PBS高端访谈:精英应该教工人阶级如何生活

 　　GWEN IFILL:Next, the author of a new bestseller talks with NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman about the economic plight¹ and social values of working-class Americans. The book is already receiving a heated reception.

　　The discussion is part of Paul's ongoing² reporting Making Sense of financial news.

　　CHARLES MURRAY, author, "Coming Apart":It's not too dramatic to say this. We're losing a lot of what has made America exceptional as we become increasingly a class society in which a big chunk³ of the people on the bottom no longer behave in the ways that are essential for a self-governing, free society.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Conservative lightning rod Charles Murray, who wrote "Losing Ground" in 1984, blasting welfare programs for making poverty worse, co-wrote "The Bell Curve" in 1994, arguing that economic success comes increasingly from genetic⁴ differences in I.Q.

　　Both books offended blacks in particular. He returns to these themes in his latest bestseller, "Coming Apart," which restricts its scrutiny⁵ to white people to emphasize the issue of class, not race.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:We have developed classes in this country that are different in kind from anything we have known before.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:The new super-smart, super-educated upper class is out of touch, says Murray, tucked away in exclusive zip codes, he calls the "SuperZips." But Murray reserves his actual anxiety for the 30 percent at the bottom.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:We have a new lower class that's large and growing that has fallen away from a lot of the basic core behaviors and institutions that made America work.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:That's because, he argues, they're less honest, less religious, less responsible than white working-class people were half-a-century ago, violent crime, for example, way up, at least as measured by arrest rates.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:In 1960, it was still—no nostalgia⁶ here—an age when you could leave your door unlocked even in urban neighborhoods. Even after the reductions in crime that we've seen since the 1990s, you're still at about four to five times the level of violent crime in these neighborhoods that you had before.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Regular worship, meanwhile, way down.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:If you define sort of the core religious population as being people who go to church regularly and say they have a strong affiliation⁷ with their faith, you're down to 12 percent in the white working-class who have that kind of relationship to religion.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:But perhaps the widest gap over the past 50 years, says Murray, is in marriage rates.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:Is collapse⁸ too strong a word? I'm not sure, but it's really close to that. 1960, you've got about 94 percent of the upper-middle-class whites who are married, compared to 83 percent of the white working class. It's the norm in both groups.

　　You turn to 2010, you're still at 84 percent for the upper middle class.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Eighty-four percent married.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:Right. For the white working-class, you're down to 48 percent.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:According to Murray, nearly half of all white working-class kids are now born to single moms, who look at the dads and say:

　　CHARLES MURRAY:Why should I marry these losers? You know, the guy who impregnated me was a nice guy, but he can't hold on to a job.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:And that's because of a final piece of Murray's dreary⁹ data. Over the past 50 years, lower-rung white males have left the labor¹⁰ force.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:You know, 1960, guys are supposed to work. That is as universal a social norm as there is. You don't work, you're a bum¹¹. And just about everybody either did work or was looking for work.

　　Turn to 2008, before the recession, you're up to about one out of eight white working-class males ages 30 to 49 is not even looking for work.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:But, as with Murray's previous books, the coverage¹² has often been withering¹³, and the main critique is that he's left out the most important factor in working-class decline: economics.

　　On the left, Salon¹⁴.com's Joan Walsh mocked Murray's insistence¹⁵ on culture over economics, claiming her next book will be called "Coming Together: How the White Working-Class Woke Up and Realized the Right Now Thinks They're Dumb and Lazy Too."

　　On the right, David Frum asked, "How can you tell a story about the moral decay of the working-class with the work part left out?"

　　What Murray's saying, "Coming Apart," you know, these people are—they're dissolute.

　　THEA LEE, deputy chief of staff, AFL-CIO:As opposed to rich people.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Thea Lee is deputy chief of staff at the AFL-CIO.

　　THEA LEE:Go to any private school in Washington, D.C. You know, take the level of drug use, you know, at private high schools. Or look at Bernie Madoff. I'm just trying to get my head around this idea of morality being the purview¹⁶ of the wealthy, the elite¹⁷ and the intellectually accomplished¹⁸.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Besides, says Lee.

