Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a Br

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问题    Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. 【F1】We have run our economies, he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship—a closed system, alone in space, carrying finite supplies. We need, said Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. 【F2】"Ecological economists", as they call themselves, do not want to revolutionise at the margins of economics, but to revolutionise its aims and assumptions. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
   To its practitioners, their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. 【F3】But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.
   They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource depletion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. 【F4】In its place they advocate more holistic approaches (整体分析法 ), such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)(真是发展指数), a composite index that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer.
   Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy 18th century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Human ingenuity finds solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity and climate change. 【F5】That suggests that ecological economists are at least asking some important questions, even if their answers turn out to be wrong. It may be no bad thing if economics became a little more Neil Armstrong, and a little less Jesse James.
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答案他们提倡采用更多的整体分析方法取而代之,例如采用真实发展指数(GPI),这是一项包含了诸如污染成本、森林采伐以及交通事故等因素的综合经济发展指数。

解析 ①本句为复合句,包含一个定语从句。主句为主谓宾结构,such as the Genuine Progress Indicator(GPI)为插入语,对宾语more holistic approaches作举例说明。其后的a composite index为the Genuine Progress Indicator(GPI)的同位语。②a composite index后接一个that引导的定语从句对其进行修饰,说明GPI是包含什么因素的指数。该定语从句为主谓宾结构,that既是引导词又是主语。index表示“指标,指数”,常在经济类文章中出现。
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