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大家好,周四经管~
今天的 SPEAKER 仍然是英音,大家厚住~~ SPEED 部分都是关于近期公布的诺贝尔奖的文章,OBSTACLE 关于美国经济。
PART I: SPEAKER Listen to a TED talk on
How to use experts and when not to
【REPHRASE 1】
【SPEECH - 14:37】
Source: TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/noreena_hertz_how_to_use_experts_and_when_not_to.html
PART II: SPEED Article 2: The Economics Nobel Highlights a Big Unanswered Question
By the Editors Oct 14, 2013
【TIME 2】
The awarding of a Nobel Prize to three economists with divergent views on the working of markets highlights a troubling truth about the state of the discipline: We still don’t know nearly enough about why the prices of stocks, bonds and other assets move the way they do.
If the economics profession wants to help the world avert - - or at least better survive -- financial crises, it will have to be more open to new ways of looking at this question.
The recipients of this year’s Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences -- Eugene F. Fama and Lars Peter Hansen of the University of Chicago and Robert J. Shiller of Yale University - - have all made important contributions to the understanding of financial markets. Fama demonstrated that markets are very good at processing new information quickly. Shiller showed that despite this, prices can get out of whack and stay there for long periods of time. Hansen provided tools to help figure out whether markets’ often odd behavior can happen in a world where investors are rational, or must be explained by human bias or some other malfunction.
Unfortunately, decades after the three economists had their groundbreaking insights, the crucial question remains unanswered: Can policy makers know with any certainty when markets are dangerously out of line, and is there anything they can do about it?
Central bankers still debate whether it’s possible to recognize asset bubbles when they occur, and whether they can or should be deflated. Regulators and bankers are still at odds over new financial products such as credit derivatives: Do they simply improve the market’s ability to process and reflect information, or do they also present new dangers of their own?
【TIME 2 ENDS – 287 WORDS】
【TIME 3】
This is a failure that left the world unprepared for the most recent financial crisis, and the economics profession has been far too complacent about it. Economists can’t be expected to predict the future. But they should be able to identify threatening trends, and to better understand the conditions that can turn a change in prices into a financial tsunami.
On the margins, economists are doing promising work, together with researchers from other disciplines such as physics. Some, taking their cue from the computer modeling that helps forecast events such as hurricanes, are trying to build more realistic models of markets and the economy that take into account the interactions of countless individuals. Others are looking at how investors with differing views, using leverage, can turn otherwise benign financial instruments into tools of disaster.
What’s amazing is that the largest and most prestigious universities aren’t placing more emphasis on such paradigm-shifting work. For young researchers trying to get published and land good jobs in academia, challenging the conventional wisdom -- and questioning the workings of a financial industry that provides lucrative backing to business schools -- can beperilous. The commanding heights are often occupied by tenured professors heavily invested in the status quo.
This year’s Nobel shows the economics discipline in all its frustrating, admirable splendor. With apologies to Harry Truman’s jaundiced view of economists, it’s only a matter of time before the joke starts making the rounds: Did you hear about the two economists who couldn’t agree on how markets work? Yeah, they won a Nobel for it.
Yet if better understanding of that question is possible, it will come only through trial and error, the positing and refuting of theories. This is exactly the kind of creative thinking and intellectual risk-taking that Fama, Hansen and Shiller engaged in. It’s also what the economics profession needs more of as it continues to try to understand financial markets and how they can go awry.
【TIME 3 ENDS – 324 WORDS】
Source: Bloomberg
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-14/the-economics-nobel-highlights-a-big-unanswered-question.html
Article 3: Why are some scientists unhappy with the Nobel prizes?
Oct 9th 2013 by T.C.
【TIME 4】
THE Nobel prizes in physiology or medicine, physics and chemistry are the most prestigious gongs in science. The annual announcement of the winners is a big event in the scientific calendar, as is the ritzy party that takes place on December 10th to honour the winners directly. But talk to scientists in private, and many will grumble. The Nobels are a great way to get people interested in science, they’ll say, and it’s good that we have them. But there have been strange omissions, with people who should have won a prize denied. The grumpiest complain that despite the glitz of the prizes, and the ensuing media attention in articles like this one, the rules that govern them no longer reflect the way modern science works. Why (besides jealousy, perhaps) are some scientists unhappy with the Nobels?
One reason is that the committees can often be slow to recognise achievement. Alfred Nobel, the dynamite magnate who set up the prizes in 1895 (pictured above), specified in his will that the prizes should reward work done in the previous year. But experience soon showed that this was risky, as medals were given out for discoveries that later proved questionable. So a degree of caution is probably advisable. Sometimes, though, it can be taken too far. Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, for instance, had to wait until 1983 to win a prize for work he had done in the 1930s on the structure of stars. And caution can sometimes lead to strange results. Albert Einstein never won a prize for his theory of relativity (although he did get one in 1921 for discovering the photoelectric effect). Even though some pretty suggestive evidence had been produced by Arthur Eddington in 1919, relativity—which has subsequently passed every experimental test ever thrown at it—was still considered somewhat risky and recondite.
