好英语网为什么亿万富翁还要继续工作？
“Billionaires should not exist,” Sen. Bernie Sanders said last month. And, at the Democratic presidential debate this week, he said that the wealth disparity in America is “a moral and economic outrage.”
“亿万富翁不应该存在，”参议员伯尼·桑德斯(Bernie Sanders)上个月说。在本周的民主党总统候选人辩论中，他说美国的贫富差距是“一种道德和经济暴行”。
“Senator Sanders is right,” said Tom Steyer, a businessman from California who happened to be the only billionaire onstage that night (as far as we know).
“桑德斯参议员是对的，”加州商人汤姆·斯泰尔(Tom Steyer)说。他碰巧是（我们所知的）当晚台上唯一的亿万富翁。
“No one on this stage wants to protect billionaires — not even the billionaire wants to protect billionaires,” noted Sen. Amy Klobuchar.
“在这个讲台上，没有人想要保护亿万富翁——即使是亿万富翁也不想保护亿万富翁，”参议员艾米·克罗布查(Amy Klobuchar)说。
这个想法随处可见。身家近700亿美元的Facebook创始人马克·扎克伯格(Mark Zuckerberg)显然也赞成。“我不知道我对一个人应该拥有多少钱有没有什么确切的门槛，”他在10月初与公司员工的直播问答环节中说。“但在某种程度上，没有人应该拥有那么多钱。”
Yet here we are, chugging into the 10th year of an extremely top-heavy economic boom in which the 1 percenters, by all statistical measures, have won, creating the greatest wealth disparity since the Jazz Age. This era, in length and gains, dwarfs the “greed is good” 1980s, that era of yellow ties, nigiri rolls and designer espresso machines that has come to symbolize gilded excess in popular imagination.
然而我们创造了自爵士时代以来最大的贫富差距，进入经济极度繁荣的第10个年头，根据所有的统计数据，1%赢了。这个时代无论在时间长度还是在增长方面，都让奉行“贪婪是好事”的1980年代相形见绌，也就是那个黄色领带、手握寿司和设计师款意式咖啡机成为大众想象中的富华象征的时代。
And yet the only thing we know in this casino-like economy — a casino that may, in fact, soon be shuttered — is that for those at the top, too much is never enough.
然而，在这个赌场式经济——事实上这座赌场可能即将关闭——中，我们所知的唯一一件事是，对于那些处于顶层的人来说，再多也永远不够。
Many normal, non-billionaire people wonder: Why is that?
许多普通的非亿万富翁想知道：为什么会这样？
Studies over the years have indicated that the rich, unlike the leisured gentry of old, tend to work longer hours and spend less time socializing. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, whose worth has been estimated in the hundreds of millions, has said that he wakes up at 3:45 a.m. to mount his daily assault on his corporate rivals. Elon Musk, the man behind Tesla and SpaceX, is worth some $23 billion but nevertheless considers it a victory that he dialed back his “bonkers” 120-hour workweeks to a more “manageable” 80 or 90.
多年来的研究表明，富人与那些悠闲的老绅士不同，他们的工作时间更长，社交时间更少。苹果公司(Apple)首席执行官蒂姆·库克(Tim Cook)的身家估计在数亿美元，他说自己每天凌晨3点45分起床，向公司的竞争对手发起每日攻击。特斯拉(Tesla)和SpaceX的掌门人埃隆·马斯克(Elon Musk)身家约230亿美元，他把自己每周120小时的“疯狂”工作时间调至更“好对付”的80或90小时，还觉得这是一种胜利。
And they continue to diversify. Lady Gaga makes a reported $1 million per show in her residency at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, and has evolved from pop music to conquer film — but still also recently unveiled a cosmetics venture with Amazon.
他们在不断多元化。据报道，Lady Gaga在拉斯维加斯美高梅公园驻场演唱会每场收入100万美元，并从流行音乐进军电影，但最近她还与亚马逊合作了一个化妆品项目。
Almost everything rich people touch makes money, but this current financial inferno has meant little for the bottom 50% of earners in the United States, who have 32% less wealth than they did in 2003.
