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  3. Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a Br

Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a Br

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问题    Cowboy or spaceman? A dilemma for a children’s party, perhaps. But also a question for economists, argued Kenneth Boulding, a British economist, in an essay published in 1966. 【F1】We have run our economies, he warned, like cowboys on the open grassland: taking and using the world’s resources, confident that more lies over the horizon. But the Earth is less a grassland than a spaceship—a closed system, alone in space, carrying finite supplies. We need, said Boulding, an economics that takes seriously the idea of environmental limits. In the half century since his essay, a new movement has responded to his challenge. 【F2】"Ecological economists", as they call themselves, do not want to revolutionise at the margins of economics, but to revolutionise its aims and assumptions. What do they say—and will their ideas achieve lift-off?
   To its practitioners, their starting point is to recognise that the human economy is part of the natural world. Our environment, they note, is both a source of resources and a sink for wastes. 【F3】But it is ignored in conventional textbooks, where neat diagrams trace the flows between firms, households and the government as though nature did not exist. That is a mistake, say ecological economists.
   They are suspicious of GDP, a crude measure which does not take account of resource depletion, unpaid work, and countless other factors. 【F4】In its place they advocate more holistic approaches (整体分析法 ), such as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)(真是发展指数), a composite index that includes things like the cost of pollution, deforestation and car accidents. While GDP has kept growing, global GPI per person peaked in 1978: by destroying our environment we are making ourselves poorer, not richer.
   Mainstream economists are unimpressed. The GPI, they point out, is a subjective measure. And talk of limits to growth has had a bad press since the days of Thomas Malthus, a gloomy 18th century cleric who predicted, wrongly, that overpopulation would lead to famine. Human ingenuity finds solutions to some of the most annoying problems. But ecological economists warn against self-satisfaction. In 2009 a paper in Nature, a scientific journal, argued that human activity is already overstepping safe planetary boundaries on issues such as biodiversity and climate change. 【F5】That suggests that ecological economists are at least asking some important questions, even if their answers turn out to be wrong. It may be no bad thing if economics became a little more Neil Armstrong, and a little less Jesse James.
【F1】
选项
答案他警示人们，我们一直以来就像牧场中的牛仔一样地运行经济：获取并利用着世界上的资源，自以为在视野之外仍有无尽的资源。
解析 ①本句为复合句，主句为主谓宾结构。主句主干后的he warned为插入语，说明本句内容是谁的观点。②插入语后的like引导方式状语，将人类运行经济的方式与牛仔管理牧场的方式作类比。③冒号之后的非谓语成分是对run our economies like cowboys进行解释说明，其中包含一个that引导的宾语从句，confident前省略了be动词。
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