全文翻译自纽约时报9月8日文章
原题：What the Rich Won’t Tell You
作者：Rachel Sherman
译者：冬天毛
纽约时报（The New York Times）是一家日报，于1851年创办，是美国严肃报刊的代表。由于风格古典严肃，它有时也被戏称为“灰色女士”（The Gray Lady）。
（维基百科）
正文：
Over lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me about two decisions she and her husband were considering. They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took the price tags off her clothes so that her nanny would not see them. “I take the label off our six-dollar bread,” she said.
碧翠丝是个年龄奔四的纽约人，我们在闹市区一家餐馆吃了顿午饭，席间她给我讲了她和丈夫目前面临的两个选择：在哪买第二处房子，小孩该不该上私立学校。讲完这些，她又坦白了一件事：她把她衣服上的价签都摘了，免得让保姆看见。她说：“我把六美元的面包上的标签也摘了。”
She did this, she explained, because she was uncomfortable with the inequality between herself and her nanny, a Latina immigrant. She had a household income of $250,000 and inherited wealth of several million dollars. Relative to the nanny, she told me, “The choices that I have are obscene. Six-dollar bread is obscene.”
她解释说，她之所以这么做，是因为对自己和拉美移民保姆间的贫富差距感到别扭。她全家收入25万美元，还继承了几百万美元的财富。她告诉我，与她家保姆相比，“我拥有的这些选择简直伤风败俗。六美元的面包简直伤风败俗。”
An interior designer I spoke with told me his wealthy clients also hid prices, saying that expensive furniture and other items arrive at their houses “with big price tags on them” that “have to be removed, or Sharpied over, so the housekeepers and staff don’t see them.”
我采访的另一位室内设计师告诉我，他那些有钱的客户也会藏价签。他说，昂贵家具之类的物品送货到家后，“那些大额价签必须得摘掉或者涂掉，免得让管家和其他职工看见。”
These people agreed to meet with me as part of research I conducted on affluent and wealthy people’s consumption. I interviewed 50 parents with children at home, including 18 stay-at-home mothers. Highly educated, they worked or had worked in finance and related industries, or had inherited assets in the millions of dollars. Nearly all were in the top 1 percent or 2 percent in terms of income or wealth or both. They came from a variety of economic backgrounds, and about 80 percent were white. Reflecting their concern with anonymity and my research protocol, I am using pseudonyms throughout this article.
这些人同意与我会面，以配合我研究有钱人的消费习惯。我采访了50位家里有孩子的父母，其中包括18名家庭主妇。这些人受教育程度很高，在金融或其他相关行业工作，又或是继承了数以百万美元计的资产；他们几乎全都要么在收入、要么在财富方面达到了前1%-2%水平，或是两者兼备；他们的经济背景多种多样，当中有80%是白人。鉴于他们希望保持匿名以及我的研究准则，我在本文中提及的均为假名。
We often imagine that the wealthy are unconflicted about their advantages and in fact eager to display them. Since Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” more than a century ago, the rich have typically been represented as competing for status by showing off their wealth. Our current president is the conspicuous consumer in chief, the epitome of the rich person who displays his wealth in the glitziest way possible.
在我们的想象中，富人往往对他们具有的优势毫不避讳，并其实恨不得秀给别人看。自从一个多世纪前托斯丹·范伯伦（冬天毛注：美国著名经济学家，著有《有闲阶级论》）发明“炫耀性消费”这个词以来，人们往往将富人塑造成攀比炫富的形象。我们的现任总统就是一位“总炫耀消费者”，他是富人极尽大张旗鼓之能事炫富的典型代表。
Yet we believe that wealthy people seek visibility because those we see are, by definition, visible. In contrast, the people I spoke with expressed a deep ambivalence about identifying as affluent. Rather than brag about their money or show it off, they kept quiet about their advantages. They described themselves as “normal” people who worked hard and spent prudently, distancing themselves from common stereotypes of the wealthy as ostentatious, selfish, snobby and entitled. Ultimately, their accounts illuminate a moral stigma of privilege.
然而我们之所以相信有钱人都生怕别人不知道自己有钱，仅仅是因为我们所了解的那些有钱人是如此，但这是有必然性的，否则我们从一开始就不会听说他们。恰恰相反的是，我采访的这些富人都对露富一事表达了深深的矛盾感。他们对自己的钱既不吹嘘也不炫耀，而是在人前对自己的优越绝口不提。他们将自己标榜为努力工作、审慎消费的“普通”人，远离一般人对富人具有的铺张、自私、势利和自以为是的印象。到头来，他们的这些说法反映出的，是特权阶层被打上的道德烙印。
The ways these wealthy New Yorkers identify and avoid stigma matter not because we should feel sorry for uncomfortable rich people, but because they tell us something about how economic inequality is hidden, justified and maintained in American life.
