财富确实能带来幸福感，但其他一些东西带来的幸福感更强

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.

一国国民变得更富裕了，就会更幸福吗?大多数政府似乎都这么认为，不然它们也不会把重点放在不懈地逐年提高GDP上。然而，没有可靠的长期证据显示财富与幸福感之间存在关联。而且衡量幸福感本身就问题重重，因为它往往依赖让受访者主观评估自己幸福感的调查。

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.

尽管如此，英国华威大学的丹尼尔·斯格罗伊(Daniel Sgroi)和格拉斯哥大学的欧金尼奥·普罗图(Eugenio Proto)认为他们找到了答案。二人在研究了自1820年以来在四个国家(美国、英国、德国和意大利)出版的数百万本书籍和报刊文章后，描绘出了每个国家的幸福感历史，他们希望这种衡量方式是客观的。他们的答案是，财富确实能带来幸福感，但其他一些东西带来的幸福感更强。

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，人们的内在幸福感体现在他们所说或所写的内容中。因此，斯格罗伊和普罗图查阅了报纸档案和谷歌图书(Google Books，已有超过800万种图书，占所有已出版纸质图书的6%)。他们在其中搜索被赋予了心理“价”(该值表示一个词在情感上正面或负面的程度)的词语，同时把诸如“快乐的”(gay)和“可怕的”(awful，曾经最常用的意思是“令人敬畏”)等词汇在词义上的变化考虑在内。最终他们得出了国民幸福价指数(National Valence Index)，于本月稍早时发表在《自然人类行为》杂志(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.

沿历史时间轴铺开后，所研究国家的国民幸福价指数显示了其国民幸福感的变化与重大事件之间的关联。以英国为例，两次世界大战期间该国居民幸福感急剧下降。1945年之后又再次上升，到1950年触顶，之后一直逐渐下降——包括在所谓的“摇摆的六十年代”，直到在1980年前后达到谷底。

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.

美国国民的幸福感也在两次世界大战期间下降了。19世纪60年代内战期间及之后的几年里其国民幸福感同样出现了下降。越战期间幸福感长期下滑。1975年，美国在西贡被攻陷后狼狈撤退，同年国民幸福感也跌至该国史上最低水平。

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.

德国和意大利也因第一次世界大战而幸福感下降。而在二战期间，随着战事的推进，两国的国民幸福感都提升了。一开始，这或许可被归因为两国早期的成功，但苏联红军即将攻入柏林之际德国人的幸福感还那么高就很难解释了。研究人员推测，这里所衡量到的数据是政治宣传和审查制度的结果，而不是真实的想法。但他们无法证实这一点。不过，往前追溯意大利历史会发现，在1848年发生了一次显而易见且易于解释的幸福感暴跌：当时旨在统一意大利六个邦国的革命以失败告终。然而令人惊讶的是，19世纪60年代成功统一后，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.

至于财富的作用，维多利亚时期经济稳步发展的同时，英国的幸福感也在稳步提升;20世纪20年代的经济繁荣也一样，它让英国人和美国人的精神都有所提振。1929年股市崩盘后的大萧条期间，两国的幸福感再次下降。不过，在经历了20世纪70年代的低谷之后，两国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.​

总体而言，斯格罗伊和普罗图发现幸福感确实会随GDP的变化而改变。但是，健康和预期寿命对幸福感的影响更大(即使考虑到财富增加对健康的促进作用)，这两者的影响不像繁荣、萧条和武装冲突那样是阶段性的。例如，寿命延长一年，对国民幸福感的影响与GDP增长4.3%的影响相同。而且，正如对漫长历史的探究所显示的那样，战争导致幸福感下降最多。平均而言，一年的战争所导致的幸福感降幅需要GDP增长30%才能拉平。结果似乎是，虽然增加国民收入对提升幸福感很重要，但确保人口健康和避免冲突的作用更大。