Part IV Translation and Writing
3-a-1 When economist began to measure the sources of economic growth, what previously had been considered an unexplained residual－an unexplained factor －became identified as human capital.
当经济学家开始测定经济发展的因素时，从前被认为是无法解释的剩余因素后来被逐渐确立为人力资本。
3-a-2 The term “human capital” suggests to some a depersonalization of individual and is associated in the popular mind with a dehumanizing society that equates men with machines. In fact, it is just the other way around.
有些人认为：“人力资本”这一术语的含义就是剥夺人们的个性，使广大民众联想到一个将人类等同机器，失去人性的社会。实际情况正好相反。
3-a-3 But human capital also improves the adaptability and efficiency of resources in society. It allows agents to allocate resources more effectively across tasks. It enhances the ability of agents to adapt to changes and to respond to new opportunities.
人力资本还能够提高社会资源的适应性和配置效率，能使当事人更有效地在各种工作之间分配资源,增强当事人适应变化和看准新机遇的能力。
3-a-4 Great skill also facilitates worker mobility across occupations, industries and regions in response to new opportunities, and helps people reallocate resources, both human and physical, toward more productive opportunities, and even to realize that those opportunities exist.
技能广还便于劳动者在出现新的机会时进行跨工种、跨行业、跨地区的流动，高技能有助于人们重新分配人力资本和实物资本的资源，向效益更高的机会倾斜，甚至预见这些机遇的存在。
3-a-5 Capital and skill are complimentary. Each factor raises the productivity of the other. An investment strategy that emphasizes physical capital to the exclusion of human capital fails to capture the benefits that can arise from a more balanced investment strategy.
资本和技能是互补的，两者相互提高对方的收益，强调实物资本而忽略人力资本的投资战略不可能获得更均衡的投资战略所能产生的收益。
3-a-6 Estimating the rate of return to education in China in the way economist in Western economies ordinarily do, you will find that the rate of return to education in China in the early 1990s is about 4%.
按照经济学家在西方经济体中通常的做法估算中国的教育投资回报率，你会发现这一数据在二十世纪九十年代早期只有百分之四左右。
3-a-7 Another way to foster human capital that entails less direct cost to government is to free up labor market for human capital. A free labor market that allows the same kind of incentives to operate as those that increasingly govern capital market and product market in China would go a long way toward promoting skill formation.
另外一个推动人力资本投资而不需要政府多花钱的方法就是放开人力资本的劳动力市场，一个自由的劳动力市场会使得越来越多地主宰中国资本市场和产品市场的那样一种激励机制发挥作用，这将大大促进技能培训。
3-a-8 Eliminating regional disparity in wages and opening up markets to allow freedom of migration and pursuit of opportunities throughout China would enhance economic development. So would a centralized finance policy that serves to allocate governmental funds from the center more evenly across regions and among rural and urban areas.
消除工资的地区差，放开市场，让人口在全国范围内自由流动寻找机会，这会加快经济发展。同样，集中式教育财政政策有利于将政府资金从中央更均衡地分配到各地区和城乡，这也会加强国家的经济发展。
3-a-9 For this system to operate effectively, credit market for schooling should be developed to allow students to borrow against their future earnings. In the absence of such market, only potential students from wealthy families can pay tuition charges which currently are as high as 50% of mean income. Inequality will be increased across the generation if only the rich can send their children to school.
为了使这种体制有效地运行，应该培育教育信贷市场，让学生拿未来的收入作抵押进行贷款。如果没有这样的市场，只有来自富裕家庭的学生才能够负担起当前高达占平均收入50% 的学费。如果只有富人才能送子女上学，隔代人之间的不平等将会扩大。
3-a-10 Another potentially important policy goal might be to promote ties between industry and universities. Some universities have begun such partnerships but there is much room for growth of these productive arrangements. Such partnerships allow the universities to respond to practical problems, and therefore help local industry solve some of the problems that accompany the introduction and improvement of technology. This will improve the efficiency of the region and will provide a source of financing by private industry for the educational enterprise.
