为什么每个人都这么忙上.docx

1、为什么每个人都这么忙上【为什么每个人都这么忙？】 （上） 【为什么每个人都这么忙？】 （上） 2015-01-01 ECO中文网 In search of lost time寻找逝去的时间Why is everyone so busy?为什么每个人都这么忙？Time poverty is a problem partly of perception and partly of distribution时间贫瘠一方面是我们的认知问题，另一方面是时间分配问题Dec 20th 2014 | From the print edition of The Economist译者：keyjingT

2、HE predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working h

3、ours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free ti

4、me?那些预言听起来如同诺言一般：1930年，约翰.梅纳德.凯因斯认为，未来的工作时间会变短，假期会变长。“我们的子孙们”每天只需“工作三小时”左右-如果他们这么选择的话。在他那个年代，经济和科技发展已经将工作时间大大缩短了，所以没理由相信这种趋势不会继续。新功能汽车，各种省时工具和其他电器设备让我们在生活的方方面面更加快捷灵活。社会心理学家甚至开始烦恼：人们的空闲时间那么多，要做什么呢？This has not turned out to be one of the worlds more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to b

5、e busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-savi

6、ng gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mailsometimes all at once.可惜这个烦恼没有成为世界的紧迫问题之一。无论在哪，人人都显得很忙碌。一家顾问公司的分析师麦肯锡称,在企业界，“时间常年不够用”这个问题苦恼着世界各地

7、的企业家，近年来这个问题变得愈发棘手。对在职父母来说，这种感觉特别强烈。许多人抱怨这些省时小发明反而吞噬了他们更多的时间，堵车时，查收语音留言或收发邮件-有时候同时做这些。Tick, tock滴答，滴答Why do people feel so rushed? Part of this is a perception problem. On average, people in rich countries have more leisure time than they used to. This is particularly true in Europe, but even in Ame

8、rica leisure time has been inching up since 1965, when formal national time-use surveys began. American men toil for pay nearly 12 hours less per week, on average, than they did 40 years agoa fall that includes all work-related activities, such as commuting and water-cooler breaks. Womens paid work

9、has risen a lot over this period, but their time in unpaid work, like cooking and cleaning, has fallen even more dramatically, thanks in part to dishwashers, washing machines, microwaves and other modern conveniences, and also to the fact that men shift themselves a little more around the house than

10、 they used to.为什么人们那么匆忙？部分原因是认知问题。平均来说，发达国家人们拥有的闲暇时间比从前多。在欧洲尤为突出，即便在美国，自1965年正式开始对时间使用情况进行全国范围的调查以来，人们的闲暇时间也略多了。美国人比40年前平均每周少工作12小时-这个数值的下降包括所有与工作有关的事项，比如通勤时间和茶休时间减少了。这期间，女性的工资上涨了，她们进行无偿工作-例如煮饭和打扫-的时间也大大减少了。部分原因是有了洗碗机，洗衣机，微波炉和其他便捷工具的帮忙，另一部分原因是男士们比从前更顾家了。The problem, then, is less how much time peopl

11、e have than how they see it. Ever since a clock was first used to synchronise labour in the 18th century, time has been understood in relation to money. Once hours are financially quantified, people worry more about wasting, saving or using them profitably. When economies grow and incomes rise, ever

12、yones time becomes more valuable. And the more valuable something becomes, the scarcer it seems.所以问题并不是人们的时间不够，而是人们如何看待这个问题。18世纪开始，钟表第一次被用来统一工作时间，自此以后，人们将时间与金钱联系在了一起。一旦时间被金钱量化了，人们就担忧起如何更有效的使用，节省和利用时间。当经济增长，收入增加后，每个人的时间变得更为宝贵。事物一旦越宝贵，似乎就越稀缺了。Individualistic cultures, which emphasise achievement over

13、affiliation, help cultivate this time-is-money mindset. This creates an urgency to make every moment count, notes Harry Triandis, a social psychologist at the University of Illinois. Larger, wealthy cities, with their higher wage rates and soaring costs of living, raise the value of peoples time fur