【TIME 4 ENDS – 304 WORDS】
【TIME 5】
Another criticism concerns the tradition that no more than three people can share a prize. Science is rarely this clear-cut. Take this year’s physics prize, which recognised Peter Higgs for predicting the existence of the mass-bestowing particle that now bears his name. Dr Higgs was only one of several people with a claim. Two other teams—Robert Brout and François Englert, as well as Gerald Guralnik, Carl Hagen and Tom Kibble—submitted papers on the same idea to the same journal that published Dr Higgs’s work, all within a few months of each other. Science often works like this, with different people coming up with similar ideas at similar times. In the event, the committee decided to honour Dr Englert (Brout is dead, and therefore ineligible), whose paper was earlier than Dr Higgs’s but did not explicitly predict a particle, over Dr Guralnik and his collaborators, who were more comprehensive but published a few weeks later.
The rule of three also reinforces the idea that science is carried out by a handful of geniuses, toiling by themselves in ivory towers. If that was ever true, it isn’t now. Drs Higgs and Englert won this year because their prediction was confirmed by the discovery last year of the Higgs boson. It was uncovered by CERN, which runs the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest particle accelerator. The LHC cost billions to build and employs thousands of scientists and thousands more technicians to analyse the data it produces and keep its beams humming. The papers announcing the boson’s discovery had hundreds of authors. Nor is it just physics. Big science, complicated machines and papers with half a dozen authors or more are now the rule rather than the exception in many disciplines, and that trend will only intensify as science becomes both more specialised and more collaborative. There was speculation this year that the Nobel committee would break with another tradition, that organisations are not honoured in the science prizes, and give part of the physics gong to CERN itself. But they didn’t. The rules specified in Nobel's will have been reinterpreted in the past. It may be time to rejig them once again.
【TIME 5 ENDS – 362 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/10/economist-explains-8
Article 4: The Nobel prize is a three-way split
Oct 14th 2013 by C. R.
【WARM UP】
EARLIER today, it was announced that this year’s prize in economic sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to the American economists Eugene Fama, Lars Peter Hansen and Robert Shiller. All three were awarded the prize for their work on the “empirical analysis of asset prices”.
The news that Mr Shiller (pictured) won the prize will not be a surprise to many commentators. He was mentioned as a likely recipient for last year’s prize too, and was the bookmakers’ favourite to win this year’s. Fewer people thought that Mssrs Fama and Hansen would share the prize with him though, although economists have had all three on the short-list of deserving candidates.
Together, Mssrs Fama, Hansen, and Shiller make a seemingly contradictory group of people to win the prize together. While Mr Fama has been hailed as the father of the “efficient market” hypothesis, Mr Shiller is famous for knocking holes in the exact same theory.
Yet viewed in terms of their contributions they are a more cohesive group. They have all spent their careers, in one way or another, working on how the value of financial assets vary over time and on the methods by which this can be measured.
【202 WORDS】
【TIME 6】
In the 1960s, Mr Fama, based at the University of Chicago, showed that predicting how stock prices would change in the short run is extremely difficult. Market prices react surprisingly fast to new pieces of information, he suggested, and stock price movements are unpredictable, following a “random walk” pattern. Mr Shiller, based at Yale University, showed that what is true at very short horizons is not necessarily true over longer periods. Seminal work by Mr Shiller found that while asset prices are meant to be an aggregate of expected changes in pay-offs (like dividends in the case of stocks) dividends vary much less than stock prices. Interestingly, this makes future stock price movements easier to predict. When the price-dividend ratio is high prices tend to fall. Not only does this relationship hold for stocks, but for other assets such as bonds too.
Mr Hansen, a macroeconomist at the University of Chicago, also shared the prize for his development of statistical methods to test theories of asset pricing on empirical data. He is most famous (though perhaps that is not quite the right word) for developing the generalised method of moments estimation back in 1982. Mr Hansen deployed his innovation to analyse how asset pricing works, but it has since become a workhorse of econometric analysis.
The award of the prize acknowledged the wide impacts of their work outside their immediate field of study. Mr Hansen’s statistical models have been used in all sorts fields. The work of the other new laureates has also been cited as changing practice across finance industry, well beyond the confines of academic economics. For instance, Mr Fama’s conclusions about market efficiency have encouraged the emergence of so-called index funds in financial markets. Mr Shiller has applied his work by creating the monthly Case-Shiller index (with economist Karl Case), which many asset managers now find to be an indispensible tool to measure house prices in cities across America. The committee, to its credit, managed to recognise work that has been innovative within the ivory tower and relevant outside it.
