氯霉素洗剂网上卖:从金钱到快乐

从金钱到快乐

Is well-being about to take the place of GDP as the arbiter of economic health? Those in the know – including godfather of well-being Joseph Stiglitz – offer their expert insights.

幸福会作为经济健康的仲裁者而取代GDP的位置吗？包括约瑟夫斯蒂格利茨教父在内的专家提供了他们的见解。

Teaching British civil servants how to be happy is not what you’d expect from a Pennsylvania professor of psychology. But helping Whitehall understand well-being is precisely what Marty Seligman was doing this summer in London.

你不要期待从宾夕法尼亚州的心理学教授那里得到教育英国公务员如何快乐。但是帮助白厅理解幸福正是马蒂塞利格曼今年夏天在伦敦所做的。

Seligman has a history of getting into tricky places. The expert in positive psychology was hired by the US Army to develop a ‘resilience program’ to help soldiers cope better with the stress of combat. Now he’s trying to help the rest of the world become content. And governments are listening.

塞利格曼在处理棘手问题上很有经验。美军曾雇佣这位积极心理学专家来改进“恢复项目”以帮助士兵更好地应付作战的压力。现在他正在帮助世界各地的人更知足，政府也在看效果如何。

As recession bites hard in the major economies, governments are trying to find new ways of judging their societies – not by the amount of money they generate, but by the happiness of their citizens. In February 2012, experts from the world’s most developed countries will gather in Paris for a key summit on the issue. The brightest minds are spending time, money, and effort trying to make something they don’t fully understand yet actually work. “You cannot capture happiness on a spreadsheet,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron. So why bother at all?

由于主要经济体内的经济衰退的打击，政府正在努力寻找新的方法来判断其社会，不是由数量钱，而是由其公民的幸福来判断。2012年二月，世界上最发达的国家的专家将齐聚巴黎参加峰会来讨论这个问题。这些精英正花费时间、金钱和精力来努力去弄明白这件使他们不完全理解但实际上起作用的事情。“你无法通过数据表来抓住幸福。”英国首相戴维卡梅伦如是说。为什么呢？

Until now, our lives have been ruled by one measure: Gross domestic product, or GDP. A recession, for instance, is defined as two consecutive quarterly falls in GDP – but what does that actually mean?

到现在，我们的生活都是通过一个指标，即国内生产总值，或GDP来衡量。以经济衰退为例，它定义为国内生产总值连续两季度的下降，但那到底是什么意思？

The idea of a single number to show a country’s economic power came from US economist Simon Kuznets. It was 1937, and the US was emerging from the Great Depression. Kuznets’ idea, presented to Congress that year, was simple: Measure all production by companies, people, and government. That would give a big number that represented everything the economy produced. It would go up in good times, and down in bad.

用单一数据来体现一个国家的经济实力的想法源于美国经济学家西蒙·库兹涅茨。这是在1937年提出的，那时美国正经历经济大萧条。库兹涅茨提交给国会的想法很简单：通过公司、个人和政府来衡量所有的生产。这为一切经济生产带来了很多东西，它会在好的时候上升，在坏的时候下降。

What GDP misses, however, is arguably more important than what it includes. Robert Kennedy argued that GDP “does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It measures neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” Even Kuznets agreed that “the welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”

然而，GDP所缺失的信息比它所带来的更为重要。罗伯特甘乃迪认为，GDP并没有考虑到我们孩子的健康、教育质量，或者他们的快乐。它既不能衡量我们的智慧和学习，也不能衡量我们的同情和对国家的奉献。它只是对每个部分都进行简单的衡量，而不包括那些使生活有意义的部分。库兹涅茨认为，“国家的福利无法通过国民收入来衡量。”

And it is a perverse measure. Because GDP is all about production, it doesn’t take account of the state of the environment, inequality between rich and poor, the value of an individual economy’s assets, and how sustainable the growth actually is. If you have a major disaster, such as the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico for instance, it will actually have a positive effect on GDP as the economy works to recover.

