
网上有关“有关环境科学和经济学的英文文章”话题很是火热,小编也是针对有关环境科学和经济学的英文文章寻找了一些与之相关的一些信息进行分析,如果能碰巧解决你现在面临的问题,希望能够帮助到您。
环境科学 (这篇很适合演讲,主要讲的是全球温室效应的社会认可性的问题,观点是有吸烟有害的认可度谈起,观点由浅入深,你可以重新组合的进行口试)
Do you remember all those years when scientists argued that smoking would kill us but the doubters insisted that we didn't know for sure? That the evidence was inconclusive, the science uncertain? That the antismoking lobby was out to destroy our way of life and the government should stay out of the way? Lots of Americans bought that nonsense, and over three decades, some 10 million smokers went to early graves.
There are upsetting parallels today, as scientists in one wave after another try to awaken us to the growing threat of global warming. The latest was a panel from the National Academy of Sciences, enlisted by the White House, to tell us that the Earth's atmosphere is definitely warming and that the problem is largely man-made. The clear message is that we should get moving to protect ourselves. The president of the National Academy, Bruce Alberts, added this key point in the preface to the panel's report “Science never has all the answers But science does provide us with the best available guide to the future, and it is critical that out nation and the world base important policies on the best judgments that science can provide concerning the future consequences of present actions.”
Just as on smoking voices now come from many quarters insisting that the science about global warming is incomplete, that it's Ok to keep pouring fumes into the air until we know for sure. this is a dangerous game: by the 100 percent of the evidence is in, it may be too late. With the risks obvious and growing, a prudent people would take out an insurance policy now.
Fortunately, the White House is starting to pay attention. But it's obvious that a majority of the president's advisers still don't take global warming seriously. Instead of a plan of action, they continue to press for more research-a classic case of “paralysis by analysis”.
To serve as responsible stewards of the planet, we must press forward on deeper atmospheric and oceanic research But research alone is inadequate. If the Administration won't take the legislative initiative, Congress should help to begin
fashioning conservation measures A bill by Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, which would offer financial incentives for private industry is a promising start Many see that the country is getting ready to build lots of new power plants to meet our energy needs. If we are ever going to protect the atmosphere, it is crucial that those new plants be environmentally sound.
记得那些年科学家争论说吸烟会致命、但是怀疑者坚持说我们不能肯定这一点吗、证据不确定且科学上也还没有定论吗?反对吸烟的游说活动是要破坏我们的生活方式,而政府对吸烟这件事应该置身事外吗?许多美国人相信了那套废话,结果就是在30年里,大约1000万名吸烟者过早地进入了坟墓。
随着科学家一次又一次努力提醒我们当今日益增长的全球变暖威胁,这种令人不安的情况又在发生着。最近的一次活动是由国家科学院在白宫的支持下召开的一次专题讨论会,告诉我们地球的空气肯定正变暖,而且这个问题基本上是人为造成的。其中的信息很明确,就是我们应该开始行动起来保护自己。科学院院长布鲁斯·艾伯茨在小组提交的报告前言中加进了关键的一点:"科学从来就不能提供所有的答案,但科学确实能为我们的未来提供最好的指导;而且最关键的是,关于现在采取的行动将来会产生什么影响,科学往往能够做出最好的判断,我们的国家和全世界一些最好的政策应该建立在这些最好的判断之上。"
和现在对待吸烟问题上的看法一样,来自很多地方的意见认为,科学关于全球变暖的证据不足,在我们有确切证据之前还是可以继续把废弃排放到空气中。这是一个危险的游戏:等到我们得到确凿的证据,可能就已经太迟了。随着危险日益变得显著却不断增长,一个谨慎的民族更愿意现在就采取保险措施。
幸运的是,白宫已经开始关注这个问题。但是显然大多数总统顾问仍然没有认真考虑全球变暖问题。他们不但没有制定切实可行的行动计划,而是继续督促进行更多的研究--典型的“分析性瘫痪”案例。
作为对地球负责任的管理者,我们应当进一步对大气层和海洋的状况做出更深入的研究,但是,仅仅停留于研究是不够的。如果现政府不采取法律行动,国会应该帮助着手制定保护措施。西弗吉尼亚州的民主党参议员Robert Byrd提出了一项法案,该法案提议将为私营企业提供经济刺激,这是一个良好的开端。许多人看到,我们国家正准备建设许多新的发电厂来满足我们的能源需求,如果我们还想保护大气层,这些新电站必须要具备有利于环境的条件。
经济学(用现代的观点解释19世纪末出现的劳资关系,对于解释现今的经济纠纷也同样振聋发聩)
In the last half of the nineteenth century “capital” and “labour” were enlarging and perfecting their rival organizations on modern lines. Many an old firm was replaced by a limited liability company with a bureaucracy of salaried managers. The change met the technical requirements of the new age by engaging a large professional element and prevented the decline in efficiency that so commonly spoiled the fortunes of family firms in the second and third generation after the energetic founders. It was moreover a step away from individual initiative, towards collectivism and municipal and state-owned business. The railway companies, though still private business managed for the benefit of shareholders, were very unlike old family business. At the same time the great municipalities went into business to supply lighting, trams and other services to the taxpayers .
