Профессиональная коммуникация для студентов, изучающих экономику и менеджмент = Professional communication for the students of economics & management

 

Министерство науки и высшего образования Российской Федерации 

Сибирский федеральный университет 

 
 
 
 
 
 

В. А. Разумовская, Ю. Е. Валькова 

 
 
 

ПРОФЕССИОНАЛЬНАЯ КОММУНИКАЦИЯ  

ДЛЯ СТУДЕНТОВ, ИЗУЧАЮЩИХ ЭКОНОМИКУ  

И МЕНЕДЖМЕНТ 

 

PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION  

FOR THE STUDENTS OF ECONOMICS &  

MANAGEMENT 

 
 
 

Учебное пособие 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

Красноярск 

СФУ 
2021 

 

УДК 811.111(07) 
ББК 81.432.1я73 

Р178 
 
 
Р е ц е н з е н т ы: 
П. В. Закотнова, кандидат педагогических наук, доцент, заведующая кафедрой 

иностранных языков для специальных целей Омcкого государственного университета 
им. Ф. М. Достоевского; 

Е. А. Нильсен, доктор филологических наук, профессор, заведующая кафедрой 

английского языка и перевода Санкт-Петербургского государственного экономического 
университета 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Разумовская, В. А. 

Р178 
 
Профессиональная коммуникация для студентов, изучающих экономику 

и менеджмент = Professional Communication for the Students of Economics & 
Management : учеб. пособие / В. А. Разумовская, Ю. Е. Валькова. – Красноярск : 
Сиб. федер. ун-т, 2021. – 178 с. 

 
 
ISBN 978-5-7638-4524-2 
 
 
 
Представлена система упражнений, разработанная на материале англоязычных публи-

каций о профессиональной деятельности выдающихся ученых, оказавших большое влияние 
на развитие современной экономической мысли, направленная на формирование у студентов 
основных лингвистических (языковой, коммуникативной, дискурсивной) и межкультурной 
коммуникативной компетенций. 

Предназначено для студентов направлений 38.03.01 «Экономика» и 38.03.02 «Менедж-

мент», изучающих дисциплины «Иностранный язык», «Иностранный язык в бизнес-
пространстве», «Профессионально ориентированный иностранный язык», «Междисциплинарная 
среда профессионального развития: деловой иностранный язык», «Деловой 
иностранный язык». 

 
 

Электронный вариант издания см.:

http://catalog.sfu-kras.ru

УДК 811.111(07)
ББК 81.432.1я73

 
 

ISBN 978-5-7638-4524-2 
© Сибирский федеральный университет, 2021 

CONTENTS 

 
От авторов ............................................................................................................................... 4 

UNIT 1 
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB:  DECISION THEORY, RISK & PROBABILITY ......... 5 

UNIT 2 
HA-JOON CHANG:  INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS .................................................. 17 

UNIT 3 
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA:  INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY .................... 32 

UNIT 4 
THOMAS PIKETTY:  PUBLIC ECONOMICS & ECONOMIC HISTORY ................. 45 

UNIT 5 
DANIEL KAHNEMAN:  PSYCHOLOGY & ECONOMICS ........................................... 59 

UNIT 6 
JOSEPH EUGENE STIGLITZ:  MACROECONOMICS, PUBLIC &   
INFORMATION ECONOMICS .......................................................................................... 72 

UNIT 7 
STANLEY FISCHER:  MACROECONOMICS &   
NEW KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS ..................................................................................... 84 

UNIT 8 
MATHILDE MESNARD:   OECD, GOVERNANCE &   
DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS ........................................................................................ 95 

UNIT 9 
MARC FLEURBAEY:   NORMATIVE ECONOMICS &   
SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY ............................................................................................. 108 

UNIT 10 
ERIK BERGLÖF:  CORPORATE GOVERNANCE ...................................................... 123 

UNIT 11 
HERNANDO DE SOTO:  ECONOMICS OF THE INFORMAL SECTOR &  
PROPERTY RIGHTS THEORY ....................................................................................... 137 

UNIT 12 
AMARTYA SEN: WELFARE ECONOMICS,  
DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS &  SOCIAL CHOICE THEORY ............................. 150 

APPENDIX ........................................................................................................................... 164 

CROSSWORD PUZZLES ANSWERS .............................................................................. 172 

 

От авторов 

Учебное пособие «Профессиональная коммуникация для студентов, изучающих 

экономику и менеджмент / Professional Communication for the Students of Economics & 
Management» является логическим продолжением серии изданий по профессионально 
ориентированной коммуникации на английском языке, которые были опубликованы 
в Сибирском федеральном университете в 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018 и 2019 годах. Цель 
издания – совершенствование основных видов иноязычной речевой деятельности 
студентов и формирование у обучающихся целостного представления о выдающихся 
достижениях современности в области экономики и менеджмента.  