这些有钱的纽约人们意识到，并试图避免这种道德烙印，而我之所以提出这一点，不是为了号召大家来同情这些心怀不安的有钱人，而是因为它揭示了贫富差距在美国式生活中是如何被掩盖、辩护，继而维系的。
Keeping silent about social class, a norm that goes far beyond the affluent, can make Americans feel that class doesn’t, or shouldn’t, matter. And judging wealthy people on the basis of their individual behaviors — do they work hard enough, do they consume reasonably enough, do they give back enough — distracts us from other kinds of questions about the morality of vastly unequal distributions of wealth.
对特定社会阶层的存在保持沉默，能够让美国人们觉得该社会阶层不重要，或者说没必要在乎；这一习俗所应用于的远不仅仅是富人阶级。基于富人的个人行为来对他们进行评判——他们工作努不努力？消费合不合理？是否回馈社会？——会转移我们对其他问题的注意力，使我们忽略财富分配严重不均等的道德问题。
To hide the price tags is not to hide the privilege; the nanny is no doubt aware of the class gap whether or not she knows the price of her employer’s bread. Instead, such moves help wealthy people manage their discomfort with inequality, which in turn makes that inequality impossible to talk honestly about — or to change.
即使藏起价签，也藏不住特权；不管保姆知不知道雇主吃的面包值多少钱，她都无疑清楚双方的阶层差距。这种行为只会帮助有钱人抑制自己内心对贫富差距感到的不安，并使人们再也无法坦诚地谈论这种不平等，遑论求变。
The stigma of wealth showed up in my interviews first in literal silences about money. When I asked one very wealthy stay-at-home mother what her family’s assets were, she was taken aback. “No one’s ever asked me that, honestly,” she said. “No one asks that question. It’s up there with, like, ‘Do you masturbate?’ ”
财富的恶名第一次在我的采访中浮现，是在一位受访者面对金钱问题选择了彻底的沉默时。当我询问一位非常富有的全职妈妈她家有多少资产时，她大吃一惊。她说：“从来没人问过我这个问题，真的。没人问这种问题。这就像是问人家：‘你手淫吗？’”
Another woman, speaking of her wealth of over $50 million, which she and her husband generated through work in finance, and her home value of over $10 million, told me: “There’s nobody who knows how much we spend. You’re the only person I ever said those numbers to out loud.” She was so uncomfortable with having shared this information that she contacted me later the same day to confirm exactly how I was going to maintain her anonymity. Several women I talked with mentioned that they would not tell their husbands that they had spoken to me at all, saying, “He would kill me,” or “He’s more private.”
另外一位妇女表示，她和丈夫在金融界工作，积累了超过5000万美元的财富，房子的价值也超过1000万美元。她对我说：“没人知道我们平时怎么花钱。我开诚布公地把数字告诉别人，你还是唯一一个。”她对于透露这些经济信息感到极为不安，当天晚些时候还联系我，以确保我不会泄露她的身份。有几位我采访的妇女均提到，自己不会将接受我采访一事告诉丈夫，还说：“他知道了非杀了我不可。”或是“他比我隐私意识更强。”
These conflicts often extended to a deep discomfort with displaying wealth. Scott, who had inherited wealth of more than $50 million, told me he and his wife were ambivalent about the Manhattan apartment they had recently bought for over $4 million. Asked why, he responded: “Do we want to live in such a fancy place? Do we want to deal with the person coming in and being like, ‘Wow!’ That wears on you. We’re just not the type of people who wear it on our sleeve. We don’t want that ‘Wow.’ ” His wife, whom I interviewed separately, was so uneasy with the fact that they lived in a penthouse that she had asked the post office to change their mailing address so that it would include the floor number instead of “PH,” a term she found “elite and snobby.”
这种矛盾心态往往使人们对露富深感不安。斯考特继承了超过5000万美元的财富，他告诉我，他和妻子对两人最近花400多万美元在曼哈顿买下的公寓感到心情矛盾。我问他为什么，他回答说：“我们真的想住这种高端场所吗？我们真的受得了别人来访时‘哇’的一声惊叹吗？那只会让你疲于应对。我们就不是那种乐于显摆的人。我们就不想听那声‘哇’。”我也单独采访了他的妻子，她对他们住顶楼公寓这件事感到很不自在，以至于还请求邮局改写他们的邮寄地址，把顶楼标识（PH）改成具体的楼层号，因为她觉得顶楼标识有一股子“精英阶层的势利劲儿”。
My interviewees never talked about themselves as “rich” or “upper class,” often preferring terms like “comfortable” or “fortunate.” Some even identified as “middle class” or “in the middle,” typically comparing themselves with the super-wealthy, who are especially prominent in New York City, rather than to those with less.
