论幸福悖论的成因与启示

从幸福与收入的关系来看,幸福悖论的成因是:达到临界收入后,收入的功能目的(必然性)向手段(可能性)的转换、收入边际效用递减与收入的负外部性凸显以致人们对收入的公平性和可持续性等需要递增、个人自我实现与带来收入的工作的偏离等导致幸福悖论。揭开幸福悖论的面纱,可以清楚地看到,我国现阶段只有大力发展经济,同时克服经济发展的负外部性,重建公共家园,即关注民生、创造社会财富,把社会进步与个人自我实现有机地结合起来,实现幸福的帕累托最优,才能真正踏上幸福经济之路。     

“非逻辑行为”如何使社会学成为可能

帕累托的社会学理论在社会学研究中独辟蹊径,将非逻辑行为界定为社会学的研究对象。而将逻辑行为划归到经济学研究领域中。在帕累托的社会学巨著《普通社会学纲要》中可以看到,他的社会学核心思想是剩余物。这一概念是他分析从个人心理到社会历史过程的起点,也是他用以连接个人与社会的桥梁。在对帕累托通过《普通社会学纲要》反映的社会学思想进行回顾的基础上,尝试论证他如何用非逻辑行为构建个人与社会的桥梁,并分析帕累托的社会学理论对社会学方法论作出的贡献,即如何使社会学成为可能。     

市场的逻辑还是逻辑化的市场?——流行市场观的逻辑缺陷

现代主流经济学认为,市场机制有助于从个人逐利行为中实现帕累托改进乃至社会财富最大化,但这种理念建立在逻辑化市场之上,是以原子个体假设和形式逻辑推理为基础的。但在真实世界中,市场主体是异质的,行为也嵌入在具体社会关系之中。实际上,真实世界的市场逻辑结论体现为:(1)市场由人类创设而非自然之物;(2)异质性市场主体享有的自由程度不同;(3)市场收入分配往往有利于强势者;(4)市场马太效应会导致社会两极化;(5)市场实现个人收益而非社会效用最大化;(6)市场竞争难以自发导向帕累托优化;(7)自发市场秩序扩展时往往会中断或内卷;(8)掠夺性市场中的获胜者往往是蟑螂性人物。     

社会价值、市场效率与收入分配

本文介绍我们所研究的总量消费者剩余方法。我们将老子的"为而不争"对应为市场经济的优化原理,定义为老子第二原则。老子第二原则在个人水平上的实现使市场有效率并达到个人水平上的帕累托最优。而老子第一原则"天之道利而无害"对应于帕累托改进,代表着社会进步的方向。由于自由市场不能自动实现最优收入分配,遵循"老子第一原则"的最大可能的社会进步的实现超越于自由市场力量之外。     

社会价值、市场效率与收入分配

本介绍我们所研究的总量消费剩余方法。我们将老子的“为而不争”对应为市场经济的优化原理，定义为老子第二原则。老子第二原则在个人水平上的实现使市场有效率并达到个人水平上的帕累托最优。而老子第一原则“天之道利而无害”对应于帕累托改进，代表着社会进步的方向。由于自由市场不能自动实现最优收入分配。遵循“老子第一原则”的最大可能的社会进步的实现超越于自由市场力量之外。     

收入与幸福关系的经济学考察

经验研究显示,经济增长和人均收入的提高并没有带来国民幸福程度的上升,这无疑违背了传统的绝对收入效用理论.但是,引入相对收入理论将可能导致经济增长变得毫无意义,而另一种理论试图将欲望集引入效用函数以此来解决收入与幸福的悖论.如果社会政策的目标是实现大多数人的最大幸福,那么我们就有必要研究怎样才能增进人们的幸福.     

城镇社区安全管理模式的经济学分析

城镇社区安全是社会安全与稳定的基础。本文基于纳什均衡和帕累托理论，对城镇社区安全管理模式进行了经济学分析。结果显示，为实现社区安全管理资源的帕累托最优，需要改进现有的安全管理制度，通过契约协作的方式，协调社区联盟中每户居民的安全支出，以避免“搭便车”现象的发生。基于上述经济学理论分析，最后提出了有关实现社区安全管理制度创新的模式及相应对策措施。     

人力资本的市场失灵及其矫正

工业产品的生产一旦出现了市场失灵,其产量就会偏离帕累托最优水平;同理,人力资本投资如果存在市场失灵,那么,产量也不会实现帕累托最优。尽管度量人力资本还存在着技术困难,但只要正确认识并消除了市场失灵,做到既定资源投资到人力资本与物质资本上的边际报酬相等,帕累托最优水平的人力资本投资量仍可能实现。该文在全面认识人力资本市场的失灵后,从新古典主义、新兴古典主义、新制度主义经济学角度出发,分别给出了消除市场失灵,实现人力资本投资帕累托改进的措施。     

