Welfare economics is the study of the welfare system.

Welfare economics is the study of

A.how the allocation of resources affects economic well-being.

B.taxes and subsidies.

C.how technology is best put to use in the production of goods and services.

D.government welfare programs for needy people.

d education.

A．scopes

B．ranges

C．ranks

D．domains

新福利经济学(new welfare economics)

A、Principles of Economics

B、The Worldly Philosophers：The Lives, Times and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers

C、An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

D、The Economics of Welfare

A、Happiness in Economics

B、Triumphant: The Twenty-first Century in Historical Respective, 1996

C、Fortune: The impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare, 1987

D、The Contemporary Reader

A.The government sets the quantity of televisions; firms respond to the quantity by charging a specific pric

B.The government sets the price of televisions; firms respond to the price by producing a specific level of output.

C.The market equilibrium price for televisions maximizes the total welfare of television buyers and sellers.

D.The market equilibrium price for televisions maximizes consumer welfare and minimizes producer profit.

cial sciences try to help us to do. How to make cities more harmonious, reduce crime rates, improve welfare, overcome racism, increase our wealth—this is the stuff of social sciences. The trouble is that the findings of social sciences are often dismissed as being too theoretical, too ambitious or too unpalatable. The methods of research are also often attacked for their lack of rigor, and critics are quick to point out that the people who make the important decisions pay little attention to what social scientists have to say anyway. This would change if the social sciences made themselves more relevant and ready for the society of the 21st century.

Social sciences began to take shape in the 19th century, but came into their own at the beginning of the 20th century, when a number of well-established disciplines, including economics, sociology, political science, history and anthropology really made their mark. Geography and psychology could be added to that list. However, only sociology, political science and economics have succeeded in consolidating their position in the social sciences mainstream. The others were virtually all marginalised. Moreover, powerful institutional barriers now separate the various disciplines.

Hardly the right atmosphere in which to grow and deal with the harsh criticism which the social sciences have come in for from many quarters, including governments and international commissions. Radical measures are now being suggested to turn things round, from how to award university chairs, to setting syllabi and raising funds.

The need for decompartmentalising and striking a new order in the relationship between the disciplines concerns all of the social sciences, though perhaps economics most of all, Only it has acquired a dominant position in management and public affairs. Some would My it has fallen under the sway of "unitary thinking", with little room for debate, for example, on the question of debt reduction or monetary tightness. Moreover, many people do not believe that economic science forms part of social sciences at all. This is a somewhat problematic position to uphold, particularly as economic developments are largely determined by political, social and cultural factors. Yet, economists often have difficulty understanding or taking such factors into account. This has left economics exposed to attack, for example, over its prescriptions for development and its analysis of events, such as the causes of the Asian crisis. To many, economics relies too heavily on hypothetical and sometimes unrealistic assumptions.

Can social sciences bounce back and assert themselves in the 21st century？ We will probably not be able to tell for a few decades, since the ways in which societies analyse themselves develop very slowly. After all, the social sciences are rarely given to sudden discoveries and headline breakthroughs like some other sciences. What is more, social sciences may continue to face the stout resistance of established institutions defending their own territory and opposing innovation and change. Could it be that society, which by definition seeks stability, has an in- built resistance towards indulging in any form. of self-analysis？ Few people have an appetite for hard truth. But perhaps in the information age and in the dematerialised economy of the knowledge world, all that could change. Perhaps society will discover a pressing need to know itself much better, if only to survive. Social sciences will then have a different status.

The social sciences are criticised for

A．their research methods and their results.

B．their research methods, their results and their irrelevancy.

C．their emphasis on social issues.

D．being emily dismissed.

, and at least as important as, the problem of the division of labour," Friedrich Hayek told the London Economic Club in 1936. What Mr. Hayek could not have known about knowledge was that 70 years later weblogs, or blogs, would be pooling it into a vast, virtual conversation. That economists are typing as prolifically as anyone speaks both to the value of the medium and to the worth they put on their time.

Like millions of others, economists from circles of academia and public policy spend hours each day writing for nothing. The concept seems at odds with the notion of economists as intellectual instruments trained in the maximisation of utility or profit. Yet the demand is there: some of their blogs get thousands of visitors daily, often from people at influential institutions like the IMF and the Federal Reserve. One of the most active "econobloggers" is Brad DeLong, of the University of California, Berkeley, whose site, delong, typepad, com,, features a morning-coffee videocast and an afiernoon-tea audiocast in which he holds forth on a spread of topics from the Treasury to Trotsky.