富人接触的几乎所有东西都能赚钱，但目前的金融地狱对美国收入最低的50%的人来说意义不大，他们的财富比2003年减少了32%。
The 1% have, as of last decade, 85% of their net worth tied up in investments like stocks, bonds and private equity, where value has exploded. According to Redfin, the average sale price of properties in the top 5% are up 43% nationally over the past decade, and up even more in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
过去10年，1%阶层有85%的净资产投资于股票、债券和私募股权等价值激增的投资领域。Redfin的数据显示，在过去10年里，全美前5%的房产平均售价上涨了43%，洛杉矶和旧金山的涨幅甚至更大。
Fine vintage watches, which have become a must-have for the young male money class, are exploding in value, with prices on certain five-figure models of Rolexes doubling in just a few years.
高档古董表已成为年轻男性富人阶层的必备品，其价值正呈现爆炸式增长，某些劳力士(Rolex)5位数型号的价格在短短几年内翻了一番。
Gold, once derided as a relic, is up 40% in the past few years.
一度被嘲笑为过时的黄金在过去几年价格上涨了40%。
What’s happening?
发生了什么事情？
马克·扎克伯格
No One Has a Retirement Number These Days如今没有人有理想退休金额
“What’s your number?” asked anyone caught up in the dot-com boom of the 1990s.
“你的理想退休金额是多少？”在1990年代的互联网热潮中，所有人都会这样问。
Could you retire to Napa with $5 million? $20 million?
你能带着500万美元退休去纳帕吗？2000万美元呢？
Some hit their number and some went bust, but Silicon Valley is more than ever a showcase for the unfettered capitalism of 2019.
有些人达到了目标，有些人破产了，但是2019年的硅谷比以往任何时候都更能让人看到，什么是不受约束的资本主义。
Yet no one seems to talk about their number anymore, said Antonio García Martínez, who sold a startup to Twitter and served as a Facebook product manager before publishing his memoir, “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley,” in 2016.
然而，安东尼奥·加西亚·马丁内斯(Antonio García Martínez)说，似乎没有人再谈论他们的理想退休金额了。他把自己的初创公司卖给了Twitter，并在Facebook担任产品经理，之后于2016年出版回忆录《混乱的猴子——硅谷的肮脏财富和随机失败》(Chaos Monkeys: Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)。
Yesterday’s big score is just seed capital for tomorrow’s bigger one.
昨天的大数字只是明天更大数字的种子资本。
“There’s never some omega point,” García Martínez, 43, said. “People who get to that point don’t stop once they get there.”
“从来没有什么‘欧米伽点’，”43岁的加西亚·马丁内斯说。“人到了那个点并不会停下来。”
“People say, ‘Why don’t you develop a hobby, or do philanthropy?’ ” García Martínez said. “But for many, they simply can’t stop doing it. They derive transcendent meaning from capitalism. Without their money, what else would they have?”
“人们会说，‘你为什么不培养一种爱好，或者做点慈善呢？’”加西亚·马丁内斯说。“但是对于很多人来说，他们就是停不下来。他们从资本主义中获得了卓越的意义。没了钱他们还能有什么？”
At a time of low taxes, friendly interest rates and torrents of venture capital available to would-be moguls, it’s a historical moment in the quest for more among the entrepreneurial class.
这是一个低税收、利率友好、未来大亨可以拥有源源不断的风险资本的时代，这是创业阶层寻求更多机会的历史性时刻。
Tim Ferriss, the life-hacking author and podcast star who was an angel investor in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade, wrote in an email that many of these people have been “navigating work and life in sixth gear for decades.”
蒂姆·费里斯(Tim Ferriss)是生活破解领域的作者和播客明星，曾在硅谷做了近十年的天使投资人，他在电子邮件中写道，这些人中的许多人“几十年来一直以第六档的高速度在工作和生活中行驶”。
Without Constant Work, We Must Face the Nature of Existence
没有了永不停止的工作，我们就必须面对存在的本质
“Once they have no financial need to work — are ‘post-economic,’ as some say in San Francisco — they have trouble shifting into lower gears,” Ferriss wrote. “They’re like drag racers who now have to learn to navigate the turns and intersections of neighborhoods at 30 mph.”
“一旦他们没有了工作的经济需要——就像旧金山的一些人所说的，进入了‘后经济时代’——他们就很难转到低速档，”费里斯写道。“他们就像直线竞速赛车手，现在必须学会以每小时30英里的速度在居民区街角和十字路口驾驶。”
“Without ambitious projects to fill space,” he added, “there is often a void that makes some of the bigger questions hard to avoid. The things you neglected are no longer drowned out by noise; they are the signal. It’s like facing the Ghost of Christmas Past.”
