Zhu Hai: Why Is China'S Happiness Index Lower Than Russia And India?

Development mode

If we fail to improve people's happiness, is this mode worth pursuing? In the past few decades, we have concentrated on economic construction, and people's material life standard has indeed increased. But why is it still unhappiness? We should know that "happiness" is a kind of satisfaction with life, not only depends on the quantity and quality of material consumption, but also with many other factors.

The difference between human beings and animals is that the better the animals eat, the happier they are. The happiness of animals is "isolated", that is to say, it is only related to their own pleasure, and it increases their enjoyment. It is more happiness, and human happiness is more "interpersonal" or "social". People are people in the society, and their happiness is influenced by others' actions, which can be direct or indirect.

In this way, we know that a development model that maximizes personal utility is not necessarily a happy model, which may be applied to animals but not necessarily to humans.

The development path of our past decades is precisely such a problem, that is, one sidedly focuses on the improvement of the level of personal consumption, but neglects the solution to the problems of people's society.

So we can see that on the one hand, the economy has grown and the material has been greatly enriched, but on the other hand, all kinds of contradictions in the society are accumulating or even intensifying, or the development of the economy has not brought about the corresponding progress of the society.

Economic development

Although its original proposal is reasonable, it is not necessarily the road to happiness.

In fact, in order to promote economic development, we must adopt some artificial means. These artificially means include some unhappiness "genes". Taking the "loose currency" and "stimulating exports" as examples, they are all important means to promote economic development. But what are the consequences of these measures? Obviously, it is "inflation", and the result of inflation is price, especially the soaring of house prices, which makes people's living standard drop and life pressure increase.

In addition to the above two means, "government investment" is also one of our main means of promoting economic development. This means not only leads to inflation, but also leads to social problems such as corruption, collusion between government and business. This is equivalent to artificially creating "injustice" and directly reducing people's happiness.

Perhaps it is no exaggeration to say that what we are going to do is a path conducive to the rapid increase of the total economy, but it is not conducive to improving individual happiness.

It has to be pointed out that mainstream economics is endorsed for this development path. The mainstream welfare economics theory equates the improvement of overall utility to the improvement of individual utility, and the simplest way to measure the overall utility is the total economic volume.

Sense of worth

It is closely linked, because happiness is the realization of value, and what kind of happiness is a person's values.

So what should be the values that can bring happiness? Obviously, it should be contentment and moderation, not excessive greed.

To be sure, excessive greed for material or power and excessive pursuit of personal interests are hard to bring happiness.

To some extent, this happiness list illustrates this point. For example, why is Hongkong ranked only sixty-seventh, or even lagging behind Vietnam (sixty-fifth place) whose economic development level is far inferior to it? How do I explain this? I think this is Hongkong's "capitalism with the greatest personal interests". People are overly chasing money and living pressure, while Vietnam is more leisurely.

Similarly, the Nordic countries in the top ranking are not "value oriented" countries. I have lived in Denmark for the first time in the list of happiness. I have a deep understanding of this kind of values in Scandinavian countries. It may be hard for us to imagine that people in these Scandinavian countries regard others' happiness as their own happiness, so they are willing to pay taxes to narrow the gap between the rich and the poor and achieve social harmony.

On the contrary, few of us are concerned about the development of society and their own interests. People are more concerned about their own interests. As for society, it has little to do with him. So many people have "gone" after having money, and have become "naked" after having power. "Immigrants" and "naked officials" have become the two special landscapes of contemporary society.