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2024-01-13  22
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 contri- bution 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 Viviana 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 educa- tion 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 would be most consistent with the practices of sociological e-conomics as these practices are described in the passage?
选项 A、Arguing that most health-care professionals enter the field because they believe it to be the most socially useful of any occupation.
B、Arguing that most college students choose majors that they believe will lead to the most highly paid jobs available to them.
C、Arguing that most decisions about marriage and divorce are based on rational assessments of the likelihood that each partner will remain committed to the relationship.
D、Analyzing changes in the number of people enrolled in colleges and universities as a function of changes in the e-conomic health of these institutions.
E、Analyzing changes in the ages at which people get married as a function of a change in the average number of years that young people have lived a-way from their parents.
答案 B
解析 哪一个像是社会经济学家的主张?类比题，此类人的总结见第三题。选项中现象次要，关键看后面原因的解释。A．对社会最有用，显然不符。B．能找到挣钱最多的工作。正确，符合上文总结。C．对可能性的理性评估。无。D．易混。一些院校的经济情况决定报名情况，不是学生们自身的经济利益。E．由青年人离家时间长短来分析其婚龄，毫无相似之处。
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