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Everyone except the die-hard faithful now realizes that Donald Trump’s second presidency is a colossal failure .

除了顽固的忠实信徒之外，现在每个人都意识到唐纳德·特朗普的第二任总统任期是一个巨大的失败。

The president is doing his best to gin up symbolic, minor controversies in order to activate negative polarization and distract from his spectacular failures on inflation, the Iran War, corruption, racial harmony, and so on.

总统正在竭尽全力引发象征性的小争议，以引发负面极化，并分散人们对他在通货膨胀、伊朗战争、腐败、种族和谐等方面的巨大失败的注意力。

These include demanding that artificial intelligence be rename d “artificial superintelligence”, bellowing that he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize , and conducting an execution on live TV .

其中包括要求将人工智能更名为“人工超级智能”，咆哮他应该获得诺贝尔和平奖，以及在电视直播中执行死刑。

The goal is to get Republicans fighting Democrats over these controversies, in order to trick everyone into focusing on how much they hate the other team instead of how much they hate Trump.

其目标是让共和党人就这些争议与民主党人进行斗争，以欺骗每个人都关注他们有多讨厌另一支球队，而不是他们有多讨厌特朗普。

The trick will probably fail, just as Trump’s promise to give every American $5000 for voting Republican backfired .

这个伎俩很可能会失败，就像特朗普承诺为每个投票给共和党的美国人提供 5000 美元的承诺一样，结果适得其反。

All of these little tempests-in-teapots simply reinforce what a cruel, selfish, petty buffoon Trump is.

所有这些茶壶里的小暴风雨都强化了特朗普是一个多么残忍、自私、小小丑。

And Trump’s approval rating just drifts lower and lower:

而特朗普的支持率却越来越低：

Trump will probably lose the midterms, and become a lame duck president, spamming increasingly grandiose, unworkable executive orders while battling a stream of Congressional investigations.

特朗普可能会输掉中期选举，成为一名跛脚鸭总统，在与一系列国会调查作斗争的同时，不断发布越来越宏大、行不通的行政命令。

That means the window is closing on my ability to force Democrats to reckon with their failures during the Biden years.

这意味着我迫使民主党正视拜登执政期间失败的能力的窗口正在关闭。

If and when Trump loses a national election, there will be far less pressure for soul-searching on the left.

如果特朗普在全国大选中落败，左翼反省的压力就会小得多。

And once the GOP is no longer in control of all three branches of government, the Democrats will be able to influence actual policy instead of sitting around rebuilding their brand.

一旦共和党不再控制政府的所有三个部门，民主党将能够影响实际政策，而不是坐视重建自己的品牌。

So before that happens, I want to summon the last fading scraps of the self-reflection that Democrats and progressives were briefly forced into after Trump thumped Kamala Harris two years ago.

因此，在此之前，我想唤起民主党和进步人士在特朗普两年前击败卡马拉·哈里斯后短暂被迫进行的最后一点自我反思。

When Trump won, I wrote four blog posts trying to explain where the Democrats had gone wrong:

当特朗普获胜时，我写了四篇博客文章试图解释民主党哪里出了问题：

So today I’m going to repost all four parts of my election post-mortem, so that the progressives and Democrats among my readers can take one final moment to reflect on how not to enable the rise of authoritarian rightist leaders in future election cycles.

因此，今天我将重新发布我的选举事后分析的所有四个部分，以便我的读者中的进步派和民主党人可以利用最后一刻来思考如何不让威权右翼领导人在未来的选举周期中崛起。

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I think Trump is a terrible choice for America , but there’s no denying that the American people have made their choice.

我毫不掩饰我认为特朗普对美国来说是一个糟糕的选择，但不可否认的是，美国人民已经做出了他们的选择。

Trump is currently projected to win every single swing state.

目前预计特朗普将赢得每个摇摆州。

He outperformed his 2020 performance in every single county in the country .

他在全国每个县的表现都超过了 2020 年的表现。

He’s projected to win a solid majority of the popular vote — the first time a Republican has done so since 2004.

预计他将赢得绝大多数民众选票——这是自 2004 年以来共和党首次取得如此成绩。

I still don’t like the Electoral College as an institution, but you can’t blame it for this result like you could for 2016.

我仍然不喜欢选举团制度，但你不能像 2016 年那样将这一结果归咎于它。

In fact, Trump’s victory was part of a more general Republican landslide — the GOP took the Senate and improved its majority in the House.

事实上，特朗普的胜利是共和党全面压倒性胜利的一部分——共和党拿下了参议院，并提高了在众议院的多数席位。

A map of political shifts between 2020 and 2024 shows almost solid red .

2020 年至 2024 年之间的政治转变地图几乎显示为纯红色。

I suppose a small silver lining here is that we won’t have to spend the next two months enduring waves of “Stop the Steal” election denials, lawsuits, and threats to repeat January 6th.

我认为这里的一线希望是，我们不必在接下来的两个月里忍受一波又一波的“停止窃取”选举否认、诉讼和威胁，以重复 1 月 6 日的情况。

Democracy delivered Trump a victory, and so Trump has little incentive to attack democracy.

民主给特朗普带来了胜利，因此特朗普没有动力去攻击民主。

In fact, that silver lining might extend to the long term too.

事实上，这一一线希望也可能延续到长期。

Trump and the GOP won because nonwhite voters and working-class voters — traditional Democratic constituencies — shifted his way.

特朗普和共和党获胜是因为非白人选民和工人阶级选民——传统的民主党选区——改变了他的立场。

Dems still won Hispanic, Black, and Asian voters overall, but their margins fell significantly from previous elections, while actually improving with White voters:

总体而言，民主党仍然赢得了拉美裔、黑人和亚裔选民的支持，但他们的优势比之前的选举大幅下降，而实际上在白人选民中的支持率有所提高：

Update: Over at Matt Yglesias’ blog, Jed Kolko shows that heavily Hispanic areas swung harder toward Trump than any other parts of the country:

更新：在马特·伊格莱西亚斯（Matt Yglesias）的博客中，杰德·科尔科（Jed Kolko）表示，拉美裔人口稠密的地区比美国其他地区更倾向于特朗普：

Ronald Reagan’s prophecy that Latinos would become Republicans is coming to pass .

罗纳德·里根关于拉丁裔将成为共和党人的预言即将成为现实。

Income has realigned as well.

收入也进行了调整。

Democrats are now the party of the educated upper middle and wealthy class, but have lost their appeal to the middle and working classes:

民主党现在是受过教育的中上层和富裕阶层的政党，但已经失去了对中产阶级和工人阶级的吸引力：

This largely destroys the narrative that nonwhite immigration will demographically drown White Americans under a tide of imported minority votes.

这在很大程度上摧毁了非白人移民将在人口上将美国白人淹没在少数族裔选票浪潮中的说法。

In fact, it vindicates my guest poster Wally Nowinski, who observed that high-turnout elections like this one now help Republicans , because marginal voters — working-class Americans and Hispanic Americans — now lean to the right:

事实上，它证明了我的客座海报沃利·诺文斯基（Wally Nowinski）的正确性，他观察到像这样的高投票率选举现在对共和党有利，因为边缘选民——美国工人阶级和西班牙裔美国人——现在倾向于右翼：

At some point, Republicans are going to realize this, and hopefully become less anxious about America’s racial future.

到了某个时候，共和党人将会意识到这一点，并有望减少对美国种族未来的焦虑。

Hopefully they will also realize that any attempt to make voting harder actually hurts them in the future, because the impact would fall disproportionately on their own base.

希望他们也能意识到，任何让投票变得更加困难的尝试实际上都会在未来伤害他们，因为影响将不成比例地落在他们自己的基础上。

I expect these realizations to take some time to sink in, but ultimately their effect could be very salutary for American democracy.

我预计这些认识需要一些时间才能被接受，但最终它们的影响可能对美国民主非常有益。

In the days of Nixon and Reagan, Republicans never worried about democracy itself — it was obviously on their side.

在尼克松和里根时代，共和党人从不担心民主本身——民主显然站在他们一边。

Even in 2004, Republicans could tell themselves that we lived in a “ center-right nation ”.

即使在 2004 年，共和党人也可以告诉自己，我们生活在一个“中右翼国家”。

Now, Trump’s victory, powered by lower-income Americans and Hispanic men, will hopefully convince the GOP that democracy is still a game they can win.

现在，特朗普在低收入美国人和西班牙裔男性的推动下取得胜利，有望让共和党相信民主仍然是一场他们能够获胜的游戏。

A democracy needs both major parties to believe they can win via persuasion rather than by organized resistance, and 2024 showed that Republicans can still do that — even if the method of persuasion is one that I personally wish hadn’t worked so well.

民主需要两个主要政党都相信他们可以通过说服而不是有组织的抵抗来获胜，而 2024 年表明共和党仍然可以做到这一点——即使我个人希望说服的方法不太有效。

So what other important lessons can we learn from this disappointing election result?

那么，我们还可以从这次令人失望的选举结果中学到哪些其他重要的教训呢？

I didn’t title this post “Why Trump won”, because I don’t think I really have a convincing answer — I’m not a political scientist, or even a political pundit.

我没有将这篇文章的标题定为“特朗普为何获胜”，因为我认为我并没有真正令人信服的答案——我不是政治科学家，甚至不是政治专家。

In fact, there are probably a bunch of reasons, not just one.

事实上，原因可能有很多，而不仅仅是一个。

Nor am I going to be one of those pundits who tells you that if only Democrats had listened to my policy priorities, things would have gone very differently.

我也不会成为那些告诉你如果民主党人听取了我的政策重点，事情就会大不相同的专家之一。

In fact, few Americans care about my own policy priorities.

事实上，很少有美国人关心我自己的政策重点。

My top issues are industrial policy and pro-democratic foreign policy .

我最关心的问题是产业政策和亲民主的外交政策。

I definitely don’t think emphasizing those more, or doing more of those things, would have propelled Harris to victory.

我绝对不认为更多地强调这些，或者做更多这些事情，会推动哈里斯取得胜利。

(I don’t think they would have hurt ; I think voters just don’t care.)

（我不认为他们会受到伤害；我认为选民只是不在乎。）

But I do think there are some important lessons that we can already learn from this election, especially at the intersection of economics and politics.

但我确实认为我们已经可以从这次选举中学到一些重要的教训，特别是在经济和政治的交叉点。

In particular, I see three big ones:

特别是，我看到了三个大问题：

Identity politics — viewing racial groups as homogeneous “communities” to be targeted with appeals to collective grievances — is not an effective way of winning over Hispanic (or, probably, Asian) voters.

身份政治——将种族群体视为同质的“社区”，成为诉诸集体不满的目标——并不是赢得西班牙裔（或者可能是亚洲裔）选民的有效方式。

The educated professional class has become dangerously out of touch with the rest of the country.

受过教育的专业阶层已经与国家其他地区脱节，这是危险的。

Instead of writing all of these in one post, I’m going to split it into three, because I think the lessons are each very important.

我不会将所有这些内容写在一篇文章中，而是将其分成三篇，因为我认为每一篇文章都非常重要。

Since I’ve already shown the racial and class breakdown of the exit polls, I’ll talk about how identity politics is failing Democrats.

既然我已经展示了出口民意调查的种族和阶级细分，我将谈谈身份政治如何让民主党失望。

Whether or not you think identity politics drove voters into Trump’s arms, it certainly hasn’t done an effective job of retaining Hispanic voters.

无论你是否认为身份政治将选民推向特朗普的怀抱，它肯定没有有效地保留拉美裔选民。

The whole approach needs a deep rethink.

整个方法需要深入反思。

In the 2010s, there was a big debate over identity politics, with scholars like Francis Fukuyama warning that treating the American electorate as a balkanized set of racial collectives was undermining democracy.

2010 年代，关于身份政治发生了一场大辩论，弗朗西斯·福山等学者警告说，将美国选民视为巴尔干的种族集体正在破坏民主。

Stacey Abrams and other progressive writers pushed back against Fukuyama , arguing that all politics is identity politics, and so Democrats should continue focusing on racial appeals.

斯泰西·艾布拉姆斯和其他进步作家反驳福山，认为所有政治都是身份政治，因此民主党人应该继续关注种族诉求。

Abrams et al.

艾布拉姆斯等人。

were right in the facile, definitional sense that people’s personal identification with larger groups, movements, and ideas — rather than their own personal economic interests — drives much of their political behavior.

从简单的定义意义上来说，这是正确的，即人们对更大群体、运动和思想的个人认同——而不是他们自己的个人经济利益——驱动了他们的大部分政治行为。

After all, if human beings were rational calculating machines, they wouldn’t even vote, given the incredibly low probability that any election will be decided by a single vote.

毕竟，如果人类是理性的计算机器，他们甚至不会投票，因为任何选举由一票决定的可能性极低。

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But the 2024 election — even more than the 2020 election — makes it clear that most Hispanic and Asian voters don’t want to be appealed to based on the racial group of which they’re supposedly a part.

但 2024 年的选举——甚至比 2020 年的选举更清楚地表明，大多数拉美裔和亚裔选民不希望因为他们所属的种族群体而受到吸引。

For example, lenient policies toward asylum seekers from Latin America don’t seem to have won over many Hispanics:

例如，对拉丁美洲寻求庇护者的宽松政策似乎并没有赢得许多西班牙裔的支持：

In Hidalgo County, in South Texas — a Mexican American stronghold that Biden won with 58% of the vote in 2020 — Vice President Harris and Trump were virtually tied early Wednesday, with Harris leading by less than half a percentage point…In Cameron County, at the southern tip of Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, Trump led Harris, 52-47, according to early results.

在德克萨斯州南部的伊达尔戈县——拜登在2020年以58%的选票赢得了墨西哥裔美国人的据点——周三早些时候，副总统哈里斯和特朗普几乎打成平手，哈里斯领先不到半个百分点……在德克萨斯州格兰德河谷南端的卡梅伦县，根据初步结果，特朗普以52比47领先哈里斯。

Biden won that county with 56% of the vote four years ago.

四年前，拜登以 56% 的选票赢得了该县。

The whole notion that lenient policies on illegal and quasi-legal immigration would win inroads with Latinos was based on the idea that Hispanic Americans identify strongly with others of their same race .

对非法和准合法移民的宽松政策将赢得拉丁裔美国人的青睐的整个观念是基于西班牙裔美国人对同种族其他人的强烈认同。

Political scientists call this the theory of “ linked fate ”.

政治学家将此称为“命运相连”理论。

Democrats clearly buy into this theory when they refer to racial groups as “communities”.

当民主党人将种族群体称为“社区”时，他们显然接受了这一理论。

This term has become ubiquitous in Democratic messaging — for example, Harris talked about her “ economic agenda for the Latino community ”.

这个词在民主党的信息中已经无处不在——例如，哈里斯谈到了她的“拉丁裔社区的经济议程”。

But races are not communities .

但种族不是社区。

Our country is not like a segregated 1930-era city, where Black people live in a ghetto, Chinese people live in Chinatown, Italian people live in Little Italy, and so on.

我们的国家不像1930年代的隔离城市，黑人住在贫民窟，中国人住在唐人街，意大利人住在小意大利，等等。

Hispanic and Asian Americans might share a sense of “linked fate” with others of their race, but it’s only one of many things they care about, and perhaps not even a major one.

西班牙裔和亚裔美国人可能与他们的种族其他人有一种“命运相连”的感觉，但这只是他们关心的众多事情之一，甚至可能不是主要的事情。

The big exception, of course, is Black Americans, who continue to vote mostly like a racial bloc, despite Trump’s modest inroads with Black men.

当然，最大的例外是美国黑人，尽管特朗普对黑人的影响不大，但他们仍然像一个种族集团一样投票。

This has clearly influenced the Democrats’ view of how racial politics operates in America, and they’ve tried to apply the same mental model to Hispanics and Asians.

