0092-313-5000-734
This participation was part of the meetings within the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly’s High-level Week. Upon arriving in New York, it felt as if this tiny area of Manhattan was crammed with people from all over the globe during that week.
The skyrocketing housing prices were astonishing: During the General Assembly week, throughout the entire Manhattan area, it was impossible to find even a single-person room priced lower than the equivalent of 4,000 yuan per night, regardless of whether it was a hotel or a homestay, and on any platform. Such single-person rooms were actually quite small, and the bathrooms didn’t even have doors. Even so, among several platforms, there was only one hotel that had a dim neon light as its only promotional photo, and it was still left deserted online with no one showing any interest. To my surprise, a staff member of the United Nations General Assembly told me that aside from the conference, the overall consumption had gone up, and some hotels in New York had previously been converted into immigrant shelters, reducing the supply, which was also one of the reasons.
After the meetings in New York, I rushed to Harvard University, thinking that things would finally get better.
I was completely wrong.
In the Cambridge area and central urban area of Boston where Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are located, there was the same “thriving” scene. I even saw some ordinary rooms priced at 8,000 yuan per night. A teacher friend on campus told me that it might be because Harvard was having an alumni reunion recently. Sure enough, for the world’s top university, the consumption of the graduates who are presumably willing to return to campus to celebrate should match the same high level.
Excluding all coincidences and fluctuations, even in central agricultural states like Kentucky and Ohio, the rent for regular rooms was also 1,000 to 2,000 yuan per night. The housing prices mentioned above have all seen a significant increase compared to my consumption during my trips to the United States many years ago.
Perhaps the only thing that comforted me was in Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States. A hotel with excellent conditions and location was only 800 yuan per night, and parking was only 20 dollars per day. It couldn’t help but make one laugh and wonder if this was a kind of “reverse adjustment” of “administrative subsidy”?
The rent for outsiders is just the tip of the iceberg of consumption phenomena.
In fact, taking New York as an example, its CPI has been rising by 2 to 3 percentage points month after month, mainly due to energy and housing costs, and food and beverages are also major factors contributing to inflation. A survey titled “Wealth Watch” by New York Life Insurance Company shows that compared to a year ago, on average, 61% of Americans have seen an increase in their expenditures on groceries and dining out, and the costs in these categories have risen by an average of 209.45 dollars per month.
This time, in Kentucky, the hometown of Colonel Sanders of KFC, in the middle of the United States, I drove past a supermarket at a gas station, picked up a can of beer with a yellow price tag of 2.12 dollars, and imagined that later, when I arrived at a motel in Elizabethtown, with the endless farmland outside the window as my companion, I would experience the complex taste of locally fermented malt.
In the movie “The Truman Show”, Truman’s “good friend” Marlon often showed up with beer. It was a symbol of “friendship” and a prop to relieve emotions, as well as an advertising placement. Of course, when the truth was revealed, this false friendship and comfort instantly collapsed.
On recent NBA courts, the price of beer at the Cleveland Cavaliers is 5.91 dollars, at the Oklahoma City Thunder it is 6.84 dollars, and the Boston Celtics boldly sell 16-ounce beers at a price of 20.32 dollars.
Ultimately, the average price of beer in NBA arenas across the United States is 12.57 dollars, the average price of a 500-milliliter American-made bottled beer for ordinary consumption in the United States is about 1.97 dollars, and the average price of draft beer in bars is about 5.81 dollars.
Finally, for an alcohol lover like me, I never got tipsy even in the swing states.
According to reports such as by The Washington Post, in the United States, the price of a 24-pack of instant noodles has risen from 5.22 dollars in 2019 to 7.63 dollars in 2024, with an increase of as high as 46%. On the Internet, the owner of a Sichuan cuisine restaurant in Temple City, the United States, said that the price of garlic sprouts has risen from 15 dollars per box to 30 dollars, and the price of rapeseed oil has risen from 18 dollars per barrel to 40 dollars. In 2022, Colgate launched a high-end toothpaste priced at 10 dollars, which was regarded as an important product demonstrating the company’s ability to raise product prices.
Charlie Wise, senior vice president and global research and consulting director of TransUnion, one of the three major credit reporting agencies in the United States, said that an increasing number of American consumers are defaulting on their payments.
The cost-of-living crisis has plunged the low- and middle-income groups in the United States into difficulties. A poll in April this year showed that only 27% of low-income American families said that their lives were going okay.
When I was driving through Muskingum County, Ohio this time, I thought of a recent article titled “Dayton v. Yale”. The article mentioned that the vitality of the United States in the 1960s led the Democratic Party to believe that the typical voter was young and highly educated. For example, a 24-year-old lecturer in political science at Yale University. In fact, the typical voter was like a 47-year-old woman living in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio. She had no college degree, and her husband was a mechanic.
