特朗普在德州的权力争夺

这里是《纽约时报》，我是娜塔莉·基特罗夫。您正在收听的是《每日播报》。

From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroef. This is The Daily.

对许多人而言，这个逻辑似乎无可辩驳：给予贫困家庭金钱将显著改善他们孩子的生活。于是几年前，社会科学家们着手验证这一假设是否正确。但实验结果令他们震惊。今天，我的同事杰森·德帕尔将讲述一项开创性实验如何颠覆了关于终结儿童贫困循环的根深蒂固的认知。

For many, the logic seemed unassailable. Giving poor families money would measurably improve the lives of their children. And so a few years ago, social scientists set out to test whether that assumption was right. But the results of that test have shocked them. Today, my colleague Jason DeParle on how a groundbreaking experiment has undercut deeply held assumptions about how to end the cycle of childhood poverty.

今天是8月6日，星期三。

It's Wednesday, August 6.

杰森，你数十年来一直报道贫困问题及其应对措施，还就此著书立说。请谈谈这项在你所关注的政策领域引发震动的研究吧。

Jason, you've been reporting on poverty and the efforts to address it for decades. You've written books on the subject. So tell me about this study that has really shaken the policy world that you cover.

长久以来人们都清楚，富裕家庭的孩子在认知发展和行为表现上优于低收入家庭的同龄人。问题始终在于原因——是金钱本身起了作用，还是相关因素？比如父母受教育程度更高，或居住环境更好。

It's long been clear that children in affluent families do better than their low income peers on measures of cognitive development and behavior. The question has always been why. Is it the money itself that makes a difference, or is it associated factors? Like, maybe their parents have more education. Maybe they live in better neighborhoods.

也许他们能上更好的学校，享受更优质的托育服务。大量间接证据表明贫困本身会导致儿童发展不良，但从未有研究能单独验证现金的影响。这具有重大政策意义，因为多数发达国家确实会向育儿家庭提供某种无条件现金补助，而美国却是个例外。民主党人和进步派迫切希望改变这一现状。

Maybe they have access to better schools. Maybe they have access to better childcare. There's lots of indirect evidence that suggests poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, but there hasn't been a study that isolates the effect of cash itself. And this is a big policy question because most advanced countries do provide some sort of unconditional cash aid to parents raising children. The United States is unusual in that it does not, and the Democrats and progressives are eager to change that.

因此这个问题具有极高的公共政策相关性。

So this question has a high public policy potential relevance.

所以

So

一组知名研究者开始尝试单独验证金钱对儿童发展的影响。

a group of prominent researchers set out to try to isolate the effect of money alone on children's development.

没错。这些研究者试图解答的核心问题是：如果我们无条件给家庭发放现金，他们的孩子能否在儿童发展方面直接受益？这就是研究目标。

Right. And the question these researchers are trying to answer is essentially, if we give money to families with no strings attached, will their kids benefit from that specifically in terms of child development? That's the goal here.

没错。无条件现金援助支持者的希望是，它能帮助平衡竞争环境，让低收入家庭的儿童也能获得高收入家庭儿童的一些机会。因此，这具有潜在的深远影响。

Right. The hopes of the proponents of unconditional cash aid is that it could help level the playing field, that it could help give low income children some of the opportunities that high income children have. So it has potentially profound consequences.

他们发现了什么？

And what'd they find?

这组研究人员发现，四年后，接受援助的儿童与未接受援助的儿童之间没有可检测到的差异。

This group of researchers found that after four years, there were no detectable differences between the children that got the aid and the children that didn't get the aid.

完全没有可检测到的差异？正确。

No detectable differences at all? Correct.

就研究人员所知，这笔钱并没有带来改变，这一结果令人惊讶，以至于研究人员本身对其解读也存在很大分歧。

The money, as far as the researchers could tell, has not made a difference, which was such a surprise the researchers themselves are quite divided over what to make of it.

好的，这很有趣。让我们深入了解这项研究本身。它是如何设计的？

Okay. That's fascinating. Let's get into the study itself. How was it designed?

