New Book of Economics —Animal Spirits No two economic crises are identical. But the same questio

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问题                         New Book of Economics
                            —Animal Spirits
    No two economic crises are identical. But the same questions recur. How did we get into mess? How can we get out of it? How do we avoid another? Some answers repeat themselves too. You can be pretty sure that sooner or later someone, quite possibly an anguished economist, will declare that economics itself has gone astray. The wisdom of some past master, whether celebrated or neglected, has been forgotten, and the economy is paying the price.
    A new book, "Animal Spirits" follows this rule to the letter. The authors seek to answer the first of those three old questions and thus to provide some pointers about the other two. They do indeed believe that economics has lost its way. And their chosen economist is Keynes.
    So far, so familiar. But this book is rather more than the usual lament about the failings of economics. Its authors are two of the discipline’s leading lights. Mr. Akerlof won a Nobel prize in 2001, in part for a classic paper explaining how markets may fail. Mr. Shiller sounded a warning about the " Irrational Exuberance" of the tech-boom stockmarket in a book of that name—and did the same for the housing market in a second edition.
    The lesson that Messrs Akerlof and Shiller draw from Keynes is not just the standard one, of the usefulness of deficit finance in recessions. They borrow their title from "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money".
    Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as a result of animal spirits—of a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of the weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.
    Too much economics, say Mr. Akerlof and Mr. Shiller, has been built on the premise that humans are rational calculators. That is not a new criticism, even from economists. Over the past couple of decades Homo economicus has evolved into a being more like H. sapiens, as economics has drawn on psychology, biology and even neuroscience. "Behavioural" economics has shaped public policy—for instance, in encouraging people to save or in shaping the choice of investments in their pension pots. Behavioural economists have earned Nobel prizes. Mr. Akerlof and Mr. Shiller, however, complain that this evolution has been confined mainly to microeconomics. It is time for macroeconomics to catch up.
The expression "to the letter" in Para. 2 means______.

选项 A、completely
B、not at all
C、a little
D、to some extents

答案A

解析 语义分析题。根据题于定位至第二段。解析本题的关键是理解前两段以及第三段的开头句。根据第一段可知,虽然每次的经济危机和其他的不完全相同,但是其一,相同的问题总是重复出现;其二,相同的答案总被重复给出;其三,经济学家相同的引经据典而得出相同的经济误人歧途的结论总是重复出现。与第一段的三点“相同”相呼应,《动物精神》这一著述也提出了相同的三个问题、试图提供相同的答案、引用英国经济学家凯恩斯的观点并得出经济学发展迷失方向的相同的结论。而且第三段第一句提出“到目前为止,该书所述为我们所熟悉。”由此可见,该书是完全按照之前的理论进行的,所以,正确答案是[A]。
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