This Dayton voter was not originally poor, but she was struggling in the face of the ever-rising inflation. At that time, she began to worry about crime, student protests, and drug use. She was ambivalent about the Vietnam War. She was an “ordinary person” who had long voted for the Democratic Party but was uncomfortable with the party’s shift to the left and might have a new choice. A Democratic author who wrote a book in 1970 wrote that unless the Democratic Party changed its course, “otherwise we are likely to see a Republican president in the White House.”
According to the recent poll results by Ipsos, 50% of American respondents said that the cost of living was the issue they cared about the most. 24% of the respondents believed that the most important issue in the 2024 presidential election was prices and inflation, 13% chose employment and the economy, surpassing a series of traditional issues such as immigration, health care, abortion, and civil rights.
In a recent survey of young voters at Harvard University, more than a quarter also believed that the economy was the issue that the next president must address first. Many low- and middle-income African American young people, who have suffered greatly from inflation during the post-pandemic recovery period, are gradually shifting to the Trump and Republican camps.
As Scammon and Wattenberg put it, social class is a better predictor of a person’s voting outcome than race or age.
The American people have experienced price increases for 41 consecutive months. Economic reasons have led to the shrinking of the middle class and internal structural changes in social strata. It reminds me of the gardener I met in Pittsburgh who was preparing to take the entrance exam for the master’s program in international law at the University of Pittsburgh and planned to leave the United States with his children and go to Europe.
If I have the opportunity, I would like to share my three-month experience in Europe. The extent of price increases and inflation there is far higher than that in the United States. In a few areas in the Netherlands, it has even reached two or three times, and in Germany, which has always had a stable economy, the prices have also risen nearly by one time.
You should know that when I was in Germany in 2019, I would only buy delicious red wines priced below 2 euros.
Now, this price line has been forced to rise to 3.5 euros.
When I finally arrived in Elizabethtown, Kentucky on this trip, a movie with the same name, “Elizabethtown”, was based here.
Among them, there is a soundtrack titled “Sugar Blue – Making the Best of a Bad Situation”, and the selected lyrics are as follows:
Hobo songs and railroad gin
Alcohol evaporates through skin
One gift
Sugar blue
Holding darkness up to the light
The other side shows through
The raven’s song it breaks the night
And I rise from me through broken hues
