揽瓜阁俱乐部第四期 Day7 2021.01.24
【社会科学-医学】 The rising prevalence of dementia is a global emergency：It requires more research, better provision for long-term care and changes in individual behaviour (The Economist - 898字 长精读）
Of all the troubles facing the world, the rising prevalence of dementia might seem among the less pressing. The reason behind it—longer lifespans—is to be cheered; it does not advance at the speed of a viral infection but with the ponderous inevitability of demographic change; and its full effects will not be felt until far into the future. But the reality is very different. As our special report this week makes clear, dementia is already a global emergency. Even now, more people live with it than can be looked after humanely. No cure is in the offing. And no society has devised a sustainable way to provide and pay for the care that people with it will need.
“Dementia” is an umbrella term for a range of conditions, with a variety of causes, of which the most common is Alzheimer’s disease, accounting for 60-80% of cases. It usually starts with forgetfulness and a mild loss of cognitive functioning. But as it advances, people lose the ability to look after themselves. Many require round-the-clock care long before they die. It does not just affect the elderly, but they are much more likely to have it—and life expectancy globally has climbed from not much more than 30 a century ago to over 70 now, and over 80 in rich countries. By some estimates, 1.7% of 65- to 69-year-olds have dementia and the risk of developing it doubles every five years after that. At present, about 50m people around the world have the condition, a number expected to rise to 82m by 2030 and 150m by 2050. Most of the new cases are in the developing world, where populations are rising and ageing.
The problems these numbers will bring everywhere have already been felt in countries where people are older, and especially acutely during lockdowns—witness the difficulty of looking after people with dementia in their own homes, and the large numbers in overstretched care homes who receive little individual attention. As families shrink, single children and grandchildren will struggle to cope with their old folk. Already, dementia care has had a knock-on effect on general health care. Before the pandemic as many as a quarter of beds in British hospitals were occupied by people with dementia. There was nowhere else for them to go.
Not all the news is bad. Recent research has shown that behaviour such as smoking less, exercising more and losing weight in middle age has reduced the risk of dementia among old people in some Western countries in the past 30 years. And America’s Food and Drug Administration has promised to decide by March 2021 whether to license a drug said to be the first to stem cognitive decline in Alzheimer’s patients. But the risk of dementia still seems to be rising in much of the world and any new therapy in the foreseeable future is likely to benefit only some patients partially.
That is why governments should act now to lessen the social and economic harm from the growing prevalence of dementia. The first step is to recall the urgency with which many were promising to tackle the problem just a few years ago—in 2013, for example, when David Cameron, then Britain’s prime minister, used the rotating chairmanship of the g8 to convene a “dementia summit”, which promised to fund research with the goal of finding a “disease-modifying treatment” by 2025. Instead, funding for work on dementia has lagged far behind that for cancer or coronary heart disease. And as the pandemic hampers or prevents clinical trials and research, and sucks resources away from other areas, dementia risks again being left behind.
Governments also need to think about long-term care for people with dementia. The question that is most often asked is how to pay for it. Japan’s compulsory long-term-care insurance scheme, requiring everyone aged 40-65 to pay a premium, seems attractive, as it avoids penalising the young. But it is not self-financing. The increasing burden there as elsewhere will fall on individuals and the taxpayer.
And an even more fundamental question than who pays for care is: who will do it? Undertaken with humanity and dignity, it is extremely labour-intensive. Technology can help lighten the load—using remote monitoring to let people stay at home and, perhaps in future, robots to perform some basic tasks (see article). But looking after people with dementia requires people. The job is usually classified as low-skilled and is often poorly paid. In fact it demands huge reserves of patience, empathy and kindness. It should be better rewarded and more highly regarded even though that would add to the bill. In countries such as Japan and Britain, with acute shortages of care-workers, immigration will have to be made easier for those willing and able to do it.
Lastly, evidence suggests that as many at 40% of cases of dementia can be delayed or averted by changing behaviour earlier in life. The trouble is that public-health campaigns have a patchy record and they do nothing for dementia’s most intractable pre-existing condition—old age. No cure, insufficient financing and a tricky public-health message: perhaps that is enough to make you throw up your hands in despair. Instead, however, it only underlines how the solutions to dementia, like the disease itself, will take decades to unfold. It is yet another reason to start working on them right away.
Source: The Economist
【社会科学-企业】 Did Tough Antitrust Enforcement Cause the Diversification of American Corporations? (WSY - 842字 长阅读)
A central question in financial economics remains unresolved: What caused the rise and decline of corporate diversification during the last four decades? Even though a number of plausible explanations have been advanced, there is little more than anecdotal support for or against any of them.