这项研究名为‘婴儿的第一年’。大约十年前，一组知名研究人员开始尝试单独研究金钱对儿童发展的影响。这是一项相当复杂的努力。他们筹集了2200万美元，部分来自政府，部分来自私人基金会。他们和一组助手从四个城市的12家医院招募了一千名母亲。

The study is called baby's first years. It came together about a decade ago when a group of prominent researchers set out to try to isolate the effect of money alone on children's development. It was quite an elaborate effort. They raised $22,000,000, some of it from the government, some of it from private foundations. They and a team of assistants recruited a thousand mothers from 12 hospitals in four cities.

他们在母亲分娩时做好准备，然后在四年内通过各种指标跟踪她们。研究涉及神经科学家、经济学家、民族志学者和心理学家。

They got them ready when the mothers were giving birth and then followed them for four years on all kinds of measures. They had neuroscientists involved. They had economists involved. They had ethnographers involved. They had psychologists involved.

他们考察了儿童发展的各个方面。

They looked at every aspect of child development.

然后呢？

And

他们被随机分成两组。一组每月无条件获得333美元的现金补贴，另一组仅因参与研究而象征性获得20美元。随机对照研究被视为科学实验的黄金标准，因为它试图排除其他对结果的影响因素。这就像药物试验那样，能得出一种科学结论。

they divided them at random into two groups. One group got $333 a month in cash stipends unconditional. The other got a nominal $20 just for participating in the study. A random control study is considered a kind of gold standard in scientific experimentation because it attempts to weed out the other forms of influences on the results. This gives you a kind of scientific result the way drug trials work.

对吧？就像给一半人安慰剂，另一半人真药那样。

Right? Where you give half the group a placebo and half the group the drug.

没错。随机对照的理念在于真正隔离干预措施本身的效果。就好比说，如果这是你唯一改变的因素，它是否产生了差异？

Right. The idea of randomized control is that you really isolate the effect of the intervention itself. It's like, if this is the only thing you're changing in this scenario, is that making a difference?

正是如此。这正是研究者的期望。

Exactly. That was the hope.

我们能暂停一下吗？我必须问问这个金额本身。按我计算，每月约330美元，一年约4000美元。这实在不算多。

Can we pause here just for a sec? Because I have to ask about the dollar amount itself. Because by my math, it's 330 ish dollars a month, about $4,000 a year. That's just not that much.

让我退一步解释现金援助促进儿童发展的两种理论。其一是经济理论：让家庭能购买更多物品——孩子获得更好的食物、居住在更好的社区。

Let me step back for just a second and explain the two theories about why cash aid would help child development. One is an economic theory. It lets families buy more stuff. The kids get better food. They can live in better neighborhoods.

他们有更多玩具或书籍，因此得以茁壮成长。其二（两者并不互斥）是压力模型：大量证据表明低收入家庭承受着极高压力。人们担忧水电切断、被驱逐，这种焦虑会传递给孩子，影响其发育。值得注意的是，研究中所有母亲都低于联邦贫困线。

They have more toys or books, and therefore, they grow and they thrive. The second, and they're not mutually exclusive, is a stress model. There's lots of evidence that the stress levels in low income families are just really high. You know, people worrying about utility cutoffs, evictions, and the anxiety gets translated onto the kids, and this affects their child development. I think it's important to remember that all the women, all the mothers in this study were below the federal poverty line.

所以年收入增加4000美元意味着约18%的提升。虽非根本性改变，但研究者认为足以有效测试现金援助的影响。不过也有顾问担心金额可能不足以产生预期效果。嗯。现金援助可能通过两条路径帮助儿童。

So a $4,000 a year increase to their income was about an 18% increase. It's not transformative, but they thought it would be enough to be a meaningful test of what difference cash aid could make. At the same time, I would say there were some concerns among some advisers to the group that maybe the sum wasn't gonna be large enough to produce the results they expected. Mhmm. So there was two pathways through which the increased cash aid could have helped children.

值得称赞的是，研究者预先登记了七项关于现金援助效果的假设：测量儿童词汇量、执行功能、前读写能力、空间感知力，并让母亲评估其社交情感行为。

And to their credit, the researchers preregistered seven hypotheses about what effect the cash aid would have. There were measures of children's vocabulary, their executive function, their preliteracy skills, their spatial perception. They had mothers rank them on assessments of social and emotional behavior.

那如何判断认知发展情况呢？具体要怎么衡量这种变化？

And how do you get at the question of, you know, is someone developing cognitively? Like, how do you actually tell if that's happening?

