【文章标题】：What if our biggest problems aren’t economic? 如果我们最大的问题不是经济问题呢？
【文章正文】： Photo by
Dmitry Vechorko
on
Unsplash 摄影：
Dmitry Vechorko
发布于
Unsplash
It’s hardly news that Americans are not happy with the state of their nation. Confidence in the country’s direction crashed hard during the Bush years and never recovered. But what’s notable about more recent years is Americans’ increasing dissatisfaction with their personal lives: 美国人对自己国家的现状感到不满，这几乎算不上新闻。在布什执政期间，民众对国家发展方向的信心急剧下滑，且从未恢复。但近年来值得关注的是，美国人对个人生活的满意度日益下降：
1
Source:
Gallup 1
来源：
盖洛普
This decline looks pretty mild, but other numbers tell an even starker story. For example, happiness surveys show an increasingly despondent populace: 这一下降趋势看似相当温和，但其他数据则揭示出更为严峻的现实。例如，幸福调查显示民众日益消沉：
Source: IFS via
Simon Kuestenmacher 来源：IFS，转引自
Simon Kuestenmacher
Suicide has been
slowly rising
as well. And then there’s consumer sentiment: 自杀率也一直在
缓慢上升
。此外还有消费者信心指数：
Source:
UMich 来源：
密歇根大学
For intellectuals and commentators such as myself, for many policy wonks and academics, and even for many politicians, the question is how to make the American people happier. And the answers we come up with are usually
economic
ones — ideas for policies that will improve the material well-being of either the whole populace, or some segment of it. 对于像我这样的知识分子和评论员、许多政策专家和学者，甚至许多政界人士来说，问题在于如何让美国人民更幸福。而我们想出的答案通常是
经济
方面的——即旨在改善全体或部分民众物质福祉的政策构想。
This is common on both sides of the aisle. On the left, centrists have embraced the
Abundance movement
, whose main idea is to give Americans more
stuff
— more housing, electricity, health care, and so on. For progressives and leftists, meanwhile, Medicare for All is probably the centerpiece idea. On the right, Trump’s trade agenda has usually been justified with claims that it will return good manufacturing jobs to the American working class. Even immigration restriction is usually couched in economic terms — the
MAGA people claim
that mass deportations will open up jobs for Americans, lower the price of housing, and so on. 这在两党中都很常见。在左翼，中间派人士接受了
充裕运动
，其核心理念是给美国人更多的
物质
——更多的住房、电力、医疗保健等等。与此同时，对于进步派和左翼人士来说，“全民医保”可能是核心主张。在右翼，特朗普的贸易议程通常被辩护为将为美国工人阶级带回优质的制造业工作岗位。甚至移民限制也通常以经济理由来表述——
MAGA人士声称
大规模驱逐将为美国人腾出工作岗位、降低住房价格等等。
The roots of the country’s malaise, too, are often described in economic terms. Many people claim that the First China Shock — and the loss of good blue-collar jobs to offshoring more generally — left a disappointed, angry working class in its wake. Progressives decry corporate landlords that they claim raise the cost of housing, and blame grocery stores’ greed for the rising cost of food. Practically everyone agrees that inflation was the biggest reason Trump won the 2024 election. 美国社会弊病的根源也常常被用经济术语来描述。许多人声称，第一次中国冲击——以及更广泛地，优质蓝领工作岗位因离岸外包而流失——留下了一个失望、愤怒的工人阶级。进步派谴责企业房东，称他们抬高了住房成本，并将食品价格上涨归咎于杂货店的贪婪。几乎所有人都认为，通胀是特朗普赢得2024年大选的最大原因。
I’ve spent a lot of time arguing against a lot of these ideas (and in favor of a few of them). But I almost always accept the basic frame that A) many of America’s problems are due to economic malaise, and B) we ought to focus on finding ways to make Americans richer. Partly, this is because I was trained as an economist; I recognize that things like culture wars are also important to Americans, but I don’t have much special expertise in that area. But partly, I think I just subscribe to the general tendency of American intellectuals to focus on the material. 我花了很多时间反驳其中许多观点（也支持其中少数几个）。但我几乎总是接受这样的基本框架：A）美国的许多问题源于经济萎靡，B）我们应当专注于寻找让美国人更富裕的方法。部分原因是我受过经济学训练；我认识到文化战争等问题对美国人也很重要，但我在那个领域没有太多专长。但部分原因，我想我只是认同了美国知识分子普遍倾向于关注物质层面的倾向。
