2. 职称英语
  3. In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their

In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their

游客2023-12-14  19
问题     In 1896 a Georgia couple suing for damages in the accidental death of their two year old was told that since the child had made no real economic contribution to the family, there was no liability for damages. In contrast, less than a century later, in 1979, the parents of a three year old sued in New York for accidental-death damages and won an award of $750,000.
    The transformation in social values implicit in juxtaposing these two incidents is the subject of Viyiana Zelizer’s excellent book, Pricing the Priceless Child. During the nineteenth century, she argues, the concept of the "useful" child who contributed to the family economy gave way gradually to the present-day notion of the "useless" child who, though producing no income for, and indeed extremely costly to, its parents, is yet considered emotionally "priceless." Well established among segments of the middle and upper classes by the mid-1800’s, this new view of childhood spread throughout society in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as reformers introduced child-labor regulations and compulsory education laws predicated in part on the assumption that a child’s emotional value made child labor taboo.
    For Zelizer the origins of this transformation were many and complex. The gradual erosion of children’s productive value in a maturing industrial economy, the decline in birth and death rates, especially in child mortality, and the development of the companionate family (a family in which members were united by explicit bonds of love rather than duty) were all factors critical in changing the assessment of children’s worth. Yet "expulsion of children from the ’cash nexus,’ ...although clearly shaped by profound changes in the economic, occupational, and family structures," Zelizer maintains, "was also part of a cultural process ’of sacralization’ of children’s lives." Protecting children from the crass business world became enormously important for late-nineteenth-century middle-class Americans, she suggests; this sacralization was a way of resisting what they perceived as the relentless corruption of human values by the marketplace.
    In stressing the cultural determinants of a child’s worth, Zelizer takes issue with practitioners of the new "sociological economics," who have analyzed such traditionally sociological topics as crime, marriage, education, and health solely in terms of their economic determinants. Allowing only a small role for cultural forces in the form of individual "preferences," these sociologists tend to view all human behavior as directed primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain. Zelizer is highly critical of this approach, and emphasizes instead the opposite phenomenon: the power of social values to transform price. As children became more valuable in emotional terms, she argues, their "exchange" or "surrender" value on the market, that is, the conversion of their intangible worth into cash terms, became much greater. [br] Which of the following alternative explanations of the change in the cash value of children would most likely come from sociological economists?
选项 A、Parents began to increase their emotional investment in the upbringing of their children.
B、Children’s expected earnings over the course of a lifetime increased greatly.
C、Compulsory education laws reduced the supply, and thus raised the costs, of available child labor.
D、Changes in the law made available of indemnity for damages in accidental-death cases.
答案 B
解析 推断题，问几个解释儿童金钱价值变化的选项中，哪个最符合社会经济学家的观点。进行推理前首先需要了解什么是社会经济学家的观点，根据关键词“sociological economists”找到文章第三段的开头，其后(第二句)总结了他们的观点：把人的一切行为都解释为试图获得最大的经济利益(view all human behavior asdirected primarily by the principle of maximizing economic gain)，根据这个观点，判断只有B“儿童的预期收入增长很大”符合。A是Zelizer的观点；C是因果倒置，法是价值转变后的果；D是文章的一个例证，和社会经济学家无关，自然就不能代表其观点。
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