这正是我认为他们极具创新性和活力的地方。他们甚至通过上门为婴儿做脑电图来测量其脑波活动——这种测试需要将电极贴在婴儿头部，试图检测脑活动，观察是否存在可能预示未来认知发展的脑波增强迹象。从这项测试到母亲们关于孩子健康与行为的自我报告，再到认知测试，他们采用了多种测量手段，力求全面考察家庭生活的各个层面。

This is where I thought they were really innovative and energetic. They went as far as measuring brainwave activity in infants by going to their homes and giving them electroencephalograms, which are these tests where you attach electrodes to infants' heads and try to detect brain activity and see if there are increases in brain waves that might predict future cognitive development. They went from that to self reports on the mothers, on their children's health and behavior, to cognitive tests, just a a wide range of measures trying to look at all elements of the family's life.

为什么他们要研究从出生开始的这个年龄段的孩子？这个阶段有什么重要意义？

And why are they looking at children at this age, you know, from birth? What's important about that?

我认为有两个原因。首先，大量证据表明成长初期至关重要，生命最初几年发生的事很大程度上决定了儿童发展轨迹。其次，这也呼应了关于现金援助的政策辩论——理论认为，相较于直接资助成年人，将现金援助定向给年幼儿童可能产生更大影响。

I think there's two reasons. One, there's just a realm of evidence of the importance of the formative years that so much of what happens in the first few years sets the trajectory for a child's development. And, also, it mirrors this policy debate about cash aid. If you're going to give cash aid, I think the theory is you can have a bigger impact if you target younger children than if you simply give it to adults.

没错。核心理念是给母亲现金本身就可能促进这些指标中任意一项或多项的改善。

Right. And the idea again is that if you give moms cash, that in and of itself could lead to improvements on any one of these metrics or on various.

正是如此。这无疑是无条件现金援助支持者的期望。但由于款项无条件发放，受助者可自由支配。反对者则担忧无约束的资金援助会适得其反——母亲们可能滥用资金购买毒品酒精，或因此辞职导致家庭更贫困。

That's the idea. That's certainly what the advocates of unconditional cash aid hope. But, again, because it's unconditional, they can spend it however they want. There's certainly people who oppose the idea that worry giving families money with no strings attached will hurt them, that the mothers will misuse the money. They'll spend it on drugs or alcohol, or they'll it'll incentivize them to quit their jobs, and the families will actually become poorer.

但经过四年现金发放，研究者发现母亲们并未滥用资金。她们没有增加烟酒毒品支出，反而每月多花费68美元为孩子购置玩具书籍、支付育儿服务，并增加了亲子陪伴时间。

But after four years of cash payments, the researchers found the mothers didn't misuse the money. They didn't spend more on alcohol or drugs. They didn't spend more on cigarettes. In fact, they did spend more on their kids. They spent $68 a month more on toys and books and childcare and services for their kids, and they spent a little more time with their kids.

然而这些支出和时间投入都未能如预期般影响儿童发展的主要指标：未改变孩子的脑波活动，未提升母亲对其社交情感行为的评分，未改善词汇量、执行功能、前读写能力或空间感知力，母亲们的就业率也未下降。

Nonetheless, none of that spending and none of that time affected the main yardsticks of child development in the ways they predicted. It didn't change the brainwave activity in the children. It didn't make their mothers rank them higher on assessments of social or emotional behavior. It didn't improve their vocabulary or their executive function or their preliteracy skills or their spatial perception. And the mothers didn't work less.

她们负责任地使用了资金，但并未如研究者预期那样对孩子产生影响。

They used the money responsibly, but it didn't affect the kids in the way the researchers had predicted.

母亲们确实将钱用在孩子身上，但研究发现这些支出毫无效果——七项指标均无改善。这结果相当引人深思。

The mothers are using this money on their kids, but the researchers find that that spending has no effect. It doesn't cause an improvement on any of the seven metrics. That's that is just pretty remarkable.

是的。需注意研究者原本并未预期所有七项指标都会改变。真正令人惊讶的是其中任何一项都未受影响。于是问题就变成了：为什么？

Yes. And it's important to remember the researchers didn't predict it would necessarily change all seven. I think what's particularly striking is that it didn't change any of the seven. So then the question becomes, why?

