【每日阅读训练第四期——速度越障24系列】【24-04】经管

杀G给猴看

Official Weibo:  http://weibo.com/u/3476904471

PART I: SPEAKER

Article 1:
Listen to a TED talk on A new  kind of labour market.
【REPHRASE 1】

[Dialog: 12:20]
Source: TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/wingham_rowan_a_new_kind_of_job_market.html

PART II: SPEED

Article 2: Who are the "squeezed middle"?
Aug 18th 2013, by J.C.

【TIME 2】
POLITICIANS love to talk about the middle. Barack Obama has said he wants an economy that grows "not from the top down but from the middle out". David Cameron promises that his government will support Britain's "strivers". The fashion has spread beyond the rich world: last year's election in Mexico saw much talk of the new clase media. But defining these categories is tricky: in a radio interview in 2010 Ed Miliband, the leader of Britain's Labour Party, stumbled over his new catch-phrase—“the squeezed middle”—when asked exactly who was in it. Despite the ridicule that this attracted at the time, the description is now commonplace, and is likely to be a feature of the run-up to Britain's 2015 general election. So just who is in the middle, and what is squeezing them?
When talking about the squeeze, most commentators refer not just to those exactly in the middle of the income distribution. They tend to take in those who are neither so poor that they depend overwhelmingly on government handouts, nor overtly prosperous. The Resolution Foundation, a British think-tank that has led the debate on stagnant wages, has concentrated on the 40% of the population that earns less than the median wage but more than the bottom 10%. This group, it argues, has particularly suffered from the stagnation of wages and the withdrawal of in-work benefits in recent years.
【TIME 2 ENDS -- 235 WORDS】

【TIME 3】
The plate tectonics of the labour market are responsible for the squeeze. In the early 2000s, in both& Britain and America growth and wages peeled apart. The economy kept growing, but median earners did not feel the benefit. Partly, this was a product of globalisation; the share of new wealth going to employees (rather than shareholders, or back into companies as reinvestment) declined as the quest for profits intensified. But the decline of “middle class” jobs is the most important explanation. On both sides of the Atlantic, automation and outsourcing have destroyed administrative and, particularly, blue-collar industrial jobs. The recent bankruptcy of Detroit is a revealing example of the shift. These jobs were relatively well-paid and secure. Some of those who lose their jobs successfully retrain and join growing service-sector industries as well-paid professionals. But others struggle to do so, and find insecure, low-wage jobs at the other end of the service economy, as call-centre workers or cleaners, for example. So while the overall economy keeps growing, the rewards increasingly accrue to those at the top, and wages for those on low-to-middle incomes stagnate relative to prices.
So what is to be done about the squeezed middle? In the past, politicians mitigated mediocre incomes with cheap debt and benefits. The deregulation of the mortgage market in America—which led to the growth of sub-prime debt that helped to create the conditions for the 2007-08 credit crunch and ensuing downturn—was a classic wheeze to make those on low incomes feel better off than they really were. In Britain the Labour government supplemented low pay with tax credits—by 2008, Leviathan was slipping the "middling" 40% a top-up worth 3.7% of national income every year, the Resolution Foundation calculates. A more sustainable solution might be to support the vocational training and high-tech start-ups that create good, new middle-class jobs. Vocational and technical skills in Britain and America lag behind those in economies such as Germany and Sweden where, not coincidentally, the middle is looking rather less squeezed.
【TIME 3 ENDS -- 341 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/08/economist-explains-10


Article 3: Explaining the Pain in Emerging Markets
By Roben Farzad  August 29, 2013

