2017年10月亚太地区SAT1阅读经济文章解析
本篇社会科学类文章(Bretton Woods Revisited)是围绕二战后布雷顿森林货币体系(Bretton Woods system)以及其发展过程所展开的。
在第二次世界大战结束之后，为了构思设计战后国际货币体系，英美两国政府分别提出了凯恩斯计划和怀特计划。两者的共同目的都是促进世界经济发展，但运营方式不同， 凯恩斯计划相对激进，且企图恢复英国在资本主义世界的盟主地位。
然而由于二战后，美国凭借其强大的经济及军事实力， “怀特计划”成为布雷顿森林会议最后通过决议的蓝本，国际货币体系建立在以美元为中心的基础之上。布雷顿森林体系的建立，促进了战后世界经济的恢复和发展，但最终由于美国经济危机的频繁爆发，该体系于20世纪70年代宣告结束。
On July 22, 1944, as allied troops were racing across Normandy to liberate Paris, representatives of 44 nations meeting at the Mount Washington resort in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, created a financial and monetary system for the postwar era. It had taken three weeks of exhausting diplomacy. At the closing banquet, the assembled delegates rose and sang “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The fellow in question was John Maynard Keynes, leader of the British delegation and intellectual inspiration of the Bretton Woods design.
Lord Keynes, the world’s most celebrated economist, was playing a tricky dual role. He had proposed a radical new monetary system to free the world from the deflationary pressures that had caused and prolonged the Great Depression. Bretton Woods, he hoped, would be the international anchor for the suite of domestic measures that came to be known as Keynesian—the use of public spending to cure depression and the regulation of financial markets to prevent downturns caused by failed private financial speculation.
Keynes was also hoping to restore Britain’s prewar position as a leading industrial and financial power. His two roles overlapped, but far from perfectly. The Americans shared the British desire to restore world growth, but not to preserve Britain’s empire or its protectionist system of preferential trade deals for nations that settled their accounts in pounds sterling.
Writing to a colleague after the conference ended, Keynes professed to be pleased. He wrote that in the new International Monetary Fund, “we have in truth got both in substance and in phrasing all that we could reasonably hope for.” The new World Bank, Keynes declared, offered “grand possibilities. … The Americans are virtually pledging themselves to quite gigantic untied loans for reconstruction and development.”
Yet in many respects, Bretton Woods was a rout for Keynes and the British. America today is often described as the sole surviving superpower, but in 1944 U.S. supremacy was towering. Germany and Japan were on the verge of ruin. Britain had gone massively into debt to prosecute the war, sacrificing more than a quarter of its national wealth. The Russians had lost tens of millions of soldiers and civilians. America was unscathed, its casualties were modest by comparison, it held most of the world’s financial reserves, and its industrial plant was mightier than ever.
Though Keynes inspired Bretton Woods, the Americans won the day. As leverage, Keynes had only his own brilliance and a fast-fading appeal to Anglo-American wartime solidarity. In most matters, a rival design by Keynes’s American counterpart, Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White, a left-wing New Dealer serving as No. 2 man at the Treasury, shared Keynes’s basic views on money. But the White planprovided a far more modest fund and bank. Instead of the generous extension of wartime lend-lease aid that Keynes was promoting, the British had to settle for an American loan, to be repaid with interest.(两人的观点是不太一样的，White希望温和的经济政策，凯恩斯比较激进)
The Bretton Woods system was hailed as a vast improvement over both the rigid gold standard of pre-1914 and the monetary anarchy of the interwar period. For a quarter-century, Bretton Woods undergirded a rare period of steady growth, full employment, and financial stability. But in many respects, the vaunted role of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Bretton Woods rules specifying fixed exchange rates was a convenient mirage. (学生回忆这里有题目，我没有看到题目，这里说这些组织的作用被夸大，如同海市蜃楼。)The system’s true anchor was the United States—the U.S. dollar as de facto global currency; the U.S. economy as the residual consumer market for other nations’ exports; and U.S. recovery aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, which dwarfed the outlays of the World Bank.
In the early 1970s, the Bretton Woods system came crashing down when domestic inflation forced the United States to devalue its own currency and cease playing the hegemonic role. Monetary instability and slower growth followed. By the 1980s, laissez-faire was enjoying renewed prestige.(美国60年代经过越南战争耗费了很多财力，因此后来这个体系维持不下去了，以至于影响70年代。而80年代里根总统的供给侧经济政策使得经济倾向于自由放任的laissez-faire 。)
总之，这篇经济题材的文章要比这次历史题材的文章容易，但背景知识非常重要，还有一些关键的词汇也非常重要。同时这篇经济的文章和历史也有一定的联系。
在阅读时间非常紧张的情况下，这些功底是需要学生平时长期积淀的，而不是突击培训出来的。读懂是做对题目的保障。一般读懂了，题目不应有太大的问题。
通过这次考试，我进一步看到了CB对于希望把学科教学(SAT2和AP)与SAT1结合起来的努力.
