每日至少认真读一篇the economist.
来自: Shining宁(旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福)
2010-11-17 03:56:02
Taiwan and Japan X not V Taiwan’s standard of living has just surpassed Japan’s Nov 11th 2010 IN THE 1930s the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu proposed a theory of how the economies of Asia might take wing. It became known as the “flying geese” model of development. As Akamatsu pointed out, “Wild geese fly in orderly ranks forming an inverse V, just as aeroplanes fly in formation.” Japan, the first Asian country to industrialise, would lead the way. Its neighbours would follow, breaking into new industries as the goose in front graduated out of them. Yet this year Japan was overtaken by a goose in its slipstream—not China, which remains far poorer than Japan, even if its economy is now bigger, but rather the island economy of Taiwan. In 2010, according to the IMF, Japan’s income per head will be $33,800; Taiwan’s will be over $34,700. These incomes are converted not at market exchange rates, but at purchasing-power parities (PPPs), taking account of the higher cost of living in Japan. By this measure, Taiwan is not the first of the trailing geese to overtake the leader. Singapore and Hong Kong caught Japan in the early 1990s. South Korea is also closing the gap. Akamatsu’s inverse V is beginning to turn into an X. Calculated at market rates, Japan’s per head income ($42,300) remains far higher than Taiwan’s ($18,300). Tokyo’s chic districts are richer than their Taipei counterparts. And if Akamatsu’s theory applies to a country’s industrial mix, rather than its standard of living, Japan is well out in front. It is further along in the transition to a service economy, with industry accounting for less than a quarter of its GDP, compared with almost a third for Taiwan. Yet despite 15 years of deflation, punishingly high prices still take a toll in Japan on people’s standard of living. PPPs are based on a global survey of prices led by the World Bank in 2005. It found that Taiwan’s housing was a third cheaper than Japan’s, even though Taiwan has almost double the population density. Taiwan’s food also costs only half as much as Japan’s. The survey’s price-checkers did their best to compare like with like, matching the price of staples and delicacies in each country. Inevitably the comparisons can be contested. Taiwanese food may seem cheap next to Japan’s sashimi and fugu. But then again, how much would you pay for stinky tofu? Asia Take wing: 展翅翱翔 per head: 人均 文章最后一句话好幽默，歧视臭豆腐吗？
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-18 13:58:48
Antimatter Gotcha! Antihydrogen atoms are captured for the first time Nov 17th 2010 THE history of physics is littered with the detritus of once-sacred assumptions. As better technology enables more exacting experiments, phenomena that were once scoffed at as impossible become the new norm. For this reason, physicists have long been searching for more sensitive means of probing the realm of antimatter, which theory holds should mirror the familiar world of matter. If precise comparisons of the two were to turn up differences, that would signal a fundamental flaw in understanding of the universe. Now, a team of scientists working at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory, has announced a breakthrough in the quest for such tests. In the current issue of Nature, members of the ALPHA experiment report that they have been able to trap a very small amount of antihydrogen—the simplest type of anti-atom—for the first time. Since the hydrogen atom is one of the best-measured systems in all of science, this opens the door to a series of experiments testing just how similar matter and antimatter really are. The symmetry between particles and antiparticles is woven deep into the foundations of physics. For each particle there should be a corresponding antiparticle with exactly the same mass and lifetime but with an opposite electrical charge. Bring the two together and they annihilate each other in a flash of energy. When anti-electrons (or positrons, as they are usually called) orbit antiprotons and antineutrons, the resulting anti-atoms should have the same energy levels as the common or garden variety. Furthermore, it is thought that gravity should pull on matter and antimatter in just the same way. In reality, no one has ever been able to drop an anti-apple and watch it fall down (or up), and the antimatter produced in particle colliders is so energetic that it is hard to examine with the tools of precision physics. For decades, physicists at CERN and elsewhere have been trying to overcome these limitations with antihydrogen, which consists of a single positron orbiting a single antiproton. By shining laser light onto hydrogen or antihydrogen and observing which wavelengths are absorbed, the energy levels of the two can be compared in detail. And since hydrogen is electrically neutral, it should be possible to observe gravity’s tiny tug on it without the confounding effects of electrostatic attraction to other particles. Antihydrogen atoms were produced in the past by several experiments at CERN. But they were so energetic that they immediately bumped into the walls of the experimental apparatus and were annihilated. Since then several teams have been trying to make colder antihydrogen and to hold on to it using clever configurations of electrical and magnetic fields. This is what ALPHA has just succeeded in doing. Coaxing hot and bothered antiprotons and positrons to couple is quite a task. The magnetic traps employed to hold the antihydrogen are only strong enough to confine it if it is colder than around half a degree above absolute zero. The antiprotons themselves, which are produced by smashing regular protons into a piece of iridium, are around 100 billion times more energetic than this. Several stages of cooling are needed to slow them down before they can be trapped, forming a matchstick-sized cloud of around 30,000 particles. The positrons, produced by the decay of radioactive sodium, are cooled into a similarly sized cloud of around 1m particles and held in a neighbouring trap. The antiprotons are then pushed into the same trap as the positrons and left to mingle for a second or so. In that time some of the particles get together and form antihydrogen. Next, an electrical field is used to kick out any remaining positrons and antiprotons. The electrically neutral antihydrogen atoms are left behind. To test whether any antihydrogen was actually formed and captured in their trap, the ALPHA team turned off its trapping magnet. The antihydrogen was then free to wander towards the walls, and thus annihilation. The detectors duly observed 38 bursts of energy which the team concluded came from antihydrogen atoms hitting the wall of the trap. Although the number of trapped atoms recorded was small, the team is optimistic. It has developed better techniques for cooling both positrons and antiprotons, which should allow it to trap more anti-atoms. Soon it will be able to see just how contrarian antimatter really is. 科技类文章比经济类更难懂。。。 回lss,个人兴趣啊／。本人无考试压力，各种考都过了。。。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-19 07:55:41
All over bar the bluffing Nov 17th 2010, 19:39 by The Economist | BRUSSELS THE pretence is almost over. International financial inspectors will arrive in Dublin tomorrow to start examining the ruins of Ireland’s banks to decide how much can be rebuilt with foreign help and how much rubble needs to be cleared away. The Irish government still insists that a European rescue is “not inevitable” and, in public at least, members of the euro zone are careful to say that they have not (yet) been asked for financial help. But everyone assumes that a bail-out of between €50 billion ($68 billion) to €100 billion is just days away, weeks at most. Even Britain seems ready to help Ireland, whether on its own or through its contributions to the European Union’s budget. Brian Lenihan (pictured), Ireland’s finance minister, is ever more explicit about the need for Ireland to take the assistance aid. He told RTE: Despite a large range of measures adopted by the government, Ireland is a small country, and if the banking problems in the country are too big for this small country to manage, Europe is making it clear that they will help and help in every possible way to secure the system because we are part of the euro system...and that's the framework within which we work. Irish officials are signalling that the problem is, indeed, too big. So why not take the money now and end the damaging speculation on the markets? Part of the reason is political: can the Irish government, clinging to a thin majority and facing a by-election later this month, dress up the EU rescue as an operation to salvage the banks rather than the state? It would be more palatable to pretend that the government's finances are somehow separate from those of the banks. The EU is willing to take part in this dance to some extent. Finance minsters of the euro zone announced [PDF] last night that they would send officials from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF for a “short and focused consultation” with the Irish government “to determine the best way to provide any necessary support to address market risks, especially as regard the banking sector”. The Commission says Ireland is a different case from Greece, or indeed from Portugal. It has been willing, on its own, to swallow heavy doses of austerity. And there is no doubt about the competitiveness of the Irish economy. That said, there is a limit to the EU’s ability to sugar the medicine. It is hard enough to convince European taxpayers to bail out other governments; explaining why they should save other countries’ banks may prove even more unpopular. Christine Lagarde, the French finance minister, made clear that this would not be “a plan to save the banks”. Apart from national pride, another reason for Irish reluctance to grasp the lifebuoy is the hope that, merely by being seen to make it ready, the EU might be able to calm down the panic. Publication of a four-year Irish budget may also reduce the buffeting. The financial inspectors may, perhaps, agree with Irish officials who insist that the damage to the banks, particularly their mortgage books, may not be as terrible as some fear. While this may not avert the need for a bail-out, it may delay it and reduce its scope. As a result, the conditions that might be attached to it might be more limited. The Irish will fear, above all, a demand to increase their corporation tax rate, which, at 12.5%, is among the lowest in Europe. Officials from other countries complain of Ireland’s low taxes as a form of unfair competition, and speak with glee of Ireland’s “failed business model”. The Austrian finance minister, Josef Pröll, hinted at making aid for Ireland conditional on raising corporation tax. For Ireland, though, low tax is a totemic issue, largely accepted from left to right. Irish officials argue that raising corporation taxes would be pointless at best, and probably counter-productive, because it would deter investment, drive big exporters out of the country and so lower tax revenues. The authors of this report reckon that even a small shift could have a “dramatic effect” on Ireland. Better, say officials, to widen the base of income tax. All this makes for an odd kind of crisis. European leaders seem to care more about saving Ireland’s bankers than the Irish government does; and they seem much more upset than Irish voters about big business getting off with low taxes. 喜欢the economist小词的使用，像本篇sugar the medicine的比喻国人决定写不出。 sugar当动词用也很特别，还有像mirror和surface做动词用。 —————————————————————————————————— 出去旅行，休版三日。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 06:39:41
America in numbers One nation, divisible As America undergoes dramatic, uneven changes, it may become harder to govern Nov 18th 2010 | CHICAGO AMERICA is getting used to political upheaval. Barack Obama’s election was, to many voters, a moment of transformation. His first two years, many others lamented, brought a dangerous expansion of government; now the right has arisen again. The new Congress will be more polarised than at any time since Reconstruction, reckon some political scientists. But these swings, however large and consequential, are arguably only symptoms. If people feel as if the country is changing quickly, that’s because it is. The first set of numbers from the 2010 decennial census will be published in December. They will, sadly, be less interesting than in previous decades, as the census form has been radically shortened this time. But plenty of other data get collected by the Census Bureau every year, and our trawl of what has been gathered over the past decade already reveals some seismic shifts. Baby boomers are retiring in large numbers; the young are more racially diverse than ever. Hispanic immigrants are transforming communities, bringing both promise and tension. The first decade of the 21st century was not kind to America’s middle class—real median household income was 7% lower in 2009 than it was in 2000. The gap between rich and poor widened (see table). And the young are doing relatively badly in education. All these trends are enough to shake a nation. Just as important, however, is that they are playing out very differently from one part of the country to another. Of course, some variation is inevitable; but as the fault lines that criss-cross the country widen, finding political consensus becomes ever more difficult. In one important respect America has a sunny demographic outlook. Its elderly may be growing in number but, to the envy of other developed countries, America also has a burgeoning young population. However the distribution of old and young makes this picture more complex. For decades Americans have followed the sun westward. This shift continued from 2000 to 2007, when the gathering recession all but stopped migration. However the populations of the north-east and Midwest have not just shrunk (which means that the census will require them to give up congressional seats) but become greyer. Young families leave, often to look for economic opportunity or an affordable home (Michael Bloomberg, New York’s mayor, calls his town a “luxury city”). Between 2000 and 2009 Maine surpassed Florida as having the highest concentration of those 50 and older, according to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Of the 20 oldest states in 2009, 14 were in the north-east and Midwest. The sunbelt, in contrast, was home to eight of the ten states with the highest concentration of youth. Austin’s number of married couples with children rose by 24%; Youngstown’s shrank by the same. America’s young and old are differentiated not just by region but by race. Hispanic immigrants in particular are helping to swell the ranks of the young. The decade saw America’s foreign-born population grow by 24%, or about 7.4m. In 2009 Hispanics comprised 21% of those younger than 25; those 65 and older were 80% white and only 7% Hispanic. But this divide—what William Frey of the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, calls “the cultural generation gap”—is very much wider in some states and cities. In Arizona, for example, 83% of the elderly are white and 42% of those under 25 are Hispanic. This can lead to divergent priorities, such as the reluctance of the old to pay for education, or even a political eruption. This year Arizona’s anti-immigration ordinance sparked protests far beyond the state’s borders and a lawsuit from the federal government. Such conflict may well be replicated as other places welcome (or fail to) new residents. Immigrants are increasingly dispersed, settling in areas unused to outsiders. South Carolina’s Hispanic population expanded by 116% between 2000 and 2009. South Dakota, Tennessee and Alabama also saw big jumps. In the long term, these immigrants or their children may become local economic stars. In the short term, tension is mounting. Mr Frey found that many of the new magnet states attract immigrants unlikely to speak English or to have completed school. Voters in such communities may view immigration rather differently than do those in San Francisco or Pittsburgh, hubs for skilled, foreign-born workers. There is also a range of subtler shifts. In his 2008 book “The Big Sort”, Bill Bishop argues that communities are differentiated not just by demography but by the way people live. In the 1960s and 1970s communities on the whole grew ever more alike. But since the 1980s they have diverged on a range of indicators, from the age at which women have children to the age at which residents die. The most powerful “sort”, however, may be the slow concentration of educated workers. America as a whole is becoming better educated. In 2000 24% of those 25 and older had a bachelors degree or more. By 2009 28% did. But this rise is not uniform across ethnic groups—blacks and Hispanics are lagging—or throughout the country. In the 1970s America’s college graduates were distributed relatively equally among cities. Since then, however, the skill-level of metropolitan areas has diverged. Brookings ranks the 100 biggest metropolitan areas by rate of educational attainment. The gap between the most and least educated cities was 26 in points in 1990. By 2009 it had widened to 34 points. These trends, if they continue, will surely affect regional prosperity. From 1999 to 2009 median household income rose in only five states, and in four of these the gains were driven by soaring commodity prices. The biggest drops in income were all in states that depend on low-skill industries: Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. During the recession, education was workers’ best shield. Of the 20 best-educated metropolitan areas, only four saw their employment rate drop further than the national average, according to Brookings’s Alan Berube. The worst-hit areas were those dependent on construction and manufacturing. It was there, too, that women began to support their families in higher numbers—3.4% of families had an unemployed husband and a working wife in 2009; Florida, Nevada, Michigan and Ohio had shares well above the average. E pluribus unum? All these conflicting interests are helping to polarise further America’s politics. In the 1976 election, explains Mr Bishop, 26% of voters lived in counties where one party won by 20 points or more. In 2008 a whopping 48% of voters did so. Strikingly, less than 400 of America’s 3,141 counties switched parties at the 2008 election. Politicians, like marketers, have become adept at identifying likely customers. “Bringing out the base” is the key to winning. As a result of this polarisation, satisfying a range of constituents is becoming harder. The federal stimulus revealed this well. The bail-out gratified some Wall Street bankers. Aid to state governments mostly helped workers in capital cities. But voters in places with battered housing markets got little benefit from either. James Gimpel, a political scientist at the University of Maryland, notes that areas with high rates of foreclosure, such as suburban Atlanta, were hotbeds of tea-party activism. Talking about their generation The best hope for a return to moderation may lie in America’s suburbs. Once blandly homogenous, suburbs are now home to a majority of America’s Asian, black and Hispanic populations. They are increasingly filled not just with the rich and middle class but the poor. It is little wonder that the closest political battles are often waged in suburbia. For now, however, more polarisation seems likely. This year many moderate Democrats either retired or were sacked. “There is much too much partisanship and not enough progress,” Evan Bayh lamented as he announced his retirement from the Senate. So from January Congress will include a higher proportion of lefty Democrats and a new crop of conservative Republicans. Keith Poole, a political scientist from the University of California, San Diego, thinks the 112th Congress will be the most divided since the end of the civil war. With the federal government deadlocked, bold measures may be confined to state and local governments. Already, Mr Bishop points out, states find it easier to pass controversial initiatives than the federal legislature does, whether that be allowing gay unions in the north-east or banning embryonic stem-cell research in South Dakota. In some respects, decentralised policies make sense—local and state politicians are better suited to tackle divergent needs. But America has big national problems. Increasing divergence will not make agreeing on how to deal with them any easier.
