| 原文地址 American marriages 美国婚姻 Demand, meet supply 需求走高，供给不足  019 United States - American marriages.mp3Most Americans would get married, if only they could find someone suitable 大多数美国人愿意结婚，如果他们能遇到合适人选的话。  1. AS A high-powered media executive in New York city, Leah had been wary of marriage. After seeing other women get “mommy-tracked” at work, she was ambivalent about letting children compromise her career. But love has a way of making a hash of plans, and these days she and her husband manage two full-time jobs and the care of their 18-month-old daughter. Leah still works nearly 50 hours a week and earns a bit more than her husband, but she also handles most of the routine caregiving, cooking and cleaning at home. Juggling everything often leaves her feeling “inadequate,” she admits, but she chalks it up to the struggle of trying to have it all. “Rich world problems, right?” she says with a chuckle. 作为纽约市一位工作忙碌的媒体主管，Leah对婚姻一直十分小心。见到其他女同事在工作时还要为孩子操心，她对是否要孩子感到矛盾。但爱总能想方设法做出一堆糟乱的计划，如今她与丈夫各有一份全职工作，同时还养育他们18个月大的女儿。Leah每周工作50个小时，收入比丈夫略高，但家里照顾女儿，做饭和家务的责任也主要由她承担。她承认，同时做这一切时常让自己觉得“不称职”，但她把这看成是为了同时拥有家庭和事业的努力。“富人的问题，不是吗？”她轻笑着说道。 2. While fewer women are marching to the altar—the proportion of those married before the age of 30 has fallen from 50% in 1960 to around 20% today—the ones that do increasingly look like Leah. Highly educated, financially independent women were once among the least likely to get hitched. Now they are getting married at a faster rate than their lesser-educated peers, and often to highly educated men. These unions are not only the most common, but also the most harmonious. New data show that America’s divorce rate has continued its plunge from its 1981 peak—from 5.3 to 3.2 divorces per 1,000 people in 2014—but this decline is largely concentrated among the better-educated. Among college graduates who married in the early 2000s, only around 11% divorced within seven years, according to data from Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan. 迈入婚姻的女人越来越少——30岁前结婚的女性由1960年的50%下降至如今的20%——像leah这样的已婚女性越来越多。受过高等教育，经济独立的女人曾经是最无人问津的对象。如今她们比受教育更少的女性更早结婚，对象常是同样受高等教育的男性。这类组合不仅最常见，也常是最和谐的。新的数据表明美国的离婚率持续降低－自1981年离婚高峰的0.53%。下降至2014年0.32%。——但这一降幅主要集中在文化水平更高的群体中。据密西根大学的贾斯汀沃尔佛表示，21世纪初结婚的大学毕业生中，只有11%左右的人在7年内离婚。 3. This has created a fairly uneven marriage market. Although the returns to a college education have risen sharply in recent decades, America’s college-graduation rate has been inching up slowly, and now hovers at around 40%. Women make up a growing share: those born in 1975, for example, were around 20% more likely to complete a four-year degree than their male counterparts. Meanwhile, women with less education are stuck with a stock of less-appealing men. Women of nearly all levels of education have seen their earning power climb since the 1970s, while the earnings of men without a college degree have fallen between 5% and 25%, according to David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, both economists at MIT. Less-educated men also tend to have more anachronistic views about who should do what at home: they are not only less comfortable with partnerships in which women earn more, they also tend to be less-attentive parents and less helpful around the house than their better-educated peers. 