美国中产阶级崩溃：五成美国人生活贫困或在贫困边缘

One in five US adults now lives in households either in poverty or on the cusp of poverty, with almost 5.7m having joined the country’s lowest income ranks since the global financial crisis.

五个美国成年人中就有一个生活贫困或是处于贫困边缘的，全球金融危机以来，已经有570万人加入美国国家最低收入保障行列中。

Many of the new poor, or near-poor, have become so even amid an economic recovery that is widely expected to lead the US Federal Reserve to raise interest rates next week for the first time in almost a decade. More than 45 percent of them — almost 2.5m adults — have joined the lowest income ranks since 2011, long after the post-crisis recession was ostensibly over.

许多新的贫困人口或接近贫困人口都期待美国联邦储备委员会在下周提高利率来实现经济复苏，这是近十年来的第一次。在后金融危机经济衰退结束后很长时间，有超过45%的人——近250万成年人——从2011年就加入到最低收入保障中。

The findings, contained in data prepared for a new study of the US middle class by the Pew Research Center and shared with the Financial Times, put a stark human face on the economic legacy left by the crisis and reveal how uneven the recovery has been.

这些发现是美国佩尤研究中心为其美国中产阶级新研究准备的并与英国《金融时报》共享的数据，共同研究经济危机后遗症这个严肃的事实，并揭示了经济恢复的坎坷。

They illustrate how many Americans are being left behind even amid the strong jobs growth that, should the Fed move as expected, will be at the core of the argument its policymakers present for raising rates.

他们阐明了即使在强劲的就业增长趋势下还是有很多美国人无法正常就业，如果美联储按预期实施措施，决策者们目前加息的决定将是争论的核心问题。

They also help explain why any notion of a recovery still seems a long way off to many in the US and why the message of populist politicians such as Donald Trump that America is not working resonate on the eve of an election year.

他们还解释了为何美国经济复苏还很遥远以及为何像唐纳德·特朗普这样的民粹主义政治家的言论，在选举前夕并不能得到很好的共鸣。

“There’s a new American dream,” says Torrey Easler, a Baptist preacher who helps feed a growing population of poor in the town of Eden, North Carolina. “The old American dream was to own a home and two cars. The new American dream is to have a job.”

托里·伊斯勒是北卡罗来纳州伊甸镇的一位致力于帮助解决不断增长的贫困人口问题的牧师，他说：“现在有了新的美国梦，过去的美国梦是拥有一个自己的家和两辆汽车。新的美国梦是有一份工作。”

A large part of the shrinking of the US middle class, which for the first time in decades now forms less than a majority of the country’s adult population, has surprisingly been due to the country’s growing affluence, the Pew study found.

佩尤研究中心发现。近十年来，很大一部分美国中产阶级的萎缩导致中产阶级不再是美国成年人口的多数，令人惊讶的是这是因为美国日益富裕造成的。

But the country’s lowest income group — defined by Pew for a three-person household as earning less than $31,402 a year — has also grown at more than five times the rate of the middle class in the past seven years. There are now 48.9m adults in this bracket in the US, up from 43.2m in 2008 and just 21.6m in 1971.

但美国最低收入群体——佩尤定义的即三口人家庭年收入低于31402美元——在过去7年间，是中产阶级增加速度的5倍多。现在美国低收入成人达4890万，相比2008年的4320万人和1971年的2160万人增加了。

Kathryn Edin, a Johns Hopkins University sociologist who authored a recent book about those living on less than $2 a day in the US, argues that the shrinking social safety net after landmark 1990s welfare reforms has made the US a harsher place to be poor than it was.

约翰霍普金斯大学社会学家凯瑟琳·艾丁，最近负责编写一本书，关于在美国每天生活费不足2美元的那群人。他认为在具有里程碑意义的20世纪90年代福利改革后，萎缩的社会安全网让美国成为一个对待贫穷更残酷的地方。

The offshoring or automation of many low-skilled jobs has also made rising out of poverty harder than it once was, she says: “The bad jobs of yesterday were just much, much better than the bad jobs of today.”

很多低技术要求工作的离岸外包和自动化也使脱离贫困比以前更难了。她说：“过去所谓不好的工作，也比现在不好的工作要好的多。”

The educational make-up of the middle class has also changed significantly. In 1971, 76 percent of adults in middle class households had a high-school education or less. Today that figure is just 40 percent, according to Pew’s data analysis, while just 12 percent of adults in lower income households had a university degree.

中产阶级的教育构成也发生了重大变化。在1971年，中产阶级中76%的成年人有高中或高中以下学历。现在根据佩尤数据分析，现在这个数据仅仅是40%，同时低收入家庭中只有12%的成年人拥有大学学历。

“It’s a tough world out there when you get into these very competitive, knowledge-based, very up and down, transient businesses that are here today and gone tomorrow,” says Robert Doar, a former New York City social services commissioner and now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “But that’s not what the problem is at the bottom. The problem for people at the bottom is that they can’t get up and be in that game.”

前纽约市社会服务专员、现美国企业研究所保守派研究员长罗伯特·多尔说：“世界很残酷，要保住这些竞争激烈、基于知识、时好时坏、瞬息万变的企业的饭碗尤其如此。但这并不是底层人的问题所在。底层人的问题是不能站起来参与进这个游戏中。”

Vocabulary

cusp: 尖头；尖端

offshoring: 离岸外包