2015년 11월 17일 화요일

Dic: begin to (for emphasizing the impossibility)



  • You can't begin to imagine how much that saddens me.
  • he couldn't begin to compete with her.
  • I can't begin to imagine how awful it must have been.
  • Those measures do not even begin to address the problem.

* * *

△ If you say that you cannot ^begin to^ imagine, understand, or explain sth, you are emphasizing that it is almost impossible to explain, understand, or imagine.

△ (used with a negative) to have the least capacity (to do sth)

△ (can't begin to understand/imagine etc) spoken. used to emphasize how difficult something is to understand etc

△ to do accomplish in the least degree.

.... COBUILD, COLLINS, LDOCE, American Heritage



2015년 11월 12일 목요일

[책: D. Coyle's] The Economics of Enough (2011)


출처: Diane Coyle. The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters. Princeton Univ. Press, 2011.
자료: 구글도서


※ 주료 차례 (Main Contents): 

Overview  (1)

Part I: CHALLENGES
  • 1. Happiness  (21)
  • 2. Nature  (55)
  • 3. Posterity  (85)
  • 4. Fairness  (114)
  • 5. Trust  (145)
Part II: OBSTACLES
  • 6. Measurement  (181)
  • 7. Values  (209)
  • 8. Institutions  (239)
Part III: MANIFESTO
  • 9. The Manifesto of Enough  (267)

Notes  (301)
References  (313)


※ 발췌 (excerpt): pp. 39~ 


THE ANTIGROWTH ALTERNATIVE

Criticizing the indicator being measured is one approach; an alternative is to reject the use of any growth indicator at all, preferring to focus on ^happiness^. The inspiration for this approach stems from an influential 1974 paper by economist Richard Easterlin presenting what has come to be known as the Easterlin Paradox.

  He noted that levels of happiness were higher in richer than in poor countries, and higher for rich than for poor people within a single country; but over a period of decades, GDP had risen much more than measured happiness. In fact beyond a certain threshold level of income, higher GDP didn't seem to increase average happiness at all. Other economists followed up Easterlin's paper and confirmed the finding. This body of work has come to create a sort of received wisdom about growth and happiness. These pieces of research find the same apparently conflicting evidence between cross-section samples of data (comparisons between countries or between people in one country at a point in time) and time-series samples (over time in one country). The conclusion typically drawn is that money does increase happiness but only up to a point. As Richard Layard put it in his well-known book ^Happiness: Lessons from a New Science^: "Once a country has over $15,000 per head, its level of happiness appears to be independent of its income per head."[n.26]

  There are two explanations given for this paradoxical result. One is that people usually adapt to changes in their circumstances to become pretty much just as happy as they were; this is true of certain positive events such as winning a lot of money and of some negative ones such as becoming badly disabled by an accident. A second and related explanation is that because people quickly get used to better circumstances, they need more and more income just to sustain their happiness─it's called the "hedonic treadmill."[n. 27]  Richard Layard writes: "I grew up without central heating. It was fine. Sometimes I had to huddle over a fire or put my feet into a bowl of hot water, but my mood was good. When I was forty, I got central heating. Now I would feel really miserable if I had to fight the cold as I once did. In fact, I have become addicted to central heating."[n.28]  ( ... ... )

  The Easterlin Paradox, along with the strong policy conclusions some researchers draw from it, has struck a chord. Robert Frank (in ^Luxury Fever^) argued that high taxes should be used to discourage consumer spending, which won't buy happiness. Barry Schwartz has written about ^The Paradox of Choice^, whereby the great variety of goods and services available to Western consumers only makes us unhappy  (despite the fact that consumers do buy a huge variety of products). The Kingdom of Bhutan has become an icon for its policy pursuit of Gross National Happiness, despite the country's miserably poor human development indicators.

  However, recently the evidence on growth and happiness has been persuasively reassessed. As described below, recent research strongly suggests that there is no paradox, as growth and happiness are in fact usually positively linked.

  To me it always seemed odd to expect happiness to rise fully in line with GDP in the first place─not least because the fall in GDP associated with a recession always causes great unhappiness. Of course, higher incomes should make us happier on average but why would anyone expect GDP and happiness to rise ^in proportion^ to each other? Higher incomes make us taller on average too, but nobody would expect height to continue rising at the same pace as GDP.[n.30]  This instinct was articulated rigorously by Helen Johns and Paul Ormerod when they pointed out that the happiness measures used in the studies are derived from surveys that ask respondents to rate their happiness (or life satisfaction) on a scale with three or five choices. The way the figures are constructed means they simply cannot increase as much as GDP figures, which are constructed completely differently and do not have upper limit. No firm conclusion can be drawn from empirical research that does not acknowledge this statistical issue.[n.31]

  Several recent papers redo the empirical testing with due account taken of the very different character of the two variables. These look at the links between happiness measures and the ^logarithm^ of GDP (the log measure increases at an ever slower rate than the absolute measure).[n.32]  These economists find that in both cross-section and time-series data there is good evidence from a number of different datasets that happiness rises with GDP, and does so at a constant rate. ( ... ... )

2015년 11월 6일 금요일

[자료] 한국의 무보수 가사노동 위성계정 개발을 위한 개념 틀과 시산 결과 (2001)

지은이: 문숙재 외 다수
출처: 미상 (인터넷에서 발견, 자료링크)
시기: 2001 추정


※ 자료 상의 안내: 본 자료는 여성부의 2001년 용역과제로 문숙재(이화여자대학교, 책임연구자)․성지미(한국기술교육대학교, 공동연구자)․정영금(카톨릭대학교, 공동연구자)․윤소영(이화여자대학교, 공동연구자)이 수행한 「무보수 가사노동 위성계정 개발을 위한 연구」의 일부 내용을 발췌하여 수록하였음.