这是一个有悖常理的措施。因为国内生产总值只是关于生产，它没有考虑环境状况，贫富差距，个人经济资产的价值，以及实际上如何可持续增长。如果遇到一个大的灾难，如英国石油公司在墨西哥湾的石油泄漏，运行的恢复实际上会产生积极的影响。

It is the baleful influence of GDP that motivates the godfather of well-being, Professor Joseph Stiglitz. The Nobel Prize-winning former World Bank Chief Economist and Columbia professor points out that an obsession with GDP actually helped push the US into the housing bubble that burst so spectacularly. “In the years before the crisis, many people in Europe were saying they ought to follow the American model as GDP growth was greater. As an American, I was a little bit sensitive to some of the weak points – the fact that most Americans were worse off year by year, our growth was based on a bubble, and prices were distorted,” he says.

国内生产总值的负面影响促进了幸福的发展。诺贝尔奖得主，前世界银行首席经济学家和哥伦比亚教授斯蒂格利茨指出，对国内生产总值的迷信实际上帮助推动美国的房地产泡沫惊人的破裂。“在危机前的几年中，欧洲很多人说，因为GDP的增长剧烈，他们应该遵循美国模式。作为一个美国人，我对其中的一些弱点有点敏感，其实大多数美国人的状况一年比一年糟糕，我们的增长是基于一个泡沫和价格扭曲，”他这么说。

“That was quite a dramatic illustration because now people realize the growth the US had was not sustainable and was going to only a small group of the population. Today, you don’t hear that argument much.”

“这真是一个戏剧性的例子，因为现在人们意识到美国的增长是不可持续的，并将只是人口中的一小部分。今天，你不会听到太多这样的说法。”

The answer is to measure something else – but something broader than ‘happiness.’ Happiness is intangible; well-being, on the other hand, is measurable in the same way that our economy is.

答案是要求衡量其他的东西，比快乐更宽广的东西。快乐是无形的；另一方面，幸福同我们的经济一样是可衡量的。

It was French president Nicolas Sarkozy who asked Stiglitz to look at other ways to measure how well a nation was doing as part of the country’s presidency of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Well-being is now being examined in the US, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, and Spain. There are parliamentary commissions looking into the issue in Germany, Norway, and Denmark. The OECD has also launched its Better Life Index, where users can go online to compare countries across a range of indicators from wealth and crime to housing and inequality.

这是法国总统尼古拉斯·萨科齐让斯蒂格利茨去寻找其他来衡量一个国家是如何在经济合作与发展组织（经合组织）中发挥积极作用的方式。美国，加拿大，澳大利亚，法国，意大利和西班牙等国都在研究幸福。在德国，挪威和丹麦，委员会议员也在探讨这个问题。经合组织也推出了更好的生活指数，用户可以在网上比较各国在各种指标，范围从财富和犯罪到住房和不平等。

In the UK, David Cameron has taken a personal interest in the issue, ordering national statistician Jill Matheson of the Office for National Statistics to organize a $3.2 million-a-year project to work out how to measure well-being. The UK project is led by policy wonk David Halpern, a key part of Cameron’s Downing Street brain trust and head of the Behavioural Insight Team. Halpern previously worked for Tony Blair’s Labour administration.

在英国，戴维卡梅伦对这个问题很感兴趣，他下令国家统计局的统计员吉尔马西森负责一个一年经费为3.2百万美元的项目以解决如何衡量幸福。英国的项目是由主管政策的戴维哈本领导，他是卡梅伦英国政府的智囊团和行为洞察团队的关键人物。哈本曾为托尼布莱尔的工党政府工作。

While Blair debated the issue and ordered research, very little actually happened. But Cameron, watching from the Opposition benches, took it all in. Halpern says the project “has a profoundly democratic element to it because it’s driven by what people really want. Only a small part of your life is spent in paid employment,” he adds. “When we spend time with our friends or watch TV, those things are very consequential but we don’t measure them.”

尽管布莱尔讨论这个问题并下令研究，但收效甚微。但从反对派来看，卡梅伦接受了这一切。哈本说：“这个项目有一个深刻的民主元素，这是因为它是人们真正想要的。你的生命中只有一小部分是在有偿就业，”他补充道。“当我们花时间与我们的朋友在一起或看电视，这些事情是非常重要我们不予衡量。”

For Jill Matheson, it’s a chance to make a difference. The ONS has already started surveying 200,000 people about their level of fulfillment, anxiety, and stress – the so-called ‘subjective’ measures – in its annual Integrated Household Survey. She has also produced a major report into how to look at ‘objective’ measures – wealth, income, childhood, and inequality. In October this year, the ONS will produce a detailed report on how it proposes to measure these factors.