这显然影响了民主党对美国种族政治运作方式的看法，他们试图将相同的思维模式应用于西班牙裔和亚裔。

This is explicit in California, where you hear the term “Black and brown” thrown around a lot.

这在加利福尼亚州尤为明显，在那里你经常听到“黑色和棕色”这个词。

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But it isn’t working.

但它不起作用。

In fact, it’s backfiring.

事实上，这是适得其反的。

A recent paper by d’Urso and Roman found that use of the term “Latinx” actually made Hispanics vote for the Republicans in nontrivial numbers!

d’Urso 和 Roman 最近发表的一篇论文发现，使用“拉丁裔”一词实际上使拉美裔投票支持共和党的人数非同小可！

Group labels are political, but little theory and evidence explains how group labels shape politician evaluations…Latinos’ relationship with “Latinx,” a gender-inclusive label, is a theoretical test case.

群体标签是政治性的，但很少有理论和证据解释群体标签如何影响政治家的评价……拉丁裔与“拉丁裔”（一个性别包容性标签）的关系是一个理论测试案例。

Using several datasets, we find: Latinos are less likely to support politicians who use “Latinx”…Latinos who oppose “Latinx” are less likely to support politicians who used or are associated with “Latinx”…Latinos in areas where “Latinx” is more salient are more likely to switch their vote toward Trump between 2016-2020[.]

使用多个数据集，我们发现：拉丁裔不太可能支持使用“拉丁裔”的政客……反对“拉丁裔”的拉丁裔不太可能支持使用“拉丁裔”或与“拉丁裔”相关的政客……在“拉丁裔”更突出的地区，拉丁裔更有可能在 2016 年至 2020 年期间将投票转向特朗普[.]

One common interpretation of this result — and one the authors discuss — is that many Latinos are conservative, and that this makes them susceptible to “anti-LGBTQ+” labels.

对这一结果的一种常见解释（也是作者讨论的一种解释）是，许多拉丁裔是保守派，这使他们容易受到“反 LGBTQ+”标签的影响。

I’m highly skeptical of this interpretation.

我对这种解释非常怀疑。

Outside small, highly educated, deeply progressive circles, who even knows that the purpose of the “x” in “Latinx” was to be trans-inclusive?

在受过高等教育、非常进步的小圈子之外，谁知道“拉丁裔”中“x”的目的是包容跨性别者？

Almost no one who is likely to be offended by the term is even aware of this.

几乎没有人可能会被这个词冒犯，甚至没有意识到这一点。

Instead, what they hear is simply someone making up a weird label and applying it to them.

相反，他们听到的只是有人编造了一个奇怪的标签并将其应用到他们身上。

It’s what sociologists call ascription — it’s someone making up a racial category for someone else and then stuffing them into it without their consent.

这就是社会学家所说的归属——有人为别人编造一个种族类别，然后在未经他人同意的情况下将他们塞进去。

The Occam’s Razor explanation for Hispanics’ dislike of “Latinx” is that it minoritizes them — it declares that they’re part of a special “community”, separate from other Americans.

奥卡姆剃刀对西班牙裔不喜欢“拉丁裔”的解释是，它使他们处于少数地位——它宣称他们是一个特殊“社区”的一部分，与其他美国人不同。

Democrats’ purpose in assigning Americans to “communities”, of course, is not to exclude them, but to reward them — to hand them special prizes or favors via government policy.

当然，民主党将美国人划分为“社区”的目的不是要排除他们，而是要奖励他们——通过政府政策给予他们特殊的奖励或优惠。

For example, the Biden administration had a whole policy oriented around giving government benefits specifically to “HSIs” — an abbreviation for “Hispanic-Serving Institutions”, i.e. colleges that a lot of Hispanic people tend to go to.

例如，拜登政府制定了一项专门向“HSIs”提供政府福利的整体政策，“HSIs”是“西班牙裔服务机构”的缩写，即许多西班牙裔人倾向于就读的大学。

Harris also had a plan for encouraging small banks to give Hispanic people more loans.

哈里斯还制定了一项鼓励小银行向西班牙裔人提供更多贷款的计划。

This is, fundamentally, a special-interest model of politics — it’s similar to the kind of quid pro quo that historically dominates much of urban machine politics.

从根本上来说，这是一种特殊利益的政治模式——它类似于历史上主导大部分城市机器政治的交换条件。

I’m not sure whether today’s Dems inherit their instinct for this kind of group giveaway from their old Tammany Hall days, but it’s recognizably similar to the way California cities hand out cash to favored nonprofits — especially because the programs are often targeted at colleges or banks or nonprofits or other organizations that claim to serve the racial “community” in question.

我不确定今天的民主党人是否继承了过去坦慕尼协会时代的这种团体赠品的本能，但这显然与加州城市向受青睐的非营利组织发放现金的方式相似——特别是因为这些计划通常针对声称为相关种族“社区”服务的大学、银行、非营利组织或其他组织。

But there are notable downsides to this approach.

但这种方法有明显的缺点。

First, unlike in a city, these targeted initiatives probably don’t make it through to the public consciousness.

首先，与城市不同，这些有针对性的举措可能不会进入公众意识。

What Puerto Rican voter in Philadelphia even knows what the heck an “HSI” is?

费城的哪个波多黎各选民知道“HSI”到底是什么？

But more fundamentally, I think most Americans, including most Hispanic Americans, would rather be treated as individuals than as members of a racial “community”.

但更根本的是，我认为大多数美国人，包括大多数西班牙裔美国人，宁愿被视为个体，也不愿被视为种族“社区”的成员。

Identity has many components.

身份有很多组成部分。

For my part, I identify as an American, a Texan, a liberal, a rabbit keeper, a writer, a nerd, a PhD holder, a science fiction fan, a Jew, a white person, a Lithuanian-American, and so on.

就我而言，我认为自己是美国人、德克萨斯人、自由主义者、养兔人、作家、书呆子、博士持有者、科幻小说迷、犹太人、白人、立陶宛裔美国人，等等。

3 If politicians primarily spoke to me as part of the “Jewish community”, I would be annoyed, because I don’t necessarily want to be defined by that component of my identity.

3 如果政客主要将我视为“犹太社区”的一部分来与我交谈，我会很生气，因为我不一定希望被我身份的这一组成部分所定义。

I don’t reject it, but I don’t want to be reduced to it either.

我不拒绝它，但我也不想沦落到这样的地步。

And if politicians tried to appeal to me with policies targeted through Jewish organizations to benefit Jews, I would simply not care.

如果政客们试图通过犹太组织制定有针对性的政策来吸引我，让犹太人受益，我根本不会在意。

In fact, I would be a little conflicted about accepting any of those benefits, since it would pigeonhole me into prioritizing an identity that exists as only one component among many.

事实上，我对于接受这些好处中的任何一个都会有点矛盾，因为它会让我优先考虑一个仅作为众多组成部分存在的身份。

Even more fundamentally, being constantly minoritized — being told to think of myself as a Jew first and as an American second — would pressure me to shrink the circle of people that I consider part of my own in-group.

更重要的是，不断被少数化——被告知首先要把自己视为犹太人，其次才是美国人——会迫使我缩小我认为属于自己群体的人的圈子。

Because I think of myself as an American first and foremost, I feel like there are 330 million other people who share my primary identity — 330 million people on my “team”.

因为我首先认为自己是一个美国人，所以我觉得还有 3.3 亿人与我有共同的主要身份——我的“团队”中有 3.3 亿人。

But if I were to think of myself first and foremost as a Jewish person, that would shrink my in-group to only 16 million, almost none of whom live near me.

但如果我首先将自己视为犹太人，那么我的圈内人数就会减少到只有 1600 万，而且几乎没有人住在我附近。

It would make me feel more isolated, and might even cause me to start questioning whether the 323 million non-Jewish Americans who live all around me have my best interests in mind.

这会让我感到更加孤立，甚至可能让我开始质疑生活在我周围的 3.23 亿非犹太裔美国人是否考虑到了我的最大利益。

In other words, being set apart from your fellow countrymen and neighbors is generally not a desirable thing, even if the reason is to put you on a pedestal.

换句话说，与你的同胞和邻居分开通常并不是一件令人愉快的事情，即使原因是为了让你受人尊敬。

I suspect many Hispanic Americans feel the same way.

我怀疑许多西班牙裔美国人也有同样的感觉。

Talking to Hispanic folks (remember, I’ve lived most of my life in either Texas or California) and reading books like The Diversity Paradox , The New Americans?

与西班牙裔人交谈（记住，我一生的大部分时间都生活在德克萨斯州或加利福尼亚州）并阅读《多样性悖论》、《新美国人》等书籍？

, and The Great Demographic Illusion , it seems clear that most would like to think of themselves as regular Americans — not to give up or forget their national origins or ethnic identity, but to prioritize their American-ness.

和《人口大幻觉》中，很明显，大多数人都愿意将自己视为普通美国人，而不是放弃或忘记他们的民族血统或种族身份，而是优先考虑他们的美国性。

The progressive movement of the 2010s told us that this was a bad thing.

2010年代的进步运动告诉我们这是一件坏事。

“Assimilation” became a dirty word in progressive circles, and the University of California told their faculty not to call the U.S. a “melting pot”.

“同化”在进步人士圈子里成了一个肮脏的词，加州大学告诉他们的教员不要称美国为“熔炉”。

The implicit assumption was that given the choice, people would like to prioritize their racial and ethnic identities, and that only forcible conformity pressure from American institutions — or from White people — was preventing people of color doing that.

隐含的假设是，如果有选择，人们希望优先考虑他们的种族和民族身份，而只有来自美国机构或白人的强制服从压力才能阻止有色人种这样做。

The Democratic party’s embrace of identity politics — its habit of targeting racial “communities” with encouraging rhetoric and specific material benefits — was seen as a way to counteract the pressures of assimilation.

民主党对身份政治的拥护——它习惯用鼓励性的言辞和具体的物质利益来针对种族“社区”——被视为抵消同化压力的一种方式。

The conservative counter-narrative was that race relations had been fine right up until progressives started making everything in America about race.

保守派的反叙述是，种族关系一直很好，直到进步人士开始在美国制造一切与种族有关的事情。

Conservatives always send me the following chart:

保守派总是给我发下面的图表：

This is a powerful argument.

这是一个有力的论据。

If structural racism was really so entrenched before 2014, then why did two-thirds of Black adults say race relations were good?

如果结构性种族主义在 2014 年之前确实如此根深蒂固，那么为什么三分之二的黑人成年人表示种族关系良好？

Essentially, the progressive story is that they were effectively bullied into saying this — or perhaps bullied into thinking it.

从本质上讲，进步的故事是他们实际上是被胁迫才说出这句话的——或者可能是被胁迫才这么想的。

The conservative story is that progressives created the decline in race relations by making everyone think about race all the time.

保守派的说法是，进步派让每个人都无时无刻不在思考种族问题，从而导致了种族关系的恶化。

I suspect that neither of these stories gets it quite right, but that the conservative story is closer to the truth.

我怀疑这两个故事都不太正确，但保守派的故事更接近事实。

Increasing the salience of racial divisions and racial conflict makes people mistrust their neighbors more.

种族分歧和种族冲突的日益突出使人们更加不信任邻居。

And although both sides were guilty of this in the 2010s, progressives were far more zealous and absolutist about it.

尽管双方在 2010 年代都曾犯过这样的错误，但进步派对此更加狂热和专制。

Essentially, the progressivism of the 2010s sought to turn American society into a sort of estate society , where people’s rights, privileges, and social roles would be mediated by their identity group.

从本质上讲，2010年代的进步主义试图将美国社会变成一种地产社会，在这种社会中，人们的权利、特权和社会角色将由他们的身份群体来调节。

How your teachers and principals treated you, your relationship with the law, what colleges were available to you, what kind of parties you could go to , what jobs you could get hired for, how your bosses treated you at work, what kind of benefits you could expect from your government, and even how people walked past you on the street were to be determined by the race you were born into , rather than your own actions as an individual.

你的老师和校长如何对待你，你与法律的关系，你可以上什么大学，你可以参加什么样的聚会，你可以从事什么工作，你的老板在工作中如何对待你，你可以从政府那里得到什么样的福利，甚至人们在街上如何从你身边走过，这些都取决于你出生的种族，而不是你作为个人的行为。

These race-based social relationships were to be enforced by a combination of DEI departments, lawsuits, social shaming, job loss, and so on.

这些基于种族的社会关系将通过 DEI 部门、诉讼、社会羞辱、失业等手段的结合来强制执行。

Ibram X.

伊布拉姆·X.

Kendi even suggested the totalitarian step of creating a constitutionally mandated “ Department of Antiracism ” to enforce race-based social relations at every level of society — all in the name of combatting “structural racism”, which Kendi couldn’t even define when asked .

肯迪甚至建议采取极权主义步骤，建立一个宪法授权的“反种族主义部门”，以在社会各个层面加强基于种族的社会关系——所有这些都是以打击“结构性种族主义”的名义，而当被问到时，肯迪甚至无法定义这一点。

Democratic party politicians never fully embraced this vision of the future, even in 2020-21.

即使在 2020-21 年，民主党政客也从未完全接受这一未来愿景。

Some of these ideas were tried out in 2020-21, but they failed almost as quickly as they were tried , making basically everyone mad in the process.

其中一些想法在 2020-21 年进行了尝试，但几乎和尝试一样快就失败了，基本上每个人都在这个过程中感到愤怒。

By 2024, Kamala Harris was tacking pretty strongly away from the racialized vision of America.

到 2024 年，卡玛拉·哈里斯 (Kamala Harris) 正在大力摆脱美国的种族化愿景。

But that was too little, too late.

但这太少了，也太晚了。

People remember the individualistic Americanism largely prevailed in public life before 2014, and they remember the constant hyper-consciousness of race in 2014-21, and they know which one they like better.

人们还记得2014年之前公共生活中普遍盛行的个人主义美国主义，还记得2014-21年持续的种族过度意识，他们知道自己更喜欢哪一种。

And although Democrats abandoned much of their woke rhetoric, the practice of targeting politics at specific “communities” has persisted.

尽管民主党人放弃了大部分醒悟的言论，但针对特定“社区”的政治做法仍然存在。

I suspect that it refreshes the bad memories of the racial conflicts of 2014-21.

我怀疑它会刷新人们对2014-21年种族冲突的糟糕记忆。

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that Democrats’ racial targeting probably makes a lot of Hispanic people feel singled out and alienated in their own country, even if the purpose is to help them.

所有这些都是一种冗长的说法，民主党的种族目标可能让许多西班牙裔人在自己的国家感到被孤立和疏远，即使目的是帮助他们。

But that’s not all.

但这还不是全部。

Democrats’ identity politics flies strongly in the face of the narrative that has defined the American experience for many Hispanics.

民主党的身份政治强烈反对许多西班牙裔美国人的美国经历。

To the extent that most Hispanic Americans do share a common experience, it’s the immigrant experience.

就大多数拉美裔美国人确实有共同经历而言，那就是移民经历。

Immigrants come to America seeking the American Dream of upward mobility and opportunity.

移民来到美国寻求向上流动和机会的美国梦。

And by and large, they achieve it.

总的来说，他们实现了这一目标。

Their children tend to earn a lot more than they do, and their grandchildren earn even more.

他们的孩子往往比他们挣得更多，而他们的孙辈挣得甚至更多。

This was the path that most immigrant groups have followed — the Irish, the Italians, the Lithuanians, the Chinese, and so on.

这是大多数移民群体所遵循的道路——爱尔兰人、意大利人、立陶宛人、中国人等等。

For a while, people argued that Hispanics were different — that they would be permanently excluded from the American Dream.

有一段时间，人们认为拉美裔是不同的——他们将永远被排除在美国梦之外。

That turned out not to be true:

事实证明这不是真的：

For many Hispanic Americans, their salient experience of America has not been one of racialized exclusion, but one of upward economic mobility and social inclusion.

