(单词翻译:单击)
中英文本
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.
随着健康指标、繁荣指标、平等指标、意见指标和生活质量指标使我们逐渐意识到我们是谁、情况是在变好还是在变坏,政治家们也变得严重依赖统计数据来巩固自己的权威
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on "experts" is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have "lost touch" with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of "seeing like a state", to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their "imagined community" does not exist.
当代民粹主义者对“专家”的攻击和对民选代表的攻击在很多方面源自同样的怨恨
On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
另一方面,统计数据(以及民选代表)在几十年甚至几百年的时间里在支持可信的公众话语方面发挥了足够的作用
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
统计危机并不像看上去那么突然
词语解释
1.sick of doing sth 厌倦做某事
In fact, many teachers in America are sick of hearing their students' saying that they are sick of homework, sick of studying, or sick of each other!
事实上,美国的很多教师已经烦透了听到他们的学生说他们讨厌家庭作业、讨厌学习或者是彼此讨厌!
2.keep pace with 并驾齐驱,保持同步
The earnings of the average American have failed to keep pace with the rate of inflation.
一般美国人的收入跟不上通货膨胀的速度
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