词汇大师-- Economists Pursue Happiness

　　AA: I'm Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on Wordmaster: happiness as defined by an economist¹.
RS: For almost a year, economists² at the University of Michigan have been asking Americans about their happiness for the school's widely quoted monthly measure of consumer confidence.
AA: Miles Kimball is an economics professor at Michigan. He says only results from the first three months have been analyzed³ so far. We asked him how all this works, language-wise.

　　MILES KIMBALL: "What we did was we added to the survey of consumers the following question: 'Now think about the past week and the feelings you've experienced. Please tell me if each of the following was true for you much of the time this past week: You were happy. You felt sad. You enjoyed life, You felt depressed⁴.' And people are asked to give yes-no answers to each of those four questions. That takes only about forty-five seconds for people to answer that, so it's quite quick."
RS: "Why would you want to know the answers to these questions?"
AA: "And then we can ask you, what have you found so far?"
MILES KIMBALL: "Well, actually maybe I could explain how this relates to language because I think that answers those questions, too. So, in most languages, the word for happiness is related to the word for good luck. And in English, for example, we have the word 'happenstance' or this archaic⁵ phrase 'as happ has it,' which are both about luck and things that happen by chance.
"And so that meaning of happiness ends up meaning something like having a good life or the outcome of good fortune. And it's important to realize this is a different meaning of happiness than just how you feel. They're obviously related, and that's important -- related but different.
"One of the striking facts about happiness in the sense of how you feel is that it tends to go back to normal pretty fast. So we found this in our data after -- in people's reaction after Hurricane Katrina. So we measured the happiness of people across the country -- so almost none of these people are those who are directly affected⁶ by the hurricane, and yet their happiness dipped down for a week or two. And then it came back to normal.
"So it's not too surprising that people would react strongly to Katrina. But then that becomes a measuring rod for other things. One of the surprising things we found was that a month later there was almost as strong a dip in happiness after the earthquake in Pakistan. To me this makes sense. You know, you see on TV suffering people and it doesn't matter if they're suffering people on the other side of the world or in your own country -- I mean it does matter, but either way you care about them because they're human beings."
AA: "Well, let me ask you, there have been a lot of stories recently I've noticed about happiness, and studies of happiness, and economists and others seem very interested in this. What's going on, why the interest now in happiness?"
MILES KIMBALL: "Well, a lot of the interest is based on these two meanings. Some of the interest is based on something bigger than I think we can actually do. The big thing would be if somehow these two meanings of happiness happen to be equal to one another. So, in other words, if you could go out and ask people how happy they felt and have a measure of how well their life was going overall, that would be very handy and you could do all kinds of things with that.
"And so, for example, there is an economist in England, Richard Laird, who has written a book on happiness who proposes to do public policy on that basis. That's taking things a little bit too far. You can learn a lot from looking at happiness, but in order to learn about what matters to people, you'd actually have to find news events.
"The trouble you find is that these news effects go away after a while. People adjust to new situations. There's a name for that, 'hedonic adaptation,' that the happiness goes back to normal. And the other interesting thing is that the normal level of happiness depends on a lot of things that are not necessarily an overall measure of how well your life is going."
RS: Economist Miles Kimball at the University of Michigan hopes to get a three-year grant to continue measuring Americans' happiness. The current funding lasts through September.
AA: And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail address is [email protected] and you can download all of our segments at voanews.com/wordmaster. With Rosanne Skirble, I'm Avi Arditti.

1 economist   

n.经济学家，经济专家，节俭的人

参考例句：

• He cast a professional economist's eyes on the problem.他以经济学行家的眼光审视这个问题。
• He's an economist who thinks he knows all the answers.他是个经济学家，自以为什么都懂。

2 economists   

n.经济学家，经济专家( economist的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The sudden rise in share prices has confounded economists. 股价的突然上涨使经济学家大惑不解。
• Foreign bankers and economists cautiously welcomed the minister's initiative. 外国银行家和经济学家对部长的倡议反应谨慎。 来自《简明英汉词典》

3 analyzed   

v.分析( analyze的过去式和过去分词 )；分解；解释；对…进行心理分析

参考例句：

• The doctors analyzed the blood sample for anemia. 医生们分析了贫血的血样。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The young man did not analyze the process of his captivation and enrapturement, for love to him was a mystery and could not be analyzed. 这年轻人没有分析自己蛊惑著迷的过程，因为对他来说，爱是个不可分析的迷。 来自《简明英汉词典》

4 depressed   

adj.沮丧的，抑郁的，不景气的，萧条的

参考例句：

• When he was depressed,he felt utterly divorced from reality.他心情沮丧时就感到完全脱离了现实。
• His mother was depressed by the sad news.这个坏消息使他的母亲意志消沉。

5 archaic   

adj.(语言、词汇等)古代的，已不通用的

参考例句：

• The company does some things in archaic ways,such as not using computers for bookkeeping.这个公司有些做法陈旧，如记账不使用电脑。
• Shaanxi is one of the Chinese archaic civilized origins which has a long history.陕西省是中国古代文明发祥之一，有悠久的历史。

6 affected   

adj.不自然的，假装的

参考例句：

• She showed an affected interest in our subject.她假装对我们的课题感到兴趣。
• His manners are affected.他的态度不自然。