论人力资本投资的限度

人力资本投资并非多多益善,它有一个合理的限度,即人力资本投资存在一个帕累托最优的水平。该文认为既定资源在物质资本投资上的边际报酬与在人力资本投资上的边际报酬相等,且人力资本给每一个厂商带来的边际报酬相等时,人力资本投资便实现了帕累托最优。这就要求全社会在人力资本与物质资本上的投资齐头并进;并且,只要政府在人力资本上的投资不超过帕累托最优水平,则个人的自利行为就会自动地填补"帕累托缺口"。     

标准真实经济周期理论批判——劳动跨期替代的微观基础

标准RBC理论认为,面对真实冲击,由于代表性经济人理性地选择劳动跨期替代,宏观经济虽产生了波动,但仍属于帕累托改进。本文认为,由于现实世界并不是完全竞争的,收入结构呈现金字塔型,收入下层经济人的劳动替代往往是非自愿的,因此这样的劳动波动不可能是帕累托改进。事实上,正是没有考虑到非自愿失业的存在,导致了＂就业变化之谜＂,即RBC预测到的就业变化不如实际数据大.     

Social security, public education and the growth-inequality relationship

We study how the relationship between economic growth and inequality depends upon the levels of funding of two of the largest government programs, public education and social security. We do this in the context of an overlapping generations economy with heterogeneous agents where the government collects a tax on labor income to finance these programs. We show that in our model an increase in government spending on social security reduces income inequality and can have a non-monotonic effect on growth. When the initial level of social security funding is low, as is the case in most poor economies, then its increase will enhance growth. When its funding level is high as is typical for developed countries, we show that its further increase can slow down growth while reducing income inequality. These results obtain regardless of whether the increase in social security funding is financed by a tax increase or by cutting the public education budget. We also find that the effects of increasing the level of public education expenditures or the overall size of the government budget (holding the budget composition fixed) are characterized by similar non-monotonic growth-inequality relationships.     

Who benefits from big government? A life satisfaction approach

Which impact does government size have on life satisfaction, and how do effects of bigger government differ between income groups in society? Previous studies typically employed country averages and thus neglected possibly heterogeneous happiness effects between income groups. This paper addresses empirically the effects of government spending on subjective well-being of individuals belonging to different income groups. Our analysis is based on individual data from 25 European countries participating in the European Social Survey. In contrast to most previous studies we take account of the endogeneity between relative income position and reported life satisfaction by an instrumental variable approach. Our results suggest, first, that most government spending categories, including social protection, are on average negatively related to individual well-being. Secondly, estimated marginal effects of health, education and social protection spending at different income levels show that spending increases always have a stronger negative effect on high income groups’ well-being than on low income groups’ life satisfaction. For all government spending categories, marginal happiness effects of higher public spending are clearly negative for income groups at the top.     

收入差距与社会地位寻求:一个高储蓄率的原因

我们使用中国城镇住户调查数据证实:在控制家庭收入之后,收入差距仍然会显著减少家庭除教育以外的消费。我们还发现收入差距对低收入或年轻家庭的消费抑制更加明显,但能刺激教育投资的上升。这很可能来源于为提升社会地位而储蓄的动机。更高的社会地位可以带来各种物质或非物质上的收益。而社会不平等的增加意味着进入社会上层可以获得更高的收益,同时提升地位需要更多的财富。这些都可能加强人们为提高社会地位而储蓄的激励。     

Income comparison and happiness: The role of fair income distribution

Relative income gap is one of the most popular approaches for explaining the income–happiness relationship. We argue in this article that when people compare their incomes, they care about distributional fairness more than relative income disparity. It is difficult for us to explain China's income–happiness paradox if we simply compare the income gap and do not explore the income‐generation process leading to income inequality. We therefore employ an approach based on a responsibility‐sensitive theory of justice that decomposes individual income into fair and unfair components. As a proxy for distributional unfairness, unfair income is considered the main source of unhappiness. Using data from the Chinese Household Income Project survey, we find strong support for the negative relationship between income unfairness and happiness. We also find a significantly positive relationship between the relative income gap and income unfairness, which leads us to consider the income comparison hypothesis as the explanation for the income–happiness paradox in a new light. Sensitivity analyses confirm the robustness of our results.     

