经济学人封面故事(2016-4-30)：How-to-measure-prosperity.docx

2016-4-30经济学人封面故事：是时候更新下GDP这个指标了
文章来自享阅读书（微信公众号：enjoyreading2016）。

The 21st-century economy
How to measure prosperity

导读：
GDP从20世纪30年代开始就被用来测量人类的物质财富，但它也有诸多缺陷，比如：家务这类不产生现金流的工作不被计入；谷歌和脸书这类免费的服务不被计入，品牌多样化给人来带来的福利也不被计入……本文认为，当代应该建立一个新的GDP指标，即GDP-plus，
GDP-plus将通过以下手段产生：①改善计算GDP使用的数据来源；②服务主导的国家应开研发出一套更精准的GDP测量方法。尽管新的GDP的诞生也将历经周折，但对于当代生活来说，这是非常有必要的改变。

“GDP is a bad gauge of material well-being. Time for a fresh approach.”

WHICH would you prefer to be: a medieval monarch1 or a modern office-worker? The king has armies of servants. He wears the finest silks and eats the richest foods. But he is also a martyr2 to toothache. He is prone to fatal infections. It takes him a week by carriage3 to travel between palaces. And he is tired of listening to the same jesters4. Life as a 21st-century office drone5 looks more appealing once you think about modern dentistry, antibiotics, air travel, smartphones and YouTube.

单词注释
1. medieval monarch – 中世纪君主；
2. martyr - n. 烈士；殉道者；
3. carriage - n. 运输；运费；四轮马车；举止；客车厢；
4. jesters - n. （中世纪宫廷或贵族家中的）小丑；爱开玩笑的人；
5. drone - n. 懒惰者；

The question is more than just a parlour game6. It shows how tricky it is to compare living standards over time. Yet such comparisons are not just routinely made, but rely heavily on a single metric: gross domestic product (GDP). This one number has become shorthand7 for material well-being, even though it is a deeply flawed8 gauge of prosperity, and getting worse all the time. That may in turn be distorting levels of anxiety in the rich world about everything from stagnant9 incomes to disappointing productivity growth.

单词注释
6. parlour game – 室内游戏；
7. shorthand - n. 速记；速记法
8. flawed - adj. 有缺陷的；有瑕疵的；有裂纹的
9. stagnant - adj. 停滞的；不景气的；污浊的；迟钝的

Faulty speedometer10
Defenders of GDP say that the statistic is not designed to do what is now asked of it. A creature of the 1930s slump and the exigencies11 of war in the 1940s, its original purpose was to measure the economy’s capacity to produce. Since then, GDP has become a lodestar12 for policies to set taxes, fix unemployment and manage inflation.

单词注释
10. Speedometer - n. 速度计；里程计；
11. Exigencies - n. 紧急状态；迫切情况（exigency的复数形式）；
12. Lodestar – n. 北极星；

Yet it is often wildly inaccurate: Nigeria’s GDP was bumped up by 89% in 2014, after number-crunchers13 adjusted their methods. Guesswork14 prevails: the size of the paid-sex market15 in Britain is assumed to expand in line with the male population; charges at lap-dancing clubs16 are a proxy17 for prices. Revisions are common, and in big, rich countries, bar18 America, tend to be upwards. Since less attention is paid to revised figures, this adds to an often exaggerated impression that America is doing far better than Europe. It also means that policymakers take decisions based on faulty data.

单词注释
13. number-crunchers – 捣弄数字的人；
14. Guesswork - n. 猜测；臆测；凭猜测所作之工作；
15. the paid-sex market – 性交易市场；
16. lap-dancing clubs – 脱衣舞俱乐部；
17. proxy – n. 体现；
18. bar - prep. 除……外；

If GDP is failing on its own terms, as a measurement of the value-added in an economy, its use as a welfare benchmark is even more dubious. That has always been so: the benefits of sanitation, better health care and the comforts of heating or air-conditioning meant that GDP growth almost certainly understated the true advance in living standards in the decades after the second world war. But at least the direction of travel was the same. GDP grew rapidly; so did quality of life. Now GDP is still growing (albeit19 more slowly), but living standards are thought to be stuck20. Part of the problem is widening inequality: median household income in America, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged21 for 25 years. But increasingly, too, the things that people hold dear22 are not being captured by the main yardstick23 of value.

