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

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.
【F5】
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答案这意味着生态经济学家们至少提出了一些重要的问题，即使他们的回答被证实是错误的。
解析 ①本句为复合句，包含一个宾语从句，宾语从句中又包含一个让步状语从句。②主句为主谓宾结构，宾语由从句充当。句首的that为代词，指代上文In 2009 a paper…argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries…的内容，作主语。第二个that为宾语从句的引导词；宾语从句亦为主谓宾结构。③宾语从句中，even if引导让步状语从句，该状语从句为主系表结构，their指ecological economists’。
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