What’s the best country in the world to live in? Is it the one with the best food? The longest life expectancy? The best weather? For the past 70 years, most governments have relied heavily on a single number to answer that question. This number influences elections, the stock market, and government policy. But it was never intended for its current purpose; and some would argue that the world is addicted to making it grow... forever. This number is called the Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, and it was invented by the economist Simon Kuznets in the 1930s, to try and gauge the size of an economy in a single, easy to understand number.
世界上哪个国家最宜居? 是食物最好的国家吗? 还是寿命最长的国家? 抑或是气候最好的国家? 在过去的七十年里, 要回答这个问题,多数政府 主要依据一项数据, 该数据会影响选举、 股市和政府政策, 但其目的从来不是当下; 有些人会争辩说世界沉迷于 让它增长,永远增长下去, 这个数字被称为 国内生产总值,即 GDP , 二十世纪三十年代由经济学家 西蒙·库兹涅茨(Simon Kuznets)发明, 试图用一个易理解的单一数字 来衡量经济体的规模。
GDP is the total monetary value of everything a country produces and sells on the market. To this day, GDP per capita, which is just the total GDP divided by the number of people living in that country, is widely seen as a measure of well-being.
GDP 是一个国家在市场上生产 和销售的所有物品的货币总值, 时至今日,人均国内生产总值, 即 GDP 总额除以该国居民人口数, 被广泛视为衡量福祉的指标。
But GDP doesn’t actually say anything direct about well-being, because it doesn't take into account what a country produces or who has access to it. A million dollars of weapons contributes the exact same amount to a country’s GDP as a million dollars of vaccines or food. The value society derives from things like public school or firefighters isn’t counted in GDP at all, because those services aren’t sold on the market. And if a country has a lot of wealth, but most of it is controlled by relatively few people, GDP per capita gives a distorted picture of how much money a typical person has.
但 GDP 其实未直接反映福祉, 因为它不包括一个国家生产了什么 或谁可以获得它。 百万美元的武器 对一个国家 GDP 的贡献, 与百万美元的疫苗或食品完全相同。 而公立学校或消防员的 社会价值并未计入 GDP, 因为这些服务不在市场上出售。 如果一个国家拥有大量财富, 但大部分财富由相对较少的人控制, 那么人均 GDP 就不能真实反映 一个普通人真正拥有多少钱。
Despite all that, for a long time, higher GDP did correlate closely to a higher quality of life for people in many countries. From 1945 to 1970, as GDP doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in some western economies, people’s wages often grew proportionally. By the 1980s, this changed. Countries continued to grow richer, but wages stopped keeping pace with GDP growth, or in some cases, even declined, and most of the benefits went to an ever-smaller percentage of the population.
尽管如此,长期以来, 较高的 GDP 确实与许多国家人民的 较高生活质量密切相关。 从 1945 年到 1970 年, 一些西方经济体的 GDP 翻了一番、三倍、甚至四倍, 人们的工资往往成比例地增长。 到了二十世纪八十年代, 这种情况发生了变化, 国家继续变得更加富裕, 但工资不再随 GDP 同步增长, 或者在某些情况下甚至下降, 而且大部分福利流向 越来越小的人口比例。
Still, the idea of capturing a nation’s well-being in a single number had powerful appeal. In 1972, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk of Bhutan came up with the idea of Gross National Happiness as an alternative to Gross Domestic Product. Gross National Happiness is a metric that factors in matters like health, education, strong communities, and living standards, having citizens answer questions like, “How happy do you think your family members are at the moment?” “What is your knowledge of names of plants and wild animals in your area?” and “What type of day was yesterday?” The United Nations’ Human Development Index is a more widely used metric; it takes into account health and education, as well as income per capita to estimate overall well-being.
尽管如此,用一个数字来衡量 一个国家福祉的想法 仍然具有强大的吸引力。 1972 年,不丹国王吉格梅·辛格· 旺楚克(Jigme Singye Wangchuk) 提出了以国民幸福总值 作为国内生产总值的替代方案。 国民幸福总值是一个衡量 诸如健康、教育、强大社区 和生活水平等因素的指标, 通过公民回答诸如以下问题得出: “你认为你的家人现在有多幸福?” “您对所在地区的植物 和野生动物名称了解多少?” “昨天过得怎么样? ” 联合国的人类发展指数 是一个更广泛使用的指标, 它通过健康和教育, 以及人均收入来估计总体福祉。
Meanwhile, a metric called the Sustainable Development Index factors in both well-being and the environmental burdens of economic growth, again, boiling all this down to a single number. Though no country has been able to meet the basic needs of its people while also using resources fully sustainably, Costa Rica currently comes the closest. Over the past few decades, it’s managed to grow its economy and improve living standards substantially without drastically increasing its emissions. Other countries, like Colombia and Jordan, have made notable progress. Costa Rica now has better well-being outcomes like life expectancy than some of the world’s richest countries.
而一项称为可持续发展指数的指标 则将福祉和经济增长对环境的影响 同时都考虑在内, 同样,将所有这些归结为一个数字。 尽管没有一个国家 能够在充分可持续地利用资源的同时 满足其人民的基本需求, 但哥斯达黎加目前是最接近的。 在过去的几十年里, 它成功地发展了经济, 并大幅提高了生活水平, 而环保排放却没有大幅增加。 其他国家,如哥伦比亚和约旦, 也取得了显著进展。 目前,哥斯达黎加 比世界上一些最富裕的国家 福祉更好,例如预期寿命。
Ultimately, there are limits to any approach that boils the quality of life in a country down to a single number. Increasingly, experts favor a dashboard approach that lays out all the factors a single number obscures. This approach makes even more sense given that people have different priorities, and the answer to which country is best to live in depends on who’s asking the question.
归根结底,将一个国家的生活质量 归结为一个数字的任何方法 都是有限度的。 专家们越来越青睐仪表板方法, 该方法罗列了单一数字 无法概括的所有因素。 考虑到人们的优先事项不同, 这种方法更有意义, 而“哪个国家最宜居”的答案 会取决于是谁提出的问题。
So what if that were you designing your countries well-being metric? What do you value, and what would you measure?
那么,若由你设计所在国家 或地区的福祉指标,你会怎么做? 你会看重什么,你会去衡量什么?