* * *

용어: 가정 생산(아마도 household production), 가계 생산(아마도 household production). 두 용어가 병용되는데, 개념어로서는 가계 생산이 주로 쓰이는 듯.


[자료: 황남희] 인구고령화와 가계생산 : 국민시간이전계정(National Time Transfer Accounts)의 개발 (2013)



출처: 황남희. 인구고령화와 가계생산 : 국민시간이전계정(National Time Transfer Accounts)의 개발. 여성연구. 2013. Vol. 84. No. 1, pp. 135-170


용어: 가계 생산(household production).

[책: 마이클 페럴먼 지음/김영배 옮김] 무엇이 우리를 무능하게 만드는가 (2014)


출처: 마이클 페럴먼 (김영배 옮김). 무엇이 우리를 무능하게 만드는가. 어바웃어북 (2014)
원제: The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism
자료: 구글도서


※ 주요 차례

1. 세상에서 가장 추한 손  (27)

2. 프로크루테스의 침대에 누운 사람들  (39)

3. 그들의 학문이 우리의 불행을 방조했다  (75)

4. 소비하는 자와 투자하는 자만이 존재하는 세상  (161)

5. 국경을 넘는 프로크루테스 괴물들  (189)

6. 시작부터 그릇된 어떤 경제학자의 가르침  (205)

7. '노동을 파는 상인'이라는 정체성  (243)

8. 측정될 수 없는 가치는 쓸모없는가?  (273)

9. 우리를 무능하게 만드는 것들  (303)

10. 희망이란 진정 존재하는가?  (369)

옮긴이의 글  (427)
참고문헌  (430)

2015년 11월 5일 목요일

[자료: B. Christophers] Banking across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (2013)

출처: Brett Christophers, Banking across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism, ... 2013.
자료: 구글도서



※ 주요 차례 (Main Contents):

Introduction   (1)

  • All Roads Lead to FISIM
  • The Accumulation of Effective Determinations
  • The Argument and Structure of the Book

Part I, Wolds Apart: Before Keynes  (25)

1. The Birth of Economic Productiveness  (27)
  • Scourging the Money Lender
  • Deposit Banking and Wealth Destruction
  • Productive and Unproductive Labor
  • Dissolving the Production Boundary

2. Instrumental Internationalism  (57)
  • A Brief "Pre" History of the Geographies of Money, Finance, and Banking
  • Logics of Boundary Crossing
  • Thinking About Financial Geography

Part II, Worlds Aligned: From the Great Depression to the Eve of the Big Bang   (101)

3. Enclosing the Unproductive   (103)
  • The Retreat to the Nation
  • Bretton Woods and the Properties of Mobile Capital
  • The Birth of National Accounting and the Rebirth of Economic Productiveness
  • The Banking Problem
  • Banking Problem? What Banking Problem?

4. America, and Boundaries Breached   (146)
  • Making Peace with Common Sense
  • On the Deep Relevance of a Certain Misquotation in Financial History
  • The Re-internatinalization of the US Banking Business
  • Morbid Symptoms and Nightmarish Computations

Part III, Co-Constituted Worlds: The Age of Financialization?   (185)

5. Layering the Logics of Free Trade in Banking   (187)

6. Anaemic Geographies of Productive Finance  (229)

Afterword   (275)

2015년 11월 4일 수요일

[발췌: T. Hale's] Securitization: the chicken and egg version (FT, nov 2015(

출처: Financial Times, Nov 3, 2015.
자료: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9089429a-7ef3-11e5-98fb-5a6d4728f74e.html#axzz3qVbNsV14
지은이: Thomas Hale

※ 발췌(excerpt):

Securitization: the chicken and egg version


1. What is securitization?

Securitization is a way of transferring assets and risk to investors, and generating funding for more assets.

A bank might lend money to homebuyers. It can put these mortgages in a special vehicle (a shell company), which then issue bonds. Investors buy the bonds, and the bank receives the cash, via the vehicle. The investors receive income based on the mortgage payments. The bank has (mostly) moved the mortgages off its balance sheet and can issue new mortgages with the new funding.


2. I am still unclear─can you provide me with a frivolous analogy?

Yes. Consider a chicken farmer. Imagine you have 100 chickens and they each lay one egg per day.

One day, you decide the egg business is not necessarily the best way to make money─owning so many chickens is tiresome, and takes a long time to become profitable. So you speak to a group of peope from another village who need a long-term supply of eggs.

After much discussion, you agree to create an enormous special "coop" for the chickens (a "shell" company), somewhere between you respective villages. The investors pay a lump sum up front (for the value of 95 of the chickens─you retain 5 of them) and in return, they receive nearly all of the eggs the chickens lay each day. You receive a few daily eggs for yourself, and a few eggs are left to one side.

So far, so good. You have saved these people the trouble of tracking down eggs from different farms. Within such a large coop, the risk of the flow of eggs drying up is low, and if the chickens stop laying eggs, the investors can legally sell them to a butcher to recoup some value.

You don't need to worry about looking after your chickens any more, and anyway, they are not really "yours"─except for those 5 you retained. Some of the leftover eggs can be used to hire someone to look after the coop, and paid into a store of "spare eggs" in case the chicken stop laying.

You have also bought in "funding" from the investors, which you can use to breed or buy new chickens in your considerably more spacious village, and ultimately repeat the whole process, assuming enough people are addicted to eggs.


3. Hold on─isn't that what caused the crisis? No─the financial crisis?

( ... ... )


4. The chicken analogy has run its course ...

( ... ... )


5. So what is the problem?

( ... ... )


6. Why should I care about any of this?

( ... ... )