Policy and the pursuit of happiness

双语|政策|目标|a+|happiness---傻大方小编总结的关键词

Money can’t buy me love,” sang The Beatles, although it is doubtful that this was a rigorous empirical claim. Still, nobody disputes that there’s more to life than money and a new book, The Origins of Happiness , argues that happiness should be a guide to government policy.

“金钱不能为我买来爱”，披头士乐队(The Beatles)唱道，尽管它很可能不是一种严谨的经验主义断言。话虽如此，没人否认人生中还有比金钱更重要的东西，而新书《幸福的起源》(The Origins of Happiness)主张，幸福应该是政府政策的一项指南。

Two years ago this would have been part of the zeitgeist: one of Barack Obama’s senior advisers, the economist Alan Krueger, was a noted expert in “subjective wellbeing” (happiness to you and me), while former UK prime minister David Cameron also championed the idea. It now seems strangely out of step with the times: whatever you think is driving Britain’s current PM Theresa May or US president Donald Trump, it seems unlikely to be surveys of life satisfaction.

若是在两年前，这会是时代精神的一部分：巴拉克?奥巴马(Barack Obama)的高级顾问之一、经济学家艾伦?克鲁格(Alan Krueger)是“主观幸福感”方面的一位著名专家，而英国前首相戴维?卡梅伦(David Cameron)也支持这一想法。现在这一想法奇怪地看上去与时代脱节：无论你认为是什么理念在驱动英国现首相特里萨?梅(Theresa May)或美国总统唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)，似乎都不太可能是对生活满意度的调查。

Still, it is easy to sympathise with Thomas Jefferson’s remark, shortly after he stepped down as US president, that “The care of human life & happiness, & not their destruction, is the first & only legitimate object of good government.”

话虽如此，人们很容易对托马斯?杰斐逊(Thomas Jefferson)在卸任美国总统不久后的言论产生共鸣：“关怀人的生命安全及幸福，而不是破坏他们，应该是一个良好的政府的首要的、唯一的正当的目的。”

The question is what that means for government policy — and whether the academic study of wellbeing can help.

问题是，这对政府政策来说意味着什么？关于幸福的学术研究能否起到帮助作用？

The five authors of The Origins of Happiness, including Professor Richard Layard of the London School of Economics, focus on answers to the question “Overall, how satisfied are you with your life these days?” on a scale of 0-10.

包括伦敦经济学院(LSE)教授理查德?莱亚德(Richard Layard)在内，《幸福的起源》的五位作者研究了针对“总体而言，你对自己近来的生活有多满意？”这个问题在0分至10分范围给出的打分。

It’s not an absurd question, but if a group of academics proposed reforming a nation’s economic institutions and industrial strategy on the basis of answers to the question, “Overall, how rich do you think you are these days, on a scale of 0-10?” we might reasonably object that our evidence base was too fuzzy to provide much guidance.

这不是一个荒谬的问题，但如果一群学者依据对于“在0分至10分范围，总体而言，你对自己当下的富裕程度的打分是多少？”这个问题的回答，提议改革一个国家的经济体制和产业战略，我们也许会合理地反驳称，我们的证据基础过于模糊，无法提供太多的指导。

Nor is it clear whether someone moving from three to four on the scale is enjoying the same boost to happiness as someone moving from seven to eight. And what does “10” really mean? Is it literally impossible to become happier from there — or, Spinal Tap-style, should there be room to go up to 11?

同样也不清楚的是，从3分提高到4分的人所感受到的幸福感提升幅度，是否跟从7分提高到8分的人一样。“10分”到底是什么意思？在10分基础上不可能变得更幸福——抑或应该有上升到11分的空间？

These questions might trouble only the philosophers, except that Lord Layard and his co-authors write of a “revolution in policymaking” based on findings such as “an extra year of education directly raises your own happiness by 0.03 points on average throughout life”. This suggests a confident policy swagger that I confess to lacking myself.

这些问题也许只会困扰哲学家，只是莱亚德勋爵和他的合著者们写到一场“政策制定的革命”，而依据是诸如“增加一年教育可以让你一生的幸福度平均提高0.03点”之类的研究发现。这暗示一种政策自信；我承认自己缺乏这种自信。

Still, a meagre kind of knowledge is better than no knowledge at all, and it would be wilful to ignore what people tell us about how they are feeling. So what do we learn?

