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| If you have ever wondered how the ultra-rich live, it turns out — are you ready for it? — they live pretty well. Even in the early, chaotic days of the pandemic, they managed as a class to thrive: hunkered down in the Hamptons while the values of their stock portfolios soared, able to procure precious Covid tests that were unavailable to the unmoneyed and unconnected. |
| 你是否曾好奇超级富人是怎么生活的？原来——准备好听答案了吗？——他们过得非常好。即使在大流行早期混乱的日子里，他们这个阶层的生活还是蒸蒸日上：他们的股票投资组合价值一边飙升，他们一边在汉普顿躲避疫情，能够设法得到珍贵的新冠检测——没钱又没门路的人是得不到的。 |
| But Michael Mechanic wants us to see how being rich isn’t the life of carefree ease that it’s made out to be. Part of his argument in “Jackpot” is that such inordinate wealth “harms us all” — including the ultra-rich themselves, even if their reality is so remote from ours that they wouldn’t know what “us” was if it came brandishing a pitchfork. |
| 但是迈克尔·梅肯尼克(Michael Mechanic)想让我们看到，拥有财富并不代表就能过上人们以为的那种无忧无虑的轻松生活。他在《头彩》(Jackpot)一书中的部分论点是，如此不合理的财富“损害了我们所有人”——包括超富者本身，尽管他们的现实与我们的相距甚远，就算向他们挥舞干草叉，他们也不知道“我们”是什么。 |
| The prospect of being “blissfully unshackled” from ordinary economic constraints sounds so liberating that “seldom do we interrupt our reveries to contemplate the social, psychological and societal complications that come with great affluence.” This gave me pause: Whose responsibility is it to contemplate this idea, and is it really all that counterintuitive? Isn’t it the plot of the New Testament? |
| 从平凡的经济限制中“开心地摆脱枷锁”的前景听上去如此令人解脱，“我们很少会停下遐想，去思考伴随着巨大的财富而来的地位、心理和社会层面的复杂情况。”看到这里我停顿了一下：思考这些是谁的责任？以及它真的是那么有违直觉吗？这不就是《新约》的情节吗？ |
| But Mechanic, a senior editor at Mother Jones, shows that as the topmost sliver of the 1 percent has peeled off from the rest of the population, resentment of their situation has escalated while comprehension has declined. I sometimes wasn’t so sure about Mechanic’s insistence that we need to extend any special empathy to ultra-rich people, who seem more than capable of taking care of themselves. But as this readable book progressed, I appreciated his attempt to pull off a delicate balancing act: serving up the digestible morality tale of people spoiling themselves truly rotten before he digs into the fibrous, sociological knot of the system as a whole. |
| 但身为Mother Jones高级编辑的梅肯尼克向我们展示，随着顶端百分之一的阶层从人群中脱离出来，人们对他们现状的不满情绪加剧了，而理解力则下降了。梅肯尼克坚持认为我们需要向超富者表达特别的同理心，对此我不是很能接受，这些超富者看上去完全能够照顾好自己。但是随着这本可读性强的书的展开，我欣赏他为实现微妙的平衡所做的努力：先讲容易消化的道德故事——人们如何把自己宠坏到极致，然后深入探讨整个系统中的繁杂的社会学难题。 |
| Mechanic chose his title deliberately, being susceptible himself to the lure of hitting it big. He recalls purchasing lottery tickets when he was making a decent salary working for The Industry Standard, the magazine of the dot-com boom, in the late ’90s. He was indulging in the get-rich-quick fantasies of the time. There was the recent college grad who used a trace amount of the $30 million he acquired (“earned” doesn’t seem like quite the right word) after Netscape went public to fill his bathtub with Silly Putty. “A lottery jackpot is so raw, so disconnected from anything real,” Mechanic writes. He chalks up such windfalls to “dumb luck,” though it’s clear that many of the rich people he describes think they’re very smart. |
| 梅肯尼克故意选择了这个书名，因为他也会被畅销大卖的诱惑所吸引。他回想起曾经买过彩票，那是上世纪90年代末，他为互联网泡沫时代的杂志《行业旗报》(The Industry Standard)工作，赚得体面的薪水。他沉迷于那个时代的快速致富梦。那时，一个刚毕业的大学生靠网景(Netscape)上市获得（说“挣得”似乎不太合适）了3000万美元，用这笔钱的零头去买橡皮泥，填满他的浴缸。“彩票头奖是如此简单直白，与任何真实事物都脱节了，”梅肯尼克写道。他将这样的意外之财归结为“傻福”，尽管很明显，他所描述的许多有钱人都认为自己很聪明。 |
| Yes, Mechanic allows, there are individuals who innovate and take on enormous risks and put in start-up hours for years and perhaps deserve to earn more than others. But economic inequality is now so extreme, he suggests, that there’s no way to explain it convincingly in terms of the so-called meritocracy that gets trotted out whenever panicked tycoons hear the words “taxes” and “redistribution.” Mechanic questions the morality of a society that allows individuals to accumulate billions of dollars for themselves. Citing Anand Giridharadas’s 2018 book “Winners Take All,” Mechanic says that relying on this billionaire class for its enormous philanthropic outlays is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong. |
