【读书】《我们的孩子：美国梦的危机》书评作者：法兰西斯·福山

'Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis', by Robert Putnam

Francis Fukuyama

原载于《金融时报》

Fifteen years after the celebrated 'Bowling Alone', the political scientist turns his attention to inequality. The results should shock Americans into confronting what has happened to their society

在名著《独自打保龄球》问世15年后，这位政治学家把注意力转向了不平等。其结果应当震动美国人，让他们去直面发生在他们社会中的事实。

译者：老狒狒

The financial crisis of 2008, in which Wall Street oligarchs walked away with huge bonuses while imposing enormous costs on ordinary Americans, has finally made it acceptable for the political class in the US to talk about the issue of inequality. Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a runaway bestseller and even Republican presidential hopefuls have broached the subject of middle-class decline. This stands in sharp contrast to the 2008 campaign, when Barack Obama was blasted for engaging in “class warfare” after mentioning the subject of redistribution.

对于美国的政治阶层来说，让华尔街的寡头们带着巨额奖金走开却把高额的成本转嫁到了普通美国人身上的2008年金融危机的一个最终结果就是，使得讨论不平等问题成为可以接受的事情。托马·皮克迪的《21世纪资本论》成为了一本脱销的畅销书，就连有望成为共和党总统候选人的政客们也提出了中产阶层衰落的话题。这同贝拉克·奥巴马因提及再分配问题后介入“阶层战争”而遭受攻击的2008年竞选形成了鲜明的对比。

Yet much of the current debate about inequality has a strangely abstract quality, focusing on the excesses of the 1 per cent without really coming to terms with what has happened to the American middle class over the past two generations. Into this void steps the political scientist Robert Putnam, with a truly masterful volume that should shock Americans into confronting what has happened to their society.

然而，当前的大多数不平等讨论都存在着一种奇怪的抽象性特征，焦点集中在了1％的骄奢淫逸，而没有真正地去涉及过去20多年来发生在美国中产阶层身上的事情。政治学家罗伯特·帕特南带着一本真正的大师级的著作走进了这片空白地带。这本书应该能够震动美国人，让他们去直面他们的社会已经发生的变化。

Putnam begins his analysis with a vignette of his home town of Port Clinton, Ohio, where he graduated from high school in 1959. He notes that while there were class differences then, there was a much higher degree of social equality: children of the wealthiest families in town befriended kids from working-class backgrounds. This equality was underpinned by a critical social reality: virtually everyone, rich or poor, grew up in a two-parent family in which fathers had steady jobs. He then fast-forwards to the present, where deindustrialisation has led to a social transformation in which the proportion of children born to unwed parents rose to 40 per cent, while drug use and crime became rampant. In the meantime, a new tier of luxury gated communities has appeared on the nearby shores of Lake Erie.

帕特南的分析始于对他的家乡小镇——俄亥俄州的克林顿港的一段简介。他于1959年从那里的高中毕业。他指出，虽说那时也有阶层差异，但是还有着一种程度高得多得社会平等：镇上富有家庭的孩子同来自蓝领阶层背景的孩子互帮互助，和谐相处。这种平等得到了一种至关重要的社会现实的支撑。这种社会现实就是：镇上的几乎每一人，不论富有还是贫穷，都是在一个父亲有着稳定工作的双亲家庭中长大的。随后，他快进到工业化退潮带来了一次社会转型后的现在：生在未婚父母家庭中的孩子的比例已经上升到40％，吸毒和犯罪也变得日渐猖獗。与此同时，一个新的富人社区出现在了附近的伊利湖畔。

Putnam moves seamlessly from these stories to social-science data that confirm a truth understood by specialists for some years now. Beginning with the publication of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's 1965 report The Negro Family, a broad consensus formed that poverty among African-Americans and the attendant ills of drug use and crime were directly connected to the decline of two-parent families. It turns out, however, that African-Americans were the canary in the coal mine, and that the social decline that hit residents of inner cities in the 1970s and 1980s has now spread to the entire white working class.

