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Part I: Speaker
Article 1
ESL Podcast 945 – Using Electronics While Traveling [Rephrase 1]
[Dialog, 16min 4sec]
Transcript
Slow dialog: 1:18
Explanations: 2:53
Fast dialog: 14:31
Justin: Are you nearly packed?
Marsha: Almost. Let’s see, I have wall chargers for my cell phone and other devices, extra memory cards for my camera, and noise- canceling headphones for the airplane.
Justin: Oh, yeah, I forgot to pack my headphones. I’d better dig them out right now.
Marsha: I’ve also packed portable batteries for our devices in case we run out of power en route. I’ve also brought a power strip to use in our hotel room.
Justin: Why?
Marsha: Hotel rooms never have enough outlets.
Justin: That’s true. I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe I should bring one, too. Between the two of us, we have a lot of gadgets to plug in.
Marsha: And I’m bringing some cables in case we want to hook up our devices to the TV.
Justin: Don’t you think that’s overkill?
Marsha: Not at all. How else will we entertain ourselves for an entire week?
Script by Dr. Lucy Tse
Source: ESL
http://www.eslpod.com/website/show_podcast.php?issue_id=14328065
Part II: Speed Article 2 The perils of falling inflation [Time 2]
WHAT is a central banker’s main job? Ask the man on the street and the chances are he will say something like “keeping a lid on inflation”. In popular perception, and in their own minds, central bankers are the technicians who squeezed high inflation out of the rich world’s economies in the 1980s; whose credibility is based on keeping it down; and who must therefore always be on guard lest prices start to soar. Yet this view is dangerously outdated. The biggest problem facing the rich world’s central banks today is that inflation is too low.
The average inflation rate in the mostly rich-world OECD is 1.5%, down from 2.2% in 2012 and well below central banks’ official targets (typically 2% or just under). The drop is most perilous in the euro area: annual consumer-price inflation was only 0.7% in October, down from 2.5% a year ago. That is partly because commodity prices have been falling, but even if you strip out volatile food and fuel prices, the euro zone’s underlying or “core” inflation is 0.8%, as low as it has ever been since the single currency began. In America the headline rate in September was 1.2%, down from 2% in July—and the core rate, as defined by the Federal Reserve, has stubbornly stayed at 1.2%, close to its low point. There were inklings this week that some at the Fed want even looser monetary policy. True, things are improving in Japan, which seems finally to have escaped 15 years of falling prices, but even there underlying inflation is still only zero. The only big, rich economy where prices are rising at a clip is Britain, where overall inflation is 2.7%.
【282】
[Time 3]
These are depressing numbers. The most obvious danger of too-low inflation is the risk of slipping into outright deflation, when prices persistently fall. As Japan’s experience shows, deflation is both deeply damaging and hard to escape in weak economies with high debts. Since loans are fixed in nominal terms, falling wages and prices increase the burden of paying them. And once people expect prices to keep falling, they put off buying things, weakening the economy further. There is a real danger that this may happen in southern Europe. Greece’s consumer prices are now falling, as are Spain’s if you exclude the effect of one-off tax increases.
In America and northern Europe deflation is less of an immediate risk. Most economies are growing, albeit slowly. And surveys show consumers still expect medium-term inflation to be at or above the central banks’ target of 2%. But if an economy with high unemployment grows too slowly for too long, prices and wages are eventually likely to fall. In Japan deflation did not set in until seven years after the asset bubble burst.
Even without reaching that critical level, ultra-low inflation has costly side-effects. It tends to go with a weaker economy and higher-than-necessary joblessness: America’s unemployment rate is 7.2%, France’s 11.1% and Spain’s 26.6%. It also means that nominal incomes grow more slowly than they would if prices were rising faster. This makes both government and household debts harder to pay off. And low inflation makes it tougher for uncompetitive countries within a single currency to adjust their relative wages. With Germany’s inflation rate at 1.3%, Italian or Spanish firms need outright wage cuts to compete with German factories.
What’s more, too little inflation will undermine central bankers’ ability to combat another recession. Normally, during a period of growth bankers would raise rates. But policy rates are close to zero, and central bankers are reliant on “unconventional” measures to loosen monetary conditions, particularly “quantitative easing” (printing money to buy bonds) and “forward guidance” (promising to keep rates low for longer in a bid to prop up people’s expectations of future inflation). Should the economy slip back into recession, the central bankers will find themselves unusually impotent.
【363】
[Time 4]
An attitude for altitude
Most rich countries, then, would be better off if consumer prices were rising a bit faster. But what is “a bit”, and how should central bankers go about nudging prices upwards without losing control of them? Too often in the past a bit of inflation has turned into a lot—with nasty consequences. And it is not as if central bankers have been doing nothing: from the Federal Reserve to the Bank of Japan, their balance-sheets have exploded. That has pumped up asset prices, and leads many to fret that dangerously higher consumer-price inflation will eventually appear too.