对于许多拉美裔美国人来说，他们在美国的显着经历并不是种族排斥，而是经济向上流动和社会包容。

Economists have found that Hispanic incomes are converging to White levels across the generations.

经济学家发现，几代人中西班牙裔的收入正在向白人水平靠拢。

Once you control for the composition effect of new poor immigrants coming in, there’s strong income convergence across the generations:

一旦控制了新贫困移民的构成效应，各代人之间的收入就会趋同：

We study the sources of racial and ethnic disparities in income using de-identified longitudinal data covering nearly the entire U.S. population from 1989-2015….[T]he intergenerational persistence of disparities varies substantially across racial groups.

我们使用涵盖 1989 年至 2015 年几乎整个美国人口的去识别化纵向数据来研究种族和民族收入差异的来源……不同种族群体之间代际间持续存在的差异存在很大差异。

For example, Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations because they have relatively high rates of intergenerational income mobility…

例如，西班牙裔美国人的代际收入分配显着上升，因为他们的代际收入流动性相对较高……

Hispanic Americans are moving up significantly in the income distribution across generations.

拉美裔美国人的代际收入分配显着上升。

For example, a model of intergenerational mobility analogous to Becker and Tomes (1979) predicts that the gap will shrink from the 22 percentile difference between Hispanic and white parents observed in our sample…to 6 percentiles in steady state…

例如，类似于 Becker 和 Tomes (1979) 的代际流动性模型预测，差距将从我们样本中观察到的西班牙裔和白人父母之间 22% 的差异缩小到稳定状态下的 6%……

Hispanics are on an upward trajectory across generations and may close most of the gap between their incomes and those of whites…Their low levels of income at present thus appear to to be primarily due to transitory factors.

西班牙裔人的收入水平在几代人之间呈上升趋势，可能会缩小他们与白人之间的大部分收入差距……因此，他们目前的低收入水平似乎主要是由于暂时性因素造成的。

In fact, despite composition effects from continued immigration, Hispanic wages have grown faster than White wages in America since the turn of the century:

事实上，尽管持续移民对构成产生影响，自世纪之交以来，美国拉美裔工资的增长速度仍快于白人工资：

Surveys unsurprisingly have found widespread economic optimism among Hispanics for many years.

毫不奇怪，调查发现拉美裔多年来普遍对经济持乐观态度。

Hispanics are climbing the ladder of education :

西班牙裔人正在攀登教育阶梯：

Hispanic homeownership is rising strongly .

西班牙裔的住房拥有率正在强劲上升。

And Hispanics are starting businesses at very high rates :

西班牙裔人的创业率非常高：

New businesses owned by Latinos accounted for 36% of launches in 2023…As of 2023, Latino entrepreneurs have established a staggering five million businesses across the United States, collectively generating over $800 billion in annual revenue …The rapid pace of this growth is further highlighted by the fact that the number of Latino/a-owned businesses surged by 34% from 2007 to 2019 .

2023 年，拉丁裔拥有的新企业占新成立企业的 36%……截至 2023 年，拉丁裔企业家在美国各地建立了惊人的 500 万家企业，年收入总计超过 8000 亿美元……从 2007 年到 2019 年，拉丁裔/黑人拥有的企业数量激增 34%，这一事实进一步凸显了这种增长的快速步伐。

In other words, Hispanic Americans’ economic path looks reasonably similar to that of Italian Americans or Irish Americans.

换句话说，西班牙裔美国人的经济道路看起来与意大利裔美国人或爱尔兰裔美国人相当相似。

In the 2010s, it became taboo to even talk about these successes in some progressive circles.

在 2010 年代，在一些进步人士的圈子里甚至谈论这些成功都成了禁忌。

The University of California’s 2015 speech guidelines told faculty not to say “America is the land of opportunity”.

加州大学 2015 年演讲指南要求教师不要说“美国是机遇之地”。

This was deemed to be a racist utterance, since it supposedly minimized the economic exclusion that many minority groups have faced.

这被认为是种族主义言论，因为它据称最大限度地减少了许多少数群体面临的经济排斥。

But the fact is, America is the land of opportunity, especially for immigrants and their children.

但事实是，美国是一片充满机遇的土地，尤其是对于移民及其子女而言。

Hispanic Americans, broadly speaking, have been prime beneficiaries of that upward mobility — they have worked incredibly hard, gone to school, started businesses, learned English, and done everything else they were supposed to do.

从广义上讲，拉美裔美国人是这种向上流动的主要受益者——他们工作非常努力，上学，创业，学习英语，并做了他们应该做的所有其他事情。

And America has rewarded them with economic success and social integration.

美国以经济成功和社会融合来奖励他们。

Compared to that self-bootstrapped success, racial preferences — DEI, affirmative action, preferential government contracts, and so on — are basically a booby prize.

与自我引导的成功相比，种族偏好——DEI、平权行动、优惠政府合同等等——基本上是一个骗局。

Yes, in reality, those policies can sometimes help accelerate Latino achievement.

是的，实际上，这些政策有时可以帮助加速拉丁裔的成就。

But the mere fact that they’re on offer — and that Democrats seemingly view them as permanent policies instead of temporary ones — sends the message that Hispanics are a permanently racialized, excluded, marginalized group.

但这些政策的推出——而且民主党人似乎将其视为永久性政策而不是临时政策——这一事实本身就传达了这样的信息：拉美裔是一个永久被种族化、被排斥、边缘化的群体。

This message is often explicit — when Democrats and progressives talk about “marginalized groups”, which they often do, that term is generally supposed to include Hispanics.

这一信息通常是明确的——当民主党人和进步人士谈论“边缘化群体”时（他们经常这样做），这个词通常应该包括西班牙裔。

The tricky part for Democrats is that this is an approach that has largely worked with Black voters — or at least failed to alienate them.

对于民主党人来说，棘手的部分是，这种做法在很大程度上对黑人选民有效，或者至少未能疏远他们。

It will be difficult for Democrats to convince themselves that Hispanic voters are not going to work the same, after spending so many years believing they would.

民主党人很难让自己相信西班牙裔选民不会以同样的方式工作，尽管多年来他们一直相信他们会这样做。

But the 2024 election, and the trend of the last few elections, makes it clear that the two are not going to work the same.

但 2024 年的选举以及最近几次选举的趋势清楚地表明，两者的作用不会相同。

Identity politics allows Democrats to hold on to a supermajority of the Black vote, so I suspect it will never go away.

身份政治使民主党能够保住绝大多数黑人选票，所以我怀疑它永远不会消失。

But the Black vote is a smallish and shrinking part of the electorate, and even there, the power of idpol may be fading a bit.

但黑人选票在选民中所占的比例很小，而且还在不断萎缩，即便如此，国际警察组织的力量也可能会有所减弱。

Meanwhile, Hispanic voters, Asian voters, and Middle Eastern voters are the future.

与此同时，西班牙裔选民、亚洲选民和中东选民才是未来。

Those groups are all strongly upwardly mobile, and mostly descended from people who came to America voluntarily in search of the American Dream.

这些群体都具有很强的向上流动性，并且大多是自愿来到美国寻找美国梦的人的后裔。

And although ethnic studies professors and progressive activists will happily tell you all about the Chinese Exclusion Act and post-9/11 Islamophobia, it’s just not the case that Hispanic, Asian, and Middle Eastern Americans have anything that compares to the history of slavery and segregation.

尽管种族研究教授和进步活动人士会很高兴地告诉你有关排华法案和 9/11 事件后的伊斯兰恐惧症的一切，但西班牙裔、亚裔和中东裔美国人的情况却无法与奴隶制和种族隔离的历史相比。

The Democrats need to move away from identity politics.

民主党需要摆脱身份政治。

And switching to class-based politics, as some have suggested, won’t really help.

正如一些人所建议的那样，转向基于阶级的政治并不会真正有帮助。

Biden was probably the most pro-union and pro-worker President America has had since the mid 20th century, and yet some prominent unions refused to endorse Harris .

拜登可能是 20 世纪中叶以来美国最支持工会和工人的总统，但一些知名工会拒绝支持哈里斯。

Instead, Democrats need to retool their message to be about American identity, as it was in the New Deal days, and as it arguably was for Clinton and Obama.

相反，民主党人需要重新调整他们的信息，使之成为关于美国身份的信息，就像新政时代的情况一样，也可以说是克林顿和奥巴马的情况。

I believe Harris actually took steps in the right direction, but not enough, and not nearly soon enough — and she was probably the wrong person to sell the idea.

我相信哈里斯实际上朝着正确的方向采取了步骤，但还不够，而且还不够快——而且她可能不是推销这个想法的人选。

My advice is not to be discouraged, and to keep at it — Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis both went down to crushing defeats with centrist, positive messaging, but then Bill Clinton eventually figured out how to make the approach work.

我的建议是不要灰心丧气，要坚持下去——沃尔特·蒙代尔和迈克尔·杜卡基斯都因中间派、积极的信息而遭受惨败，但后来比尔·克林顿最终想出了如何使这种方法发挥作用。

Republicans will eventually screw up.

共和党最终会搞砸。

Trump is old, and he has a lot of foolish and bad people around him , and his economic policy program is kind of a dead end.

特朗普老了，他身边有很多愚蠢和坏人，他的经济政策方案有点走进了死胡同。

At some point, America will once more call upon the Democrats to save them from Republican mistakes, as they did in 2008 and in 1992.

在某个时刻，美国将再次呼吁民主党避免重蹈共和党的覆辙，就像他们在 2008 年和 1992 年所做的那样。

Democrats will have an easier time rising to that inevitable summons if they leave the identity politics of the 2010s behind.

如果民主党将 2010 年代的身份政治抛在脑后，他们将更容易应对这一不可避免的召唤。

Because that stuff just isn’t getting the job done.

因为那些东西根本无法完成工作。

In 2021, there was a fierce debate, both within the Biden administration and among the general left-of-center commentariat, about how much to worry about inflation.

2021年，拜登政府内部和一般中左翼评论界就对通胀的担忧程度展开了激烈辩论。

For example, in May 2021, Larry Summers wrote :

例如，2021 年 5 月，拉里·萨默斯 (Larry Summers) 写道：

Even six months ago, it was reasonable to regard slow growth, high unemployment and deflationary pressures as the predominant risk to the economy.

即使在六个月前，人们也有理由将缓慢增长、高失业率和通货紧缩压力视为经济的主要风险。

Today, while continuing relief efforts are essential, the focus of our macroeconomic policy needs to change…Inflationary pressures are mounting…How much does it matter whether inflation accelerates?

如今，虽然持续的救援工作至关重要，但我们的宏观经济政策的重点需要改变……通胀压力正在加大……通胀是否加速有多重要？

In general, increases in inflation disproportionately hurt the poor and are associated with reductions in trust in government.

总体而言，通货膨胀的加剧对穷人造成了不成比例的伤害，并且与政府信任度的降低有关。

Progressives might consider the role that inflation played in electing Richard M.

进步派可能会考虑通货膨胀在选举理查德·M·布什(Richard M.

Nixon in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.

1968 年的尼克松和 1980 年的罗纳德·里根。

In February 2021, Olivier Blanchard, another prominent macroeconomist, wrote a detailed argument that the Biden administration was spending too much on Covid relief with the American Rescue Plan, and that this would generate a surge of inflation.

2021年2月，另一位著名宏观经济学家奥利维尔·布兰查德(Olivier Blanchard)撰写了一篇详细论点，称拜登政府在美国救援计划中在新冠救济上花费过多，这将导致通胀飙升。

The argument included a simple model whose predictions ended up being close to what actually happened.

争论包括一个简单的模型，其预测最终接近实际发生的情况。

Other economists pushed back hard against Blanchard and Summers, arguing that inflation was due to transitory factors, and that it was important to keep spending in order to preserve full employment.

其他经济学家强烈反对布兰查德和萨默斯，认为通货膨胀是暂时性因素造成的，为了保持充分就业，保持支出非常重要。

One of these was Paul Krugman, who declared himself “a card-carrying member of Team Transitory” — “Team Transitory” being those who thought inflation was mostly due to pandemic disruptions and would fade on its own.

其中之一是保罗·克鲁格曼（Paul Krugman），他宣称自己是“瞬态团队的正式成员”——“瞬态团队”是那些认为通货膨胀主要是由于大流行病的破坏而导致的，并且会自行消退的人。

There was even a live debate between Krugman and Summers in early 2022.

2022 年初，克鲁格曼和萨默斯甚至进行了现场辩论。

But by late 2022, Krugman issued a mea culpa , and admitted that Biden’s American Rescue Plan had exacerbated inflation:

但到了 2022 年底，克鲁格曼公开道歉，承认拜登的美国救援计划加剧了通货膨胀：

In early 2021 there was an intense debate among economists about the likely consequences of the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion package enacted by a new Democratic president and a (barely) Democratic Congress.

2021 年初，经济学家们对美国救援计划可能产生的后果进行了激烈辩论，该计划是由新任民主党总统和（勉强）民主党国会颁布的 1.9 万亿美元一揽子计划。

Some warned that the package would be dangerously inflationary; others were fairly relaxed.

一些人警告说，该计划将导致危险的通货膨胀；其他人则相当放松。

I was Team Relaxed.

我是团队放松的。

As it turned out, of course, that was a very bad call.

当然，事实证明，这是一个非常糟糕的决定。

Economic analyses of the inflation surge of 2021-22 generally assign the American Rescue Plan some share of the blame .

对 2021-22 年通胀飙升的经济分析普遍认为美国救援计划负有一定责任。

Ignoring Summers’ warnings, and believing Team Transitory, might have cost the Democrats the 2024 election.

无视萨默斯的警告并相信“过渡团队”可能会让民主党在 2024 年大选中失败。

I’m no political scientist, but there are reasons to believe that the burst of high inflation in 2021-22 was one factor in Kamala Harris’ loss.

我不是政治学家，但有理由相信 2021-22 年高通胀的爆发是卡马拉·哈里斯落选的因素之一。

The first reason we should think inflation mattered is that people pretty consistently said it mattered.

我们应该认为通货膨胀很重要的第一个原因是人们一致表示它很重要。

On Gallup’s long-running “most important problem” survey, inflation consistently ranked as the most important specific economic problem that people mentioned, right behind “economy in general”.

在盖洛普长期进行的“最重要问题”调查中，通货膨胀一直被列为人们提到的最重要的具体经济问题，仅次于“总体经济”。

A lot of other surveys showed similar results .

许多其他调查也显示了类似的结果。

And the percentage of people who told Gallup that the economy was “extremely important” to their presidential vote was unusually high — almost as high as in 2008, when the financial crisis had just devastated the U.S. economy:

告诉盖洛普经济对他们的总统投票“极其重要”的人比例异常高——几乎与 2008 年一样高，当时金融危机刚刚摧毁了美国经济：

And of course consumer sentiment was pretty low , even after adjusting for changes in methodology:

当然，即使在根据方法论的变化进行调整之后，消费者信心仍然相当低：

Now, it’s possible that this was mostly just Republicans complaining about inflation because it felt more substantive than talking only about more social/cultural grievances like wokeness, immigration, trans stuff, etc. After all, opinion on the economy shows a very partisan pattern depending on who’s in the White House:

现在，这可能主要只是共和党人抱怨通货膨胀，因为这感觉比只谈论更多的社会/文化不满（如觉醒、移民、跨性别问题等）更具实质性。毕竟，对经济的看法显示出一种非常党派的模式，具体取决于谁在白宫：

It’s a pretty good bet that Republicans will suddenly “discover” that inflation in America is actually low now, and give Trump the credit.

很有可能共和党人会突然“发现”美国的通胀率现在实际上很低，并把功劳归功于特朗普。

But if you look historically and across countries, it really looks like inflation tends to make voters particularly mad.