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 06:55:14
China's rising prices Hunting down the hoarders To rein in prices, the Chinese government turns to unconventional measures Nov 18th 2010 | HONG KONG LENIN thought inflation a subversive force, as damaging to capitalism as any Bolshevik revolutionary. Certainly, his heirs in the Chinese Communist Party are taking no chances. On November 17th the State Council, China’s cabinet, promised “forceful measures” to stabilise prices. It said it would drum up supply and crack down on hoarders and speculators. It even threatened to “interfere” with the prices of daily necessities, which might include grains, cooking oils, sugar and cotton. Inflation is not yet a threat to the republic. But consumer prices rose by 4.4% in the year to October, the fastest rise for over two years. Food prices, which account for more than a third of the consumer-price index, are largely to blame: vegetables are almost a third more expensive than they were a year ago. Even the most exotic commodities have been affected (see article). As China’s prices rise, consumer confidence and the stockmarket are falling. Shanghai shares have fallen by a tenth since the inflation figures came out. Rising food prices may explain China’s inflation, but what is behind their rise? Floods, including a deluge in Hainan province last month, hurt some crops. Harvests have also disappointed elsewhere in the world: the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said this week that the cost of the world’s food imports may exceed $1 trillion this year, only $5 billion short of the record bill in 2008. Related items China's price inflation, continued: Caterpillar fungus, the new gold Nov 18th 2010 The macroeconomic weather has also played a role. China’s banks appear determined to breach their quota of 7.5 trillion yuan ($1.1 trillion) of new loans this year. The People’s Bank of China raised their reserve requirements this month for the fourth time this year and lifted interest rates in October for the first time since 2007. But neither step will do much to constrain banks swimming in deposits and lending to an economy growing, in nominal terms, by 15% a year. And so the government is reaching for less conventional weapons. To shield the vulnerable, it urged local governments to raise unemployment benefits, pensions and the minimum wage in line with inflation. It also promises to increase shipments of cotton from the western region of Xinjiang, and to cut the price of electricity, gas and rail transport for fertiliser makers. To keep the population sweet, on November 22nd it will sell 200,000 tonnes of sugar. If extra supplies do not curb prices, the government may set caps. It may repeat the kinds of measures it imposed in 2008, when food inflation topped 23% after an outbreak of disease killed many of China’s pigs. Then, the government required sellers of pork, rice, noodles, cooking oil and other staples to ask permission before raising their prices. Such controls serve as an “extreme signal” of the government’s determination to fight inflation, note Mark Williams and Qinwei Wang of Capital Economics. That may help quash self-fulfilling expectations of higher prices. But beyond that, price controls have “little to commend them.” If sellers cannot fetch a good price, they will limit the supply of what they offer, or adulterate the quality. Whenever the government stops petrol prices from rising in line with oil prices, queues at the pump merely lengthen. Inflation undermines capitalism, according to Keynes, in part because it discredits entrepreneurs. They become “profiteers” in the eyes of those hurt by rising prices. China’s leaders promise to hunt down and punish hoarders and speculators. According to Andy Rothman of CLSA, a broker, some traders are taking possession of agricultural commodities in the hopes that prices will rise. But how to stop households buying two bottles of cooking oil rather than one? Asia in line with 和sth一致 top v 突破
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-22 10:45:32
Microfinance Leave well alone Capping microfinance interest rates will hurt the poor. There are better ways to regulate the industry Nov 18th 2010 MICROFINANCE is an example of something that is sadly all too rare: an anti-poverty tool that usually at least breaks even. If you make small, uncollateralised business loans to groups of poor women, they almost always repay them on time. It has grown rapidly in many countries, not least Bangladesh and India. With nearly 30m clients each, these are now the world’s biggest markets for microfinance. Yet the industry has come under attack for being too commercial. In Bangladesh the government has capped the annual interest rate that microfinance institutions (MFIs) can charge at 27%. In India a new breed of for-profit microlenders has shaken up an otherwise NGO-dominated sector—and annoyed the authorities. In Andhra Pradesh (AP), the Indian state with the most microfinance borrowers and the base for the biggest for-profit MFIs, local politicians have bullied the business to a virtual halt. An interest-rate cap is mooted. These steps are ostensibly motivated by a desire to defend the poor from getting stuck in a debt. But they are wrong-headed. Despite charging what may seem high interest rates, MFIs typically have wafer-thin margins because of the high costs of making and collecting payments on millions of tiny loans. Pressing them to reduce rates further would jeopardise their ability to attract private capital, inhibiting their growth. Slower growth would in turn hamper their ability to harness economies of scale in order to lower transaction costs and cut rates of their own accord, as many—including the biggest for-profit MFIs—have done in the past. Forcing down rates would also deter new entrants and reduce competition. The rush to impose restrictions on MFIs also betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about how the poor use credit. Many politicians cite the existence of clients with loans from several MFIs at once to argue that the poor are over-indebted. This ignores the fact that most microcredit loans are tiny, so that several are needed to meet the needs of even a small business. Indeed, the poor often use microloans to pay off far more expensive loans from village moneylenders. This suggests that restricting people’s access to microcredit by capping rates could have the perverse effect of driving more poor people into the arms of village loan-sharks, who still provide the bulk of rural credit in poor countries. (In rural AP, 82% of households have such informal loans, whereas only 11% have loans from MFIs.) That would be good news for these moneylenders, but is surely not the outcome that policymakers want. Peruse prudent Sensible regulation need not be at odds with a thriving microfinance industry. Peru, for example, is ranked by the Economist Intelligence Unit (our sister company) as having the best business environment for microfinance, in part because the regulator has successfully set and enforced rules on capital buffers, leading to a more stable environment for the industry. India, in contrast, is yet to decide whether rules governing microfinance are to be set at the national level or by individual states. An association of Indian MFIs is trying to set up a credit bureau which would allow them to track clients’ overall indebtedness and credit histories, thus guarding them against lending a person more than she is able to handle. This would be helped enormously if the government speeded up its efforts to give all Indians a universal identification number. The Indian government should also allow MFIs to take deposits, which they are currently prevented from doing: this would make them less dependent on capital markets for funding. All rather complicated things, unlikely to stir up populism. And all a lot more useful for the poor than an interest-rate cap. wrong-headed 执迷不悟的
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-26 21:02:04
Climate change How to live with climate change It won’t be stopped, but its effects can be made less bad Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION * * COMPARED with the extraordinary fanfare before the global-warming summit in Copenhagen a year ago, the meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that starts in Cancún next week has gone unheralded. That is partly because of a widespread belief that the publicity build-up to last year’s summit contributed to its failure, but also because expectations have changed dramatically. In the wake of the Copenhagen summit, there is a growing acceptance that the effort to avert serious climate change has run out of steam. Perhaps, after a period of respite and a few climatic disasters, it will get going again. It certainly should. But even if it does, the world is going to go on getting warmer for some time (see article). Acceptance, however, does not mean inaction. Since the beginning of time, creatures have adapted to changes in their environment. Unfortunately, such adaptation has always meant large numbers of deaths. Evolution works that way. But humankind is luckier than most species. It has the advantage of being able to think ahead, and to prepare for the changes to come. That’s what needs to happen now. Related items * Adapting to climate change: Facing the consequencesNov 25th 2010 Related topics * Copenhagen * Science and technology * Nature and the environment * Climate change * Environmental problems and protection Russian summer Even if the currently moderate pace of emissions reduction steps up, the likelihood is that the Earth will be at least 3°C warmer at the end of this century than it was at the start of the industrial revolution; less warming is possible, but so is more, and quicker. Heatwaves that now set records will become commonplace. Ecosystems will find themselves subject to climates far removed from those they evolved in, endangering many species. Rain will fall harder in the places where it falls today, increasing flooding; but in places already prone to drought things will by and large get drier, sometimes to the point of desertification. Ice will vanish from Arctic summers and some mountaintops, permafrost will become impermanent, sea levels will keep rising. These changes will benefit some. As the melting ice allows access to the Arctic, Russia will become richer still in fossil fuels. For many, though, the prospects are grim. Drought and flood will put the livelihoods of hundreds of millions, mostly in developing countries, at risk. So the question is how to limit those risks. Those who can adapt will do so mostly through private decisions: by moving house, say, or planting different crops. But governments have a role too. The best protection against global warming is global prosperity. Wealthier, healthier people are better able to deal with higher food prices, or invest in new farming techniques, or move to another city or country, than poor ones are. Richer economies rely less on agriculture, which is vulnerable to climatic change, and more on industry and services, which by and large are not. Richer people tend to work in air-conditioned buildings. Poor ones tend not to. But development is hardly an easy solution to the problem. There are already plenty of good reasons for poor-country governments to put sensible economic policies in place, stop stealing money and do the manifold other things necessary to get their economies on the right track; and if they haven’t done those things already, the threat of climate change will not spur them into action. Climate change does, however, provide an extra reason for rich countries—which caused the problem in the first place—to find ways to help poor countries develop. That is a matter of justice, not just humanity. There is another problem with relying on development: although it can help protect poor countries from climate change, it also threatens to make the problem worse, because as economies grow, they consume more and more energy. Here again, rich countries can help, by offering poor countries support for greener energy technologies, and thus allowing them to make use of their capacity for generating renewable energy from water, wind and sunlight. Beyond encouraging climate-friendly development, governments need to take some focused measures in three areas: infrastructure, migration and food. The Dutch, who have centuries of experience of protecting themselves against high water, are already working out how to adapt and build infrastructure to minimise the risks of flooding as sea levels rise and the rain-fed Rhine grows friskier. Elsewhere, politicians need to assess the vulnerability of their cities to changes in peak temperatures, in rainfall, in severe-storm frequency and in sea level, and act accordingly. As life gets harder in vulnerable places, people will need to migrate both between and within countries. Rich people can help make life easier for poor ones by allowing larger numbers across their borders. Within rich countries, governments should stop subsidising insurance in vulnerable areas—such as the Florida coastline—and thus stimulating development there. People need to be encouraged to migrate away from vulnerable areas, not into them. Going with the grain Food security will become a crucial issue. Drought-resistant seeds are needed; and, given that the farmers least able to pay will require the hardiest varieties, seed companies’ efforts should be supplemented by state-funded research. Since genetic modification would help with this, it would be handy if people abandoned their prejudice against it. Even with better crops, better soil conservation, better planting patterns and better weather forecasts, all of which are needed, there will still be regional calamities. To ensure that food is always available, the global food market will have to be deeper and more resilient than it is now. That means abandoning the protectionism that bedevils agriculture today. None of this will make climate change all right. It remains the craziest experiment mankind has ever conducted. Maybe in the long run it will be brought under control. For the foreseeable future, though, the mercury will continue to rise, and the human race must live with the problem as best it can. Leaders 读过最简单的一篇。。。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-28 09:36:17
One nation, with Aunt Susan How Americans turn religious diversity into a source of unity—for some Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION AT A time when Americans are worried about their crippling political divisions, it is pleasing to report that two social scientists, Robert Putnam of Harvard University and David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame, have just written a book that examines a powerful source of American unity. Perhaps unexpectedly, the unifying force they focus on is religion. America’s religiosity has been extensively documented and should surprise no one. It is, Sarah Palin said in her own new book this week, “a prayerful country”. More than eight out of ten Americans say they belong to a religion. More Americans than Iranians (four out of ten) say they attend a religious service nearly once a week or more. What is a surprise—or should be, when you think about it in the way Messrs Putnam and Campbell have—is that religion in America is not more divisive. They argue in “American Grace” (Simon & Schuster) that religion gives Americans a sort of “civic glue, uniting rather than dividing”. The unifying impact of religion would not be so puzzling in a country where people were pious but where there was only one dominant religion—Catholic Poland, say. Americans, by contrast, hold intense religious beliefs but belong to many different faiths and denominations. That should in theory produce an explosive combination. So why doesn’t it? Related topics United States Culture and lifestyle Religion There are the protections of the constitution, of course. But the authors put much of it down to Aunt Susan. Such is America’s churning diversity that most Americans are intimately acquainted with people of other faiths. Aunt Susan may be a Methodist, and you a Jew, but you know that Aunt Susan deserves a place in heaven anyway. In fact, Susan does not have to be your aunt, because in addition to the Aunt Susan principle the authors have invented the My Friend Al principle. In this case you befriend Al because, say, of a shared interest in beekeeping, and later learn that he is an evangelical Christian. Having an evangelical Christian in your circle of friends makes you warmer than you were before to evangelical Christians. Not only that, befriending someone from another faith makes you warmer to other religions in general. This is not just a hunch. Mr Putnam and Mr Campbell administered a questionnaire to a representative sample of thousands of Americans in the summer of 2006, and in the spring and summer of 2007 they went back to question the same people. Sure enough, those whose circles had became more religiously diverse in between the surveys expressed measurably more positive feelings towards other religions. Is this web of interlocking personal relationships among people of many different faiths the secret transmission mechanism of religious tolerance in America? One happy feature of modern America is indeed that soaring interfaith marriages over the past century mean that the average person has a good many Aunt Susans. Roughly half of all married Americans today are married to someone who grew up in a different religion from their own. So it is little wonder that when the authors asked their subjects whether a person of a different faith from theirs could find salvation and go to heaven, almost nine out of ten said yes. Three blemishes in paradise Yet Mr Putnam and Mr Campbell are also careful not to claim too much. About a tenth of Americans are what they call “true believers” holding strong and inflexible views about morality and their own creed’s exclusive pathway to heaven; Aunt Susan is not welcome in their company. Also worrying is the continuing “God gap” in politics: Americans who are more religious have become Republicans and the more secular have become Democrats. A final blemish on the picture of tolerance is that the circle of those who are tolerated is tightly drawn. For example, even though nine out of ten Americans think that people of a different faith can get into heaven, a much smaller proportion think that a Mormon should get into the White House, as Mitt Romney discovered in his 2008 campaign to win the Republican presidential nomination. When the authors asked respondents to rank their feelings about other religions, the resulting scores were highly uneven. Almost everyone said they liked “mainline” Protestants, Jews and Catholics. Evangelical Protestants liked almost everyone else more than they were liked in return. Mormons liked everyone else, while almost everyone else (except Jews) disliked Mormons. And almost everyone disliked Muslims and Buddhists more than any other group. Part of the problem for Muslims and Buddhists in America could be their small number: few Americans have a Muslim relation or a Buddhist friend. But since being few in number has not prevented Jews from eventually becoming the most popular religious group in the nation, this is not a good enough explanation on its own. Osama bin Laden did not help American Muslims by attacking America in Islam’s name, but Mr Putnam and Mr Campbell believe another factor is at work: the fact that Muslims, Buddhists and Mormons do not have a place in what people have come to call America’s Judeo-Christian framework. Tolerance of Jews and Christians only? That is not quite so impressive. Worse, anti-Muslim feeling may be growing. In a recent survey the Public Religion Research Institute found that 45% of all Americans, and 67% of Republicans, agreed that the values of Islam were “at odds” with America’s way of life. Two scholars from the Brookings Institution, E.J. Dionne and William Galston, worried aloud this month that divisions over Islam inside America may now be deeper than they were ten years ago. George Bush tamped down anti-Muslim feeling, but some of today’s Republicans—Newt Gingrich, with his wild crusade against sharia, is a spectacular example—seem intent on stirring it up. What chance does Aunt Susan stand against the demagoguery of fear? 宗教。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-11-28 23:30:59
Mittel-management Germany’s midsized companies have a lot to teach the world Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION MANAGEMENT gurus are constantly scouring the world for the next big idea. Thirty years ago they fixated on Japan. Today it is India. The more restless are already moving on to Peruvian or Zulu management. Yet in all this intellectual globe-trotting the gurus have sorely neglected the secrets of one of the world’s great economies. Germany is the world’s largest goods exporter after China despite high labour costs and a strongish euro. It is also stuffed full of durable companies that have survived hyperinflation and two world wars. Faber-Castell, a giant among pencilmakers, boasts that Bismarck was a customer. Thankfully, a couple of management thinkers have defied the boycott on Germany. On November 18th Bernd Venohr, of the Berlin School of Economics and Law, gave a fascinating talk on the “secret recipe” of the country’s Mittelstand at the second annual Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna. Last year Hermann Simon, of Simon-Kucher & Partners, a consultancy, published an even more gripping sequel to his 1996 book on “Hidden Champions”. Put the two together and you get a good idea of the management theory at the heart of Germany’s success. Although the term Mittelstand is sometimes applied to quite small, parochial firms, the most interesting ones are rather bigger and more outward-looking. Most shun the limelight: 90% of them operate in the business-to-business market and 70% are based in the countryside. They are run by anonymous company men, not hip youngsters in T-shirts and flip-flops. Related topics Europe Germany Western Europe Business Economics They focus on market niches, typically in staid-sounding areas such as mechanical engineering rather than sexy ones like software. Dorma makes doors and all things door-related. Tente specialises in castors for hospital beds. Rational makes ovens for professional kitchens. This strategy helps them avoid head-to-head competition with global giants (“Don’t dance where the elephants play” is a favourite Mittelstand slogan). It has also helped them excel at what they do. Globalisation has been a godsend to these companies: they have spent the past 30 years of liberalisation working quietly but relentlessly to turn their domination of German market niches into domination of global ones. They have gobbled up opportunities in eastern Europe and Russia. They have provided China’s “factory to the world” with its machine-tools. The Mittelstand dominates the global market in an astonishing range of areas: printing presses (Koenig & Bauer), licence plates (Utsch), snuff (Pöschl), shaving brushes (Mühle), flycatchers (Aeroxon), industrial chains (RUD) and high-pressure cleaners (Kärcher). Kärcher’s dominance of the high-pressure market is so complete that in 2005 Nicolas Sarkozy caused a scandal, after a spate of riots, by calling for a crime-ridden banlieue to be cleaned out “au Kärcher”. How durable is the Mittelstand model? Sceptics worry that it will eventually become the victim of globalisation: emerging-world companies will learn to produce their own clever machines at a fraction of the cost. They also worry that Mittelstand companies are too conservative. American start-ups can become global giants in a generation (Wal-Mart, now the world’s biggest retailer, was not even listed on the stock exchange until 1972). German companies are content to remain relatively small. The first criticism is overstated. Mittelständler have not only focused on sophisticated niches that are hard to enter. They have thrown their energies into building up ever more powerful defences. They constantly innovate to stay ahead of potential rivals. They are relentless about customer service. Their salespeople are passionate about their products, however prosaic, and dogged in their determination to open up new markets. Mr Simon’s “hidden champions”, mostly German Mittelstand firms, typically have subsidiaries in 24 foreign countries, offering service and advice. Many get the bulk of their revenues from service rather than products. Hako, which makes cleaning equipment, generates only 20% of its revenue from sales of its machines. The second criticism has more substance. Germany has a poor record at generating start-ups or at quickly turning smallish firms into giants. Mittelstand firms are finding it increasingly difficult to persuade the world’s best and brightest to make their careers in rural backwaters. But for all that, the record of the Mittelstand over the past three decades has been a history of global conquest rather than missed opportunities. Koenig & Bauer, for example, gets 95% of its revenue from outside Germany. German lessons So the Mittelstand is likely to keep powering Germany’s export machine for years to come. But does it have any lessons for the rest of the world? Mr Simon says that although 80% of the world’s medium-sized market leaders are based in Germany and Scandinavia, successful Mittelstand-style companies can be found everywhere from the United States (particularly the Midwest) to northern Italy, so the model does seem to be transferable. Three general lessons—for politicians as well as corporate strategists—follow from this. First, you do not need to try to build your own version of Silicon Valley to prosper; it is often better to focus on your traditional strengths in “old-fashioned” industries. Second, niches that appear tiny can produce huge global markets. The third lesson is that Western companies can preserve high-quality jobs in a vast array of industries so long as they are willing to focus and innovate. Theodore Levitt, one of the doyens of Harvard Business School, once observed that “sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.” That is a lesson that the Germans learned a long time ago—and that the rest of the rich world should take to heart. sustained success is largely a matter of focusing regularly on the right things and making a lot of uncelebrated little improvements every day.