Материал и система упражнений направлены на формирование у студентов 

основных лингвистических компетенций (языковой, коммуникативной, дискурсивной) 
и межкультурной коммуникативной компетенции – обязательных для профессионального 
общения на иностранном языке, эффективной иноязычной и межкультурной 
профессиональной речевой деятельности. Включенные в учебное пособие тексты 
различных жанров из современных англоязычных научных, научно-популярных, публицистических 
изданий представляют собой фрагменты материалов, опубликованных 
в открытых англоязычных источниках, и используются исключительно в учебно-
методических целях. Авторы издания основываются на опыте преподавания профессионально 
ориентированного английского языка для экономистов и менеджеров в Сибирском 
федеральном университете и Финансовом университете при Правительстве РФ. 

Учебное пособие организовано с учетом и на основе базовых методологических 

принципов: системности, комплементарности, последовательности, целостности, 
интерактивности и взаимосвязанности обучения различным видам речевой деятельности. 
Особое внимание уделяется творческим заданиям, позволяющим актуализировать 
полученные в процессе обучения знания и повысить мотивацию студентов. 

U N I T  1  

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB:  

DECISION THEORY, RISK & PROBABILITY 

The difference between technology and 
slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they 
are not free.

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, 
carbohydrates, 
and 
a 
monthly 
salary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

 
1. Work in small groups and speculate on the quotations. What is meant under these 
provocative words? Who can find them insulting? Could you offer your own list of three 
most harmful addictions nowadays? 
 
2. Read some facts about Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In your opinion, what is his main 
contribution to the probability theory and behavioural economics? What are the key 
concepts of his books enlisted here? 
 
Seneca is the favored philosopher of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, our most important 
contemporary theorist of chance, luck, and the vagaries of life. Taleb has made the art of 
bullshit detection a way of life, and he appreciates Seneca in particular because he found in 
Stoic teaching not consolation for misfortune so much as spiritual discipline for handling 
fantastic wealth. (Seneca’s quotation in the Siena marble: Magna servitus est magna 
fortuna, “Great fortune is a great slavery.”) Taleb is a successful options trader, but he is more 
proud of what he is not: a sucker, a charlatan, or a slave to money.  
 
Taleb’s first book shows his roots as a trader, risk analyst, and expert in the mathematics of 
probability. In Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the 
Markets (2001, revised 2004), Taleb views probability theory as a method for dealing with 

ignorance. But the “life” of the subtitle is significant: Taleb’s attention to mathematics and 
markets is rooted in fundamental questions about the human condition, especially questions 
epistemological (understanding the limits and tricks of the human mind – for instance, in 
attributing success to expertise when luck is a better explanation) and moral (finding 
happiness). Taleb describes himself as a skeptical empiricist: “We favor the visible, the 
embedded, the personal, the narrated, and the tangible; we scorn the abstract.” 
 
Fooled by Randomness earned Taleb the beginning of a cult following, but his second book 
made him a celebrity. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable came out a year 
before the 2008 market crisis and was revised two years after. The idea of a “Black Swan” has 
become identified with large and unexpected economic events, and Taleb’s authority is 
assumed to be that of a far-sighted hedger. But finance is only one field in which the ideas 
of The Black Swan play out. The book urges the application of epistemic humility to a wide 
range of social phenomena. Readers hoping for investment advice are confronted with a 
philosophical mixture of Nietzsche and Stoicism. The wisdom on offer is more 
epistemological, moral, and aesthetic than financial. 
 
Taleb’s most ambitious and intellectually sophisticated book is Antifragile: Things that Gain 
from Disorder (2012). The bibliography contains 568 items with hardly a field of thought 
unrepresented. By this point, Taleb has come to view all three works as composing a unified 
project, which he calls Incerto, about “decision making under uncertainty.” The central idea 
of Antifragile is that risk, volatility, or turbulence is in many cases not to be feared and 
avoided, but desired and sought. Taleb claims to have identified a new concept: Whereas 
fragile things are harmed by shocks, and robust things are resilient or unharmed, what 
is antifragile actually benefits from shocks. A related concept and characteristic Talebism: 
What is “Lindy” is likely to survive a long time because it has already survived a long time – 
named after a Manhattan restaurant where actors observed the phenomenon in Broadway 
runs. 
 
