商务英语综合教程上册课件刘玉玲主编 ISBN9787810789844Unit 8 The Costs of Economic Growth.ppt

Unit Eight Introduction The economy has developed greatly in the past years, and people’s life has changed a lot with invention of telephones, automobiles, computers etc. However, the weather is becoming warmer and warmer; the air and water are polluted more and more seriously. Text 1 Citizens and scholars are today raising a fundamental question: Is economic growth desirable? Or to put it only slightly less grandly: when a society has reached a stage of wealth where all the necessities of life and a high (historical standards) degree of comfort have been assured to the overwhelming number of its citizens, does it thereby reach a stage when the costs of growth begin to exceed its benefits, when its energies should properly be turned in other directions？ Text Similarly, in the case of producer-induced demand, business firms advertise to convince the consumers that they need the goods that they would not have missed had the advertising and the additional production never occurred. 7 Few critics would claim that these are the only motives that make consumers wish additional goods---one may want to buy more records or books, for example, simply because one likes to listen to music or to read----but such motives clearly do enter into many of our purchases and , to this degree, the benefits that accrue from still additional economic growth are far less than they appear in the statistics. As the society becomes ever more affluent, these benefits can be expected continually to decline. 8 The second theme of this argument, and increasingly the more important theme, has to do with the costs of economic growth. Growth has always had associated costs. At the time of the English Industrial Revolution, there was the tremendous dislocation in the traditional pattern of life that the birth of the industrial system involved. Indeed, even the measurement of growth is made difficult by the fact that many of the products that we include