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Manufacturer inventories. Durable-goods orders. Nonfarm payrolls. Inflation-adjusted GDP. These are the dreary reportables that tell us how our economy is doing. And many of them look a whole lot better now than they did at their early-pandemic depths.
制造商库存，耐用品订单，非农就业人数，通胀调整后的国内生产总值——这些沉闷的报道告诉了我们经济状况如何，其中许多数据在现在看来比大流行初期（的惨淡情形）好多了。
But what if there's another factor we're missing? What if the data points are obscuring a deepening recession in a commodity that underpins them all?
但是，如果我们忽略了另一个因素呢？如果这些数据点掩盖了支撑它们的大宗商品日益加深的衰退，那又会怎样呢？
Trust. Without it, Adam Smith's invisible hand stays in its pocket; Keynes's "animal spirits" are muted.
信任。没有它，亚当·斯密的“看不见的手”就会留在口袋里；凯恩斯的“动物精神”就会被压制。
"Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust," the Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote in 1972. But trust is less quantifiable than other forms of capital. Its decline is vaguely felt before it's plainly seen.
诺贝尔经济学奖得主肯尼斯·阿罗在1972年写道：“几乎每一笔商业交易本身都有信任的成分。”但是与其他形式的资本相比，“信任”更难量化。信任衰退在被明显看到之前就已经能被隐约感知了。
As companies have gone virtual during the coronavirus pandemic, supervisors wonder whether their remote workers are in fact working. New colleagues arrive and leave without ever having met.
由于在冠状病毒大流行期间公司都实现了虚拟化办公，管理者对他们的远程员工是否真的在工作心存疑虑。新同事来来去去，大家却未曾谋面。
Direct reports ask if they could have that casual understanding put down in writing. No one knows whether the boss's cryptic closing remark was ironic or hostile.
直接下属询问他们是否可以将这种非正式的理解写下来。没人知道老板隐晦的结束语是讽刺还是敌意。
Sadly, those suspicions may have some basis in fact. The longer employees were apart from one another during the pandemic, a recent study of more than 5,400 Finnish workers found, the more their faith in colleagues fell.
可悲的是，这些怀疑可能有一些事实依据。最近一项针对5400多名芬兰员工的研究发现，疫情期间员工彼此分开的时间越长，他们对同事的信心就越低。
Ward van Zoonen of Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, began measuring trust among those office workers early in 2020. He asked them: How much did they trust their peers? How much did they trust their supervisors? And how much did they believe that those people trusted them?
荷兰伊拉斯谟大学的沃德·范·佐宁从2020年初开始评测这些办公室职员的信任度。他询问这些员工：他们有多信任自己的同事？有多信任自己的管理者？在多大程度上相信那些人也同样信赖他们?
What he found was unsettling. In March 2020, trust levels were fairly high. By May, they had slipped. By October—about seven months into the pandemic—the employees' degree of confidence in one another was down substantially.
他的发现令人不安。2020年3月，信任度还相当高。到了5月，信任度就已经下滑了。到了10月，大约在疫情大流行的七个月后，员工之间的信任度大幅下降。
Another survey, by the Centre for Transformative Work Design in Australia, found bosses having trust issues too. About 60 percent of supervisors doubted or were unsure that remote workers performed as well or were as motivated as those in the office.
澳大利亚变革工作设计中心的另一项调查发现，老板们也存在信任问题。大约60%的管理者怀疑或不确定远程员工的表现是否和办公室里的员工一样出色或者动力十足。
Meanwhile, demand for employee-surveillance software has skyrocketed more than 50 percent since before the pandemic. And this spring, American employees were leaving their jobs at the highest rate since at least 2000.
与此同时，与疫情之前相比，对员工监控软件的需求飙升了50%以上。今年春天，美国员工的离职率达到了至少2000年以来的最高水平。
