每天一篇经济学人 | Loud about quiet quitting ...

It’s not the crime but the cover-up. And it’s not the video but the reverberations. In the past few weeks the term “quiet quitting” has entered conversations about the workplace. A 17-second clip on TikTok, a social-media platform, in which an American called Zaid Khan embraces the notion of not going above and beyond at work, has caused an awful lot of noise. 

这不是犯罪，而是掩盖事实。不是视频的问题，而是反响的问题。过去几周，“躺平”一词进入了有关职场的对话。社交媒体平台TikTok上一段17秒的视频片段引起了很大的争议。在视频中，一位名叫Zaid Khan的美国人接受了不要在工作中有超越(自我)的想法。

The video itself is amazingly anodyne. A piano tinkles. Bromides such as “Work is not your life” and “Your worth is not defined by your productive output” flash on the screen. Mr Khan implies that time not spent hustling at work can be better spent playing with a bubble machine and admiring trees. 

视频本身令人惊讶地平静。钢琴声响起。诸如“工作不是你的生活”和“你的价值不是由你的产出来定义的”之类的陈词滥调在屏幕上闪过。Khan先生暗示，花在忙碌的工作上的时间，可以更好用来玩泡泡机以及欣赏树木上。

Dull or not, it stamped on a nerve. Workers approvingly shared their stories about deciding not to work overtime, about prioritising work-life balance and about doing enough to get their job done without succumbing to burnout. Several bosses promptly lost their moorings. Kevin O’Leary, a businessman-cum-television-personality, called it “the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard”. Arianna Huffington, another entrepreneur, wrote a LinkedIn post in which she described quiet quitting “as a step towards quitting on life”.

不管是不是无聊，它都戳到我的神经了。员工们赞同地分享了他们决定不加班、优先考虑工作与生活的平衡、尽力完成工作而不过度劳累的故事。几位老板立即失去了他们的根基。商人兼电视名人凯文•奥利里称这是“我听过的最愚蠢的想法”。另一位企业家阿里安娜•赫芬顿则在领英上发表了一篇文章，她在文中将“躺平”描述为“迈向放弃生活的一步”。

The fact that some employees feel unenthused about their work is hardly new. In all workplaces employees show varying degrees of commitment to their jobs. Some work late, others leave at 5 o’clock sharp, a few seem to do little more than respire. A survey of workers around the world by Gallup, a pollster, found that only 21% of them are engaged by their jobs. The very idea of going above and beyond requires a distribution of effort, with less committed colleagues providing a baseline against which others can be judged. The nature of the work also matters: it is easier to be engaged by some jobs than others. It is unsurprising, too, that quiet quitting has a particular resonance now. Lots of employees feel detached from their work. 

事实上，一些员工对自己的工作缺乏热情并不是什么新鲜事。在所有的工作场所，员工对工作表现出不同程度的投入。有些人工作到很晚，有些人5点整就下班了，还有些人似乎除了呼吸几乎什么也不做。民意调查机构盖洛普对全球员工进行的一项调查发现，只有21%的工人全身心投入到工作中。超越(自身)的想法本身就需要分配努力，不太投入的同事则提供一个基准，其他人可以据此做出判断。工作的性质也很重要：有些工作比其他工作更容易让人投入。现在，“躺平”引起了特别的反响，这也不足为奇。很多员工都觉得自己脱离了工作。

The bargain of hard work for higher pay is less attractive than it once was. A succession of big shocks, from the financial crisis of 2007-09 to the pandemic, has made career planning seem pointless to some. Higher salaries go less far in many places: housing affordability is at its lowest level on record in Britain, according to Halifax, a lender. All of which may make some workers less motivated to pull all-nighters in search of a promotion. 

以努力工作换取更高薪水的交易已经不像以前那么有吸引力了。从2007-2009年的金融危机到新冠肺炎疫情，一连串的重大冲击让一些人觉得职业规划毫无意义。在许多地方，更高的工资并没有起到多大作用：据贷款机构哈利法克斯称，英国的住房负担能力处于历史最低水平。这一切可能会降低一些员工为了升职而通宵工作的积极性。

The melodramatic reaction of some bosses looks stranger at first glance. This is not the start of a revolution, after all. Mr Khan’s post may have garnered 3.5m views on TikTok but the most viewed video on the platform has been seen 2.2bn times (it features an illusionist on a broomstick). Even slackers need to make money; showing application is still a pretty reliable way of getting ahead in the workplace. 

一些老板的夸张反应乍一看很奇怪。毕竟，这不是一场革命的开始。Khan的帖子在TikTok上可能获得了350万次观看，但该平台上观看次数最多的视频已经有22亿次(视频的主角是一个骑着扫帚的魔术师)。即使是懒人也需要赚钱；展示自己的应用能力仍然是在职场取得成功的一个相当可靠的方法。

Even so, for many chief executives, it may well feel as though the ground is shifting in new and disturbing ways. Consider the types of people who tend to make it to the corner office. These are individuals who almost certainly want to be on the highest rung of a career ladder, who are heavily influenced by monetary incentives and who have made work their life. Quiet quitting is simply not in their make-up. 

即便如此，对许多首席执行官来说，他们很可能会觉得形势正在以一种新的、令人不安的方式发生变化。想想那些倾向于进入高管办公室的人吧。这些人几乎肯定想要登上职业阶梯的最高层，他们深受金钱激励的影响，并把工作当成了自己的生活。“躺平”根本不是他们的风格。

Yet old certainties about what motivates people have changed. The pursuit of purpose matters more than it did during the formative years of many of today’s bosses. The modern version of Gordon Gekko would run a social-impact fund and say “green is good”. Research published last year showed that co-workers and culture matter more to people’s sense of job satisfaction than pay, a blow to anyone who thinks that the prospect of landing a bigger pay cheque is all it takes to gin up wild enthusiasm. 

不过，关于人们动机的旧的定论已经改变了。对当今的许多老板来说，追求目标比他们成长时期做啥更重要。现代版的戈登•盖柯会经营一家社会影响基金，并说“绿色是好的”。去年发表的一项研究显示，同事和文化对人们的工作满意度的影响比工资更大，这对那些认为只要有更高的薪水就能激发热情的人来说是一个打击。

The pandemic has discombobulated bosses in other ways. Advice to burn the midnight oil jars when everyone else is worried about burnout. Plenty of corner-office occupants want employees to return to the office, the environment in which they built their careers; the end of summer has seen another push from many American companies to fill up the cubicles again. The idea that employees may all be playing with bubble machines rather than going the extra mile feeds suspicions about remote work. 

疫情在其他方面也让老板们感到困惑。当所有人都在担心自己会精疲力竭的时候，又建议大家熬夜继续工作。许多高管希望员工回到办公室，回到他们职业生涯的环境；夏季结束后，许多美国公司又在推动员工们重新坐满隔间。员工们可能都在玩泡泡机，而不是多付出一点努力，这种想法加剧了人们对远程工作的怀疑。

The quiet-quitting kerfuffle tells a tale of two alienated groups. One comprises those disenchanted employees who wonder what the point is of working themselves to the bone. The other is a less obvious tribe: those in the corporate elite whose way of thinking about the workplace is under threat.

“躺平”的喧嚣讲述了两个被疏远群体的故事。一种是那些不抱幻想的员工，他们想知道拼命工作的意义何在。另一个群体则不那么明显：那些企业精英，他们对职场的思考方式正受到威胁。