economic orthodoxies. But the grand theory does as much to reveal the scale of contemporary ignorance as to illuminate the mechanics of the global economy.
The purpose of the writer in writing this passage is to________.
选项
A、introduce a book
B、recommend an economist
C、elaborate an economic theory
D、make a comparison between two books
答案
A
解析
主旨题。本题涉及作者的写作目的,需纵观全文进行解答。文章开篇将米兰诺维奇的新书《全球不平等》和皮克迪的《21世纪资本论》进行了对比,接着提到《全球不平等》的结构以及理论——“库兹涅茨波浪”,然后详细解释了该理论,结尾部分提出该书的优缺点。因此,作者意在介绍米兰诺维奇的新书《全球不平等》,故[A]为正确答案。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/h6BK777K
0
专业英语八级
相关试题推荐
PASSAGETWOWhatisthepossibleattitudeofresearcherstowardstheanthropocentricapproach?
PASSAGEONEWhatdid"thisdream"inPara.16mean?
PASSAGEFOURWhatistheopportunitytoattracttheMySpacecrowdaccordingtoMcGuire?
PASSAGETWOWheredidtheHIVepidemicoriginatefromaccordingtoHahn?
A、Beingproficientinallwalksoflife.B、Beingfamiliarwitheverysubject.C、Takingamediastudiescourse.D、Beingexpertso
A、BecauseRogeristoorealisticonthehouseissue.B、BecauseRogerpreferslivinginpopularvillages.C、BecauseshethinksRo
A、Ithelpspeopleacquirevariousmeansofcommunication.B、Ithelpspeopleunderstandhowtogetalongwithfriends.C、Ithelps
A、Lackofinterestinreading.B、Thepurposeforimprovingreadingability.C、TheinfluenceofHinton’sbooks.D、HisEnglishtea
A、SituationswherepeoplespeakFrenchinnationalbusinesssituations.B、SituationswherepeoplespeakEnglishinlocalbusines
随机试题
测得某碱液蒸发器中蒸发室内二次蒸气的压力为p,碱液沸点为t。今若据p去查水的汽化潜热rp与据t去查水的汽化潜热rt,可断定r与rt的相对大小为()。
Whatdoesthepoem"TheChimneySweeper(fromSongsofExperience)"reveal?
最可能的诊断是该病人应首选的治疗是
以下属于主要水工建筑物的有()。
燃气锅炉房选用的防爆型事故排风机,其排风量满足换气次数不少于()次/h。
某房地产开发企业以出让方式取得一宗土地的开发经营权,土地出让年限为50年。根据土地使用权出让合同及规划设计条件,可建设8幢17层的住宅。项目采用一次性开发的方式,预计建设期为2年,第一年开始预售。在营销策划过程中,确定营销活动由房地产开发企业自行组织,采取
以下经济组织中,()可以公开发行股票。
一些同志______懂得建设社会主义精神文明的重要,______知道它在建设中国特色社会主义当中的地位,______在一定时期内能够做到两个文明一起抓,______当精神文明建设形势比较好,经济建设任务又很重要的时候,他们往往______自觉不自觉地将精神
2014年12月,为加快旧城改造,某市城南区政府决定征收黎明小区的房屋。就补偿问题,区政府未能与部分居民达成一致。区政府遂对小吴等反对拆迁的“钉子户”的住宅实施监控并断水断电。小吴在其微博中连续披露此事,批评区政府行为违法,引起社会关注。城南区政府以消除社
MIDI音乐、图像压缩编码、图像变换、流媒体、多媒体数据库、计算机支持的协同工作都是多媒体应用领域的相关技术。在上述技术中,为保证学生通过网络边下载边观看收听音视频信息,需要采用什么技术?活动图像专家组(MPEG)开发了许多电视图像数据和声音数据的编码
最新回复
(
0
)