我们马上回来。杰森，2200万美元，多年长期研究，非常严谨的研究。在他们预期会看到影响的任何方面都没有发现影响。你说过的。我迫切想知道原因。

We'll be right back. Jason, $22,000,000, years long study, very rigorous study. No impact is found on any of the things that they're expecting to see an impact on. You said it. I'm dying to know why.

研究人员自己也不确定原因，并且他们之间对于是否可以从这些结果推广到更广泛的问题——即Cascade是否帮助孩子——存在分歧。一种可能性是大流行干扰了研究。大流行发生时孩子们大约一岁。大流行可能至少在两个方面产生了干扰。第一，它打乱了每个人的生活。

The researchers themselves aren't sure why, and they disagree among themselves about whether they can generalize from these results to the broader question of whether Cascade helps kids. One possibility is that the pandemic interfered. The pandemic occurred when the kids were about a year old. The pandemic could have interfered in at least two ways. One, it just disrupted everybody's life.

许多家庭从工作中回家，或者在许多情况下，贫困家庭无法从工作中回家。他们仍然在外面努力谋生。他们承受了很大的压力。人们的生活安排发生了变化。这是一个非常糟糕的环境，试图隔离像每月300美元津贴这样的效果。

Families came home from work or, in many cases, poor families weren't able to come home from work. They were still out there trying to make a living. They had lots of stress. People's living arrangements changed. It's just a a really bad environment to try to isolate something like the effect of a $300 a month stipend.

对吧？没有人想在大流行期间进行社会实验。研究人员显然在开始之前无法预知这一点。但大流行可能扭曲结果的第二种方式是它引发了其他多种形式的政府援助，对照组家庭也收到了这些援助。因此，相对于家庭获得的其他援助，实验性支付的规模变得更小。

Right? Nobody wants to do a social experiment in the midst of a pandemic. The researchers obviously couldn't have known this going into it. But a second way in which the pandemic could have skewed the results is that it triggered lots of other forms of government aid, which the families in the control group also received. So it made the size of the experimental payments even smaller relative to the other aid families were getting.

当你不获得其他形式的援助时，获得333美元的支付可能是一回事。但当你在每年数千美元的其他紧急援助基础上获得它时，情况就不同了。所以也许仅仅是政府支出压倒了这些实验性津贴的效果。

It may be one thing to get a $333 payment when you're not getting other forms of aid. It's another thing when you're getting it on top of thousands of dollars a year in other forms of emergency aid. So maybe just the government spending overwhelmed the effect of these experimental stipends.

是的。这里的想法是，基本上，如果你有一个政府已经在发放大量资金，你就会削弱其他现金支付的影响。就像，在这种情况下，它本身不会那么重要。

Yeah. The idea here is that, basically, if you have a government that's giving out a lot of money anyway, you blunt the impact of this other cash payment. Like, it's not gonna be in and of itself that important in that context.

正确。大流行可能影响结果的另一种方式是它引发了高通胀，这逐渐侵蚀了现金津贴的价值。最初，对于获得现金援助的家庭来说，这是收入增加了18%，但随着通胀的影响，这一比例逐渐缩小。最后一个注意事项是实验尚未结束。这些结果衡量了四年支付的影响。

Correct. And another way in which the pandemic might have shaped the results is that it triggered high inflation, which eroded the value of the cash stipend over time. Initially, it was an 18% bump in income for the families that received the cash aid, but that steadily shrank with the impact of inflation. And a final caveat is that the experiment's not over. These results measure the impact of four years of payments.

支付持续了六年。所以在某个时候，我们将获得另外两年的结果数据，情况可能会发生变化。但四年的结果已经很多了，而且一些证据表明，对儿童的干预实际上会随着时间的推移而减弱，而不是增强。但是，不，我们并不确定。

The payments went on for six years. So at some point, we'll get data on two more years of results, and it's possible the picture will change. But four years of results is a lot of results, and some evidence shows that child interventions actually fade with time rather than increase. But, no, we don't know for sure.

好的。虽然所有这些情有可原的情况、注意事项看起来完全合理，也许大流行和通胀掩盖或削弱了一些效果。但如果无限制现金有人们希望它可能具有的好处，你不认为你会在某个地方看到它显现出来吗？

Okay. While all of these extenuating circumstances, caveats seem completely legitimate, maybe the pandemic and inflation obscured or blunted some of the effect. But if unrestricted cash had the benefits that people were kind of hoping it might have, don't you think you would see it show up somewhere?