　　THEA LEE:If you look at the big economic picture in the United States, it's one of a weak labor market, wage stagnation¹⁹, and growing inequality. The U.S. economy is in a dead end right now because there's been too much focus on cutting costs, cutting labor costs, laying people off, making due with less.

　　And in the end, what you see is an economy that's shrinking, that's failing, that's not providing a middle-class lifestyle.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:You really think it has nothing to do with all the jobs that have been shipped overseas and, more importantly perhaps, the technology that has made so many jobs obsolete²⁰?

　　CHARLES MURRAY:I don't see the relationship between the changing nature of the distribution of working-class jobs and the increased dropout²¹ from the labor force. It's not as if assembly line jobs were so much fun and the jobs that are available now are so much less fun that you are discouraged from taking those jobs.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:No, they paid more. They paid way more.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:You aren't going to fix it by bringing back unionized assembly line jobs.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Instead, Murray advocates cultural changes, encouraging the lower class to emulate²² the more virtuous²³ behavior of those above, who might as well living on another planet, so clueless have they become about what's going on in the rest of the culture.

　　You have got a quiz in the book.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:"How thick is your bubble?"

　　PAUL SOLMAN:The quiz, which you can take on our Making Sense website, measures upper-class familiarity with working-class America.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day? Because my feeling is, if you can't answer yes to that question, you are in big trouble in trying to understand the country you live in.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Though Murray, Harvard grad, MIT Ph.D., qualifies as what he calls an OES, an overeducated elitist snob²⁴, he grew up solidly in the middle in small-town Iowa, nothing whiter, he's called it. And he stayed close to mainstream²⁵ America. Since 1989, he's lived in tiny Burkittsville, M.D., way outside the Washington Beltway, the nearest town of any size, Brunswick, where Murray and his wife sent their kids to public school.

　　I told him I had one final line of questioning. He suggested we stop in at Mommer's Diner to discuss it.

　　To you, so many of the rewards in our society come from talent, which is, to a large extent, innate²⁶, right?

　　CHARLES MURRAY:Right in the second half. Okay?

　　The first half, which says so many of the rewards in our society come from talent, if you're talking about money, yeah. But if you're talking about rewards in life, meaning deep satisfactions in life, vocation²⁷, that is having a job that you find satisfying, and marriage and religiosity and community, which are as accessible to people on the bottom of society as the top, those are still there as potential rewards.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Since Murray denies that the lack of economic rewards are the cause of cultural decline, he's not pushing any governmentfnbsp;economic solutions.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:It's a very well-verified social science finding that government programs don't do a good job at solving the human problems that I'm discussing.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:So, Murray says the upper crust should try to share their—or perhaps I should say our—superior virtues²⁸ with those who have lost them.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:We have right now an upper class that will not say out loud, as elites²⁹ really need to do in any society, this is a good way to live. This doesn't mean they're passing laws. It doesn't mean they're forcing people. They are setting a standard.

　　THEA LEE:And how do we do that exactly? Do the people just wander into a poor neighborhood and start instructing people in how to not have sex before marriage or. . .

　　PAUL SOLMAN:Again, the AFL-CIO's Thea Lee.

　　THEA LEE:I'm trying to imagine the picture of the wealthy elite sharing the benefit of their knowledge and superior situation with the less fortunate. And that just might not be that much fun.

　　CHARLES MURRAY:The way that social norms become social norms is not through any systematic³⁰ process. It is through a flowering of an understanding within a culture. And here's the good news, Paul. I think these are ideas whose time has come.

　　PAUL SOLMAN:With the coming of "Coming Apart," ideas that Charles Murray is doing everything he can to propagate.

　　GWEN IFILL:You can find out if you're living in a bubble by taking the quiz on our website's home page.

