【英语生活】养宠物值不值？

With the imminent passing of my pet rat I am faced with a lot of grief; he has been a great pet and so I will be more saddened by his passing than if he had been a bad one. My question is: is it possible for the cost (the grief from losing a friend/pet/family member) to outweigh the benefit (the joy gained through time spent with them) and so make the purchase of my pet not worth it, as the net benefit would be negative? Would there be a point where you would say: “I don't want to get involved because I love X so much that I will be destroyed if I lose him?”

Ilka

Dear Ilka,

Your intriguing problem has not, as far as I know, been explored by economists before, although it has been discussed by artists. Your ailing rat puts me in mind of a departed sparrow, mourned in verse by Catullus. Paul Simon expressed the trade-off more directly in his early song “I Am a Rock”: “If I never loved I never would have cried.”

But poetic speculation gets us nowhere. Let's head straight to the data. Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick University, provides the following data points to ponder, based on surveys of life-satisfaction. Relative to never having been married, being married is worth 0.38 “points” of life satisfaction on a scale of 1-7. Being separated is worth -0.24, widowed -0.19 and divorced -0.09.

This is not much to go on, but it is better than nothing. If we incautiously interpret these numbers as causal – in fact they are merely correlations – then we could conclude that 20 years of marriage is compensation for up to 40 years of widowhood. Ten years of marriage more than justifies 40 years as a divorcee.

For human marriages, these odds seem pretty good. For a pet rat, less so: the little darlings hit puberty at six weeks and rarely live past three years. Perhaps you should buy a tortoise next time.

亲爱的经济学家：

我的宠物鼠即将离开人世，我心中充满了悲伤；如果它很让人讨厌，我也不会像现在这么伤心，问题是它一直非常棒。我的问题是：成本（失去一个朋友、宠物或家人的悲伤）是否有可能超过收益（从与他们共度的时光中获得的欢乐），使净收益变成负值，从而导致购买宠物变得不值吗？下面这种说法有道理吗：“我不想陷进去，因为我爱X爱得太深，如果失去他，我会垮掉的。”

伊卡尔(Ilka)

亲爱的伊卡尔，

据我所知，之前还没有经济学家研究过你提出的这个有趣的问题，但艺术家却有过这类讨论。你垂死的老鼠让我想起了一只已故的麻雀，卡图卢斯（Catullus，古罗马诗人——译者注）曾用诗歌哀悼过它。保罗•西蒙(Paul Simon)在其早期歌曲“我是一块磐石(I Am a Rock)”中更加直接地表达了这种利弊权衡：“假如我从没爱过，我就决不会伤心地哭泣。”

但诗人的思考对我们解决问题没有什么帮助。让我们直接来看数据。华威大学(Warwick University)经济学教授安德鲁•奥斯瓦尔德(Andrew Oswald)基于生活满意度调查提供了如下数据点，供我们思考。与从未结过婚的人相比，在1到7级的生活满意度中，结婚价值0.38分。分居价值-0.24分，丧偶价值-0.19分，离婚价值-0.09分。

这些数据没有提供多少可供继续讨论的依据，但好过什么都没有。如果我们不那么谨慎，将这些数字解读成因果关系——事实上它们只是具有相关性——那么可能会得出下述结论：即，20年的婚姻足以补偿至多40年的丧偶经历。而10年的婚姻完全能够让40年的离婚生活也变得值得起来。

对于人类的婚姻而言，这种比率似乎相当不错。对于一只宠物鼠而言，就不那么令人满意了：这个可爱的小动物6周时就已经进入青春期，并且寿命很少能够超过3年。或许，下次你应该买一只乌龟。

译者/何黎