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幸福不能靠政府

有关政府政策应更明确地聚焦于"增进幸福"的主张，近来正获得支持。支持此种观点的人指出，基于所谓幸福感调查的幸福指标，已停滞了几十年。一个重要的原因是，各国政府着眼于提高一个定义狭隘、以物质为本的经济福利衡量指标，即国民生产总值(GNP)，而非一个更全面的基于幸福的福利指标。
The idea that government policy should be focused more explicitly on promoting happiness has been gaining support. Proponents of this view argue that happiness indicators, based on surveys that purport to measure how happy people feel, have stagnated over decades. An important reason is that governments have aimed to maximise a narrowly defined materially based measure of economic welfare, gross national product, rather than a more holistic indicator of welfare based on happiness.

这一前提显然是错误的。古往今来，政界人士想实现的许多目标，并非旨在提高GNP。例如，最近在英国财政部网站公布的公共服务协议，阐明了政府的承诺，要增加中小学的体育课，鼓励人们参与艺术活动，并减少羊搔痒症的发病率。想必，这并非"曲线"推动经济增长的方式。
This premise is clearly false. Politicians have always sought to achieve many things that are not designed to increase GNP. The most recent public service agreements on the British Treasury website, for example, spell out government commitments to make schoolchildren do more physical education, increase participation in the arts and reduce scrapie in sheep. Presumably these are not just oblique ways of boosting the economy.

幸福趋势几十年停滞不前，也许正说明政府政策总体上是失败的，说明过去50年来，通过政治进程来"改善人类"的努力是徒劳的。但这将是一个令人沮丧的结论。因此，幸福感倡导者把GNP当作替罪羊，主张经济增长与幸福无关，甚至有害。
A decades-long flat happiness trend could be showing that government policies in general fail; that efforts to improve the human lot through the political process over the past 50 years have proved futile. But this would be a depressing conclusion. Instead, happiness advocates make a scapegoat out of GNP and argue that economic growth is irrelevant or detrimental to happiness.

另一种观点是，长期的幸福感数据包含的真正信息很少，甚至完全没有。我们根本不能依赖此类数据作为有用的指标。的确，这些数据并未显示出与一系列显然有望增进幸福的因素具有相关性，例如大幅增加休闲时间，预期寿命更长，以及性别不平等的缩小。
The alternative view is that the happiness data over time contain little or no genuine information. We simply cannot rely on such data as an indicator of anything useful. Indeed, they show no correlation with a whole range of factors that might reasonably be thought to improve well-being, such as a massive increase in leisure time, a tendency to live longer and a decline in gender inequality.

人们往往主张，收入不平等是幸福与否的重要决定因素，而这一"事实"被用作增加累进税收的理由。然而，在收入不平等加剧或减缓期间，我们没有发现幸福感数据有任何变化。我们还被告知，近数十年来，忧郁症发病率大幅上升，但幸福指标并未出现与之对应的下降。
Income inequality is often claimed to be a strong determinant of happiness, and this "fact" used to argue for more progressive taxation. Yet we do not see any change in recorded happiness when inequality goes up or down. We are also told there has been a large rise in depression in recent decades, but this is not reflected by a downturn in measured happiness.

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