Why there's Hope for the Middle Class_纽约时报——考研题源报刊阅读_免费在线阅读收听下载

为什么中产阶级还有希望

America has often thought of itself as a middle-class nation — one in which most people are merely comfortable and neither very rich nor very poor.

That notion has come under siege lately. Income inequality has been rising since the early 1980s, and the median household income is now lower than it was in 1999. The status of the middle class has become a highly charged political issue.

Nonetheless, a sober look at the trends of recent years reveals some reason for optimism:Pathways that already exist offer some chance of rejuvenating
the class.

The weakness of recent middle-class wage growth has stemmed from a number of factors, including foreign competition, technological changes that favor highly skilled workers and persistent poverty.

Much of the competition for American manufacturing has come from China, and recent
research has shown that China's economic impact in the United States has been bigger than many economists initially thought, and in some ways, it has been more painful. China's manufacturing has held down American middle-class wages, while soaring Chinese demand for commodities has pushed up resource prices. Of course, cheap Chinese imports have made American paychecks go further, but that is no consolation for people who have lost their jobs or suffered lower wages as a consequence.

Better times may be ahead, though. Higher wages in China - and other emerging nations - are now limiting the competitive advantage of those economies. And perhaps more important for Americans, as China reaches technological maturity, it is likely to shower innovations on consumers, creating a net gain for people in the United States.

China is already the major producer of solar panels and electric cars, for example. It is likely to contribute important innovations in consumer drones and driverless cars and in many other fields: The Chinese government is pouring immense resources into biotechnology, including new gene editing techniques. When it comes to mobile apps, messaging and electronic payments, China is arguably ahead of America. Imagine a future in which Chinese innovations benefit Americans just as the United States benefited Europe and vice versa.

This would mean more competition from China, of course, and lost jobs in some fields, but to simply focus on the negatives would be shortsighted. The reality is that innovators do not capture all or even most of the benefits they bring to the world.

What economists call skill-based technical change may also shift in a more egalitarian direction. The advent of information technology increased the value of workers and managers who could manipulate these new talents effectively, while smart software eliminated the jobs of many travel agents and paper-filing clerks. But consider a universe in which all it takes to work with a computer is to talk to it. That could lower the wages of technicians, while opening a new world where less skilled laborers could work with

Why there's Hope for the Middle Class

Why there's Hope for the Middle Class

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