“如果没有雄心勃勃的项目来填补空间，”他还写道，“往往会出现空白，让一些更大的问题无从避免。你忽略的事情不再被噪音淹没；它们成了信号。就像面对旧日圣诞节幽灵一样。”
In a sense, it has been going on in this country for 2 1/2 centuries. “We are a nation founded on the overthrow of kings and the idle rich, so the hustle is deeply baked into mainstream notions of what it means to be American,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who is a New York Times opinion contributor.
在某种意义上，这种情况已经在这个国家持续了两个半世纪。“我们的国家建国的基础就是推翻国王和无所事事的富人，所以这种忙碌感深深融入了美国人身份认同的主流观念，”华盛顿大学(University of Washington)历史学教授、《纽约时报》观点撰稿人玛格丽特·奥马拉(Margaret O’Mara)说。
Rich People Know Too Many Rich People
有钱人认识太多有钱人
With the number of Americans making $1 million or more spiking by 40% between 2010 and 2016, according to the Internal Revenue Service, you may think that the rich are finally feeling flush enough to ease up, kick back, chill out.
国税局(Internal Revenue Service)的数据显示，2010年至2016年，美国年收入在100万美元以上的人的数量激增了40%，你可能会认为，富人们终于感到手头宽裕，可以休息、放松、舒服一下了。
They are not.
他们没有。
One recent Harvard survey of 4,000 millionaires found that people worth $8 million or more were scarcely happier than those worth $1 million.
哈佛大学(Harvard)最近对4000名百万富翁进行的一项调查发现，财富在800万美元以上的人并不比财富在100万美元以上的人更幸福。
In a widely cited 2006 study, rich people reported that they spend more time doing things they were required to do.
在2006年一项被广泛引用的研究中，富人们称，他们花了更多的时间做他们被要求做的事情。
Why do they want to do this to themselves?
他们为什么要这样对待自己？
The fact that there are more rich people who are, in fact, richer than ever may be part of the reason.
事实上，比以往任何时候都富有的富人越来越多，这可能是部分原因。
Sociologists have long talked about “relative income hypothesis.” We tend to measure material satisfaction by those around us — not in absolute terms.
社会学家一直在讨论“相对收入假说”。也就是说，我们倾向于用周围的人来衡量自己对物质的满足——而不是使用绝对的标准。
“For most people, enough is enough,” said Robert Frank, the wealth editor for CNBC and the author of the 2007 book “Richistan: A Journey Through the American Wealth Boom and the Lives of the New Rich,” who has interviewed many plutocrats. “But there is another group of people, no matter what they have, they have to keep going. I call them ‘scorekeepers.’ They’re truly driven by competitive zeal.”
“对大多数人来说，足够了就是足够了，” CNBC台的财富编辑罗伯特·弗兰克(Robert Frank)说。“但还有另一群人，不管他们拥有什么，他们必须继续前进。我管他们叫‘记分员’。他们真正的驱动力是对竞争的狂热。”
Money Is Like Alcohol but for Money
金钱就像酒精，但追求的是金钱
Living inside bubbles, the rich need greater excess just to feel the same high, said Steven Berglas, a psychologist, executive coach and author.
心理学家、高管教练和作家史蒂文·伯格拉斯(Steven Berglas)表示，生活在与外界隔绝的泡泡之中的富人需要更多的放纵，才能感受到同样的快感。
“If you’re an alcoholic,” he said, “you’re going to take one drink, two drinks, five drinks, six drinks to feel the buzz. Well, when you get a million dollars, you need 10 million dollars to feel like a king. Money is an addictive substance.”
“如果你是个酒鬼，”他说，“你喝上一杯，之后就得再喝上两杯、五杯、六杯，才能感受到酒精的刺激。当你有一百万美元的时候，你需要一千万美元才能感觉自己像个国王。钱是会令人上瘾的东西。”
Feeding the addiction becomes even more challenging in a top-heavy economy where the price tags of the status symbols keep adding zeros.
在一个头重脚轻的经济里，地位象征的价格标签后面不断地加零，满足金钱之瘾变得更加困难。
For the superrich looking to buy their way in to professional sports, it’s no longer enough to have courtside seats or a luxury box. You need a team. They’re pricey.