单词注释
19. Albeit - conj. 虽然；即使；
20. Stuck - adj. 被卡住的；不能动的；
21. Budged - vi. 挪动；微微移动；
22. hold dear -看重；
23. yardstick - n. 码尺；

With a few exceptions, such as computers, what is produced and consumed is assumed to be of constant quality. That assumption worked well enough in an era of mass-produced, standardised goods. It is less reliable when a growing share of the economy consists of services. Firms compete for custom on the quality of output and how tailored it is to individual tastes. If restaurants serve fewer but more expensive meals, it pushes up inflation and lowers GDP, even if this reflects changes, such as fresher ingredients or fewer tables, that customers want. The services to consumers provided by Google 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 drop out of GDP. The convenience of online shopping and banking is a boon24 to consumers. But if it means less investment in buildings, it detracts from GDP.

单词注释
24. Boon - n. 恩惠；福利；利益

Stop counting, start grading25
Measuring prosperity better requires three changes. The easiest is to improve GDP as a gauge of production. Junking26 it altogether is no answer: GDP’s enduring appeal is that it offers, or seems to, a summary statistic that tells people how well an economy is doing. Instead, statisticians should improve how GDP data are collected and presented. To minimise revisions, they should rely more on tax records, internet searches and other troves of27 contemporaneous28 statistics, such as credit-card transactions, than on the standard surveys of businesses or consumers. Private firms are already showing the way—scraping vast quantities of prices from e-commerce sites to produce improved inflation data, for example.

单词注释
25. Grading - v. 定等级；
26. Junking - vt. [口语]把…当作废物丢掉；废弃；
27. troves of – 大量的；
28. contemporaneous - adj. 同时期的；同时代的，同时发生的；

Second, services-dominated rich countries should start to pioneer a new, broader annual measure, that would aim to capture production and living standards more accurately. This new metric—call it GDP-plus—would begin with a long-overdue29 conceptual change: the inclusion in GDP of unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives. GDP-plus would also measure changes in the quality of services by, for instance, recognising increased longevity in estimates of health care’s output. It would also take greater account of the benefits of brand-new30 products and of increased choice. And, ideally, it would be sliced up to reflect the actual spending patterns of people at the top, middle and bottom of the earnings scale: poorer people tend to spend more on goods than on Harvard tuition fees.

单词注释
29. long-overdue – 期待已久的；
30. brand-new - adj. 崭新的；最近获得的；

Although a big improvement on today’s measure, GDP-plus would still be an assessment of the flow of income. To provide a cross-check31 on a country’s prosperity, a third gauge would take stock, each decade, of its wealth. This balance-sheet would include government assets such as roads and parks as well as private wealth. Intangible capital—skills, brands, designs, scientific ideas and online networks—would all be valued. The ledger32 should also account for33 the depletion34 of capital: the wear-and-tear of machinery, the deterioration of roads and public spaces, and damage to the environment.

单词注释
31. cross-check - n. 反复核对；
32. ledger - n. 总帐，分户总帐；[会计] 分类帐；帐簿；底帐；
33. account for – 列入；
34. depletion - n. 消耗；损耗；放血；

Building these benchmarks will demand a revolution in national statistical agencies as bold as the one that created GDP in the first place. Even then, since so much of what people value is a matter of judgment, no reckoning can be perfect. But the current measurement of prosperity is riddled with35 errors and omissions36. Better to embrace a new approach than to ignore the progress that pervades37 modern life.

单词注释
35. Be riddled with – 被……打出许多洞；
36. errors and omissions – 错误与遗漏；
37. Pervade - vt. 遍及；弥漫