1 plight   

n.困境，境况，誓约，艰难；vt.宣誓，保证，约定

参考例句：

• The leader was much concerned over the plight of the refugees.那位领袖对难民的困境很担忧。
• She was in a most helpless plight.她真不知如何是好。

2 ongoing   

adj.进行中的，前进的

参考例句：

• The problem is ongoing.这个问题尚未解决。
• The issues raised in the report relate directly to Age Concern's ongoing work in this area.报告中提出的问题与“关心老人”组织在这方面正在做的工作有直接的关系。

3 chunk   

n.厚片，大块，相当大的部分（数量）

参考例句：

• They had to be careful of floating chunks of ice.他们必须当心大块浮冰。
• The company owns a chunk of farmland near Gatwick Airport.该公司拥有盖特威克机场周边的大片农田。

4 genetic   

adj.遗传的，遗传学的

参考例句：

• It's very difficult to treat genetic diseases.遗传性疾病治疗起来很困难。
• Each daughter cell can receive a full complement of the genetic information.每个子细胞可以收到遗传信息的一个完全补偿物。

5 scrutiny   

n.详细检查，仔细观察

参考例句：

• His work looks all right,but it will not bear scrutiny.他的工作似乎很好，但是经不起仔细检查。
• Few wives in their forties can weather such a scrutiny.很少年过四十的妻子经得起这么仔细的观察。

6 nostalgia   

n.怀乡病，留恋过去，怀旧

参考例句：

• He might be influenced by nostalgia for his happy youth.也许是对年轻时幸福时光的怀恋影响了他。
• I was filled with nostalgia by hearing my favourite old song.我听到这首喜爱的旧歌，心中充满了怀旧之情。

7 affiliation   

n.联系，联合

参考例句：

• There is no affiliation between our organization and theirs,even though our names are similar.尽管两个组织的名称相似，但我们之间并没有关系。
• The kidnappers had no affiliation with any militant group.这些绑架者与任何军事组织都没有紧密联系。

8 collapse   

vi.累倒；昏倒；倒塌；塌陷

参考例句：

• The country's economy is on the verge of collapse.国家的经济已到了崩溃的边缘。
• The engineer made a complete diagnosis of the bridge's collapse.工程师对桥的倒塌做了一次彻底的调查分析。

9 dreary   

adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的

参考例句：

• They live such dreary lives.他们的生活如此乏味。
• She was tired of hearing the same dreary tale of drunkenness and violence.她听够了那些关于酗酒和暴力的乏味故事。

10 labor   

n.劳动，努力，工作，劳工；分娩；vi.劳动，努力，苦干；vt.详细分析；麻烦

参考例句：

• We are never late in satisfying him for his labor.我们从不延误付给他劳动报酬。
• He was completely spent after two weeks of hard labor.艰苦劳动两周后，他已经疲惫不堪了。

11 bum   

n.臀部；流浪汉，乞丐；vt.乞求，乞讨

参考例句：

• A man pinched her bum on the train so she hit him.在火车上有人捏她屁股，她打了那人。
• The penniless man had to bum a ride home.那个身无分文的人只好乞求搭车回家。

12 coverage   

n.报导，保险范围，保险额，范围，覆盖

参考例句：

• There's little coverage of foreign news in the newspaper.报纸上几乎没有国外新闻报道。
• This is an insurance policy with extensive coverage.这是一项承保范围广泛的保险。

13 withering   

使人畏缩的，使人害羞的，使人难堪的

参考例句：

• She gave him a withering look. 她极其蔑视地看了他一眼。
• The grass is gradually dried-up and withering and pallen leaves. 草渐渐干枯、枯萎并落叶。

14 salon   

n.[法]沙龙；客厅；营业性的高级服务室

参考例句：

• Do you go to the hairdresser or beauty salon more than twice a week?你每周去美容院或美容沙龙多过两次吗？
• You can hear a lot of dirt at a salon.你在沙龙上会听到很多流言蜚语。

15 insistence   

n.坚持；强调；坚决主张

参考例句：

• They were united in their insistence that she should go to college.他们一致坚持她应上大学。
• His insistence upon strict obedience is correct.他坚持绝对服从是对的。

