每周工作超过60小时的美国人报告说,他们平均希望每周少工作25小时。他们这么说是因为工作使他们遭受“时间饥荒”。一项2006年的研究发现,这影响了他们与配偶和孩子建立牢固关系、维持家庭、甚至过上令人满意的性生活的能力。哈佛商学院(Harvard Business School)最近一项高管调查的一名受访者自豪地坚称,“我晚上给孩子们的10分钟比花在工作上的10分钟伟大一百万倍。”只有十分钟!
优雅地或至少冷静地承受这些时间的能力已经成为精英成功的标准。一家大公司的一名高管接受了社会学家阿丽·拉塞尔·霍奇奇德(Arlie Russell Hochschild)为其著作《时间捆绑》的采访。她观察到,展示了自己技能和奉献精神的有抱负的经理面临着的“最终淘汰赛”是这样的: “有些人会火冒三丈,变得古怪,因为他们一直在无休止地工作……而高层的人非常聪明,工作得像疯子一样,而且不会火冒三丈。他们仍然能够保持良好的心态,保持家庭生活在一起。最终是他们赢得了比赛。”
社会制度相应的变化,就是一个强健的安全网络,能容忍各种试错,能护扶年轻人的勇往直前不怕跌倒,让what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger不仅是一句鸡汤而能理直气壮成为他们的信念。当然,在美国,一个很重要但一直被忽略的,就是社会对基础研究的投入,想想如果当初的bell labs在美国到处开花。。。聪明的年轻人不用只往花街律师医生这几行里面挤了。
立委后记:
Great great thesis. Right to the point on problems of modern society. Is the solution feasible ?
立委按:偶然听到金灿荣教授在点评中美贸易摩擦升级的一个演说。他提到美国中情局定期发布更新的《世界概况》(The World Factbook),对中国经济有准确的描述,笑称,比发改委还要正面,就是一本【厉害了我的国】的英文版。出于好奇,上网查到了他说的这个报告,的确精细客观,大概是美国的智囊团专家和中国通们撰写的,具有不错的参考价值,利用搜狗机器翻译稍加编辑如下,以飨读者。
YANG: If you've heard anything about me and my campaign, you've heard that someone is running for president who wants to give every American $1,000 a month. I know this may sound like a gimmick, but this is a deeply American idea, from Thomas Paine to Martin Luther King to today.
Let me tell you why we need to do it and how we pay for it. Why do we need to do it? We already automated away millions of manufacturing jobs, and chances are your job can be next. If you don't believe me, just ask an auto worker here in Detroit.
How do we pay for it? Raise your hand in the crowd if you've seen stores closing where you live. It is not just you. Amazon is closing 30 percent of America's stores and malls and paying zero in taxes while doing it. We need to do the opposite of much of what we're doing right now, and the opposite of Donald Trump is an Asian man who likes math.
(APPLAUSE)
So let me share the math. A thousand dollars a month for every adult would be $461 million every month, right here in Detroit alone. The automation of our jobs is the central challenge facing us today. It is why Donald Trump is our president, and any politician not addressing it is failing the American people.
Mr. Yang, I want to bring you in. You support a Medicare for All system. How do you respond to Governor Inslee?
YANG: Well, I just want to share a story. When I told my wife I was running for president, you know the first question she asked me? What are we going to do about our health care?
That's a true story, and it's not just us. Democrats are talking about health care in the wrong way. As someone who's run a business, I can tell you flat out our current health care system makes it harder to hire, it makes it harder to treat people well and give them benefits and treat them as full-time employees, it makes it harder to switch jobs, as Senator Harris just said, and it's certainly a lot harder to start a business.
If we say, look, we're going to get health care off the backs of businesses and families, then watch American entrepreneurship recover and bloom. That's the argument we should be making to the American people.
YANG: I'm the son of immigrants myself. My father immigrated here as a graduate student and generated over 65 U.S. patents for G.E. and IBM. I think that's a pretty good deal for the United States. That's the immigration story we need to be telling.
