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

    還記得工作不值得你們談論的時候嗎？想想前兩年，設想你正參加一個雞尾酒舞會亦或接你踢完足球的孩子回家。那時的對話是怎樣的？你們討論房子。一個新的話題！你們談論各自的投資組合，如何做一個小老板。你們提起過因為有一份穩定的薪水而多開心么？可能沒有。"土地值錢，資金也值錢 ,而勞動力--誰關心呢？"大衛埃里森，一個波士頓的短期資本經營者說，"我的心態就是，只要買幾套房子，投資一項避險基金就可以了。我就能夠坐在椅子上看球賽了。"

    我們現在知道這一切是如何結束的了。你的資金下跌了50%,抵押借款比房子價值更多，你的存款賬戶中的錢寥寥無幾。這時，工作就顯得格外重要，當然不僅僅在統計學的意義上。我們正處于經濟衰退，畢竟從1983年起失業率從未達到8.1%之高。但是就美國人靈魂而言，也就是每家的資產負債表，我們可以重新發現工作收入是最有價值的資產。

    近幾年，我們感覺與事實相反，但也情有可原。從1999年到2006年，個人擁有的房地產權比自己擁有住房權的兩倍還多。一個典型家庭在股市中錢從1989年的僅為金融融資的28%猛增至2007年的53%,這一現象所占家庭的比例從32%增至51%.

    房子和股票，是我們所關心的，這兩樣東西給于我們自信成為一個好的美國消費者。與此同時，我們儲蓄的收入比例一降再降直至2005變成負值（由于信用卡和其他借記卡的功能）.這些被"財富效應"巧妙地搪塞：我們花的不是自己的錢因為我們感覺自己，從技術上講，因為有資產而更富有。

    我們始終幸福地忽視著一些小概念，經濟學家喜歡稱之為人力資源。你腦中的認知能力，你所受的教育和訓練，是值錢的。我們不僅可以從房子和投資組合中提取價值，我們也可以從自身提取價值。那么提取這種價值的途徑是什么呢？工作。"工作所獲得的收入就像證券的利息收益一樣。"約翰霍普金大學的經濟學家開羅說："這就像人力財富的股息一樣。"

    人力資本很值錢。格雷貝克，諾貝爾獎獲得者，芝加哥大學經濟學家，指出在現代化工業經濟中，75% 至80%的財富生產來自人力資本。當然，在泡沫經濟的年代，我們之中的非經濟學家不這么認為。"人們開始沉迷于他們有多富有，"貝克說"卻沒有意識到他們賺錢能力中最重要的資產。"

    如今潮流已經變換。從哪里可以得知，我們來看儲蓄率。在2005年后半年儲蓄率變為負值后，又曲折地上升至最小的正數地帶。去年，又開始回升。在第四個季度，我們將收入的3.2%都存入銀行。一月份，儲蓄率達到5%.我們不再不看重薪水，而是將工作收入同樣視作一種可行的財富資源。"人們開始意識到工作是財政穩定的一個重要資源，"艾利森，"他們必須靠工作生存，而非資產。"我們在學習了如何創造財富。

    與此同時，我們開始對工作另眼相待。如果你的工作突然成為唯一的財政生命線，你會更加謹慎的對待。如果你只剩下一個薯條，就不情愿將它放在桌上。在這一嶄新的時代，一份可預見的薪水比在債息股票中有機會獲得宏利更吸引人。找一份政府工作作為最后的安全保障之一，看上去比較好。不久后的一天你也許發現自己獨到一份成長最快，收入最高的職業列表，盡力把自己想象成一位精算師。不是花費幾千美元筑造一個新天地，取而代之，你更可能花這筆錢好好學習。

    職業專家迪克預見了另一個變化。如果作為一個社會，我們將精力放回工作中，如果我們像沉溺于房產和投資那樣對待工作在時代初期，然后我們又會開始問更深入的話題比如我們為什么這么做，我們在做什么。十二月份，波利發現他1970年寫的書又重回最佳銷售量的名單。"你的降落傘是什么顏色的？"這本書是關于求職和轉換工作的，但是同樣涉及了有關你是誰，你想要怎樣的生活這類問題。"為什么人們要爭著去買關于有意義的工作的書籍？"波利問道"因為他們意識到必須重新審視工作如果沒有另一個更好的計劃的話。這又重新提出了另一個問題：什么類型的工作適合我去做？"

    這看起來像是一個完美的結局：衰退的經濟最終讓人們再度認識工作的重要性。不好的是，這又 使工作難找了許多，我們常常在失去的時候才醒悟我們所擁有的有多重要。