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How many really suffer as a result of labor marketproblems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policyquestions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree ofhardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it didin the 1930’s when most of the unemployed were primary breadwinners, whenincome and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, andwhen there were no countervailing social programs for those failing in thelabor market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, thegrowing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and improvedsocial welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated the consequences ofjoblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions ofhardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the minimum wagelevel, the overwhelming majority are from multiple-earner, relatively affluentfamilies. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly orhandicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the laborforce, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate indicator of labormarket pathologies.
Yet there are also many ways our social statisticsunderestimate the degree of labor-market-related hardship. The unemploymentcounts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so lowthat their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolongedunemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support.Since the number experiencing joblessness at some time during the year isseveral times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a resultof forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even thoughonly a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every personcounted in the monthly unemployment tallies, there is another working part-timebecause of the inability to find full-time work, or else outside the laborforce but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our country have alwaysfocused on the elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so thatthe dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does not necessarily meanthat those failing in the labor market are adequately protected.
As a result of such contradictory evidence, it isuncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of labor marketproblems number in the hundreds of thousands or the tens of millions, and,hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be counteredby job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement inthis debate—that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics areinadequate for one their primary applications, measuring the consequences oflabor market problems.
2. Theauthor uses “labor market problems” in lines 1-2 to referto which of the following?
(A) The overallcauses of poverty
(B)Deficiencies in the training of the work force
(C) Traderelationships among producers of goods
(D) Shortagesof jobs providing adequate income（D）
(E) Strikes andinadequate supplies of labor
为什么是D，通过哪里的定位推断出来的？谢谢了
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发表于 2011-3-5 20:45:40
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发表于 2011-3-7 11:46:37