The growth of the limited liability company and municipal business had important consequences. Such large, impersonal manipulation of capital and industry greatly increased the numbers and importance of shareholders as a class, an element in national life representing irresponsible wealth detached from the land and the duties of the landowners; and almost equally detached from the responsible management of business. All through the nineteenth century, America, Africa, India, Australia and parts of Europe were being developed by British capital, and British shareholders were thus enriched by the world’s movement towards industrialisation. Towns like Bournemouth and Eastboume sprang up to house large. “comfortable” classes who had retired on their incomes, and who had no relation to the rest of the community except that of drawing dividends and occasionally attending a shareholders’ meeting to dictate their orders to the management. On the other hand "shareholding" meant leisure and freedom which was used by many of the later Victorians for the highest purpose of a great civilisation.
The “shareholders” as such had no knowledge of the lives, thoughts or needs of the workmen employed by the company in which he held shares, and his influence on the relations of capital and labour was not good. The paid manager acting for the company was in more direct relation with the men and their demands, but even he had seldom that familiar personal knowledge of the workmen which the employer had often had under the more patriarchal system of the old family business now passing away. Indeed the mere size of operations and the numbers of workmen involved rendered such personal relations impossible. Fortunately, however, the increasing power and organization of the trade unions, at least in all skilled trades, enabled the workmen to meet on equal terms the managers of the companies who employed them. The cruel discipline of the strike and lockout taught the two parties to respect each other’ s strength and understand the value of fair negotiation.
19世纪后半叶,“资方”和“劳方”按现代手段不断扩大和完善各自的竞争对手。许多老字号都被责任有限公司所取代,由领薪经理构成其管理层。通过聘用大批专业人员来,这种变革满足了新时代的技术要求,并防止了效率的降低。在过去,这种效率的下滑使得许多第一代千辛万苦创立的旧式家族企业毁在第二、三代手中。另外,这也是公司摆脱个体创造,走向集体化、市营化和国营化迈出的一步。虽然铁路公司仍是为股东谋利的私有企业,但与过去的旧式家族企业大不相同了。与此同时,大城市也开始涉足商业活动,为纳税人提供照明、电车及其他服务。
有限责任公司及市政企业的发展具有重要的意义。这种大规模的对资本与企业的非个人操纵大大地增加了股东作为一个阶层的数量及其重要性。他们是国民生活的重要部分,代表着非责任性的财富,不仅与土地及土地所有者的责任相分离,而且几乎也同样与企业的责任经营脱离。整个19世纪,美洲、非洲、印度、澳洲及欧洲的部分地区都靠英国的资本发展起来的,而英国股东则因世界性的工业化而大发其财。像伯恩茅斯和伊斯特本这样的城市的兴起是为了给大批“衣食无忧”的阶层提供居住场所,这些人靠自己的丰厚收入而无需工作,除了领取红利,偶尔参加股东会议向管理人员发号施令外,他们与周围其他人没有联系。另一方面,“持股”意味着悠闲和自由,维多利亚后期许多人把这种有钱有闲的生活视为伟大文明的最高目标。
这种股东尽管持有股份,却丝毫不了解他们所持股公司里工人们的生活、思想和需求。他们对劳资关系也不会产生任何积极的影响。花钱请来的代表公司经营的经理与员工以及他们的需求有着更直接的关系,但即使是经理也很少像正在被淘汰的旧式家族企业家长制中的雇主那样对员工有着亲近的、个人化的了解。的确,仅从公司的经营规模和所用的工人数量来看,建立这种个人关系是不可能的了。然而,幸运的是,工会的势力和组织在日益壮大,至少在各个技术行业是这样,从而工人与雇用他们的公司经理们拥有了平等的地位。罢工和封厂的严酷惩罚使双方学会了彼此尊重的力量,理解公正协商的价值。
希望对你们有帮助!!