16 purview   

n.范围；眼界

参考例句：

• These are questions that lie outside the purview of our inquiry.这些都不是属于我们调查范围的问题。
• That,however,was beyond the purview of the court;it was a diplomatic matter.但是，那已不在法庭权限之内；那是个外交问题。

17 elite   

n.精英阶层；实力集团；adj.杰出的，卓越的

参考例句：

• The power elite inside the government is controlling foreign policy.政府内部的一群握有实权的精英控制着对外政策。
• We have a political elite in this country.我们国家有一群政治精英。

18 accomplished   

adj.有才艺的；有造诣的；达到了的

参考例句：

• Thanks to your help,we accomplished the task ahead of schedule.亏得你们帮忙,我们才提前完成了任务。
• Removal of excess heat is accomplished by means of a radiator.通过散热器完成多余热量的排出。

19 stagnation   

n. 停滞

参考例句：

• Poor economic policies led to a long period of stagnation and decline. 糟糕的经济政策道致了长时间的经济萧条和下滑。
• Motion is absolute while stagnation is relative. 运动是绝对的，而静止是相对的。

20 obsolete   

adj.已废弃的，过时的

参考例句：

• These goods are obsolete and will not fetch much on the market.这些货品过时了，在市场上卖不了高价。
• They tried to hammer obsolete ideas into the young people's heads.他们竭力把陈旧思想灌输给青年。

21 dropout   

n.退学的学生；退学；退出者

参考例句：

• There is a high dropout rate from some college courses.有些大学课程的退出率很高。
• In the long haul,she'll regret having been a school dropout.她终归会后悔不该中途辍学。

22 emulate   

v.努力赶上或超越，与…竞争；效仿

参考例句：

• You must work hard to emulate your sister.你必须努力工作，赶上你姐姐。
• You must look at the film and try to emulate his behavior.你们必须观看这部电影，并尽力模仿他的动作。

23 virtuous   

adj.有品德的，善良的，贞洁的，有效力的

参考例句：

• She was such a virtuous woman that everybody respected her.她是个有道德的女性，人人都尊敬她。
• My uncle is always proud of having a virtuous wife.叔叔一直为娶到一位贤德的妻子而骄傲。

24 snob   

n.势利小人，自以为高雅、有学问的人

参考例句：

• Going to a private school had made her a snob.上私立学校后，她变得很势利。
• If you think that way, you are a snob already.如果你那样想的话，你已经是势利小人了。

25 mainstream   

n.（思想或行为的）主流；adj.主流的

参考例句：

• Their views lie outside the mainstream of current medical opinion.他们的观点不属于当今医学界观点的主流。
• Polls are still largely reflects the mainstream sentiment.民调还在很大程度上反映了社会主流情绪。

26 innate   

adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的

参考例句：

• You obviously have an innate talent for music.你显然有天生的音乐才能。
• Correct ideas are not innate in the mind.人的正确思想不是自己头脑中固有的。

27 vocation   

n.职业，行业

参考例句：

• She struggled for years to find her true vocation.她多年来苦苦寻找真正适合自己的职业。
• She felt it was her vocation to minister to the sick.她觉得照料病人是她的天职。

28 virtues   

美德( virtue的名词复数 )； 德行； 优点； 长处

参考例句：

• Doctors often extol the virtues of eating less fat. 医生常常宣扬少吃脂肪的好处。
• She delivered a homily on the virtues of family life. 她进行了一场家庭生活美德方面的说教。

29 elites   

精华( elite的名词复数 )； 精锐； 上层集团； （统称）掌权人物

参考例句：

• The elites are by their nature a factor contributing to underdevelopment. 这些上层人物天生是助长欠发达的因素。
• Elites always detest gifted and nimble outsiders. 社会名流对天赋聪明、多才多艺的局外人一向嫌恶。

30 systematic   

adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的

参考例句：

• The way he works isn't very systematic.他的工作不是很有条理。
• The teacher made a systematic work of teaching.这个教师进行系统的教学工作。