| 是的，梅肯尼克承认有些人进行创新并承担巨大的风险，花费数年时间去创业，也许的确有资格比其他人赚更多的钱。但是，他表示，现在的经济不平等状况如此极端，每当恐慌的大亨听到“纳税”和“重新分配”这样的词汇时，一味说唯才是举似乎没办法再令人信服。一个社会允许个人为自己累积数十亿美元，梅肯尼克质疑这样的社会的道德体系。他引用阿纳德·吉利达拉达斯(Anand Giridharadas)在2018年出版的《赢家通吃》(Winners Take All)一书说，依赖亿万富翁阶层的巨额慈善捐献表明事情已经错的离谱了。 |
| The first third of “Jackpot” is devoted to the goodies that money can buy: a $400,000 car, a $21,000 bathtub, a bespoke watch so intricate that its price is a secret. At times the parade of opulence is so garish that I started feeling numb. Mechanic might say that I, like the people who can actually afford such things, had hit my “satiation point.” A psychologist who specializes in the mental health of the rich says that they are actually at a disadvantage when it comes to happiness. The less moneyed among us can still hold out the hope, even if it gets constantly frustrated, that more money would solve all our problems, while “his clients don’t have that fallacy to cling to.” |
| 《头彩》的前三分之一讲的是用钱可以买到的东西：一辆40万美元的汽车、一个2.1万美元的浴缸、一块精致到不能明码标价的定制手表。有时，富裕生活的排场已经艳丽到让我感觉麻木。梅肯尼克可能会说，和实际上买得起这类东西的人一样，我已经达到了我的“满足感”。专门研究富人心理健康的心理学家说，在幸福方面，他们实际上处于劣势。即使生活挫折不断，我们这些没什么钱的人仍然可以抱有希望，希望更多的钱可以解决我们所有的问题，而“他的客户无法执着于这种谬误”。 |
| Still, as Mechanic concedes, those clients can at least afford to address their mental health issues. They can pay for concierge health care in a country where even basic, affordable health care isn’t a given. They can easily send their children to the priciest private schools, where minuscule class sizes ensure “extensive nurturing.” I sometimes sensed that Mechanic, despite his generous talk about the need for “empathizing with the pain of fortunate people,” felt what some of his readers might: the stirrings of class rage. |
| 不过，梅肯尼克也承认，这些客户至少可以付得起解决他们的心理健康问题的费用。他们可以在一个连价格合理的基本医保都没有的国家，享受礼宾医疗保健服务。他们可以轻松地将他们的孩子送到最昂贵的私立学校，那里是小班制，可以确保“全面培育”。尽管梅肯尼克大篇幅地谈论“与幸运者的痛苦共情”的必要，我有时会感觉到，他也感受到他的一些读者可能会有的情绪：阶级仇恨正在被挑起。 |
| One thing that makes it hard for a reader to do much empathizing is that Mechanic ended up talking to only a handful of these “fortunate people.” It wasn’t for lack of trying. As he explains, such people are extremely secretive about their wealth for all kinds of reasons, including an awareness that being candid about their lives would make them possible targets of not only theft and ransom demands but also envy — and perhaps provoke in them attendant feelings of shame. Consequently, he mostly interviewed those who feel uncomfortable with their extreme wealth and have devoted themselves to causes like a more equitable tax code. |
| 令读者难以进行太多共情的一件事是，梅肯尼克最终只和这些“幸运者”中的一小部分人进行了交谈。他并不是没有去尝试。他解释说，这些人出于各种原因对自己的财富守口如瓶，这些原因包括意识到如果坦诚谈论他们的生活，他们不但将会成为盗窃和勒索的对象，还会成为被嫉妒的对象——可能随之而来的是他们的羞耻感的激活。因此，他主要采访了那些对自己的巨额财富感到不舒服，并致力于诸如更公平的税法之类事业的人。 |
| Besides, empathy for high-net-worth individuals would seem to be largely beside the point, since what Mechanic arrives at in the last third of “Jackpot” is an exploration of how structural so many problems are. That the ultra-wealthy skew overwhelmingly white and male indicates that something systemic is afoot. |
| 而且，对高净值人士的同理心似乎严重偏离了主题，因为梅肯尼克在《头彩》的最后三分之一中得出的结论是对这么多问题的结构性探索。超富人群中绝大多数是白人和男性，这表明某种系统性的因素出了问题。 |
| Mechanic offers such a fluent survey of the vast literature on historical inequality — indicating that he’s not only read that literature but understood its implications — that I was surprised by his upbeat ending, when he suggests that transformative change could happen if only more rich people had a change of heart. |
| 梅肯尼克对历史不平等的大量文献进行了如此畅达的调查——表明他不仅阅读了文献，而且理解了其含义——我为他乐观结论感到惊讶：他提出只有更多的富人改变心意，变革性的改变才可能发生。 |
| “This needn’t be a French-style Revolution, one the wealthy must fear,” he writes, “but rather a revolution in which they can play a constructive role, picking up a pitchfork with the rest and using it to bale a neighbor’s hay in exchange for camaraderie and a hearty meal.” Considering that the sumptuous lifestyles he has described don’t even entail cleaning one’s own bathroom, let alone baling anybody’s hay, it’s unclear how this is going to work. |
| “没必要进行一场让富人惊恐的法国式革命，”他写道。“这应该是一场他们可以发挥建设性作用的革命，与其他人一起拿起干草叉，给邻居堆起干草，以换来同志情谊和丰盛的一餐。”鉴于他所描述的奢华生活方式甚至不用自己清洁浴室，更不用说帮任何人堆干草垛了，我想不出来这如何行得通。 |
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