Source  language

Target  language

ASK people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: “Old age isn’t so bad when you consider the alternative.” Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world’s careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect—better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread ageing. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

问问人们迈入老年时感觉如何，他们回答的口气可能就跟莫里斯谢瓦利艾一样:”晚年并没有你们年轻时设想的那么糟糕。“关节僵硬，肌肉松弛，视力下降，记忆力衰退，外加上现代社会对老年人的漠不关心，似乎年纪大了就前景不妙了 ，聊生与死，但比死也强不到那里去。可是，人类害怕变老是不对的。生命并不像是从阳光照耀的高出走向死亡之谷，那样的一长段缓缓下降的斜坡，实际上，人生轨迹是一个U型弯。

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness

一般来说，人们即将成年时，都会非常高兴。从青年到中年再到人生低谷，也就是中年危机，情况就有所变化，在走下坡路了。到这一步，大家都很熟悉。此后，就出现了意外变化。虽然步入老年，人们会丢掉他们宝贵的东西，比如青春活力，敏锐的头脑，以及美貌， 但同时他们也得到了人们终生追求的：幸福。

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

这个奇怪的发现来自于经济学的一个新的分支学科的研究分析。该学科探索比金钱更能让人感到幸福的方法。在谈到幸福时，传统经济学只是简单地把金钱看做是一项取得幸福的实用工具，但是一些经济学家并不认同这种看法，他们认为金钱和幸福是直接相关的，因此他们决心深入研究，衡量幸福到底是什么。

These ideas have penetrated the policy arena, starting in Bhutan, where the concept of Gross National Happiness shapes the planning process. All new policies have to have a GNH assessment, similar to the environmental-impact assessment common in other countries. In 2008 France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, asked two Nobel-prize-winning economists, Amartya Sen and Joseph Stiglitz, to come up with a broader measure of national contentedness than GDP. Then last month, in a touchy-feely gesture not typical of Britain, David Cameron announced that the British government would start collecting figures on well-being

上述观点，从不丹开始，已经渗透到了决策领域。不丹的国民幸福指数决定着着规划过程。所有新政策都必须进行国民幸福指数评估，就像是其他国家常用的环境影响的评估一样。2008年，法国总统尼古拉萨科奇要求两个获得诺贝尔奖的经济学家，阿玛蒂亚森和约瑟夫斯蒂格利茨，提交一份比国内生产总值更为全面的全民满意度方案。于是上个月，虽然过于感情化不是英国人的做法，但是英国首相大卫喀麦隆宣布，英国政府将着手收集幸福数据。

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America’s General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of question. One concerns people’s assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

目前，关于幸福这一课题已经收集了许多的数据，比如，美国综合社会调查，欧洲民意调查，以及盖洛普民意测验等。这些调查问卷主要询问两类问题。一个涉及人们对自己生活的评价，另一个询问在特定时间段里，他们的感觉如何。第一个问题沿着这样的一条主线：从总体上认真思索你的生活，你感觉怎样？所问的第二个问题类似于：昨天，你高兴，满意，生气或是焦虑吗？头一个问题据说可以用来衡量全球幸福状况，第二个问题是有关快乐或是感情幸福的。这些调查所得到的回答并非是千篇一律的。比方说，由孩子，让人们对自己的整体生活感觉更好，但同时增加了他们头一天生气或焦虑的几率。

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

统计学家在浩如烟海的数据里艰难搜索，查阅这些调查问卷，有点像矿工在沙里淘金一样无比艰辛。他们想找到“什么让人幸福”，这个反复出现的问题的答案。

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: a fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

似乎有四大因素：性别，性格，外部条件和年龄。总的来说，女人比男人的幸福指数略高一点。但是女人也更易于感到沮丧消沉，20%到25%的女人在其一生中的某些时刻感到沮丧，而这一数字在男性中只占到10%。这就表明不论是女人更有可能经历更多的极端情绪，亦或是比男人痛苦的女人多点，总之，大多数的人还是比较快乐的。

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists’ regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people—those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety—tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people’s mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: they also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

在经济学家复杂的还原分析过程中，体现出了两种性格，神经过敏型和外向型。神经过敏的人群容易感到内疚，生气和焦虑，他们不容易高兴起来。当民意调查员或经济学家问及他们的感情时，这就不仅仅是一个对于人类情绪的一个重复多余的考察了。学生们跟踪调查了许多年，发现这些神经过敏的人性格稳定，还能充分预料到幸福的程度。神经过敏的人不仅易于产生消极情绪，而且情商也比较低，这就使得他们在建立关系和处理关系方面表现欠佳，这些劣势反过来又让他们无法快乐起来。

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: a study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extrovert and happier than the Chinese and Japanese

神经过敏的人易于产生沮丧情绪，反过来，外向行性格的人则容易产生乐观情绪。那些喜欢团队合作，以及喜欢聚会的人比那些大白天把自己关在办公室里，晚上猫在家里不出门的人，更容易感到幸福。这种个性有助于解释一些不同文化之间的文化差异性。一项研究，通过比较英国人，中国人和日本人的表现，发现，从总体上看，英国人比中国人和日本人更加外向，更加幸福。