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  3. Economics has long been known as the dismal science. But is any economist so

Economics has long been known as the dismal science. But is any economist so

游客2025-04-24  23
问题    Economics has long been known as the dismal science. But is any economist so dreary as to criticize Christmas? At first glance, the holiday season in western economies seems a treat for those concerned with such vagaries as GDP growth. After all, everyone is spending; in America, retailers make 25% of their yearly sales and 60% of their profits between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even so, economists find something to worry about in the nature of the purchases being made.
   Much of the holiday spending is on gifts for others. At the simplest level, giving gifts involves the giver thinking of something that the recipient would like—he tries to guess her preferences, as economists say—and then buying the gift and delivering it. Yet this guessing of preferences is no mean feat; indeed, it is often done badly. Every year, ties go unworn and books unread. And even if a gift is enjoyed, it may not be what the recipient would have bought had they spent the money themselves. Intrigued by this mismatch between wants and gifts, in 1993 Joel Waldfogel, then an economist at Yale University, sought to estimate the disparity in dollar terms. In a paper that has proved seminal in the literature on the issue, he asked students two questions at the end of a holiday season: first, estimate the total amount paid (by the givers) for all the holiday gifts you received; second, apart from the sentimental value of the items, if you did not have them, how much would you be willing to pay to get them? His results were gloomy: on average, a gift was valued by the recipient well below the price paid by the giver. The most conservative estimate put the average receiver’s valuation at 90% of the buying price. The missing 10% is what economists call a deadweight loss: a waste of resources that could be averted without making anyone worse off. In other words, if the giver gave the cash value of the purchase instead of the gift itself, the recipient could then buy what she really wants, and be better off for no extra cost. If the results are generalized, a waste of one dollar in ten represents a huge aggregate loss to society. It suggests that in America, where givers spend $40 billion on Christmas gifts, $4 billion is being lost annually in the process of gift-giving. Add in birthdays, weddings and non-Christian occasions, and the figure would balloon. So should economists advocate an end to gift-giving, or at least press for money to become the gift of choice? [br] The purpose of Joel Waldfogel’s study is to ______.
选项 A、prove the mismatch between wants and gifts
B、spark new ideas of economic studies on holiday spending
C、evaluate the disparity between wants and gifts in economic terms
D、discover the exact cost of holiday spending on gift-giving
答案 C
解析 文中表明Joel Waldfogel只是intrigued by this mismatch between wants and gifts，才想做进一步的研究，而他的研究不是为了证明需要与礼物之间的不相配，因为这已经被别人所证明，他正是受此激发才要做研究的。他的目的是estimate the disparity in dollar terms，即采用一种经济学的手段去估算这种不匹配的程度。所以应该选C。
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