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1、Technology and HappinessJames Surowiecki The text is taken from Technology Review, January 2005.1 In the 20th century, Americans, Europeans, and East Asians enjoyed material and technological advances that were unimaginable in previous eras. In the United States, for instance, gross domestic product
2、 per capita tripled from 1950 to 2000. Life expectancy soared. The boom in productivity after World War II made goods better and cheaper at the same time. Things that were once luxuries, such as jet travel and long-distance phone calls, became necessities. And even though Americans seemed to work ex
3、traordinarily hard, their pursuit of entertainment turned media and leisure into multibillion-dollar industries.技术与幸福詹姆斯萨洛维奇20世纪的美国人、欧洲人和东亚人都享受到了过去历代人都无法想象的物质和技术进步带来的乐趣。譬如，在美国，从1950年到2000年国民生产总值翻了3倍。人们的寿命大幅度提高。二战后生产力的迅速发展使商品变得价廉物美。诸如乘飞机旅游和打长途电话等曾经是奢侈的事情成了生活不可或缺的一部分。2 By most standards, then, you wou
4、ld have to say that Americans are better off now than they were in the middle of the last century. Oddly, though, if you ask Americans how happy they are, you find that they are no happier than they were in 1946 (which is when formal surveys of happiness started). In fact, the percentage of people w
5、ho say they are very happy has fallen slightly since the early 1970s even though the income of people born in 1940 has, on average, increased by 116 percent over the course of their working lives. You can find similar data for most developed countries.那么，根据大多数标准衡量，你会说，现在的美国人比上个世纪中叶富裕多了。不过，奇怪的是，如果你问美
6、国人有多幸福，你会发现，他们并不比1946年时幸福（1946年正式开始对幸福状况进行调查）。事实上，那些说自己“非常幸福”的人所占的比例自20世纪70年代以来一直稳中有降尽管20世纪40年代出生的人的收入在他们的工作生涯中平均增长了116。你可以在大多数发达国家找到相似的数据。3 The relationship between happiness and technology has been an eternal subject for social critics and philosophers since the advent of the Industrial Revolution
7、. But its been left largely unexamined by economists and social scientists. The truly groundbreaking work on the relationship between prosperity and well-being was done by the economist Richard Easterlin, who in 1974 wrote a famous paper entitled Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Easterlin
8、 showed that when it came to developed countries, there was no real correlation between a nations income level and its citizens happiness. Money, Easterlin argued, could not buy happiness at least not after a certain point. Easterlin showed that though poverty was strongly correlated with misery, on
9、ce a country was solidly middle-class, getting wealthier did not seem to make its citizens any happier.自工业革命开始以来，幸福与技术之间的关系一直是社会批评家和哲学家们长期研究的课题，然而，基本上还没有受到经济学家和社会学家们的关注。经济学家理查德伊斯特林在经济繁荣和幸福的关系方面进行了具有开拓性的研究，并于1974年发表了一篇题为“经济增长改变人类命运吗？”的著名论文。伊斯特林表明，就发达国家而言，一个国家的收入和国民的幸福之间没有真正的相互关系。伊斯特林认为，金钱买不到幸福，至少在（金钱
10、）达到了一定程度以后是如此。伊斯特林认为，尽管贫穷与苦难密不可分，但是，一个国家一旦达到稳定的中产阶级水平，富有似乎并没有让其国民感到更多的幸福。4 This seems to be close to a universal phenomenon. In fact, one of happiness scholars most important insights is that people adapt very quickly to good news. Take lottery winners for example. One famous study showed that altho
11、ugh winners were very, very happy when they won, their extreme excitement quickly evaporated, and after a while their moods and sense of well-being were indistinguishable from what they had been before the victory.这好像几乎是一种普遍现象。实际上，研究幸福的学者们最重要的观点之一是：人们对好消息很快便习以为常。拿彩票中奖者为例。一项重要的研究表明，尽管买彩票中奖的人中奖时会感到非常非
12、常幸福，可这种兴奋很快就消逝了。一段时间之后，他们的心情和幸福感与中奖之前没有什么两样。5 So, too, with technology: no matter how dramatic a new innovation is, no matter how much easier it makes our lives, it is very easy to take it for granted. You can see this principle at work in the world of technology every day, as things that once seeme
13、d miraculous soon become common and, worse, frustrating when they dont work perfectly. Its hard, it turns out, to keep in mind what things were like before the new technology came along.人们对待技术的态度也是一样的：无论一种新事物多么引人注目，也无论它使我们的生活变得多么舒适，人们都认为这是理所当然的事情。在技术世界，你每天都会看到这一原则起作用。曾经一度被视为非常神奇的东西很快就变得习以为常，更糟的是，当这些
14、东西运转不正常时，还会令人沮丧。要把新技术问世之前的情形牢记在心原来是如此困难！6 Does our fast assimilation of technological progress mean, then, that technology makes no difference? No. It just makes the question of technologys impact, for good or ill, more complicated. Lets start with the downside. There are certain ways in which techn
15、ology makes life obviously worse. Telemarketing, traffic jams, and identity theft all come to mind. These are all phenomena that make people consciously unhappy. But for the most part, modern critiques of technology have focused not so much on specific, bad technologies as the impact of technology on our human relationships.那么，我们对技术进步的快速吸收是否意味着技术没有发挥什么作用呢？不，决非如此。不论好歹，这只是把技术影响的问题变得更加复杂。我们先从负面影响谈起。在某些方面，技术显然使得生活更加糟糕了。譬如，我们马上会想到电话推销、交通阻塞以及身份资料失窃等情况。这些都是让人们明显意识到不幸福的现象。可是，现代的技术评论文章多半都没有把焦点集中在具体的、有害的技术上，而是集中在了技术对人际关系的影响上。7 Privacy has be
