标题: 谁说金钱不能买幸福？ [打印本页] 作者: celiahe 时间: 2008-4-9 10:29 标题: 谁说金钱不能买幸福？ Money might not buy you love, but it might be able to buy you happiness. Research by two US economists suggests that richer countries are happier than poorer ones and that as countries get richer their inhabitants become happier.
Conventional wisdom of the past three decades held that higher national gross domestic product often did not translate into a greater overall sense of wellbeing.
This view, known as the Easterlin Paradox after a 1974 paper by economist Richard Easterlin, inspired some calls for governments to shift their focus away from increasing GDP.
At the beginning of this year, French president Nicolas Sarkozy announced an effort to find a new measure for GDP that took a greater account of quality of life.
But a paper by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the Easterlin Paradox is not true.
Prof Wolfers said their dissenting conclusion partly came from improved statistics covering more countries - poor as well as rich - and a greater number of happiness surveys conducted over the past three decades.
The paper will be discussed next week at the Brookings Institution think-tank spring conference.
Prof Easterlin, who has seen the paper, said his paradox still stood. He commended his younger critics' "serious research" but they needed to focus more on happiness in specific countries, rather than "throwing all of these countries together", he said.
Prof Gary Becker, a University of Chicago Nobel prize winner, will comment on the finding at next week's conference.
"I think a lot of people found it politically comforting to find that income only mattered for the very poor and once we satisfied our basic needs it didn't matter," Prof Wolfers said.