【TIME 4】
It’s been a tough summer for emerging markets, amid a year that has cut more than $1 trillion from the value of their stock markets. Currencies and bourses in India, Indonesia, and the Philippines keep getting hammered. Here’s what emerging-markets gurus are saying about the situation.
Arjun Jayaraman of Causeway Capital Management says that fears of rising interest rates in the U.S. are behind the selloff. He says the carry trade of borrowing in U.S. dollars and lending in higher-rate currencies in emerging markets provided essential support for those economies since the financial crisis. “Then, at the slightest hint that U.S. rates are going up,” he says, “we have seen a tremendous unwinding of that trade. Unfortunately, this is a situation that feeds on itself as very few buyers of emerging-market currencies emerge due to the risk of the trade. You can lose an entire year’s worth of carry in one or two days of negative currency movements.”
Charles de Vaulx of International Value Advisers says the “problems are the result of loose monetary policies in the U.S. and other countries (like U.K., Switzerland, and now Japan) that have created mini credit bubbles in many emerging countries. Inflation and misallocation of capitation has resulted from that.” He also cites China’s slowdown and a growing realization that many emerging-market stocks, such as Samsung (005930:KS) and PetroChina (PTR), are plays on the global economy—not on local growth.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 236 WORDS】

【TIME 5】
Even if emerging economies were prime beneficiaries of U.S. monetary largesse, their weakening growth and falling currencies could now hurt the U.S. economic recovery. “Longer-term we should care, due to the feedback loop to the U.S.,”Mohamed El-Erian, chief executive officer and co-chief investment officer of Pimco(ALV:GR), the world’s biggest manager of bond funds, said in a radio interview today on Bloomberg Surveillance with Tom Keene. “You will see a tightening of financial conditions to markets. You will see growth more challenged, and the ability of U.S. companies to get top-line growth from emerging markets is going to be less going forward.”
Now throw in worries about an attack on Syria and a broader destabilizing of the Middle East—the likes of which have already sent West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices to a two-year high. Brent crude may “spike briefly” to $150 a barrel if a U.S.-led attack on Syria sparks further conflict in the Middle East and leads to supply disruptions, Société Générale (GLE:FP) said in a Wednesday report.
While Syria itself isn’t a major oil producer, its ally Iran is: One-fifth of global supply gets transported through the Strait of Hormuz. A spillover of instability into the Suez Canal or Syria neighbors Iraq and Turkey are also of concern. Higher prices are disproportionately painful for key emerging markets that are net importers of the commodity, such as India, Indonesia, Turkey, and Thailand—particularly as they grapple with weakening currencies.
【TIME 5 ENDS – 241 WORDS】

【TIME 6】
Causeway’s Jayaraman says the prospect of war or military action has increased global uncertainty and led to the selloff of risky assets such as emerging markets. “We do understand why some markets such as Turkey and the Middle East have sold off due to their proximity to the conflict,” he says. “But the broader-based emerging-market selloff, as it relates to Syria, seems unwarranted.”
Ed Yardeni of Yardeni Research says that fears of the Fed, Syria, and crude oil prices only partially explain emerging markets’ swoon. He calculated that the projected earnings of the companies in the MSCI Emerging Markets composite index peaked at a record high two years ago and has been trending lower ever since. Analysts’ consensus estimates for both 2013 and 2014 also are falling, and at a faster pace in recent weeks. And net earnings revisions have been negative for the past 30 months. Yardeni says “the big story” is the collapse of emerging markets’ projected profit margins, to 6.5 percent from around 8.5 percent since early 2011—likely due to rising labor costs and a recent increase in oil prices.
For all the attention placed on threats, Mark Mobius, a longtime emerging-markets cheerleader, would rather focus on how developing economies are still forecast to grow about five times faster than developed markets in 2013. He likes how emerging markets generally have large and growing foreign exchange reserves and debt levels relative to their gross domestic product typically much lower than that of many developed markets. “There are always risks, and unexpected shocks could occur,” he writes. “But I still believe in the comeback story.”
【TIME 6 ENDS – 268 WORDS】
Source: Businessweek
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-08-29/explaining-the-pain-in-emerging-markets#r=nav-r-story

PART III: OBSTACLE

Article 4: On "bullshit jobs"
Aug 21st 2013 by R.A.


