【TED演讲】全球幸福指数（1/9)

英语自学网

Statistician Nic Marks asks why we measure a nation's success by its productivity -- instead of by the happiness and well-being of its people. He introduces the Happy Planet Index, which tracks national well-being against resource use (because a happy life doesn't have to cost the earth). Which countries rank highest in the HPI? You might be surprised.
         
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        Simon Kuznets
       
         
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What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've known for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce.怎么才算改善人类的生活？我们现在面临的一个问题是，那些操纵市场的人是用金钱来定义进步，是用经济来定义进步。某种方法是，只要我们让数值增加，我们就会变得更好，也不管是股票，还是GDP或是经济的增长，只要是增长，我们都能变得更好。这也是用某种方式定义人们的贪婪而不是恐惧，增长就能变得更好。其实，在西方世界，我们拥有的很多，但也有些国家不是。我们很久以来都知道，这不是衡量一个国家福利的好方法。事实是，我国核算系统的创造者，Simon Kuznets在30年代就说：一个国家的福利是很难从收入上去推断的。但当我们建立国家核算系统时就是明确建立在生产力和产量（生产东西）上。确实这个标准可能有些历史了，但也有适用的时候。在二战时，我们必须生产很多东西，我们以前在生产时多么成功以至于我们摧毁了欧洲大部分，然后又不得不自己重建。所以我们的体系就只是建立在计算我们能生产什么东西上。