帕特南从这些故事无缝地转到了证实一个如今已被专家们知道了多年的事实的社会科学数据上面。自丹尼尔·帕特里克·莫伊尼汉在1965年发表《黑人家庭》报告开始，一个广泛的共识已经形成。那就是：存在于非裔美国人之中的贫穷以及随之而来的吸毒和犯罪等不良行为，同双亲家庭的衰落有着直接的关联。然而，之后的发展表明，非裔美国人起到了一种警示的作用，而且上世纪70年代和80年代打击了内地城市居民的社会衰落，如今已经扩展到整个白人蓝领阶层。

Putnam defines social class by education: with technological advance, the premium on higher education has risen relentlessly. For Americans with a bachelors degree or higher, the past three decades have seen both rising incomes and a huge restoration of family values, while, for their less educated peers, this period has been an utter disaster. One of the most sobering graphs in Our Kids shows that while the proportion of young children from college-educated backgrounds living in single-parent families has declined to well under 10 per cent, the number has risen steadily for the working class and now stands at close to 70 per cent. This is the same percentage that rang loud alarm bells when it happened to the black community a generation ago.

帕特南定义社会阶层的基础是教育：随着技术的进步，高等教育的溢价一直在不停地上升。对于拥有一个学士学位或者更高学位的美国人来说，过去的30年目睹了收入的不断上升和家庭价值的巨大修复；与此同时，对于他们那些受教育程度较低的同辈人来说，这段时期却是一场彻底的灾难。《我们的孩子》中最发人深省的一张图表显示，就在来自生活在单亲家庭的且受过高等教育的年轻孩子的比例已经跌至10％以下很多的同时，蓝领阶层的这个数字却一直在稳定地上升，目前已经接近70％。这就是在一代人之前为发生在黑人社区的事情敲响警钟的那同一个百分比。

Putnam then goes on to explain, through the lens of accumulated social-science research, how important parenting and family structure are to life outcomes for children. Early childhood stimulation, appropriate role models, stable expectations and family dinners are all part of the environment needed to produce upwardly mobile adults, and almost all are lacking today for Americans from less educated backgrounds. Many people overcome dysfunctional families, but it is far easier to do so with adequate resources. Economic inequality thus becomes self-reinforcing through the mechanism of absent families.

随后，帕特南通过经年累月的社会科学调查这个镜头，开始解释父母之道和家庭结构对于孩子人生结果的重要性。早期的儿童激励、适当的角色榜样、稳定的期望和家庭聚餐，这些都是产生向上流动的成年人所必需的、而恰恰又为当今来自受教育较少的背景的美国人所缺乏的那种环境的全部。许多人能够克服已经失去了正常功能的家庭，但是，如果具有适当的资源，他们做起来会容易很多。因此，经济的不平等通过破碎家庭这种机制变得能够自我强化了。

Putnam points out that while both gender and racial equality have greatly improved over this period, the gains have been completely offset by widening class differences. College-educated Americans have been pulling away from their high school-educated peers within subgroups such as African-Americans, Hispanics and women. There is today a substantial upwardly-mobile black middle class that, like its white counterpart, has moved to the suburbs and segregated itself from the poor.

帕特南指出，虽说性别不平等和种族不平等双双在这段时期内有了极大的改善，但是这种收获却被日渐拉大的基层差异给完全抵消了。在非裔美国人、拉丁裔美国人和女性这些亚人群中，受过高等教育的美国人一直都在拉开与受过高中教育的同辈的距离。如今，存在着一个潜在在具有向上流动性的黑人美国黑人中产阶层，他们就像白人同辈那样，已经搬到郊区，而且还疏远了自己与黑人穷人之间的距离。

Back in the 1980s, the debate over black poverty was polarised between liberals who blamed structural (ie economic) factors such as the decline in manufacturing jobs, and conservatives who denounced permissiveness and shifting cultural norms for the breakdown of families. Putnam makes very clear that both of these causes are at work in the present crisis. The huge erosion of middle-class jobs in countless manufacturing industries has led to a decline in real incomes of 22 per cent since 1980 for high-school dropouts, and 11 per cent for high-school graduates. But culture also matters: while rising joblessness produces social dysfunction in all societies, the stresses of the Great Depression did not lead to an explosion of single-parent families because of cultural norms then in place, such as the stigmatisation of unwed parenthood and shotgun weddings. Conservatives who see family breakdown as a simple matter of cultural decay, however, have to explain the emergence of “helicopter parents” and steadily strengthening family bonds among the college-educated.