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-02 02:20:44
Britain's students: the revolution will be along later Nov 30th 2010, 21:28 by Bagehot "YOU ARE the backbone of a new movement. This is a movement that is capable of changing Britain, Europe and the world," bellowed the student representative from University College, London (UCL), standing on the plinth at the base of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. His claim was manifestly false. I am sure he believed it, as a megaphone carried his words into a horizontal-sleet-laden wind. I suspect many of the crowd of a few hundred freezing young protestors gathered below wanted to believe it. They clutched placards denouncing plans by the Coalition government to raise a cap on student tuition fees to about £9000 a year, and they were genuinely, sincerely angry. Today's day of action was the third major demonstration by students in central London, and the foul weather had not deterred a good number of students from showing up, though they were outnumbered by chilly-looking police. There were signs of troublemaking here and there: hairy, middle-aged Trots handing out tracts called things like Proletarian Struggle or words to that effect. Lots of ready-made signs distributed by the Socialist Workers' Party, a hardline outfit. A few gaggles of scary youths in hooded tops with scarves over their faces, roaming the crowd in search of trouble. An Iranian television news crew filming the scene. Trouble there has been, too: mostly on a first student demonstration earlier in November which the Metropolitan Police badly misjudged, sending too few officers to keep order when a small group of breakaway protestors attacked the headquarters of the Conservative Party, a short distance from Parliament. But this was not a British revolution in the making. At the risk of being proved horribly wrong by some stunning act of civil unrest on a campus, I think the current band of student demonstrators are too incoherent, too diverse and—in many cases—simply too polite and sensible to constitute any threat to the Government. This is not going to be a sneering blog posting, though on today's showing, British students are a lot more muddled when it comes to political ideology than their peers in other countries where I have reported. On the contrary, though I disagreed with almost every student I talked to in Trafalgar Square and later at UCL in Bloomsbury (now in its seventh day of a sit-in), I found myself oddly relieved. The contrast was striking with student demonstrations I have reported on elsewhere, over the years. In France and China, for example, students are fantastically articulate, but in a slightly creepy, parrot-like fashion. In France, it is impossible to escape the feeling that students have been marinated in a sour soup of sub-Marxism by their teachers: talk to a score of them, and your notebook soon fills with near-identical little sermons full of abstract nouns and odd verbs, about the need for massive struggle that fundamentally rejects the brutalising logic of a capitalist system that renders the disfavoured fragile and promotes social anguish. In China, whenever the authorities turned on some invisible tap and briefly allowed students to vent their nationalist anger in the wake of some foreign crime against the Motherland, their words were literally identical, being taken from editorials in the state-controlled press. The students in Trafalgar Square had not been filled with anything as coherent as an ideology. Two students from Middlesex University, who said they were finishing PhDs, declared that it was an outrage that the British government could "help Irish bankrupt banks, but cannot help their own students." An Anthropology student from Goldsmiths' College in London said he was "unsure" when I asked him how he thought higher education should be funded. "I mean, to be honest, stop putting money in the banks, and have higher taxes," he finally ventured. "To be honest, I blame the whole system. Capitalism needs growth, but the planet is finite. I'm still thinking about it," he told me. Every student reserved their greatest ire for the Liberal Democrats—whose parliamentary candidates all signed written pledges vowing to vote against a rise in tuition fees before the General Election in May. There was especial contempt for Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader and deputy prime minister, who was variously accused of being a "Judas Iscariot", a "schmuck" and a "dickhead", for repeatedly vowing to oppose a rise in tuition fees in leaders' debates before the polls. Two achingly middle-class teenagers, looking like choirboys who had been stretched and put into denim jackets, were at pains to explain why they had voted Lib Dem in May: "Because we live in Worthing, and it's a really Tory seat, we had to vote tactically," said one of them, Wilf. "But I don't think Labour or the Conservatives would have done differently," said his friend, Elliot. Did they think the movement would change Government policy, I asked. "It's important we show we're unhappy," they said. Another gaggle of Goldsmiths students insisted that higher education should be free, because the government kept going on about how billions in debt had got the country into problems, so why were they now trying to encourage young people into debt? And university was free when David Cameron and Nick Clegg were at college, and that was a really terrible time with Thatcher and that, so how come it was not possible now. It was about priorities: they should just scrap nuclear weapons. And Everyone Knew that David Cameron and the millionaires in the cabinet would raise tuition fees, but from the Lib Dems it was hypocrisy. Each time, I put the counter-arguments: that back in the 1980s perhaps one in six people went to university, while now it is nearly one in two, and so funding from general taxation looks like an impossible luxury now. That a graduate tax would be hard or impossible to collect from foreign students and being centrally-collected would rob universities of autonomy. Time and again, students predicted that the prospect of running up tens of thousands of pounds of debt would put people off from even applying for college, whether it was their younger brothers and sisters, their cousins or simply anyone from a poorer background. But in the years since Labour introduced tuition fees, there has not been any drop-off in applications from low or high income families, I argued. But now they are tripling the fees, came the reply. A clutch of 16 and 17 year olds from John Roan sixth form college in London insisted the threat of student debt was enough to put them off from applying. I thought of assuring them they were wrong to be put off, before realising how hollow that would sound. Because actually, none of us know. As with so much else from this Coalition, it is a bit of a gamble. Raising the cap on tuition fees while trying to design a loans system that is workable and progressive looks like a reasonable solution to the funding crunch caused by massively expanding higher education. But if in a few years' time, it turns out to have deterred lots of poorer students from applying to university, that will be a bad thing. I hope it will not happen like that. The students I spoke to were convinced it would: and that fear of debt was the one thing that came up again and again. I have a hunch that our differing instincts are partly driven by something as simple as age: at 18, it seems horrible to face decades of debt in return for higher education, even if that education is an asset that opens up the chance of higher earnings later. At 18, a debt of £27,000 seems an impossible sum. As a middle-aged hack with a mortgage, the idea is less alarming, perhaps. From Trafalgar Square I jumped on the Northern Line to UCL to inspect the student occupation of the Jeremy Bentham Room, named after the philosopher (whose straw-stuffed remains are on display nearby). The grand inner courtyard was decked with banners and chalked graffiti: one read "Let's Shift Some Godamn Paradigms." After the students had held a brief meeting to decide whether to let me in, I was ushered into the tidiest sit-in in history. There was the neatly labelled "Media" desk at which students tweeted and blogged, and a quiet work area for students on a deadline for tests. There were recycling bins and ordinary bins, timetables on the walls and lists of affiliated protests, and a giant screen for social media announcements. There were photocopied reproductions of 1968 French protest posters, saying things like "Nous sommes le pouvoir", with English translations helpfully added to the bottom in little capital letters. A sign read: "This is an open space for open people, We'll have no trouble here." There was no smoking, no stacks of beer cans. The students all looked pretty fresh: it turned out they were occupying the hall in shifts, so that they could pop home to sleep, attend lectures and keep up with their essays. Outside in the hall lay a cardboard coffin, labelled Education RIP. Candles and flowers lay strewn around, but also little bits of paper with slogans referring to the Harry Potter novels. What's with the Harry Potter references, I asked the sit-in organisers? They rolled their eyes: there are some strange people around here, they said. A fresh-faced undergraduate, listening in, burst out: "Well, Harry Potter would be for free education." Nobody slapped him down. It would be easy to mock: if this was the revolution, it was not going to be allowed to endanger anyone's grades. But would violence be worse? And the earnestness was not purely selfish: high on a list of demands for ending the occupation was a call for contract cleaners and support staff at UCL to be paid a higher "living wage" more in line with London living costs. Back in Trafalgar Square, the least convincing hand-made sign of all read: "1968 revisited? Yes. But we'll finish the job this time." On current showing, Britain's student protestors are as close to revisiting Brideshead as they are 1968, and they are not that close to either. The anger and sense of alienation from party politics is real enough: there is much talk of using technology to create a new democracy. But a revolution, this is not. "In China, whenever the authorities turned on some invisible tap and briefly allowed students to vent their nationalist anger in the wake of some foreign crime against the Motherland, their words were literally identical, being taken from editorials in the state-controlled press." 说得很含蓄。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-03 09:04:05
Global power The dangers of a rising China China and America are bound to be rivals, but they do not have to be antagonists Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION * * TOWARDS the end of 2003 and early in 2004 China’s most senior leaders put aside the routine of governing 1.3 billion people to spend a couple of afternoons studying the rise of great powers. You can imagine history’s grim inventory of war and destruction being laid out before them as they examined how, from the 15th century, empires and upstarts had often fought for supremacy. And you can imagine them moving on to the real subject of their inquiry: whether China will be able to take its place at the top without anyone resorting to arms. In many ways China has made efforts to try to reassure an anxious world. It has repeatedly promised that it means only peace. It has spent freely on aid and investment, settled border disputes with its neighbours and rolled up its sleeves in UN peacekeeping forces and international organisations. When North Korea shelled a South Korean island last month China did at least try to create a framework to rein in its neighbour. But reasonable China sometimes gives way to aggressive China. In March, when the North sank a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors, China failed to issue any condemnation. A few months later it fell out with Japan over some Chinese fishermen, arrested for ramming Japanese coastguard vessels around some disputed islands—and then it locked up some Japanese businessmen and withheld exports of rare earths vital for Japanese industry. And it has forcefully reasserted its claim to the Spratly and Paracel Islands and to sovereignty over virtually the entire South China Sea. Related items * Banyan: Lips, teeth and spitting the dummyDec 2nd 2010 * A special report on China's place in the world: Brushwood and gallDec 2nd 2010 As the Chinese leaders’ history lesson will have told them, the relationship that determines whether the world is at peace or at war is that between pairs of great powers. Sometimes, as with Britain and America, it goes well. Sometimes, as between Britain and Germany, it does not. So far, things have gone remarkably well between America and China. While China has devoted itself to economic growth, American security has focused on Islamic terrorism and war in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two mistrust each other. China sees America as a waning power that will eventually seek to block its own rise. And America worries about how Chinese nationalism, fuelled by rediscovered economic and military might, will express itself (see our special report). The Peloponnesian pessimists Pessimists believe China and America are condemned to be rivals. The countries’ visions of the good society are very different. And, as China’s power grows, so will its determination to get its way and to do things in the world. America, by contrast, will inevitably balk at surrendering its pre-eminence. They are probably right about Chinese ambitions. Yet China need not be an enemy. Unlike the Soviet Union, it is no longer in the business of exporting its ideology. Unlike the 19th-century European powers, it is not looking to amass new colonies. And China and America have a lot in common. Both benefit from globalisation and from open markets where they buy raw materials and sell their exports. Both want a broadly stable world in which nuclear weapons do not spread and rogue states, like Iran and North Korea, have little scope to cause mayhem. Both would lose incalculably from war. The best way to turn China into an opponent is to treat it as one. The danger is that spats and rows will sour relations between China and America, just as the friendship between Germany and Britain crumbled in the decades before the first world war. It is already happening in defence. Feeling threatened by American naval power, China has been modernising its missiles, submarines, radar, cyber-warfare and anti-satellite weapons. Now America feels on its mettle. Recent Pentagon assessments of China’s military strength warn of the threat to Taiwan and American bases and to aircraft-carriers near the Chinese coast. The US Navy has begun to deploy more forces in the Pacific. Feeling threatened anew, China may respond. Even if neither America nor China intended harm—if they wanted only to ensure their own security—each could nevertheless see the other as a growing threat. Some would say the solution is for America to turn its back on military rivalry. But a weaker America would lead to chronic insecurity in East Asia and thus threaten the peaceful conduct of trade and commerce on which America’s prosperity depends. America therefore needs to be strong enough to guarantee the seas and protect Taiwan from Chinese attack. How to take down the Great Wall History shows that superpowers can coexist peacefully when the rising power believes it can rise unhindered and the incumbent power believes that the way it runs the world is not fundamentally threatened. So a military build-up needs to be accompanied by a build-up of trust. There are lots of ways to build trust in Asia. One would be to help ensure that disputes and misunderstandings do not get out of hand. China should thus be more open about its military doctrine—about its nuclear posture, its aircraft-carriers and missile programme. Likewise, America and China need rules for disputes including North Korea (see article), Taiwan, space and cyber-warfare. And Asia as a whole needs agreements to help prevent every collision at sea from becoming a trial of strength. America and China should try to work multilaterally. Instead of today’s confusion of competing venues, Asia needs a single regional security forum, such as the East Asia Summit, where it can do business. Asian countries could also collaborate more in confidence-boosting non-traditional security, such as health, environmental protection, anti-piracy and counter-terrorism, where threats by their nature cross borders. If America wants to bind China into the rules-based liberal order it promotes, it needs to stick to the rules itself. Every time America breaks them—by, for instance, protectionism—it feeds China’s suspicions and undermines the very order it seeks. China and America have one advantage over history’s great-power pairings: they saw the 20th century go disastrously wrong. It is up to them to ensure that the 21st is different. 本文强调中国不扩张，不殖民，对世界还是有威胁。立场还算中立，比之前一贯批评中国的文章相比，含蓄多了。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-04 09:44:02
谢谢支持～ Gardening Planting ideas Amused and amusing Nov 25th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION Thoughtful Gardening. By Robin Lane Fox. Basic Books; 345 pages; $29.95. Published in Britain by Particular Books as “Thoughtful Gardening: Great Plants, Great Gardens. Great Gardeners”, £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk Blooming marvellous WHAT is thoughtfulness in the garden? It is, partly, the careful application of knowledge about the practical needs of plants. In addition, it is also a kind of two-step between exerting tight, intellectual control over nature and, as with all creative arts, knowing when to let go. Thus reads the central philosophy of this collection of revamped newspaper columns—together with a light top-dressing of new material—from Robin Lane Fox, for 40 years a gardening columnist on the Financial Times in London. And philosophy is not too strong a word. Mr Lane Fox is a tutor in ancient history at Oxford University and a fellow of New College (where he is responsible for its glorious public gardens), and his day job informs every word. No other garden writer would start a discussion of the beauty of bearded irises with a disquisition on Plato’s ideal forms and the hallucinatory experiences of Aldous Huxley. Related topics United States Europe United Kingdom Western Europe This, his third gardening book, is also his first in 25 years, but little here feels fusty or irrelevant. The book was published in Britain in September and is about to come out in America. In it the columns are grouped, usefully, into four seasonal chapters and address the gamut of his horticultural life, past and present—planting and propagating, battling with wildlife at home in the Cotswolds, visiting gardens in America, Ireland, Europe and Britain, and considering other plantsmen and women. These mini-memoirs are a strength. Some Mr Lane Fox reimagines through visits to where they worked the earth —“the dead”, he says, “imprint themselves on gardens”—others he has direct personal experience of. As a young man he worked with Nancy Lancaster, an influential designer-decorator, and draws an evocative thumbnail sketch of her, as a woman who “spent money as freely as water from her garden hose”, and her garden, with its tumbling roses and “Italian cypresses whose leaves smelt of paper in old books”. Valerie Finnis he describes communicating shrub news, with her proud “28 flowers on the xanthoceras”, to her housebound husband using a walkie-talkie “whose volume, eventually, she learned to control”. That “eventually” is priceless. It is also typical of Mr Lane Fox’s donnishness, expressed both by his amused, gently amusing, tone and in his unequivocal dismissal of current trends, among them prairie gardening, organic vegetables and the creation of “natural habitats”. Wildlife lovers will blanch: Mr Lane Fox is a rabid fan of pesticides and herbicides. He laces an oversexed rabbit’s milk with weedkiller and recommends eating squirrels. His years of practical plantsmanship result in deft delineations of the colour, needs and suitable companions of specific flower varieties: he describes one group of cone flowers as looking “as if they have started to put their ears back in anxiety”. But although fecund with practical advice, this not a how-to manual. Rather it is an episodic expression of Mr Lane Fox’s “thoughtfulness”, and his wry acknowledgment that despite all his best efforts—like his triennial battle to prune his classical patte d’oie of ornamental pears—real gardening begins at the moment you understand that nature “can never be pinned down”. It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for. Books and Arts It’s a philosophy worth getting your hands dirty for. 喜欢这句。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-04 10:59:39
