Early in Warren Buffett’s life, his father failed to get hired at the family grocery store during the Great Depression. Without a job, and without any money after a run on the banks, the family of four ran up a tab of grocery bills at the store to put food on the table, and even then, his mother sometimes skipped meals. Leila Buffett, beset by stress and with a mind likely impacted by linotype fumes she inhaled as a child, would often berate her two small children.
在沃伦·巴菲特的早年生活中，他的父亲在大萧条时期未能在家族杂货店里找到工作。没有工作，在银行出现挤兑之后也没什么钱，四口之家从商店里买回来一些食品杂货，把食物放在桌子上，他的母亲有时会不吃饭。莱拉·巴菲特饱受压力的困扰，她的大脑可能受到了小时候吸入的亚麻型烟雾的影响。她经常痛斥自己的两个年幼的孩子。
From this nadir, the family gradually achieved more secure financial footing. His father started a stock brokerage and eventually went on to become a four-term congressman. Young Warren started showing an aptitude for numbers. He became obsessed with timing everything, calculating odds, even tallying the frequency of the letters that appeared in the bible most frequently, according to The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life. By age 15 he managed to earn thousands working his local paper route. The rest, as they say, is history.
从这个低谷开始，这个家庭逐渐获得了更稳固的经济基础。巴菲特的父亲开了一家股票经纪公司，后成为了四届国会议员。年轻的沃伦开始展现出对数字的天赋。据《滚雪球：巴菲特和他的财富人生》一书介绍，他沉迷于给一切事情计时，计算赔率，甚至计算圣经中常见字母的出现频率。15岁时，他通过送本地报纸赚了数千美元。正如他们所说的，剩下的就是历史。
On Friday, the legendary investor, 87, was surpassed in wealth by 34-year-old Mark Zuckerberg. The gap was closed in part by Facebook’s surging stock—up 15 percent this year so far—and in part by Buffett’s large charitable cash outflows. Today, the three richest people in the world, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Zuckerberg, have all made their fortunes in tech.
上周五，这位87岁的传奇投资者的财富被34岁的马克扎克伯格超越。这一定程度上是因为Facebook股价今年迄今为止上涨了15%，还因为巴菲特投入巨额做慈善。如今，世界上富有的三个人——杰夫·贝佐斯、比尔·盖茨和扎克伯格——全都是在科技领域发了大财。
Compared to Buffett and many of his contemporaries, Zuckerberg’s childhood was more banal. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, a small middle-class suburb of New York, the son of a dentist and a psychiatrist. He started using his father’s computer at a young age, and showed an early facility for programming, before graduating from an elite prep school.
与巴菲特和他同时代的许多人相比，扎克伯格的童年显得更为平庸。他在纽约的小型中产阶级郊区多布斯费里长大，父亲是牙医，母亲是精神病医生。他在很小的时候就开始使用父亲的电脑，在从一所精英预科学校毕业之前，他展示出了早期的编程才能。
Zuckerberg’s story is typical of the slate of newly minted technology billionaires in the ranks of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And there are a lot of them. With 64 technology businessmen and women on Bloomberg’s list, which tracks the world’s 500 richest people, the industry has produced more billionaires than any other (unless you count inheritances—there’s a lot of inherited wealth on the list, too). This year alone, tech has created 11 new billionaires.
扎克伯格的故事是彭博亿万富翁指数中新上榜的科技亿万富翁的典型例子。这种富翁有很多。在彭博追踪全球500位富有的人的榜单上，有64位科技界商人和女性上榜，这个行业产生的亿万富翁比其他任何行业都多(除非你把遗产计算在内——榜单上也有很多人继承别人的财富)。仅今年一年，科技界就新增了11位亿万富翁。
But there’s something missing from the foundational stories of this new group of self-made men (yes, they’re mostly men). Where earlier generations’ formative experiences revolved around paper routes and pathos, today’s prototypical founding story involves an upper-middle-class childhood, early access to a computer, and an elite education—even if that education was abandoned. Before he famously walked out of Harvard University, Zuckerberg created an instant messaging system for his dad’s dental practice at age 12. At 15, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey was dazzling his bosses during a programming internship. And Uber’s Travis Kalanick was writing code by middle school.
但是，这个白手起家的新群体的成功故事却缺少了某种东西(是的，他们大多是男性)。早期几代人的成长经历基本都是历经万难的故事，而今天典型的创业故事基本都涉及出身于中上层阶级，早早接触电脑，接受精英教育——即使这种教育被放弃了。在从哈佛大学退学之前，扎克伯格在12岁时为他父亲的牙科诊所开发了一个即时通讯系统。15岁时，Twitter的杰克·多尔西在一次编程实习中让他的老板们惊叹不已。Uber的特拉维斯·卡兰尼克在中学时就开始写代码了。
The self-made man has always played a profound role in the American imagination. Horatio Alger wrote stories of plucky, lower-class strivers who made their way in the world by dint of honesty and hard work. Hollywood has fetishized the underdog since movies were invented. And for years, the business world offered real stories too.
白手起家的人在美国人的想象上一直起着深刻的作用。霍雷肖·阿尔杰写过这样的故事：勇敢的下层奋斗者依靠诚实和勤奋在世界上闯出一片天地。自从电影被发明以来，好莱坞就十分迷恋弱者。多年来，商界也提供了不少真实的故事。
But the modern rise of the Harvard dropout (or New York University in Dorsey’s case, or UCLA in Kalanick’s case), complicates that story. Today’s founders are long on brilliance, but short on hardship. It’s difficult, after all, to become a computer prodigy without a computer. That dollop of privilege speaks to a larger trend in the American economy: For millions of low-income people, it’s getting harder to build something from nothing. In order to drop out of Harvard, first you have to get in.
