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David Landes, author of The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, credits the world's economics and social progress over the last thousand years to "Western civilization and its dissemination." The reason, he believes, is that Europeans invented systematic economic development. Landes adds that two unique aspects of Europeans culture were crucial ingredient in EUrope's economic growth.
First, Landes espouses a generalized form. of Max Weber's thesis that the values of work, initiative, and investment made the difference for Europe. Despite his emphasis on science, Landes does not stress the notion of rationality as such. In his view, "what counts is work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity." The only route to economic success for individuals or states is working hard, spending less than you earn, and investing the rest in productive capacity. This is the fundamental explanation of the problem posed by his book's subtitle: "Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor." For historical reasons—an emphasis on private property, an experience of political pluralism, a temperate climate, an urban style—Europeans have, on balance, followed those practices and therefore have prospered.
Second, and perhaps most important, Europeans were learners. They "learned rather greedily," as Joel Mokyr put it in a review of Landes's book. Even if Europeans possessed indigenous technologies that gave them an advantage (spectacles, for example), as Landes believes they did, their most vital asset was the ability to assimilate knowledge from around the world and put it to use—as in borrowing the concept of zero and rediscovering Aristotle's Logic from the Arabs and taking paper and gunpowder from the Chinese via the Muslim world. Landes argues that a systematic resistance to learning from other cultures had become the greatest handicap of the Chinese by the eighteenth century and remains the greatest handicap of Arab countries today.
Although his analysis of Europeans expansion is almost nonexistent, Landes does not argue that Europeans were beneficent bearers of civilization to a benighted world. Rather, he relies on his own commonsense law: "When one group is strong enough to push another around and stands to gain by it, it will do so." In contrast to the new school of world historians, Landes believes that specific cultural values enabled technological advances that in turn made some Europeans strong enough to dominate people in other parts of the world. Europeans therefore proceeded to do so with great viciousness and cruelty. By focusing on their victimization in this process, Landes holds, some postcolonial states have wasted energy that could have been put into productive work and investment. If one could sum up Landes's advice to these states in one sentence, it might be "Stop whining and get to work." This is particularly important, indeed hopeful, advice, he would argue, because success is not permanent. Advantages are not fixed, gains from trade are unequal, and different societies react differently to market signals. Therefore, not only is there hope for undeveloped countries, but developed countries have little cause to be complacent, because the current situation "will press hard" on them.
The thrust of studies like Landes's is to identify those distinctive features of European civilization that lie behind Europe's rise to power and the creation of modernity more generally. Other historians have placed a greater emphasis on such features as liberty, individualism, and Christianity. In a review essay, the art historian Craig Clunas listed some of the less well known linkages that have been proposed between Western culture and modernity, including the propensities to think quantitatively, enjoy pornography, and consume sugar. All such proposals assume the fundamental aptness of the question: What elements of Europeans civilization led to European success？ It is a short leap fr
When I was in high school in the 1970s,we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers. If an otherwise normal girl thought that the best way to spend a Saturday night was home with her parents—not just co-existing with them, but actually hanging out with them—we would have been looking for a bucket of pig's blood.
In my day, we did whatever was necessary to get out on a Saturday night: we climbed out of windows; we jumped on the hack of motorcycles; God help us, we hitchhiked. We needed, on the most basic and physical level, to be out in the dangerous night, with one another, away from our parents and the safety of home. It was no way to live, and some of us didn't. But it was a drive so elemental and essential that there seemed no way to deny it.
That a profound change has taken place in the relationship between American teenagers and their parents is made clear by statistics from the Federal Highway Administration showing a steady decline in the number of licensed teenage drivers. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver's licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third.
The reasons have a great deal to do with the cost of car insurance and driver's education programs. But among middle-and upper-middle-class young adults, the peer power that created the teenage car culture, the compelling energy that once served to blast an adolescent away from his or her parents has begun to drain away. Teenagers report that they don't need to drive: their parents are willing to take them where they want to go, and they are content to ride shotgun with Mom, texting and yakking all the way to the mall.
I had not taught high school long before I attended my first funeral: an 18-year-old,loud in the halls one day, dead on the side of the road the next. If you want to improve your daughter's chances of surviving her teens, don't give her the car keys. If our generation of parents has done one thing right, it has been to manipulate our children into giving up driving.
How have we managed it？ Through the very aspect of family life we complain about the most: the extracurricular activities that we pay for and arrange and attend; the risibly involved homework assignments that we are so enmeshed with; the whole annoying side industry of being a "servant" and a "private driver".
These things harass us no end. But they have bound our children to us in complex and powerful ways, and this has been, to some extent, the point of the entire exercise. It means that we can prolong the period of our children's dependency, to extend the sweet phase of cocooning and protecting well into their adolescence.
An American teenager is part premature and part invalid, able to excel in obscure sports but needing his mother to rush the field with a jacket and thermos of soup when he's finished. They have been hobbled by our endless meddling; they lack resourcefulness and resilience. They're like little children, soft and easily wounded.
But for all their fussiness and neediness, they love us; they want
What is scientists' attitude towards the saying that dreams about future will come true？
听力原文： The outgoing parliament in the Palestinian territories has voted to give new powers to the President Mohammad Abbas. The move has been met with anger from the militant group Hamas which won the Palestinian elections last month. President Mohammad Abbas's Fatah Party suffered a stunning electoral defeat at the hands of Harass. But in what was almost their final act before the new Hamas dominated legislature is sworn in, Fatah members have boosted the president's position. They've given him the authority to bypass parliament and appoint judges to the constitutional court. Hamas has been outraged. It regards Fatah as having used the old unrepresentative legislature's dying moments to strengthen the president's hand for cynical party political aims.
President Mohammad Abbas has been given the authority to bypass parliament because
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