但如果你纵观历史和各国，通货膨胀确实会让选民特别生气。

Research often finds that cumulative inflation over a President’s term in office — not just the current inflation rate — affects presidential approval and election performance.

研究经常发现，总统任期内的累积通胀——而不仅仅是当前的通胀率——会影响总统的支持率和选举表现。

If you look at Gallup’s long-running survey, you’ll see that the inflation of the 1970s dominated Americans’ complaints even more than the unemployment of the Volcker recessions in the early 80s, or the recession of the early 90s:

如果你看一下盖洛普的长期调查，你会发现 20 世纪 70 年代的通货膨胀在美国人的抱怨中占据主导地位，甚至超过了 80 年代初沃尔克经济衰退或 90 年代初的衰退造成的失业：

And if you look at other countries, you’ll see that governing parties in every other rich country have seen their vote shares go down this year:

如果你看看其他国家，你会发现其他所有富裕国家的执政党今年的选票份额都下降了：

There are relatively few factors that are affecting all rich countries at the same time.

同时影响所有富裕国家的因素相对较少。

A backlash over immigration is another possible common factor, but the list is basically just that plus inflation.

对移民的强烈反对是另一个可能的共同因素，但清单基本上只是移民加上通货膨胀。

On top of that, there was a model that predicted the election outcome quite well.

最重要的是，有一个模型可以很好地预测选举结果。

An interdisciplinary team of researchers created a model based on presidential approval ratings and economic conditions in each state, and they ended up predicting each state correctly:

一个跨学科的研究团队根据每个州的总统支持率和经济状况创建了一个模型，他们最终正确地预测了每个州：

It might be a fluke, but the same model got only one state wrong in 2020 (Georgia), so that’s pretty encouraging.

这可能是一个侥幸，但同样的模型在 2020 年只在一个州（乔治亚州）出错，所以这是相当令人鼓舞的。

In any case, the model relies partly on economic fundamentals — measures of the labor market and real wages.

无论如何，该模型部分依赖于经济基本面——劳动力市场和实际工资的衡量标准。

And real wages depend on inflation.

实际工资取决于通货膨胀。

So since labor markets are generally very strong all across America, the erosion of state-level wages by inflation is going to be the main economic factor that led this model to forecast a Trump victory.

因此，由于全美劳动力市场普遍非常强劲，通货膨胀对州级工资的侵蚀将成为导致该模型预测特朗普获胜的主要经济因素。

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So I think it’s safe to say that while it’s possible inflation mattered less for Trump’s victory than people say on polls, it did matter at least somewhat.

因此，我认为可以肯定地说，虽然通胀对特朗普获胜的影响可能不如人们在民意调查中所说的那么重要，但它至少在某种程度上确实很重要。

Let’s talk a little about macroeconomics for a second.

让我们谈谈宏观经济学。

Most mainstream macroeconomic models assume that there’s some sort of short-term tradeoff between inflation and unemployment.

大多数主流宏观经济模型都假设通货膨胀和失业之间存在某种短期权衡。

If the Fed lowers interest rates or does quantitative easing or otherwise prints money, the general consensus is that unemployment will go down and inflation will go up.

如果美联储降低利率或实行量化宽松或以其他方式印钞，普遍的共识是失业率将会下降，通货膨胀将会上升。

Similarly, if the government borrows and spends money and the Fed doesn’t counteract this by raising interest rates, the general consensus is that you’ll get faster growth, more jobs, and rising prices.

同样，如果政府借钱和花钱，而美联储不通过加息来抵消这种情况，那么普遍的共识是，你将获得更快的增长、更多的就业机会和物价上涨。

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Macroeconomic policy then becomes a question of how to strike the right balance .

那么宏观经济政策就变成了如何取得适当平衡的问题。

We want everyone to have a job.

我们希望每个人都有工作。

We don’t want inflation to go about 2%.

我们不希望通货膨胀率达到 2% 左右。

But if we have to choose between these two things, how do we choose?

但如果我们必须在这两者之间做出选择，我们该如何选择呢？

In economic models, the relative degree that policymakers should care about inflation versus unemployment is determined by a social welfare function — basically, how much each of these economic ills makes regular people unhappy.

在经济模型中，政策制定者应该关心通货膨胀与失业的相对程度是由社会福利函数决定的——基本上，这些经济弊病让普通人不高兴的程度。

A lot of economic research is dedicated to figuring out what that welfare function, and there’s not really a consensus.

许多经济研究致力于弄清楚福利函数是什么，但并没有真正达成共识。

But the experiences of the 1970s and the 2020s are teaching us that in America at least, people seem to get even madder about inflation than they do about unemployment.

但 20 世纪 70 年代和 2020 年代的经历告诉我们，至少在美国，人们对通货膨胀的愤怒似乎比对失业的愤怒还要大。

And the question is why.

问题是为什么。

I actually wrote a post about this back in March of 2021, shortly after the American Rescue Plan was passed:

事实上，我早在 2021 年 3 月，即美国救援计划通过后不久就写过一篇关于此事的文章：

The basic story here comes from a survey Robert Shiller did in 1990 .

这里的基本故事来自 Robert Shiller 在 1990 年所做的一项调查。

Basically, inflation tends to make people’s purchasing power go down, because their wages can’t keep up.

基本上，通货膨胀往往会使人们的购买力下降，因为他们的工资跟不上。

6 This makes people poorer, and people do not like to be poorer.

6 这使人们变得更加贫穷，而人们不喜欢变得更加贫穷。

The inflation of 2021-22 definitely made people poorer.

2021-22 年的通货膨胀肯定会让人们变得更穷。

In fact, the drop in real personal disposable income from mid-2021 to mid-2022 was more severe than the Great Recession or the 1970s inflation!

事实上，从 2021 年中期到 2022 年中期，实际个人可支配收入的下降比大衰退或 1970 年代的通货膨胀还要严重！

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This was caused by a combination of the end of pandemic relief, and falling real wages and other income due to inflation.

这是由于大流行救济的结束以及通货膨胀导致的实际工资和其他收入下降共同造成的。

In 2021 and 2022, Americans’ real wages suffered their biggest drop in postwar history, thanks to inflation 8 :

2021 年和 2022 年，由于通货膨胀，美国人的实际工资遭受了战后历史上最大的降幅 8 ：

Remember, real wages are a key economic input that went into the model that managed to successfully predict every state’s election result.

请记住，实际工资是成功预测每个州选举结果的模型中的关键经济投入。

People really don’t like it when their real wages go down!

人们真的不喜欢实际工资下降！

One key thing to understand is that this sudden impoverishment happened to most Americans .

需要理解的一件关键的事情是，这种突然的贫困发生在大多数美国人身上。

Rising consumer prices affect everyone, from the rich to the poor, the employed and the unemployed, the old and the young.

消费价格上涨影响到每个人，从富人到穷人、就业者和失业者、老年人和年轻人。

In a recession, on the other hand, the negative effects are largely concentrated .

另一方面，在经济衰退中，负面影响主要集中。

If you’re one of the unlucky people who loses their job, you take a huge hit.

如果你是不幸失业的人之一，你会受到巨大的打击。

But if you’re not one of those people, you probably do OK.

但如果你不是这些人中的一员，你可能会做得很好。

Maybe your wages grow more slowly for a few years, and maybe you have to stress out about the increased possibility of being laid off.

也许你的工资在几年内增长得更慢，也许你不得不担心被解雇的可能性增加。

But in general, the harms of inflation are diffuse while the harms of unemployment are concentrated.

但总体而言，通货膨胀的危害是分散的，而失业的危害是集中的。

If you’re a moral philosopher, an activist, or an economist estimating a social welfare function, you may prefer harming a lot of people a little bit with inflation to harming a few people a lot with unemployment.

如果你是一位道德哲学家、活动家或估算社会福利函数的经济学家，你可能更喜欢用通货膨胀对很多人造成一点伤害，而不是用失业对少数人造成很大伤害。

But a democracy doesn’t vote based on social welfare.

但民主国家的投票不是基于社会福利。

It’s one person, one vote.

这是一个人，一票。

So if unemployment harms 10 million people a lot, and inflation harms 200 million people by a moderate amount, it’s clear that inflation will directly harm a much larger number of voters .

因此，如果失业对 1000 万人造成很大伤害，而通货膨胀对 2 亿人造成一定程度的伤害，那么很明显，通货膨胀将直接伤害更多的选民。

The social welfare function and the “get your butt kicked in an election” function are two very different things.

社会福利功能和“在选举中踢你的屁股”功能是两个截然不同的东西。

I actually suspect that there are other reasons why inflation bothers voters even more than unemployment.

我实际上怀疑通货膨胀比失业更让选民烦恼还有其他原因。

Inflation is something that’s obviously beyond an individual’s control — if the price of eggs goes up, you can choose not to buy eggs, but otherwise there’s not much you can do.

通货膨胀显然是个人无法控制的——如果鸡蛋价格上涨，你可以选择不买鸡蛋，但除此之外你也无能​​为力。

But unemployment is something that individuals do exercise some degree of control over — if you work a bunch of extra hours during a recession and establish a good relationship with your boss, maybe you can avoid getting laid off.

但失业是个人可以在一定程度上控制的事情——如果你在经济衰退期间加班很多，并与老板建立良好的关系，也许你可以避免被解雇。

In general, I think people are less worried about risks they have some control over, even if the overall level of danger is higher.

总的来说，我认为人们不太担心他们可以控制的风险，即使总体危险程度较高。

Look at how people are more afraid to fly than to take long road trips, despite road trips being much deadlier per mile.

看看人们如何比长途公路旅行更害怕乘坐飞机，尽管公路旅行每英里的致命性要高得多。

The leading theory is that in a car you have some control over your safety, while in a plane you have basically zero control.

主要理论是，在汽车中，您对自己的安全有一定的控制权，而在飞机上，您基本上具有零控制权。

Similarly, I suspect that inflation makes people feel powerless, like being stuck in a crashing airplane.

同样，我怀疑通货膨胀会让人们感到无能为力，就像被困在坠毁的飞机里一样。

In any case, this is probably an important area for survey research to explore.

无论如何，这可能是调查研究需要探索的一个重要领域。

But in the meantime, Democrats need to remember that full employment doesn’t necessarily mean an economy that Americans are happy with.

但与此同时，民主党人需要记住，充分就业并不一定意味着美国人对经济感到满意。

If it comes at the expense of rapid inflation, that price is going to be one that most Americans aren’t comfortable paying.

如果这是以快速通货膨胀为代价，那么大多数美国人都不愿意支付这一代价。

I’d like to say a little more about the debate over the American Rescue Plan in 2021.

我想多说一点关于 2021 年美国救援计划的争论。

While Paul Krugman and Larry Summers viewed their argument in purely technical terms, some economists and commentators did come at the debate from an ideological angle.

虽然保罗·克鲁格曼和拉里·萨默斯纯粹从技术角度看待他们的论点，但一些经济学家和评论家确实从意识形态的角度来看待这场辩论。

In general, spending more was considered the progressive position, while spending less in order to avoid high inflation was considered more centrist or moderate.

一般来说，增加支出被认为是进步立场，而为了避免高通胀而减少支出则被认为是更中间派或温和派。

This makes sense — full employment disproportionately benefits the least well-off in society.

这是有道理的——充分就业给社会中最不富裕的人带来了不成比例的好处。

The lowest-paid workers are often the first to be fired in a recession and the last to be hired in an expansion, so the longer you can keep an expansion going, the more poor people can have jobs.

收入最低的工人往往在经济衰退时最先被解雇，在经济扩张时最后被雇用，因此扩张持续的时间越长，就越多的穷人可以找到工作。

Also, full employment tends to push up wages, especially at the lower end of the scale — in fact, even as most Americans lost purchasing power during the inflation of 2021-22, the bottom 10% of American workers actually saw their real wages rise .

此外，充分就业往往会推高工资，尤其是在低端工资——事实上，尽管大多数美国人在 2021-22 年的通货膨胀期间失去了购买力，但底层 10% 的美国工人的实际工资实际上有所上升。

This July, I wrote about how some influential progressive think tanks basically push for full employment all the time, and downplay worries about inflation:

今年七月，我写了一些有影响力的进步智库如何基本上一直在推动充分就业，并淡化对通货膨胀的担忧：

Some progressive economics commentators — I will not name names, because I’m trying to be a less confrontational blogger these days — also consistently downplayed the risks of inflation and extolled the many benefits of full employment during Biden’s tenure in office.

一些进步的经济评论员——我不会点名，因为这些天我试图成为一个不那么对抗性的博主——也一贯淡化通胀风险，并赞扬拜登任职期间充分就业的诸多好处。

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In retrospect, whether or not this was a good move from a moral standpoint, it looks like a big mistake from an electoral standpoint.

回想起来，无论从道德角度来看这是否是一个好举动，但从选举角度来看，这似乎是一个很大的错误。

I hope that these commentators are reevaluating their beliefs.

我希望这些评论者重新评估他们的信念。

And I hope that Democratic politicians, staffers, and donors are reevaluating the paradigm as well.

我希望民主党政治家、工作人员和捐助者也能重新评估这一范式。

Full employment is great, all things equal.

充分就业是伟大的，一切都是平等的。

But sometimes the price of full employment is too high — not just for the majority of Americans who have to endure years of erosion in their purchasing power, but for everyone who has to suffer from the election of leaders like Donald Trump.

但有时，充分就业的代价太高了——不仅对大多数不得不忍受购买力多年下降的美国人而言，而且对每一个因唐纳德·特朗普(Donald Trump)等领导人当选而受苦的人来说也是如此。

Update : Good to see some left-leaning economists quickly coming to the same conclusions.

更新：很高兴看到一些左倾经济学家很快得出了相同的结论。

Our task now is to get the ear of Democratic politicians, which will probably require wresting it away from some progressive think tanks and Twitter posters.

我们现在的任务是吸引民主党政客的注意，这可能需要从一些进步智库和推特海报中夺取它。

I’ve been writing about the lessons that Democrats should take away from the big GOP victory.

我一直在写关于民主党应该从共和党大胜中吸取的教训。

I’ve written about how identity politics is failing to attract Hispanic voters , and about how Dems cared too much about employment and not enough about inflation .

我写过关于身份政治如何未能吸引西班牙裔选民，以及民主党如何过于关心就业而不够关心通货膨胀的文章。

The third big lesson, I think, is about class in America.

我认为，第三个重要教训是关于美国的阶级。

The educated professional class is drifting away from the rest of the country, in terms of values, beliefs, and their information diet.

受过教育的专业人士阶层在价值观、信仰和信息饮食方面正在逐渐远离全国其他地区。

This election upended a lot of demographic trends that people had been very certain about only a few years ago.

这次选举颠覆了人们几年前还非常确定的许多人口趋势。

Trump seems to have produced a large-scale shift of Hispanic voters to the Republicans, and big cities swung harder toward the GOP than other areas.

特朗普似乎导致拉美裔选民大规模转向共和党，大城市比其他地区更倾向于共和党。

But there’s one key trend that this election didn’t reverse: education polarization.

但这次选举没有扭转一个关键趋势：教育两极分化。

Trump was even more dominant among non-college voters than he was in the last two elections, while Harris won the highly educated by about as much as Biden did.

特朗普在非大学选民中的影响力甚至比前两次选举中还要大，而哈里斯在受过高等教育的选民中的获胜率与拜登差不多。

Over the years, the Democratic base has shifted decisively from the working class to the educated professional class:

多年来，民主党的基础已经决定性地从工人阶级转向受过教育的专业阶级：

This shift doomed Harris’ campaign, since people without college degrees outnumber their college-educated counterparts — in 2024, the latter were only 43% of the electorate .

这一转变注定了哈里斯的竞选失败，因为没有大学学位的人数超过了受过大学教育的人数——到 2024 年，后者仅占选民的 43%。

And this weakness looks likely to be a long-term problem.

