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  3. "Wealth is not without its advantages," John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "and the case to the contrary, although it has often

"Wealth is not without its advantages," John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "and the case to the contrary, although it has often

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问题     "Wealth is not without its advantages," John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote, "and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive. " Despite the obvious advantages of wealth, nations do a poor job of keeping count of their own. They may boast about their abundant natural resources, their skilled workforce and their world-class infrastructure. But there is no widely recognised, monetary measure that sums up this stock of natural, human and physical assets.
    Economists usually settle instead for GDP. But that is a measure of income, not wealth. It values a flow of goods and services, not a stock of assets. Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet. Happily, the United Nations this month published balance-sheets for 20 nations in a report overseen by Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University. They included three kinds of asset; "manufactured", or physical, capital(machinery, buildings, infrastructure and so on); human capital(the population’s education and skills); and natural capital(including land, forests, fossil fuels and minerals). Officials often say that their country’s biggest asset is their people. The UN calculates a population’s human capital based on its average years of schooling, the wage its workers can command and the number of years they can expect to work before they retire(or die).
    By putting a dollar value on everything from bauxite to brainpower, the UN’s exercise makes all three kinds of capital comparable and commensurable. It also implies that they are substitutable. A country can lose $ 100 billion-worth of pastureland, gain $ 100 billion-worth of skills and be no worse off than before. The framework turns economic policymaking into an "asset-management problem", says Sir Partha.
    The idea that natural assets are substitutable makes some environmentalists nervous. Many of the services the environment provides, like clean water and air, are irreplaceable necessities, they point out. However, the undoubted value of these natural treasures should be reflected in their price, which should rise steeply as they become scarcer. A good asset manager will then husband them carefully, knowing that it will take an ever-increasing amount of human or physical capital to make up for further losses of the natural kind.
    No one is more aware of its limitations than the report’s authors. Their estimates are illustrative, not definitive, says Sir Partha. The calculations are inevitably crude, just as the first guesstimates of GDP were crude over 70 years ago. He hopes more economists will do the hard but valuable work of pricing the seemingly priceless. The profession does not really reward this work, says Sir Partha. But some economists do it anyway. Taylor Ricketts of the University of Vermont has even calculated the value of pollination, showing that one Costa Rican coffee-grower benefited by $ 62,000 a year from the feral honey bees in two nearby patches of forest.
According to the UN report, a nation’s human capital might remain unaffected when______.
选项 A、its workforce become less skilled
B、it lowers the retirement age
C、the number of dropouts increases greatly
D、the average lifespan of its citizens extends
答案D
解析 将选项与原文内容一一对应是事实细节题常用的解题方法。
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