富人比穷人更幸福，但当一个国家随着时间的推移变得更富有时，它的人民并没有变得更幸福。理查德·伊斯特林的这一对看似矛盾的发现被称为伊斯特林悖论。然而，它遇到了反证。为了更清楚地说明这一争议，我们区分了这一悖论的五种不同版本。这些版本既适用于国家集团，也适用于单个国家，既适用于长期，也适用于中期。我们认为，长期是检验悖论最合适的，而且悖论的检验应该总是控制一个自主的时间趋势。不幸的是，这一要求使得单个国家的长期悖论无法检验。我们用来自27个欧洲国家的欧洲晴雨表数据检验了这个悖论的所有其他版本。我们通过估算国家小组的平均生活满意度方程来做到这一点，其中包括人均GDP的趋势和周期成分作为回归因子。在测试适用于国家群体的悖论变体时，我们发现，九个西欧和北欧国家的长期和中期悖论版本得到了清晰而有力的证实。 Moreover, we obtain a non-robust rejection of the medium-term variant of the paradox for a set of eleven Eastern European countries. On the level of individual countries, the medium-term variant of the paradox clearly holds for the nine Western and Northern European countries, but is consistently rejected for Greece, Ireland, Italy, and Spain. In the case of the Eastern European countries, the medium-term version of the paradox is rejected for Bulgaria, Lithuania, and Poland. As the Western and Northern European countries have a high per capita GDP as compared to that of Southern and Eastern European countries, our results are in line with the finding of Proto and Rustichini (2013), who find a non-monotonic relation between per capita GDP and life satisfaction over time which is positive for poorer countries, but flat (or negative) for richer countries.