另外一个重要的要实现的目标是推动产业与高校的联系。有些大学已经和企业展开了合作关系，但这种富有成效的做法仍然有很大的提升空间。这种合作关系使得高校能够对实际问题作出反应，从而帮助当地企业解决伴随着技术引入和进步而产生的问题。这将会提升当地的生产效率，使私企成为教育机构的一个资金来源。
3-b-1 Truth be told, the Bracey critique is not entirely misplaced. Most commentators rely more on the commonsense understanding that countries must have good schools to succeed economically rather than presenting conclusive empirical evidence that connects what students learn in school to what subsequently happens in a nation’s economy. Even economists, the people who think the most systematically about the way in which “human capital” affects a nation’s economic future, have skirted the heart of the question by looking only at “school attainment,” namely the average number of years students remain in school.
说实话，布里斯的批评并不是完全错误的。大多数评论员更多地依赖常识性的理解，即国家必须有好的学校才能在经济上取得成功，而不是提供确凿的经验证据来证明学生在学校里学到的与后来在一个国家的经济中所发生的联系。甚至经济学家，即那些最系统地思考“人力资本”如何影响一个国家经济未来的人，回避了这个问题的核心, 只注意了“学业成就”，即学生在校平均年数。
3-b-2 A more direct measure of a country’s human capital is the performance of students on tests in math and science, something that might be called the average level of “cognitive skills” among those entering a country’s work force. At one time, internationally comparable information on student performance was not available for a sufficient number of countries over a long enough period of time to allow for systematic study, which is why economists relied upon the less informative measures of school attainment. Now that test-score data for many countries over an extended period of time are readily available, it is possible to supplement measures of educational attainment with these more direct measures of cognitive skills.
对一国的人力资本进行更直接的衡量是学生在数学和科学考试中的表现,即那些影响国家劳动力技能中、可以称之为“认知技能”平均水平的东西。过去，做进行系统的研究时，许多国家缺乏相当长一段时间内学生学业表现的国际可比信息，这就是为什么经济学家依赖信息量少的学校成绩测量。现在许多国家已经具备了一段较长时间的考试分数数据，就可以用这些更直接的认知技巧来辅助测量教育成就了。
Entering：[no passive] to form part of something or have an influence on something成为…的一部分；影响
E.g. This possibility never entered into our calculations.我们从未估计到这种可能性。Your personal feelings shouldn’t enter into this at all.这根本就不应该掺杂进你个人的感情。
3-b-3 Fortunately, we could construct that norm by using information from tests in
the United States, the country that has had the earliest, most sophisticated,
and most comprehensive system of testing. The United States has
participated in all of the international tests since 1964, and it has also
maintained a separate longitudinal testing system of its own, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). With that information in hand,
it was possible to calibrate scores on each of the separate international tests
to one another via the connection of those tests to the NAEP. To obtain
further precision, we used the variation in scores across a subset of the
more-advanced developed countries to obtain an estimate of the spread in
scores across countries. By following these two steps, we were able to
aggregate all available scores for each country into measures of average
cognitive skill levels for each country.
幸运的是，美国具有最早、最精密、最全面的测试系统，我们可以利用美国的测试信息来建立标准；美国自1964以来参加了所有国际测试，同时也保持了自己单独的纵向测试系统，国家教育进展评估（NAEP）。有了这些信息，就可以通过这些测试与NAEP的关联，对每一个单独的国际测试中分数进行校准了。为了获得更高的精确度，我们使用了更先进发达国家的一个子集的分数的变化，得出了各国得分分布的估计值。通过这两个步骤，我们能够将每个国家的所有可用分数汇总成每个国家平均认知技能水平的度量标准。
3-b-4 If one country’s test-score performance was 0.5 standard deviations higher than another country during the 1960s—a little less than the current difference in the scores between such top-performing countries as Finland and Hong Kong and the United States—the first country’s growth rate was, on average, one full percentage point higher annually over the following 40-year period than the second country’s growth rate. Further, once the impact of higher levels of cognitive skills are taken into account, the significance for economic growth of school attainment, i.e., additional years of schooling, dwindles to nothing (see Figure 3). A country benefits from asking its students to remain in school for a longer period of time only if the students are learning something as a consequence.