大卫?李嘉图
(David Ricardo, 1772-1823)
The brilliant British economist David Ricardo was one of the most important figures in the development of economic theory. He articulated and rigorously formulated the "Classical" system of political economy. The legacy of Ricardo dominated economic thinking throughout the 19th Century.
David Ricardo's family was descended from Iberian Jews who had fled to Holland during a wave of persecutions in the early 18th Century. His father, a stockbroker, emigrated to England shortly before Ricardo's birth in 1772. David Ricardo was his third son (out of seventeen!).
At the age of fourteen, after a brief schooling in Holland, Ricardo's father employed him full-time at the London Stock Exchange, where he quickly acquired a knack for the trade. At 21, Ricardo broke with his family and his orthodox Jewish faith when he decided to marry a Quaker. However, with the assistance of acquaintances and on the strength of his already considerable reputation in the City of London, Ricardo managed to set up his own business as a dealer in government securities. He became immensely rich in a very short while. In 1814, at the age of 41, finding himself "sufficiently rich to satisfy all my desires and the reasonable desires of all those about me" (Letter to Mill, 1815), Ricardo retired from city business, bought the estate of Gatcomb Park and set himself up as a country gentleman.
Egged on by his good friend James Mill, Ricardo got himself elected into the British parliament in 1819 as an independent representing a borough in Ireland, which he served up to his death in 1823. In parliament, he was primarily interested in the currency and commercial questions of the day, such as the repayment of public debt, capital taxation and the repeal of the Corn Laws. (cf. Thomas Moore's poems on Cash, Corn and Catholics)
Ricardo's interest in economics was sparked by a chance reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) when he was in his late twenties. Bright and talkative, Ricardo discussed his own economic ideas with his friends, notably James Mill. But it was only after the persistent urging of the eager Mill that Ricardo actually decided to write them down. He began in 1809, authoring newspaper articles on currency questions which drew him into the great Bullionist Controversy that was raging at the time In that affair, he was a partisan of the Bullionist position, which argued for the resumption of the convertibility of paper money into gold. He wrote a pair of tracts (1810, 1811) articulating their arguments and outlining what has since become known as the "classical approach" to the theory of money.
In these very same tracts, Ricardo also suggested the impossibility of a "general glut" -- an excess supply of all goods -- in an economy. This provoked the Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus to respond to Ricardo. The course of this debate continued in their extensive correspondence with each other, culminating in a series of notes Ricardo wrote on Malthus's 1820 Principles (these were later published posthumously as Notes on Malthus). Ricardo stood firm in his support of Say's Law and dismissed Malthus's underconsumption thesis as theoretically impossible. Yet, in spite of their disagreements on economic doctrines, they took to each other personally and fostered a legendary friendship. Ricardo even passed on investment tips to Malthus -- the most famous case being when Ricardo urged Malthus to invest in the bond market in anticipation of a British victory at Waterloo. Ever the conservative parson, Malthus declined. Ricardo, as usual, made a killing.