14、ther still. New Yorkers are thriftier with their minutesand more harriedthan residents of Nairobi. Londons pedestrians are swifter than those in Lima. The tempo of life in rich countries is faster than that of poor countries. A fast pace leaves most people feeling rushed. “Our sense of time”, observ

15、ed William James in his 1890 masterwork, “The Principles of Psychology”, “seems subject to the law of contrast.”伊利诺斯大学社会心理学家哈利.特里安迪斯指出，强调集体之上成就的个人主义文化灌溉了这种-时间就是金钱-的观念，这种观念让人们想要充分利用每一分钟。富裕的大城市，由于工资较高，不断上升的生活成本使人们对时间的重视程度更胜一筹。纽约客们比内罗毕的人们更节约时间，更匆忙。伦敦行人的速度比利马人更快。富裕国家人们的生活节奏比贫困国家更快。节奏快的地方让人们感到匆忙。正如1890年威

16、廉.詹姆斯在他的名著“心理学原则”中写到的，“我们的时间观念似乎与想法背道而驰。”When people see their time in terms of money, they often grow stingy with the former to maximise the latter. Workers who are paid by the hour volunteer less of their time and tend to feel more antsy when they are not working. In an experiment carried out by S

17、anford DeVoe and Julian House at the University of Toronto, two different groups of people were asked to listen to the same passage of musicthe first 86 seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera “Lakm”. Before the song, one group was asked to gauge their hourly wage. The participants who made this

18、 calculation ended up feeling less happy and more impatient while the music was playing. “They wanted to get to the end of the experiment to do something that was more profitable,” Mr DeVoe explains.当人们视时间为金钱的时候，常常用尽时间来取得金钱的最大化。时薪制的员工不愿无偿贡献自己的时间，不工作的时候更感坐立不安。多伦多大学的斯坦福德.德沃和朱利安.豪斯做了这样一个实验，要求两组人听同一段音乐-

19、歌剧“拉克美”中的“花之二重唱”，时长86秒。在听歌前，一个小组被要求估计他们的时薪。参加这个评估的实验对象在歌曲播放过程中，情绪并不高涨也比较没有耐心。德沃解释道：“他们想尽快结束实验好做点有效益的事。”The relationship between time, money and anxiety is something Gary S. Becker noticed in Americas post-war boom years. Though economic progress and higher wages had raised everyones standard of livi

20、ng, the hours of “free” time Americans had been promised had come to nought. “If anything, time is used more carefully today than a century ago,” he noted in 1965. He found that when people are paid more to work, they tend to work longer hours, because working becomes a more profitable use of time.

21、So the rising value of work time puts pressure on all time. Leisure time starts to seem more stressful, as people feel compelled to use it wisely or not at all.盖瑞 S.贝克尔在美国战后的繁荣年间就注意到了时间，金钱和焦虑的关系。尽管经济和工资的增长提高了人们的生活水平，但美国人被许诺的“闲暇”时间却没有了。他在1965年指出“相比一个世纪以前，如今人们更为谨慎的利用时间了。”他发现人们的薪水增加后，会倾向于将更多时间花在工作上，因为多

22、工作能让他们多赚钱，因此工作时间价值的不断增加也增加了工作压力。闲暇时间变得让人焦虑，因为人们觉得他们需要更明智的利用时间，要么干脆就不休息了。The harried leisure class焦虑的有闲一族Being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙That economic prosperity would create feelings of time poverty looked a little odd in the 1960s, given all those

23、 new time-saving blenders and lawnmowers. But there is a distinct correlation between privilege and pressure. In part, this is a conundrum of wealth: though people may be earning more money to spend, they are not simultaneously earning more time to spend it in. This makes timethat frustratingly fini

