Money Cant Buy Happiness. Er, Can It?
Money Can't Buy Happiness. Er, Can It? 金钱能够购买幸福吗？你说说看。经济学家的笔触也是很散文化的，读来动人......Money Can't Buy Happiness. Er, Can It?By PAUL KRUGMANCAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A few weeks ago my wife and I finally gave in to the pressures of modern life and acquired a cell phone. But it turned out that once we had the thing we had a few questions -- questions we couldn't get answered, because customer service was swamped with similar calls from the thousands of other people who had recently signed on. Meanwhile, my parents started calling contractors about some minor work on their house -- only to be told that every carpenter and plumber in the area was booked well into next year. Talk to almost any middle-CLASS American, and you will hear similar stories -- about poor service, excessive traffic, overpriced housing and so on. In fact, there seems to be a sort of rising chorus of complaints about the annoyances of prosperity -- complaints, in effect, that spending lots of money isn't as gratifying as people expected it to be. Most of this is petty stuff, but it is just possible that the chorus of complaints marks the beginning of a broader shift in attitudes -- a shift that will be healthy if it doesn't come too quickly. Of course, people don't complain about the disappointments of prosperity unless they are prosperous, and in a way all this whining is a symptom of a remarkably successful era in American economic history. Still, you don't have to be an ascetic to wonder if there isn't something a bit manic about the pace of getting and -- especially -- spending in fin-de-siècle America. Even the dry statistics suggest that something a little strange is going on. Consider: we are now eight years into an economic expansion. Consumer spending traditionally lags behind the economy as a whole in boom times, because families figure that times will not always be that good and that they should save for a rainy day. This time, however, consumers are leading the charge: while the economy expanded an impressive 4 percent between the first quarter of 1998 and the first quarter of 1999, consumption grew 5.5 percent, and spending on consumer durables -- cell phones, bathroom fixtures, S.U.V.'s and home entertainment systems -- surged an incredible 12 percent. There are at least two reasons to question whether America's consumption boom is really a good thing. One is that by conventional standards, the typical American family is being a bit, well, imprudent in spending so much -- indeed, personal savings, never high in this country, have now disappeared almost completely. True, millions of families have seen their wealth surge because of a soaring stock market, but while more people than ever own stock, most still have no significant personal stake in the market. You might argue that ordinary families are spending freely, despite sluggish wage growth, because they believe that prosperity is here to stay. But survey evidence suggests that many workers remain nervous about job security, a 共2页，当前第1页12
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