【TIME 6 ENDS – 343 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economics-nobel-prize
PART III: OBSTACLE Article 5: Not open for business
America’s engines of growth are misfiring badly
Oct 12th 2013 |From the print edition
【REPHRASE 7】
START-UPS have always been at the heart of America’s economic success. Companies that are five years old or younger account for all of the country’s net job creation. They also account for the bulk of innovation. Established firms are usually in the business of preserving the old world; start-ups are under more pressure to come up with new ideas, and if they do so they usually create lots of new jobs. But these growth machines have broken down. America is not producing as many start-ups as it did a decade ago and those that have been created are providing fewer jobs—less than five each, compared with an historical average of about seven. Start-ups created 2.7m new jobs in the 2012 financial year compared with 4.7m in 1999.
The financial crisis clearly bears a lot of the blame for reducing America’s stock of capital and animal spirits. But it is only a partial explanation. The decline in the number of firms going public began in 2001. And these problems are continuing to delay the recovery despite the federal government pump-priming the economy and keeping interest rates near zero.
Three years ago John Dearie and Courtney Geduldig, who both worked for the Financial Services Forum, which represents America’s biggest financial institutions, came up with an inspired idea. Why not ask entrepreneurs themselves what is going wrong? Both big multinationals and established small firms have lots of representatives in Washington, DC. Entrepreneurs are too busy inventing their companies to spend time lobbying. The pair organised meetings and conducted lots of polls. Across a vast and diverse country they heard the same message from everyone they asked: entrepreneurship is in a parlous state. And everyone pointed to the same problems. The result is a new book, “Where the Jobs Are”, which should be dropped onto the heads of America’s squabbling politicians.
The first worry is over human capital. Entrepreneurs repeatedly complain that they cannot hire the right people because universities are failing to keep pace with a fast-changing job market. Small firms lack the resources to provide training and are consequently making do with fewer people working longer hours.
Exasperation turns to fury when it comes to immigration. Immigrants are responsible for launching about half the country’s most successful start-ups and producing a striking number of its patents. But the authorities do their best to drive them out of the country once they have been educated or to break their spirits on the visa treadmill. The system for skilled workers is skewed towards established firms because it demands guaranteed employment for a certain length of time and forces workers to leave the country if they lose their jobs. Start-ups are turning themselves upside down trying to deal with this problem. The authors came across two heterosexual men who were thinking of taking advantage of new gay-marriage rules and getting hitched so that the foreign-born one could stay in the country. They also found Max Marty, who is raising money to moor a ship in international waters off San Francisco. Foreign-born entrepreneurs will work in the floating office-park and make trips to Silicon Valley.
The second problem is the complexity and cost of government. Entrepreneurs the world over complain about regulations and taxes. But America’s have lots to gripe about: in 2009-11 the Obama administration issued 106 new regulations each expected to have an economic impact of at least $100m a year. Besides this business founders suffer from the constant political uncertainty generated by a combination of ambitious new legislation, such as Obamacare, and ideological trench warfare. The Vanguard Group, an asset-management firm, calculates that since 2011 Washington’s bickering politicians have imposed, in effect, a $261 billion uncertainty tax that has cost up to 1m new jobs.
The financial crisis has worsened the third problem: raising money. Over 70% of new businesses are launched using savings or assets—particularly houses. The crisis reduced the average net wealth of American households by about 40%. Business founders repeatedly mention other problems too. Venture capitalists are increasingly risk-averse. The Sarbanes-Oxley act imposes additional costs of $1m a year on public companies. Investors no longer bother with “growth stocks” because there is more money to be made in making lots of big trades in established firms. The dramatic decline in the number of firms going public since 2001 is worrying because, over the past four decades, more than 90% of jobs created by start-ups came into being after they went public.
Stop start-up
Congress tried to fix some of these problems with last year’s JOBS act: for example new firms can now apply for exemption from the most onerous parts of Sarbanes-Oxley for five years. But problems such as political uncertainty have worsened. Mr Dearie and Ms Geduldig suggest other, more ambitious reforms such as giving entrepreneurs a special status, under which their new firms would be subject to a flat 5% tax on their income for the first five years. But these reforms will make an absurdly labyrinthine tax system more complicated still. There is a stronger case for reducing regulations and taxes across the board: American firms now pay the highest corporation taxes in the world, for example. Start-ups would gain disproportionately from such reforms.
Fixing the small-business problem should be at the top of the political agenda. Some 22m workers are either unemployed or underemployed, or have given up looking for work. If it continues to generate new jobs at its current anaemic rate, America will not return to pre-recession employment levels until 2020. The country is lucky that entrepreneurship is part of its DNA. It seems perverse to put unnecessary obstacles in the path of people whose ambition is to found businesses and hire new workers.
【OBSTACLE ENDS – 952 WORDS】
Source: The Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21587778-americas-engines-growth-are-misfiring-badly-not-open-business
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