嗯，绝对是的，援助没有产生预期影响的一个可能解释是从一开始就错误地期待了它。研究人员自己对此也意见不一。对我来说的一个警示是，你无法从中得出任何结论。这只是一个罗夏测试。人们会把自己的偏好投射到它上面。

Well, absolutely, one of the possible explanations for why the aid didn't have the expected impact is that it was wrong to expect it from the beginning. And the researchers themselves are quite divided over what to make of it. One caution to me, you can't make anything of it. Just a Rorschach test. People will project their own preferences upon it.

另一位相当知名的研究者格雷格·邓肯——加州大学欧文分校的经济学家——告诉我，这些结果促使他改变了观点。他感到惊讶，并认为这些结果不能简单地被归因于低额津贴或疫情干扰。格雷格是该领域最杰出的研究者之一，数十年来一直研究政府援助对儿童的影响。他仍然认为政府援助对促进儿童发展大有裨益，但这些结果让他对无条件现金支付的效果产生了质疑。

And another, a quite a prominent researcher named Greg Duncan, who's a economist at the University of California Irvine, told me that these results have prompted him to change his views. He has been surprised, and he thinks they can't simply be dismissed away as the product of low stipends or pandemic interference. Greg is one of the most prominent researchers in the field. He spent decades studying the impact of government aid on children. He still thinks that government aid does a lot to boost children's development, but these results have made him question the impact of unconditional cash payments.

目前他是唯一得出这一结论的人。

He's the only one who so far has come to that conclusion.

听起来他在质疑自己的假设，这显然不容易做到。你认为为什么只有他持这种看法？

It sounds like he's questioning his own assumptions, which obviously is hard to do. Why do you think he's alone in that?

我认为学术界对如何解读这一复杂证据体系存在合理的实质性分歧。此外，研究团队中也有人担心公开这些数据，害怕它们会被用作削减政府援助的论据或借口。

I think there's a legitimate substantive academic disagreement over how to interpret a complicated body of evidence. I think there's also some concern among the group about publicizing these data for fear that others will use them as an argument or a pretext to cut government aid.

因为这些结果出现在政府援助本身备受争议的时期。我是说，特朗普政府最近一直在大幅削减社会保障网络。

Because the results are coming at a time a pretty fraught time for government aid itself. I mean, the Trump administration has been going about making some pretty extreme cuts to the social safety net recently.

是的。为幼儿提供现金保障是民主党的首要社会政策重点。这是背景之一，但更大的背景是特朗普政府大幅削减各类政府援助，一些研究者认为，在疫情期间公布一项现金实验可能存在的矛盾结果不合时宜。举个例子说明背景变化：他们确实发布了第一年结果，显示儿童脑部活动出现可能预示更好认知发展的初步改善。那篇论文发表在期刊上，当时他们都乐于讨论。

Yeah. The idea of providing cash guarantees to young children is a a top social policy priority for the Democratic Party. So there's that context, but then there's also the much larger context of the Trump administration cutting back significantly on all sorts of government aid and some of the researchers thinking that, gee, this isn't the time to publicize potentially ambivalent results from one cash experiment during a pandemic. To give you an example of how the context has changed, they did publish year one results, which showed some tentative improvements in the children's brain activity in a way that could predict better cognitive development. That paper was published in a journal, and they were all happy to discuss that.

当时看起来很有希望，政治环境也不同。而这次他们低调发布结果，大多数研究者拒绝讨论。

It seemed very promising. It was also a different time politically. In this context, they published the results quietly, and most of the researchers declined to discuss them.

你如何看待这种对研究发现的沉默态度？这是否会让人怀疑研究者可能低估了他们发现的重要性？

What do you make of the reluctance to talk about what was found here? I mean, do you think it could raise questions that some of the researchers may be underplaying the significance of what they found?

确实，当我向人们求证这些结果时，有人提出这个问题：为什么他们选择低调发布？是在回避自己的发现吗？我认为不完全是这样，他们毕竟公布了结果。

Certainly, when I was bouncing the results off of people, I got that question. Why are they publishing quietly? Are they burning away from their results? I don't think that's quite right. They did publish them.