二十世纪60年代内，如果一个国家的测试得分表现高于另一个国家0.5个标准差，即比像现在的芬兰、香港和美国这样表现最佳的国家之间的分数低一点点，那么第一个国家的平均增长率在接下来的40年里就要比第二个国家的增长率高出一个百分点。
此外，一旦考虑到更高层次的认知技能的影响，学业成就对经济增长的意义，即受教育附加的年限，对于学校的程度，即经济增长的意义，教育附加年不断下降为零（见图3）。一个国家若要通过要求其学生在学校呆更长一段时间得到好处，只有学生们在学习某种东西才行。
3-b-5 To gain additional insight into the relationship between cognitive skills and economic growth, we examined the separate impact of improvements at different levels of a nation’s distribution of skills. Loosely speaking, is it a few “rocket scientists” at the very top of the distribution who spur economic growth, or is it “education for all” that is needed?
Which is more important for growth—having a substantial cadre of high performers or bringing everyone up to a basic level of performance? The answer, it seems, is not one or the other but both! When we estimated the importance of each within the same model, we found each of them to be separately important to economic growth. That is, both the performance of countries in ensuring that almost all students achieve at basic levels and their performance in producing high achieving students seem to matter.
为了更深入地了解认知技能与经济增长之间的关系，我们研究了在一个国家的技能分布的不同层次上的改进带来的不同影响。简单地说，是处于分布最顶端的几个“金融专家（或者：极其聪明的人） ”在推动经济增长，还是“全民教育”是必要的？
哪一个对成长更重要？有大量的高绩效干部，还是每个人都能达到一个基本的绩效水平？答案似乎不是一个或另一个，而是两个！当我们估计同一个模型中每一个模型的重要性时，我们发现每一个模型对经济增长都是重要的。也就是说，各国确保几乎所有学生都能达到基本水平，以及培养高成就学生方面两者似乎都很重要。
rocket scientists：1. <俚>穿梭于金融市场的行家
- 极其聪明的人;智商高的人 If you say that it does not take a rocket scientist to do something, you mean that you do not have to be clever to do it.
It doesn‘t take a rocket scientist to make a rock record. 制作摇滚唱片并不要求你非得绝顶聪明。
3-b-6 The United States has never done well on international assessments of student achievement. Instead, its level of cognitive skills is only about average among the developed countries. Yet the country’s GDP growth rate has been higher than average over the past century. If cognitive skills are so important to economic growth, how can we explain the puzzling case of the U.S.?
Part of the answer is that the United States may be resting on its historic record as the world’s leader in educational attainment. In addition, the United States has other advantages, some of which are entirely separate and apart from the quality of its schooling. The U.S. maintains generally freer labor and product markets than most countries in the world. There is less government regulation of firms, and trade unions are less powerful than in many other countries. Put more broadly, the U.S. has generally less intrusion of government in the operation of the economy, including lower tax rates and minimal government production through nationalized industries. Taken together, these characteristics of the U.S. economy encourage investment, permit the rapid development of new products and activities by firms, and allow U.S. workers to adjust to new opportunities.
美国在学生成绩的国际评估方面从未做过出色的成绩。相反，其认知技能水平在发达国家中仅为平均水平。然而，在过去的一个世纪里，美国的GDP增长率高于平均水平。如果认知技能对经济增长如此重要，我们如何解释美国令人费解的情况呢？
部分答案是，美国可能处于世界教育成就领袖的历史记录中。此外，美国还有其他优势，其中一些是完全独立的，而且与学校教育质量无关。美国的劳动力和产品市场普遍比世界上大多数国家都要自由。政府对企业的监管较少，工会的力量比其他许多国家都要小。更广泛地说，美国在经济运行中一般较少受到政府干预，包括更低税率和通过国有化产业来减少政府生产。总之，美国经济的这些特点鼓励投资，允许公司迅速发展新产品和活动，并允许美国工人适应新的机遇。
