KNOWING that you are paid less than your peers has two effects on happiness. The well-known one is negative: a thinner pay packet harms self-esteem. The lesser-known one is called the “tunnel” effect: high incomes for peers are seen as improving your own chances of similar riches, especially if growth, inequality and mobility are high.

众所周知，比同事的薪水少这一事实，对自己的幸福感会产生两种效应。大部分人知道的是负面效应：较少的薪水会伤害人的自尊心。此外还有一个较少人知道的另一个效应被称为“隧道效应”：高薪水的同事会让你有动力去争取机会拿到同样的薪水，特别是处于公司成长性、工资差异和人员流动性较高的环境。

A paper co-authored by Felix FitzRoy of the University of St Andrews and presented this week at the Royal Economic Society in Cambridge separates the two effects using data from household surveys in Germany. Previous work showed that the income of others can have a small, or even positive, overall effect on people’s satisfaction in individual firms in Denmark or in very dynamic economies in transition, such as post-communist eastern Europe. But Mr FitzRoy’s team theorised that older workers, who largely know their lifetime incomes already, will enjoy a much smaller tunnel effect.

圣安德鲁斯大学的菲茨.罗伊斯（Felix FitzRoy）与人合著了一篇论文，通过研究对德国家庭调查获得的数据以区分这两种效应。这篇论文于这周在剑桥举办的皇家经济学会上亮相。先前的研究表明，在丹麦或者转型中的新兴的经济体国家（如后共产主义的东欧国家）的个体企业，其他同事的收入能使人们对所在公司的满意度产生较少甚至正面的效应。但是菲茨.罗伊斯研究团队的理论认为，对于那些已经基本上知道自己终身收入的老员工，隧道效应则要小很多。

The data confirm this hypothesis. The negative effect on reported levels of happiness of being paid less than your peers is not visible for people aged under 45. In western Germany, seeing peers’ incomes rising actually makes young people happier (even more than a rise in their own incomes, remarkably). It is only those people over 45, when careers have “reached a stable position”, whose happiness is harmed by the success of others.

调查的数据证实了这个假设。对于那些45岁以下的员工，比同事的薪水少所带来的负面影响并不明显。在西德，看到同事的收入增长实际上使年青人更快乐，即使同事收入的增长比自己要快很多。只有那些处于事业稳定期的45岁以上的员工，其幸福感会因为他人的成功而受损。

The prospect of 20-plus years of bitterness might make retirement seem more appealing. But the real gains in happiness from retirement go not to the outshone, but to the out-of-work. Unemployment is known to damage happiness because not working falls short of social expectations. This loss of identity cannot be compensated for by unemployment benefits or increased leisure time. A paper presented at the same conference by a team represented by Clemens Hetschko of Freie Universität Berlin uses the same German household data to show that the spirits of the long-term unemployed rise when they stop looking for work, go into retirement and no longer clash with social norms.

与摆在面前的20多年的辛苦工作相比，退休显得更吸引人。但是退休带来的真正幸福感在于停止工作而不在于优胜。没有工作的人未能达到社会的期望，使得失业将有损幸福感。这种身份的损失不是失业补助或更多的闲暇时间能够弥补的。Freie大学的Clemens Hetschko 与其研究团队在同样的会议上也发表了一篇论文。他们通过对同样的德国家庭数据进行研究表明，当长期失业的人们停止寻找工作步入退休后，将不再与社会规范冲突，他们的精神状态有所提高。[注]

Those with jobs are no happier after they retire, however, perhaps because their lives already line up with social expectations. Indeed, retiring early from work can have nasty side-effects. Another paper, co-authored by Andreas Kuhn of the University of Zurich, investigates the effect of a change in Austrian employment-insurance rules that allowed blue-collar workers earlier retirement in some regions than others. Men retiring a year early lower their odds of surviving to age 67 by 13%. Almost a third of this higher mortality rate, which seemed to be concentrated among those who were forced into retirement by job loss, was caused by smoking and alcohol consumption. If you’re in a job, even an underpaid one, hang on in there.

那些有工作的人退休后并没有更快乐，可能是因为他们的生活已经和社会期望一致。实际上，过早的退休会产生令人讨厌的副作用。另一篇论文，由苏黎世大学的Andreas Kuhn与人合著，研究了奥地利的就业保障法的变更带来的效应，这一法律允许某些地区的蓝领工人可以更早退休。与其他的人相比，过早退休的人存活到67岁的几率降低了13%。更高的死亡率中大约有1/3的因素是由于吸烟和酗酒导致，集中在那些因为失业而被迫退休的人。如果你在工作中，即使薪水较低，也要坚持下去不要过早退休。

[注] “social norms” 在之前并未提及，这里应指” the norm that they are expected to work “, 相当于文中的 ”social expectations”. Clemens Hetschko的论文’ Changing Identity Retiring from Unemployment’中有其具体阐述，如下：

A person’s utility does not only depend on individualistic consumption of material goods and leisure but is also influenced by how well a person conforms to the norms and ideals of the social category she belongs to. Applying identity theory to the relationship between unemployment and life satisfaction implies that unemployed people are not only dissatisfied with their life because they have lower incomes, but also because they deviate from the norms of their social category under which they are expected to work. This explains the inability of the long-term unemployed to adapt to unemployment: they do not give up regarding employment as part of the social norm they strive to fulfill. Since they continuously deviate from this norm, the long-term unemployed get low recognition from others, often become negatively stereotyped, and experience social isolation and stigmatization, which can be interpreted as sanctions to fulfill the norm to work.

一个人的效应不单依靠对物质的消费和闲暇的享用，还取决于一个人如何与社会规范和所处的社会类属相匹配的程度。失业的人的失落感，不单来自于低收入，还因为他们偏离了他们所处的社会类属的规范——应该要去工作。失业的人仍然把就业看作社会规范的一部分，这也是他们想去实现的。过久地脱离这一社会规范之外，长期失业的人被他人看轻，经常成为反面教材，饱受社会的孤立和偏见——这些可以看作没能满足这一社会规范的处罚。