So why do it？ "It's a place in the intellectual influence game," Mr. DeLong replies (by e-mail, naturally). For prominent economists, that place can come with a price. Time spent on the Internet could otherwise be spent on traditional publishing or collecting consulting fees. Mr. DeLong caps his blogging at 90 minutes a day. His only blog revenue comes from selling advertising links to help cover the cost of his servers, which handle more than 20,000 visitors daily.

Gary Becket, a Nobel-prize winning economist, and Richard Posner, a federal circuit judge and law professor, began a joint blog in 2004. The pair, colleagues at the University of Chicago, believed that their site, becker-posner-blog, com, would permit "instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers." The practice began as an educational tool for Greg Mankiw, a professor of economics at Harvard and a former chairman of George Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. His site, gregmankiw, blogspot, com, started as a group e-mail sent to students, with commentary on articles and new ideas. But the market for his musings grew beyond the classroom, and a blog was the solution. "It's a natural extension of my day job—to engage in intellectual discourse about economics," Mr. Mankiw says.

With professors spending so much time blogging for no payment, universities might wonder whether this detracts from their value. Although there is no evidence of a direct link between blogging and publishing productivity, a new study by E. Hah Kim and Adair Morse, of the University of Michigan, and Luigi Zingales, of the University of Chicago, shows that the Internet's ability to spread knowledge beyond university classrooms has diminished the competitive edge that elite schools once held.

Top universities once benefited from having clusters of star professors. The study showed that during the 1970s, an economics professor from a random university, outside the top 25 programmes, would double his research productivity by moving to Harvard. The strong relationship between individual output and that of one's colleagues weakened in the 1980s, and vanished by the end of the 1990s.

The faster flow of information and the waning importance of location—which blogs exemplify—have made it easier for economists from any university to have access to the best brains in their field. That anyone with an internet connection can sit in on a virtual lecture from Mr. DeLong means that his ideas move freely beyond the boundaries of Berkeley, creating a welfare gain for professors and the public.

Universities can also benefit in this part of the equation.

6. Nobel Prize Winners of Oxford and Cambridge The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are both known for their Nobel laureates – Oxford has 69 and Cambridge has an astonishing 118, more than any other university in the world except Harvard, and more than any country other than the USA and UK. Here are two of the most interesting and notable Nobel laureates of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 1. Dorothy Hodgkin (Oxford and Cambridge, Chemistry, 1964) The first British woman to win a Nobel prize, Dorothy Hodgkin is a graduate of both Oxford, where she studied for her BSc and then returned as a fellow – and Cambridge, where she studied for her PhD. At the time when she was studying for her BSc in Oxford, she would not have been able to take a degree at Cambridge, which did not grant women full degrees until 1947. Hodgkin’s work was focused around her refinement of the technique of X-ray crystallography, which enabled her to uncover the structure of different biomolecules. This included confirming the structure of penicillin, and discovering the structure of vitamin B12 and later insulin – discoveries which helped to uncover how these biomolecules work. As a tutor at Oxford, Hodgkin taught Margaret Thatcher when she was an undergraduate, and Thatcher later displayed a portrait of Hodgkin in Downing St, though the two women had markedly different political views. Alongside the Nobel prize, her groundbreaking work was recognised with the Order of Merit, which she became only the second woman to receive, after Florence Nightingale, and she was also the first woman to receive the Royal Society’s Copley Medal. 2. Amartya Sen (Oxford and Cambridge, Economics, 1998) Born in Bengal in 1933, Amartya Sen was just nine years old when he witnessed the famine of 1943, which killed three million people. Nearly 20 years later, he wrote on poverty and famines, arguing that a famine is not only caused by lack of food – indeed, that in Bengal in 1943 there had been sufficient food to feed the population, had its supply not been affected by British military policies, panic buying and rapid price rises. By then, he was teaching at the University of Oxford – he would later also become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge – and his scholarly approach that combined philosophy with economics have led to him being regarded as one of the world’s leading intellectuals. It was for his work on famine that he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Sen has led on our economic understanding of development and the developing world, providing new means of assessing poverty and the welfare of a population. He has argued that such measures should be used alongside other measures such as GDP and productivity measures, so that governments will be able to assess the impact of their policies on people’s day-to-day lives. 12. Which one of the following is NOT the achievement of Dorothy Hodgkin？

A、Discovering the structure of vitamin B12 and later insulin.

B、Confirming the structure of penicillin.

C、Confirming the structure of artemisinin.

D、Refinement of the technique of X-ray crystallography.