In 1815, Ricardo published his groundbreaking Essay on..Profits. There he introduced the differential theory of rent and the "law of diminishing returns" to land cultivation. Coincidentally, this principle was discovered simultaneously and independently by Malthus, Robert Torrens and Edward West. (more astoundingly, all of them published their tracts within three weeks in February, 1815!) In his 1815 Essay, Ricardo formulated his theory of distribution in a one-commodity ("corn") economy. With wages at their "natural" level, Ricardo argued that rate of profit and rents were determined residually in the agricultural sector. He then used the concept of arbitrage to claim that the agricultural profit and wage rates would be equal to the counterparts in industrial sectors. With this theory, he could show that a rise in wages did not lead to higher prices, but merely lowered profits.
Arguably, a proper theory of value was missing in the 1815 tract. In a one-commodity model, this is not an big issue. But, prodded on by Malthus's criticisms, Ricardo realized that in a multiple-commodity economy, for rents and profits to remain residuals, then prices must be pinned down somewhere. In his formidable treatise, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), Ricardo finally articulated and integrated a theory of value into his theory of distribution.
For Ricardo, the appropriate theory was the "labor-embodied" theory of value or LTV, i.e. the argument that the relative "natural" prices of commodities are determined by the relative hours of labor expended in their production. Indeed, he began his 1817 book by criticizing Adam Smith's alternatives -- the "labor-commanded" and "adding up" theories of value -- because, he argued, that made value a function of wages and thus income distribution. For Ricardo, this was untenable. In his vision, value was independent of distribution, and thus only the "labor-embodied" theory made sense.
However, Ricardo realized that when the question of capital comes in, a problem arose: specifically, as different industries apply different amounts of capital per laborer, then the rate of profit will also differ across industries. Ricardo understood that if he then assumed that the rates of profit across different industries were equalized (as free competition would imply), then, mathematically, relative prices would now vary with wages -- exactly what he had criticized Smith for! Ricardo realized that the labor theory of value would only work if the degree of capital-intensity was the same across all sectors, casting doubt on the generality of his cherished theory.
Ricardo proposed two ways out of this dilemma. The first was the empirical argument that firms apply capital in a roughly proportional manner to the amount of labor invested. In this case, the resulting prices when profits are equalized would not differ much from the values implied by the LTV. This is what Stigler (1958) has called Ricardo's "93% labor theory of value". The second solution was to find a commodity which has the average capital per worker, so that its price would reflect labor-embodied value and thus not vary with changes in distribution. He called this the "invariable standard of value" . If one can find what this "standard" commodity is, Ricardo argued, then the rest of the analysis is simple. One can, say, change technology, trace the change in value of the standard commodity, and then extrapolate the change in value for all other commodities by the degree to which their capital composition deviates from this standard. Despite his search, Ricardo never found this standard commodity. On his death, an incomplete paper entitled "The Invariable Standard of Value" was found on his desk. Eventually, Karl Marx (1867) proposed one way out of it, but the proper solution would have to wait until Piero Sraffa (1960).
A little tripped up on value, Ricardo (1817) pressed on nonetheless. With prices (more or less) pinned down by the LTV, he restated his old theory of distribution. Dividing the economy into classes of landowners (who spend their rental income on luxuries), workers (who spend their wage income on necessities) and capitalists (who save most of their profit income and reinvest it), Ricardo argued showed once again how the size of profits is determined residually by the extent of cultivation on land and the historically-given real wage. He then added on a theory of growth. Specifically, with profits determined in the manner given above, then the amount of capitalist saving, accumulation and labor demand growth could also be deduced. This, in turn, would increase population and thus bring more land, of less and less quality, into cultivation. As the economy continued to grow, then, by his theory of distribution, profits would be eventually squeezed out by rents and wages. In the limit, Ricardo argued, a "stationary state" would be reached where capitalists will be making near-zero profits and no further accumulation would occur.