450,000 guys named Mo Dec 2nd 2010, 17:00 by The Economist online | NEW YORK THE amount of facial hair in the world declined significantly on December 1st, as some 450,000 men spread over a dozen countries shaved off the moustaches they had been sponsored to grow during the previous month. This has been a record year for Movember—short for grow a Mo’ in November—which has become one of the world’s, ahem, fastest-growing charities since it was founded in 2003 by a few Australian men who “wanted to annoy our girlfriends and bosses by bringing back the Mo,” says one of them, Adam Garone, now its chief executive. It was only later that the thought occurred of doing this for a good cause—which, when they realised there was no male equivalent of the mass activism around breast cancer for women, was soon chosen as prostate cancer. They may look ridiculous, but all those taches are no laughing matter. Movember is now the world’s largest private-sector source of funds for research into a cure for prostate cancer, which afflicts one in six men, The hair-raising fund-raising has spread rapidly from Australian upper lips to those of New Zealanders, Americans, Brits, South Africans, Finns and Spaniards, among others. By 2009, $100m had been raised worldwide; this year’s campaign will bring in a further $70m. This spectacular growth has been achieved by tapping into three of the strongest trends in charity. First, slacktivism. Sprouting a furry friend involves very little effort on the part of the fundraisers—certainly less than running for breast-cancer charities. Movember always ends with a series of riotous parties at which awards are handed out for the best examples of the art. Last year’s winner in New York was a female (“Mo Sista”) sporting a presumed falsie. Second, partnerships. Movember has joined forces with the Prostate Foundation of America, created by former junk bond king Michael Milken, and with the Livestrong charity started by cancer-surviving cyclist Lance Armstrong. Mr Milken’s charity, which has been highly effective in tackling the disease that once threatened his life, has grasped the opportunity to add a broader base of public support to its relatively small set of wealthy donors. Livestrong welcomes putting on a different face as Mr Armstrong’s appeal declines due to him no longer being the world’s best cyclist and to increased questioning of whether, despite frequent denials, he used performance-enhancing drugs when he was. Movember has been keen to tap the expertise of both organisations, not least in how to use the money it raises well. Third, a focus on results. “In a decade's time, we don’t want to be known as the charity that raised $1 billion by growing Mos, but as the charity that effectively cured prostate cancer,” says Mr Garone. To this end, Movember is becoming increasingly proactive in challenging researchers to do better—especially in sharing results and collaborating between countries. “We were shocked to find how the research effort is so nationally focused,” says Mr Garone—which is why Movember has launched a global action plan in which a proportion of the money raised, $6m this year, will be allocated by an international committee of experts to the one effort they jointly consider the top priority. This year the project will be to find a better screening test for prostate cancer than the widely used prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Next year, Movember will also convene its first global summit to get the researchers it funds in different countries to compare notes. Mr Garone is optimistic that within a decade no one will be dying of prostate cancer. The biggest risk? Perhaps the moustache will become fashionable again, so men no longer need sponsorship as a reason to grow one. Fortunately, the ridiculous face furniture on display this past November suggests this remains a distant prospect. 喜欢它的结构。喜欢这句式，长短交错，错落有致。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-05 10:15:56
Breaking up the euro area How to resign from the club The barriers to leaving are high but could still be crawled over by a country determined to leave Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION MEMBERSHIP of the euro is meant to be for keeps. Europe’s currency union is supposed to be immune from the sort of speculative attack that cracked the exchange-rate mechanism, the system of currency pegs that preceded it, in 1992-93. A lesson from that time is that when the foreign-exchange markets are far keener on one currency than another, even the stoutest official defence of a peg between the two can be broken. Inside the euro zone, no one can be forced to devalue because no one has a currency to mark down. The strains in euro-zone bond markets this year show that there are other ways for markets to drive a wedge between the strong and the weak. Concerted selling of their government bonds has forced Greece and now Ireland to seek emergency loans from other European Union countries and the IMF. Portugal may soon join them in intensive care. Spain is in the markets’ sights and the trouble is spreading to Italy, home of the world’s third-largest market for public debt. The convergence of government-bond yields that was spurred by the euro’s launch has thus been sharply reversed. The idea that the euro itself might also be reversible and that one or more countries might revert to national currencies is no longer unthinkable. This would be costly and cause huge financial shocks for both leavers and those left behind. But the bar to exit, though high, would be surmountable. Related items The crisis in the euro area: No easy exit Dec 2nd 2010 The idea of breaking up the currency zone raises at least three questions. First, why would a country choose to leave? Second, how would a country manage the switch to a new currency? Third—and perhaps most important—would leavers be better off outside the euro than inside it? The main reason why a country might choose to leave the euro is to regain the monetary independence it sacrificed on joining and to set monetary policy to suit its own economic conditions. This could apply to the strong as well as the weak. Germans may long to have the Bundesbank in charge again. It would surely not take risks with long-term inflation, by keeping liquidity lines open to weak foreign banks, or with its political independence, by buying government bonds. And given the strength of the German economy, it might raise interest rates soon. As it is, the European Central Bank (ECB), though based in Germany and modelled on the pre-euro Bundesbank, has had to react to the economic and financial weaknesses of the rest of the euro zone in ways that Germans do not like. Add to this taxpayers’ disgust at having to stand behind the public debts of less thrifty countries, and the idea of abandoning the euro looks enticing to some Germans. That appeal might extend to countries, such as Austria and Netherlands, with strong economic ties to Germany. They might prefer to join a new D-mark block than to stay with the euro, were Germany to leave. Weak economies might also hanker for a monetary policy tailored to their own needs. The euro may have abolished market-based nominal exchange rates but it has led to marked divergences in real exchange rates (see chart). Consumer prices in peripheral countries have risen at a faster rate than in Germany since the start of the euro in 1999. So have wages, making it hard for firms in those countries to compete with Germany in foreign markets and with low-cost imports from Asia in their home markets. Leaving the euro would allow Italy, Spain and the rest to devalue and bring their wage costs into line with workers’ productivity. How could this be done? Introducing a new currency would be difficult but not impossible. A government could simply pass a law saying that the wages of public workers, welfare cheques and government debts would henceforth be paid in a new currency, converted at an official fixed rate. Such legislation would also require all other financial dealings—private-sector pay, mortgages, stock prices, bank loans and so on—to be switched to the new currency. The changeover would have to be swift and complete to limit financial chaos. Bank deposits would have to be converted at the same time, and the same rate, as overdrafts and mortgages to keep the value of banks’ debts in line with their assets. When Argentina broke its peg with the dollar in 2001, it decreed that bank deposits should be switched at a more favourable exchange rate than loans, in an effort to appease savers. This imposed losses on an already crippled banking system, and led to a sharp contraction in domestic credit. The central bank would have to distribute new notes and coins fast. It would also have to set interest rates, and would need a lodestar, probably an inflation target, to guide it. Whatever the official exchange rate at a changeover, the new currency would quickly find a market level against the euro and other currencies. A new D-mark would be expected to rise against the now-abandoned euro; a new drachma or punt would trade at a big discount to its official changeover rate—a devaluation, in effect. The switch to the euro was smooth, but it was planned for years in great detail and in co-operation among countries. The reverse operation would be far messier. The mere prospect of euro break-up could cause bank runs in weak economies as depositors scrambled to move savings abroad to avoid forced conversion. If Germany were the leaver, it would face an inward flood. To prevent such a drain, a weak country thinking of leaving the euro would have to impose caps on bank withdrawals, other forms of capital controls, and perhaps even restrictions on foreign travel. That might not work in a region as integrated as Europe—and if it did it would depress the economy by limiting the circulation of cash for commerce. It would also cut the country off from foreign credit, because foreign firms and banks would fear that their money would be trapped. Trade would suffer badly, at least for a while. A departing country would also have to prepare for legal challenges. A change in the currency in both weak and strong countries would impose devastating losses on businesses and depositors at home and abroad. Savers who could not get their money out of banks before its forced conversion would not be happy to be paid in a devalued currency. Many would sue, as happened in Argentina. The legal uncertainty would further hamper the banks, which would be loth to extend credit for fear they might yet be forced to make depositors whole. Foreign banks and pension funds holding weak economies’ euro-denominated government bonds would suffer an effective default. They might sue, too. A sovereign might expect to win its legal battles if it drafted its conversion laws well and if it could assert the primacy of its law over European law. But the European dimension would at the very least mean that costly legal battles would drag on. All the while a government seeking to replace the euro with a devalued currency could scarcely rely on bond sales to finance its operations. But such a country would have long been cut off from capital markets anyway. The prospect of monetary independence would give it new options. In the run-up to passing a conversion law, the government could pay some of its bills, including wages, by issuing small-denomination IOUs, which could be traded for goods and services. These would form a proto-currency that would trade at a discount to the remaining euros in circulation—a shadow price of the devaluation to come. Since the money supply would be shrinking fast, as euro deposits fled the country, this sort of paper would be accepted readily. Scrip issued by the province of Buenos Aires circulated freely months before Argentina’s dollar peg broke. Germany would be in a happier position. Should it opt to leave, it would have an incentive not to convert its stock of euro-denominated debts to claims in a new, stronger currency. It could instead choose to repay those depreciating debts over time. Rather than invite legal disputes, however, it might instead go for a comprehensive conversion and keep balance-sheets straight. Germany would in any case be able to issue cheap debt in the run-up to conversion. A rush out of euros into German assets in anticipation of revaluation would drive up the prices of Bunds—conceivably to a point where the interest rates on them were negative. Even so, Germany would face costs it could not control. A new D-mark would surely rise steeply, harming the country’s exporters. Exit from the euro area would deplete its customers in the rest of the zone of the cash and credit needed to buy German goods. As a big creditor, it holds lots of assets elsewhere in the zone. The value of these would plummet in new D-marks, and a contraction in credit in the rump of the euro zone would mean that the value of assets, including businesses that might otherwise have survived, would be destroyed. Germany would no longer be able to influence the euro area’s monetary policy. It could not prevent the ECB from stoking inflation, which would undermine the real value of German loans made to euro-zone banks, businesses and governments. A determined country could leave the euro and establish its own currency again: nothing is truly irreversible for a sovereign nation. But even the most wilful and powerful state could not fully control the banking chaos and social unrest that a forced currency conversion would unleash. It would be a curious decision for Germany to seek to abandon the euro in search of greater monetary and fiscal stability. It would first have to endure a long period of financial disarray. Is it worth it? Countries at the euro zone’s periphery that face years of austerity and high unemployment inside the euro may find it harder to believe that things could be much worse if they left. A devaluation would spare them the grinding wage deflation needed to price the unemployed back into work (though it would not address the economic weaknesses that lie behind poor competitiveness). The spectre of bank runs, high funding costs, default and social unrest might not seem so scary in today’s conditions: some countries are already vulnerable to these. Efforts to ameliorate these problems have so far proved inadequate (see article). Therein lies the danger for the euro. The cost of breaking up the single currency would be enormous. In the ensuing chaos and recrimination, the survival of the EU and its single market would be in jeopardy. But by believing that a break-up cannot happen, the euro zone’s authorities will always tend to stop short of the radical measures needed to hold the project together. Given the likely and devastating chaos, it would be a mistake for a country to choose to leave. But mistakes occur in times of stress. That is why some are beginning to contemplate the unthinkable. 欧洲经济不行啊，可东西还是很贵。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-06 04:30:53
A special report on China's place in the world Brushwood and gall China insists that its growing military and diplomatic clout pose no threat. The rest of the world, and particularly America, is not so sure, says Edward Carr Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION IN 492BC, at the end of the “Spring and Autumn” period in Chinese history, Goujian, the king of Yue in modern Zhejiang, was taken prisoner after a disastrous campaign against King Fuchai, his neighbour to the north. Goujian was put to work in the royal stables where he bore his captivity with such dignity that he gradually won Fuchai’s respect. After a few years Fuchai let him return home as his vassal. Goujian never forgot his humiliation. He slept on brushwood and hung a gall bladder in his room, licking it daily to feed his appetite for revenge. Yue appeared loyal, but its gifts of craftsmen and timber tempted Fuchai to build palaces and towers even though the extravagance ensnared him in debt. Goujian distracted him with Yue’s most beautiful women, bribed his officials and bought enough grain to empty his granaries. Meanwhile, as Fuchai’s kingdom declined, Yue grew rich and raised a new army. Goujian bided his time for eight long years. By 482BC, confident of his superiority, he set off north with almost 50,000 warriors. Over several campaigns they put Fuchai and his kingdom to the sword. In this special report » Brushwood and gall « Less biding and hiding In the balance Friends, or else Strategic reassurance The fourth modernisation Sources and acknowledgments Offer to readers The king who slept on brushwood and tasted gall is as familiar to Chinese as King Alfred and his cakes are to Britons, or George Washington and the cherry tree are to Americans. In the early 20th century he became a symbol of resistance against the treaty ports, foreign concessions and the years of colonial humiliation. Taken like that, the parable of Goujian sums up what some people find alarming about China’s rise as a superpower today. Ever since Deng Xiaoping set about reforming the economy in 1978, China has talked peace. Still militarily and economically too weak to challenge America, it has concentrated on getting richer. Even as China has grown in power and rebuilt its armed forces, the West and Japan have run up debts and sold it their technology. China has been patient, but the day when it can once again start to impose its will is drawing near. However, Goujian’s story has another reading, too. Paul Cohen, a Harvard scholar who has written about the king, explains that the Chinese today see him as an example of perseverance and dedication. Students are told that if they want to succeed they must be like King Goujian, sleeping on brushwood and tasting gall—that great accomplishments come only with sacrifice and unyielding purpose. This Goujian represents self-improvement and dedication, not revenge. Which Goujian will 21st-century China follow? Will it broadly fit in with the Western world, as a place where people want nothing more than a chance to succeed and enjoy the rewards of their hard work? Or, as its wealth and power begin to overshadow all but the United States, will China become a threat—an angry country set on avenging past wrongs and forcing others to bend to its will? China’s choice of role, says Jim Steinberg, America’s deputy secretary of state, is “the great question of our time”. The peace and prosperity of the world depends on which path it takes. Some people argue that China is now too enmeshed in globalisation to put the world economy in jeopardy through war or coercion. Trade has brought prosperity. China buys raw materials and components from abroad and sells its wares in foreign markets. It holds $2.6 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves. Why should it pull down the system that has served it so well? But that is too sanguine. In the past integration has sometimes gone before conflagration. Europe went up in flames in 1914 even though Germany was Britain’s second-largest export market and Britain was Germany’s largest. Japan got rich and fell in with the European powers before it brutally set about colonising Asia. Others go to the opposite extreme, arguing that China and America are condemned to be enemies. Ever since Sparta led the Peloponnesian League against Athens, they say, declining powers have failed to give way fast enough to satisfy rising powers. As China’s economic and military strength increase, so will its sense of entitlement and its ambition. In the end patience will run out, because America will not willingly surrender leadership. Reasons for optimism But that is too bleak. China clings to its territorial claims—over Taiwan, the South China Sea, various islands and with India. Yet, unlike the great powers before 1945, China is not looking for new colonies. And unlike the Soviet Union, China does not have an ideology to export. In fact, America’s liberal idealism is far more potent than token Communism, warmed-up Confucianism or anything else that China has to offer. When two countries have nuclear weapons, a war may not be worth fighting. In the real world the dealings between rising and declining powers are not straightforward. Twice Britain feared that continental Europe would be dominated by an expansionary Germany and twice it went to war. Yet when America took world leadership from Britain, the two remained constant allies. After the second world war Japan and Germany rose from the ashes to become the world’s second- and third-largest economies, without a whisper of a political challenge to the United States. International-relations theorists have devoted much thought to the passing of empires. The insight of “power-transition theory” is that satisfied powers, such as post-war Germany and Japan, do not challenge the world order when they rise. But dissatisfied ones, such as pre-war Germany and Japan, conclude that the system shaped and maintained by the incumbent powers is rigged against them. In the anarchic arena of geopolitics they believe that they will be denied what is rightfully theirs unless they enforce their claim. So for most of the past decade the two great powers edged towards what David Lampton, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, calls a double wager. China would broadly fall in with America’s post-war order, betting that the rest of the world, eager for China’s help and its markets, would allow it to grow richer and more powerful. America would not seek to prevent this rise, betting that prosperity would eventually turn China into one of the system’s supporters—a “responsible stakeholder” in the language of Robert Zoellick, a deputy secretary of state under George Bush junior and now president of the World Bank. For much of the past decade, barring the odd tiff, the wager worked. Before 2001 China and America fell out over Taiwan, the American bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade and a fatal mid-air collision between an American EP3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter. Many commentators back then thought that America and China were on a dangerous course, but Chinese and American leaders did not pursue it. Since then America has been busy with the war on terror and has sought plain dealing with China. American companies enjoyed decent access to Chinese markets. China lent the American government huge amounts of money. This suited China, which concluded long ago that the best way to build its “comprehensive national power” was through economic growth. According to its analysis, articulated in a series of white papers and speeches in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the country needed a “New Security Concept”. Growth demanded stability, which in turn required that China’s neighbours did not feel threatened. To reassure them, China started to join the international organisations it had once shunned. As well as earning it credentials as a good citizen, this was also a safe way to counter American influence. China led the six-party talks designed to curb North Korea’s nuclear programme. The government signed the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty and by and large stopped proliferating weapons (though proliferation by rogue Chinese companies continued). It sent people on UN peacekeeping operations, supplying more of them than any other permanent member of the security council or any NATO country. Inevitably, there were still disputes and differences. But diplomats, policymakers and academics allowed themselves to believe that, in the nuclear age, China might just emerge peacefully as a new superpower. However, that confidence has recently softened. In the past