对于那些希望通过金钱进入职业体育领域的超级富豪来说，拥有场边座位或豪华包厢已经不够了。你得拥有一个队才行。那是非常昂贵的。
The Golden State Warriors, for example, sold in 2010 for an NBA record $450 million to an ownership group headed by Joe Lacob, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. The team is now valued at $3.5 billion.
例如，2010年，金州勇士队(Golden State Warriors)以创纪录的4.5亿美元卖给了一个由硅谷风险投资家乔·莱科布(Joe Lacob)领导的所有权集团。该队目前价值35亿美元。
Even that is not enough. Now you have to build the biggest, flashiest arena. The Warriors owners recently put the finishing touches on a gleaming new waterfront arena in San Francisco called the Chase Center. It was financed largely by themselves for $1.4 billion.
但这还不够。现在你还得兴建最大、最华丽的球场。勇士队的所有人们最近在旧金山新建了一座熠熠生辉的滨水球场，名为“大通中心”(Chase Center)。它的14亿美元造价主要是由他们自己承担。
Not to be left behind, Steve Ballmer, the former Microsoft chief and owner of the rival Los Angeles Clippers, is seeking to build a $1 billion pleasure dome of his own in Inglewood, California.
微软前首席执行官、洛杉矶快船队(Los Angeles Clippers)老板史蒂夫·鲍尔默(Steve Ballmer)也不甘落后，他正寻求在加州英格尔伍德建造一座价值10亿美元的球场。
Clustered courtside together at the sporting palaces, the celebrities, naturally, begin to envy the fortunes of the moguls near them.
在这些体育宫殿里，聚集在场边的各路名流自然开始羡慕起他们身边那些大亨们的财富。
The Rich Suspect the Roller Coaster Is About to Crash
富人们怀疑过山车式致富模式即将崩溃
As a hedge fund veteran, precious metals adviser and financial author, James Rickards is a rich guy who talks to a lot of other rich guys. They don’t always like what he has to say.
作为一名对冲基金老手、贵金属顾问和金融作家，詹姆斯·里卡兹(James Rickards)是个与许多其他富人交谈的富人。他们有时不太喜欢听到他的看法。
He believes that the current debt-fueled recovery may be a prelude for an economic collapse to dwarf the Great Recession. Until recently, he said, such theories were met with polite lack of interest by many wealthy people. Lately, something has changed.
他认为，目前由债务推动的复苏可能是一场使大萧条(Great Depression)相形见绌的经济崩溃的前奏。他表示，前不久这种观点还受到许多富人礼貌的冷遇。但最近，情况有些变化。
“Literally, in a matter of weeks, certainly a couple of months, the phone calls have had a different tone to them,” Rickards said. “What I’m hearing is, ‘I’ve got the money. How do I hang on to it?’ ‘Are gold futures going to hold up or should I have bullion?’ ‘If I have bullion, should I put it in a bag in a private vault?’ ”
“实际上，在几周、当然是几个月的时间里，电话里的语气不同了，”里卡兹说。“我现在听到的是，‘我手里有钱。怎么才能保住’？‘黄金期货能撑住吗，还是应该持有金条？‘如果我有金条，我该把它放在私人保险库的袋子里吗？’”
“It’s a level of concern that I’ve never heard from the superrich,” he said. “The tone of voice is, ‘I need an answer now!’”
“这样的担忧程度，我从来没从超级富豪那里听到过。”他说。“那种语气是，‘我现在就需要答案！’”
It is not just the rockiness of the stock market. The fears of the wealthy seem to be of a more existential nature.
不只是股市动荡那么简单。富人怀有的似乎是一种关乎生存的恐惧。
It is as if the very people who have profited most from these good times cannot believe that times are good — or that they will stay good, in the event of, say, a Bernie Sanders presidency.
仿佛从这些好时光中获益最多的人，恰恰无法相信现在是好时光——也不相信比方说，伯尼·桑德斯当上总统后，还会继续是好时光。
Paul Singer, who oversees the behemoth Elliot Management fund, is reportedly tapping investors for billions as a war chest for a possible market implosion.