One response might be to raise official inflation targets, say from 2% to 4%. But changing what has been the cornerstone of central banking for decades could easily prove counter-productive, by unnerving financial markets. Nor is such radicalism yet necessary. Central bankers’ first step should be to work harder at reaching their existing inflation goals.
The European Central Bank, which cut its main policy rate from 0.5% to 0.25% on November 7th, still has the most work to do. Bolder moves to loosen financial conditions, including broad bond-buying and a new cheap financing facility for banks, are needed. The ECB must also stress that its target is an inflation rate close to 2% for the euro zone as a whole, even if that means higher inflation in Germany.
The Fed, which is still buying $85 billion-worth of bonds a month, does not need to expand quantitative easing. But it can change its forward guidance. This week’s kerfuffle was based on the idea that the Fed should reduce the “threshold” below which unemployment must fall before rates are raised, lowering it from 6.5% to 6% or below (see article). That looks a good idea. The Fed’s boss-in-waiting, Janet Yellen, could introduce an inflation threshold of, say, 1.75%: prices would have to rise faster than that for her to raise rates.
None of this means that inflation will not one day be a risk. But it is not today’s problem. All the “sound money” fanatics who issued dire warnings about rampant inflation when central bankers began their unconventional measures might usefully reconsider whether Western policymakers did too little, not too much. Be afraid of inflation, by all means; but life can be even scarier when it sinks.
【387】
Source: the economist
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21589424-both-america-and-europe-central-bankers-should-be-pushing-prices-upwards-perils-falling
Article 3 U.S. jobs market seen taking a hit from government shutdown [Time 5]
(Reuters) - U.S. job growth likely slowed in October as a partial shutdown of the government delayed hiring and forced some workers to stay home, undermining the economy's fourth-quarter growth prospects.
Employers are expected to have added a modest 125,000 new jobs to their payrolls last month, according to a Reuters survey of economists, down from a gain of 148,000 in September.
While the hit from the 16-day federal government shutdown will be temporary, it will undercut a labor market that was already struggling. Job gains slowed to an average of 143,000 per month in the third quarter after increasing by a fairly brisk 182,000 in the April-June period.
As a result of the shutdown, the unemployment rate is forecast to climb to 7.3 percent from September's nearly five-year low of 7.2 percent.
Economists said the risk the government could default on its debt as lawmakers locked horns over the budget was another factor that may have created uncertainty that dampened hiring.
"Businesses are unlikely to have moved ahead with hiring plans given that the U.S. government was potentially on the brink of a default and the government shutdown," said Laura Rosner, an economist at BNP Paribas in New York.
Economists estimate the shutdown reduced payrolls by as much as 50,000 jobs last month. The Labor Department will release the closely watched report on Friday at 8:30 a.m. (1330 GMT).
The slowdown in hiring is likely to be concentrated in the private sector, where government contractors and others whose jobs depend indirectly on government funding were temporarily laid off.
In contrast, little impact is expected on government payrolls because the hundreds of thousands of federal workers furloughed received retroactive pay.
Some economists, however, think the consensus forecast might overestimate the actual private-sector damage. The Institute for Supply Management said on Tuesday that its gauge of the services sector survey increased in October, with services industry employment rising to a near-six-month high.
"There was a little bit too much hype surrounding the calculation of the damage the shutdown would do to the economy," said Adolfo Laurenti, deputy chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago.
"The economy was weakening before the shutdown, so the shutdown may not have helped in that respect. (But) if we look at the services ISM, chances are we are not going to get the sharp slowdown that many are expecting."
【393】
[Time 6]
SLOWER FOURTH-QUARTER GROWTH EYED
Still, even a payrolls count that beats market forecasts is unlikely to change expectations of slower economic growth in the fourth quarter, given that consumer spending slackened and business inventories rose in the July-September period.
Economists estimate the shutdown will shave as much as 0.6 percentage point off annualized fourth-quarter gross domestic product, through reduced government output and damage to both consumer and business confidence.
With fourth-quarter growth now expected to be below 2 percent, it is unlikely the Federal Reserve will curtail its bond-buying program before March of next year, even if October payrolls were to surprise on the upside, economists said.
"The Fed will wait for more data to assess the economy's resilience," said Michelle Girard, chief economist at RBS in Stamford, Connecticut.
While furloughed government workers probably had little direct impact on payrolls, they are expected to have pushed up the unemployment rate as they were without jobs during the Labor Department's survey period.
A reversal in state and local government employment after a burst of hiring will likely be one factor weighing on payrolls. State and local governments added a total of 67,000 jobs between August and September, the bulk of them in education - gains economists said were due to difficulties adjusting the data for seasonal fluctuations at the start of the new school year.
