Economic Growth and Well‐Being: A Behavioural Analysis
本书通过英美等国的百年人均收入增长数据，对比人们变富但未变幸福的现象，探讨相对地位与绝对财富对幸福感的影响，适合关注经济增长与主观福祉关系的读者。
The great American vaudeville singer Sophie Tucker remarked, ‘I've been rich and I've been poor – and believe me, rich is better.’ This book, which documents in great detail and insight the vast growth in per capita income in the United States and Britain (with some attention to other countries) over the past century, contrasts Sophie Tucker's widely shared sentiment with the carefully researched fact that people are getting richer, but they are not getting happier. What, asks Offer, accounts for this curious situation? An earlier generation answered this question by noting that being richer involves both having more than before, and having more than others. If relative status is important but absolute wealth is not, argued Frank (1985), then when everyone becomes richer, average well‐being will not increase. Indeed, this had been the common view (although with numerous dissenters), since Duesenbury's famous ‘ratchet effect’ explanation of the...