尽管如此，点滴的知识要好过一无所知，而忽视人们向我们吐露的感受将是不厚道的。那么我们学到了什么?

First, we have a love-hate relationship with our jobs. We know from panel data (interviewing the same people more than once over time) that being unemployed is miserable and stays miserable for many years. This is a good argument in favour of policies that promote low unemployment — something Japan, Germany, the UK and the US have managed to do, and France, Italy and Spain have not.

首先，我们对自己的工作爱恨交加。我们从讨论小组数据（在一段时间内对相同对象进行多次访谈）了解到，失业带来痛苦，而且会让人痛苦很多年。这是支持促进低失业率政策的好理由——日本、德国、英国和美国已成功地做到这一点，而法国、意大利和西班牙则没有。

But while unemployment is depressing, work itself is no paradise. Self-employed people are happier than employed people by the same margin that unemployed people are less happy. And Mr Krueger and Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman have shown that of all the day-to-day activities we engage in, commuting and work are the least enjoyable — while of all the people we spend time with, colleagues are bad and bosses are worse.

可是，尽管失业令人沮丧，但工作本身并不是天堂。自雇人士比雇员更幸福的程度，与雇员比失业者更幸福的程度相当。克鲁格和诺贝尔经济学奖得主、心理学家丹尼尔?卡尼曼(Daniel Kahneman)已证明，在我们参与的所有日常活动中，通勤和工作是带给我们乐趣最少的——而在与我们相处的所有人当中，同事很糟糕，老板更糟糕。

The answer, of course, is more jobs, and better jobs, please. And for that matter, it seems that more time in satisfying romantic relationships would also help — but I prefer to leave the government out of that.

答案当然是：请给我们更多的工作和更好的工作。就此而言，在令人满意的浪漫关系中度过美好时光也会有帮助——但我不希望政府管到这个层面。

Lord Layard and his colleagues argue in general for evaluating government spending using “a method of cost-effectiveness in which the benefits are measured in units of happiness”. Some policies — such as providing ready-mix concrete floors to poor households in Mexico — pass this test easily. Others do not.

莱亚德勋爵和他的同事们笼统地主张，要用“一种用幸福单位来衡量效益的性价比方法”来评估政府支出。有些政策——比如为墨西哥的贫困家庭提供预拌混凝土地板——很容易通过这项测试。也有些政策不能。

Lord Layard has long been an advocate of devoting more resources to treatment for depression and anxiety. He is right. Even a modest success rate would go a long way here.

长期以来，莱亚德勋爵一直提倡投入更多资源治疗抑郁症和焦虑症。他说对了。在这方面，即便是中度的成功率也会提供很大帮助。

But beyond that, much depends on the capacity of government to deliver what matters. Better schools, we’re told, improve the emotional wellbeing of children, which is an excellent investment in happiness. Fine, but nobody is in favour of worse schools and the researchers confess to knowing very little about what features of a school are correlated with happy pupils.

但除此之外，很多事情取决于政府交付重要目标的能力。我们被告知，更好的学校可以改善儿童的情绪健康，这是对幸福感的一种极好投资。不错，但没有人赞成更糟糕的学校，研究人员承认，对于学校的哪些特点与小学生的幸福感存在关联，他们知之甚少。

There is much in the idea of an activist happiness policy to amuse or horrify anyone with laissez-faire instincts. But to the extent that we think governments can sometimes bodge their way into bettering the human condition, there’s a case to look at what people say makes them happy with their lives.

出台活动人士般的幸福政策——这个构想让怀有自由放任本能的任何人既感到有趣，也感到恐惧。但是，就我们认为政府有时会拙劣地试图改善人类状况而言，有理由看一看人们说哪些东西让他们感受到人生幸福。

As a cautionary note, however, I offer economist Adam Smith’s warning against the person who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chessboard”. Whether a politician seeks to maximise national income or national happiness, Smith’s critique rings just as true.

然而，作为一种警示，我想援引经济学家亚当?斯密(Adam Smith)的话，他曾警告某些人“似乎想象自己能够轻松地安排一个庞大社会中的不同成员，就像手在棋盘上安放棋子一样”。无论一个政治人物是在寻求国民收入还是国民幸福的最大化，史密斯的精辟之言听上去都是中肯的。