One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage ove

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问题     One of the most startling things about the post-crisis landscape is how tone-deaf the wealthiest Americans remain to outrage over their Croesus-like pay packages.【F1】Silver medals should certainly be handed out to the many executives and corporate lawyers who were complaining last week about the new Dodd-Frank bill, which includes a rule requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their chief executive and their lowest-level workers. It would be a "logistical nightmare," these titans of industry cried, for firms to compile this information.
    Well, maybe, but if you issue pay stubs, surely you can tally them up.【F2】The real nightmare will be when the public sees the numbers, which will illuminate just how huge the U. S. pay gap has become. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal think tank based in Washington, the average S&P 500 CEO takes home 263 times what his cheapest laborer does. While CEO pay is indeed down from its pre-crisis highs in 2007, it’s still double what it was in the 1990s, and eight times the level in the 1950s.
    Such facts are inevitably followed by the impossible-to-answer question, do they deserve it?【F3】While the corporate world has certainly gotten more complex over the last 50 years, it’s hard to make the case that CEOs themselves have gotten any smarter, or that investors are doing a better job of judging a CEO’s success. Compensation levels are all too often driven by short-term thinking. The CEOs of the 50 firms that laid off the most workers since the onset of the economic crisis took home 42 percent more pay in 2009 than their peers did—largely because cutting workers boosts short-term profits and appeals to Wall Street.
    Yet a growing body of academic research suggests that downsizing doesn’t always lead to increased profitability over the longer haul, or even lower costs.【F4】There are many reasons for this, ranging from the fact that companies going into layoff mode often lose their best workers to competitors, to the toll taken on R&D spending, which is what produces the revenue and growth potential of the future.
    While one can argue the merits of layoffs on a company-by-company basis, what’s striking is that the executives who are the most willing to ax workers also seem to be the least likely to tighten their own belts.【F5】If nothing else, it could be the starting point of a conversation in which America’s business leaders explain, to their shareholders and to the wider public, exactly why they need so much money to get the job done.
【F4】

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答案有很多原因可以说明这一点,首先,采用裁员模式的公司通常会把最好的工人输给竞争对手;其次,研发费用方面会受影响,而研发费用是未来企业收入以及增长潜力的保证。

解析 本句是复合句,句子主体为there be结构。最难处理的是ranging from the fact…to…结构,因为from后面有一个同位语从句,修饰fact,如果直译成“从……到……”,句子太过臃肿,因此译成:“首先,……其次,……”。同位语从句中的going into layoff mode修饰前面的companies,因此翻译时要放在companies的前面。最后的which is what…是定语从句,修饰前面的R&Dspending,在这个定语从句中又包含一个由what引导的表语从句。因此在翻译时要注意处理好句子的层次关系,what则根据句意译成“……的保证”。
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