读新闻练BEC中级阅读 (25).docx

读新闻练BEC中级阅读 (25)有关政府政策应更明确地聚焦于“增进幸福“的主见，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缘由是，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. 这一前提明显是错误的。

古往今来，政界人士想实现的很多目标，并非旨在提高GNP例如，最近在英国财政部网站公布的公共效劳协议，说明了政府的，要增加中小学的体育课，鼓舞人们参加艺术活动，并削减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，或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。

但这将是一个令人懊丧的结论因此，幸福感提倡者把GNP当作替罪羊，主见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靠此类数据作为有用的指标确实，这些数据并未显示出与一系列明显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，以及性别不公平的缩小。

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. 人们往往主见，收入不公平是幸福与否的重要打算因素，而这一“事实“被用作增加累进税收的理由然而，在收入不公平加剧或减缓期间，我们没有发觉幸福感数据有任何变化我们还被告知，近数十年来，愁闷症发病率大幅上升，但幸福指标并未消失与之对应的下降。

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. 有时候，我们被告知，幸福程度之所以没有上升，是由于家庭和邻里关系裂开在抵消经济增长的好处但是，根据这种说法的规律，决策者应当无动于衷，由于以这种“全面“的幸福指标来衡量，我们并没有比以前变得更糟就连最阴沉的正统经济学家也不会声称，物质财宝可以替代亲情 Sometimes we are told that happiness has failed to increase because the benefits of economic growth have been offset by a breakdown in family and community relationships. But the normative implication of this argument is that policymakers should be indifferent because, by this supposedly all- encompassing measure of welfare, we are no worse off than we were before. Not even the most dismal orthodox economist would claim that material wealth is a substitute for kinship. 政府试图提高幸福指标，而非提高我们的生活水平，这种做法很可能适得其反：设立武断的目标，分散了公务员的核心职能；向很多人传递一个信息：幸福来自国家政策，而非我们自己的努力；以及为政府制造压力，要求政府提高一个指标，而这个指标以往从未对任何政策或社会经济变化做出系统性反响。

这些正是一切瞄准目标的心态的错误所在，这种心态正充满英国公共领域我们应当从这些错误中吸取教训，而非重复它们 Government attempts to increase measured happiness, rather than making life better for us, may well do the opposite: create arbitrary objectives that divert civil service energies from core responsibilities; give many people the message that happiness emanates from national policy rather than our own efforts; and create pressure for government to appear to increase an indicator that has never before shifted systematically in response to any policy or socioeconomic change. These are exactly the mistakes of the target-driven mentality that now pervades the British public sector. We should learn from these rather than replicate them. 从更阴暗的角度看，这个世界的幸福观具有内在的反民主倾向。

拿着笔记板、把握统计学问的专家比一般人更清晰是什么让他们“幸福“因此，他们能够“理直气壮“地*当地民主决策或个人决策由于从外表上看，增进幸福是一个无可辩驳的目标，它可以压倒对某些政策的反对，而实际上，这些政策构成政治上永久存在的特别真实的困难选择 More sinisterly, the happiness view of the world has tendencies that are inherently anti-democratic. The expert with his or her clipboard and regressions knows better than ordinary people themselves what makes them happy. So local democratic or individual decisions can be overridden with a clean conscience. Because, at face value, promoting happiness is an incontestable aim, it would be ideal for steamrolling opposition to policies that, on closer inspection, pose the same very real tough choices that are a continual presence in politics. 国民生产总值并不是包含一切的福利指标；它只是衡量经济的规模。

它还没有纳入很多对我们的幸福颇为重要的因素这些因素的维系，要依靠一个强大。