財富確實能帶來幸福感，但其他一些東西帶來的幸福感更強

DO A COUNTRY’S inhabitants get happier as it gets richer? Most governments seem to believe so, given their relentless focus on increasing GDP year by year. Reliable, long-term evidence linking wealth and happiness is, however, lacking. And measuring well-being is itself fraught with problems, since it often relies on surveys that ask participants to assess their own levels of happiness subjectively.

一國國民變得更富裕了，就會更幸福嗎?大多數(shù)政府似乎都這么認為，不然它們也不會把重點放在不懈地逐年提高GDP上。然而，沒有可靠的長期證據(jù)顯示財富與幸福感之間存在關聯(lián)。而且衡量幸福感本身就問題重重，因為它往往依賴讓受訪者主觀評估自己幸福感的調查。

Daniel Sgroi of the University of Warwick and Eugenio Proto of the University of Glasgow, both in Britain, think, nevertheless, that they have an answer. By examining millions of books and newspaper articles published since 1820 in four countries (America, Britain, Germany and Italy), they have developed what they hope is an objective measure of each place’s historical happiness. And their answer is that wealth does bring happiness, but some other things bring more of it.

盡管如此，英國華威大學的丹尼爾·斯格羅伊(Daniel Sgroi)和格拉斯哥大學的歐金尼奧·普羅圖(Eugenio Proto)認為他們找到了答案。二人在研究了自1820年以來在四個國家(美國、英國、德國和意大利)出版的數(shù)百萬本書籍和報刊文章后，描繪出了每個國家的幸福感歷史，他們希望這種衡量方式是客觀的。他們的答案是，財富確實能帶來幸福感，但其他一些東西帶來的幸福感更強。

Previous research has shown that people’s underlying levels of happiness are reflected in what they say or write. Dr Sgroi and Dr Proto therefore consulted newspaper archives and Google Books, a collection of more than 8m titles that constitute around 6% of all books physically published. They searched these texts for words that had been assigned a psychological “valence”—a value representing how emotionally positive or negative a word is—while controlling for the changing meanings of words such as “gay” and “awful” (which once most commonly meant “to inspire awe”). The result is the National Valence Index, published earlier this month in Nature Human Behaviour.

先前已有研究表明，人們的內在幸福感體現(xiàn)在他們所說或所寫的內容中。因此，斯格羅伊和普羅圖查閱了報紙檔案和谷歌圖書(Google Books，已有超過800萬種圖書，占所有已出版紙質圖書的6%)。他們在其中搜索被賦予了心理“價”(該值表示一個詞在情感上正面或負面的程度)的詞語，同時把諸如“快樂的”(gay)和“可怕的”(awful，曾經(jīng)最常用的意思是“令人敬畏”)等詞匯在詞義上的變化考慮在內。最終他們得出了國民幸福價指數(shù)(National Valence Index)，于本月稍早時發(fā)表在《自然人類行為》雜志(Nature Human Behaviour)上。

Placed alongside the timeline of history, the valence indices for the places under study show how changes in national happiness reflect important events. In Britain, for example, happiness fell sharply during the two world wars. It began to rise again after 1945, peaked in 1950, and then fell gradually, including through the so-called Swinging Sixties, until it reached a nadir around 1980.

沿歷史時間軸鋪開后，所研究國家的國民幸福價指數(shù)顯示了其國民幸福感的變化與重大事件之間的關聯(lián)。以英國為例，兩次世界大戰(zhàn)期間該國居民幸福感急劇下降。1945年之后又再次上升，到1950年觸頂，之后一直逐漸下降——包括在所謂的“搖擺的六十年代”，直到在1980年前后達到谷底。

America’s national happiness, too, fell during the world wars. It also fell in the 1860s, during and after the country’s civil war. The lowest point of all came in 1975, at the end of a long decline during the Vietnam war, with the fall of Saigon and America’s humiliating defeat.