Ricardo suggested two things which might hold this law of diminishing returns at bay and keep accumulation going at least for a while: technical progress and foreign trade. On technical progress, Ricardo was ambivalent. One the one hand, he recognized that technical improvements would help push the marginal product of land cultivation upwards and thus allow for more growth. But, in his famous Chapter 31 "On Machinery" (added in 1821 to the third edition of his Principles), he noted that technical progress requires the introduction of labor-saving machinery. This is costly to purchase and install, and so will reduce the wages fund. In this case, either wages must fall or workers must be fired. Some of these unemployed workers may be mopped up by the greater amount of accumulation that the extra profits will permit, but it might not be enough. A pool of unemployed might remain, placing downward pressure and wages and leading to the general misery of the working classes. Technical progress, for Ricardo, was not a many-splendored thing.
On foreign trade, Ricardo set forth his famous theory of comparative advantage. Using his famous example of two nations (Portugal and England) and two commodities (wine and cloth), Ricardo argued that trade would be beneficial even if Portugal held an absolute cost advantage over England in both commodities. Ricardo's argument was that there are gains from trade if each nation specializes completely in the production of the good in which it has a "comparative" cost advantage in producing, and then trades with the other nation for the other good. Notice that the differences in initial position mean that the labor theory of value is not assumed to hold across countries -- as it should be, Ricardo argued, because factors, particularly labor, are not mobile across borders. As far as growth is concerned, foreign trade may promote further accumulation and growth if wage goods (not luxuries) are imported at a lower price than they cost domestically -- thereby leading to a lowering of the real wage and a rise in profits. But the main effect, Ricardo noted, is that overall income levels would rise in both nations regardless.
With his 1817 treatise, Ricardo took economics to an unprecedented degree of theoretical sophistication. He formalized the Classical system more clearly and consistently than anyone before had done. For his efforts, he acquired a substantial following in Great Britain and elsewhere -- what became known as the "Classical" or "Ricardian" School. His system, however, was improved very little by his disciples. Perhaps only John Stuart Mill (1848) and Karl Marx (1867-94) added insights of any great weight.
Ricardo's theory gradually fell out of favor, and died a slow death soon after the Marginalist Revolution of 1871-74. But research continued in some corners of the world, e.g. Vladimir Dmitriev (1898). only much later did Piero Sraffa (1960) finally solve the "invariable measure of value" problem and re-ignited interest in Ricardo's theory. The "Neo-Ricardian" research program continues to advance today.
试着翻译了一下,希望对楼主有帮助
比较难的在于asset和posses的名词解释;就文意来说,asset倾向于“资源禀赋”这一含义,而posses照字面译为进程未尝不可,但对经济学没有概念的读者而言,未必能理解其中的精准含义,只有看了文章才明白。也许译成“生产进程”,并意译为“加工经济”更能体现其涵义。楼主请自行判断,也欢迎高人指点
资源禀赋与加工经济
在竞争力管理中,世界竞争力组织同样分析了国家怎样将资源禀赋与加工经济相结合。一些国家如巴西、印度和俄罗斯,他们富有资源——如土地,人口,自然资源等——却并不一定有竞争力。另一方面,也有如新加坡、日本、瑞士这样的国家,其传统资源很贫乏,但却非常有竞争力。他们掌握了被经济学家称之为“转型加工经济”的经济形态。
日本的表现很好的说明了这种情况。从1950年以来,相较于美国164次、英国44次获得诺贝尔奖,日本仅在精密科学和经济学领域共四次得到该奖项。事实上,日本并没有什么能从根本上改变我们经济生活的科技突破。晶体管、机器人、录像机、电脑、传真机、磁盘、彩色电视机——所有这些都是美国和欧洲公司所发明的。日本的非凡成功在于其产品营销上:他们在将一个创意转化成更便宜、更快捷和更有效律的产品或服务方面的能力上,远超其竞争对手。换句话说,日本的竞争力是以加工经济为基础的。
1996年世界竞争力年度报告将基于一国资源禀赋的竞争力与通过加工经济实现的竞争力,做了详细区分。这个关键性区分是重要的,因为未来似乎更倾斜于那些掌握了“加工经济”的国家(事实上,一些经济学家使用“自然资源魔咒”来描述那些因富有资源而洋洋得意的国家的命运)。通常,公司也采用相同的策略,他们关注在如质量、速度、订单执行、规模用户和顾客满意度等进程管理中所产生的附加价值。
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