This may be a statement of the obvious at Christmas, but our families can sometimes let us down. Evidence comes from a little-noticed survey published by the US Census Bureau in September.
我们的家庭有时会让我们失望。美国人口普查局(US Census Bureau) 2013年9月发布的一项调查为这一观点提供了证明，不过没引起多少关注。
The findings are conveyed in a sad and simple graph. It reports a survey of “households experiencing hardship” in 2011 - and who helped them when times were tough. What counted as tough times? Having a phone disconnected, missing utility bill payments, falling into rent or mortgage arrears, or not seeing a doctor or dentist when needed.
该项调查针对2011年“经历困境的家庭”，以及陷入困境时得到过谁的帮助，调查结果通过一幅简单而令人悲哀的图表呈现。那么怎样算是陷入困境呢？电话停机，漏缴公用事业账单，拖欠房租或房贷，或者生病了看不起医生或牙医。
More than half of such households expected help from family members, as did almost half from friends. Rather fewer - about a fifth - hoped for help from a social agency, charity or church.
一多半家庭期望得到家人的帮助，还有近一半则指望朋友帮助。只有很少一部分家庭（大约五分之一）希望得到社会机构、慈善团体或教堂的援助。
The overwhelming majority were disappointed. It was rare for family members to provide help with rent arrears - about one time in six - and it was rarer still to receive financial help from other sources or for other purposes.
结果绝大多数家庭的希望都落了空。家人极少帮忙付租金（大约六分之一），而从其他来源（或者为了其他目的）获得资金援助就更加罕见了。
In short, hard-up Americans were confident of help in need from those close to them - and that confidence was misplaced. (If you're looking for an explanation of the popularity of payday loans, this finding isn't a bad start.)
简言之，手头拮据的美国人相信能从亲友那儿得到帮助，但这种信任是没有根据的。（如果你想了解“发薪日贷款”为何如此流行，不妨从这份报告入手。）
An optimistic reading of this research is that there are plenty of people whose families or friends did help them and thus never featured in the sample. Perhaps.
这份研究当然也不乏乐观解读：也许有许多人得到了亲友的帮助，因此根本不在调查对象之列——或许吧。
But as the economist Timothy Taylor comments, enough people experience disappointment to leave “lasting shadows”.
但正如经济学家蒂莫西•泰勒(Timothy Taylor)所言，生活中有太多人经历深切失望，这种失望给他们留下“持久的阴影”。
This dispiriting stuff reminded me of Mark Granovetter's work on “the strength of weak ties”, published in 1973. Granovetter, a sociologist, brought together two disparate strands of work: a survey of how people with professional or managerial jobs had found those jobs; and a theoretical analysis of the structure of social networks.
这种令人沮丧的现实让我想起马克•葛兰诺维特(Mark Granovetter)在1973年发表的《弱纽带的力量》(the strength of weak ties)。葛兰诺维特是社会学家，他将两项不相干的研究拉到一起：一个是关于人们怎样找到专业或管理工作的调查；另一个是对社会关系网结构的理论分析。
Start with the theoretical observation first: the most irreplaceable social connections, paradoxically, are often rather weak or distant ones. A family group or clique of close friends all tend to know each other and know similar things at similar times. Their social ties are strong but also redundant, in the sense that there are many different paths through which information could pass from one member of that group to another.
先谈理论观察：最不可取代的社会关系（听上去有点矛盾）往往是相当薄弱或者遥远的关系。家族或朋友圈成员倾向于在圈子内互相结交，他们在同一个时期知道的事情也大致相同。这种社会纽带虽强但也累赘，也就是说，信息在这些圈子内部的传播渠道非常多。
By contrast, “weak ties” between one social cluster and another are valuable precisely because the social contact is unusual. Information passed along a weak tie will often be totally new - and if it doesn't arrive through the weak tie, it is unlikely to arrive at all.
与此形成反差的是，不同社会群体之间的“弱纽带”有价值，正是因为这样的社会联系不寻常。通过弱纽带传递的信息往往是全新的——换言之，如果不通过弱纽带，新信息可能压根传递不过来。
Granovetter then supplemented this theoretical idea with his survey, showing that it was very common for people to find jobs - especially managerial jobs and jobs with which they were satisfied - through personal contacts. The old saw is true: it's not what you know, it's who you know. Or as Granovetter put it in his book Finding a Job, what matters most is “one's position in a social network”.
葛兰诺维特接着通过自己的调查对上述理论进行补充。调查显示，人们常常通过个人关系找到工作（尤其是管理工作，或者是称心如意的工作）。老话说得对：知道什么不重要，认识谁才重要。或套用葛兰诺维特在其著作《怎样找工作》(Finding a Job)中的说法，最重要的是“一个人在社会关系网中的位置”。
But this is not because of crude nepotism: the key contacts who helped job-seekers find jobs were typically distant rather than close friends - old college contacts, perhaps, or former colleagues. Granovetter's analysis made this finding make sense: it's the more peripheral contacts who tell you things you don't already know.
但这不同于赤裸裸的裙带关系：帮助求职者找到工作的关键联系人，一般关系并不密切，算不上老同学、前同事等密友。葛兰诺维特的分析为调查结果提供了合理的解释：比较外围的联系人才能提供你不知道的信息。
More recent research - for instance, a “big data” analysis of millions of mobile phone records conducted by Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and others - has backed up Granovetter's argument that the weaker ties are the vital ones.
就拿最近一项研究为例，尤卡-佩卡•翁内拉(Jukka-Pekka Onnela)，奥尔贝特-拉斯洛•鲍劳巴希(Albert-Laszlo Barabasi)等人分析了数以百万计的手机通话记录，用这些“大数据”对葛兰诺维特的观点提供了支持，即弱纽带才是必不可少的。