这种弱点看起来可能是一个长期问题。

In the past, when college education was steadily increasing, it was easy to think that college-educated voters would own the future.

过去，当大学教育程度稳步提高时，人们很容易认为受过大学教育的选民将拥有未来。

But in recent years, the rate of college enrollment has plateaued and begun to fall:

但近年来，大学入学率已趋于稳定并开始下降：

And the number of new college graduates fell in 2022 , even as America’s total population grew .

尽管美国总人口在增长，但 2022 年应届大学毕业生的数量仍然下降。

As for why fewer Americans are getting a college education, I wrote a post about this back in July:

至于为什么接受大学教育的美国人越来越少，我在七月份写过一篇文章：

The short version is that tuition soared even as the earnings boost from a college degree shrank substantially, making college a less attractive value proposition.

简而言之，尽管大学学位带来的收入大幅下降，但学费却在飙升，这使得大学的价值主张不再那么有吸引力。

A lot of this had to do with colleges themselves boosting spending on administrators and facilities, and having to charge students more to pay for it.

这在很大程度上与大学本身增加了管理人员和设施方面的支出，并且不得不向学生收取更多费用来支付费用有关。

If universities cut costs, cut tuition, and raised their value proposition, we could see enrollment rise again at some point, but I wouldn’t bet on that happening soon.

如果大学削减成本、削减学费并提高其价值主张，我们可能会在某个时候看到入学率再次上升，但我不认为这种情况会很快发生。

Meanwhile, socialists’ plan for universal free college is dead on arrival; even Biden’s generous new student loan repayment provisions might prove to be temporary, since the fiscal cost is so huge .

与此同时，社会主义者的全民免费大学计划一到就夭折了。即使拜登慷慨的新学生贷款偿还条款也可能被证明是暂时的，因为财政成本如此巨大。

So a wave of taxpayer cash is not going to restore the trend of rising educational attainment.

因此，纳税人的一大笔钱并不能恢复教育程度上升的趋势。

In other words, Democrats’ education problem is here to stay.

换句话说，民主党的教育问题将继续存在。

Unless Dems can figure out how to win back those non-college voters, they’re likely to be at a huge electoral disadvantage for the foreseeable future.

除非民主党能够弄清楚如何赢回那些非大学选民，否则在可预见的未来，他们可能会处于巨大的选举劣势。

But winning back those voters would require the educated professional types who make up the backbone of the Democratic base and the progressive movement to figure out how to connect rhetorically with the less-educated masses, addressing their concerns, speaking to their values, and just speaking their language in general.

但要赢回这些选民，就需要构成民主党基础和进步运动中坚力量的受过教育的专业人士弄清楚如何与受教育程度较低的群众进行言辞联系，解决他们的担忧，表达他们的价值观，并只讲他们的一般语言。

And although it’s too early to tell, many of the reactions I’m seeing on social media are, to put it mildly, very unencouraging:

尽管现在下结论还为时过早，但我在社交媒体上看到的许多反应，温和地说，非常令人沮丧：

Obviously these are extreme examples, but in general it seems to me that the educated professional class has simply grown apart from the rest of the country over the past few decades.

显然，这些都是极端的例子，但总的来说，在我看来，受过教育的专业人士阶层在过去几十年里已经与这个国家的其他阶层分开了。

The most important disconnect between educated professionals and the rest of America is about the problems they face on a day-to-day basis.

受过教育的专业人士与美国其他人之间最重要的脱节在于他们每天面临的问题。

Practically every problem that Trump voters cited is something that hits the working class harder than the professional class.

事实上，特朗普选民提到的每个问题对工人阶级的打击都比对专业阶级的打击更大。

About a year ago, I found a really good place to get a haircut.

大约一年前，我找到了一个非常好的理发场所。

The hairstylist, a Vietnamese immigrant woman in her 50s, was complaining about rampant theft from small businesses in the neighborhood.

这名发型师是一名 50 多岁的越南移民妇女，她抱怨附近小企业的盗窃行为猖獗。

She said that if thieves stole less than $950, they wouldn’t even be arrested or prosecuted, creating an incentive for constant theft.

她说，如果小偷偷的钱少于 950 美元，他们甚至不会被逮捕或起诉，从而刺激了不断的盗窃行为。

In fact, stealing less than $950 was still a crime, but there was a plebiscite in 2014 called Proposition 47 that changed it from a felony to a misdemeanor.

事实上，盗窃少于 950 美元仍然是犯罪行为，但 2014 年的一项名为“47 号提案”的公民投票将其从重罪改为轻罪。

(Prop 47 was mostly repealed this year , when California voters passed another ballot measure called Prop 36.) I’m not sure how big of a factor Prop 47 was, but for whatever reason, property crime in San Francisco did rise quite a lot in the late 2010s:

（今年，加州选民通过了另一项名为“36 号提案”的投票措施，47 号提案大部分被废除。）我不确定 47 号提案的影响有多大，但无论出于何种原因，旧金山的财产犯罪在 2010 年代末确实大幅上升：

I am an educated professional, not a small local businessperson.

我是一名受过教育的专业人士，而不是当地的小商人。

I had heard about the big wave of car break-ins in San Francisco, but it took me a very long time to realize how common retail theft had become.

我听说过旧金山的汽车盗窃大潮，但我花了很长时间才意识到零售盗窃已经变得多么普遍。

To me, the wave of smash-and-grab attacks in the Bay Area was a sign of urban disorder and decay, and a force causing a bunch of downtown stores to close .

对我来说，湾区的打砸抢袭击浪潮是城市无序和衰败的标志，也是导致市中心许多商店关门的一股力量。

But to someone who owns a hair salon that gets robbed, or a convenience store that gets looted, that’s their livelihood .

但对于拥有一家被抢劫的发廊，或者被抢劫的便利店的人来说，这就是他们的生计。

That could be their child’s ticket to college, or their ability to get the pipes fixed at their house, or their chance to get their car fixed.

这可能是他们孩子上大学的门票，或者是他们修理家里管道的能力，或者是他们修理汽车的机会。

As an educated professional, I’m simply much less exposed to robbery and theft.

作为一名受过教育的专业人士，我遭遇抢劫和盗窃的机会要少得多。

And on top of that, I’m an urban educated professional.

最重要的是，我是一名受过城市教育的专业人士。

Those who live out in the fancy suburbs are even more disconnected from the crime wave that afflicted America in 2020 and 2021.

那些住在豪华郊区的人与 2020 年和 2021 年困扰美国的犯罪浪潮更加脱节。

It’s lower-earning people in cities or poorer neighborhoods who bore the brunt of the explosion of disorder that followed in the wake of the Floyd protests.

弗洛伊德抗议活动引发的骚乱中首当其冲的是城市或贫困社区的低收入人群。

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Stuff like “defund the police” is a luxury of the rich and mobile — i.e., of the educated professional class.

像“撤资警察”这样的事情是富人和流动人口（即受过教育的专业阶层）的奢侈品。

It’s lower-income Americans and small business owners who need the police the most.

最需要警察的是低收入美国人和小企业主。

How about inflation?

通货膨胀怎么样？

When defending the Biden economy, I often point out that real wages for people in the lower part of the distribution increased faster .

在为拜登经济辩护时，我经常指出分配较低部分的人们的实际工资增长更快。

That’s adjusted for inflation, but it’s adjusted for the overall state-level inflation rate.

这是根据通货膨胀进行调整的，但也是根据州一级的总体通货膨胀率进行调整的。

In fact, as the Minneapolis Fed’s Jeff Horwich explains , people who make less money have faced higher price increases since 2021, for two reasons.

事实上，正如明尼阿波利斯联储的 Jeff Horwich 所解释的那样，自 2021 年以来，收入较少的人面临着更高的物价上涨，原因有两个。

First, the things that lower-income and middle-income people spend a larger percent of their income on — especially housing — tended to go up in price a bit more:

首先，低收入和中等收入人群花费较大比例收入购买的东西（尤其是住房）的价格往往会上涨一些：

The second reason is pretty obvious: Having less money makes drops in purchasing power harder to bear.

第二个原因非常明显：钱少了，购买力下降就更难以承受。

If my cost of living went up by 10%, it would be a minor annoyance; to a working-class person that could very well be ruinous.

如果我的生活成本上涨10%，这只是一个小烦恼；对于一个工人阶级来说，这很可能是毁灭性的。

No wonder lower-income people tend to notice price changes more:

难怪低收入人群更容易注意到价格变化：

So while educated professionals like myself were able to put the post-pandemic inflation behind us fairly quickly after it subsided in 2023, regular Americans probably felt a more lingering hurt.

因此，虽然像我这样受过良好教育的专业人士能够在 2023 年疫情消退后很快地将疫情后的通货膨胀抛在脑后，但普通美国人可能会感受到更挥之不去的伤害。

How about the wave of asylum seekers that flooded across the border in the Biden years?

拜登时代涌入边境的寻求庇护者浪潮又如何呢？

Lower-skilled immigrants don’t actually tend to reduce wages for native-born working-class Americans.

低技能移民实际上并不会降低美国本土工人阶级的工资。

But a big part of the reason they don’t reduce wages is that native-born people respond to increased immigration by going back to school and climbing the skill ladder.

但他们不降低工资的很大一部分原因是，本土出生的人通过重返学校和攀登技能阶梯来应对移民增加。

That takes time and money.

这需要时间和金钱。

Also, low-skilled immigrants directly compete with less-educated and lower-earning Americans for housing .

此外，低技能移民直接与受教育程度较低、收入较低的美国人争夺住房。

Asylum seekers tend to be poor, meaning they will try to get apartments and houses in lower-income neighborhoods.

寻求庇护者往往很穷，这意味着他们会尝试在低收入社区购买公寓和房屋。

The effect on local rents in those neighborhoods, and for those types of housing, will be greater than the overall citywide or statewide effect.

对这些社区和这些类型住房的当地租金的影响将大于全市或全州的整体影响。

Rent will go up for the American working class, differentially affecting their purchasing power in ways that don’t get captured by state-level or national statistics.

美国工人阶级的租金将会上涨，这会对他们的购买力产生不同的影响，而州级或国家统计数据无法体现这一点。

So although Biden did beat inflation, crime did go down, and Biden did eventually crack down on the border, I can understand why the traumas that working-class Americans had to suffer in 2020-2022 couldn’t be expunged just by some encouraging charts.

因此，尽管拜登确实击败了通货膨胀，犯罪率确实下降了，拜登最终也确实打击了边境问题，但我可以理解为什么美国工薪阶层在 2020-2022 年所遭受的创伤不能仅仅通过一些令人鼓舞的图表来消除。

And the fact that educated professionals were much more insulated from the disruptions of the pandemic and from Biden’s missteps in 2021 mean that they didn’t necessarily even see the need to acknowledge how hard these had been on everyone else.

事实上，受过教育的专业人士更能免受大流行的干扰和拜登在 2021 年的失误的影响，这意味着他们甚至不一定认为有必要承认这些对其他人来说有多么困难。

This disconnect probably ended up alienating people without college degrees.

这种脱节可能最终疏远了那些没有大学学位的人。

Not only did it cause many progressives to support deeply unpopular things like “defund the police” on social media, but Democratic politicians who became used to talking to their educated progressive base probably got a distorted idea of what was troubling the rest of America.

这不仅导致许多进步人士在社交媒体上支持诸如“撤资警察”等极不受欢迎的事情，而且习惯于与受过教育的进步派基础交谈的民主党政客可能对困扰美国其他地区的问题产生了扭曲的想法。

I was taking an Uber with a friend a couple of weeks ago, and the driver went on a gigantic rant about how inflation is out of control, vaccines are ineffective and are causing all kinds of massive health problems, there are no jobs anymore, and so on.

几周前，我和一位朋友乘坐优步，司机大肆咆哮，说通货膨胀如何失控、疫苗无效并导致各种严重的健康问题、不再有工作机会等等。

Listening to his rant drove home the fact that there are huge segments of the American populace that I’m just completely out of touch with.

听他的咆哮让我明白了这样一个事实：我与美国民众中的很大一部分人完全脱节。

Almost all of what he said was factually wrong, of course.

当然，他所说的几乎所有内容实际上都是错误的。

Inflation is back down to a low level, and has been for years now .

通货膨胀已回落至低水平，并且已经持续多年。

Employment is near all-time highs .

就业率接近历史最高水平。

Vaccines are safe and effective, and so on.

疫苗安全有效等等。

But the fact that he believed in all of this stuff is a sign that there’s an information ecosystem out there that’s totally separate from the world of blogs and Washington Post articles and nerdy podcasts and Econ Twitter that comprises my own information diet.

但事实上，他相信所有这些东西，这表明存在一个信息生态系统，它与博客、《华盛顿邮报》文章、书呆子播客和构成我自己的信息饮食的经济推特的世界完全分开。

In fact, this information disconnect is probably one reason why Trump won.

事实上，这种信息脱节可能是特朗普获胜的原因之一。

Voters who knew about the positive data that I know about — and which I frequently talked about on this blog — went very strongly for Harris, while voters who had the same misapprehensions as my Uber driver went pretty strongly for Trump:

了解我所知道的积极数据的选民（我经常在这个博客上谈论这些数据）非常强烈地支持哈里斯，而与我的优步司机有同样误解的选民则非常强烈地支持特朗普：

Now, people may simply be bullshitting on these polls — there’s research that shows that when you pay people to get these facts right, they tend to get them right .

现在，人们可能只是在对这些民意调查胡说八道——有研究表明，当你付钱让人们正确地了解这些事实时，他们往往会弄对。

Saying “inflation is still high” might just be a way of saying “I like Trump”.

说“通货膨胀仍然很高”可能只是说“我喜欢特朗普”的一种方式。

Also, note that all four of these questions are specifically phrased in such a way that the correct answer says something positive about Joe Biden’s tenure in office.

另请注意，所有这四个问题的措辞都特别明确，正确答案对乔·拜登的任期有积极的影响。

If the questions had been things like “Overall, murder rates were higher under Biden than under Trump (True)”, or “Inflation in the U.S. since 2021 has been the highest of any four-year period since the 1970s (True)”, or “Since 2021, unauthorized border crossings have been higher than at any point since the early 2000s (True)”, it might have been Democrats getting the facts wrong instead of Republicans.

如果问题是“总体而言，拜登领导下的谋杀率高于特朗普领导下的谋杀率（正确）”，或者“自 2021 年以来美国的通货膨胀率是 2021 年以来 1970 年代以来四年中最高的（正确）”，或者“自 2021 年以来，未经授权的越境人数比 2000 年代初期以来的任何时候都要高（正确）”，那么可能是民主党人而不是共和党人弄错了事实。

(We’ll never know, of course, but Democrats do tend to show partisan bias on economic surveys.)

（当然，我们永远不会知道，但民主党人确实倾向于在经济调查中表现出党派偏见。）

But it also seems likely that many of these less-educated Trump voters just don’t get nearly as much information about politics, economics, and public affairs.

但似乎许多受教育程度较低的特朗普选民也没有获得那么多有关政治、经济和公共事务的信息。

Highly educated folks consume a lot more news in general .

一般来说，受过高等教育的人会阅读更多的新闻。

And people who consume a lot more political news tended to vote for Harris:

阅读更多政治新闻的人倾向于投票给哈里斯：

And when they do consume news, it’s likely to be from different sources .

当他们确实消费新闻时，很可能来自不同的来源。

Many election postmortems have focused on the fact that Joe Rogan, a popular podcast host with many blue-collar fans, interviewed both Donald Trump and JD Vance during the campaign, but not Kamala Harris or Tim Walz.

许多选举事后分析都集中在这样一个事实：乔·罗根（Joe Rogan）是一位颇受欢迎的播客主持人，拥有许多蓝领粉丝，他在竞选期间采访了唐纳德·特朗普（Donald Trump）和 JD·万斯（JD Vance），但没有采访卡马拉·哈里斯（Kamala Harris）或蒂姆·沃尔兹（Tim Walz）。

Joe Rogan’s podcast has 18 million subscribers .

