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国民幸福总值
Reading between the lines
字里行间寻幸福
Books reveal a country’s historical sense of its own well-being
书籍揭示了一个国家国民幸福感的历史变化
DO A COUNTRY’Sinhabitantsget happier as it gets richer? Most governments seem to believe so, given theirrelentless focus on increasing GDP year by year. Reliable, long-term evidence linking wealth and happiness is, however, lacking. And measuring well-being is itselffraught with problems, since it often relies on surveys that ask participants to assess their own levels of happinesssubjectively.
一国国民变得更富裕了，就会更幸福吗？大多数似乎都这么认为，不然它们也不会把重点放在不懈地逐年提高GDP上。然而，没有可靠的长期证据显示财富与幸福感之间存在关联。而且衡量幸福感本身就问题重重，因为它往往依赖让受访者主观评估自己幸福感的调查。
Daniel Sgroi of the University of Warwick and Eugenio Proto of the University of Glasgow, both in Britain, think,nevertheless, that they have an answer. By examining millions of books and newspaper articles published since 1820 in four countries (America, Britain, Germany and Italy), they have developed what they hope is an objective measure of each place’s historical happiness. And their answer is that wealth does bring happiness, but some other things bring more of it.
尽管如此，英国华威大学的丹尼尔·斯格罗伊（Daniel Sgroi）和格拉斯哥大学的欧金尼奥·普罗图（Eugenio Proto）认为他们找到了答案。二人在研究了自1820年以来在四个国家（美国、英国、德国和意大利）出版的数百万本书籍和报刊文章后，描绘出了每个国家的幸福感历史，他们希望这种衡量方式是客观的。他们的答案是，财富确实能带来幸福感，但其他一些东西带来的幸福感更强。
Previous research has shown that people’s underlying levels of happiness are reflected in what they say or write. Dr Sgroi and Dr Proto therefore consulted newspaper archives and Google Books, a collection of more than 8m titles that constitute around 6% of all books physically published. They searched these texts for words that had beenassigneda psychological“valence”—a value representing how emotionally positive or negative a word is—while controlling for the changing meanings of words such as“gay”and“awful”(which once most commonly meant“to inspire awe”). The result is the National Valence Index, published earlier this month in Nature Human Behaviour.

先前已有研究表明，人们的内在幸福感体现在他们所说或所写的内容中。因此，斯格罗伊和普罗图查阅了报纸档案和谷歌图书（Google Books，已有超过800万种图书，占所有已出版纸质图书的6%）。他们在其中搜索被赋予了心理“价”（该值表示一个词在情感上正面或负面的程度）的词语，同时把诸如“快乐的”（gay）和“可怕的”（awful，曾经常用的意思是“令人敬畏”）等词汇在词义上的变化考虑在内。终他们得出了国民幸福价指数（National Valence Index），于本月稍早时发表在《自然人类行为》杂志（Nature Human Behaviour）上。