Income–happiness paradox in Australia: Testing the theories of adaptation and social comparison

This paper investigates whether the theories of adaptation and social comparison can explain the income–happiness puzzle (Easterlin Paradox) in Australia. Alternative specifications of happiness model that incorporate adaption, comparison incomes and other relevant variables are estimated using the panel data from the five waves (2001–2005) of the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) surveys. The statistical tests provide no support for the adaptation effect on happiness. However, we find strong support for the theory of social comparison as an explanation for the happiness paradox. An increase in peer group income hurts the poor more than the rich, suggesting that a redistribution of income is likely to enhance the overall wellbeing of society. A sensitivity analysis is conducted to check the robustness of results.     

Income inequality, consumption, and social-status seeking

Using the Chinese Urban Household Survey data between 1997 and 2006, we find that income inequality has a negative (positive) effect on household consumption net of education expenditures (savings) even after we control for household income. We argue that people save to improve their social status when social status is associated with pecuniary and non-pecuniary benefits. Rising income inequality can strengthen the incentives of status-seeking savings by increasing the benefit of improving status, and by enlarging the wealth level required for status upgrading. We also find that the negative effect of income inequality on consumption is stronger for poorer and younger people and that income inequality stimulates more education investment, which are consistent with the status-seeking hypothesis.     

Happiness and loss aversion: Is utility concave or convex in relative income?

A central finding in happiness research is that a person's life satisfaction depends on the level of her income relative to the average income in her social reference group. This dependence of life satisfaction on relative income can be related to the reference dependence of the value function in Kahneman and Tversky's [Kahneman, D., Tversky, A., 1979. Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47, 263–291] prospect theory. In this paper we investigate whether the characteristics of the value function like concavity for gains, convexity for losses, and loss aversion apply to the dependence of life satisfaction on relative income. This is tested with an improved measure for the reference income for a large German panel spanning the years 1984–2001. We find concavity of life satisfaction in positive relative income, but unexpectedly strongly significant concavity of life satisfaction in negative relative income as well. We also present a new method to show the robustness of these concavity results to extreme distortions of the reported-life-satisfaction scale. The concavity for negative relative income implies a rising marginal sensitivity of life satisfaction to more negative values of relative income, and hence loss aversion (in a wide sense). This may be explained in terms of increasing financial obstacles to social participation.     

Relative Affluence and Child Labor—Explaining a Paradox

Some micro level empirical studies found child labor incidence increasing even with improvement in the economic conditions of the poor. This paper provides a possible explanation as to why increase in absolute income may not be sufficient to solve the problem of child labor. We argue that people in general are not just concerned about their own consumption; they are very much affected by the consumption of their peers. While taking decisions regarding the time allocation of their children between work and leisure, parents do keep an eye on their relative position in the society. We develop a theoretical model of household decision making to show that child labor supply from a poor family can increase even with improvements in its economic conditions, if the family's relative position in the society deteriorates and if the relative status effect is sufficiently strong.     

Education and income attraction: an online dating field experiment

Prior studies have found a robust correlation in the education of dating and married couples. However, there is little evidence to suggest that such correlations are causal, that is, for the sake of relationship public goods such as the pleasures of the enlightened conversations that only a common high level of education might support. Being empirical studies, they cannot rule out couples matching on other characteristics like income, height or health, which are correlated with education, from driving results. We contribute to this literature by randomly assigning high and low education and income levels to 388 artificial male and female profiles on a large online dating website in China. We then counted thousands of ‘visits’ – clicks on abbreviated profiles, which included education and income information, from search engine results. We found that men’s visits to female profiles were unaffected by the profile’s assigned education level, while women’s visits to male profiles increase with the profile’s education. However, that increase was not increasing on the women’s own level of education, though their visits to the higher income male profiles was increasing on their own education. Our findings suggest that the relationship public goods that stem from a common level of high education are not at the forefront of either men’s or women’s minds before their first dates, when one might expect such goods to play a critical role in the decision to develop the relationship further.     

城市流迁就业新格局下的农民工收入问题思考——基于主观感知视角的实证研究

随着代际更替的完成,农民工城市流迁模式出现新的变化。新生代农民工行业选择性增强,劳动力回流返城再就业比重上升,安居乐业正在成为"家庭迁徙型"农民工城市生活的写照。尽管还有部分农民工仍往返于城乡与地区之间,但这种"候鸟型"流迁模式已在明显弱化。因此,以北京5区县为样本取集聚地,针对不同流迁模式下的农民工收入状况及幸福感知进行计量分析。研究结果表明:收入边际效用影响力在下降,农民工积极感知呈上升趋势,表明作为"城市边缘人"的农民工社会待遇不公、幸福感低下境遇正在改善,这与社会关注度提高、新生代农民工成为群体主导有关。在收入水平短期内难以获得大幅提升的现阶段,政府应致力于教育、职业发展以及社会保障权利等国民待遇平等环境创造,尽可能激发农民工群体正向心理潜能,以其积极品质提升主观幸福感。