翻译作业123
1、How to measure prosperity
GDP is a bad gauge of material well-being.Time for a fresh approach
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Which would you prefer to be: a medievalmonarch or a modern office-worker? The king has armies of servants. He wearsthe finest silks and eats the richest foods. But he is also a martyr totoothache. He is prone to fatal infections. It takes him a week by carriage to travel betweenpalaces. And he is tired of listening to the same jesters. Life as a21st-century office drone looks more appealing once you think about moderndentistry, antibiotics, air travel, smartphones and YouTube.
2、The question is more than just a parlour game.It shows how tricky it is to compare living standards over time. Yet such comparisonsare not just routinely made, but rely heavily on a single metric: grossdomestic product (GDP). This one number has become shorthand for m
aterialwell-being, even though it is a deeply flawed gauge of prosperity, and gettingworse all the time (see pages 21-24). That may in turn be distorting levels of anxietyin the rich world about everything from stagnant incomes to disappointingproductivity growth.
Faulty speedometer
Defenders of GDP say that the statistic isnot designed to do what is now asked of it. A creature of the 1930s slump andthe exigencies of war in the 1940s, its original purpose was to measure the economy’scapacity to produce. Since then, GDP has become a lodestar for policies to settaxes, fix unemployment and manage inflation.
3、Yet it is often wildly inaccurate:Nigeria’s GDP was bumped up by 89% in 2014, after number-crunchers adjustedtheir methods. Guesswork prevails: the size of the paid-sex market in Britainis assumed to expand in line with the male population; charges at
comparisons
lap-dancingclubs are a proxy for prices. Revisions are common, and in big, rich countries,bar America, tend to be upwards. Since less attention is paid to revisedfigures, t
his adds to an often exaggerated impression that America is doing farbetter than Europe. It also means that policymakers take decisions based onfaulty data.
4、If GDP is failing on its own terms, as ameasurement of the value-added in an economy, its use as a welfare benchmark iseven more dubious. That has always been so: the benefits of sanitation, betterhealth care and the comforts of heating or air-conditioning meant that GDPgrowth almost certainly understated the true advance in living standards in thedecades after the second world war. But at least the direction of travel wasthe same. GDP grew rapidly; so did quality of life. Now GDP is still growing(albeit more slowly), but living standards are thought to be stuck. Part of theproblem is widening inequality: median household income in America, adjustedfor inflation, has barely budged for 25 years. But increasingly, too, the thingsthat people hold dear are not being captured by the main yardstick of value.
5、、With a few exceptions, such as computers, what is produced and consumedis assumed to be of constant quality. That assumptionworked well enough in an era of mass-
produced, standardised goods. It is lessreliable when a growing share of the economy consists of services. Firmscompete for custom on the quality of output and how tailored it is to individualtastes. If restaurants serve fewer but more expensive meals, it pushes upinflation and lowers GDP, even if this reflects changes, such as fresher ingredientsor fewer tables, that customers want. The services to consumers provided byGoogle and Facebook are free, so are excluded from GDP. When paid-for goods,such as maps and music recordings, become free digital services they too dropout of GDP. The convenience of online shopping and banking is a boon toconsumers. But if it means less investment in buildings, it detracts from GDP.
6、Stopcounting, start grading
Measuring prosperity better requires threechanges. The easiest is to improve GDP as a gauge of production. Junking italtogether is no answer: GDP’s enduring appeal is that it offers, or seems to, asummary statistic that tells people how well an economy is doing. Instead,statisticians should improve how GDP data are collected and presented. Tominimi
se revisions, they should rely more on tax records, internet searches andother troves of contemporaneous statistics, such as credit-card transactions,than on the standard surveys of businesses or consumers. Private firms arealready showing the way—scraping vast quantities of prices from e-commercesites to produce improved inflation data, for example.
7、Second, services-dominated rich countriesshould start to pioneer a new, broader annual measure, that would aim to captureproduction and living standards more accurately. This new metric—call itGDP-plus—would begin with a long-overdue conceptual change: the inclusion inGDP of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives. GDP-plus wouldalso measure changes in the quality of services by, for instance, recognising increased longevityin estimates of health care’s output. It would also take greater accountof the benefits of brand new products and of increased choice. And, ideally, itwould be sliced up to reflect the actual spending patterns of people at thetop, middle and bottom of the earnings scale: poorer people tend to spend more ongoods than on Harvard tuition fees.

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