美國國民的幸福感也在兩次世界大戰(zhàn)期間下降了。19世紀60年代內戰(zhàn)期間及之后的幾年里其國民幸福感同樣出現(xiàn)了下降。越戰(zhàn)期間幸福感長期下滑。1975年，美國在西貢被攻陷后狼狽撤退，同年國民幸福感也跌至該國史上最低水平。

In Germany and Italy the first world war also caused dips in happiness. By contrast, during the second world war these countries both got happier as the war continued. Initially, that might be put down to their early successes, but this can hardly explain German happiness when the Red Army was at the gates of Berlin. The researchers hypothesise that what is being measured here is the result of propaganda and censorship, rather than honest opinion. But they cannot prove this. Earlier in Italian history, though, there was a clear and explicable crash in happiness in 1848, with the failure of revolutions intended to unite into a single nation what were then half a dozen disparate states. Surprisingly, however, successful unification in the 1860s also saw a fall in happiness.

德國和意大利也因第一次世界大戰(zhàn)而幸福感下降。而在二戰(zhàn)期間，隨著戰(zhàn)事的推進，兩國的國民幸福感都提升了。一開始，這或許可被歸因為兩國早期的成功，但蘇聯(lián)紅軍即將攻入柏林之際德國人的幸福感還那么高就很難解釋了。研究人員推測，這里所衡量到的數(shù)據(jù)是政治宣傳和審查制度的結果，而不是真實的想法。但他們無法證實這一點。不過，往前追溯意大利歷史會發(fā)現(xiàn)，在1848年發(fā)生了一次顯而易見且易于解釋的幸福感暴跌：當時旨在統(tǒng)一意大利六個邦國的革命以失敗告終。然而令人驚訝的是，19世紀60年代成功統(tǒng)一后，幸福感也下降了。

As to wealth, the steady progress of the Victorian period matched a steady increase in British happiness, as did the economic boom of the 1920s, which also lifted American spirits. Both countries’ spirits fell again in the Great Depression that followed the stockmarket crash of 1929. After the lows of the 1970s, though, happiness in both has been on the rise ever since.

至于財富的作用，維多利亞時期經(jīng)濟穩(wěn)步發(fā)展的同時，英國的幸福感也在穩(wěn)步提升;20世紀20年代的經(jīng)濟繁榮也一樣，它讓英國人和美國人的精神都有所提振。1929年股市崩盤后的大蕭條期間，兩國的幸福感再次下降。不過，在經(jīng)歷了20世紀70年代的低谷之后，兩國的幸福感一直在上升。

Overall, then, Dr Sgroi and Dr Proto found that happiness does vary with GDP. But the effect of health and life expectancy, which does not have the episodic quality of booms, busts and armed conflict, is larger, even when the tendency of wealth to improve health is taken into account. A one-year increase in longevity, for example, has the same effect on national happiness as a 4.3% increase in GDP. And, as the grand historical sweep suggests, it is warfare that causes the biggest drops in happiness. On average it takes a 30% increase in GDP to raise happiness by the amount that a year of war causes it to fall. The upshot appears to be that, while increasing national income is important to happiness, it is not as important as ensuring the population is healthy and avoiding conflict.?

總體而言，斯格羅伊和普羅圖發(fā)現(xiàn)幸福感確實會隨GDP的變化而改變。但是，健康和預期壽命對幸福感的影響更大(即使考慮到財富增加對健康的促進作用)，這兩者的影響不像繁榮、蕭條和武裝沖突那樣是階段性的。例如，壽命延長一年，對國民幸福感的影響與GDP增長4.3%的影響相同。而且，正如對漫長歷史的探究所顯示的那樣，戰(zhàn)爭導致幸福感下降最多。平均而言，一年的戰(zhàn)爭所導致的幸福感降幅需要GDP增長30%才能拉平。結果似乎是，雖然增加國民收入對提升幸福感很重要，但確保人口健康和避免沖突的作用更大。