this is the Age of the Incredible Shrinking Everything. Home prices, the stock market, G.D.P., corporate profits, employment: they’re all a fraction of what they once were. Yet amid this carnage there is one thing that, surprisingly, has continued to grow: the paycheck of the average worker. Companies are slashing payrolls: 3.6 million people have lost their jobs since the recession started, with half of those getting laid off in just the past three months. Yet average hourly wages jumped almost four per cent in the past year. It’s harder and harder to find and keep a job, but if you’ve got one you may well be making more than you did twelve months ago.

This combination of rising unemployment and higher wages seems improbable. But, as it turns out, it’s what history would lead us to expect. Even during the early years of the Great Depression, manufacturing workers actually saw their real wages rise, and wage cuts have been scarce in every recession since. Oil and wheat prices may rise and fall instantaneously to reflect supply and demand, but wages are “sticky”: even when the economy goes bad, it takes a lot to make them fall.

It’s not because businesses are generous that wages are sticky; it’s because employers are worried. In part, bosses are afraid of what economists call “adverse selection”: if they cut wages, it’s the least productive workers who would be the most likely to stay, while the best workers would start looking elsewhere. (Even in a weak economy, businesses still compete for talent.) In a 1997 study of almost two hundred employers, the economists Carl Campbell and Kunal Kamlani found that the threat of losing their best employees was a major reason that bosses didn’t cut wages.

Even more important is the impact of wage cuts on morale. After the 1990-91 recession, the economist Truman Bewley interviewed managers and labor officials at more than two hundred companies and found that most believed that wage cuts wreck employee morale and eat away at productivity. Whatever money they’d save by cutting wages, bosses assume, would be cancelled out by the decline in effort and the breakdown of trust that wage cuts would create. Not everyone believes this: in the past month, both Hewlett-Packard and FedEx have announced plans for pay cuts. But generally, when sales and profits drop, wages aren’t cut, even in firms undergoing layoffs. Of course, layoffs don’t exactly help morale, but, as one of the bosses that Bewley interviewed coldly put it, they “get the misery out the door.” Cutting wages keeps the misery around.

Today’s sticky wages aren’t just the result of custom, though. They’ve also stayed high because of the most unusual aspect of this recession: even as the economy has cratered, American workers have become more productive, not less. Productivity—how much output workers produce per hour of work—is the key to a healthy economy. Historically, productivity has been “procyclical”: it rose during booms and fell during recessions. But not this time. Even as the economy did a cliff dive in the last quarter, productivity rose an impressive 3.1 per cent. And since, in theory, workers get paid more the more productive they are, their increased productivity has helped them avoid pay cuts.

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In times as grim as these, stable wages and higher productivity seem like good things. But they come at a price. The reason that companies have remained so productive despite the slowdown has a lot to do with one of the most celebrated efficiency gains of recent years: the so-called just-in-time economy. In past recessions, companies often delayed firing people, because, in their uncertainty over the precise state of their business, they preferred to keep people around rather than go to the trouble of firing them and having to hire replacements later. In economist-speak, companies “hoarded labor.” But during the past two decades companies have got significantly better at responding quickly to changes in the marketplace. Retailers carry less inventory; manufacturers have shorter lead times on production. This made the system as a whole more efficient, and each individual worker more productive. But it has also made redundant workers more expendable, and labor hoarding a thing of the past.

Bad times have always meant job losses, of course. But what’s distinctive about the speed and depth of today’s job cuts is that, even before the recession hit, American companies were, by historical standards, running lean operations. While the economy grew at a respectable rate for much of this decade, hiring did not. So one might have thought that companies would have had less room to slash payrolls, since they were already relatively slim. Instead, the same companies that were slow to hire after the last recession have been fast to fire during this one. G.D.P., after all, actually grew for much of 2008. Yet every month companies were cutting jobs. And after the credit crisis erupted, in September, companies wasted no time: as fast as consumer spending was plummeting, businesses were cutting payrolls even more aggressively. Companies have always wanted to do more with less; nowadays it’s a positive obsession.

For the employed, then, this recession may be less than awful—if, that is, you can forget about the value of your home and your 401(k). But the very factors that benefit people with jobs—higher productivity and sticky wages—make prospects bleaker for those without them. That’s one reason that it was important for the stimulus package to extend and increase unemployment benefits, as well as create jobs. We’re a more productive, more efficient economy than ever, but that’s cold comfort when you’re on the dole.