【WARM UP】
ANTHROPOLOGIST David Graeber has written an amusing essay on the nature of work in a modern economy, which seems to involve lots of people doing meaningless tasks they hate:
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshalled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
It is not the case, he writes, that people have to keep working to produce the consumer goods for which the rich world hungers. Outrageously, meaningless employment—in what he calls "bullshit jobs"—is concentrated in “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers”:
In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector...
Why in the world would firms spend extraordinary amounts of money employing people to do worthless tasks (especially when they've shown themselves to be exceedingly good at not employing people to do worthless tasks)? Says Mr Graeber:
The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the ‘60s).
I am immediately bursting with questions. Such as, should we conclude that protesters around the world—in Brazil, India, North Africa, Turkey—are in fact too happy? How does the ruling class co-ordinate all this hiring, and if much of the economy's employment is useless in the first place why not just keep them on during recessions?
But there is actually an important point here. The place to start is to recognise that, romance aside, many of the industrial jobs that have been automated away were incredibly tedious and unpleasant for those doing them. The development of assembly line processes contributed to rising worker wages in part because of increased productivity...but also because employers were tired of training workers only to lose them once they realised they'd be affixing Tab A to Frame B, repeatedly, all day long.
Employers had to retain such workers—had to pay them a wage sufficient to keep them on the job despite its dreadful tedium—because the machines of the era lacked the manual dexterity to complete the required tasks, and so a line of human machines was the only way to make the highly productive assembly-line system work. As technology evolved, however, automating routine tasks became ever easier. And the high wages needed to compensate labourers for the soul-crushing repetitiveness of their work gave employers every incentive to automate routine tasks as soon as it was technically feasible.
Perhaps you see where this is going.
【620 WORDS】

【PARAPHRASE 7】
As technology has improved, it has become ever easier to dispense with human labour in mechanical processes. There are still jobs where a very high level of physical dexterity and task flexibility is needed—in construction, for example, or janitorial work—and people continue to do those jobs. But it is not surprising that employment growth has shifted elsewhere. And administrative jobs are the modern equivalent of the industrial line worker.
Over the past century the world economy has grown increasingly complex. The goods being provided are more complex; the supply chains used to build them are more complex; the systems to market, sell and distribute them are more complex; the means to finance it all is more complex; and so on. This complexity is what makes us rich. But it is an enormous pain to manage. I'd say that one way to manage it all would be through teams of generalists—craftsman managers who mind the system from the design stage right through to the customer service calls—but there is no way such complexity would be economically workable in that world (just as cheap, ubiquitous automobiles would have been impossible in a world where teams of generalist mechanics produced cars one at a time).
No, the efficient way to do things is to break businesses up into many different kinds of tasks, allowing for a very high level of specialisation. And so you end up with the clerical equivalent of repeatedly affixing Tab A to Frame B: shuffling papers, management of the minutiae of supply chains, and so on. Disaggregation may make it look meaningless, since many workers end up doing things incredibly far removed from the end points of the process; the days when the iron ore goes in one door and the car rolls out the other are over. But the idea is the same.
One question is why today's workers aren't rewarded with high wages for their suffering. And one possible answer is that, well, they are. Real wages for today's clerical workers are far higher than they were for manufacturing workers a century ago, and the work, for all its tedium, probably isn't nearly as unpleasant. Administrative workers get to sit down in climate-controlled offices, tweeting and playing fantasy football on their desktop when time allows. If firms had to pay more to get a body in the deskchair, they would.
Technology continues to improve, however. Just as robots became ever better at various manual tasks over the past century—and were therefore able to replace human labour in a growing array of jobs, beginning with the most routine—computer control systems are able to handle ever more of the work done by human administrative workers. Jobs from truck driver to legal aid to medical diagnostician to customer service technician will soon be threatened by machines. Starting with the most routine tasks. Human labour will not be eliminated entirely from these sectors. Jobs that require a particularly high level of task flexibility, or creativity, or empathy may continue to employ people (for a while). Yet most office jobs will eventually go the way of the dodo.
And at that point advanced economies may find it necessary to address what is really the central complaint in Mr Graeber's essay. The issue is not that jobs used to have meaning and now they don't; most jobs in most periods have undoubtedly been staffed by people who would prefer to be doing something else. The issue is that too little of the recent gains from technological advance and economic growth have gone toward giving people the time and resources to enjoy their lives outside work. Early in the industrial era real wages soared and hours worked declined. In the past generation, by contrast, real wages have grown slowly and workweeks haven't grown shorter.
The development of large-scale technological unemployment or underemployment, however, would force rich societies to revisit a system that primarily allocates purchasing power via earned wages. And that, in turn, could allow households to get by or even thrive while working many fewer hours than is now typically the case—albeit through a pretty hefty level of income redistribution. They would then be free to write poetry or tutor disadvantaged children, though we shouldn't be surprised if most use their new leisure to spend more time with a beloved video game.
We can't be certain that the robots are coming for all our jobs. Disemployment in administrative jobs could create new, and perhaps highly remunerative, work in sectors or occupations we can't yet anticipate. If we're lucky, that work will be engaging and meaningful. Yet there is a decent chance that "bullshit" administrative jobs are merely a halfway house between "bullshit" industrial jobs and no jobs at all. Not because of the conniving of rich interests, but because machines inevitably outmatch humans at handling bullshit without complaining.
【PARAPHRASE ENDS – 812 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/08/labour-markets-0?spc=scode&spv=xm&ah=9d7f7ab945510a56fa6d37c30b6f1709