Joe Rogan 的播客拥有 1800 万订阅者。

In comparison, Fox News, the most popular cable news network, has somewhere around 2 million primetime viewers.

相比之下，最受欢迎的有线新闻网络福克斯新闻 (Fox News) 的黄金时段观众人数约为 200 万。

12 Meanwhile, Barstool Sports, another news outlet that’s popular with blue-collar types, went solidly for Trump and reportedly refused Harris’ offer for an interview.

12 与此同时，另一家深受蓝领阶层欢迎的新闻媒体 Barstool Sports 坚定支持特朗普，据报道拒绝了哈里斯的采访邀请。

In other words, Democrats are still doing a good job of getting their message to educated Americans who consume lots of political news, but are increasingly failing to reach the non-college masses.

换句话说，民主党人仍然很好地向受过教育的美国人传达了他们的信息，这些美国人消费了大量的政治新闻，但越来越无法接触到非大学大众。

That’s why listening to an Uber driver talk about politics can seem like meeting someone from another universe.

这就是为什么听 Uber 司机谈论政治就像遇见了来自另一个宇宙的人。

This is not to say that educated progressives get the facts right, while blue-collar conservatives get them wrong.

这并不是说受过教育的进步人士所了解的事实是正确的，而蓝领保守派所了解的事实则是错误的。

In fact, highly educated progressives can talk themselves into believing some absolutely insane things.

事实上，受过高等教育的进步人士可以说服自己相信一些绝对疯狂的事情。

During the summer of 2020, a lawyer friend insisted to me that the institution of police grew out of the institution of American slavery (obviously wrong, since police emerged independently all over the world).

2020年夏天，一位律师朋友向我坚称警察制度源于美国奴隶制（显然是错误的，因为警察在世界各地独立出现）。

A number of progressives also asserted to me that police don’t reduce crime ( false ).

许多进步人士还向我断言警察不会减少犯罪（错误）。

The oft-repeated progressive claim that slaves built America is also obviously false, since slaves were less than 10% of the population.

经常重复的进步派声称是奴隶建立了美国，这显然也是错误的，因为奴隶只占总人口的不到 10%。

A few educated progressives even fiercely defend intentional fabrication of results in the social sciences, on political grounds.

一些受过教育的进步人士甚至以政治理由强烈捍卫社会科学中故意捏造的结果。

But whatever the various myths are on the left and right, they are different myths.

但不管左派和右派有什么不同的神话，它们都是不同的神话。

And because educated professionals swim in entirely different information ecosystems, they have little clue how to reach the masses and tell their side of the story.

由于受过教育的专业人士游走在完全不同的信息生态系统中，他们几乎不知道如何接触大众并讲述他们的故事。

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The educated professional class has been growing apart from America’s other social classes for decades now.

几十年来，受过教育的专业人士阶层一直在与美国其他社会阶层分开。

Part of this was due to the big shift in the U.S. economy — the rise of knowledge industries like IT, finance, biopharma, and business services pulled America’s talented people to coastal metros and college towns.

部分原因在于美国经济的巨大转变——IT、金融、生物制药和商业服务等知识产业的崛起将美国的人才吸引到沿海大都市和大学城。

As the economist Enrico Moretti showed in his excellent book The New Geography of Jobs , a city’s human capital — i.e., how many educated professionals live there — became the best predictor not only of economic success, but also various measures of public health and well-being.

正如经济学家恩里科·莫雷蒂（Enrico Moretti）在他的优秀著作《就业新地理》中所指出的那样，一个城市的人力资本（即居住在那里的受过教育的专业人士数量）不仅成为经济成功的最佳预测指标，而且成为衡量公共卫生和福祉的各种指标的最佳指标。

For those with the talent to escape the bleakness of their hometowns, big cities like New York, San Francisco, and Minneapolis — or college towns like Ann Arbor, Madison, and Berkeley — became magical playgrounds, full of great restaurants and shops and bars, other educated professionals to date and marry, and plenty of money to be made.

对于那些有能力逃离家乡的荒凉的人来说，纽约、旧金山和明尼阿波利斯这样的大城市，或者安娜堡、麦迪逊和伯克利这样的大学城，成了神奇的游乐场，到处都是很棒的餐馆、商店和酒吧，还有其他受过教育的专业人士可以约会和结婚，还有很多钱可以赚。

I was one of the people who made that escape.

我是逃脱的人之一。

But what happened to the places the talented people left behind ?

但那些人才留下的地方怎么样了呢？

Bereft of their talent in an age when talent equals money, they stagnated economically — counties that voted for Biden in 2020 represented just over half of the electorate, but 70% of America’s total GDP .

在人才等于金钱的时代，他们失去了人才，经济陷入停滞——2020 年投票给拜登的县只占选民的一半多，但占美国 GDP 总量的 70%。

And without as many talented people to be local doctors, teachers, etc., those places saw their health deteriorate — drug use and obesity ran rampant.

由于没有那么多有才华的当地医生、教师等，这些地方的健康状况恶化——吸毒和肥胖现象猖獗。

Even the well-documented decline of marriage among the less-educated could be partially due to talented professionals fleeing the area — without as many visible examples of economically successful educated people getting married and staying married and raising kids in two-parent families, some working-class people in left-behind towns may have simply abandoned the practice.

即使是有据可查的受教育程度较低的人结婚率下降的部分原因也可能是由于有才华的专业人士逃离该地区——没有那么多经济上成功的受过教育的人结婚并维持婚姻并在双亲家庭中抚养孩子的明显例子，一些留守城镇的工薪阶层可能干脆放弃了这种做法。

This is the first reason for the disconnect.

这是断线的第一个原因。

The second, I think, was institutional.

我认为第二个是制度性的。

In earlier times, there were a number of institutions that regularly brought people together across social classes — the three main examples being churches, businesses, and the military.

在早期，有许多机构定期将不同社会阶层的人们聚集在一起——三个主要的例子是教堂、企业和军队。

But after Vietnam, the U.S. Military shifted from a mass-participatory conscript force to an elite professional volunteer force.

但越南战争之后，美国军队从一支大众参与的义务兵部队转变为一支精锐的专业志愿部队。

Business became increasingly fragmented, with much blue-collar work and low-level service work outsourced or automated.

业务变得越来越分散，许多蓝领工作和低水平的服务工作被外包或自动化。

And church membership has declined 14 in America, possibly as a result of the internet:

美国的教会成员人数下降了 14 人，这可能是互联网的结果：

Combine this with the de-localization of American social life due to the car and the internet, and you have a recipe for extreme sorting .

再加上汽车和互联网导致的美国社会生活的去本地化，你就得到了极端分类的秘诀。

As Tyler Cowen writes in his book The Complacent Class , Americans have become increasingly expert at sorting themselves according to education, income, and other characteristics.

正如泰勒·考恩（Tyler Cowen）在其著作《自满阶层》中所写，美国人越来越擅长根据教育、收入和其他特征对自己进行分类。

There was one public institution that managed to retain its broad functionality over this time period: College .

有一个公共机构在这段时间内成功地保留了其广泛的功能：学院。

American universities tried hard to recruit and mix people of diverse backgrounds, teach them healthy personal and social habits, and provide them with a rich community life that could be a model for their later adult communities.

美国大学努力招募和混合不同背景的人，教给他们健康的个人和社会习惯，并为他们提供丰富的社区生活，这可以成为他们后来成年社区的典范。

And to a large degree, this worked.

在很大程度上，这确实有效。

But it only worked for 40% of the population!

但它只对40%的人有效！

The majority of Americans lacked the talent, the study habits, the inclination, the time, or (eventually) the money to get that four-year degree.

大多数美国人缺乏获得四年制学位的天赋、学习习惯、兴趣、时间或（最终）金钱。

So for that lucky 40%, colleges were church and army and work team all in one — an acceptable substitute for the tight-knit villages that the modern economy of the car and the internet had destroyed.

因此，对于那 40% 的幸运者来说，大学是教堂、军队和工作团队的结合体——它是现代汽车和互联网经济摧毁的紧密联系的村庄的一个可接受的替代品。

For the rest of the country there was nothing.

对于该国其他地区来说，什么也没有。

There were daytime TV and televangelists and methamphetamine and conspiracy theories.

有白天的电视和电视布道者、甲基苯丙胺和阴谋论。

There were strip-malls and NASCAR and hip-hop and Marvel movies.

这里有露天购物中心、纳斯卡车赛、嘻哈电影和漫威电影。

There were Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage.

有福克斯新闻、拉什·林博和迈克尔·萨维奇。

There was plenty of cheap land, big houses, cheap cars, and jobs in the vast service sector.

那里有大量廉价的土地、大房子、廉价汽车，以及庞大的服务业的就业机会。

But their upper caste had fled them for the playgrounds of college and the big city and the Google cafeteria.

但他们的上层种姓已经逃离了他们，前往大学的操场、大城市和谷歌自助餐厅。

But they were still part of the same country as the educated professionals.

但他们仍然与受过教育的专业人士属于同一个国家。

And so they all still voted in the same elections.

所以他们仍然在同一次选举中投票。

So one day Donald Trump came along, and the classes were reunited by the institution of electoral democracy, in a very unpleasant and painful way.

因此有一天，唐纳德·特朗普出现了，选举民主制度以一种非常不愉快和痛苦的方式重新团结了各个阶级。

After this crushing defeat, many educated progressives will turn to the idea of Bernie Sanders-style “class” politics as an alternative to the identity politics that failed so spectacularly.

在这场惨败之后，许多受过教育的进步人士将转向伯尼·桑德斯式的“阶级”政治理念，作为失败如此惨重的身份政治的替代方案。

But this won’t work either.

但这也行不通。

First of all, Bernie himself underperformed Kamala Harris in this year’s election.

首先，伯尼本人在今年的选举中表现不如卡马拉·哈里斯。

Second, and more importantly, Biden has been the most pro-labor, pro-union President in many decades, and it availed the Democrats nothing.

其次，更重要的是，拜登是几十年来最支持劳工、支持工会的总统，这对民主党没有任何好处。

Biden raised overtime pay , strengthened unions with various new laws, revived factory construction with industrial policy, mandated the hiring of union workforces for federal contracts, became the first President to walk a picket line, funded vocational education and apprenticeships, banned noncompete clauses, and took dozens of other actions in support of the blue-collar working class.

拜登提高了加班工资，通过各种新法律加强了工会，通过产业政策恢复了工厂建设，强制要求为联邦合同雇用工会劳动力，成为第一位走纠察线的总统，资助职业教育和学徒制，禁止竞业禁止条款，并采取了数十项其他行动来支持蓝领工人阶级。

Wages rose strongly for the working class, and inequality fell.

工人阶级的工资大幅上涨，不平等现象减少。

Biden also enacted a lot of Bernie-style policies — canceling student debt, passing a huge climate bill, and increasing subsidies for health care.

拜登还制定了许多伯尼式的政策——取消学生债务、通过一项庞大的气候法案以及增加医疗保健补贴。

And none of it helped Kamala Harris.

这些都对卡玛拉·哈里斯没有帮助。

The Teamsters union withheld their endorsement .

卡车司机工会拒绝了他们的认可。

The East Coast dockworkers’ union threatened a crippling strike just weeks before the election.

就在选举前几周，东海岸码头工人工会威胁要进行严重罢工。

All across the nation, steelworkers and other blue-collar union workers defied their leaders and organized in support of Donald Trump .

全国各地的钢铁工人和其他蓝领工会工人反抗他们的领导人并组织起来支持唐纳德·特朗普。

Harris did win a slim majority of the union vote, but this probably came mostly from educated professional types, especially public unions.

哈里斯确实赢得了工会的微弱多数选票，但这可能主要来自受过教育的专业人士，尤其是公共工会。

The fact is, America just isn’t the industrial society it was in the 1950s.

事实上，美国已不再是 20 世纪 50 年代那样的工业社会。

The broad blue-collar manufacturing laborer class is a thing of the past, and the fragments of that class that remain are often more focused on sociocultural issues than on pure pocketbook concerns.

广泛的蓝领制造业工人阶级已经成为过去，剩下的这个阶级的碎片往往更关注社会文化问题，而不是纯粹的钱袋子问题。

Most of the American non-college populace are non-unionized suburban service workers with no real class consciousness.

大多数美国非大学人口都是没有加入工会的郊区服务人员，没有真正的阶级意识。

America, fundamentally, is an incredibly rich country with a sick society.

从根本上来说，美国是一个极其富裕的国家，但社会却是病态的。

We have higher consumption by far than people in any other country on the planet, and yet by and large, except for the few people who were lucky enough to receive the blessings of community and health from our one remaining functional institution, we’re a bunch of unhealthy socially isolated drug addicts.

到目前为止，我们的消费量比地球上任何其他国家的人都要高，但总的来说，除了少数幸运地从我们仅存的功能机构中获得社区和健康祝福的人之外，我们是一群不健康的社会孤立的吸毒者。

As for the solution to all this, I don’t have an easy fix.

至于解决这一切的办法，我没有一个简单的解决办法。

In the long run our country needs to build new inclusive institutions — places where society’s classes mingle and cooperate.

从长远来看，我们的国家需要建立新的包容性机构——社会各阶层相互交流与合作的场所。

I don’t know what those can be, though of course I’ll think about the problem.

我不知道那些可能是什么，但我当然会考虑这个问题。

But it will take a long time.

但这需要很长时间。

Obviously, YIMBY policies that allow working-class people to live in big cities will help a bit, by putting the various classes in physical proximity, but without integrating institutions the effect will be marginal.

显然，允许工薪阶层居住在大城市的 YIMBY 政策会有所帮助，因为可以让各个阶层在物理上接近，但如果不整合机构，效果将是微乎其微的。

Nor do the educated right-wing professionals in the tech industry understand their new working-class political allies any better than the progressives do.

科技行业受过教育的右翼专业人士也不比进步人士更了解他们的新工人阶级政治盟友。

Beyond helping to elect Donald Trump and annoy educated progressives, they don’t really have any plans to help those who lack the talent to work at SpaceX.

除了帮助唐纳德·特朗普当选并惹恼受过教育的进步人士之外，他们实际上并没有任何计划来帮助那些缺乏在 SpaceX 工作的人才的人。

In the short term, what Democrats can do is to realize the extent of the problem, and begin doing everything they can to explore the culture and the information ecosystem of Americans who didn’t go to college.

从短期来看，民主党人能做的就是认识到问题的严重性，并开始尽一切努力探索没有上过大学的美国人的文化和信息生态系统。

Get interviewed on Rogan and Barstool Sports and wherever, but don’t just get interviewed — immerse yourself in the culture.

接受 Rogan 和 Barstool Sports 以及任何地方的采访，但不仅仅是接受采访 - 让自己沉浸在文化中。

Don’t get your information about regular Americans from the activist groups who knock on your staffers’ doors, or from 20-something socialists who spout stale Marxist theory.

不要从敲开你员工大门的活动团体那里，或者从那些滔滔不绝地宣扬陈旧的马克思主义理论的 20 多岁的社会主义者那里，获取关于普通美国人的信息。

Go meet them, find out what they care about, and think about how to give it to them.

去见见他们，找出他们关心什么，并考虑如何将其提供给他们。

Fixing America’s great class disconnect will take a long time, but there’s no better time to start.

解决美国巨大的阶级脱节需要很长时间，但现在正是开始的最佳时机。

Donald Trump’s victory in November 2024 wasn’t the only important election result.

唐纳德·特朗普 (Donald Trump) 在 2024 年 11 月的胜利并不是唯一重要的选举结果。

Big cities in California shifted away from so-called “progressive” governance.

加利福尼亚州的大城市放弃了所谓的“进步”治理。

In San Francisco, progressive champion Aaron Peskin was soundly defeated in the mayoral race, and his vacated seat was won by a moderate.