24、te, unrenewable resourcefeel more precious.鉴于20世纪60年代有各种诸如搅拌机和修草机的省事新发明，当时看来，经济繁荣让人们感到时间不够有点奇怪。但优越感和压力明显相关。从某种程度上来说，这是富裕的一个难题：尽管人们可以赚更多钱买更多东西，但他们却没有更多时间花赚来的钱。这使有限而不会再现的时间更为宝贵。Daniel Hamermesh of the University of Texas at Austin calls this a “yuppie kvetch”. In an analysis of international time-stre

25、ss data, with Jungmin Lee, now of Sogang University in Seoul, he found that complaints about insufficient time come disproportionately from well-off families.德州大学奥斯汀分校的丹尼尔.哈默梅什将此现象称为“雅皮士的抱怨”。首尔西江大学的李重敏做的一项全球时间压力数据分析显示，那些抱怨时间不够的大多来自富裕家庭。Even after holding constant the hours spent working at jobs or a

26、t home, those with bigger paychecks still felt more anxiety about their time. “The more cash-rich working Americans are, the more time-poor they feel,” reported Gallup, a polling company, in 2011. Few spared a moment to feel much sympathy.即便用于工作的时间或花在家里的时间保持不变后，高收入人群对他们的时间还是感到很焦虑。民意调查公司盖洛普在2011年的调查结

27、果显示，“越是赚钱多的美国人越觉得他们的时间不够用，”很少有人抽空去感同身受。So being busy can make you rich, but being rich makes you feel busier still. Staffan Linder, a Swedish economist, diagnosed this problem in 1970. Like Becker, he saw that heady increases in the productivity of work-time compelled people to maximise the utility

28、of their leisure time. The most direct way to do this would be for people to consume more goods within a given unit of time. To indulge in such “simultaneous consumption”, he wrote, a chap “may find himself drinking Brazilian coffee, smoking a Dutch cigar, sipping a French cognac, reading the New Yo

29、rk Times, listening to a Brandenburg Concerto and entertaining his Swedish wifeall at the same time, with varying degrees of success.” Leisure time would inevitably feel less leisurely, he surmised, particularly for those who seemed best placed to enjoy it all. The unexpected product of economic pro

30、gress, according to Linder, was a “harried leisure class”.早在1970年，瑞典经济学家斯特凡.林德就发现，越忙越有钱，越有钱就越忙。和贝克尔一样，他看到人们工作时间的增加会迫使他们最大化的利用闲暇时间。最直接的方式是在单位时间内尽可能多的消费。纵容自己“快速消费”，他写到，一个小伙子“可能喝着巴西咖啡，抽着丹麦雪茄，咪着法国白干，读着纽约时报，听着勃兰登堡协奏曲，逗乐着他的瑞典妻子-同时做着这些事情，取得不同程度的效果。”他总结道，闲暇时间不再让人放松，特别是对那些最该享受的人来说。林德将这种经济增长的意外产物称为“焦虑的有闲一族”。T

31、he explosion of available goods has only made time feel more crunched, as the struggle to choose what to buy or watch or eat or do raises the opportunity cost of leisure (ie, choosing one thing comes at the expense of choosing another) and contributes to feelings of stress. The endless possibilities

32、 afforded by a simple internet connection boggle the mind. When there are so many ways to fill ones time, it is only natural to crave more of it. And pleasures always feel fleeting. Such things are relative, as Albert Einstein noted: “An hour sitting with a pretty girl on a park bench passes like a

33、minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour.”各种便捷产品的出现反而让时间变得紧巴巴的，人们还要在众多产品中选择买哪一个，看什么节目，吃什么东西，这反而提高了空闲时间的机会成本（也即，选择一件东西就损失了选择另一件东西的可能性），也让压力增加了。仅仅一个互联网就提供了无穷无尽的选择，搅乱着我们的头脑。当时间可以用来做各种各样的事情时，渴望更多的时间也是自然的。时间还是相对的，欢乐的时光总是短暂，就如爱因斯坦说的：“跟一个美女坐在公园椅子上时，一小时好像一分钟，但坐在热火炉上，一分钟就好像一小时那么漫长。”The ability to satisfy desires instantly also bree