这导致婚姻市场变得相当地不公平。虽然近几十年来大学教育的回报率大幅增高，美国的本科毕业率仍上升缓慢，目前浮动在40%左右。女性所占的比例越来越多：例如1975年出生的女性，完成四年学习的可能性比他们的男同学高出20%。与此同时，受更少教育的女性无法摆脱大量缺乏吸引力的男性。据两位MIT的经济学家, 大卫奥图和美琳沃森曼表示，自1970年来，不同受教育水平的女性都感受到了收入的上升，但学历低于本科的男性收入下降了5%到25%。文化程度低的男性对男女在家庭中的分工也更容易有过时的观念：他们中更多人会在女性收入高的关系中感到不舒服，相较受教育更多的男性而言，他们更少参与子女教育，做家务活也更少。 4. This asymmetry is especially profound for African-American women, whose store of available men has been whittled down further by higher rates of incarceration and mortality. Inter-racial marriage is becoming more common but remains relatively rare. Black women are half as likely as black men to marry someone of another hue, according to the Pew Research Centre. Mismatched desires among lesser-educated men and women have shrunk the share of households headed by a married couple from two-thirds in 1960 to less than half today. The proportion of children being raised by a single parent has more than doubled in the past four decades. More than seven in ten births to African-American women are outside marriage. 这种不对称性对非洲裔美国女性的影响尤其深刻。高犯罪率和高死亡率使得适龄非洲裔美国男性数量缩减。跨种族婚姻虽更常见但相对而言仍属少数。pew研究中心表示，黑人女性进入跨种族婚姻的可能性是黑人男性的一半。文化程度低的不相配男女组合使已婚家庭比例由1960年的2/3降低至如今不到1/2. 在过去40年间，与单亲父母一同生活的儿童数量增长超过了一半。非洲裔美国女性的孩子超过70%属于非婚生。 Here’s your whisky, darling 亲爱的，来杯威士忌吧 Concentrating gains from marriage at the top has exacerbated existing trends in inequality. 上层社会婚姻的集中受益使现有的不平等现象日益恶化。 5. On most measures, the children of married couples are already more likely to fare better than those with single parents. But well-educated parents often have more money for schools, safer neighbourhoods and nutritious food, and fewer children to invest in (owing to the higher opportunity cost of child-rearing for career-oriented women). Well-educated parents spend more time with their children than their less-educated peers. For mothers the gap is only a few extra hours a week, but among fathers the difference is considerable: those with a job and a college degree spend more than double the time of less-educated men, according to Jonathan Guryan of Northwestern University and his co-authors. 从大多数方面来看，婚生子女比与单亲父母生活的孩子更有可能获得成功。但除此之外，文化程度高的父母在教育，安全的居住环境和食品营养上通常也有更充足的财力支持，他们对孩子的投资也会更集中（由于这些受高等教育的女人孕育孩子所需的高机会成本）。与文化水平低的父母相比较，受教育多的父母会花更多时间与孩子相处 。西北大学的乔纳森格瑞安和他的同事表示，在母亲间这种差别只是一周几个小时，但父亲中就相当大了：大学毕业的在职父亲比受更少教育的男性多花超过一倍的时间与孩子相处。 6.Having fewer sprogs makes it easier to continue this support through early adulthood, which more parents seem to be doing. Nearly 43% of all young men (ages 18 to 34) and more than a third of all young women have yet to flee the nest, according to a new Pew analysis of census data. This boom in late-bloomers may be another sign of privilege. A recent paper from the New York Fed found that this trend can largely be attributed to the surge in student debt over the past decade or so, and it is better-off children who tend to enroll in college in the first place. Children from homes with an annual income of over $108,650, for example, are nearly twice as likely to enroll than those from homes that make less than $34,160, according to a report from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. 越来越多的父母在孩子成年早期仍提供支持，拥有更少的孩子使这种支持变的相对容易。 根据pew的一项新的人口普查数据分析显示，将近43%的年轻男性（18岁至34岁之间）和三分之一的年轻女性仍未脱离父母的支持。这批大器晚成的年轻一代也许是另一个特权的迹象。