管理着庞大的埃利奥特管理基金(Elliot Management fund)的保罗·辛格(Paul Singer)据信正在向投资者募集数十亿美元资金，以应对可能出现的市场崩盘。
Among the tech zillionaire classes, a place to bug out in the event of an economic collapse, environmental disaster or violent uprising became the thing to have.
在科技界的亿万富翁阶层中，一旦发生经济崩溃、环境灾难或暴力骚乱，一个可以逃离的地方成了必须拥有的东西。
After he left Facebook, García Martínez himself bought 5 wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest equipped with generators and solar panels, as The New Yorker reported in 2017.
据《纽约客》(The New Yorker)2017年报道，离开Facebook后，加西亚·马丁内斯自己在太平洋西北部的一个小岛上买了5英亩林地，配备了发电机和太阳能电池板。
The newly rich from normal backgrounds are the most anxious of all, said Jennifer Streaks, a personal finance commentator and CNBC contributor.
个人理财评论员、CNBC撰稿人珍妮弗·斯特里克斯(Jennifer Streaks)表示，在所有人当中，出身平凡的新贵最焦虑。
“Imagine growing up middle class or even poor and then amassing millions,” Streaks said. “This sounds like the American dream, but suddenly you have a $5 million apartment, a $200,000 car and a family that has these expectations.”
“想象一下在中产阶级甚至穷人家长大，然后积聚了数百万美元，”斯特里克斯说。“这听起来像是美国梦，但突然间你有了一套价值500万美元的寓所，一辆20万美元的车和一个达到这些期待值的家庭。”
A panic ensues when those people believe “that they are one bad investment away from being broke.”
当这些人认为“只要有一次糟糕的投资，就会破产”，恐慌就会随之而来。
And the Rich Become Anxious and Isolated
富人变得焦虑和孤立
It’s not like Jeff Bezos, the $110 billion man, is going to have to auction off his $65 million Gulfstream jet if he makes a bad bet on Amazon delivery drones (or goes through a $36 billion divorce).
身家1100亿美元的富翁杰夫·贝佐斯(Jeff Bezos)在亚马逊送货无人机上押注失误（或者经历360亿美元的离婚），也不至于要被迫拍卖他那架6500万美元的湾流(Gulfstream)飞机。
Even so, the isolation that often accompanies extreme wealth can provide an emotional impulse to keep on earning, long after material comforts have been met, said T. Byram Karasu, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx who said he has worked with numerous high earners in his private practice.
即便如此，时常伴随巨富的孤立感可以在物质享受得到满足很久之后，提供一种继续赚钱的情感冲动，布朗克斯区的阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦医学院(Albert Einstein College of Medicine)精神病学荣休教授T·拜拉姆·卡拉苏(T. Byram Karasu)说，他说在私营执业期间接触过大量高收入者。
Apex entrepreneurs and financiers, after all, are often “adrenaline-fueled, transgressive people,” Karasu said. “They tend to have laser-focused digital brains, are always in transactional mode, and the bigger they get, the lonelier they are, because they do not belong.”
毕竟，顶尖的企业家和金融家通常都是“肾上腺素分泌旺盛、不循规蹈矩的人”，卡拉苏说。“他们往往拥有高度专注的数字大脑，总是处于交易模式，并且他们做得越大就越孤独，因为他们没有归属感。
Berglas, a onetime member of the Harvard Medical School faculty in psychology, said: “If you can’t relate to people, you presume that the failure to have rewarding relationships is because of jealousy — your house is three-X your neighbors’, and they look at your brand-new Corvette and drool. It’s a compensatory mechanism — ‘I might not have a ton of friends, but I can do anything I want and I’m the most powerful SOB there is.”
曾在哈佛医学院教授心理学的伯格拉斯说：“如果你无法与人接触，你会假定没有成功的人际关系是因为嫉妒——你的房子是你邻居的三倍，而他们看到你崭新的科尔维特(Corvette)车就会流口水。这是一种补偿机制——‘我可能没有很多朋友，但我可以做任何我想做的事情，我是世界上最厉害的混蛋。’”
Limitless opportunity, extreme isolation. They already own the present. What else is left to buy but tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that? Suddenly, the fetish of the superrich for space tourism starts to make sense.
无限的机会，极度的孤立。他们已经拥有现在。除了明天，和明天的明天，还有什么可以买？突然之间，超级富豪对太空旅游的迷恋开始变得合理。