One of the most venerable and enduring of these explanations is the “antitrust hypothesis.” According to this explanation, firms diversified in the 1960s because antitrust authorities prevented them from expanding in their home industries. When antitrust policy became less stringent in the 1980s, firms were able to expand horizontally, leading them to de-diversify and refocus on their core business. Stigler (1966) was perhaps the first to present evidence on the antitrust hypothesis, concluding that, “[t]he 1950 Merger Act has had a strongly adverse effect on horizontal mergers by large companies.” More recently, Shleifer and Vishny ((1991), p. 50) speculated that
The most likely reason for diversification [in the 1960s] was the antitrust policy that, after the Celler-Kefauver Act passed in 1950, turned fiercely against mergers between firms in the same industry. Unable to acquire businesses related to their own, flush with cash, and facing a favorable market for equity issues, acquirers bought companies outside their industries.
The view that antitrust contributed substantially to corporate diversification also enjoys abundant anecdotal support.1 But it has its share of skeptics, including Scherer (1980) and Comment and Jarrell (1995), who note that diversification appears to be common in countries with significantly different antitrust policies than the United States.
The purpose of this paper is to make an empirical assessment of the antitrust hypothesis. Antitrust enforcement in the 19605 focused on how a merger would affect market concentration. Consequently, large horizontal mergers were more likely to have been challenged than small horizontal mergers. Diversifying mergers, in contrast, were unlikely to have been challenged regardless of size. If the antitrust hypothesis is correct, then, acquisition-minded firms avoided large horizontal acquisitions, and either i) substituted into small horizontal acquisitions and mergers with firms of any size in unrelated industries, or ii) dropped out of the merger market altogether. In either case, there should have been a relatively high fraction of diversification acquisitions among large mergers and a relatively low fraction among small mergers during the conglomerate merger wave of the 1960s and 1970s. This implication does not find support in a sample of 549 mergers by NYSE firms during 1968: diversification was no more common among large mergers than small mergers. The finding is robust to a number of different measures of diversification, and also holds for samples of mergers during 1971 and 1974.
In addition to the statistical evidence, I examine diversification patterns in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, and France in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although none of these countries had legal restrictions on horizontal growth comparable to those in the United States, they also experienced diversification waves. This corroborates the negative view of the antitrust hypothesis that emerges from the American data. It seems too much to conclude that antitrust played no role whatsoever—surely it was a factor in some decisions—but the evidence suggests that the primary cause of corporate diversification lies elsewhere.
International Evidence A second reason to be skeptical about the antitrust hypothesis is that increasing corporate diversification has been a feature of most Western economies in the postwar years even though tough legal restrictions on horizontal growth were unique to the United States.
In Britain, competition policy was governed by the 1956 Restrictive Trade Practices Act, intended to discourage cartels. A 1965 act gave the government the power to control certain mergers when they were against the “public interest.” These restrictions were rarely applied as the government was more interested in encouraging horizontal combinations than discouraging them (OECD (1974)). Despite this favorable environment for horizontal mergers, the United Kingdom also experienced a diversification merger wave in the 1960s and early 1970s. The peak was in 1965 measured by numbers, and 1971 measured by value of transactions (OECD ( 1974)). The number of takeovers that involved entry into new industries rose from 9.3 percent in 1949—1953 to 38.8 percent in 1954—1958, and 46.6 percent in 1969—1973 (Goudie and Meeks (1982)). British firms diversified internally as well. In 1950, 23 of the 100 largest British firms were diversified; by 1970, 54 of the top 100 were diversified (Chandler (1990)). A number of conglomerates even arose in the early 1970s, most notably BTR, the Hanson Trust, GEC, and Tarmac.
Mergers in Canada were governed by the Combines Investigation Act, which prohibited mergers that lessened competition “to the detriment ...of the public”(Section 2). The few court judgements that had been issued by the middle of the 1970s took a narrow view of what constituted illegal mergers, essentially only those that would have created a “virtual monopoly” (OECD (1974)). Even so, by the early 1970s, diversification had become the primary type of Canadian merger. Only 43 percent of Canadian mergers were horizontal in 1971—1973 and only 30 percent in 1977—1979 (Baldwin and Gorecki (1990)).
Source: WSY
【社会科学-商业】 Asian nations form world's biggest free trade deal (BreakingNews - 1分48秒 精听)
先做听力再核对原文哦~
Fifteen Asian and Pacific countries have signed the world's biggest free trade deal. It is called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The countries include 10 Southeast Asian economies along with China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
These countries account for around 30 per cent of the global economy. The idea for the RCEP started in 2012. The governments have been talking to each other since then. China was key in pushing the deal forward to help economies during the coronavirus pandemic. An economics expert said: "COVID-19 has reminded the region of why trade matters and governments are more eager than ever to have positive economic growth."
Leaders of the 15 governments believe the free trade deal will help their countries and the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese Premier said: "The fact the RCEP has been signed after eight years of negotiations brings a ray of light and hope amid the clouds." He added: "It clearly shows that multilateralism is the right way, and represents the right direction of the global economy and humanity's progress." South Korea said: "We believe that the RCEP, being the world's largest free trade arrangement, represents an important step forward toward an ideal framework of global trade and investment." It said the deal included, "a diverse mix of developed, developing and least developed economies."
Source: BreakingNews
【笔记格式要求】 同学们任选 2 篇文章精读/精听并进行笔记打卡
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家三点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2021-1-23 22:31:25
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