I was thinking of this as I read Jay Caspian Kang’s essay, “
Subaru Socialists and the Great Disappointed
.” Kang argues that the young, educated, angry voters who currently form the Democrats’ base can be separated into two basic groups: Millennials who are mad about the raw economic deal they received during and after the Great Recession, and Zoomers who are mad about Covid and Palestine. Here he describes the first of these groups: 我是在阅读杰伊·卡斯皮安·康的文章《
斯巴鲁社会主义者与极度失望者
》时想到这些的。康认为，目前构成民主党基本盘的年轻、受过教育、愤怒的选民可以分为两个基本群体：对大衰退期间及之后所遭受的恶劣经济待遇感到愤怒的千禧一代，以及对新冠疫情和巴勒斯坦问题感到愤怒的Z世代。以下是他对第一类群体的描述：
This new voting bloc has two similar but distinct components. There are what I call the Subaru Socialists: college-educated millennials in their thirties and early forties who earn a somewhat steady income but not what they expected. These voters arrived at their politics via
the Great Recession
,
Occupy Wall Street
, and the continual escalation of housing prices in urban areas—all of which heightened the contrast between what they were promised when they took on student debt and their current circumstances. 这个新的投票群体有两个相似但不同的组成部分。有我所谓的斯巴鲁社会主义者：三十多岁到四十出头、受过大学教育的千禧一代，他们收入还算稳定，但未达到预期。这些选民的政治立场形成于
大衰退
、
占领华尔街运动
以及城市房价持续攀升——所有这些都加剧了他们背负学生债务时所被承诺的前景与当前处境之间的反差。
For a long time, I basically bought the narrative that at least some of the unrest of the 2010s was due to angry Millennials who had gotten screwed by the Great Recession. It makes intuitive sense that a generation who were on the losing end of such a vivid demonstration of economic risk would turn toward policies that decrease economic risk — like government health insurance and rent control. It also makes sense that they’d want student debt forgiveness. 很长一段时间里，我基本上接受了这样一种说法：2010年代至少部分动荡源于在大衰退中吃了亏的愤怒千禧一代。直觉上说得通：一代人亲身经历了如此生动的经济风险展示，且处于不利地位，他们会转向降低经济风险的政策——比如政府医疗保险和租金管制。他们想要学生债务减免也合情合理。
But as time has gone on and I’ve seen Millennials do better and better economically, I’ve begun to doubt this narrative. Corinth and Larrimore (2026)
write
: 但随着时间的推移，我看到千禧一代在经济上表现越来越好，我开始怀疑这种说法。科林斯和拉里莫尔（2026）
写道
：
We find that Millennials had a real median household income that was 20% higher than that of the previous generation, a slowdown from the growth rate of the Silent Generation (36%) and Baby Boomers (26%), but similar to that of Generation X (16%). The slowdown for younger generations largely resulted from stalled growth in work hours among women…Additionally, lifetime income gains for younger generations far outweigh their higher educational costs. 我们发现，千禧一代的实际家庭收入中位数比上一代人高出20%，增速较沉默一代（36%）和婴儿潮一代（26%）有所放缓，但与X世代（16%）相近。年轻一代增速放缓主要源于女性工作小时数增长停滞……此外，年轻一代的终身收入增长远远超过其更高的教育成本。
And here’s a chart: 下面是一张图表：
Source:
Corinth and Larrimore (2026) 来源：
科林斯和拉里莫尔（2026）
It’s not just government redistribution giving Millennials a boost. By the time they hit their mid 30s, their market income was well ahead of Gen X or the B 不仅仅是政府再分配让千禧一代受益。到他们35岁左右时，他们的市场收入已经远远领先于X世代或B