他们并未隐瞒。我认为部分沉默源于论文尚未经过同行评审，意味着未被其他研究者全面验证并发表在学术期刊上。但更根本的原因可能是他们态度矛盾——这些结果与早期发现相左，而许多研究者曾对现金援助能改变儿童生活寄予厚望。当涉及我们深信不疑的事物时，重新思考总是困难的，更何况当前还存在疫情等干扰因素，实验也尚未完全结束。

They're not hiding them. I think some of the reluctance involves talking about a paper that hasn't yet been peer reviewed, meaning it hasn't been fully vetted by other researchers and published in an academic journal. I think probably the more fundamental reluctance to talk about it is that they are ambivalent, and they do contradict this earlier finding that I think a lot of the researchers really found hopeful that cash aid could really make a difference in children's lives. I think it's hard for all of us to really rethink something we fundamentally believe in, and all the more so in this case when there's confounding circumstances like the pandemic and the experiment isn't fully complete.

这很有道理。我想有些听众可能会说，我理解科学家对他们的研究抱有希望，但他们不应该让这种希望阻碍他们开放地接受并真正参与研究结果，即使结果不如预期。那么，杰森，你长期研究这个问题，你认为这对无条件现金转移支付告诉我们什么？我们应该如何解读这些结果？

That makes a lot of sense. I guess I just think there will be some people listening to this who would say, you know, I get that scientists have hopes for their research, but they shouldn't let that get in the way of being open to and really engaging with the results even if the results aren't what you would want. And so, I mean, on those results, Jason, you've been looking at this stuff for a really long time. What do you think this tells us about unconditional cash transfers? How should we interpret this?

我想明确一点。这些结果并未证实进步派希望现金援助能明确帮助儿童的期望，但也没有证实保守派担忧现金援助会伤害儿童的恐惧。它们并未完全支持任何一方。我的意思是，母亲们并未像某些保守派担心的那样滥用这笔钱，她们也没有停止工作。你不必相信现金援助会对儿童的认知发展产生可衡量的影响，才能支持为儿童提供现金援助。

I wanna be clear. These results did not bear out progressives' hope that cash aid will unequivocally help children, but they didn't bear out conservatives' fears that cash aid would hurt children either. They didn't really provide full support for either side. I mean, it didn't the mothers didn't misspend the money as some conservatives feared, and they didn't stop working. You don't have to believe that cash aid will make a measurable cognitive difference in a child's development in order to support cash aid for kids.

你可能只是认为这是一件好事，尤其是在一个如此不平等的社会中。我们对大多数政府援助的受益者并不进行认知测试。对吧？支持给贫困家庭钱还有其他理由。参与这项研究的人种志学者，那些去采访母亲的人，说他们听到母亲们表示这笔钱对她们意义重大。

You might just think it's a good thing to do, particularly in a world of such extreme inequality. And we don't impose a cognitive test on the on beneficiaries for most forms of government aid. Right? There's other reasons to support, giving poor families money. And the ethnographers involved in the study, the people who went out and interviewed the mothers, said that they heard mothers saying that the money was meaningful to them.

他们让母亲们拍下她们用钱做了什么，其中一位母亲发了一张新冬衣的照片，她为自己能给孩子买这件衣服感到非常自豪。虽然这并未转化为他们预测的可量化基准变化，但这可能仍然有意义。你知道，衡量孩子生活中的意义还有其他方法。

They asked mothers to take pictures of what they did with it, and one of the mothers sent in a picture of a new winter coat that she felt so proud that she had been able to give her kid. Now that didn't translate into quantifiable changes in these benchmarks as they predicted. But it may be meaningful nonetheless. You know, there's other ways to measure meaning in a child's life.

你认为这对整个领域意味着什么？对于那些试图找到干预措施来解决贫困儿童比富裕同龄人表现更差这一核心问题的人来说，如果你是一个试图找出改善儿童早期发展方法的人，现在有了这项研究表明，至少到目前为止，无条件现金转移支付没有产生那种效果，你会怎么做？

What do you think this means for the field overall, for for people who are trying to find interventions to try to address this core problem that poor kids have worse outcomes than their more affluent peers? Like, if you're a person trying to figure out what will improve early childhood development, what do you do now that you have this study that's saying that, look, no strings cash, at least until now, hasn't had that effect?

