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Old 10-22-2004, 12:36 PM   #2 (permalink)
jackspeese
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Excellent job, I made a few small corrections in [], if you have any questions let me know. One general thing, when you're talking about people, you should use the relative pronoun who, not that, that is for things.

The use and abuse of economics
This is an article published in the Economist on the 25th of November 1995. The Economist is an economic weekly magazine. The text is an editorial, that is, a paper in which its author presents his own point of view. The text therefore is not supposed to be objective. It is entitled "The use and abuse of economics" and [talks about] the distortion of economic ideas by politicians. The paper begins with the exposition of a paradox: economics is recognized as a sound discipline. This social science is more and more influential in our societies. Yet, economists are much criticized. What could explain this paradox? The whole of the text intends to answer to this question. If economists are so derided, it is because of the distortions of their ideas, mainly by politicians.


Economics is more and more influential in our societies. Its specialists should then be accepted as authorities. Yet, this is not the case. They are even more and more derided. This situation is partly due to economists themselves [who] tend to exaggerate their differences and to quibble about quite insignificant matters.

However, the [main ones responsible] for this paradox are politicians. Indeed, the man in the street is informed about economics mostly through them, and the [latter] often distort economic ideas in order to be re-elected. This distortion is made [in] three ways.


1) The one-sided coin

All [of] the economic facts (inflation, trade surplus or deficit, interest rates change etc.)

contain in themselves advantages and drawbacks : all coins have two sides. Politicians see the two aspects of each one but tend to present only one side in order to corroborate their political aims. In other words, they stress on the side that suits them. [In doing so ](ce faisant), they mislead people and prevent them from understanding economics.


2) Shoot the messenger


The market is a place that centralized in terms [of] all of the knowledge, all [of] the decisions of its operators. The information is "materialized" in the different market prices. Prices [indicate] which operations are profitable for economic agents. For example, in the financial market, speculators give information to the government, taking advantages of some market anomalies. They are not the [ones] responsible, [rather, they are] the messengers of these anomalies. On the contrary, [by bringing] these anomalies to light, they give useful [signals] to governments : Yet, the [latter] mislead people by "shooting the messengers".


3) [Fear of/Aversion to] change

When politicians fear []economic change, they tend to mislead people by inventing some fallacious arguments. For example, the politicians of industrialized countries [who] do not want to change the structure of their economy argue that new technology [destroys] more jobs than it creates, which is false.

Unfortunately, politicians can be expected to keep on misleading people, making fallacious claims with demagogic aims.
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