我这些受访者们从来不说自己是“富人”或“上流阶级”，而往往更偏好“安康”或“富足”之类的说法。有些人甚至自称“中产阶级”或“中不溜”，这种结论一般是通过刻意和超级富人们对比而来，后者在纽约市里尤其显眼。
When I used the word “affluent” in an email to a stay-at-home mom with a $2.5 million household income, a house in the Hamptons and a child in private school, she almost canceled the interview, she told me later. Real affluence, she said, belonged to her friends who traveled on a private plane.
一位家庭年收入250万美元、在汉普顿地区（冬天毛注：位于纽约长岛东部，为海滩度假胜地，2016年平均房价850万美元）有房、孩子上私立学校的全职母亲在接受采访后告诉我，就因为我在电子邮件里提了“富裕”这个词，她差点把访谈给取消了。她说：真正的富裕，说的是她那些坐私人飞机旅行的朋友。
Others said that affluence meant never having to worry about money, which many of them, especially those in single-earner families dependent on work in finance, said they did, because earnings fluctuate and jobs are impermanent.
也有人说，富裕的意义是永远不用担心钱，而他们中很多人，尤其是那些家里全靠一个人在金融业挣钱的，是做不到这一点的，因为收入总有起伏，工作也不是铁饭碗。
American culture has long been marked by questions about the moral caliber of wealthy people. Capitalist entrepreneurs are often celebrated, but they are also represented as greedy and ruthless. Inheritors of fortunes, especially women, are portrayed as glamorous, but also as self-indulgent.
对有钱人道德水准的质疑一直是美国文化的特征之一。资本型企业家受到人们的追捧，但他们同时也被打造成贪婪、无情的形象。财富的继承者往往被塑造得魅力四射，但同时也被看成是自我放纵的——尤其是女性。
The negative side of this portrayal may be more prominent in times of high inequality (think of the robber barons of the Gilded Age or the Gordon Gekko figures of the 1980s). In recent years, the Great Recession and Occupy Wall Street, which were in the background when I conducted these interviews, brought extreme income inequality onto the national stage again. The top 10 percent of earners now garner over 50 percent of income nationally, and the top 1 percent over 20 percent.
在贫富差距大的时代，人们塑造的这种形象的负面部分可能会更加突出（比如镀金时代的强盗资本家，或是80年代的戈登·盖柯）。（冬天毛注1：镀金时代（The Gilded Age）是指美国内战后到第一次世界大战前的时代，该词出自马克·吐温的同名小说，这一时期美国经济飞速发展，但贫富差距也加大，资本家背负骂名，“强盗资本家”（robber baron）便是指用肮脏手段致富的资本家）（冬天毛注2：戈登·盖柯是1987年电影《华尔街》中的虚构人物，后成为流行文化中贪得无厌的形象）近年来，经济大衰退和占领华尔街运动（冬天毛注：2011年的一系列集会活动，旨在针对大公司和华尔街）将收入极端不平等的问题再一次带上了全国问题的舞台，而我进行这些采访也恰是在这一背景下。如今，收入排前10%的人收获超过50%的全国总收入，而收入排前1%的人则获取了超过20%的总收入。
It is not surprising, then, that the people I talked with wanted to distance themselves from the increasingly vilified category of the 1 percent. But their unease with acknowledging their privilege also grows out of a decades-long shift in the composition of the wealthy. During most of the 20th century, the upper class was a homogeneous community. Nearly all white and Protestant, the top families belonged to the same exclusive clubs, were listed in the Social Register, educated their children at the same elite institutions.
于是，我所采访的这些人想要和日渐被丑化的那1%划清界限，也就不是什么咄咄怪事了。然而，他们对承认自己的特权这件事所感的不安，也是来源自数十年来富人群体成分的转换。在20世纪的前大半，上流阶层是一个高度同一的群体：他们几乎全是白人新教徒，上层家庭家族都参加一样的专属俱乐部，都登记在社会名人录（冬天毛注：美国的一部专门用来记录名门望族人名住址的名录，如今已经过时）上，小孩都在一样的精英机构接受教育。
This class has diversified, thanks largely to the opening of elite education to people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds starting after World War II, and to the more recent rise of astronomical compensation in finance. At the same time, the rise of finance and related fields means that many of the wealthiest are the “working rich,” not the “leisure class” Veblen described. The quasi-aristocracy of the WASP upper class has been replaced by a “meritocracy” of a more varied elite. Wealthy people must appear to be worthy of their privilege for that privilege to be seen as legitimate.