我的意思是，贫困儿童是否能公平地获得美国生活机会，这对美国身份和我们作为一个民族的本质来说是一个核心问题。我认为世界渴望一个解决方案。对我来说，报道这个问题几十年后，我会说这些结果加深了为什么有些孩子茁壮成长而另一些却没有的谜团。我本来会认为，现金援助当然会起作用。给贫困家庭更多的钱会帮助他们。

I mean, the question of whether poor kids have a fair shot at American life is just such a central question to American identity and to, you know, who who we are as a people. I think the world's hungry for a solution. And for me having reported on this issue for decades, I'd say the results have just deepened the mystery of why some kids flourish and others don't. I mean, there's a part of me that would have said, of course, the cash aid would make a difference. Giving poor families more money is gonna help poor families.

这是不言而喻的。但另一方面，我也会想，当贫困儿童面临如此多的挑战，从巨大的经济不平等到暴力社区、糟糕的学校，再到父母教育和帮助他们能力的差异，为什么你会认为每年几千美元会对一个家庭的生活产生有意义的影响？你可以列出50个因素。我觉得尽管我思考这个问题很久了，但我离答案并没有更近，这项研究只是加深了我的困惑。

That's self evident. And then there's part of me that thinks, why would you think a few thousand dollars a year would make a meaningful difference in a family's life when poor kids are up against so many things from vast economic inequality to violent neighborhoods to bad schools to differences in parental education and ability to help them. It's just you could make a list of 50 things. I feel like as long as I've thought about this issue, I'm no closer to knowing the answer, and this study only deepens my puzzlement.

杰森，非常感谢你。

Jason, thank you so much.

谢谢你，娜塔莉。

Thank you, Natalie.

我们稍后回来。

We'll be right back.

以下是今日其他需知要闻。周二，由共和党掌控的众议院监督委员会向司法部发出传票，要求其提交关于杰弗里·爱泼斯坦及其长期同伙吉丝莲·麦克斯韦尔的案件文件。该委员会还向10名前民主党与共和党官员发出传票，要求他们就本案作证，其中包括比尔·克林顿和希拉里·克林顿。委员会共和党主席是在上月民主党就该问题强行推动投票后被迫签发这些传票的。若司法部未能在委员会设定的8月19日截止日期前提交文件，可能引发特朗普政府与国会在这一激怒MAGA运动支持者的议题上正面交锋。

Here's what else you need to know today. On Tuesday, the Republican run House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Justice Department for its files on Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime associate, Ghislain Maxwell. The committee also sent subpoenas to 10 former Democratic and Republican officials it wants to depose in relation to the case, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. The committee's Republican chairman was required to send the subpoenas after Democrats forced a vote on the issue last month. If the justice department doesn't deliver the documents by the August 19 deadline set by the committee, it could set up a showdown between the Trump administration and Congress on an issue that's provoked outrage within the MAGA movement.

因性剥削虐待未成年少女正在服20年刑期的麦克斯韦尔，周二请求联邦法官驳回政府要求公开其与爱泼斯坦调查案大陪审团笔录的动议。麦克斯韦尔的律师称她本人从未见过这些材料，且解封将违反大陪审团保密原则。本期节目由奥利维亚·纳特、玛丽·威尔逊和杰西卡·钟制作，马克·乔治在丽莎·周和莱克西·刁协助下完成编辑，配乐由帕特·麦库斯克与罗温·内米斯托原创，艾丽莎·莫克斯利负责音频工程。

Maxwell, who's serving a twenty year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, asked a federal judge on Tuesday to deny the administration's request to unseal the grand jury transcripts from the investigation against her and Epstein. Maxwell's lawyers said she'd never seen the material herself and that unsealing it would be a violation of grand jury secrecy. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Natt, Mary Wilson, and Jessica Chung. It was edited by Mark George with help from Lisa Chow and Lexi Diao. Contains original music by Pat McCusker and Rowan Nemisto and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

节目主题音乐由Wonderlane乐队的吉姆·布伦德伯格与本·兰兹伯格创作。以上就是本期《每日新闻》全部内容，我是主播娜塔莉·基特罗菲，明天见。

Our theme music is by Jim Brundberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderlane. That's it for The Daily. I'm Natalie Kittrowife. See you tomorrow.