但是哈佛辍学生在现代的崛起(或者像多尔西那样从纽约大学辍学，或者像卡兰尼克那样从加州大学洛杉矶分校辍学)，让这个故事变得更加复杂。如今的创业者们都很有才华，但缺乏艰辛环境的磨练。毕竟，没有电脑的话要成为电脑天才是很困难的。在美国经济中，那种特权代表着一种更大的趋势：对数以百万计的低收入人群来说，白手起家越来越困难了。要想从哈佛退学，首先你得入学。
Statistically as well as anecdotally, true American rags-to-riches stories are getting rarer. Class mobility, as defined by the percentage of children who earn more than their parents, has been in a state of mostly uninterrupted decline since the 1940s. Economist Raj Chetty found that only about half of the children born in 1980 have surpassed their parents’ income. In 1940, that number exceeded 90 percent.
不管从统计数据还是从轶事来看，美国真正的白手起家的故事正变得越来越少。阶级流动——由收入高于父母的孩子的百分比来定义——自上世纪40年代以来基本上一直都处于下降的状态。经济学家拉吉·切迪发现，在1980年出生的孩子中，只有大约一半的人的收入超过了父母。而在1940年，这个数字超过了90%。
Of course, most successful entrepreneurs have earnings that vastly outstrip their parents’. In fact, they outstrip the earnings of nearly every human in history. In by-now-familiar statistics, the rate of income growth at the top levels of earning in the U.S. have far outpaced growth at the bottom segments (in the 1980s, it was the other way around, according to research by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman). Last year Oxfam International found that more than 80 percent of earnings went to the top 1 percent of the world population.
当然，大多数成功的企业家的收入都远远超过他们父母的收入。事实上，他们的收入超过了历史上几乎所有人的收入。根据托马斯·皮凯蒂、伊曼纽尔·赛斯和加布里埃尔·祖克曼的研究，在目前为人熟知的统计数据中，美国收入高收入阶层的收入增长速度远远超过了底层人群(而在上世纪80年代，情况则相反过来)。去年，国际慈善组织乐施会发现，超过80%的收入流向了世界上富有的1%人口。
That so many of today’s new billionaires mostly come comfortable backgrounds is emblematic of a broader concentrating of wealth in the U.S. According to recent Federal Reserve data, the median family’s net worth had not recovered its pre-recession value by 2016, while the top 10 percent gained double digits since 2007.
今天这么多的新晋亿万富翁大多出身于殷实家境标志着，美国的财富正在变得更加集中。美联储近公布的数据显示，2016年中位收入家庭的资产净值还没有恢复到经济衰退前的水平，而收入高的10%家庭资产净值则自2007年以来取得了两位数的增长。
And unlike yesterday’s titans, the newest of generation billionaires don’t have histories likely to assuage popular resentment. The three youngest self-made billionaires on Bloomberg’s index are all Facebook cofounders. Their story is legend: After Zuckerberg’s auspicious beginnings in Dobbs Ferry, he created a hotness-ranking tool called Facemash before he and his friends dropped out to found Thefacebook.com. Just above them on the list in age is Sean Parker, now 38, who took up programming early and interned for future Zynga CEO Mark Pincus while he was still in high school.
与过去的大亨们不同，新一代的亿万富翁们没有或许能够平息民众不满的历史。彭博指数中年轻的三位白手起家亿万富翁都是Facebook的联合创始人。他们的故事是一个传奇：在在多布斯费里度过了一个幸运的童年之后，扎克伯格和他的朋友们先是创建了一个名为Facemash的热门搜索工具，而后辍学创立facebook.com网站。排在他们前面的是现年38岁的肖恩·帕克，他很早就开始编程，高中时曾在Zynga实习。
This is not a lamentation of the comfortable childhoods of corporate leaders. In some ways, the American myth of the up-from-nothing elite was always mostly imagined. The likelihood that a child today will rise from the lowest to the highest quintile of earnings, is less than 10 percent. That’s low compared to other rich countries, according to Chetty’s data, but it’s not much changed since the 1970s.
这并不是在哀叹企业领导者舒适无忧的童年。在某些方面，白手起家的精英的美国神话大多是虚构的。如今，孩子的收入从底层的五分之一上升到收入高的五分之一阶层的可能性还不到10%。根据切迪的数据，这一数字低于其他的富裕国家，但自上世纪70年代以来变化不大。
The American Dream has always been a story we told ourselves, bolstered by the hardscrabble tales of men who rose from nothing to become magnates. Today, Zuckerberg is a moral leader—a family man, and a donor to noble causes. But those looking to follow in his footsteps will cast an eye back to his early days: To the comfortable Westchester upbringing, the fencing club captainship at an elite prep school, the insouciant Harvard days, and to Facemash. American youth may aspire to climb the same ladder. They’re likely to find it’s missing some rungs.
美国梦一直以来是我们讲给自己听的一个故事，它被那些白手起家成为大富翁的人的艰难故事所充实着。如今，扎克伯格是一名道德领袖——一个有家庭的人，是高尚的慈善事业的捐赠者。但那些想要追随他脚步的人会把目光投向他早年的生活：舒适的韦斯特切斯特(美国纽约州的县，富人聚居区)成长环境，参加精英预科学校的击剑俱乐部，无忧无虑的哈佛时代，以及Facemash。美国的年轻人可能渴望爬上同样的阶梯。他们很可能会发现它缺少了一些梯级。
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