而上流阶层如今已经变得多种多样，这很大程度上要归功于二战后精英教育向不同民族和宗教背景的人们的开放，同时也是因为近年来金融界天文数字收入的崛起。与此同时，金融及其相关领域的崛起也意味着最富有人群当中有很多都是“劳动富人”，而非范伯伦描述的“有闲阶级”。白人盎格鲁-萨克逊新教徒（冬天毛注：即上段所述的传统上流阶级，White Anglo-Saxon Protestant，缩写WASP）上流阶级的准贵族被更加多样化的“贤族”精英取代。富人们必须展现出配得上其特权的能力，人们才会认可这种特权的合法性。
Being worthy means working hard, as we might expect. But being worthy also means spending money wisely. In both these ways, my interviewees strove to be “normal.”
“配得上”也就意味着努力工作，这并不出人意料；然而，“配得上”同时还意味着慎重花钱。我的受访者们在这两方面都努力遵循“常规”。
Talia was a stay-at-home mom whose husband worked in finance and earned about $500,000 per year. They were combining two apartments in a renovation, and they rented a country home. “We have a pretty normal existence,” she told me. When I asked what that meant, she responded: “I don’t know. Like, dinners at home with the family. The kids eat, we give them their bath, we read stories.” It wasn’t as if she was dining out at four-star restaurants every night, she said. “We walk to school every morning. And, you know, it’s fun. It’s a real neighborhood existence.”
塔利娅是一位全职母亲，她的丈夫在金融业工作，每年挣大约50万美元。他们把两套公寓装修成了一套，还另租了一套乡下别墅。她对我说：“我们的过法挺普通的。”我问她这话什么意思，她回答道：“我也说不大清楚。比如说，一家人在家吃晚饭。孩子们正常吃东西，我们正常给他们洗澡、读故事。”她说，她又不是天天都在四星级餐厅吃晚饭。“我们每天早上都走路去学校，就是那种感觉，乐在其中。地道的街区生活。”
Scott and his wife had spent $600,000 in the year before our conversation. “We just can’t understand how we spent that much money,” he told me. “That’s kind of a little spousal joke. You know, like: ‘Hey. Do you feel like this is the $600,000 lifestyle? Whooo!’ ” Rather than living the high life that he imagined would carry such a price tag, he described himself as “frenetic,” asserting, “I’m running around, I’m making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.” Having money does not mean, in his view, that he is not ordinary.
在我采访斯考特的前一年，他们夫妻两个一共花了60万美元。他对我说：“我们也不知道我们怎么就花了那么多钱。这有点像是那种夫妻小玩笑，就是那种，‘诶，你感觉60万美元的日子就是这么过的吗？嗬嗬！’”他说他过的不是自己想象中这个价位的奢华生活，而是过得很“狂热”。他坚称：“我就是在忙东忙西，做着花生果酱三明治。”在他看来，有钱并不意味着自己不是常人。
The people I talked with never bragged about the price of something because it was high; instead, they enthusiastically recounted snagging bargains on baby strollers, buying clothes at Target and driving old cars. They critiqued other wealthy people’s expenditures, especially ostentatious ones such as giant McMansions or pricey resort vacations where workers, in one man’s sarcastic words, “massage your toes.”
我采访的人们从不会炫耀物品的高价，而是兴致勃勃地细数自己买特价婴儿车、在Target（冬天毛注：美国大众超市）买衣服以及开旧车的事迹。他们对其他富人的开销品头论足，尤其不放过那些铺张的消费，比如巨无霸豪宅或是高价的胜地度假；其中一个人还不无讽刺地说，那里的人“连脚趾头都要给你按摩一遍”。
They worried about how to raise children who would themselves be “good people” rather than entitled brats. The context of New York City, especially its private schools, heightened their fear that their kids would never encounter the “real world,” or have “fluency outside the bubble,” in the words of one inheritor. Another woman told me about a child she knew of whose father had taken the family on a $10,000 vacation; afterward the child had said, “It was great, but next time we fly private like everyone else.”