在旧金山，进步派冠军亚伦·佩斯金(Aaron Peskin)在市长竞选中惨败，他空出的席位被温和派赢得。

Peskin’s close ally, Dean Preston, was unseated by moderate challenger Bilal Mahmood, and the Board of Supervisors is expected to lose its progressive majority.

佩斯金的亲密盟友迪恩·普雷斯顿 (Dean Preston) 被温和派挑战者比拉尔·马哈茂德 (Bilal Mahmood) 赶下台，监事会预计将失去进步多数席位。

In Los Angeles progressive district attorney George Gascón lost his reelection bid, while Oakland’s Pamela Price was recalled.

在洛杉矶，进步的地方检察官乔治·加斯科恩 (George Gascón) 失去了连任竞选，而奥克兰的帕梅拉·普莱斯 (Pamela Price) 则被召回。

This followed a national trend of progressive DAs getting the boot; meanwhile, San Francisco’s moderate DA Brooke Jenkins, who succeeded the notorious Chesa Boudin after the latter was recalled, easily cruised to reelection.

这遵循了全国进步DA的趋势；与此同时，旧金山的温和派地方检察官布鲁克·詹金斯(Brooke Jenkins)在臭名昭著的切萨·布丁(Chesa Boudin)被召回后接替了后者，轻松获得连任。

It’s possible to interpret these victories as part of a general revolt against progressive governance in big cities.

可以将这些胜利解读为对大城市进步治理的普遍反抗的一部分。

At the local level that’s a good thing, since that governance has proven remarkably poor.

在地方层面，这是一件好事，因为事实证明治理非常糟糕。

But at the national level, the urban revolt against probably helped usher in another four years of Donald Trump.

但在国家层面，城市的反抗可能帮助迎来了唐纳德·特朗普的又一个四年。

Although large metros still voted for the Democrats overall, they swung harder towards Trump than any other geographic region:

尽管大城市总体上仍然投票支持民主党，但他们比任何其他地理区域都更倾向于特朗普：

In the past two cycles, Democrats could comfort themselves by counting on urban counties to continue moving left even as rural areas shifted right.

在过去的两个周期中，民主党人可以通过指望城市县继续向左移动，即使农村地区向右移动来安慰自己。

That comfort was dashed last night, at least among counties with more than 90 percent of their results reported.

昨晚，这种安慰被打破了，至少在报告了 90% 以上结果的县中是这样。

In the New York City metro area, New York County (Manhattan) shifted nine points right, Kings County (Brooklyn) shifted 12 points right, Queens County shifted 21 points right, and Bronx County shifted 22 points right.

在纽约都会区，纽约县（曼哈顿）右移 9 个百分点，国王县（布鲁克林）右移 12 个百分点，皇后县右移 21 个百分点，布朗克斯县右移 22 个百分点。

In Florida, Orange County (Orlando) shifted 10 points right and Miami-Dade shifted 19 points right.

在佛罗里达州，奥兰治县（奥兰多）向右移动 10 分，迈阿密戴德县向右移动 19 分。

In Texas, Harris County (Houston) and Bexar County (San Antonio) both shifted eight points right and Dallas County shifted 10 points right.

在得克萨斯州，哈里斯县（休斯顿）和贝克萨县（圣安东尼奥）均右移 8 分，达拉斯县右移 10 分。

In and around the “Blue Wall” states, Pennsylvania’s Philadelphia County shifted five points right, Michigan’s Wayne County (Detroit) shifted nine points right, and Illinois’ Cook County (Chicago) shifted 11 points right.

在“蓝墙”州及其周边地区，宾夕法尼亚州的费城县右移了 5 个百分点，密歇根州的韦恩县（底特律）右移了 9 个百分点，伊利诺伊州的库克县（芝加哥）右移了 11 个百分点。

Josh Barro wrote an insightful post-election post arguing that big cities’ failure to curb urban disorder, fiscal waste, and soaring housing costs drove their inhabitants away from the Democratic party.

乔什·巴罗(Josh Barro)在选举后发表了一篇富有洞察力的文章，认为大城市未能遏制城市混乱、财政浪费和住房成本飙升，导致居民远离民主党。

Some key excerpts:

一些关键摘录：

I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services.

我在纽约市给你们写这封信，我们由民主党统治，我们缴纳全国最高的税款，但这并不意味着我们得到最好的政府服务。

Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs.

我们的交通机构是资金黑洞，尽管为其提供资金的专用税一再增加，但仍无法实现其资本计划，因为这里修建地铁线路的每英里成本是法国的四倍，而且工会规则迫使该机构人员过多，从而抬高了运营成本。

Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare , and MTA employees don’t try to make them.

一半的公交车乘客不支付车费，MTA 员工也不会尝试支付车费。

Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system…even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment.

情绪失控的无家可归者在交通系统上露营……尽管警察遍布各处（花费了纳税人的巨额费用），但他们对此并没有采取太多措施，我不能完全责怪他们，因为我们的政府缺乏法律权力将这些人关进监狱或接受治疗。

The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets…[S]chools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated .

这座城市无法阻止人们入店行窃，因此杜安·里德的大部分商品都放在上锁的柜子里……即使家庭搬走、入学率下降、长期缺勤率仍然很高，学校对纳税人来说仍然非常昂贵。

Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers.

目前，我们根据州法院的命令，花费数十亿美元在曾经接待游客和商务旅客的市中心酒店中安置移民。

Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything — and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels .

住房成本高得离谱，因为这座城市很难建造任何东西——而且在这里旅行真的很贵，部分原因是现在很多酒店都住满了移民，部分原因是市议会实际上规定建造新酒店是非法的。

And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment .

所有这一切的结果是，我们正在减少人口——在下一次重新分配中，我们可能会再失去三个国会选区。

And where are people moving to ?

人们要搬到哪里去？

To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy…

对于主要由共和党人管理的阳光地带州来说，在那里有可能建造住房并发展经济……

[A]ll of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues…has fallen so flat.

这就是为什么我认为民主党在生活成本问题上的态度……已经如此平淡。

The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs” — all the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you …I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them.

民主党的论点或多或少是“看看我的所有计划”——我将让政府做的所有事情，让你的生活更轻松……我认为美国人会环顾四周，看看当政府真正试图提供帮助时，情况如何，他们对政府真正能提供多大的帮助，以及这些好处是否真的会流向他们抱有合理的怀疑。

Democrats are making too many promises; they instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services, instead of trying to do a zillion different things and doing them badly at great expense[.]

民主党人做出了太多承诺；相反，他们需要选择一些让政府真正做好的事情，重点关注广大公众的利益，而不是为提供服务而获得报酬的人们的利益，而不是试图做无数不同的事情，并以巨大的代价做得很糟糕[。]

Of course I don’t know how big of a factor this was in Trump’s victory, but I’m not actually sure that even matters.

当然，我不知道这对特朗普的胜利有多大影响，但我实际上不确定这是否重要。

Barro is largely correct about the sad state of blue cities, and it’s the inhabitants of those cities who are suffering the most from that failure of governance.

巴罗关于蓝色城市悲惨状况的看法在很大程度上是正确的，这些城市的居民因治理失败而遭受最大的痛苦。

The most important reason to fix those cities isn’t to help Democrats get elected at the national level, but because it would make life better for urban residents themselves.

修复这些城市的最重要原因不是帮助民主党在全国范围内当选，而是因为这将使城市居民自己的生活变得更好。

The swing toward Trump is simply an illustration of just how angry city dwellers are.

倒向特朗普只是城市居民愤怒程度的一个例证。

It’s important to remember that just a few years ago, the general consensus was that big cities in America were doing really well .

重要的是要记住，就在几年前，人们普遍认为美国大城市的表现非常好。

In 2017, Will Wilkinson cited the success of American cities as a reason to reject Trump:

2017年，威尔金森以美国城市的成功作为拒绝特朗普的理由：

[W]hen Trump talks about cities, he presents a fearsome caricature that bears little resemblance to the real urban landscape…He persists in his efforts to slur cities as radioactive war zones because the fact that America’s diverse big cities are thriving relative to the whiter, less populous parts of the country suggests that the liberal experiment works…[T]he American metropolis is more peaceful and prosperous than it’s been in decades…Yes, cities have their share of failing schools.

当特朗普谈论城市时，他描绘了一幅与真实城市景观毫无相似之处的可怕漫画……他坚持将城市污蔑为放射性战区，因为美国多元化的大城市相对于该国白人较多、人口较少的地区正在蓬勃发展，这一事实表明自由主义实验是有效的……美国大都市比几十年来更加和平和繁荣……是的，城市也有失败的学校。

But they also have some of the best schools in the country and are hotbeds of reform and innovation…America’s most diverse, densely populated and well-educated cities are generating an increasing share of the country’s economic output.

但它们也拥有一些全国最好的学校，是改革和创新的温床……美国最多元化、人口最稠密、教育程度最高的城市在国家经济产出中所占的份额越来越大。

Wilkinson’s paean to big cities was the culmination of decades of real success.

威尔金森对大城市的赞歌是几十年来真正成功的顶峰。

In the middle of the 20th century, America’s cities had been hollowed out, by a combination of soaring urban crime and the lure of the suburbs.

20世纪中叶，由于城市犯罪率的飙升和郊区的诱惑，美国的城市已经被掏空。

In the 1970s, big metropolises were still losing population.

20 世纪 70 年代，大都市的人口仍在流失。

NYC almost went bankrupt .

纽约几乎破产了。

Starting around the 1980s, though, America experienced an urban revival.

然而，从 20 世纪 80 年代左右开始，美国经历了城市复兴。

Big cities began to gain back some of the population they had lost:

大城市开始恢复一些失去的人口：

There were a number of reasons for this revival.

这次复兴有很多原因。

One was the rise of knowledge industries like tech, finance, and business services, which tend to cluster together in cities.

一是科技、金融和商业服务等知识产业的兴起，这些产业往往聚集在城市。

As Enrico Moretti shows in The New Geography of Jobs , human capital tended to cluster in big cities after around 1980 or so; Richard Florida also famously documented this in The Rise of the Creative Class .

正如恩里科·莫雷蒂（Enrico Moretti）在《就业新地理》一书中所指出的那样，大约在 1980 年左右之后，人力资本倾向于聚集在大城市；理查德·佛罗里达（Richard Florida）在《创意阶层的崛起》中也对此进行了著名的记录。

Here’s some data from Jed Kolko for 2000-2014 that’s pretty representative of the general shift:

以下是 Jed Kolko 2000 年至 2014 年的一些数据，非常能代表总体转变：

A second reason for the revival was immigration — just like a century earlier, immigrants flocked to big cities.

复兴的第二个原因是移民——就像一个世纪前一样，移民涌向大城市。

Then in the 1990s, crime plummeted .

然后到了 20 世纪 90 年代，犯罪率直线下降。

In 1992, New York city had 2,245 murders.

1992年，纽约市发生了2,245起谋杀案。

By 2016 it was down to 292:

到 2016 年，这个数字下降到 292 个：

The combination of the crime drop and the knowledge-industry boom made American cities great places to live, at least for a couple of decades.

犯罪率下降和知识产业繁荣相结合，使美国城市成为了理想的居住地，至少在几十年内如此。

TV shows like Seinfeld and Friends and Sex and the City and How I Met Your Mother celebrated the lightheartedness of upper-class city life.

《宋飞正传》、《老友记》、《欲望都市》、《老爸老妈浪漫史》等电视节目颂扬了上流社会城市生活的轻松愉快。

Urban art and fashion and culture bloomed again, producing the hipster era .

都市艺术与时尚文化再次绽放，产生了潮人时代。

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15

But the renaissance was short-lived.

但文艺复兴是短暂的。

In the 2010s, the urban revival stalled , and the populations of big cities plateaued.

2010年代，城市复兴陷入停滞，大城市人口趋于稳定。

The reason was simple: housing .

原因很简单：住房。

Since the 70s, American cities had developed an entrenched culture of NIMBYism and a thicket of laws like rent control , which prevented cities from building new housing in order to accommodate the influx of population.

自20世纪70年代以来，美国城市已经形成了根深蒂固的邻避主义文化和租金管制等法律，阻碍了城市建造新住房以容纳人口涌入。

As a result, rents rose.

结果，租金上涨。

And since rich people — the same knowledge workers who were powering the urban boom — were better able to afford the rising cost of housing, it was middle-class and working-class people who were pushed out of the cities .

由于富人——也就是推动城市繁荣的知识工作者——更有能力负担不断上涨的住房成本，因此中产阶级和工人阶级被赶出了城市。

New York, San Francisco, and the rest became playgrounds for the affluent.

纽约、旧金山和其他地方成为富人的游乐场。

More progressive cities in blue states consistently built less housing than cities in red states.

蓝州较进步的城市建造的住房始终少于红州的城市。

Kahn (2011) found:

卡恩（2011）发现：

Traditional explanations for why some communities block new housing construction focus on incumbent home owner incentives to block entry.

对于一些社区为何阻止新住房建设的传统解释主要集中在现任房主阻止进入的激励措施上。

Local resident political ideology may also influence community permitting decisions.

当地居民的政治意识形态也可能影响社区的许可决策。

This paper uses city level panel data across California metropolitan areas from 2000 to 2008 to document that liberal cities grant fewer new housing permits than observationally similar cities located within the same metropolitan area.

本文使用 2000 年至 2008 年加州大都市区的城市级面板数据来证明，自由主义城市发放的新住房许可证比同一大都市区内观察到的类似城市要少。

Cities experiencing a growth in their liberal voter share have a lower new housing permit growth rate.

自由派选民比例增长的城市的新住房许可证增长率较低。

This divide continues to this very day.

这种分歧一直持续到今天。

Blue cities are still building a minuscule amount of housing:

蓝色城市仍在建造少量住房：

Some of this was due to the chronic problem of city pension obligations, which have grown more severe due to unrealistic assumptions about stock returns, the power of public-sector unions, and simple short-sightedness.

其中部分原因是城市养老金义务的长期问题，由于对股票回报、公共部门工会的权力和简单的短视的不切实际的假设，该问题变得更加严重。

But some was because local infrastructure and city services got very, very expensive — witness how New York City pays several times the cost per mile to build a new subway that a French city would pay.

但部分原因是当地基础设施和城市服务变得非常非常昂贵——看看纽约市如何支付数倍于法国城市支付的每英里成本来建造一条新地铁。

Some of this ballooning cost is due to broken bidding processes and the erosion of state capacity .

成本不断膨胀的部分原因是招标流程的中断和国家能力的削弱。

With their own departments having shrunk, progressive cities have been outsourcing more and more of their core functions to inefficient and often corrupt nonprofits .

随着城市自身部门的缩减，进步的城市将越来越多的核心职能外包给效率低下且经常腐败的非营利组织。

Recall the infamous case of La Sombrita , the ineffectual sun-shade that the Los Angeles Department of Transportation paid a nonprofit $200,000 to create:

回想一下臭名昭著的 La Sombrita 案例，这是洛杉矶交通部支付给非营利组织 20 万美元打造的无效遮阳罩：

San Francisco, as usual, is the worst offender, with a new nonprofit corruption scandal popping up every month or so.

和往常一样，旧金山是最严重的罪犯，大约每个月都会出现新的非营利腐败丑闻。

In the late 2010s, blue cities brought yet another problem on themselves: urban disorder.

2010 年代末，蓝色城市给自己带来了另一个问题：城市混乱。

Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest.

2015 年，在全国动乱的推动下，犯罪率开始上升。

But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s.

但蓝色城市并没有像 90 年代和 00 年代那样通过打击犯罪来应对。

Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades.

2010年代末的进步人士痛斥并拒绝了“拦截搜查”、“破窗治安”以及蓝色城市在过去几十年中用来维持秩序的其他工具。

Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors , enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters , and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes .

相反，他们选举了一批进步的检察官，对公共吸毒制定了更宽松的政策，通过了禁止对商店扒手使用暴力的法律，有时甚至减轻了对轻微犯罪的处罚。

The result was entirely predictable.

结果是完全可以预见的。

Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder — drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on.

蓝色城市越来越受到普遍存在的低度城市混乱的困扰——儿童公园里的吸毒针、汽车盗窃案的流行等等。

Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work.

我在旧金山的女性朋友开始报告说，她们在上班的路上被跟踪了好几个街区，在火车上被骚扰，甚至被街头行人扇了一巴掌。

The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness .

当然，住房紧缩加剧了无家可归的情况，使这种混乱更加严重。

Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged.

然后大流行和骚乱袭来，这一趋势得到了加速。

Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones .

由于没有“监视街道”来阻止犯罪，加上警察对 2020 年夏季的抗议活动感到畏惧或不满，进步的城市变得越来越无法无天、混乱不堪。

Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders .

2020-21 年，暴力犯罪激增，针对亚洲老年人等弱势群体的袭击浪潮层出不穷。

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Nowhere was the chaos more evident than in San Francisco.

没有什么地方比旧金山更明显地混乱了。

Although murder rates in SF stayed low, more minor crimes, like car break-ins and theft, skyrocketed :

尽管旧金山的谋杀率仍然很低，但更多的轻微犯罪，例如入室盗窃和盗窃，却急剧上升：

After the pandemic, there was an epidemic of store looting that continued for years, causing many of the stores in the downtown area to close .

疫情发生后，商店抢劫事件持续多年，导致市中心许多商店关门。

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17 号

The American urban renaissance is now well and truly over.

美国城市复兴现在已经真正结束了。

In the 2010s and early 2020s, many progressive cities squandered the massive windfall from the knowledge industry boom.

在2010年代和2020年代初，许多进步城市浪费了知识产业繁荣带来的巨额意外之财。

With its seemingly invincible network effects and ever-increasing bounty of tax revenues, that boom seemed to convince progressive cities that they had infinite amounts of fiscal and social surplus to dispose of as they pleased — that they could tolerate crime and disorder, spend infinite money, and neglect the need to build new housing, and that none of this would end up mattering.

凭借看似无敌的网络效应和不断增加的税收收入，这种繁荣似乎让进步的城市相信，它们有无限量的财政和社会盈余可以随心所欲地处置——它们可以容忍犯罪和骚乱，花掉无限的金钱，忽视建造新住房的需要，而这一切最终都不会产生影响。

That turned out to be wrong, and now the bill is coming due.

结果证明这是错误的，现在账单到期了。

Reviving blue cities will require a number of big changes.

复兴蓝色城市需要进行一些重大变革。

Elections like the recent one in San Francisco will be needed to push out “progressive” leaders who want to continue the failed experiments of the last decade.

需要像最近在旧金山举行的选举那样，将那些想要继续过去十年失败实验的“进步”领导人赶下台。

A sensible policy is going to have combine material abundance with intolerance toward crime and disorder.

明智的政策应该将物质丰富与对犯罪和骚乱的不容忍结合起来。

I like the basic platform advanced by GrowSF , a San Francisco advocacy group that combines pro-housing and pro-infrastructure policies with a tough-on-crime approach.

我喜欢 GrowSF 提出的基本平台，这是一个旧金山倡导组织，它将支持住房和支持基础设施的政策与严厉打击犯罪的方法结合起来。

Here’s a list of just a few of their good ideas:

以下是他们的一些好主意：

But fixing blue cities is going to require more than just waves of voter anger or a laundry list of good policies.

但修复蓝色城市需要的不仅仅是选民的愤怒浪潮或一系列良好政策。

It’s going to require a mindset change — a shift in people’s understanding of what a city should be and how it should be run.

这需要思维方式的改变——人们对城市应该是什么样子以及应该如何运营的理解的转变。

The most important thing blue cities need to understand and internalize is that anarchy is not a form of welfare .

蓝色城市需要理解和内化的最重要的事情是，无政府状态不是一种福利形式。

Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder — restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on — represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life.

许多进步人士认为，任何遏制城市混乱的行动——限制人行道帐篷、让人们支付公共交通费用、逮捕非暴力犯罪人员等等——都代表着将边缘化人群排除在公共生活之外。

In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.

在缺乏从摇篮到坟墓提供全方位服务的福利国家的情况下，进步人士认为，他们可以通过基本上让任何人做他们想做的事，将城市公用事业从富人重新分配给穷人。

But in fact, permissiveness toward the behaviors that create urban disorder destroy more value than they redistribute.

但事实上，对造成城市混乱的行为的纵容所破坏的价值比它们重新分配的价值还要多。

When you don’t make people pay for public transit, you scare people off the train, thus causing the train to go bankrupt .

当你不让人们支付公共交通费用时，你就会吓跑人们下火车，从而导致火车破产。

Pretty soon neither the rich nor the poor have a train, and everyone is screwed.

很快，无论富人还是穷人都没有火车了，每个人都完蛋了。

This is the tragedy of the commons .

这是公地的悲剧。

Measures to curb disorder therefore represent defense of the commons .

因此，遏制混乱的措施代表了对公地的保护。

When Bay Area trains put in new stronger gates to prevent people from riding the train without paying, crime on the train fell and rider satisfaction increased .

当湾区火车安装了新的更坚固的大门以防止人们不付费乘坐火车时，火车上的犯罪率下降了，乘客的满意度也提高了。

Similarly, measures to curb shoplifting — including punishing shoplifters and letting security guards and business owners defend their stores with violence — allow local businesses to keep operating, which means that poor and working-class urban residents have places to shop for their daily needs.

同样，遏制入店行窃的措施——包括惩罚入店行窃者、让保安和企业主用暴力保卫自己的商店——使当地企业能够继续营业，这意味着贫困和工薪阶层的城市居民有地方购物以满足他们的日常需求。

And so on.

等等。

Second, Josh Barro is absolutely right when he says city services should “focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services”.

其次，乔什·巴罗（Josh Barro）说城市服务应该“关注广大公众的利益，而不是为提供服务而获得报酬的人”，这是绝对正确的。

In other words, progressive cities need to realize that costs are bad for the city government .

换句话说，进步的城市需要认识到成本对市政府来说是不利的。

The habit of having cities overpay for everything is another form of highly inefficient redistribution.

让城市为一切支付过高费用的习惯是另一种形式的效率极低的再分配。

A bunch of people do get paid out — nonprofits, overstaffed contractors, expensive consultants — but at the end of the day the ballooning costs that result from all these payouts mean that cities don’t actually have the infrastructure or services they need.

确实有很多人得到了报酬——非营利组织、人满为患的承包商、昂贵的顾问——但归根结底，所有这些支出导致的成本不断膨胀，意味着城市实际上并没有他们需要的基础设施或服务。

All too often, progressive cities are operated for the benefit of the people who get the money instead of the people who get the stuff .

很多时候，进步的城市是为了那些有钱人而不是有东西的人的利益而运作的。

That payout-focused behavior is driving cities to bankruptcy while worsening the quality of infrastructure and services alike.

这种以支付为中心的行为正在导致城市破产，同时恶化基础设施和服务的质量。

Cities need to replace consultants and nonprofits with civil servants, implement stricter oversight of outside contractors, improve their bidding processes, and in general do everything they can to bring down the cost of everything they do and provide better value to the citizenry.

城市需要用公务员取代顾问和非营利组织，对外部承包商实施更严格的监督，改进他们的招标流程，并总体上尽一切努力降低他们所做的一切成本，并为公民提供更好的价值。

Finally, cities must realize that housing is non-negotiable .

最后，城市必须认识到住房是不容谈判的。

Fundamentally, cities are places that people live — if people do not have houses to live in, you don’t actually have a city.

从根本上说，城市是人们居住的地方——如果人们没有房子住，那么实际上就没有城市。

Housing is what allows businesses to function, because most people live near to where they work.

住房是企业运转的基础，因为大多数人居住在工作地点附近。

Housing is what allows retail to function, because it creates a sufficient density of customers.

住房是零售业得以发挥作用的基础，因为它创造了足够的顾客密度。

Housing sustains knowledge-industry network effects, by allowing more knowledge workers to live close to each other and exchange ideas.

住房可以让更多的知识工作者住得更近并交流思想，从而维持知识产业的网络效应。

In most states, housing generates more tax revenue for the city as well.

在大多数州，住房也为城市带来更多的税收收入。

And of course, housing reduces homelessness.

当然，住房可以减少无家可归的情况。

Blue cities should therefore do absolutely whatever it takes to get a lot more housing.

因此，蓝色城市绝对应该不惜一切代价获得更多住房。

“Whatever it takes” includes upzoning, deregulation, planning, public housing, and cutting back on policies like rent control.

“不惜一切代价”包括升级分区、放松管制、规划、公共住房以及削减租金管制等政策。

The correct method of building housing is “any and all methods”.

正确的建房方法是“任何方法”。

That’s what it means for a goal to be non-negotiable.

这就是目标不可协商的含义。

I loved the blue cities of fifteen years ago.

我喜欢十五年前的蓝色城市。

They had already sown the seeds of their own decline, but in the brief moment between the chaos of the 1970s and the foolishness of the 2010s, America’s big blue cities were indeed the glory of the country.

他们已经为自己播下了衰落的种子，但在 1970 年代的混乱和 2010 年代的愚蠢之间的短暂时刻，美国的蓝色大城市确实是这个国家的荣耀。

They can and should recapture that glory.

他们可以而且应该重新夺回荣耀。

Actually, what would happen is that the number of voters would shrink until it’s so small that a single vote had a high probability of being decisive, and voters would all randomize whether they went out and voted.

实际上，会发生的情况是，选民的数量会减少，直到很小，以至于单次投票就有很高的概率具有决定性，而选民会随机决定是否出去投票。

This, of course, is a silly fantasy, since humans do not behave like this.

当然，这是一个愚蠢的幻想，因为人类不会这样做。

Note that “Black” is capitalized in this expression but “brown” is not.

请注意，在此表达式中“Black”大写，但“brown”则不然。

This is really the way that progressives write it!

这真是进步人士的写法！

The reason is academic theory — “Black” is supposed to be an identity group that its members have chosen for themselves, while “brown” and “white” are theorized to be ascriptive terms imposed from outside.

原因在于学术理论——“黑人”应该是其成员为自己选择的身份群体，而“棕色”和“白人”则被认为是外部强加的归属术语。

Although the crosstabs of the 2024 election do lend a bit of support to that distinction, the weird capitalization behavior is still fairly precious and out of touch.

尽管 2024 年选举的交叉表确实为这种区别提供了一些支持，但奇怪的大写行为仍然相当珍贵且脱离实际。

Note that in this blog, I capitalize “White” as well as “Black”, consistent with Bloomberg and the Washington Post.

请注意，在本博客中，我将“White”和“Black”大写，与彭博社和华盛顿邮报一致。

But sometimes I forget to capitalize them, because I also just don’t care about stuff like this very much, and I think the nation would be better off if we all cared less about stuff like this.

但有时我忘记把它们大写，因为我也不太关心这样的事情，而且我认为如果我们都不太关心这样的事情，国家会变得更好。

The other factors that influence elections — culture wars, charisma, narratives, and so on — are all represented by the presidential approval ratings that get fed into the model.

影响选举的其他因素——文化战争、魅力、叙事等等——都由输入到模型中的总统支持率来代表。

This effect will generally be magnified if nominal interest rates are at the zero lower bound , as they were in 2021.

如果名义利率处于零下限（就像 2021 年那样），这种影响通常会被放大。

This sounds like one of those bleedingly obvious things that economists need a research paper to prove to themselves, but which every normal person with half a brain already knows.

这听起来像是经济学家需要一篇研究论文才能向自己证明的显而易见的事情之一，但每个有半个大脑的正常人都已经知道了。

In fact, it’s not.

事实上，事实并非如此。

Inflation drives up wages as well as prices — there’s no obvious reason why wages should go up more slowly than prices during a period of high inflation.

通货膨胀会推高工资和物价——没有明显的理由说明为什么在高通货膨胀时期工资的上涨速度应该慢于物价的上涨速度。

But in fact, that is what happens, and economists don’t know why.

但事实上，事实就是这样，经济学家也不知道为什么。

Actually, not all income measures show the same thing.

事实上，并非所有收入指标都显示出同样的情况。

Real median personal income did much worse in the Great Recession than in the post-pandemic inflation.

大衰退期间的实际个人收入中位数比大流行后通胀时期的情况要差得多。

Real median household income fell significantly in both episodes .

两次事件中家庭实际收入中位数均大幅下降。

Some of this was due to a composition effect — low-wage workers returning to work dragged down the average.

其中部分原因是成分效应——低工资工人重返工作岗位拉低了平均水平。

But wage measures that control for composition effects also found that wages failed to keep up with inflation in 2021-22.

但控制构成效应的工资指标也发现，2021-22 年工资未能跟上通货膨胀。

The most extreme form of this “macro-progressivism”, of course, is the cult-like movement known as MMT .

当然，这种“宏观进步主义”的最极端形式是被称为现代货币理论（MMT）的类似邪教的运动。

Most macro-progressives want nothing to do with MMT, of course.

当然，大多数宏观进步主义者不想与现代货币理论有任何关系。

But sometimes their beliefs can seem like MMT’s more reasonable, wonkish cousin — always pushing for a little more fiscal stimulus, rain or shine.

但有时他们的信念可能看起来像是现代货币理论的更理性、更学究的表亲——无论风雨无阻，总是推动更多的财政刺激。

Shoplifting shows a decrease on this chart, but this is probably due to a drop in reporting rates .

这张图表显示入店行窃有所减少，但这可能是由于举报率下降所致。

When you don’t think the police will do anything about shoplifting, you don’t tend to tell them when it happens, and it doesn’t get recorded.

当你认为警察不会对商店行窃采取任何行动时，你不会倾向于告诉他们事情发生的时间，也不会被记录下来。

And it was disproportionately Hispanic-owned, Asian-owned, and Black-owned small businesses that got looted that summer and afterwards.

那年夏天及之后，西班牙裔、亚裔和黑人拥有的小企业被洗劫一空。

Small wonder that nonwhite voters shifted toward Trump!

难怪非白人选民转向特朗普！

All Things Considered, the most popular NPR program, has 14.7 million weekly listeners .

All Things Thought 是最受欢迎的 NPR 节目，每周有 1,470 万听众。

Sean Hannity has about 14 million.

肖恩·汉尼蒂 (Sean Hannity) 拥有大约 1400 万。

This is obviously true for me as well, of course.

当然，这对我来说显然也是如此。

I don’t know for sure, but my bet is that almost all of my audience is college-educated.

我不确定，但我敢打赌，几乎所有观众都受过大学教育。

Note that regular church attendance is actually pretty stable .

请注意，定期参加教堂活动实际上相当稳定。

It turns out that a lot of church members lie about going to church regularly, which you can see when you track their cell phones.

事实证明，很多教会成员在定期去教堂的问题上撒谎，当你追踪他们的手机时就可以看到这一点。

But the people who only go to church services once in a while are still probably involved with the institution, which puts them in at least occasional contact with a bunch of people from other social classes.

但那些偶尔去教堂做礼拜的人可能仍然参与该机构，这使他们至少偶尔会与来自其他社会阶层的人接触。

But also producing lots of genuinely interesting and non-annoying culture as well!

但也产生了许多真正有趣且不烦人的文化！

Homeless people themselves, of course, are the most frequent victims of urban chaos, despite popular stereotypes of homeless people as predators.

当然，无家可归者本身就是城市混乱中最常见的受害者，尽管人们普遍认为无家可归者是掠夺者。

The other reason for this was decreased foot traffic in the downtown area, caused by the rise of remote work.

另一个原因是远程工作的兴起导致市中心地区的人流量减少。