回到上世纪80年代。当时，有关黑人贫困的讨论呈现出一种两极化的态势。自由派认为，罪魁祸首是诸如制造业工作衰落的结构性因素；保守派则把矛头对准了对于家庭衰落的纵容和文化规范的转变。帕特南非常明确地指出，这两种原因都在当前的危机中发挥着作用。数不清的制造业中的中产阶层工作岗位的巨大消失，导致高中辍学者和高中毕业者的实际收入自1980年以来分别下降了22％和11％。但是，文化也是重要的：就在不断攀升的失业率给所有的社会都带来社会功能失调的同时，大萧条的压力并没有导致单亲家庭的爆炸式增长，这是因为小看未婚父母和草率婚姻这样的文化规范扎当时仍在发挥作用。然而，把家庭衰落视为文化衰落的一个简单事例的保守派，不得不对“直升机父母”的出现和受过高等教育的家庭纽带的稳步强化这些现象做出解释。

The data in Our Kids parallel many of the findings in Charles Murray's 2012 book Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. Putnam, however, does not have Murray's libertarian blinders and recognises that government policies such as the Morrill Act of 1862 and the 1944 GI Bill were critical in reducing inequality in earlier periods of American history. The final chapter of Our Kids focuses on policy solutions, and runs through a familiar list of interventions, including expansion of the earned income tax credit, increasing use of long-term contraceptives, reducing sentencing for non-violent crimes (which keeps many poor fathers away from their children), a renewed focus on vocational education, better mentoring and extracurricular activities, and outright cash transfers to the poor.

《我们的孩子》中的数据契合了查尔斯·默里在2012年出版的《解体：1960年－2010年的美国白人境况》一书中的许多发现。然而，帕特南并没有戴上默里的自由主义有色眼镜，他认识到政府政策，如1896年的《莫里尔法案》和1944年的《退伍军人法》，在降低美国早期历史上的不平等方面的所发挥的关键作用。《我们的孩子》最后一章的把重点放在了政策解决方案上面，并且梳理了一个熟悉的介入清单，如扩大收入所得税的减免，增加长期避孕药的使用，降低对非暴力犯罪的惩罚（这种惩罚让许多贫穷的父亲远离了他们的子女），再次重视职业教育，改善监护和课外活动，以及对穷人实现完全的现金转移等等。

Sensible as many of these policies are, one wonders whether they will come close to fixing the problem. Take school reform, an issue into which a huge amount of time, effort and resources have been poured over the past generation through initiatives such as assisted scholarships and federal oversight via the No Child Left Behind Act. Putnam points out that schools have only a limited impact on life outcomes when compared to that of friends and family, a truth underlined by a huge body of research that began with James Coleman's famous report on education in the 1960s. Putnam compares two high schools in California's Orange County, one high-performing and one dysfunctional, where the villain is not per-pupil spending but the neighbourhoods in which the schools are located. Residential sorting shuts off poorer communities from any contact with richer ones and is the underlying cause of low educational outcomes.

这些政策中的大多数都是明智的，但是，人们还是对它们是否能够解决问题有所疑问。以学校改革为例。这是一个在过去的一代人时间中，通过诸如《不让一个孩子掉队法案》中的助学金和联邦政府监管等提案，投入了大量的时间、尝试和资源的问题。帕特南指出，一个事实是，同朋友和家庭的影响相比时，学校仅对生活结果有限的影响，这个事实已经得到了自詹姆斯·科尔曼在上世纪60年代发表了有关教育的著名报告以来的大量研究的支撑。帕特南比较了加州橙子郡的两类高中：一类是有着良好表现的高中，一类是功能失调的高中。 在这例子中，坏人不是每个学生的开支，而是学校所在地邻里们开支。按照居住地划片的做法割裂了穷人社区同富人社区之间的联系，它是造成低教育结果的根本原因。

Many of Putnam's suggested policy reforms have been tried already. Court-ordered desegregation busing, it should be remembered, was an early effort to counteract residential sorting. Other proposals, such as renewed emphasis on vocational education, have produced good results in many places but are unlikely to make up for the huge loss of income suffered by working Americans since the 1960s. Much more promising would be a return to the conditions that prevailed back when Putnam was in high school — ie mass unionisation and restrictions on immigrants competing for low-skilled jobs. But today's Republican Congress seems intent on dismantling what remains of both unions and the American welfare state. The Democrats, for their part, are much more focused on identity politics — gender, ethnicity and gay rights — than on traditional class issues, and have lost touch with the white working class.

