硕士生英语读译教程 2014-15学期

《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期

He graduated from Cornell University and reported for The Wall Street Journal for more than a decade, including two years writing its ―Heard on the Street‖ column, 1989 to 1991. He is a regular book reviewer for The New York Times and has written a number of major articles and cover stories for The New York Times Magazine.

Exercises

Learn about the text I. In the text, the numbers refer to some missing sentences. Read the context

through and decide where the sentences below should go.

a. The significance of this idea for human progress cannot be overstated.

b. On the other hand, she reclaims the lesser-known Beatrice Webb, a richly interesting and path-breaking Victorian who founded the London School of Economics and sold none other than Winston Churchill on the need for a welfare state.

c. One suspects that future economics textbooks will warrant some revisions.

d. And she is too forgiving of the modern academy‘s enslavement to the computer. e. But the juxtaposition of poverty amid rising wealth made poverty seem ―manmade, almost gratuitous.‖

f. Such arguments seem to conflate economic progress with economic thinking.

II. When an article combines information from many sources, it is sometimes difficult to determine the source of an individual piece of information. In this article it is especially difficult to determine if individual statements are those of the author or are based on the work of the experts cited. Following is a list of statements made in the article. Indicate if each one has been made by the author or one of his sources.

Example: Lowenstein Nasar is very idiosyncratic in her choice of subject.

_________________ 1. Schumpeter was very interested women and horses. _________________

2. The sex drive condemns the masses to live at the edge of starvation.

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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期

_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________

3. Charles Dickens was obsessed by the issue of eradicating poverty.

4. Marx views society and the Industrial Revolution as the agent of human society.

5. Factory owners‘ competition for profits led to a downward spiral in living standards.

6. Competition forced owners and managers to constantly make small changes to improve their products and techniques.

7. Economics has no agreed-upon catechism.

8. The Great Recession of 2008 and 2009 was no second Great Depression

9. Economic history is a story of intellectual progress despite some nasty bumps.

10. The idea that improvements wrought greater productivity and higher wages is the first great hope which wage analysis opens out to the laborer.

_________________ _________________ _________________ _________________

III. The following is two more book reviews of Grand Pursuit published by New York Times and Los Angle Times. Read carefully and compare them with the one we have just read. Review 1

How the Dismal Science Stopped Being Dismal

by Justin Fox

1. Listen to the economic debates of the past couple of years, and it‘s tempting to conclude that no progress has been made in the field in over half a century. There‘s John Maynard Keynes on the one side, arguing for deficit spending to offset the aftereffects of an once-in-a-lifetime financial crisis. On the other side there‘s Ludwig von Mises (his fellow Austrians Joseph Schumpeter and Friedrich von Hayek seem too moderate for the role), thundering that all government intervention in the economy is doomed to failure.

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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期

2. Keynes and Mises are of course both long dead. But it is the resilience of their ideas that makes studying the history of economics so rewarding for non-economists. As a rule, economists don‘t know much about history. So at times like these, anyone with a bit of familiarity with the giants of the past can weigh in on big economic issues with about as much authority and credibility as the credentialed experts. 3. This is one explanation for the continuing popularity of Robert L. Heilbroner‘s book The Worldly Philosophers: The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers. Another is that once a book makes its way onto undergraduate required reading lists, as Heilbroner‘s did, it doesn‘t easily fall off. Heilbroner wrote his irreverent group portrait of Keynes, Schumpeter, Karl Marx, Adam Smith and others in the early 1950s while studying for a doctorate at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan. (Mises was so marginalized at the time he didn‘t rate a mention.) He died in 2005, but his book lives on, with more than four million copies sold.

4. That kind of success makes a tempting target for imitators, and over the past decade, word spread among economics writers that Sylvia Nasar was at work on a new ―Worldly Philosophers‖—something to update and possibly supplant Heilbroner. Nasar is no knockoff artist; a professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former economics correspondent for The New York Times, she wrote what is perhaps the best economics-related book of the past quarter-century, ―A Beautiful Mind,‖ a near-perfect biography of the game theorist John Nash.

5. Now Nasar‘s new book Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius is here. As it turns out, it isn‘t really a Heilbroner update. For one, it doesn‘t make much chronological headway: the postwar giants Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman get a few pages, as does the philosopher and development economist Amartya Sen, who is still alive and writing books. But the major developments of post-1950 economics are for the most part ignored. So, for that matter, are the major developments of pre-1850 economics. Heilbroner was out to provide an easy-to-digest survey of economic thought through the ages. Nasar has set herself a task at once narrower and more ambitious. She has a story to tell, a story of tragedy, triumph and, as the subtitle

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《学术英语读译》2013~2014学年秋季学期

says, economic genius.

6. In the hundred years from 1850 to 1950, economists progressed from fatalistically explaining why most of humanity was condemned to poverty or worse (theirs was the ―dismal‖ science, Thomas Carlyle wrote) to doing something about it. One early hero of Nasar‘s tale is Alfred Marshall, the 19th-century English economist who not only gave us the supply-and-demand charts that still dominate Economics 101 classes but was the first to describe how rising industrial productivity could create higher living standards for all. Another is Beatrice Webb, an English railroad magnate‘s daughter who made the case for a welfare state that would even out some (but not all) of the inequalities arising from capitalist growth.

7. At the core of Nasar‘s narrative is an account of the economically troubled decades between the two world wars, as told through the experiences of Keynes, Irving Fisher, and Schumpeter and Hayek. The least well known of this lot is Fisher, a Yale professor best remembered today for his insistence in 1929 that stock prices were perched upon a ―permanently high plateau.‖ He was also the founder of modern monetary economics (his adherents include Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke) and for a time a successful entrepreneur (he invented and commercialized a precursor to the Rolodex).

8. Fisher believed that free markets were prerequisites for prosperity, but that their functioning could be improved with government action, mainly monetary policy by central banks. Keynes, himself a successful speculator and investor, held similar beliefs but came to espouse more aggressive government action than Fisher, which leaves Schumpeter and Hayek. In modern political shorthand, they were champions of free enterprise, their ideas wielded in opposition to those of the socialist Keynes. But Keynes was a capitalist, albeit a sometimes conflicted one. And Schumpeter and Hayek, while skeptical of most politicians, were far from antigovernment absolutists. 9. The two men‘s views were shaped in Vienna in the terrible years after the end of World War I and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Schumpeter did a stint as finance minister in a socialist government in 1919, an episode in his life that is usually treated as a joke, but Nasar renders it as a densely detailed tragedy. Schumpeter had a

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