We can’t always be focusing on some of the -- the -- the distressed stories. And if you go to a factory here in Michigan, you will not find wall-to-wall immigrants; you will find wall-to-wall robots and machines. Immigrants are being scapegoated for issues they have nothing to do with in our economy.
YANG: I speak for just about everyone watching when I say I would trust anyone on this stage much more than I would trust our current president on matters of criminal justice.
(APPLAUSE)
We cannot tear each other down. We have to focus on beating Donald Trump in 2020.
I want to share a story that a prison guard, a corrections officer in New Hampshire said to me. He said, we should pay people to stay out of jail, because we spend so much when they're behind bars. Right now, we think we're saving money, we just end up spending the money in much more dark and punitive ways. We should put money directly into people's hands, certainly when they come out of prison, but before they go into prison.
LEMON: Mr. Yang, why are you the best candidate to heal the racial divide in America -- your response?
YANG: I spent seven years running a non-profit that helped create thousands of jobs, including hundreds right here in Detroit, as well as Baltimore, Cleveland, New Orleans. And I saw that the racial disparities are much, much worse than I had ever imagined.
They're even worse still. A study just came out that projected the average African-American median net worth will be zero by 2053. So you have to ask yourself, how is that possible? It's possible because we're in the midst of the greatest economic transformation in our history. Artificial intelligence is coming. It's going to displace hundreds of thousands of call center workers, truck drivers -- the most common job in 29 states, including this one.
And you know who suffers most in a natural disaster? It's people of color, people who have lower levels of capital and education and resources. So what are we going to do about it? We should just go back to the writings of Martin Luther King, who in 1967, his book "Chaos or Community", said "We need a guaranteed minimum income in the United States of America." That is the most effective way for us to address racial inequality in a genuine way and give every American a chance in the 21st Century economy.
你知道谁在自然灾害中受害最深吗?是有色人种,他们的资本、教育和资源水平较低。那么我们要怎么做呢?我们应该回顾一下马丁·路德·金(Martin Luther King)的著作,他在1967年出版的《混乱还是社区》(Chaos or Community)一书中说,“我们需要美国有保障的最低收入。”这是我们以真正的方式解决种族不平等问题、让每个美国人在21世纪的经济中都有机会(分享经济红利)的最有效方式。
(掌声)
莱蒙:杨先生,非常感谢。
BIDEN: - in research for new alternatives to deal with climate change.
BASH: Mr. Yang, your response?
BIDEN: And that's bigger than any other person.
YANG: The important number in Vice President Biden's remarks just now is that he United States was only 15 percent of global emissions. We like to act as if we're 100 percent, but the truth is even if we were to curb our emissions dramatically, the earth is still going to get warmer.
And we can see it around it us this summer. The last four years have been the four warmest years in recorded history. This is going to be a tough truth, but we are too late. We are 10 years too late. We need to do everything we can to start moving the climate in the right direction, but we also need to start moving our people to higher ground.
And the best way to do that is to put economic resources into your hands so you can protect yourself and your families.
TAPPER: Thank you, Senator Gillibrand. Mr. Yang, in poll after poll democratic voters are saying that having a nominee who can beat President Trump is more important to them than having a nominee who agrees with them on major issues. And right now, according to polls, they say the candidate who has the best chance of doing that, of beating President Trump is Vice President Biden. Why are they wrong?
YANG: Well, I'm building a coalition of disaffected Trump voters, independents, libertarians, and conservatives, as well as democrats and progressives. I believe I'm the candidate best suited to beat Donald Trump and as for how to win in Michigan and Ohio and Pennsylvania, the problem is that so many people feel like the economy has left them behind.
What we have to do is we have to say look, there's record high GDP in stock market prices, you know what else they're at record high is? Suicides, drug overdoses, depression, anxiety. It's gotten so bad that American life expectancy had declined for the last three years.
