美科技业裁员不代表经济陷入衰退

After their hiring spree during the pandemic, the tech industry now seems to be on a firing spree.

在疫情期间大肆招聘之后，科技行业现在似乎正在大肆裁员。

Well, layoffs in the tech industry have been piling up this year.

嗯，今年科技行业的裁员人数不断增加。

Big tech announcing a slew of layoffs. Amazon, Twitter...

大型科技公司宣布大规模裁员。亚马逊, 推特…

Intel. Lyft. Opendoor. DoorDash. Stripe.

英特尔。来福车。Opendoor(在线购房平台)。DoorDash(外卖平台)。Stripe(网上支付平台)。

Salesforce laid off hundreds of employees this week as demand weakened in...

由于需求疲软，Salesforce(客户关系管理平台)本周解雇了数百名员工。

Tens of thousands of job cuts have come near the end of the year, as we saw a lot of publicly traded tech companies plummet in value.

我们看到许多上市科技公司市值暴跌，临近年底，数以万计的裁员已到来。

So if you remember, around 20 years ago, this might conjure the dot-com bust, if you remember that.

如果你还记得大约20年前的情景的话，这可能会让人联想到那时的互联网泡沫破裂。

So is that the sort of thing we should be worrying about happening again?

那么，这是我们应该担心再次发生的事情吗？

To get some historical perspective, we've brought in Adrian Ma, co-host of NPR's daily economics podcast the Indicator. Good morning.

为了了解一些历史的观点，我们请来了艾德里安·马，他是NPR每日经济播客“Indicator”的联合主持人。早上好。

What's up?

嗨，近来怎么样？

Yeah, thanks for coming by the studios. What happened some 20 years or more ago?

还不错，谢谢你来我们的演播室。20多年前或更久之前发生了什么?

Right. So the dot-com bust was preceded, actually, just a couple of years before by the dot-com bubble - basically, this period in the late '90s when the internet was just starting to take off.

对。实际上，互联网泡沫破裂的几年前就出现了网络泡沫——基本上，在90年代末的这段时间里，互联网刚刚开始腾飞。

And it seemed like anyone with any money to invest was just dumping it into tech companies or, really, just any company with a website.

似乎所有有钱的人都把钱投到科技公司，或者，实际上，只是投到任何有网站的公司。

Sounds familiar. But go on.

听起来很熟悉。请继续说。

Yeah. But that didn't last very long. By the year 2000, the bubble burst. Stocks tanked.

是。但这并没有持续很长时间。到了2000年，泡沫破裂了。股市下跌。

Hundreds of companies went under. And people lost jobs. And even a mini, two-year recession followed.

数百家公司倒闭。人们失去了工作。甚至还出现了为期两年的小型衰退。

Could that be happening again, then?

那么，这种情况还会再次发生吗?

Well, I, you know, heard all these headlines about layoffs that I started to wonder this myself.

嗯，我听到很多关于裁员的头条新闻，我自己也开始思考这个问题。

So I reached out to a couple labor economists who basically told me to take a deep breath.

所以我联系了几位劳动经济学家，他们基本上都让我深呼吸，放松心情。

We're a long way from there right now.

我们现在还远远不到那个地步。

One of the people I spoke to is Nick Bunker, who does econ research for the job site Indeed. And he put it like this.

尼克·邦克是我采访过的人之一，他为招聘网站“Indeed”做经济研究。他是这样说的。

What we're seeing now sort of rhymes with the year 2000 in some sense. But I don't think it's at quite the scale.

从某种意义上说，我们现在看到的情景有点像2000年。但我认为规模还没有那么大。

Right. And for a sense of that scale, during the dot-com bust, the Nasdaq, which has a lot of tech stocks on it, it fell by about 80%.

对。从那时的规模上看，在互联网泡沫破裂期间，包含大量科技股的纳斯达克指数下跌了大约80%。

And right now, so far this year, the Nasdaq exchange lost about 25% of its value.

今年到目前为止，纳斯达克交易所市值缩水约25%。

OK. So bad, but not nearly that bad so far, so far.

是。很糟糕，但到目前为止，还没有那么糟糕。

Is there any reason, though, to think we've hit bottom, it won't get much worse?

但是，有没有理由认为我们已经触底，情况不会变得更糟了?

Right. So far is a good caveat. But there is a reason why we shouldn't necessarily worry about tech dragging down the rest of the economy right now.

对。到目前为止，这是一个很好的警告。但我们现在不必担心科技业拖累经济的其他领域，这是有原因的。

And that is because the job market is pretty strong.

这是因为就业市场相当强劲。

So another person I talked to is Julia Pollak. She's chief economist at ZipRecruiter.

我采访的另一个人是茱莉亚·波拉克。她是“ZipRecruiter”的首席经济学家。

She says most employers want to hire, not fire, right now.

她表示，现在大多数雇主都想招人，而不是炒人。

And when you look at the data on all the sectors, not just tech, the economy is adding about 60% more jobs each month than it was before the pandemic.

当你查看所有行业的数据时，不仅仅是科技行业，每月的就业岗位比疫情前增加了60%左右。

The layoffs that are happening in tech are sort of tiny compared to the absence of layoffs everywhere else in the economy.

经济中的其他领域并没有裁员，与此相比，科技行业正在发生的裁员有点微不足道。

So broadly, I think, if you zoom out from tech, weakness in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street is still largely being offset by strength on Main Street.

宏观来看，我认为，如果你把镜头从科技领域拉出，会发现硅谷(科技产业)和华尔街(金融产业)的疲软在很大程度上仍然被主街(传统产业)的强劲所抵消。