2015考研英语阅读贫困的历史画像_大学英语阅读

2015考研英语阅读贫困的历史画像

　　That might sound wholly unsurprising. Yet in a new paper Martin Ravallion, an economicsprofessor at Georgetown University and a former research director at the World Bank,charts the evolution of thinking on poverty over the past three centuries. He reckons thatthis consensus is of remarkably recent vintage. Not that long ago every element of thereceived wisdomthat poverty is a problem, that public policy should try to reduce thenumbers of poor, and that there are good ways to try to do so without hurting theeconomywould have been suspect.

　　这听起来完全不足为奇。然而，曾担任过世界银行研究局局长的乔治城大学经济学教授马丁?拉瓦雷在一篇论文中记录了过去三个世纪以来人们对贫困的思考的演变历程。他认为直到最近人们才在贫困的认知方面达成共识。就在不久之前，长期积累下来并且为多数人所接受的观念贫困是个难题，公共政策应该试着减少贫困人口数量，而且有一些既能够达成这一目标而又不伤害经济发展的方式一直都受到人们的质疑。

　　According to the mercantilist thinking that dominated European thought between the 16th and18th centuries, poverty was socially useful. True, it was miserable for the poor. But it alsokept the economic engine humming by ensuring the availability of plentiful cheap labour.Bernard de Mandeville, an 18th-century economist and philosopher, thought it manifest,that in a free nation where slaves are not allowd of, the surest wealth consists in a multitudeof laborious poor. That attitude was the norm.