Man does not live by GDP alone. A new report urges statisticians to capture what people do live by

人并不单单为了GDP而活。一项最新的报道强烈要求统计学家们抓住可以显示人们生活指标的数据。

HOW well off are Americans? Frenchmen? Indians? Ghanaians? An economist’s simplest answer is the gross domestic product, or GDP, per person of each country. To help you compare the figures, he will convert them into dollars, either at market exchange rates or (better) at purchasing-power-parity rates, which allow for the cheapness of, say, haircuts and taxi rides in poorer parts of the world.

美国人、法国人、印度人和加纳人有多富有呢？据一名经济学家的最简单的回答，是平均到每个国家每个公民的国内生产总值，即GDP。为了便于你比较数据，他将它们统统转化成美元形式，或市场交易比率，再或更精确一点，采用足够世界上贫困地区的人们理发、打的的同等购买力比率。

To be sure, this will give you a fair guide to material standards of living: the Americans and the French, on average, are much richer than Indians and Ghanaians. But you may suspect, and the economist should know, that this is not the whole truth. America’s GDP per head is higher than France’s, but the French spend less time at work, so are they really worse off? An Indian may be desperately poor and yet say he is happy; an American may be well fed yet fed up. GDP was designed to measure only the value of goods and services produced in a country, and it does not even do that precisely. How well off people feel also depends on things GDP does not capture, such as their health or whether they have a job. Environmentalists have long complained that GDP treats the despoliation of the planet as a plus (via the resulting economic output) rather than a minus (forests destroyed).

可以确定一点，这将提供给你一个公平的指示物质资料生活水平的导向：总体上来说，美国人和法国人要比印度人和××人富裕很多。但是，你可能会疑问，正如经济学家必须知道的，这并不是全部的事实。美国的人均GDP比法国高，可是，法国人工作的时间要少一点，所以，法国人就真的要比美国人穷？一个印度人可能非常非常的穷困，但他会说自己是快乐的；一个美国人或许足够富裕但也足够厌倦。GDP只是被设计用来衡量一个国家的商品和服务的价值，甚至，连这个它都没法表示精确。一个人他感觉有多幸福还要依据一些GDP不能显示的事情，比如他的健康或者他有没有一份工作。长久以来，环境学家一直在抱怨，他们认为GDP视掠夺地球为一道加法题（通过作为结果的贸易出口量）而不是一道减法题（如森林破坏）。

In recent years economists have therefore been looking at other measures of well-being—even “happiness”, a notion that it once seemed absurd to quantify. Among those convinced that official statisticians should join in is Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president. On September 14th a commission he appointed last year, comprising 25 prominent social scientists, five with Nobel prizes in economics, presented its findings*. Joseph Stiglitz, the group’s chairman and one of the laureates, said the 292-page report was a call to abandon “GDP fetishism”. France’s national statistics agency, Mr Sarkozy declared, should broaden its purview.

正因如此，近几年，经济学家们一直在研究其他测量富裕的标准，甚至说幸福，它曾经被视为在数量上很晦涩的一个概念。在众多确信政府的统计学家们应该加入到这一行列的人中就有法国总统尼古拉斯·萨科奇。去年9月14号的一次委员会上，他提出了自己的观点，据会议的记录显示，这次的委员会有25名杰出的社会科学家组成，其中5人获得过诺贝尔经济学奖。这个团队的主席同时身为摘得桂冠的一员，约瑟夫·施蒂格利兹说，这份292页的报道是废除“GDP崇拜”的信号。萨科奇宣称，法国国家统计局应该扩大自己的见识。

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