few months China has fallen out with Japan over a fishing boat that rammed at least one if not two Japanese coastguard vessels off what the Japanese call the Senkaku Islands and the Chinese the Diaoyu Islands. Earlier, China failed to back South Korea over the sinking of a Korean navy corvette with the loss of 46 crew—even though an international panel had concluded that the Cheonan was attacked by a North Korean submarine. When America and South Korea reacted to the sinking by planning joint exercises in the Yellow Sea, China objected and got one of them moved eastward, to the Sea of Japan. And when North Korea shelled a South Korean island last month, China was characteristically reluctant to condemn it. China has also begun to include territorial claims over large parts of the South China Sea among its six “primary concerns”—new language that has alarmed diplomats. When members of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) complained about this in a meeting in Hanoi in the summer, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi, worked himself into a rage: “All of you remember how much of your economic prosperity depends on us,” he reportedly spat back. Last year a vicious editorial in China’s People’s Daily attacked India after its prime minister, Manmohan Singh, visited disputed territory near Tibet; Barack Obama was shabbily treated, first on a visit to Beijing and later at the climate-change talks in Copenhagen, where a junior Chinese official wagged his finger at the leader of the free world; Chinese vessels have repeatedly harassed American and Japanese naval ships, including the USS John S. McCain and a survey vessel, the USNS Impeccable. Such things are perhaps small in themselves, but they matter because of that double bet. America is constantly looking for signs that China is going to welsh on the deal and turn aggressive—and China is looking for signs that America and its allies are going to gang up to stop its rise. Everything is coloured by that strategic mistrust. Peering through this lens, China-watchers detect a shift. “The smiling diplomacy is over,” says Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under George Bush. “China’s aspiration for power is very obvious,” says Yukio Okamoto, a Japanese security expert. Diplomats, talking on condition of anonymity, speak of underlying suspicions and anxiety in their dealings with China. Although day-to-day traffic between American and Chinese government departments flows smoothly, “the strategic mistrust between China and the US continues to deepen,” says Bonnie Glaser of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. There is nothing inevitable about this deterioration. Peace still makes sense. China faces huge problems at home. It benefits from American markets and good relations with its neighbours, just as it did in 2001. The Chinese Communist Party and the occupant of the White House, of any political stripe, have more to gain from economic growth than from anything else. China’s leaders understand this. In November 2003 and February 2004 the Politburo held special sessions on the rise and fall of nations since the 15th century. American policymakers are no less aware that, though a powerful China will be hard to cope with, a dissatisfied and powerful China would be impossible. Now, however, many factors, on many sides, from domestic politics to the fallout from the financial crisis, are conspiring to make relations worse. The risk is not war—for the time being that remains almost unthinkable, if only because it would be so greatly to everyone’s disadvantage. The danger is that the leaders of China and America will over the next decade lay the foundations for a deep antagonism. This is best described by Henry Kissinger. 用卧薪尝胆举例。。。给力！
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-07 12:38:15
Austerity delayed Dec 7th 2010, 3:11 by G.I. | WASHINGTON FOR a brief interlude after the mid-terms Americans seemed seduced by the siren song of Germanic austerity. Feeble economy or no, the talk was all of rising taxes, pay freezes and spending cuts. Austerity will have to wait for its turn in the limelight. On Monday Barack Obama and Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress struck a deal on a massive new package of stimulus and tax cut extensions, worth some $800 billion (around 5% of GDP). Though it must still pass the parties’ respective caucuses, this is good news for the economy: the prospect of inadvertent fiscal tightening was the biggest cloud hanging over the 2011 outlook. But it’s a political setback for Mr Obama who gave up more than Republicans did, and worse news for those who had hoped such stimulus would be coupled with a serious medium-term deficit reduction package. The package comes in two parts. The first is an extension of all of George Bush’s tax cuts for the next two years. Mr Obama acquiesced to an extension for the upper 2%, bowing to the reality that he did not have 60 votes in the Senate to extend only the cuts for the lower 98%. Tax credits for child care, education and for low-income wage earners are also extended. The second part is an injection of short-term fiscal steroids: a two-percentage point cut in the Social Security payroll tax for workers for one year, worth $120 billion (that’s double what Mr Obama’s “making work pay” credit was worth), one year of complete expensing of business equipment, worth $200 billion, and a 13-month extension of emergency unemployment insurance benefits. A senior administration official says the result is even more stimulus for the economy than Mr Obama had planned in last February’s budget. Fiscal policy goes from being a source of drag on the economy to a source of stimulus next year, he figures. “This is a much better deal for the near term economy than what we put in the budget, and what passed the House last week. The combination of unemployment insurance, business expensing, the payroll tax holiday and [refundable tax credits] is very high impact.” While the stimulative boost is probably worth some $800 billion, or roughly 5% of GDP, the 10-year cost is lower largely because tax deferred by accelerated business investment expensing will eventually be paid. Economists had generally projected growth next year at only 2.5%, and the biggest risk to that already tepid outlook had been the prospect that some or all of Mr Bush’s tax cuts would expire at the same time as much of Mr Obama’s temporary stimulus. Tonight’s deal is likely to lead to a round of upward revisions. Last week Goldman Sachs raised its forecast for growth next year in part because of the prospect of a deal on taxes. Politically, it’s hard to see this as anything but a loss for Mr Obama. First, he vowed not to extend the tax cuts for the rich, then sought to extend them only temporarily while making the rest permanent. Republicans forced him to retreat on both counts. They also put all other legislation, including the START nuclear arms treaty, on hold until the tax issue was finished. (The administration official disputed this interpretation, noting that a stronger economy in the next year or two works against Republican hopes of denying Mr Obama a second term.) Mr Obama’s remarks last night had not a single kind word for Republicans, with every concession to their position acknowledged through clenched teeth. It is also a depressing reminder that for all the talk of a new era of austerity in America, politicians here still find it easier to give money away than to take it back. To the extent that Mr Obama is able to spin this as a victory, it's through his use of tax cuts for the wealthy as a means to obtain bigger short-term stimulus. Thoughtful economists, including those advising Mr Obama, think the ideal fiscal package would couple short-term stimulus with medium-term consolidation. We got the first in spades tonight, but there is still no sign of the second. The cold shoulder that most elected officials gave to the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission last week is evidence enough that austerity’s appeal remains mostly theoretical. Optimists think there might be an opportunity to hammer out some sort of medium-term package in the coming months: Mr Obama’s state-of-the-union speech, his budget in February, and the imminent need to raise the statutory ceiling on how much debt the Treasury may issue could all provide the setting. There is potential common ground between Republicans and Mr Obama on tax reform, Social Security, and on rules limiting discretionary spending. But administering such bitter medicine usually requires a helping of sugar, and now that both Mr Obama’s and the Republicans’ near-term priorities have been satisfied, most of the sugar is gone. A debt crisis has never been likely for America, much less imminent. But it looks to me that while the odds remain low, they went up tonight. By putting off the expiration of the tax cuts to the month after the next presidential election, the negotiators have again set us up for another nail-biting collision between the economic and political calendars. Hopefully the markets will remain as tolerant as they have so far. nail-biting：束手无策的 it easier to give money away than to take it back， 借出去容易收回来难，哈哈
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-09 10:17:29
谢谢支持～ A special report on China's place in the world Friends, or else Living with China’s rise will test America’s diplomacy as never before Dec 2nd 2010 | from PRINT EDITION IN A recent essay Hugh White, a former Australian security and defence official, describes the following exchange with his American counterparts: “I put this catechism to them: ‘Do you think America should treat China as an equal if its power grows equal to America’s?’ The answer is always no. Then I ask, ‘Do you think China will settle for anything less than being treated as equal?’ The answer to that is always no, too. Then I ask, ‘So how do you expect the US and China to get along?’ I usually get a shrug by way of reply.” That shrug is a measure of America’s difficulty in designing a China policy. America wants China to be a thriving market for its goods. It also wants China to become an active, responsible power in world affairs. Yet at the same time it feels threatened by China’s growing economic, industrial, diplomatic and military might. When America dislikes a position China has taken, it cries foul. This mix of partnership and rivalry is a recipe for confusion. One way to resolve these tensions would be to put security first. America could aim to block China now before it gets any stronger. America won the cold war by isolating the Soviet economy and stalemating its armed forces. But trying that again would be a bad idea, as Robert Art explains in a recent issue of Political Science Quarterly. For one thing, the cost would be astronomical; for another, America might suffer as much as China. The two countries’ economies are intertwined and China owns more American government debt than anyone else. In war, nations override such factors out of necessity. If an American president tried to override them in peace out of choice, he would face dissent at home and opprobrium abroad. The risks of containment In any case, a policy of containment risks backfiring, except against an unambiguously hostile China. Unless America could persuade large parts of the world to join in, China would still have access to most markets. A belligerent United States would risk losing the very alliances in Asia that it was seeking to protect. And Joseph Nye, of the Kennedy School at Harvard, has argued that the best way to make an enemy of China is to treat it like one. America may one day feel it has no choice but to focus on security alone, which is what China fears. By contrast, to focus on economics and forget security makes no sense at all. America has vital interests in Asia. It wants to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Korean peninsula and Japan. It has allies to protect and threats to police. It needs accessible sea lanes and open markets. America is the world’s pre-eminent power. It cannot surrender Asia without losing influence everywhere else. Hence for the past 15 years America has fallen back on a two-track China policy. Barack Obama articulated the first track on his visit to China in November last year. He told the students at Fudan University, in Shanghai: “The United States insists we do not seek to contain China’s rise. On the contrary, we welcome China as a strong and prosperous and successful member of the community of nations.” This means, as the president later explained in front of Hu Jintao, his Chinese opposite number, that China’s “growing economy is joined by growing responsibilities”. “Engagement” is backed by a second policy, best described as hedging. America must be able to deploy enough force to deter China. Presidents do not articulate this track quite so eagerly, but Admiral Robert Willard, head of Pacific Command, was clear enough in his remarks to Congress earlier this year: “Until…it is determined that China’s intent is indeed benign, it is critical that we maintain the readiness of our postured forces; continually reinforce our commitment to our allies and partners in the region; and meet each challenge by the PRC in a professional manner that is consistent with international law.” America faced some straightforward, if terrifying, calculations in its monochromatic relationship with the Soviet Union. By contrast, its technicolour dealings with China are less apocalyptic, but many times more complex—almost unmanageably so. In principle, the policy’s two tracks fit together well. Engagement is designed to reward good behaviour and hedging to deter bad. In practice, however, the hedge risks undermining the engagement. To see why, consider that the existence of two tracks acts as an excuse to leave important issues unresolved in America. China hawks and China doves can all support the policy, because both can continue to think that they will ultimately be proved right. That is politically handy in Washington, but hardly ideal as a policy. The engagement tends to be run by China specialists in the state department and the hedge tends to be run out of the Pentagon. In theory the policy’s two dimensions should be weighted according to whether or not China’s behaviour is threatening. With the best will in the world, the departments of state and defence do not always work well together. All too often, a twin-track policy can function as two separate policies. Read my lips That matters because Mr Obama’s generous words towards China are not taken at face value there. However sincere, no president’s words could be: pledges are broken and presidents come and go. America sends a signal when it redeploys naval forces to the Pacific and its admirals tell Congress that “China’s interest in a peaceful and stable environmentis difficult to reconcile with [its] evolving military capabilities.” Those judgments make good sense for America’s security, but they get in the way of the message that the United States welcomes China’s rise and has no intention of blocking it. Hedging is not engagement’s only complication. For much of the past 15 years, commerce drew America towards China. Indeed, globalisation became a large part of the engagement story. But now that one in ten Americans is without work, economic policy has taken on a protectionist tinge. If China loses the political backing of America’s big-business lobby, which has lately been growing restive at its treatment in China, then the tone in Washington will shift further. Thus commerce could also start to add to Chinese fears that America will ultimately choose to block it. The second doubt about America’s China policy is whether America has fully accepted what engagement asks of it. The policy rests on two notions. First, that China can develop as a “satisfied power”—one that feels no need to overturn the post-war order created and maintained by America. And second, that if China more or less abides by global norms, America will be able to accommodate its interests. So engagement supposes that China and America can find a stable mix of Chinese adherence and American accommodation. Does China abide by “global norms”? At one time the common belief was that, as Bill Clinton said, “when it comes to human rights and religious freedom, China remains on the wrong side of history.” Some Western analysts like to issue caveats about devious, far-sighted Chinese strategy. Against this racial stereotype, however, it was America, not China, that founded its policy on the maxim of Sun Tzu that it is best to win without fighting. Chinese values have changed beyond recognition since Mao’s day, when terror was dismally routine. As Richard McGregor writes in his book, “The Party”, terror is now used sparingly. Hu Jintao’s China works on seduction and bribery rather than suppression. And yet China is still a one-party state and terror remains essential to its survival. When the party needs protecting, it is applied without scruple. Likewise, in international affairs China no longer backs insurgencies against its neighbours or routinely adopts intransigent positions, seemingly for the sake of it. Yet the West still finds it a difficult partner. American critics such as Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington accuse China of a “supermarket approach”: it buys what it must, picks up what it wants and ignores what it does not. Hope is not a policy The hope is that in years to come China will indeed grow to be more democratic and that it will play its part in world affairs. But, says Richard Armitage, deputy secretary of state under George Bush, “hope is not a policy.” Given the problems of Western democracies and China’s economic success and relative stability, says Richard Woolcott, a special envoy for the Australian prime minister, China’s conversion to a multiparty democracy no longer seems quite so inevitable. Just now, the Communist Party looks firmly in control. Suppose, therefore, that China remains a communist, authoritarian, one-party state with a growing appetite to get its way. Can America accommodate it? Some American thinkers, like John Ikenberry, of Princeton University, make the argument that America has created a rules-based system that is uniquely able to absorb new members. Institutions like the United Nations, the G20, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the World Trade Organisation (WTO) could, in theory at least, operate even without American leadership. According to this picture, America can accept China so long as it fits in with this order. But the picture is flawed. America has indeed been willing to be bound by rules in ways that 19th-century European powers never were. That is one reason why so many countries have been prepared to live under its sway. However, when America thinks important interests are at stake, it still ignores the rules, just like the next hegemon. In 2005 the bid of the China National Offshore Oil Company to buy America’s Unocal was, in effect, blocked after a public outcry. When America wanted a nuclear deal with India, it rode a coach and horses through the NPT. It fought in the Balkans in the 1990s and again in Iraq in 2003 without the endorsement of the United Nations. It may yet go to war with Iran on the same basis. This is not to dispute the merits of each case, though some of those decisions looked foolish even at the time. Rather the point is that superpowers break the rules when they must—and nobody can stop them. Over time that logic will increasingly apply to China too. America must decide whether “accommodating China” means living with this or denying it. In fact, there are difficulties with judging whether China is a responsible stakeholder. From the Chinese point of view, America always seems to define acceptable international conduct as falling in with its own policy. In the words of Yuan Peng, of the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing, America’s complaint is “not that China says no to global responsibility or denies its role in world affairs, but rather that it declines to say yes to every US request”. Accommodation is easy when that means letting China do what America wants. But will America let China do things that it does not want? The shadow overhanging America’s engagement policy is that China will not change enough to satisfy America and America will not yield enough to satisfy China. That may sound abstract, but it could at any time become brutally real, either on the Korean Peninsula or across the Taiwan Strait. Korean conundrum Nobody knows whether the North Korean regime will survive, nor what might come after Kim Jong Il and Kim Junior. But imagine for a moment that, on the death of the Dear Leader, North Korea descends into anarchy or lashes out, as it did in the island attack last month that killed South Korean servicemen and civilians. The ensuing crisis would severely test the capacity of China and America to live with each other. Everyone would be worried about North Korea’s nuclear weapons. America may want to seize them, but China would not like American soldiers on its borders. Nor would China wish America or South Korea to assert control over the North, an ally and a buffer. In the longer run, China may expect to regain the sort of influence over a unified Korea that, as the dominant Asian land power, it has exercised throughout most of history. This raises a host of questions. Would America trust China to mop up North Korea’s plutonium and enriched uranium? Would China accept the idea that South Korean troops should re-establish order in the North? Would it allow Korean reunification? If that happened, would America contemplate ultimately withdrawing its troops from the peninsula? Depressingly little thought has been given to these questions. As far as anybody knows, China is not willing even to discuss them with America, because it does not want to betray a lack of confidence in its eccentric ally in the North. Yet, if talking about Korea is awkward now, it will be even more fraught in the teeth of a crisis. If the two Koreas share the world’s scariest land border, the Taiwan Strait is its scariest sea passage. China’s insistence on reunification is absolute. The story is told of how, a few years back, the editor of a Shanghainese newspaper celebrated a new semiconductor factory in the city as the biggest in China. Because he had forgotten about Taiwan, he had to offer self-criticism and take a pay cut. However, rather than beat Taiwan with a stick, China these days spoons it honey instead. Hundreds of flights a month link the mainland to Taipei. The free-trade agreement with Taiwan signed this summer included measures to help Taiwanese farmers, who tend to support the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). China has recently hinted that it might one day be willing to point its missiles away from Taiwan. For the moment the policy seems to be working. The DPP lost power in 2008. Never mind that its successor, the Kuomintang, is the Chinese Communist Party’s old enemy. Under Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan is being pragmatic. The Taiwanese people appear to want neither to enrage China by seeking independence, nor to want to surrender their democracy to a one-party state. This is just fine with America. Its arms sales to Taiwan continue, but it could just about live with a single China so long as unification came about peacefully. What it could not abide would be unification by force. Strictly, the Taiwan Relations act of 1979 does not compel America to come to Taiwan’s aid. However, barring egregious provocation of China by Taiwan, America would have little choice but to intervene. If America just stood by, it would lose the trust of its allies across the world. Taiwan remains a flashpoint. Taiwanese democracy could lead to a desire for independence, Chinese nationalism could make reunification more urgent, and America could be afraid of appearing weak. Even now, when the mood is good, the island is a test of Chinese and American restraint. America needs to be clear that it will not be manipulated: Taiwan cannot rashly bid for independence on the assumption that America will protect it. China needs to understand that coercion would destroy its credentials with the rest of the world. America does not expect China to renounce its aims; it does expect China to satisfy them within the system. Policymakers often sneer at diplomats for their compromises and half-truths. Yet the high calling of diplomacy is to find antidotes to the rivalries that poison geopolitics. Not since the 19th century have they had as great a task as managing the relationship between China and America. In Mr Obama’s administration they have a name for this: “strategic reassurance”. from PRINT EDITION | Special reports 中美问题。局势紧张啊。太长，语言点很多，要多看一会。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-10 10:22:38