纽约联邦储备银行近期的一份报告显示，这一现象很大程度是由于过去十年间学生贷款的激增，而通常那些表现良好的学生往往才会申请贷款入读大学。PELL学院一项关于受更高教育机会的报告显示，父母年收入高于108，650美金的孩子与那些收入低于34，160美金的相比，前者入读大学的可能性几乎是后者的两倍。 7.Yet while marriage has been transformed, the roles played by each partner in the home have been slower to change. A recent Pew study found that in households where both parents work full time, more of the day-to-day parenting responsibilities fall to women. Mothers are twice as likely as fathers to say that being a working parent has hurt their careers, in no small part because many employers still function according to a single breadwinner model. This is slowly changing, particularly as more women start out-earning men. In couples with two full-time working parents, 26% of women earn around the same amount as their partners, and 22% earn more, according to Pew. 婚姻虽然有所变化，但男女双方在家庭中扮演的角色似乎变的更慢。PEW研究中心的一项近期报告显示，在男女双方都有全职工作的家庭中，女性仍承担着大多数日常的子女养育责任。由于许多雇用者仍认为每个家庭只有一个人养家糊口，并以这种模式安排工作，在职母亲们感受到孩子对职业的伤害是父亲的两倍。但由于越来越多的女性收入超过男性，这一现象在慢慢改变。Pew研究中心表示，夫妻双方都有全职工作的组合中，26%的女性收入与男性的大致相同，22%的女性收入高于男性。 8.Conservative policymakers often argue that getting poorer women to marry will improve the lot of their children. But programmes to encourage more people to wed never seem to work. This is largely because most Americans are already quite convinced of the value of marriage, and even poorer people hold the institution in high regard, according to a new survey of public views of the American family from Deseret News and Brigham Young University. Most agree that marriage is the best arrangement for raising children, and many still hope to trade vows one day. Unlike Europeans, who are moving away from marriage, even younger Americans generally expect to put a ring on it, and view cohabitation as a practical step along the way. 保守的决策者常常主张让更贫困的女性结婚，这样就能改变她们孩子的命运。但催人结婚的方案似乎从未成功过。据一项由犹他新闻和布里格母青年大学展开的关于公众眼中的美国家庭的调查显示，这是因为大多数美国人已经十分相信婚姻的价值，即使贫穷的人仍将这项社会习俗看的很重。大多数人认为婚姻是抚养儿童的最佳安排，许多人仍渴望有朝一日能够交换结婚誓言。和与婚姻渐行渐远的欧洲人不同，即使是美国的年轻一代仍希望能一定终身，并将同居视为走向婚姻的实践环节。 9.The distance between the number of people with favourable views of marriage and the number actually getting married is best explained by this: many of the marriages available do not offer a good deal for women. Yet those who assume the breakdown of the nuclear family reflects a growing crisis of morals might otherwise take heart: the decline in marriage in America has coincided with a similarly precipitous decline in juvenile crime, teenage pregnancy and adolescent drug-use, and fewer children are dropping out of high-school. Those who still hope to woo more people to the altar might keep in mind that the marriage market is ultimately like any market: people buy in if the price is right. 可以这样解释渴望结婚的人和已经结婚的人之间的数量差别：许多可行婚姻对女性而言并不划算。然而那些认为小家庭的衰退意味着道德危机蔓延的人倒是可以鼓起勇气：美国结婚率的降低与青少年犯罪，未成年人怀孕和青少年吸毒的骤减不谋而合，高中生辍学也越来越少。希望娶得如意新娘的人或许可以记住，婚姻市场根本上与其他任何市场一样：价格合理，买家便会入手。 |
fyrm 发表于 2015-12-14 17:33
Nearly 43% of all young men (ages 18 to 34) and more than a third of all young women have yet to fle ...
vivien7china. 发表于 2015-12-15 16:35
have yet to 是一个固定用法，就是还没有的意思。你查字典可以查到。
蓝麦曲奇 发表于 2016-2-25 17:23
第4段The proportion of children being raised by a single parent has more than doubled in the past fo ...
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