Remember when jobs weren't worth your small talk? Think back a year or two. Picture yourself at a cocktail party or maybe picking up the kids from soccer. How did the conversation go? You talked about your house. A new deck! You talked about your portfolio. Gotta go small cap. Did you mention how much pleasure you derived from bringing home a steady paycheck? Probably not. "Land was valuable, and capital was valuable, and labor - who cared?" says David Ellison, a Boston-based money manager. "The attitude was, As long as I buy a few homes and invest in a hedge fund, I'm done. I can sit in my chair and watch football games."

    We now know how that ended up. Your portfolio is down 50%, your mortgage is worth more than your house, and your savings account is barely visible. The job, meanwhile, is making a roaring comeback. Not in a statistical sense, of course. We are in a recession, after all: at 8.1%, unemployment hasn't been this high since 1983. But in terms of the American psyche - and a household's balance sheet - we're rediscovering the job as the most valuable asset a person can have.

    For years, we felt quite the opposite, and understandably so. From 1999 to 2006, the value of real estate owned by individuals more than doubled as the homeownership rate hit a record high. The money the typical family had in the stock market soared from just 28% of financial assets in 1989 to a full 53% in 2007 as the percentage of families in the market jumped from 32% to 51%.

    Houses and stocks - those were the things we paid attention to, the things that gave us the confidence to be good American consumers （hello, home-equity- lines of credit）. At the same time, the percentage of income we saved dropped and dropped and dropped -until, thanks to the power of credit cards and other debt, it went negative in 2005. That was neatly explained away by the "wealth effect": we spent money we didn't have because we felt - and technically were - richer because of our assets.

    All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you've got up there in your head - your education and training - it's worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. "The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond," says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. "Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth."

    Human capital is worth quite a lot. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist, figures that in a modern industrialized economy, 75% to 80% of a person's economic output comes from human capital （as opposed to, say, land or machinery）. Of course, during the bubble years （first stocks, then housing）, the noneconomists among us didn't exactly think about it that way. "People became mesmerized by how rich they were," says Becker, "and didn't realize the crucial asset they had in their earning power."

    The tide is now turning. To see how, let's check back in with the savings rate. After it went negative in late 2005, it meandered back into minimally positive territory. Then, last year, it started bounding upward. By the fourth quarter, we were saving 3.2% of what we brought in. In January we hit 5%. No longer are we disrespecting our paychecks, treating employment income as an also-ran source of wealth. "People are realizing their job is their real source of financial stability," says Ellison, "that they have to live within the means of their job, not within the means of their assets. We're relearning how to create wealth."

    As we do this, we'll start looking at our jobs differently. If that thing you do at the office every day is suddenly your sole financial lifeline, you'll approach it more cautiously. When you've got only one chip left, you're much less willing to put it on the table. In this new era, a predictable salary is more appealing than the chance of scoring big with bonuses and stock options. And having a government job - one of the last bastions of security - looks even better. One day soon you might find yourself perusing a list of the fastest-growing, best-paying professions, trying to picture yourself as an actuary. And instead of spending thousands of dollars to build a new deck, you're more likely to use that money to take a class.

    Careers expert Dick Bolles sees another shift coming. If as a society, we turn our attention back to work - if we dote on our jobs as much as we did on our homes and portfolios in an earlier era - then we'll have to start asking deeper questions about why we do what we do. In December, Bolles noticed that a book he wrote in 1970 was back on the best-seller list. What Color Is Your Parachute? is about job-hunting and career-changing, but it's also about figuring out who you are as a person and what you want out of life. "Why are people rushing out to buy a book that talks about more meaningful work?" asks Bolles. "They're realizing they have to rethink work if they've got no Plan B. It reframes the whole issue of, What type of work am I willing to do?"