Going nowhere’s somewhere’s song
Finding right in what went wrong
One gift sugar blue
Sugar blue
穿越2024大选之前的美国①丨流浪汉的歌谣和劣酒——粗观美国物价与大选
此次参会属第79届联大高级别会议周组成会议，到了纽约，感觉曼哈顿这方寸之地在这一周好像挤满了整个地球的人。
其推高的房价令人嗔目：会议周期间，遍寻整个曼哈顿地区，就找不到哪怕一间低于每晚折合4000元人民币的单人间，不论酒店或民宿，无论什么平台。这样的单人间，其实面积狭小，洗手间连门都没有。就算如此，几个平台里，也只唯有一家以昏暗的霓虹灯为酒店唯一一张介绍照片的酒店，还孤零零的留在线上无人问津。惊讶之余，联大工作人员告诉我除了开会、整体消费上涨，纽约部分酒店此前被改建为移民收容所，减少了供给，也是原因之一。
纽约会开完赶去哈佛大学，心想总算就好了吧？
大错特错。
在哈佛大学和麻省理工学院等所在的波士顿剑桥区和中心市区，洋溢着一样“欣欣向荣”的景象，我甚至看到了一些普普通通的房间达到了每晚8000元人民币。
在校的老师朋友告诉我，可能是因为近期哈佛开校友会。果然，全球最高学府，会被认为愿意返校庆祝的毕业生，其消费理应匹配同样高度。
排除一切巧合与波动，即使在中部农业州的肯塔基、俄亥俄州等地，看到的常规房间房租也要1、2000人民币每晚。以上的房价，无不比我多年前来美国的消费有了大幅的飙升。
可能唯一治愈我的是在美利坚的首都华盛顿特区，条件与位置卓越的酒店，竟然只要800人民币一晚，停车也不过20美元一天。不禁令人啼笑，这算一种“行政补贴”的反向调节么？
外来客的房租不过就是消费现象的冰山一角。
事实上，纽约为例，其CPI连月按照2-3的百分点上涨，能源和住房成本主因，食品和饮料也是主要通胀主要因素。纽约人寿保险公司（New York Life）的“财富观察”（Wealth Watch）调查显示，与一年前相比，平均61%的美国人在食品杂货和外出就餐上的支出有所增加，这些类别的成本平均每月上涨209.45美元。
这一次，在肯德基上校的家乡，美国中部的肯塔基州，我开车路过加油站的超市，拎出贴着黄色价钱，即为2.12美元的听装啤酒，想象着晚些时候到了伊丽莎白镇的汽车旅馆，窗外无垠的农田为伴，感受本土麦芽发酵后的复杂口感。
电影《楚门的世界》中，楚门的“好友”马龙经常带着啤酒出现，这是“友谊”的象征和缓解情绪的道具，也是广告的植入。当然，真相大白之日，这种虚假的友谊和慰藉便瞬间崩塌。
在最近的 NBA 球场上，克利夫兰骑士队的啤酒价格为 5.91 美元，俄克拉荷马雷霆队的啤酒价格为 6.84 美元，波士顿凯尔特人队则大胆地以 20.32 美元的价格出售 16 盎司的啤酒。
最终，全美NBA赛场啤酒的平均价格为12.57 美元，全美普通消费500毫升的美国产瓶装啤酒平均价格约为 1.97 美元，酒吧里生啤平均价格则约为 5.81 美元。
最终，对于我这样的酒精爱好者，在摇摆州也从未喝得摇摇晃晃过。
据《华盛顿邮报》等，在美国，24包方便面价格从 2019 年的 5.22 美元上涨到 2024 年的 7.63 美元，涨幅高达 46%。网络上，美国坦普尔城一川菜馆老板称，蒜苗从以前一箱 15 美元涨到 30 美元，菜籽油从一桶 18 美元涨到 40 美元。2022 年，高露洁推出定价 10 美元的高端牙膏，被视为该公司抬高产品定价能力的重要产品。
美国三大信用报告机构之一全联（TransUnion）的高级副总裁兼全球研究与咨询主管查理·怀斯（Charlie Wise）表示，越来越多的美国消费者拖欠还款 。
生活成本危机让美国的中低收入人群陷入困境，今年4月的民调显示，仅有27%的美国低收入家庭表示他们生活还过得去。
在我这次开车经过俄亥俄州的马斯金格姆县时，想到最近的一篇文章《代顿诉耶鲁》。文章提到，20 世纪60 年代美国的活力让民主党认为，典型的选民年轻且受过高等教育，比如，一位 24 岁的耶鲁大学政治学讲师，事实上，典型的选民就像一位住在俄亥俄州代顿市郊区的 47 岁女性，她没有大学学位，丈夫是一名机械师。
这位代顿选民本不贫穷，但她在不断上升的通货膨胀中苦苦挣扎。当时的她，开始担心犯罪、学生抗议和吸毒问题。她对越战感到矛盾。她是一个“普通人”，长期以来一直投票支持民主党，但对该党向左转感到不舒服，有了新的选择可能。著书的民主党作者在1970年写道，除非民主党改变路线，“否则我们很可能会看到共和党总统在白宫执政。”
根据益普索的近期民调结果，50%的美国受访者表示生活成本是他们最关心的问题，24%的受访者认为2024年总统选举中最重要的问题是物价和通货膨胀，13%则选择了就业和经济，超过了移民、医保、堕胎、民权等一系列传统议题。
在哈佛大学针对年轻选民的近期调查中，也有超过四分之一认为经济是下一任总统必须最先面对的问题。许多中低收入的非裔年轻人因在疫后复苏期间深受通胀之苦，正在逐渐转向特朗普和共和党阵营。
正如斯卡蒙和瓦滕伯格所说，社会阶层比种族或年龄更能预测一个人的投票结果。
美国人民已经连续41个月经历物价上涨，经济原因让中产萎缩，让阶层发成内在结构性变化。让我想起我在匹兹堡了解的那位准备考匹兹堡大学国际法硕士专业，计划带着孩子离开美国，去往欧洲的园丁。
如果有机会，我愿意分享三个月我去到的欧洲，其物价上涨和通胀的程度远远高于美国，荷兰少数地区甚至到达了两、三倍，而经济历来稳健的德国，也物价上升接近一倍。
要知道2019年我在德国，只会买2欧元以下的美味红酒。
如今，这个价格线被迫提升到了3.5欧。
在我此行最后抵达的肯塔基州伊丽莎白镇，曾有一部同名电影《伊丽莎白镇》取材于此。
其中，有一首配乐名为《Sugar Blue 苦中作乐》，歌词摘选是这样的：
Hobo songs and railroad gin
流浪汉的歌谣和劣酒
Alcohol evaporates through skin
酒精穿过皮肤蒸发
One gift
只有一个天赋
Sugar blue
苦中作乐
Holding darkness up to the light
举起黑暗迎向光明
The other side shows through
另一边的景象透过来
The raven’s song it breaks the night
乌鸦的歌声划破黑夜
And I rise from me through broken hues
我穿过破碎的雾霭
Going nowhere’s somewhere’s song
一事无成的我和我的歌谣
Finding right in what went wrong
在颠倒的世界找寻真理
One gift sugar blue
我只能苦中作乐
Sugar blue
苦中作乐