一
1—A history of long and effortless success can be a dreadful handicap,but,if properly handled,it may become a driving force.
2—When the United States entered just such a glowing period after the end of the Second World War, it had a market eight times larger than any competitor, giving its industries unparalleled economies of scale.
3—Its scientists were the world’s best; its workers the most skilled.
4—America and Americans were prosperous beyond the dreams of the Europeans and Asians whose economies the war had destroyed.
翻译：
一段毫不费力就获得的长久成功史可能会成为一种极大的障碍，但若处理得当，它也可能转化为一种推动力。
二战结束后，美国恰好进入了这样一段辉煌时期，当时，它拥有相当于任何竞争者八倍的市场，使其产业达到无与伦比的规模经济。
它拥有世界上最优秀的科学家和技术最娴熟的工人。
美国的国富民强是那些经济遭到战争破坏的欧亚诸国做梦也无法想象的。
二
1—It was inevitable that this primacy should have narrowed as other countries grew richer.
2—Just as inevitably, the retreat from predominance proved painful.
3—By the mid-1980s Americans had found themselves at a loss over their fading industrial competitiveness.
4—Some huge American industries, such as consumer electronics, had shrunk or vanished in the face of foreign competition.
5—By 1987 there was only one American television maker left, Zenith.(Now there is none: Zenith was bought by South Korea’s LG Electronics in July.)
6—Foreign-made cars and textiles were sweeping into the domestic market.
7—America’s machine-tool industry was on the ropes.
8—For a while it looked as though the making of semiconductors, which America had invented and which sat at the heart of the new computer age, was going to be the next casualty.
翻译：
随着其他国家日益强盛，美国的这一领先优势逐渐缩小，这是不可避免的。
领先优势的后撤同样不可避免地令人感到痛苦。
到了20世纪80年代中期，面对其日益衰退的产业竞争力，美国人感到不知所措。
面对国外竞争，某些大型美国产业，如消费电子业，已经萎缩甚至倒闭。
到1987年，美国只剩下Zenith这一家电视生产商（现在一家也没有了：Zenith已于7月被韩国LG电器公司收购）。
外国制造的汽车和纷织品正在大举进入美国国内市场。
美国的机床产业也发发可危。
半导体是美国人发明的，并在计算机新时代处于核心地位，但有那么一段时间，半导体制造业似乎要成为下一个“受害者”。.
三
1—All of this caused a crisis of confidence.
2—Americans stopped taking prosperity for granted.
3—They began to believe that their way of doing business was failing, and that their incomes would therefore shortly begin to fall as well.
4—The mid-1980s brought one inquiry after another into the causes of America’s industrial decline.
5—Their sometimes sensational findings were filled with warnings about the growing competition from overseas.
翻译：
所有这一切引发了一场信心危机。
美国人不再视繁荣为理所当然之事。
他们开始相信自己的商业经营方式不灵了，也相信不久他们的收入会因此而下降。
20世纪80年代中期，人们对美国产业衰退的原因展开一次又一次的调查。
偶尔一些耸人听闻的调查结果充斥着对海外竞争压力日益增长的警告之词。
四
1—How things have changed!
2—In 1995 the United States can look back on five years of solid growth while Japan has been struggling.
3—Few Americans attribute this solely to such obvious causes as a devalued dollar or the turning of the business cycle.
4—Self-doubt has yielded to blind pride.
5—“American industry has changed its structure, has gone on a diet,has learnt to be more quick-witted,” according to Richard Cavanagh,executive dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
6—“It makes me proud to be an American just to see how our businesses are improving their productivity,” says Stephen Moore of the Cato Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC.
7—And William Sahlman of the Harvard Business School believes that people will look back on this period as “a golden age of business management in the United States.”
翻译：
情况变化如此之大！
1995年，当日本还在奋力挣扎的时候，美国却可以对五年的稳固发展（稳定增长）作一回顾了。
很少有美国人将此仅仅归因于美元贬值或经济周期的循环这些显而易见的原因。
于是，自我怀疑被盲目自豪所取代。
用哈佛大学肯尼迪管理学院执行院长理查德·卡佛纳的话说就是：“美国产业已经调整了结构，进行了精简，反应也更敏捷了。”
华盛顿特区的智囊团——卡托研究院的史蒂芬·莫尔也说：“我们的企业正在提高生产率，作为一名美国人，我感到自豪。”
哈佛商学院的威廉·萨尔曼相信人们回顾这段时期时，将把它视为“美国企业管理的黄金时代”。
