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  3. It would be so convenient if fundamental laws of nature told us how best to run a society. Governance would be a simple optimiza

It would be so convenient if fundamental laws of nature told us how best to run a society. Governance would be a simple optimiza

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问题    It would be so convenient if fundamental laws of nature told us how best to run a society. Governance would be a simple optimization problem, like finding the shortest route through a network; we could do without left—right political confrontation, and just solve the equations. Unfortunately, governance is not a well-posed problem. There must inevitably be balance and compromise. This is what makes politics and economics not just controversial, but interesting.
   Inequality is one of the biggest items on the agendas of both of these disciplines. 【F1】Few people are likely to speak in favour of inequality as such, but in stereotypical terms the political right defends wealth as a reward for hard work, whereas the left strongly disapproves of a society in which "1 percent of the people take nearly a quarter of the nation’s income". 【F2】It seems an unavoidable truth that a free-market capitalist system will create wealth inequality; to a free-market fundamentalist who sees markets as optimizers of efficiency and resource utilization, that is not only necessary but moral. Under that philosophy, by intervening in the market in the hope of making the outcome "fairer", we only throw a spanner in the works.
   Yet even if one accepts some inequality as a necessary evil, there are options beyond non-intervention. 【F3】How, and how strenuously, governments and legislators should attempt to limit the extent of wealth inequality is currently a hotly disputed matter. The strongest argument is not that it makes things more "fair". Rather, it is that gross wealth inequality polarizes attitudes, stirs up unrest and degrades trust and cooperation. At face value, a study supports that view—but with an added twist.
   【F4】In the study, groups of volunteers played a simple economic game involving cooperation, in which they could lose or gain wealth through voluntary redistribution within social networks that started with three different levels of inequality. Crucially, in some games the wealth of participants was made visible to others, whereas in others it was kept hidden. As the result turns out, simply hiding wealth decreased the wealth disparity in otherwise identical games and networks.
   Still more importantly, visible wealth reduced the overall cooperation and interconnectedness of the social network, and in fact led to lower total wealth. As the authors say: "it is not inequality in itself that is so problematic, but rather visibility of that inequality". 【F5】This fits with the established idea that it is relative, not absolute, differences in wealth that compromise happiness and promote friction: we resent what our neighbours have and we don’t. What irritates us is not knowing that others have more than us, but seeing that difference showily displayed.
【F3】
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答案政府和立法者如何以及在多大程度上努力限制财富不平等程度，是目前热议的问题。
解析 ①本句是主从复合句，主句主干为主系表结构，主语由how引导的主语从句充当。②该主语从句中，How和how strenuously均为方式状语，修饰主语从句中的谓语should attempt to…；strenuously表示“勤奋地；费力地”；of wealth inequality作the extent的后置定语，说明是“财富不平等的程度”。
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