题目内容
The twin English passions for gardening and long muddy walks may seem puzzling to foreigners, yet they are easily explained in terms of a favourite economist"s concept: scarcity. Most other nations have lots of countryside. England doesn"t, and therefore its people prize the stuff. One consequence of the rural romance is a word which exists only in English and describes those with a particular sort of hostility to development: Nimbys, who don"t mind new housing so long as it is Not In My Back Yard. Another consequence is a problem for the government. Compared with its neighbours" economies, Britain"s has been doing very nicely in recent years. Only one big threat looms: the possibility of a bust in the overheated and volatile housing market, which could feed through to the rest of the economy and lead to recession, as happened in the early 1990s. The government reckons that one reason why house prices have been rising so fast, particularly in the south-east of England, is that, while real wages have been going up and foreigners pouring in, little new housing is being built. Nimbyism helps explain the shortage of new housing in the south-east. People living in pretty villages don"t want new estates on their doorstep. After all, they spent their hard-earned cash on a view of rolling acres, not of spanking new red-tiled roofs. Nimbys" hostility to development acquires legal force through the planning system, which has, in large part, been controlled by elected local authorities. Although some big new developments—including the first new towns since the early 1970s—are getting the go-ahead, others are hard-fought. The government"s solution is to undermine local planning powers. The new Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, which starts to come into force next month, shifts power from elected county councils to unelected regional bodies, and gives statutory force to the government"s estimates of the number of new houses needed in different bits of the country. That will make it harder for councils in overheated areas to turn down developers. The government is right that the planning system is excessively biased against growth: existing property-owners, who control the system through local authorities, have little interest in sanctioning developments which may reduce the value of their houses. But the government was wrong to go about lowering the barriers to development by talking power away from local authorities, thus further centralizing Britain"s already far-too-centralised political system. According to the text, the developer"s promise in the overheated areas results from
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Education is compulsory in Britain, whether at school "or otherwise"; and "other wise" is becoming more popular. In 1999, only 12,000 children were listed as being home-schooled. Now that figure is 20,000, according to Mike Fortune-Wood, an educational researcher. But he thinks that, as most home-taught children never go near a school and are therefore invisible to officialdom, the total is probably nearer 50,000. As usual, Britain lies between Europe and America. In Germany, home teaching is illegal. In America, it"s huge: over 1 million children are home-schooled, mainly by religious parents. There are a small minority among British home-educators, who consist mainly of two types: hippyish middle-class parents who dislike schools on principle, and those whose children are unhappy at school. The growth is overwhelmingly in this second category, says Roland Meighan, a home-education expert and publisher. One reason is that technology has made home-education easier. The internet allows parents to know as much as teachers. It is also a way of organizing get-togethers, sharing tips and outwitting official hassles. That supplements e vents such as the annual home-education festival last week, where 1,600 parents and children enjoyed Egyptian dancing and labyrinth-building on a muddy hillside in Devon. But a bigger reason for the growth is changing attitudes. Centralisation, government targets and a focus on exams have made state schools less customer friendly and more boring. Classes are still based strictly on age groups, which is hard for children who differ sharply from the average. Mr. Fortune-Wood notes that the National Health Service is now far more accommodating of patients" wishes about timing, venue and treatment. "It"s happened in health. Why can"t it happen in education" he asks. Perhaps because other businesses tend to make more effort to satisfy individual needs, parents are getting increasingly picky. In the past, if their child was bullied, not coping or bored, they tended to put up with it. Now they complain, and if that doesn"t work they vote with their (children"s) feet. Some educationalists worry that home-schooling may hurt children"s psychological and educational development. Home educators cite statistics showing that it helps both educational attainment and the course of grown-up life. Labour"s latest big idea in education is "personalisation", which is intended to al low much more flexible timing and choice of subjects. In theory, that might stem the drift to home—schooling. Many home-educators would like to be able to use school facilities occasionally—in science lessons, say, or to sit exams. But for now, schools, and the officials who regulate them, like the near-monopoly created by the rule of "all or nothing". The term "otherwise" (Line 1, Paragraph 1) most probably means
Forget Iraq and budget deficits. The most serious political problem on both sides of the Atlantic is none of these. It is a difficulty that has dogged the ruling classes for millennia. It is the servant problem. In Britain David Blunkett, the home secretary, has resigned over an embarrassment (or one of many embarrassments, in a story involving his ex-girlfriend, her husband, two pregnancies and some DNA) concerning a visa for a Filipina nanny employed by his mistress. His office speeded it through for reasons unconnected to the national shortage of unskilled labour. Mr. Blunkett resigned ahead of a report by Sir Alan Budd, an economist who is investigating the matter at the government"s request. In America Bernard Kerik, the president"s nominee for the Department of Homeland Security, withdrew last week because he had carelessly employed a Mexican nanny whose Play-Doh skills were in better order than her paperwork. Mr. Kerik also remembered that he hadn"t paid her taxes. The nominee has one or two other "issues" (an arrest warrant in 1998, and allegations of dodgy business dealings and extra-marital affairs). But employing an illegal nanny would probably have been enough to undo him, as it has several other cabinet and judicial appointees in recent years. There is an easy answer to the servant problem—obvious to economists, if not to the less clear-sighted. Perhaps Sir Alan, a dismal scientist of impeccable rationality, will be thoughtful enough to point it out in his report. Parents are not the only people who have difficulty getting visas for workers. All employers face restrictive immigration policies which raise labour costs. Some may respond by trying to fiddle the immigration system, but most deal with the matter by exporting jobs. In the age of the global economy, the solution to the servant problem is simple: rather than importing the nanny, offshore the children. According to the text, the servant problem is to the ruling class what
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