这是一个一切都缩水的时代，房地产价格，股票市场，GDP，公司利润，就业率：这些通通都变成了曾经的一小部分。令人惊奇的是，在这场大衰退中，有一项东西继续在增长，那就是熟练工人的薪水。公司缩减了工资名单：自从经济衰退开始，已经有360万人失业，其中一半人是在刚刚过去的三个月里丢掉了工作。然而，平均每小时的工资在去年增长了差不多4%。找工作变得越来越难，但是如果你已经有一份工作的话，你可能比十二个月以前挣得更多。

这种高失业率和高工资的组合看起来有些不可思议，但是，这是被历史所证明的事实。即使在上世纪的大萧条时期，产业工人的工资也是在上涨的，在衰退时减薪是罕见的。石油和小麦的价格会随着供求关系的变化而变化，但是工资是“刚性的”：即使当经济形势不好的时候，想要让降薪也是很困难的。

工资的“刚性”并不是因为商人慷慨，这是因为雇主担心被经济学家称为的“逆向选择”：一旦降薪，越平庸的工人越可能留下，而越是出色的工人越可能跳槽。（即使是在经济形势不好的时候，商业的竞争就是人才的竞争。）在 1997年的一项研究中，经济学家Carl Campbell 和Kunal Kamlani 发现老板不去降薪最大的原因就是怕失去他们最好的员工。

更重要的是降薪会影响士气。经历1990到1991年的衰退之后，经济学家Truman Bewley 和超过200家公司的经理和人事主管面谈之后发现大多数人认为降薪会有损士气并最终影响生产。老板们认为降薪省下来的开支会被降薪所引发的工作效率和信任的减损所抵消。并不是每个老板都相信这一套，上个月Hewlett-Packard 和 FedEx 两家公司就宣布降薪。但是，一般来说当销售和利润下降的时候，即使去裁员也不能降薪。当然，裁员对士气也没好处，但是正如一个老板Bewley在采访中所说的那样“裁员的苦恼在公司外，降薪的苦恼在公司内部。”

虽然如今工资的刚性并不仅仅是惯例的结果，水平的工资是又有经济衰退期不寻常的景象所致：经济衰退时，美国工人的工作效率更高了，而不是更低。生产效率（工人每小时的产出）是健康经济的关键。从历史的角度看，工作效率是循环的，经济繁荣是增长，经济衰退时下降。但这次不是，即使经济在上个季度跳水的时候，生产效率还是增长了3.1%。理论上讲，工人效率越高工资越高，正是生产效率的提高避免了减薪。

在如此严酷的时期内，稳定的工资和高效率也是好的。但这也是有代价的，公司在衰退中保持高效率和近年来取得的一项成果有关：它被称为“及时经济”(“just-in-time economy”)，在以往的衰退中，公司常常推迟裁员，因为他们对公司的状况还不是很确定，他们把员工留下来以免陷入今天裁员明天就要雇人代替的麻烦之中。用经济学术语叫公司储备劳动力。但是在过去二十年间，公司对市场变化采取更为迅速的反应会更好一些。零售商少存货，制造商缩短制造周期。这使系统作为一个整体更加有效率，每个工人更加有工作效率。但这使得多余的工人越发昂贵，存蓄劳动力成为过去。

当然，衰退期意味着失业。但是区别在于裁员速度和深度，以前当经济衰弱袭来，美国公司都保持最少雇员的运转。而经济在这个十年大部分都保持了增长。但是工作却没有增长。所以有人会认为公司们已经没有空间在缩减他们的工资单了，因为他们已经很“瘦”了。相反，上一次衰退事裁员速度很慢的公司这次裁员都很快。毕竟，GDP在08年实际上增长了，但是每月都有公司在裁员。信用危机九月爆发之后，公司们没有浪费时间，和消费者缩减花费一样快，公司裁员甚至更为猛烈。公司想要做更多，如今这是一个积极的思想。

对于那些有工作的人来说，这次经济衰退还没那么可怕，至少可以让你忘却房子和汽油的价格。但是正是使得有工作的人收益的因素——高效率和刚性工资——使得失业者的前景更加暗淡。这也正是增加失业者福利和创造就业机会重要的原因。我们比以往更有效率，但是对于那些领取失业救济金的人来说起不到任何安慰作用。

金融危机来袭，为什么老板们选择裁员而不是降薪？为什么经济大萧条薪水反涨？着篇文章告诉你答案。