dericklx4la

1'29''
2'12''
1'32''
1'47''
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5'20''

olivia瓜瓜

首页啊啊 啊 晚上回来走起

Time1：1m33s

&what is the “squzeed middle” the people who are  not so poor nor overtly property.

Time2: the labor market structures areresponsible for the squeeze.

     And the government should take more credit and mortage methods toimprove middle’s condition,because

      it’s middle condition correlated with thevocational and technical skills .

Time3:1m40s

  & Emerging market is suffered drop value because of the mini creditsbubbles.

Time4：1m26s

   & In the long run, the loss of emrgingmarket will deter the ameican ecnomic from recovery.

   & Duethe attack on syria ,the crude oil price rise up to the two years top.

Time5: 1m45s

  & The war bring emerging market may uncertainty, but it also lookforward to a comback story .

Obstacle:

Warm up: 3m54s  

Ascholor predicted that the techonogy can make the developed country achieve a15-hours work week , but the truth isn’t so .

Why in the world people have do manytedious work ? too much free time cant make people happy.  And many machine need human to function.

4m52s :

  & there still have physical dexilyty workbut the employment growth have shifed to elsewhere.

& Over the past century, the work became nore complex, and the bestway to solve this problem is to special the work.

  &The minute division work becomes rather tediousand worth low because each one only need an idea.& The technology advancement didn’t make more happy work orshorter work time.

      

  

lisa_chan

Time2 1‘19 [235] Who is the “middle”? Some examples of politicians using“middle”. But what is the definition of this middle. A British think-tankorganization defined that the “middles” are 40% of the population who earn lessthan the median wage but more than 10% of the bottom.   

Time3 2‘10 [341] Why the middle is squeezed? The automation andoutsourcing.  So what to do to help themiddle? Some strategies in the US and Britain.

Time4 1‘28 [236] Some emerging markets are experiencing pain. The fearof rising interest in the US is the selloff behind the scene. Loose monetarypolicies are the causes.  

Time5 1‘22 [241] US cares about the emerging markets. 然后开始说叙利亚了，我就没看懂了…

回头又读了一次看懂了，说叙利亚的不稳定局势会影响到中东原油价格，进而影响新兴市场的走向。

Time6 1‘40 [268] continue to discuss how the instability in Middle Eastwill impact emerging markets. But people still have confidence.

Paraphrase7 5‘07” [812]

1. As technology improves, more jobs are autoed by machines. But thereare still jobs that need human to finish. Administrative jobs are the old timeindustrial jobs.

2. Because the business and trading system are complicated,administrative jobs are highly specialized. Pay raised compare to old timeindustrial jobs too.