The world economy Three-way split America, the euro zone and the emerging world are heading in different directions Dec 9th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION THIS year has turned out to be a surprisingly good one for the world economy. Global output has probably risen by close to 5%, well above its trend rate and a lot faster than forecasters were expecting 12 months ago. Most of the dangers that frightened financial markets during the year have failed to materialise. China’s economy has not suffered a hard landing. America’s mid-year slowdown did not become a double-dip recession. Granted, the troubles of the euro area’s peripheral economies have proved all too real. Yet the euro zone as a whole has grown at a decent rate for an ageing continent, thanks to oomph from Germany, the fastest-growing big rich economy in 2010. The question now is whether 2011 will follow the same pattern. Many people seem to think so. Consumer and business confidence is rising in most parts of the world; global manufacturing is accelerating; and financial markets are buoyant. The MSCI index of global share prices has climbed by 20% since early July. Investors today are shrugging off news far more ominous than that which rattled them earlier this year, from the soaring debt yields in the euro zone’s periphery to news of rising inflation in China. Earlier this year investors were too pessimistic. Now their breezy confidence seems misplaced. To oversimplify a little, the performance of the world economy in 2011 depends on what happens in three places: the big emerging markets, the euro area and America. (Yes, Japan is still an economic heavyweight, but it is less likely to yield surprises.) These big three are heading in very different directions, with very different growth prospects and contradictory policy choices. Some of this divergence is inevitable: even to the casual observer, India’s economy has always been rather different from America’s. But new splits are opening up, especially in the rich world, and with them come ever more chances for friction. Related items The president's deficit commission: No cigar Dec 9th 2010 Taxes, benefits and the deficit: Kicking the can down the road Dec 9th 2010 Economics focus: All pain, no gain? Dec 9th 2010 European banks: The last idealists Dec 9th 2010 Asian economies: Importing pessimism Dec 9th 2010 On the rise, on the edge, on the never-never Begin with the big emerging markets, by far the biggest contributors to global growth this year. From Shenzhen to São Paulo these economies have been on a tear. Spare capacity has been used up. Where it can, foreign capital is pouring in. Isolated worries about asset bubbles have been replaced by a fear of broader overheating. China is the prime example (see article) but by no means alone. With Brazilian shops packed with shoppers, inflation there has surged above 5% and imports in November were 44% higher than the previous year. Cheap money is often the problem. Though the slump of 2009 is a distant memory, monetary conditions are still extraordinarily loose, thanks, in many places, to efforts to hold down currencies (again, China leads in this respect). This combination is unsustainable. To stop prices accelerating, most emerging economies will need tighter policies next year. If they do too much, their growth could slow sharply. If they do too little, they invite higher inflation and a bigger tightening later. Either way, the chances of a macroeconomic shock emanating from the emerging world are rising steeply. The euro area is another obvious source of stress, this time financial as well as macroeconomic. In the short term growth will surely slow, if only because of government spending cuts. In core countries, notably Germany, this fiscal consolidation is voluntary, even masochistic. The embattled economies on the periphery, such as Ireland, Portugal and Greece, have less choice and a grim future. Empirical evidence suggests that countries in a currency union are unlikely to be able to improve their competitiveness quickly by screwing down wages and prices (see article). Worse, the financial consequences of a shift to a world where a euro-area country can go bust are only just becoming clear. Not only do too many euro-zone governments owe too much, but Europe’s entire banking model, which is based on thorough integration across borders, may need revisiting (see article). These difficulties would tax the most enlightened policymakers. The euro zone’s political leaders, alas, are a fractious and underwhelming lot. An even bigger mess seems all but certain in 2011. Reach for the stretch pants, Barack America’s economy, too, will shift, but in a different direction. Unlike Europe’s, America’s macroeconomic policy mix has just moved decisively away from austerity. The tax-cut agreement reached on December 7th by Barack Obama and congressional Republicans was far bigger than expected. Not only did it extend George Bush’s expiring tax breaks for two years, but it also added more than 2% of GDP in new breaks for 2011 (see article). When this is coupled with the continued bond-buying of the Federal Reserve, America is injecting itself with another dose of stimulus steroids just when Europe is checking into rehab and enduring cold turkey. The result of this could be that American output grows by as much as 4% next year. That is nicely above trend and enough to reduce unemployment, although not quickly. But America’s politicians are taking a risk, too. Even though their country’s long-term budget outlook is famously dire, Mr Obama and the Republicans did not even try to find an agreement on medium-term fiscal consolidation this week. Various proposals to fix the deficit look set to gather dust (see article). Bondholders, who have been very forgiving of the printer of the world’s chief reserve currency, greeted the tax deal by selling Treasuries. Some investors, no doubt, see faster growth on the way; but a growing number are worried about the size of America’s fiscal hole. If those worries take hold, the United States could even see a bond-market bust in 2011. How much does this parting of the ways matter? The divergence between the world’s big three will compound the risks in each one. America’s loose monetary policy and concerns about sovereign defaults in the euro zone will encourage capital to flow to emerging economies, making the latter’s central banks reluctant to raise interest rates and dampen down inflation. Over the next five years emerging economies are expected to account for over 50% of global growth but only 13% of the increase in net global public debt. Rather than rebalancing, the world economy in the immediate future will skew even more between a debt-ridden West and thrifty East. The West avoided depression in part because Europe and America worked together and shared a similar economic philosophy. Now both are obsessed with internal problems and have adopted wholly opposite strategies for dealing with them. That bodes ill for international co-operation. Policymakers in Brussels will hardly focus on another trade round when a euro member is about to go bust. And it bodes ill for financial markets, since neither Europe’s sticking-plaster approach to the euro nor America’s “jam today, God knows what tomorrow” tactic with the deficit are sustainable. Of course, it does not have to be this way. Now they have splurged the cash, Mr Obama and Congress could move on to a medium-term plan to reduce the deficit. Europe’s feuding leaders could hash out a deal to put the single currency and the zone’s banking system on a sustainable footing. And the big emerging economies could allow their currencies to rise. But don’t bet on it. A more divided world economy could make 2011 a year of damaging shocks. 三分天下经济。 don't be on it:别指望这个。 还不翻页？
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-11 08:46:06
Sexual selection Hunkier than thou Scientists are finally succeeding where so many men have failed: in understanding why women find some guys handsome and others hideous Dec 9th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION WHEN it comes to partners, men often find women’s taste fickle and unfathomable. But ladies may not be entirely to blame. A growing body of research suggests that their preference for certain types of male physiognomy may be swayed by things beyond their conscious control—like prevalence of disease or crime—and in predictable ways. Masculine features—a big jaw, say, or a prominent brow—tend to reflect physical and behavioural traits, such as strength and aggression. They are also closely linked to physiological ones, like virility and a sturdy immune system. The obverse of these desirable characteristics looks less appealing. Aggression is fine when directed at external threats, less so when it spills over onto the hearth. Sexual prowess ensures plenty of progeny, but it often goes hand in hand with promiscuity and a tendency to shirk parental duties or leave the mother altogether. So, whenever a woman has to choose a mate, she must decide whether to place a premium on the hunk’s choicer genes or the wimp’s love and care. Lisa DeBruine, of the University of Aberdeen, believes that today’s women still face this dilemma and that their choices are affected by unconscious factors. In a paper published earlier this year Dr DeBruine found that women in countries with poor health statistics preferred men with masculine features more than those who lived in healthier societies. Where disease is rife, this seemed to imply, giving birth to healthy offspring trumps having a man stick around long enough to help care for it. In more salubrious climes, therefore, wimps are in with a chance. Now, though, researchers led by Robert Brooks, of the University of New South Wales, have taken another look at Dr DeBruine’s data and arrived at a different conclusion. They present their findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Dr Brooks suggests that it is not health-related factors, but rather competition and violence among men that best explain a woman’s penchant for manliness. The more rough-and-tumble the environment, the researcher’s argument goes, the more women prefer masculine men, because they are better than the softer types at providing for mothers and their offspring. An unhealthy relationship Since violent competition for resources is more pronounced in unequal societies, Dr Brooks predicted that women would value masculinity more highly in countries with a higher Gini coefficient, which is a measure of income inequality. And indeed, he found that this was better than a country’s health statistics at predicting the relative attractiveness of hunky faces. The rub is that unequal countries also tend to be less healthy. So, in order to disentangle cause from effect, Dr Brooks compared Dr DeBruine’s health index with a measure of violence in a country: its murder rate. Again, he found that his chosen indicator predicts preference for facial masculinity more accurately than the health figures do (though less well than the Gini). However, in a rejoinder published in the same issue of the Proceedings, Dr DeBruine and her colleagues point to a flaw in Dr Brooks’s analysis: his failure to take into account a society’s overall wealth. When she performed the statistical tests again, this time controlling for GNP, it turned out that the murder rate’s predictive power disappears, whereas that of the health indicators persists. In other words, the prevalence of violent crime seems to predict mating preferences only in so far as it reflects a country’s relative penury. The statistical tussle shows the difficulty of drawing firm conclusions from correlations alone. Dr DeBruine and Dr Brooks admit as much, and agree the dispute will not be settled until the factors that shape mating preferences are tested directly. Another recent study by Dr DeBruine and others has tried to do just that. Its results lend further credence to the health hypothesis. This time, the researchers asked 124 women and 117 men to rate 15 pairs of male faces and 15 pairs of female ones for attractiveness. Each pair of images depicted the same set of features tweaked to make one appear ever so slightly manlier than the other (if the face was male) or more feminine (if it was female). Some were also made almost imperceptibly lopsided. Symmetry, too, indicates a mate’s quality because in harsh environments robust genes are needed to ensure even bodily development. Next, the participants were shown another set of images, depicting objects that elicit varying degrees of disgust, such as a white cloth either stained with what looked like a bodily fluid, or a less revolting blue dye. Disgust is widely assumed to be another adaptation, one that warns humans to stay well away from places where germs and other pathogens may be lurking. So, according to Dr DeBruine’s hypothesis, people shown the more disgusting pictures ought to respond with an increased preference for masculine lads and feminine lasses, and for the more symmetrical countenances. That is precisely what happened when they were asked to rate the same set of faces one more time. But it only worked with the opposite sex; the revolting images failed to alter what either men or women found attractive about their own sex. This means sexual selection, not other evolutionary mechanisms, is probably at work. More research is needed to confirm these observations and to see whether other factors, like witnessing violence, bear on human physiognomic proclivities. For now, though, the majority of males who do not resemble Brad Pitt may at least take comfort that this matters less if their surroundings remain spotless. from PRINT EDITION | Science and Technology 女人为何觉得有些男的帅，有些丑？ 研究下。 p.s 发的好多文章都被审核。。。河蟹掉了不少。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-11 10:07:35
Forests of the will Dec 10th 2010, 12:31 by The Economist online | CANCUN Correspondent's diary, day two: a deal that makes slowing deforestation easier is a prize worth fighting for at Cancún AS THE last day of the Cancún climate talks dawns, there is some cautious hope in the air. With a much better atmosphere than Copenhagen, and some hard but productive negotiating sessions, there’s a sense that, while hurdles remain, there is a real chance of leaving with a result. And the result most on people’s minds, from the president of Mexico on down, is a deal on forests. Within the negotiations the possibility of creating a new “Climate fund” is also seen as both a fairly big step forward and one that might actually be achieved. And different nations have all sorts of different specific requirements, the balancing of which will doubtless take the meeting well past its official closing time of six o’clock this evening. But as far as the world outside is concerned a deal to reduce deforestation and associated ills, known as REDD+, stands the best chance of generating headlines and happiness, as long as the proceedings do not break down decisively over some other issue. “What would stop it?” asks Brazil’s environment minister Izabella Teixeira rhetorically. “I hope, nothing.” A REDD deal would be a good thing both for the world and the UN climate process, which sorely needs an achievement. Deforestation, which continues at the rate of a football field a second, according to almost everyone who speaks on the subject, is a huge source of greenhouse gases. Plausible reductions in emissions from avoiding deforestation are far larger than the sort of reductions which can easily be made by slowing the industrial production of carbon dioxide in the short run. And reducing deforestation removes a threat to the livelihoods and cultures of indigenous people, as well as preserving a lot of doubtless delightful wildlife. A deal which helped secure and accelerate recent advances on the issue would be worth some trumpeting. But deals are only the beginning. Norway, which thanks to its moral seriousness, dedicated diplomacy and stacks of petrokroner has been playing something of a blinder on forest conservation in recent years, has entered a number of bilateral agreements whereby it pays for forest conservation in a REDD-like manner. One of the beneficiaries of this spending is Guyana, which has committed to forgo a certain amount of deforestation. But as Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s president, complained quite heatedly when sharing a stage with Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, at a side event at Cancun, despite having signed up for the first tranche of the forest-abnegation a year ago, Guyana still hasn’t seen any of the promised money. The complaint wasn’t aimed at Mr Stoltenberg, with whom, Mr Jagdeo is keen to stress, he enjoys a very good relationship. Norway paid the money in question to the World Bank a year ago for onwards transmission. His irritation wasn’t even really aimed, Mr Jagdeo later said, at Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, though it seems that much of the delay he objects to is due to passing the money through the careful checks and oversights of the World Bank system. The president wanted to communicate his frustration to the audience in general, which contained a lot of business people, politicians, policy makers and non-government types. What Mr Jagdeo wanted to stress was that for a recipient country REDD is not a simple matter of getting some cash and some invitations to speak to the great and the good. It involves spending political capital to get all sorts of interest groups on board. And anything that goes wrong and diminishes the charms of the project—such as the money to buy a host of promised solar panels for people's roofs, which he says will be one of Guyana's first investments—hurts the process. Mr Stoltenberg, like many in the north, has developed a great devotion to “results-based” development assistance, in which the donors see what they are getting. Mr Jagdeo wants some results based responses from the Bank. Both politicians know results are needed to keep the good work up, though they themselves may see little direct reward from their success: Mr Stoltenberg said that Norway’s extremely high levels of development assistance (more than 1% of GDP) are not domestically popular, and that both main opposition parties would cut them; Mr Jagdeo, term limited, is meant to have left the presidency by this time next year. Their message was that even when it seems simple, with all the money coming from a willing donor, halting deforestation is still a taxing political process. With its complex blend of emissions targets, counterfactual scenarios against which to measure them, attention to the livelihoods of those affected, conflation with other environmental goals, need for international financial flows and negotiated requirements for the monitoring and verification of the good that is done, the REDD process is, in a way, a microcosm of all the broader problems facing climate diplomacy. Getting a REDD deal in Cancun should help the fight against deforestation in many places, as long as the deal is sensibly and sensitively fleshed out over the coming months and years. Some areas are as yet vague, and others, including perhaps the details of how things should be financed, may be vagued up yet further in order to get through the conference’s final plenary session. This is probably to the good; easier to get the details right, including important ones on the vexed question of how to stop demand for wood from simply being displaced from protected places to unprotected ones, away from the pressure of deadlined negotiations. But though such a deal would be good, it would be a recipe for action, not action itself. And everything will grind to a halt pretty quickly if the subsequent action doesn’t yield real results. For many observers of climate negotiation, political will is needed at the beginning of the process, invoked simplistically as something which might take negotiations from where they are to where people want them to be. Mr Jagdeo sees things differently. For him political will comes before negotiations. And it fades if not fed with results. it would be a recipe for action recipe除了食谱，还有方法，诀窍的意思。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-11 10:07:35
