2023年12月英语六级真题答案（第1套）

One of the great successes of the Republican Party in recent decades is the relentless propagation of a simple formula for economic growth: tax cuts.

The formula doesn't work, but that has not affected its popularity. And while the cult of tax cuts has attracted many critics, it lacks for obvious rivals.

Democratic politicians have tended to campaign on helping people left behind by economic growth. When Democrats do talk about encouraging economic growth, they often sound like Republicans.

This is not just a political problem for Democrats; it is an economic problem for the United States. The nation needs a better story about the drivers of economic growth. The painful lessons of recent decades point to a promising candidate: higher wages.

Raising the wages of American workers ought to be the priority of economic policymakers. We'd all be better off paying less attention to quarterly updates on the growth of the nation's gross domestic product (GDP) and focusing instead on the growth of workers' paychecks.

Set aside, for the moment, the familiar argument for higher wages: fairness. The argument here is that higher wages can fuel the engine of economic growth.

Perhaps the most famous illustration of the benefits is the story of Henry Ford's decision in 1914 to pay $5 a day to workers on his Model T assembly lines. He did it to increase production—he was paying a premium to maintain a reliable workforce. The unexpected benefit was that Ford's factory workers became Ford customers, too.

The same logic still holds: Consumption drives the American economy, and workers who are paid more can spend more.

Mainstream economists insist that it is impossible to order up a sustainable increase in wages because compensation levels reflect the unerring judgment of market forces.

The conventional wisdom held that productivity growth was the only route to higher wages. Through that lens, efforts to negotiate higher wages were counterproductive. Minimum-wage laws would raise unemployment because there was only so much money in the wage pool, and if some people got more, others would get none.

It was in the context of this worldview that it became popular to argue that tax cuts would drive prosperity. Rich people would invest, productivity would increase, wages would rise.

In the real world, things are more complicated. Wages are influenced by a tug of war between employers and workers, and employers have been winning. One clear piece of evidence is the widening gap between productivity growth and wage growth since roughly 1970. Productivity has more than doubled; wages have lagged far behind.

A focus on wage growth would provide an antidote (矫正方法) to the attractive simplicity of the belief in the magical power of tax cuts.

Journal editors decide what gets published and what doesn't, affecting the careers of other academics and influencing the direction that a field takes. You'd hope, then, that journals would do everything they can to establish a diverse editorial board, reflecting a variety of voices, experiences, and identities.

Unfortunately a new study in Nature Neuroscience makes for disheartening reading. The team finds that the majority of editors in top psychology and neuroscience journals are male and based in the United States: a situation that may be amplifying existing gender inequalities in the field and influencing the kind of research that gets published.

Men were found to account for 60% of the editors of psychology journals. There were significantly more male than female editors at each level of seniority, and men made up the majority of editors in over three quarters of the journals. Crucially, the proportion of female editors was significantly lower than the overall proportion of women psychology researchers.

The differences were even starker in the neuroscience journals: 70% of editors were male, and men held the majority of editorial positions in 88% of journals. In this case, the proportion of female editors was not significantly lower than the proportion of female researchers working in neuroscience—a finding that reveals enduring gender disparities in the field more broadly.

Based on their results, the team concludes that "the ideas, values and decision-making biases of men are overrepresented in the editorial positions of the most recognized academic journals in psychology and neuroscience."

Gender inequality in science is often attributed to the fact that senior academics are more likely to be male, because historically science was male-dominated: it's argued that as time goes on and more women rise to senior roles, the field will become more equal. Yet this study showed that even the junior roles in psychology journals tended to be held disproportionately by men, despite the fact that there are actually more female than male junior psychology faculty.

This implies that a lack of female academics is not the problem. Instead, there are structural reasons that women are disadvantaged in science. Women receive lower salaries and face greater childcare demands, for instance, which can result in fewer publications and grants—the kinds of things that journals look for when deciding who to appoint. Rather than simply blaming the inequality of editorial boards on tradition, we should be actively breaking down these existing barriers.

A lack of diversity among journal editors also likely contributes to psychology's WEIRD problem. If journal editors are largely men from the United States, then they will probably place higher value on papers that are relevant to Western, male populations, whether consciously or not.