And I like to talk about my wife who is at home with our two boys right now, one of whom is autistic. What is her work count at in today's economy. Zero and we know that's the opposite of the truth. We know that her work is amongst the most challenging and vital.
The way we win this election as we redefine economic progress to include all the things that matter to the people in Michigan and all of us like our own heath, our well being, our mental health, our clean air and clean water, how are kids are doing.
If we change the measurements for the 21st century economy to revolve around our own well being then we will win this election.
(CROSSTALK)
TAPPER: Thank you, Mr. Yang. Congresswoman Gabbard, your response?
BASH: Mr. Yang, Mr. Yang, women on average earn 80 cents, about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Senator Harris wants to fine companies that don't close their gender pay gaps. As an entrepreneur, do you think a stiff fine will change how companies pay their female employees?
YANG: I have seen firsthand the inequities in the business world where women are concerned, particularly in start-ups and entrepreneurship. We have to do more at every step. And if you're a woman entrepreneur, the obstacles start not just at home, but then when you seek a mentor or an investor, often they don't look like you and they might not think your idea is the right one.
In order to give women a leg up, what we have to do is we have to think about women in every situation, including the ones who are in exploitive and abusive jobs and relationships around the country. I'm talking about the waitress who's getting harassed by her boss at the diner who might have a business idea, but right now is stuck where she is.
What we have to do is we have to give women the economic freedom to be able to improve their own situations and start businesses, and the best way to do this is by putting a dividend of $1,000 a month into their hands.
(APPLAUSE)
It would be a game-changer for women around the country, because we know that women do more of the unrecognized and uncompensated work in our society. It will not change unless we change it. And I say that's just what we do.
Mr. Yang, Iran has now breached the terms of the 2015 nuclear deal after President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal, and that puts Iran closer to building a nuclear weapon, the ability to do so, at the very least. You've said if Iran violates the agreement, the U.S. would need to respond, quote, "very strongly." So how would a President Yang respond right now?
YANG: I would move to de-escalate tensions in Iran, because they're responding to the fact that we pulled out of this agreement. And it wasn't just us and Iran. There were many other world powers that were part of that multinational agreement. We'd have to try and reenter that agreement, renegotiate the timelines, because the timelines now don't make as much sense.
But I've signed a pledge to end the forever wars. Right now, our strength abroad reflects our strength at home. What's happened, really? We've fallen apart at home, so we elected Donald Trump, and now we have this erratic and unpredictable relationship with even our longstanding partners and allies.
What we have to do is we have to start investing those resources to solve the problems right here at home. We've spent trillions of dollars and lost thousands of American lives in conflicts that have had unclear benefits. We've been in a constant state of war for 18 years. This is not what the American people want. I would bring the troops home, I would de-escalate tensions with Iran, and I would start investing our resources in our own communities.
TAPPER: Welcome back to the CNN Democratic presidential debate. It is time now for closing statements. You will each receive one minute. Mayor de Blasio, let's begin with you.
YANG: You know what the talking heads couldn't stop talking about after the last debate? It's not the fact that I'm somehow number four on the stage in national polling. It was the fact that I wasn't wearing a tie. Instead of talking about automation and our future, including the fact that we automated away 4 million manufacturing jobs, hundreds of thousands right here in Michigan, we're up here with makeup on our faces and our rehearsed attack lines, playing roles in this reality TV show.
It's one reason why we elected a reality TV star as our president.
(LAUGHTER)
(APPLAUSE)
We need to be laser-focused on solving the real challenges of today, like the fact that the most common jobs in America may not exist in a decade, or that most Americans cannot pay their bills. My flagship proposal, the freedom dividend, would put $1,000 a month into the hands of every American adult. It would be a game-changer for millions of American families.
If you care more about your family and your kids than my neckwear, enter your zip code at yang2020.com and see what $1,000 a month would mean to your community. I have done the math. It’s not left; it’s not right. It’s forward. And that is how we’re going to beat Donald Trump in 2020.