帕特南提出的许多政策改革早已被尝试过。应当被记住的是，废除种族歧视的校车曾是为了抵消按居住地划分学区的一个早期尝试。其他的建议，如重新重视职业教育，已经在许多地方产生了好的结果；但是，这些建议不可能补偿美国蓝领阶层自上世纪60年代以来所遭受的巨大的收入损失。更倍看好的是回归到帕特南高中时代的主流情况——大规模的工会化以及对移民竞争低技能工作的限制。但是，当前的共和党议会似乎把心思都用在了瓦解残存的工会和美国福利制度上面；民主党，出于他们的考虑，又过于重视性别、种族和同性权力这些认同政治，而不是传统的阶层问题，而且它们已经失去了与白人蓝领阶层的联系。

⋯⋯⋯⋯

Putnam bids fair to be the pre-eminent political scientist of his generation. There is a consistent theme running through his major books. Like Alexis de Tocqueville before him, he understands that the proper workings of democracy rest on a foundation of habits and virtues that reside in the underlying society and not in the formal political system, or in the economic incentives these institutions create. In Making Democracy Work (1993), he demonstrated that the huge discrepancies in the economic and political performance of Italy's north and south were grounded in the latter's lack of social capital — that is, the ability of individuals to connect with strangers and collaborate with them in civic organisations. Civic orientation creates trust and allows otherwise isolated people to participate fully in a democratic system. In Bowling Alone (2000), he worried that a variety of indicators showed a steady decline in social capital and trust among Americans. American Grace (2010) charted the changing but always powerful role of religion in bolstering community.

帕特南注定会成为他那一代政治学家的佼佼者。他的主要著作中有一个贯穿始终主题。如同他之前的托克韦尔，他认识到：民主制正常运行的一个基础是存在于基层社会，而不是正式的政治体系，也不是这个体系所打造的各种经济激励之中的习惯和优良品质。在1993年的《让民主运行起来》中，他阐释了造成意大利南方和北方之间的巨大的经济和政治差异的根源是后者缺乏社会资本，即个人在民间组织中与陌生人建立联系并同他们合作的能力；公民的取向所创造的是信任，它允许孤立的人完全参与到一个民主体系中。在2000年的《独自打保龄球》中，他对各种指标所展示的美国人的社会资本和信任的稳步衰落表达了担忧；2010年的《美国恩赐》记录了不断变化却又总是强大的宗教角色在支撑社区方面所发挥的作用。

Our Kids picks up where Bowling Alone left off, showing that while the decline of social capital and trust has cut across all economic classes in America, it has been much more severe among the less educated. Social isolation and distrust contribute heavily both to poor job prospects and lack of political participation within this group.

《我们的孩子》是《独自打保龄球》一书的延续，它展示了这样一种社会现实：就在社会资本和信任的衰落，在经济上割裂了美国的所有阶层之际，这种割裂最严重的地方莫过于受教育较少的阶层。社会的孤立和不信任是给这一人群带来可怜的就业前景并让他们缺乏政治参与的主要原因。

But Our Kids in some sense completes the story that Putnam began in Bowling Alone because it introduces two factors largely missing in the latter book: social class and family decline. Putnam confines the definition of social capital to networks of engagement outside the family; but social capital, understood as the ability to co-operate based on informal shared norms, exists within families as well. In southern Italy, tight nuclear families limited co-operation with strangers. As Putnam makes clear in Our Kids, strong families are critical in America as incubators of broader social engagement. One cannot tell the story of the loss of social capital without reference to the decline of family and, driving that, deindustrialisation and the relentless loss of working- and middle-class occupations.

但是，从某种意义上来讲，《我们的孩子》又是对《独自打保龄球》的一种完善，因为本书引入了上一本书所缺失的两个因素：社会阶层的衰落和家庭的衰落。帕特南将社会资本的定义局限在对于家庭之外的网络的参与；但是，如果从社会资本是基于非正式共享规范的合作能力这个角度来理解，社会资本也存在于家庭之中。在意大利南部，联系紧密的核心家族限制了同陌生人的合作。正如帕特南在《我们的孩子》中所表明的那样，强大的家族之于美国的关键性，在于它是更为广泛的社会关系的孵化器。人们不可能在不提及家庭衰落，不提及工业化退潮、不提及蓝领阶层和中产阶层的工作不停地流失的情况下，讲述社会资本流失的故事。

As in all of his books, Putnam is rigorously empirical and data-based in Our Kids. But, unlike many academics, he writes in a style that is hugely accessible. The book's statistics are interspersed with vivid personal accounts of the achievements and setbacks experienced by children and their parents on both sides of the class divide. Reading them makes abundantly clear why inequality deserves to move to the top of the American political agenda.

正如在他的所有著作中一样，帕特南在《我们的孩子》是严格的实证和以数据为基础。但是，不同于许多学者，他是以一种非常平易近人的风格在写作。书中的统计数据都配有生动的个人案例，其中既有成功的故事，也有阶层分裂的双方的孩子和他们的父母所经历的各种挫折。阅读这些故事可以让读者对不平等应当成为美国首要政治日程的原因有一个非常清醒的认识。