Forests of the will Dec 10th 2010, 12:31 by The Economist online | CANCUN Correspondent's diary, day two: a deal that makes slowing deforestation easier is a prize worth fighting for at Cancún AS THE last day of the Cancún climate talks dawns, there is some cautious hope in the air. With a much better atmosphere than Copenhagen, and some hard but productive negotiating sessions, there’s a sense that, while hurdles remain, there is a real chance of leaving with a result. And the result most on people’s minds, from the president of Mexico on down, is a deal on forests. Within the negotiations the possibility of creating a new “Climate fund” is also seen as both a fairly big step forward and one that might actually be achieved. And different nations have all sorts of different specific requirements, the balancing of which will doubtless take the meeting well past its official closing time of six o’clock this evening. But as far as the world outside is concerned a deal to reduce deforestation and associated ills, known as REDD+, stands the best chance of generating headlines and happiness, as long as the proceedings do not break down decisively over some other issue. “What would stop it?” asks Brazil’s environment minister Izabella Teixeira rhetorically. “I hope, nothing.” A REDD deal would be a good thing both for the world and the UN climate process, which sorely needs an achievement. Deforestation, which continues at the rate of a football field a second, according to almost everyone who speaks on the subject, is a huge source of greenhouse gases. Plausible reductions in emissions from avoiding deforestation are far larger than the sort of reductions which can easily be made by slowing the industrial production of carbon dioxide in the short run. And reducing deforestation removes a threat to the livelihoods and cultures of indigenous people, as well as preserving a lot of doubtless delightful wildlife. A deal which helped secure and accelerate recent advances on the issue would be worth some trumpeting. But deals are only the beginning. Norway, which thanks to its moral seriousness, dedicated diplomacy and stacks of petrokroner has been playing something of a blinder on forest conservation in recent years, has entered a number of bilateral agreements whereby it pays for forest conservation in a REDD-like manner. One of the beneficiaries of this spending is Guyana, which has committed to forgo a certain amount of deforestation. But as Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana’s president, complained quite heatedly when sharing a stage with Norway’s prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, at a side event at Cancun, despite having signed up for the first tranche of the forest-abnegation a year ago, Guyana still hasn’t seen any of the promised money. The complaint wasn’t aimed at Mr Stoltenberg, with whom, Mr Jagdeo is keen to stress, he enjoys a very good relationship. Norway paid the money in question to the World Bank a year ago for onwards transmission. His irritation wasn’t even really aimed, Mr Jagdeo later said, at Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, who was sitting in the front row of the audience, though it seems that much of the delay he objects to is due to passing the money through the careful checks and oversights of the World Bank system. The president wanted to communicate his frustration to the audience in general, which contained a lot of business people, politicians, policy makers and non-government types. What Mr Jagdeo wanted to stress was that for a recipient country REDD is not a simple matter of getting some cash and some invitations to speak to the great and the good. It involves spending political capital to get all sorts of interest groups on board. And anything that goes wrong and diminishes the charms of the project—such as the money to buy a host of promised solar panels for people's roofs, which he says will be one of Guyana's first investments—hurts the process. Mr Stoltenberg, like many in the north, has developed a great devotion to “results-based” development assistance, in which the donors see what they are getting. Mr Jagdeo wants some results based responses from the Bank. Both politicians know results are needed to keep the good work up, though they themselves may see little direct reward from their success: Mr Stoltenberg said that Norway’s extremely high levels of development assistance (more than 1% of GDP) are not domestically popular, and that both main opposition parties would cut them; Mr Jagdeo, term limited, is meant to have left the presidency by this time next year. Their message was that even when it seems simple, with all the money coming from a willing donor, halting deforestation is still a taxing political process. With its complex blend of emissions targets, counterfactual scenarios against which to measure them, attention to the livelihoods of those affected, conflation with other environmental goals, need for international financial flows and negotiated requirements for the monitoring and verification of the good that is done, the REDD process is, in a way, a microcosm of all the broader problems facing climate diplomacy. Getting a REDD deal in Cancun should help the fight against deforestation in many places, as long as the deal is sensibly and sensitively fleshed out over the coming months and years. Some areas are as yet vague, and others, including perhaps the details of how things should be financed, may be vagued up yet further in order to get through the conference’s final plenary session. This is probably to the good; easier to get the details right, including important ones on the vexed question of how to stop demand for wood from simply being displaced from protected places to unprotected ones, away from the pressure of deadlined negotiations. But though such a deal would be good, it would be a recipe for action, not action itself. And everything will grind to a halt pretty quickly if the subsequent action doesn’t yield real results. For many observers of climate negotiation, political will is needed at the beginning of the process, invoked simplistically as something which might take negotiations from where they are to where people want them to be. Mr Jagdeo sees things differently. For him political will comes before negotiations. And it fades if not fed with results. it would be a recipe for action recipe除了食谱，还有方法，诀窍的意思。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-13 10:54:20
A surprising success Dec 11th 2010, 15:53 by The Economist online | CANCUN The Cancún conference has beaten expectations by producing new, if modest, agreements THE room spoke just after the sun set. Patricia Espinosa, the foreign secretary of Mexico and the president of the UN climate conference, presented drafts of the conference’s two final texts, which had been circulating for a couple of hours, just before six o’clock on Friday December 10th. The assembled negotiators and ministers clapped. And, in a prolonged surge of relief, they kept clapping. The room rose to its feet, and clapped some more. They were not just praising the documents, and the impressive diplomatic efforts of Ms Espinosa and her team. They were clapping the fact that they were clapping, because they knew what the clapping meant. Something about their common response confirmed the feeling that had been gaining ground: the documents might actually get adopted, and the wounds inflicted on the UN process in the bruising breakdown at Copenhagen in 2009 might be healed. The room applauded yet more. For the rest of the long night, the voice of the cheering room was as important a factor in the talks as any national delegation or inspired diplomatic finesse. As expected, the subsequent sessions were dominated by Bolivia. Uncompromising in its belief that mother earth and capitalism cannot both survive, and that it is “a small country that speaks for the peoples of the world”, Bolivia rejected the proposed texts on grounds both procedural and substantive: they aimed to limit global warming to two degrees, which Bolivia considers too lax; they gave a role in a new climate fund to the World Bank, which Bolivia doesn’t like; they did not require new commitments to emissions reduction under the Kyoto protocol, which Bolivia wants; they smuggled in parts of the Copenhagen accord, a document Bolivia has bitterly imposed; and so on. Last year procedural objections to that accord—led by Bolivia, but backed by others—dominated the closing plenary of the talks, and stopped the conference from deciding to accept the accord in a formal way. Though the accord had various things in it that the parties wanted, such as pledges on emissions from developed and developing countries alike and a climate fund, the UN process neither got nor deserved the credit. The Bolivians were able to keep the accord from being integrated into the UN process because of a principle of consensus common in UN bodies; a sustained explicit objection is taken to mean that no such consensus has been reached. This year Bolivia stood alone, and the voice of the room spoke against it. When the Colombian delegate said that the principle of consensus does not allow one country to impose a veto, the delegates erupted again into prolonged applause. Ms Espinosa, in her role as the chair of the plenary, took a similar line, and got a similar response. Consensus was held not to require unanimity, and down came the gavel. The Cancún agreements became part of the UN’s climate process. Of trees and technology The texts set in train a bunch of new processes. The most anticipated aimed at reduced deforestation and forest degradation, also known as REDD+. This is a formula for action on the loss of forests in developing countries, some of which is to be paid for in various ways by the developed world. There is also, as outlined in the Copenhagen accord, a new fund for climate finance that will benefit from some of the $100 billion dollars in “long-term finance” that the agreements see flowing from north to south every year by 2020. In a compromise between likely donors and recipients, this fund will not be directly under the control of the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, but instead run by an independent board. The World Bank will function as a trustee for the fund, but in a way as yet to be fully defined. In those two respects—a lot of compromise between developed and developing countries, and a number of details to be filled in at a later date—the fund agreement is typical of Cancún’s achievements. What is surprising about the agreements is that there are so many such achievements in them. A Cancún Action Framework on adaptation; a new programme on technology transfer; an associated new technology executive body and more besides. It is hard to say how much, if at all, these things may come to matter; but they should in principle offer new ways of actually doing things, rather than just talking about them, which should do the UN process a lot of good. The Mexican presidency’s most impressive coup, though, was heading off a potential train wreck on the subject of the “second commitment period” to the Kyoto protocol. Because it actually makes binding demands on developed countries, the Kyoto protocol has a touchstone quality for developing countries; their insistence on its continuing relevance and power was one of the key stumbling blocks in Copenhagen. The developed countries which are parties to Kyoto (which is to say all of them except America) made initial commitments on cutting emissions that run out in 2012. In principle these are to be followed in 2013 by a second, more ambitious, commitment period. At the beginning of the Cancún conference Japan reaffirmed, in a particularly trenchant way, its long-held refusal to have anything to do with that second commitment period; Canada and Russia take the same position. Given that the world’s biggest emitters, America and China, are not bound to such commitments, these countries say, why should we be? The big emerging economies—Brazil, China, India and South Africa—made it clear in turn that a second commitment was their top priority. The text on the Kyoto protocol that was agreed in Cancún talks positively about the second commitment period in principle. But careful reading makes it clear that neither Japan nor anyone else is currently obliged to sign up for it, and that its legal form remains to be determined. And the pledges on emissions cuts that developed countries made as part of the Copenhagen accord have not been slotted into the Kyoto text, where they might have been seen as commitments by any other name. They have put into a separate part of the text. In short, Japan pretty much got its way. Cancún could So why did Cancún succeed in making progress within the UN process where Copenhagen so spectacularly failed? One reason is low expectations. Copenhagen was meant to produce an all-encompassing agreement; Cancún was expected to embarrass itself. Its fairly modest successes therefore look particularly good. Copenhagen itself is another reason. A similar failure would have killed the multilateral talks on climate, and many of the parties value the UN process enough to have been willing to make extra compromises in order to come away with a success. China, which did not enjoy being blamed for the breakdown at Copenhagen, went out of its way not to look like the heavy again, and probably pushed reluctant developing countries in the direction of compromise, rather than away from it. The Mexican presidency did a lot to reassure countries that their opinions were being heard, and that there were no secret talks-within-talks subverting the process; again and again in the final plenary Ms Espinosa and her colleagues were praised for their transparency and openness. The fact that Ms Espinosa is the exception among people chairing climate talks in coming from a diplomatic background, rather than being an environment minister, probably helped too, as did a wealth of diplomatic experience on her team. None of this amounts to a breakthrough. And, as the agreements make clear, the pledges from the Copenhagen accord, which have now been formally, if loosely, associated with the UN process, are nowhere near large enough to deliver the two-degree target that those agreements enshrine. Some might now be raised; there will be calls for Europe to go from a 20% cut to a 30% cut. And the problem of the second commitment period has not gone away. But something may have started to shift. The new board, programmes and institutions mean there is now more to the UN process than the flawed Kyoto protocol. And this new kit includes, in the form of the new fund, a fresh way to transfer money from north to south. With more money on the table, and more going on in the UN process, Kyoto may lose its talismanic importance, becoming one of an ever increasing raft of things to trade and compromise on. The talks ended as the sun came back up. the voice spoke against sth.用来表达反对很地道。
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-13 10:58:46
China's Catholics The party versus the pope The party tightens its grip on the Catholic church Dec 9th 2010 | SHIJIAZHUANG | from PRINT EDITION Blessed is the party THE Catholic church in China, according to a state-affiliated Catholic newspaper, Tianguang, has never enjoyed the sort of “political and religious harmony and friendly atmosphere that it has today.” This is not exactly the gospel truth. The Communist Party is trying to tighten its control of the Catholic church in China. Some of its members, as well as the Vatican, are fuming. The rosy newspaper commentary marked the opening on December 7th in Beijing of a national congress of Chinese Catholic representatives. The Vatican objects to the conclave, which is intended to elect new leaders of the Chinese church’s governing bodies. These are, in effect, government appointments over which the Vatican has no say. Several Chinese bishops, who would have preferred to stay away out of loyalty to the Vatican, have been forced to attend the three-day event. Tension between the Vatican and the Communist Party’s church-controllers has risen sharply in recent days. Earlier this month a group of seminarians at the Hebei Catholic Theological and Philosophical Seminary in the city of Shijiazhuang, 300km (185 miles) south of Beijing, mounted an unusually open protest. With the support of teachers, all 102 of the school’s seminarians went from their campus on the dusty industrial outskirts of Hebei province’s capital to the downtown office of the government’s religious-affairs bureau. There the students, wearing their white school uniforms, peacefully demanded the removal of an official at the bureau, Tang Zhaojun, as deputy rector of the school. Mr Tang is not even a Catholic. The students began boycotting classes shortly after his appointment on November 11th and only resumed their studies on December 6th. Officials at the religious-affairs bureau brusquely refuse comment. But a seminary priest says the government has made a concession. It has agreed to remove Mr Tang from his leadership position and keep him only in a teaching role. The priest says “more big problems” will arise if the government fails to keep its promise. “We are all very united”, he says. In fact, united ill-describes China’s Catholic church. Its millions of members have long faced hard choices about where their loyalties lie. The government-sanctioned church bureaucracy, consisting of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association and the Council of Chinese Bishops, does not recognise the authority of the Vatican. It manages affairs with the same heavy-handed approach that the party brings to all things. There is a widespread “underground” church structure in China that is loyal to Rome and thus suspected by the authorities of disloyalty to China. Pope Benedict XVI attempted to heal the rift in 2007 by telling Chinese Catholics not to shun the state-controlled church. But many remain deeply suspicious of it. The biggest tussle between the Vatican and China has been over the appointment of bishops. In recent years there have been tentative signs of compromise. The two sides have reached quiet deals involving joint approval of candidates. But in November, for the first time since 2006, the government-backed church ordained a bishop, Guo Jincai, without agreement from the Vatican. To bolster the ceremony’s legitimacy, officials forced Vatican-approved Chinese bishops to take part. Police kept reporters away from the venue in the Hebei town of Pingquan, northeast of Beijing. The Vatican called the event a grave violation of church law and of religious freedom. It hinted that Mr Jin might be excommunicated. China responded by accusing the Vatican of violating such freedom in China. China forced its Catholic church to cut ties with the Vatican in 1951, two years after the party seized power. Ren Yanli, a former scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and one of China’s leading experts on Catholicism, says attempts at reconciliation have been frustrated by “dove and hawk factions” on both sides. He says hardliners in China see nothing at all to gain in having a papal nuncio in Beijing. Vatican-baiters in China are in the ascendancy once again. from PRINT EDITION | Asia 宗教问题～
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2010-12-14 10:13:38