Obviously a trader in volatile markets wants to find an antifragile investment strategy; but the 
concept is easily extended to biological and ecological health, technology, and culture. Stoic 
ethics is about being emotionally antifragile. Catholicism (along with Eastern Orthodoxy, 
Taleb’s faith) is Lindy and antifragile. Recognition of the naturalness and health of 
randomness in organic systems also makes for a critique of modernity: “Modernity 
corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology.” 
Our social reorganization hasn’t actually protected us from randomness, but has made us 
fragile to new manifestations of randomness: “The story of the nation-state is that of the 
concentration and magnification of human errors.” 
 
Antifragility helps explain Taleb’s willingness to expose himself to healthy stressors. He 
extolls fasting and deadlifting, and the challenges of ancient languages and Twitter combat. 
The notion also illuminates his distinctive “fractal” writing style (with short, iterative sections 
and recurring semi-fictional characters) and his willingness to provoke and offend.  
 

Taleb’s postings on social media suggest that he is turning more directly to political theory, 
with special focus on the importance of scale. “Decentralization is based on the simple notion 
that it is easier to macrobull***t than microbull***t.” Taleb has discovered distributism, or, 
more precisely, the principle of subsidiarity. A lover of freedom with a strong sense of honor 
and responsibility, Taleb resists ideology. Libertarians have been intrigued by his thought, but 
follow at a careful distance: His advocacy of localism reflects a classical prudence that can 
find a place for strategic protectionism and “tribalism,” “socialism” on the small scale, and, of 
course, the wisdom of traditional religion. 
 
Theory and practice, epistemology and psychology, ethics and politics, economics and 
religion – Taleb has been patching back together ideas and disciplines separated from 
authentic philosophy. And perhaps because it developed outside of academic philosophy, 
behavioral economics has actually had an impact on the real world. Concepts like “framing,” 
“anchoring,” “heuristics,” and “cognitive biases” have been more widely influential than most 
ideas from academic philosophers in the past fifty years. 
 
More traditional-minded thinkers are likely to ignore the contributions of cognitive 
psychology and behavioral economics as the trendy “expertise” of tenured social scientists. 
Still, it is a sign of progress in the world of ideas that new work in various fields helps remind 
the separated disciplines that they are parts of a larger whole. Academic philosophers should 
welcome Taleb’s effort to integrate disparate disciplines. 
 
Copyright © Taleb the Philosopher by Joshua P. Hochschild.  
Available at: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/02/taleb-the-philosopher 
 
3. Look at Taleb’s employment and education records: 
MAIN New York University Tandon School of Engineering, Distinguished Professor of Risk 
Engineering (since 2008).  
PAST ACADEMIC POSITIONS (All part time, mostly when he was a practitioner):  
Oxford University, Distinguished Research Scholar, Said Business School BT Center, (2009–
2013). London Business School, London, Visiting Research Professor (2007–2009); 
University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Isenberg School of Management, Dean’s Professor 
(2005–2007); Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, Fellow, and 
Adjunct Professor of Mathematics (1999–2007). 
Education: University of Paris (Dauphine), PhD.  The Wharton School, University of 
Pennsylvania, MBA. 
On his site he specified that he stopped accepting awards, honorary doctorates, etc. He 
asks not to include those he has already got in his biography. What is the reason for it? 
What is the connection to his theories? 
 
4. Look at the map of Taleb’s concept of how our knowledge is organised – Incerto.  
 
a. Try to understand it and make your own research to know more about the methods 
stated. 
 

b. Find on the map a fat tail notion. A fat tail is a situation in which a small number of 
observations create the largest effect. When you have a lot of data, and the event is explained 
by the smallest number of observations. In finance, almost everything is fat tails. The law of 
large numbers: the outlier determines outcomes. In wealth, if you sample the top 1% of 
wealthy people you get half the wealth. In violence – a few conflicts (e.g. World Wars I and 
II) represent most of the deaths in combat: that is a super fat tail. Can you give another 
examples of fat tails? 
 
c. Place on the map another key notions and situations extensively used by Taleb. 