On the other hand, economists said surprise weakness in the leisure and hospitality industry, which lost the most jobs since late 2009 in September, likely reversed last month.
Retail employment will be watched closely after job growth slowed markedly in September from the solid gains seen for much of this year. The construction industry probably shed jobs after adding a solid 20,000 new positions in September.
Manufacturing employment also probably slipped.
While the work week is seen steady at 34.5 hours, the risk is high that it could have dipped because of furloughs among government contractors and other nonfederal workers affected by the shutdown. Hourly earnings are seen edging up 0.2 percent, in line with the recent trend.
【342】
Source: reuters
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/08/us-usa-economy-idUSBRE9A606020131108
Part III: Obstacle Article 4 Equality of Opportunity-Posner [Paraphrase 7]
Income inequality in the United States has grown substantially since the 1970s, to the point where today the bottom 20 percent of the nation’s households have 5 percent of total income, the top 10 percent about 50 percent, and the top 1 percent more than 20 percent. The question is whether such a high level of inequality is likely to reduce what is called “relative mobility,” or the likelihood that members of one generation of a family and members of the next generation will end up at different points in the income distribution. You are very likely to earn more than your father; the question is how likely are you to be higher (or lower) in the income distribution. If he is in the bottom quartile, for example, how likely are you to be in the next higher quartile?
Income inequality in the parents’ generation might be expected only to create income inequality in the next generation. Whether income inequality will affect relative mobility will depend on why income inequality in the current population is so high. One possibility is that, because of increased assortative mating as a result of declining discrimination and of the efficiency of online search for potential mates, there are greater differences in IQ across families than there used to be. Another possibility—closer to a certainty—is that as a result of automation in the broadest sense, the economic returns to IQ have risen relative to the returns to strength and stamina, which are the qualities important to such vocations as factory work, construction, mining, and farming.
The combination of assortative mating with higher returns to IQ could have dramatic effects on relative mobility if the effect was to insulate to a significant degree a prosperous family’s children from economic risk. And it may be. The adults in high-IQ families are disproportionately represented in the jobs (professional, managerial, financial, and so forth) that pay well, and their income can and often is used to give their children a boost—for example in the form of payment of tuition to high-quality (and very expensive) private schools, payment to tutors, a variety of other educational enrichments, and entry into high-quality colleges without need for their children to borrow to finance college (or graduate or professional school) and thus assume debt. Colleges like to admit kids from high-income families, seeing such kids as future donors. And high-IQ parents are likely to produce high-IQ children, further enhancing the children’s attractiveness to first-rate colleges. These factors, which loom larger the greater the inequality in the income distribution, because that inequality creates a highly affluent tier of families (a proximed by the income shares of the top 10 percent and within that group the top 1 percent) are likely to reduce relative mobility, by securing a disproportionate number of the top college and university admissions and top jobs for children of the intellectual-economic elite.
These factors can be offset to a significant extent by immigration, because immigrants tend to be more ambitious, bold, and determined than the average member of their nation of origin; refugee immigrants are often drawn from the elite of their nation of origin. First-generation immigrants tend not to have a high income, but to endow their children with the attitudes and abilities that enable the children to achieve economic success. Certainly the United States has benefited greatly in recent
years from immigration from countries like China, India, and South Korea. But relative mobility that is the consequence of the artificially depressed income of first-generation immigrant families does nothing to promote relative mobility for the children of low-income native-born Americans.
A 2011 study by Scott Winship for the Brookings Institution reports that the likelihood that an American will rank higher in the income distribution than his parents is lower than in most other wealthy countries. The report states: “If being raised in the bottom fifth [of the income distribution] were not a disadvantage and socioeconomic outcomes were random, we would expect to see 20 percent of Americans who started in the bottom fifth remain there as adults, while 20 percent would end up in each of the other fifths. Instead, about 40 percent are unable to escape the bottom fifth. This trend holds true for other measures of mobility: About 40 percent of men will end up in low-skill work if their fathers had similar jobs, and about 40 percent will end up in the bottom fifth of family wealth (as opposed to income) if that’s where their parents were.” Income inequality is greater in the United States than in our peer countries, and may be responsible for our lower relative mobility. In the limit, an income distribution that produces a very wealthy top tier of earners and a very large bottom tier of poor or low-income families may reduce movement between the tiers in subsequent generations.
Becker points to Headstart and other government programs as possible counters to the effect of income inequality on economic opportunities for children of families that are rank low in the income distribution. This raises the question whether there may be a more efficient way of dealing with the problem of relative mobility than spending government money. A natural starting point would be to increase the very low federal income tax rate (15 percent) on dividends and capital gains, which is a significant factor in the increase in income inequality.
【898】
Source：becker-posner-blog
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2013/10/equality-of-opportunity-posner.html
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