3. Technology will continue to improve, But the point is that technologydoesn’t give people more time to enjoy their life.

4. Conclusion is that people will always complain, but machines don’tcomplain.

f0070515

占个座先~
time1  1:20
introduce the phrase the squeezed middle,giving the origin and explaination
time2  1:48
the cause of the "squeeze the middle" (The plate tectonics, globalisation,decline of “middle class” jobs)
how the authories may cope with "squeeze the middle"
time3  1:22
the  causes of current movement in emerging markets
time4  1:32
the weakening growth emerging economies and falling currencies could hurt U.S. economic recovery.
the effect of conflict in syria and middle east towards oil price
higher price of oil are harmful for emerging markets
time5  1:34
the conflicts in Syria and Middle East contribute to global instability and lead to the selloff risky asset in emerging market
what threats and risks emerging economies are confront with
cheerleader's opitimtic view about emerging market
OBSTACLE
WARM UP  3:19
the rapid development of technology give workers more pressure.
productive job are more automative
the reason why employ so many people for worthless job
many industrial jobs which are well automated were incredibly tedious and unpleasant for workers, leading to rising workers' wage
why employer have to retain the such workers.
PARAPHRASE 7 4:29
human labour will get free from mechanical processes, but there are still jobs needed.
although complexity of world economy  bring benefits to human kind, it brings enormous pain to manage
the efficient way to doing things is specialisation and division
the reason why workers are not reward with high wages
many workers' jobs will be replaced by automated system,but some job in terms of high level of taski flexibility or creativity will remain
coming effects of robots for manual jobs are uncertain.

angel0428

1’30 Politicians love to talk about themiddle. The middle class refer not exactly the middle of the incomedistribution.

2’35 The structure of the labour market isthe cause of the squeeze. Several efforts should be taken for squeezed middle,eg. Less debt and benefits, vocational training and start-up that create jobs.

1’30 In the emerging market, the value of stockmarket has been cut down $1 trillion. Reasons: 1) risk of raising interestrate; loose monetary policies in US and many other countries.

1’39 Emerging Economics got benefits fromthe loss monetary policies, while the weakening growth and falling currencieshurt U.S. economic recovery. The attacks in Middle East will increase the oilprice, and that will hurt the emerging markets.

1’40 As the global uncertain increased, therisk assets such as emerging market sold out. EY pointed out another cause ofswoon of emerging market is that projected profit margins collapse. While, MMbelieve, in the long-term, the emerging market will recovery and achieve bettergrowth than developed market.

Totally 11’20

Warm: DG pointed out that people are doingmeaningless job that they hate. While the fact is that these meaningless jobsshould not be called the “bullish jobs”. Automotive machines replaced the industrywork

Time 7: The improvement of technology madethe work easier. However, people employees are still needed.

The economy becomes more complex, andbusiness should be split into tasks.

Machine will finally take over all “bullishjobs” without complain.

maskerbai

英音很不习惯啊...
第一篇文章 1'45''+2'50''
第二小段看了好长时间... 主要讲的是怎么划分中产阶级以及中产阶级怎么样会被squeezed
第二篇文章 1’40+1’55+1’54
怎么感觉越读慢了... 但是好像比原来能看懂的多了 速度神马的 慢慢在练上去吧
这篇文章讲了emerging market的不好的前景与现状 第一段提到了美国的汇率对market的影响 后面也提出了石油国家对market的影响

obstacle 3'52+4'05
The article first talked about what is "bullshit jobs" and why they exsits. Then it talked about job specialized trends and thus more robots might replace people's job. Some Admin job might also become bullshit jobs in the future.

yudihelisa

1'30
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1'40

pgjason

1'23"
1'47"
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3'14"
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Because more productive tasks are automated and technology has improved, more jobs will be replaced by robots or computers.
This trend will lead to unemployment or a situation that a job to monitor those electronics.

Thanks for preparing articles.

m1nt

妈呀。。。。london english。听多了美音突然听英音很不习惯