对吉尔马西森来说，这是一个改变世界的机会。国家统计局已经开始对20万人的成就感、焦虑和压力这些所谓的“主观”标准进行年度综合家庭调查。她还针对财富、收入、童年和不平等作了一个如何看待“客观”标准的报告。今年十月，国家统计局将出一个如何衡量这些因素的详细的报告。

Matheson dismisses the media’s verdict that this subject is ‘woolly,’ giving results that will be ill-defined compared to the hard data gathered by GDP. “It puzzles me,” she says. “I don’t know what is woolly about asking people about their lives; you can measure these things. When people start seeing results, that label will disappear.” Marty Seligman agrees that it can be measured “about as well as schizophrenia, depression, and alcoholism. [It’s] far from perfect, but psychometrically respectable.”

马西森否认媒体说这个主题是含糊不清的结论，并认为这是与GDP的数据相比较得来的结果。“我很困惑，”她说。“我不知道确切要求人们对他们的生活哪一方面，你可以衡量这些东西。当人们开始看到成果，定义也会消失。”马蒂塞利格曼同意，对于精神分裂症、抑郁症和酗酒可以测量的。这远非完美，但对于心理测验学来说是可以接收的。”

But it seems unlikely that we will ever get a single ‘happiness index’ – one number that shows how happy we all are in the way GDP shows our wealth. Not least because the international community could never agree on one. “We’re a long way off a single indicator,” says Matheson.

但是让我们像国内生产总值那样只用一个“幸福指数”来表示我们多么快乐似乎不太可能，尤其是因为国际社会在这上面还未达成统一。“我们还有很长的路要走。”马西森说。

Stiglitz agrees, and doesn’t believe there should ever be one. “No single indicator would be adequate to describe what’s going on,” he says. “If you were driving you might want to know two things: How fast you’re going, say 50 miles per hour; and how far you can go without running out of gas, say 150 miles. While each of those two numbers is individually very meaningful, if you add them together you would have a figure that was totally meaningless.”

斯蒂格利茨对此表示同意并认为不止有一个。“只用一个指标不足以说明这是怎么回事，”他说。“如果你驾驶你可能会想知道两点：速度是多少，是每小时50英里；加一次油能跑多远，是150英里。虽然单看每个人的两个数据都是非常有意义的，但如果把他们加在一起得到一个数据却是完全没有意义的。”

But how can you get politicians and – more importantly – their treasuries to take notice? According to David Halpern, having a well-being measure could have a powerful influence on policy. For example, take moves by central government in the UK to cut costs by closing post offices. “Post offices are expensive, so the answer has been to shut them down. But do they do something else, which we don’t capture?” Halpern asks.

但你怎么能让政治家以及一些更重要的人注意到呢？戴维哈本认为，在政策上实施幸福措施可以产生强大的影响力。例如，在英国可以采取通过关闭邮局行动来削减成本。“邮局是昂贵的，所以答案是关闭他们。但会不会因此带来其他我们无法了解的东西？”哈本问。

Confounding the suggestion that the well-being debate is an idea for the rich West, Stiglitz argues that it is even more important for developing nations. For instance, a company destroying a country’s environment could pump up that country’s GDP, leaving very little money going back into the economy, and thus damaging national well-being. “Some of the biggest disparities between GDP and well-being occur in developing countries,” he says.

把幸福辩论的建议综合考虑是西方社会的想法，斯蒂格利茨认为，这对发展中国家是更为重要的。例如，一个公司摧毁一国环境可以使这一国家的国内生产总值激增，投入到经济的钱却很少，从而损害国家的幸福指数。他说：“一些最大的差异发生在发展中国家的国内生产总值和幸福指数上。”

Marty Seligman, whose positive psychology theories are being trialed in both US and UK schools, says the moves are encouraging but may not go far enough. Talking about the UK in particular, he says: “Number 10 is seriously interested in the measurement of well-being and the possibility of judging public policy by its effect. It is scientifically informed, which is a good first step. But well-being for a nation, or flourishing for an individual, is more than just the subjective judgment of life satisfaction.” This is Seligman’s PERMA theory: Positive Emotion; Engagement; Relationships; Meaning; and Accomplishment.