    That almost sounds like a happy ending: the flagging economy has finally set us straight on how valuable our work is. Too bad it has also made work that much harder to come by. So often we don't know the true value of what we have until it's gone.vv

    还记得工作不值得你们谈论的时候吗？想想前两年，设想你正参加一个鸡尾酒舞会亦或接你踢完足球的孩子回家。那时的对话是怎样的？你们讨论房子。一个新的话题！你们谈论各自的投资组合，如何做一个小老板。你们提起过因为有一份稳定的薪水而多开心么？可能没有。"土地值钱，资金也值钱 ,而劳动力--谁关心呢？"大卫埃里森，一个波士顿的短期资本经营者说，"我的心态就是，只要买几套房子，投资一项避险基金就可以了。我就能够坐在椅子上看球赛了。"

    我们现在知道这一切是如何结束的了。你的资金下跌了50%,抵押借款比房子价值更多，你的存款账户中的钱寥寥无几。这时，工作就显得格外重要，当然不仅仅在统计学的意义上。我们正处于经济衰退，毕竟从1983年起失业率从未达到8.1%之高。但是就美国人灵魂而言，也就是每家的资产负债表，我们可以重新发现工作收入是最有价值的资产。

    近几年，我们感觉与事实相反，但也情有可原。从1999年到2006年，个人拥有的房地产权比自己拥有住房权的两倍还多。一个典型家庭在股市中钱从1989年的仅为金融融资的28%猛增至2007年的53%,这一现象所占家庭的比例从32%增至51%.

    房子和股票，是我们所关心的，这两样东西给于我们自信成为一个好的美国消费者。与此同时，我们储蓄的收入比例一降再降直至2005变成负值（由于信用卡和其他借记卡的功能）.这些被"财富效应"巧妙地搪塞：我们花的不是自己的钱因为我们感觉自己，从技术上讲，因为有资产而更富有。

    我们始终幸福地忽视着一些小概念，经济学家喜欢称之为人力资源。你脑中的认知能力，你所受的教育和训练，是值钱的。我们不仅可以从房子和投资组合中提取价值，我们也可以从自身提取价值。那么提取这种价值的途径是什么呢？工作。"工作所获得的收入就像证券的利息收益一样。"约翰霍普金大学的经济学家开罗说："这就像人力财富的股息一样。"

    人力资本很值钱。格雷贝克，诺贝尔奖获得者，芝加哥大学经济学家，指出在现代化工业经济中，75% 至80%的财富生产来自人力资本。当然，在泡沫经济的年代，我们之中的非经济学家不这么认为。"人们开始沉迷于他们有多富有，"贝克说"却没有意识到他们赚钱能力中最重要的资产。"

    如今潮流已经变换。从哪里可以得知，我们来看储蓄率。在2005年后半年储蓄率变为负值后，又曲折地上升至最小的正数地带。去年，又开始回升。在第四个季度，我们将收入的3.2%都存入银行。一月份，储蓄率达到5%.我们不再不看重薪水，而是将工作收入同样视作一种可行的财富资源。"人们开始意识到工作是财政稳定的一个重要资源，"艾利森，"他们必须靠工作生存，而非资产。"我们在学习了如何创造财富。

    与此同时，我们开始对工作另眼相待。如果你的工作突然成为唯一的财政生命线，你会更加谨慎的对待。如果你只剩下一个薯条，就不情愿将它放在桌上。在这一崭新的时代，一份可预见的薪水比在债息股票中有机会获得宏利更吸引人。找一份政府工作作为最后的安全保障之一，看上去比较好。不久后的一天你也许发现自己独到一份成长最快，收入最高的职业列表，尽力把自己想象成一位精算师。不是花费几千美元筑造一个新天地，取而代之，你更可能花这笔钱好好学习。

    职业专家迪克预见了另一个变化。如果作为一个社会，我们将精力放回工作中，如果我们像沉溺于房产和投资那样对待工作在时代初期，然后我们又会开始问更深入的话题比如我们为什么这么做，我们在做什么。十二月份，波利发现他1970年写的书又重回最佳销售量的名单。"你的降落伞是什么颜色的？"这本书是关于求职和转换工作的，但是同样涉及了有关你是谁，你想要怎样的生活这类问题。"为什么人们要争着去买关于有意义的工作的书籍？"波利问道"因为他们意识到必须重新审视工作如果没有另一个更好的计划的话。这又重新提出了另一个问题：什么类型的工作适合我去做？"

    这看起来像是一个完美的结局：衰退的经济最终让人们再度认识工作的重要性。不好的是，这又 使工作难找了许多，我们常常在失去的时候才醒悟我们所拥有的有多重要。