(单词翻译:单击)
Manufacturer inventories. Durable-goods orders. Nonfarm payrolls. Inflation-adjusted GDP.
制造商库存。耐用品订单。非农就业。 经通胀调整后的国内生产总值。
These are the dreary reportables that tell us how our economy is doing.
这些沉闷的报告，告诉我们的经济表现如何。
And many of them look a whole lot better now than they did at their early-pandemic depths.
现在他们中的许多人看起来比他们在早期疫情的时候好多了。
But what if there’s another factor we’re missing?
但如果我们忽略了另一个因素呢?
What if the data points are obscuring a deepening recession in a commodity that underpins them all?
如果这些数据点掩盖了支撑它们的大宗商品不断加深的衰退，那该怎么办？
Trust. Without it, Adam Smith’s invisible hand stays in its pocket; Keynes’s “animal spirits” are muted.
信任。如果信任缺失，亚当·斯密的“看不见的手”就会留在口袋里; 凯恩斯的“动物精神”就会消沉。
“Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust,” the Nobel Prize–winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1972.
诺贝尔经济学奖得主肯尼斯·阿罗在1972年写道:“几乎每一笔商业交易本身都有信任的成分。”
But trust is less quantifiable than other forms of capital.
但是信任比其他形式的资本更难量化。
Its decline is vaguely felt before it’s plainly seen.
在清楚地察觉信任衰落之前，是隐约能感觉到的。
As companies have gone virtual during the coronavirus pandemic, supervisors wonder whether their remote workers are in fact working.
由于在冠状病毒疫情期间，公司都实现了虚拟化，管理者想知道他们的远程员工是否真的在工作。
New colleagues arrive and leave without ever having met.
新同事来了又走，都从未见过面。
Direct reports ask if they could have that casual understanding put down in writing.
直接下属询问他们是否可以将这种随意的理解写成书面形式。
No one knows whether the boss’s cryptic closing remark was ironic or hostile.
没人知道老板含义模糊的结束语是讽刺还是敌对。
Sadly, those suspicions may have some basis in fact.
可悲的是，这些怀疑可能有一些事实依据。
The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell.
最近一项针对5400多名芬兰员工的研究发现，疫情期间员工彼此分开的时间越长，他们对同事的信心就越低。
Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020.
荷兰伊拉斯谟大学的沃德·范·佐宁从2020年初开始测量这些办公室职员的信任度。
He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors?
他询问他们:他们有多信任自己的同事? 他们有多信任自己的管理者?
And how much did they believe that those people trusted them?
他们在多大程度上相信那些人信任他们?
What he found was unsettling.
他的发现令人不安。
In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped.
2020年3月，信任水平较高。到了5月，信任水平下滑了。
By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees’ degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.
到了10月，也就是疫情大流行的七个月后，员工之间的信任度大幅下降。
Another survey, by the Centre for Transformative Work Design in Australia, found bosses having trust issues too.
澳大利亚变革工作设计中心的另一项调查发现，老板们也存在信任问题。
About 60 percent of supervisors doubted or were unsure that remote workers performed as well or were as motivated as those in the office.
大约60%的管理者怀疑或不确定远程员工的表现是否和办公室里的员工一样出色，或者是否和办公室里的员工一样有动力。
Meanwhile, demand for employee-surveillance software has skyrocketed more than 50 percent since before the pandemic.
与此同时，与疫情之前相比，对员工监控软件的需求飙升了50%以上。
And this spring, American employees were leaving their jobs at the highest rate since at least 2000.
今年春天，美国员工的离职率达到了至少2000年以来的最高水平。