Indian politics Nothing to smile about Is the ruling party losing its way? Dec 9th 2010 | DELHI | from PRINT EDITION AS WINTER settles on Delhi, India’s ruling party is suffering from a nasty chill. Beset by scandal, battered in a regional poll and split in an important state, Congress’s leaders are out of sorts. Less than a third of his way through his second term, the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, leads a gloomy government. Even a relatively robust economy provides little cheer. The party is preparing for a conclave of its leadership between December 18th and 20th amid a welter of corruption scandals. Indians might have wearily shrugged off one or two cases of high-profile graft, especially if the prime minister had been on his toes. But a series of horrors and leaden-footed official responses have riled them. Parliamentary business has been all but shut down for three weeks by the barracking of opposition politicians who are demanding an inquiry into a dodgy sale of 2G mobile-phone licences in 2008. One scalp has been taken. The telecommunications minister, Andimuthu Raja, who is an ally of Congress, quit in November (though denying any wrongdoing). But many Indians say he should have been sent packing years ago. Now the opposition wants public interrogations of all those connected with the affair, from Mr Singh down. That could last for months. New year will bring no respite. January sees the first report of an investigation into allegations of huge graft in the build-up to the Commonwealth games. These were held in Congress-ruled Delhi in October and run by a leading member of the party. And in Maharashtra, a state where a housing scam toppled Congress’s chief minister last month, a new scandal is brewing. The private construction of a whole new city, Lavasa, has been halted over the brazen flouting of planning rules, presumably with the connivance of politicians. National politics looks grubby too. Newspapers have been gleefully reporting on leaks of tapped phone conversations which show a lobbyist, paid by some of India’s best-known tycoons, apparently swaying the minds of ruling politicians. This sits ill with Congress’s claim to uphold above all else the interests of the “aam aadmi”, or common man. The Supreme Court last month upbraided Mr Singh for moving far too tardily over the 2G scam. The same court this week raised doubts over another official appointment, that of P.J. Thomas who was installed in September as the head of a national anti-graft body despite being charged with corruption himself. Mr Thomas may soon quit. A surer-footed prime minister would have cut him loose long ago. More troubling for Congress are signs that Mr Singh’s presumed successor as prime minister, Rahul Gandhi, a scion of the party’s dominant family, is fumbling too. Last month Mr Gandhi led attempts to revive the local Congress party in Bihar, a dirt-poor but populous eastern state which has just held elections for its legislature. He guided the campaign, wheeled out Sonia Gandhi (his mother, Congress’s president) and whipped up 16 big rallies of young supporters. Yet his returns were dismal. Congress got a measly four seats (down from nine) out of 243. The incumbent coalition led by Nitish Kumar, a capable, low-caste chief minister who has built lots of new roads, schools and hospitals in the past five years, scooped 206—one of the biggest electoral victories in Indian history. Elsewhere too, in Tamil Nadu for example, Mr Gandhi’s efforts to attract young voters and promote able leaders in Congress have not brought electoral gains. He has other opportunities, notably in Uttar Pradesh’s important state polls in 2012. But more poor results could weaken his claim to be prime ministerial material in 2014, when general elections are due. A more immediate problem for Congress is a nasty split in a big southern state, Andhra Pradesh, one of the party’s heartlands. On November 29th the head of a powerful local family, Jaganmohan Reddy, quit Congress, after months of bitter infighting. He was snubbed for the job of chief minister, a post his late father had held for the party. The Reddys were behind much of Congress’s success in the state in the past two elections. This week he said he would instead launch his own party and try to poach local Congress MPs. Rich, bitter and set on revenge, Mr Reddy may dent Congress’s support. For the moment, however, the party can at least claim two big saving graces. Its national opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party, has dreadful weaknesses too, including the lack of a charismatic leader. And many voters are still likely to credit Congress for a strong economy (at least if inflation can be kept in check), with annual growth now running at an impressive 9%. Congress could do more to sustain that performance, for example by encouraging foreign investment in India’s woeful infrastructure, shops and banks. Mr Singh is in Brussels on December 10th for an India-European Union summit, where he had once been expected to sign a free-trade deal. This is now on hold for at least another six months while, among other things, the government works out how to deal with foreign investors. Decisiveness is not a virtue of the embattled Mr Singh. from PRINT EDITION | Asia New year will bring no respite. January sees the first report of an investigation into allegations of huge graft in the build-up to the Commonwealth games. h好用。中国人很少写出这样生动的句子。
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寒玉 2011-08-12 20:58:11
America’s downgrade Looking for someone to blame After the debt cliff-hanger, the downgrade and the panic, America’s politicians turn to the urgent task of recrimination Aug 13th 2011 | WASHINGTON, DC | from the print edition THIS has been a bleak moment for America, and the darkest of Barack Obama’s presidency so far. On Friday August 5th Standard & Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating from AAA to AA+. The next day American troops in Afghanistan suffered their biggest single loss in the decade-long war when the downing of a helicopter killed 30 Americans (and eight Afghans), including 22 elite Navy SEALs, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May. Financial markets dived on their opening on Monday August 8th, at the start of a week of gyrations. With 14m Americans unemployed, little wonder that an average of polls monitored by RealClearPolitics, a website, shows that more than two out of three Americans now believe that the country is on the wrong track. On August 8th Mr Obama addressed the nation from the State Dining Room of the White House in a bid to soothe nerves and markets. He gave a terse speech that repeated many of the themes he has been replaying like a gramophone record throughout the summer, and especially during his bruising fight with the Republicans in Congress over raising the debt ceiling. Although America had a long-term deficit problem, its problems were “eminently solvable” provided Washington found the political will to add tax reform and some “modest” savings in health care to the cuts it had already agreed on in domestic and defence spending. He implored Congress to protect jobs by extending the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefit when it returned from its summer recess. As for the downgrade, no matter what “some agency” might say, this was the United States of America: “We’ve always been and always will be a triple-A country.” From the moment of S&P’s decision (the agency has also downgraded the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), the government has worked hard to discredit its analysis. But whatever the flaws in its financial logic, S&P’s political analysis is spot on. In light of the brinkmanship of the recent months, it argues, America’s governance and policymaking are becoming “less stable, less effective and less predictable”. The agency says that its decision was based not only on the modesty of the savings contained in the final deal hammered out by Republicans and Democrats but also on the way the agreement was reached. The gap between the parties had become “extraordinarily difficult” to bridge, and “the statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.” As if to prove the firm’s point, America’s politicians responded by turning instantly to the urgent business of blaming the other side for what had gone wrong. On last weekend’s Sunday talk shows (Democratic) Senator John Kerry told “Meet the Press”, and David Axelrod, a former adviser to Mr Obama, told “Face the Nation”, that this was a “tea-party downgrade”. The Republicans returned the favour by calling it “Obama’s downgrade”. Even Senator John McCain, who had criticised fellow Republicans in the House as “hobbits” during their grandstanding on the debt ceiling, pinned the ultimate blame on the president: instead of producing a plan of his own, Mr Obama had insisted on “leading from behind”. While the politicians apportion blame, voters are drawing their own conclusions. The day before the downgrade a poll for the New York Times found that a record 82% of Americans disapproved of how Congress was doing its job, the highest proportion since the Times started asking the question in 1977. More than four out of five thought that the debt-ceiling debate had more to do with the parties seeking political advantage than with doing what was right for the country. The Republicans fared worst: a full 72% disapproved of their handling of the negotiations, compared with 66% who disapproved of the Democrats and 47% who disapproved of Mr Obama’s handling of the negotiation. These numbers have not dented the pride most Republicans say they feel in having got at least some of the cuts they wanted from the fight over the debt ceiling, a fight long in the planning. According to the Washington Post, Eric Cantor, the majority leader in the House, was as early as January imploring the Republican freshmen swept into office by last November’s mid-terms to “look at a potential increase in the debt limit as a leverage moment when the White House and President Obama will have to deal with us.” Republican presidential candidates heading to Iowa for the Ames straw poll due to take place on August 13th showed no contrition either. Most had opposed the final compromise sealed by their colleagues in Congress. The two who are themselves members of the House—Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul—voted against it. Before the vote, Mrs Bachmann dismissed Mr Obama’s warnings of dire consequences if the ceiling was not raised as a “scare tactic”. After it, she demanded the resignation of Mr Obama’s treasury secretary, Tim Geithner (who has said he is staying on). So the dire consequences which Mr Obama warned of have now occurred. That ought to increase the pressure on Congress’s new joint committee on deficit reduction, comprising a dozen members with six from each party, to do its job. Created as part of the debt-ceiling agreement, this “super-committee” is supposed by November 23rd to propose ways to cut the federal budget deficit by $1.5 trillion over the next ten years. It would have been a sign of seriousness if the parties’ leaders had put members of the “gang of six” senators who have been trying to formulate a bipartisan approach to deficit reduction on the committee. But none of them were picked. On the Republican side, all six nominees have signed the pledge devised by Americans for Tax Reform, a pressure group, forswearing all tax increases. There are other signs that the ideological gap that stymied Mr Obama’s recent efforts to strike a “grand bargain” with John Boehner, the House’s Republican speaker will persist. Mr Boehner’s immediate response to Mr Obama’s address was to reiterate that “raising taxes is simply the wrong approach.” Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, promised to “hold true to our values of protecting and strengthening Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security”. When Congress reconvenes after a summer of recrimination, it is liable to be no less divided than before. The joint committee will not have an easy time. from the print edition | United States
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Shining宁 (旅行旅行走走停停。感受当下幸福) 楼主 2022-05-07 10:31:24
考古人回归； 居然半夜找回来了十年前的账号； 从英国毕业几年了，继续阅读； 重新打卡； 这十年大家的阅读习惯/APP/ 世界也发生了很大变化吧； --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The next garage 下一个车库 Silicon Valley in the pandemic 疫情下的硅谷 The crisis has hit tech’s spiritual home hard, but it is already planning ahead 这场危机重创了科技公司的精神家园，但它对此有所规划 1.FIRING SOMEBODY is hard under any circumstances. But doing it over a video call is brutal. “It’s not the best environment for this, with people at home and kids in the background,” observes Marwan Forzley, the boss of Veem, a startup based in San Francisco which allows firms to transfer money cheaply. He recently had to let go 30 of its employees. 在任何情况下解雇一个人都很难。但通过视频通话解雇员工尤其残忍。总部位于旧金山的创业公司Veem的老板Marwan Forzley评论道:“有家人和孩子在身边，这不是解雇员工最好的环境。”Veem允许公司以很低的价格转移资金。最近他不得不解雇了30名员工。 2.Mr Forzley speaks for many in Silicon Valley. The largest American tech firms may be the winners from a global pandemic. Demand for their online services has exploded among people and businesses in lockdown. But many startups in tech’s heartlandare hurting. Hardly a day goes by without news of morelay-offsand firms going out of business. Yet amid the doom and gloom,venture-capital(VC) firms and entrepreneurs are already doing the thing they believe they do best: divining the future in their crystal balls. Forzley说出了硅谷许多人的心声。美国最大的科技公司可能是此次全球疫情的赢家。在大众和企业都被封锁的情况下，对在线服务的需求呈爆炸式增长。但在科技中心地带硅谷的许多初创公司都遭受重创。几乎每天都有裁员和公司倒闭的消息。然而，在经济萧条的时候，风险投资公司和企业家们已经在做他们尽力能做到的最好：用水晶球预测未来。 3.Californian tech firms and their financiers were among the first in America to take the threat of coronavirus seriously. Some venture capitalists began refusing to shake hands at the beginning of February (and were ridiculed for it). The moneymenalso moved quickly to“triage” companies in theirportfolio, classifying them according to how likely they were to survive and what they should do. Mostly this involved letting people go. “The shocking thing is how fast everything has moved,” says Marco Zappacosta, who runs Thumbtack, a marketplace for local professionals fromplumbersto dog trainers, which laid off 250 of its 900 employees. 加州的科技公司和他们的投资者是美国第一批严肃应对新冠疫情威胁的公司。2月初，一些风险投资家开始拒绝握手(并因此遭到嘲笑)。这些金融家还迅速对投资组合中的公司进行了“分类”，根据它们存活的可能性及其应该怎么存活进行了分类。主要是解雇员工。“令人震惊的是，一切都变化得如此之快，”马克•扎帕科斯塔(Marco Zappacosta)表示。他经营的Thumbtack是一家专为从水管工到训犬师等各类专业人士提供服务的公司，该公司解雇了250名员工，而其员工总数为900人。 4.Definitive figures are hard tocome by. When big firmscut backit makes the news. Airbnb and Uber recently announced they would let go 1,900 and 3,700 workers respectively. Layoffs.Fyi, a website that tracksdismissalsin the tech industry by adding up numbers from press reports, has counted about 17,600 jobs lost since mid-March. But this misses many sackings at smaller startups. Although still well below the national average and the peak during the financial crisis of 2007-09, unemployment in the region isedging up(see chart). Some VCs expect workforces to shrink by 15% on average, adding up to total job losses in excess of 125,000. 很难得到确切的数字。当大公司裁员时，这就成了新闻。Airbnb和Uber最近宣布将分别裁员1900人和3700人。FYI是一家通过统计媒体报道数据来追踪科技行业解雇人数的网站。据该网站统计，自3月中旬以来，该行业共流失了约1.76万个工作岗位。但这也遗漏了许多小型初创公司的裁员数据。尽管仍远低于全国平均水平和2007-09年金融危机期间的峰值，该行业的失业率仍在缓慢上升(见图表)。一些风投公司预计员工数量将平均减少15%，裁员总数将超过12.5万人。 5.Yet Silicon Valley’sdenizensare not ones todwell onbad numbers. VCs are scoutingfor promising firms whose valuations have dropped and which need fresh capital. Investments in America are only down by 25% compared to before the pandemic, according to PitchBook, a data provider. For startups with cash in the coffers, it is an opportunity toscoop upweaker rivals. On May 12th it emerged that Uber, a shrinkingride-hailing servicewith a growing meal-delivery arm and $9bn in the bank, is seeking to acquire GrubHub, which also delivers food. A few days earlier Uber led a $170m funding round in Lime, an ailing startup thatrents outelectricscootersand bicycles. Expect more such deals—and more criticism that the likes of Uber are trying to use the pandemic tomonopolisemarkets. 然而，硅谷人并不是沉湎于糟糕数据的人。风投公司正在寻找估值已经下降、需要新资本且前景很好的公司。数据提供商PitchBook称，与疫情前相比，美国的投资仅下降了25%。对于资金充裕的初创公司来说，这是一个打击较弱竞争对手的机会。5月12日有消息称，优步(Uber)正企图收购GrubHub，一家提供送餐服务的公司。就在几天前，Uber还在Lime公司领投了1.7亿美元的融资，这是一家境况不佳的初创公司，出租电动摩托车和自行车。预计会有更多这样的交易，也会有更多批评认为像Uber这样的企业试图利用疫情垄断市场。 6.Silicon Valley’s leading VC firms are also trying to seize new opportunities. More than one sees the tech industry’ssweet spotsmoving from services that cater to consumers and involve the physical world, such as electric scooters and online ticketing, to offerings for business that are delivered virtually, including specialised web-based software and digitalinfrastructure. 硅谷领先的风投公司也在试图抓住新的机会。不止一家公司发现，科技行业的最佳盈利点正从迎合消费者并参与实体服务(如电动摩托车和在线售票)转向为企业提供虚拟交付服务，包括基于网络的专业软件和数字基础设施。 7.Much of the venture capital flowing in recent weeks has been aimed at deeply technical targets, such as Confluent, which manages corporate data. The firm raised $250m in April. Startups in telemedicine and online education are also doing well. And business is improving for some firms that had looked less resilient to the virus, such as Veem and Thumbtack. Firms want to move money cheaply and people stuck at home are planning to give their nests a makeover, driving demand for local services. 最近几周，许多风险资本的流动都瞄准了深层技术目标，例如负责管理企业数据的Confluent。该公司在4月份筹集了2.5亿美元。远程医疗和在线教育领域的初创企业也表现不错。一些看起来对病毒抵抗力较差的公司（比如Veem和Thumbtack）业务也正在好转。企业希望以更低的成本转移资金，而被困在国内的人们正计划改造他们的家，这推动了对当地服务的需求。 8.Looking further forward, the debate now revolves around how the pandemic will change Silicon Valley—and with it much of the tech industry. The crisis will accelerate existing trends. The Valley will continue tospread out, reckons Randy Komisar of Kleiner Perkins, another VC firm. Even before the virus hit, anexodusof sorts was under way.Exorbitantproperty prices, near-permanenttraffic jamsand thejarringnumber of homeless people have pushed a growing numbers to leave. 展望未来，现在的争论主题是此次疫情如何改变硅谷以及科技行业如何改变。危机将加速现有的趋势。另一家风投公司凯鹏华盈(Kleiner Perkins)的兰迪•科米萨(Randy Komisar)认为，硅谷将继续扩张。甚至在疫情之前，就已经有大批人离开。过高的房价、近乎永久的交通堵塞以及令人震惊的无家可归者人数，促使越来越多的人离开硅谷。 9.Startups have been moving away or have become “fully distributed”, with only their most important employees living in San Francisco and the rest spread across the world. Such dispersion is likely to speed up if a consequence of covid-19 is that working remotely becomes the norm. It looks likely. Big Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook and Google, are letting employees work from home until the end of the year. Twitter says they can do so indefinitely. 初创公司已经搬离或“全分布”，只有最重要的员工仍在旧金山，而其他员工则分布在世界各地。如果新冠病毒的后果之一是远程工作成为常态，这种扩散可能会加速。这看起来很有可能。包括Facebook和谷歌在内的大型硅谷公司，都允许员工今年年底前在家办公。Twitter表示，他们可以无限期地允许员工在家办公。 10.Another question is whether venture capital, Silicon Valley’s lifeblood, will go virtual and distributed as well. Some hope that the crisis will disrupt what Pete Flint of Nfx calls the “archaicworld of venture capital”. In April, his firm launched an online service where startups can input the information that investors want, from founders’ biographies to business plans, and then get a decision on funding within nine days. 另一个问题是，硅谷的命脉——风险投资是否也会走向虚拟化和分散化。一些人希望，这场危机将打破Nfx的皮特•弗林特(Pete Flint)所说的“陈旧的风险资本世界”。今年4月，他的公司推出了一项在线服务，初创公司可以在该服务上输入投资者想要的信息，从创始人传记到商业计划，然后在九天内得到融资。 11.Silicon Valley may no longer be the only place that matters as startupshunker downin cheaper locations with fewer distractions. Frontier is one such firm. It has decampedto Vancouver to build a marketplace for remote workers. It was founded a few months before the virus struck and got its first funding a few weeks ago. Elliot O’Connor and his co-founders areholed upin an Airbnb, using DoorDash and other delivery services to feed themselves. It feels like working in the proverbial garage, he says—not in the Valley, but of the Valley. 硅谷可能不再是唯一重要的地方，因为创业公司会选择更便宜、干扰更少的地方。Frontier就是一家这样的公司。该公司已迁至温哥华，为远程员工建立一个基地。它是在疫情爆发前几个月成立的，并在几周前获得了第一笔融资。艾略特·奥康纳(Elliot O 'Connor)和他的联合创始人躲在Airbnb里，靠Doordash和外卖充饥。他说，这感觉就像在谚语中说的在车库里工作——不是在硅谷上班，却是为硅谷工作。 精读解析 篇章结构 P1—P2：疫情之下，硅谷已经解雇了一批员工，而未来如何却是未知。 P3—P4：硅谷应对疫情的主要方式是解雇员工。 P5—P7：硅谷在积极寻找各种方式摆脱疫情：风投公司正在努力抓住新的机会，转移其投资目标。 P8—P11：疫情如何改变硅谷：加速现在大批逃离硅谷的趋势；企业正在：全分布；风投是否分散化和虚拟化。 重点单词 heartland/'hɑːtlænd/n.心脏地带;中心区域 【例句】 However, these habits contrast with those in America’s heartland. 然而，这些新颖的餐点与城市中心地带的习惯背道而驰。 lay-offn. 临时解雇期；失业期 【例句】 Research and analysis have been done on lay-off workers' attitude towards physical training and their physical training mode by means of index to literature, questionnaire and statistical data. 采用文献资料检索，问卷调查和数理统计等研究方法，对我国下岗工人体育态度和体育行为现状进行分析研究。 venture-capital风险资本 注：风险资本投资在那些被认为处于初期成长阶段的小公司上，资金由私人和机构投资者提供。 【例句】 Venture capital is a high risk investment. 风险投资是一种具有高风险的投资行为。 moneymenn. 投资者；金融家 【例句】 A class of moneymen who once only managed funds for buccaneering, rich families now count the world's largest public pension funds and endowments as clients. 曾经为喜欢投机的富翁家族理财的金融家，现今已让世界上最大的公共养老金，基金会成为其客户。 triage/'triːɑːʒ/ n. 分类；伤员验伤分类 【例句】 The military portable ECG for triage is a kind of minitype monitoring equipment for life information for the purpose that the ambulanceman carry through first aids in frontline. 便携低功耗军用分检心电图机是为救护人员在战场上进行火线抢救而设计的一款微型生命信息检测设备。 portfolio/pɔːt'fəʊlɪəʊ/ n. 公事包, 文件夹；投资组合；大臣或部长的职位或职责 注：投资组合指投资者持有的一组资产。一个资产多元化的投资组合通常会包含股票、债券、货币市场资产、现金以及实物资产如黄金等。 【例句】 So make sure to check your investment portfolio. 所以一定要记得管理好自己的投资项目。 plumber/'plʌmə/ n. 水管工；堵漏人员 【例句】 The plumber hasn't been yet. 水管工还没有来过。 cut back修剪；削减；（美）倒叙；[球]急忙返回 【例句】 Although those countries are planning to cut back production. 不过这些国家计划缩减石油生产量。 comeby vt. 得到；短暂拜访，顺道拜访 【例句】 Firm Numbers are hard to come by; as European Union (EU) citizens, the French can move to Britain without registering with any authority. 作为欧盟居民的法国人可以没有任何官方登记即可搬到英国去，所以明确的数目很难得到。 dismissal/dɪs'mɪsl/n.解雇, 免职, 开除 【例句】 The servant accepted his dismissal without any complaint. 那仆人毫无怨言地接受解雇。 edgeup渐升，微升；由边上慢慢靠拢 【例句】 To keep an edge up on the competition, you need to do new things and do things differently. 为了保持在竞争中的优势，你就要做一些新的或者是不同的事情。 denizen/'denɪz(ə)n/ vt. 给…居住权；移植n. 居民；外来语；外籍居民 【例句】 Maybe another planet's denizens also employ them. 而另一个星球的居民们也许使用这种物质。 dwell on详述；细想 【例句】 Let bygones be bygones. Don't dwell on the past too much. 让过去的事情过去吧，不要沉湎于过去。 scout/skaʊt/ n. 侦察机；侦察员；搜索，侦察vt. 侦察；跟踪，监视；发现 【短语】 scout around侦察 scout tower侦察哨 talent scoutn. 人才发掘者；伯乐 【例句】 The scouts went out during the night. 侦察兵在夜晚的时候出去。 scoop up用铲子取；兜接，舀上来；抢购一空 【例句】 The wheels scooped up stones which hammered ominously under the car. 车轮搅起的石块锤击车身，发出不祥的锤击声。 ride-hailing service打车服务 【例句】 An 8-minute field interview aims to examine applicants' proficiency on driving ability, ride-hailing order arrangement, and service standard. 8分钟的现场面试旨在测试申请人的驾驶能力、网约车顺序安排和服务标准的熟练程度。 rent out租出 【例句】 It's a British business that lets you rent out your driveway or parking space. 它是一家英国的公司，帮你出租自己的私人车道或者停车位。 scooter/'skuːtə/ n. 小轮摩托车；速可达；单脚滑行车；小孩滑板车 【例句】 This motor-scooter is my latest acquisition. 这辆摩托车是我最新购置的。 monopolize/məˈnɔpəˌlaɪz/vt.垄断, 独占;专卖, 专营 【例句】 I know this book has beenmonopolizingmy time, and you feel overworked and undervalued. 我知道这本书占用了我全部时间，你觉得工作太多又不被重视。 sweet spot蜜点；最有效点；最佳击球位置 【例句】 These weak points are minimized for applications that fall within the Rails sweet spot I described earlier, but they can be big issues at the fringes. 当应用程式满足上述的甜蜜点时，这些缺点可以被忽略不计，但是在极端情况却是很大的问题。 infrastructure/'ɪnfrəstrʌktʃə/n.基础设施; 基础结构 【例句】 And our ground infrastructure is at risk. 我们的地面基础设施处于危险之中。 spread out伸展; 延长; 分散 【例句】 He spread out the newspaper on the table. 他把报纸铺开放在了桌子上。 exodus/'eksədəs/n. 大批的离去 【例句】 There's a mass exodus of civilians underway. 现在正有大量百姓在撤离。 exorbitant/ɪg'zɔːbɪt(ə)nt/adj.过度的,极高的 【例句】 I will not pay such an exorbitant price for these shoes. 我不会为这些鞋子付这么高的价钱。 traffic jam交通阻塞，塞车 【例句】 They detoured around the traffic jam by heading south. 他们朝南绕过交通拥挤的人群。 jarring/'dʒɑ:riŋ/ adj. 刺耳的；不和谐的；辗轧的 【例句】 But it is still jarring to see just how profoundly, some countries are affected. 但是这对一些国家的影响到底有多大目前还不明朗。 archaic/ɑː'keɪɪk/ adj. 古时的,古代的,古老的；陈旧的, 已不通用的；古式的；古色古香的 【例句】 The language is archaic and the words hardly mean anything. 语言过于古老那些词语毫无意义。 hunker down渴望 【例句】 Many have fled the city. Others are hunkering down, trying to stay safe. 许多人逃离了这座城市。其他人则在观望，努力保持安全。 decamp/dɪ'kæmp/ vi. (突然而常为秘密地)(携某物)逃走；撤营,离开宿营地n. 逃走;撤营 【例句】 The finance industry, which contributes 7% of GDP, is in danger of decamping. 金融行业虽然贡献了7%的GDP，但是却存在撤出的风险。 hole up躲藏；把…监禁 【例句】 SWAT teams swarmed to a kosher market when two men holed up there after killing a policeman elsewhere. 特殊武器与战术部队涌到一处犹太认证的市场，两名男子躲在里面，此前在别处杀死了一名警员。
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