 Anchoring – a human being prefers to stick close to the references with which they 

feel most comfortable 

 Framing – the thought process people use to define a situation and decide how they are 

going to deal with it 

 Black swans – events that seem almost impossible, but that nonetheless happen with 

regularity 

 “Loser takes all” – the larger the deviation from the norm, the larger the probability of 

it coming from luck rather than skills 

 Russian legal system has conflicting and contradictory laws: sometimes you have to 

violate a law to comply with another. This legal system came from the piecewise 
development of the rules. You add a law here and there and there is no central system 
consulted every time to ensure compatibility 

 “I’m as good as my last trade” = Prospect Theory – looking at differences, not 

absolutes, and resetting to a specific reference point 

 “Sound-bite effect” or “Fade the fears” = Affect heuristic, Risk-as-Feeling Theory – 

people’s reaction to concrete and visible risks, not abstract ones 

 “It was so obvious” = Hindsight Bias – things appear to be more predictable after the 

fact 

 “You were wrong” = Belief in the law of small numbers – inductive fallacies; jumping 

to general conclusions too quickly 

 “It will never go there” = Overconfidence – risk-taking out of an underestimation of 

the odds 

 Ludic fallacy – the misuse of games to model real-life situations 
 Fat Tony, who is regarded as a man who lives by his wits, says that the odds of the 

coin coming up heads 99 times in a row are so low that the initial assumption that the 
coin had a 50:50 chance of coming up heads is most likely incorrect. “The coin gotta 
be loaded. It can’t be a fair game.” 

 Knightian uncertainty – a lack of any quantifiable knowledge about some possible 

occurrence, as opposed to the presence of quantifiable risk (e.g., that in statistical 
noise or a parameter’s confidence interval). The concept acknowledges some 
fundamental degree of ignorance, a limit to knowledge, and an essential 
unpredictability of future events 

5. What is Large Deviations Theory? Solve the cryptogram to find out. 

 

The answer is: Large Deviations Theory concerns the asymptotic behaviour of remote tails 
of sequences of probability distributions: it shows the exponential decline of the probability 
measures of certain kinds of extreme or tail events. 
 
KEEP IN MIND:     LANGUAGE REVISION 
 
6. The first text you have read contains the following excerpt: “…He found in Stoic 
teaching not consolation for misfortune so much as spiritual discipline for handling 
fantastic wealth”. 
 
So much is used here not in the meaning of as much as (regardless of or despite how much; 
although; the same quantity as).  
 
If you say that someone did not do so much as perform a particular action, you are 
emphasizing that they did not even do that, when you were expecting them to do more. 
 
I didn’t so much as catch sight of him all day long. 
Laura had not reproached him, never so much as mentioned it. 
She auctioned off the car without so much as taking a ride in it. 
 
Not so much X as Y implies that X still is/does that thing to some degree, but not to the same 
degree as Y. 
If you say that something is not so much one thing as something else, you mean it is more the 
second thing: 
 

They’re not so much lovers as friends. 
I don’t feel angry so much as sad. 
 
Give your own examples of the use of these structures. 
 
7. Fill in the sentences with as much as, so much, so much as, not so much as, too much. 
 
He was ______ nervous ______ impatient for the journey to be over. 
Taleb states that ______ information causes ______ stress, which is called noise bottleneck. 
Lessons given by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile should be considered also for 
corporate risk evaluations ______ for all other cases that organizations and not individuals 
evaluate and prepare for deviations from normal. 
Taleb values honour above all things, banging on about it ______ that at times he comes 
across as a medieval knight who’s got lost somewhere in the space-time continuum. 
Taleb loathes journalists ______ he almost backed out of his talk after learning that local 
media might attend. 
 
ON THE RIGHT TRACK:    ECONOMIC INSIGHTS 
 
8. Watch N.N. Taleb conversation with Erik Schatzker on “Bloomberg Markets” 
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpsFAf9Ep8Q). They discuss the factors causing 
global fragility, hidden liabilities in global markets, and what he sees as safe trades in 
the current market. Answer the questions below. 
Why does N.N. Taleb think that the world today is more fragile today than in 2007? 
What are the pyramid schemes? N.N. Taleb mentions Madoff and Ponzi schemes. 
Why is the real estate first shoe to drop? 
What do you think will happen to interest rates? 
 
9. Discover more about  why “you should study risk taking, not risk management” on: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4P47UTF0tZA. Answer the questions below. 
Why balance is disrupted by too much data?  
In what context are fat tails mentioned? 
Why should we learn from experience of our grandmothers?  
What are the negative effects of globalization and concentration? 
 
AND SO ON AND SO FORTH:    ROLE AND IMPACT 
 
10. Read the synopsis of anti-fragile concept introduced by N.N. Taleb. How can these 
principles be applied in real life? What is a robust world, in your opinion? 
 
TEN PRINCIPLES FOR A BLACK-SWAN-ROBUST WORLD 
 
1. What is fragile should break early while it is still small. Nothing should ever become too 
big to fail. Evolution in economic life helps those with the maximum amount of hidden 
risks – and hence the most fragile – become the biggest.