他们担心孩子养大了会“不学好”，变成自以为是的熊孩子。纽约市这个大背景，尤其是它的私立学校，让他们更加担心孩子会永远无法接触“真实的世界”，或是像一位财产继承者说的那样，“自如应对温室外面的生活”。另一位女性给我讲了她认识的一个孩子的事，这孩子的父亲带一家人度了一场一万美元的假，然后孩子说：“这次很不错，不过下次我们像其他人一样坐私人飞机度假呗。”
To be sure, these are New Yorkers with elite educations, and most are socially liberal. Wealthy people in other places or with other histories may feel more comfortable talking about their money and spending it in more obvious ways. And even the people I spoke with may be less reticent among their wealthy peers than they are in a formal interview.
当然了，这些人都是纽约人，接受的是精英教育，而且大部分人在社会问题上是自由主义的；住在其他地区或是有着其他历史背景的富人在谈及他们的钱时可能更心安理得，花起钱来也更不加遮掩。即便是我采访的这些人，他们在和其他有钱人们交流时，可能也不会像在正式访谈中那么拘谨。
Nonetheless, their ambivalence about recognizing privilege suggests a deep tension at the heart of the idea of American dream. While pursuing wealth is unequivocally desirable, having wealth is not simple and straightforward. Our ideas about egalitarianism make even the beneficiaries of inequality uncomfortable with it. And it is hard to know what they, as individuals, can do to change things.
即便如此，他们在承认自身优越特权这个问题上的矛盾态度也意味着，在美国梦这一理念的中心存在着某种庞大的张力。虽然对财富的追求无疑是我们所希求的，但拥有财富并不是一件简单明了的事。我们的平等主义观念导致即便是贫富差异的受益者也对其感到不安，而与此同时，也很难说这些人作为个体究竟能够做些什么来改变现状。
In response to these tensions, silence allows for a kind of “see no evil, hear no evil” stance. By not mentioning money, my interviewees follow a seemingly neutral social norm that frowns on such talk. But this norm is one of the ways in which privileged people can obscure both their advantages and their conflicts about these advantages.
而为了应对这些压力，富人们通过保持沉默，采取了一种类似“非礼勿视，非礼勿听”的姿态。（冬天毛注：西方人将“三不”引申为“眼不见为净”的意义）我采访的这些人通过对钱绝口不提的方式，遵循了一种谈钱色变的社会规范，它虽看似中性，但对于那些想要掩盖自己的优越条件，并掩盖因此抱持的矛盾心态的特权人群而言，这种规范却成了出路中的一条。
And, as they try to be “normal,” these wealthy and affluent people deflect the stigma of wealth. If they can see themselves as hard workers and reasonable consumers, they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American “middle,” while remaining materially at the top.
而在试图做“一般人”的同时，这些有钱人/富人也就得以免于被打上财富的道德烙印。只要他们眼中的自己工作努力、消费合理，他们就可以使自己象征性地从属于那宽泛正当的美国“中产”，而在物质上却凌驾于众人之上。
These efforts respond to widespread judgments of the individual behaviors of wealthy people as morally meritorious or not. Yet what’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.
人们往往惯于通过有钱人的个人行为来评判他们是否具有与财富相配的美德，而有钱人之所以要费上文所说的这些功夫，也正是对此作出的呼应。然而真正至关重要的是，这种评判过程分散了我们的注意力，让我们无暇思考应如何再分配。当我们基于人们的生活和工作方式评判他们的道德价值时，我们也就加强了这样一种信念：重要的是人们做了多少，而不是他们拥有多少。每当我们作出此类评判时，我们也是在重复一个系统，在这个系统里，只要富人的道德完善，那么我们就可以容许他们拥有天文数字的财富。
Calls from liberal and left social critics for advantaged people to recognize their privilege also underscore this emphasis on individual identities. For individual people to admit that they are privileged is not necessarily going to change an unequal system of accumulation and distribution of resources.
自由主义和左翼社会评论家呼吁强势人群承认他们的得天独厚，这也是在助长这种对个人身份的强调。即使作为个体的人们承认他们得天独厚，也未必能改变一个不公平的资源积累分配系统。
Instead, we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth? Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries are?
我们应当谈论的不是个人的道德价值，而是特定社会形式的道德价值。我们所希求的社会是一个只要人们努力工作、慷慨大方、不物质、不铺张，就有资格拥有成百上千万或者几十亿美元的社会吗？还是说应当有某种不同的道德方针，要求人们争取一个这样的社会：无论其得益者为人多么温和友善，如此巨大的贫富差距都是不可接受的？
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