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European holidays This house believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes The moderator's opening remarks Dec 22nd 2009 | John O'Sullivan A few years ago, a group of academics gathered in Portovenere in Italy to discuss why Western Europe, though rich, was still far less prosperous than America. In 2000, the average income per head of the 15 rich countries in the European Union was around 70% of the level in America. That gap had scarcely changed in 30 years, even though productivity had increased much faster in Europe than in America. By the end of last century, Europe's workers could almost match America's in how much they produced in their factories or at their desks. The reason Europeans remained poorer is that they spent a lot less time at work than had a generation earlier. The economists gathered in Portovenere to ask why. The title of the conference was: "Are Europeans lazy? Or Americans crazy?" This question lies at the heart of our present debate. There are many ways to account for the variations in hours worked between countries, including differences in the proportion of adults in work or in the length of the typical working week. The starkest transatlantic divide is in holiday time. In Europe six or seven weeks a year away from work is the norm, once public holidays are included. Americans, by contrast, are lucky if they can scrape four weeks vacation together. So are Europeans poverty-stricken slackers or are they simply wise enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour as leisure time? Robert Gordon argues the former. It is all very well to have lots of holiday, he says, but leisure time is more enjoyable when you have money to throw around. His conjures up a nightmarish vision of poor Europeans trudging wearily to cheap resorts that are overcrowded because everyone is forced to take the same five weeks off in August. Americans may be time-poor, he argues, but they can at least splash out on a nice vacation thanks to the extra hours of work they put in. He playfully implies that flush Americans would be wise to avoid a summer holiday in Europe, where everything is shut for weeks at a time. His opponent, John de Graaf, thinks Europe makes the right choice by sacrificing income for leisure time. "Time affluence", he says, is more satisfying than "material affluence". He stresses the benefits of regular holidays in improved health, greater happiness and family togetherness. (By contrast Mr Gordon thinks long holidays only reveal "the tedium of European family life".) Americans are envious of the time off Europeans are allowed, says Mr de Graaf. They would be happier and more productive at work if they, too, had longer holidays. The proposer's opening remarks Dec 22nd 2009 | Robert J. Gordon(Professor, Social Sciences, Northwestern University) To engage in this debate in December 2009 requires that we play a fantasy game. Whether European vacations are too long is a side show to the main issue of digging the world out of its 2007-09 economic crisis. Right now, everyone everywhere is taking too much vacation, there is too much idleness, there are too many people whose most heartfelt wish is that they could replace their current idleness, their “long holiday”, with a steady full-time job. We must debate as if we were in the summer of 2007, before the worldwide crisis started. Way back then, the unemployment rate was at the normal or "natural” level in both the United States and Europe, and we did not see millions forced into long involuntary holidays. And for clarity we must ignore all the differences among European nations and pretend that there is a single composite European nation made up of the countries in the pre-2004 EU-15. To put the case in a nutshell, Europe makes itself poor by working many fewer hours per person than Americans. Low European work effort combines the impact of long vacations, high unemployment, low labour force participation and early retirement. Excessively long vacations are only the tip of the iceberg. Even though Europeans are roughly 90% as productive as Americans, they devote so few hours to work that their income per head (i.e. their standard of living), which is only about 68% of that in the United States. That 22 percentage point difference is by definition the result of lower hours per person in Europe compared with the United States. Short work hours per person provides the answer to the puzzle, "How could Europe be so productive but so poor?" Long European holidays constitute just one of the five reasons
why annual hours of work per person in Europe are so short. Those in Europe who have jobs not only work fewer weeks per year due to long vacation, but they work fewer hours per week when they are not on vacation. Forcing employees to work shorter hours as a way to create jobs is known as the "lump of labour fallacy" and dates back to Herbert Hoover. In France there are the "hours police" who snoop on employees to make sure offices are empty at night. The third reason is a high normal or natural rate of unemployment, as in the contrast between America's 4.5% and Europe's 7.5% in 2007. Fourth is a low level of labour force participation, especially among females in the Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Spain). Fifth is early retirement, caused by a set of financial incentives embedded in state pension schemes that push Europeans into idleness and boredom at ages (57, 58) when most Americans are at their prime maximum earning ages. In fact the US retirement eligibility age for full Social Security benefits is gradually being raised from 65 to 67, reflecting increased life expectancy. Because Europeans work shorter hours, they have only 70% of the real market income per person as Americans (adjusted for differences in prices across countries). As a result Europeans face their holidays from a position of poverty rather than abundance. Those long European holidays are pitiful. They are inefficient, they hurt consumers and they reveal the tedium of European family life. And because Europeans are relatively poor, they cannot afford the frequent upscale vacations that many Americans take for granted. Americans first learn about the lavish provision of European vacations when they read their guidebooks and find that one restaurant after another in Paris or Rome is "ferme en Aout". The big advantage of Europe from its own perspective is that, generally speaking, it takes its five-week vacations all at once. The big horror of Europe from an American perspective is that it takes its five-week vacations all at once. The American mind recoils at the image of European five-week holidays, so many of them in August. These summer holidays typically take northern European families via train, car or Ryanair from their gloomy northern rain-plagued homes to the promise of sunny Spain, Corfu or Crete. Because Europeans are poor, they cannot pay for decent vacation accommodation. They stay in trailer camps and jerry-built vacation hotels crammed together on the Spanish coast in foreign ghettos where sunburned tourists huddle together to avoid contact with the locals. Worse yet, they are there for four or five weeks. This violates the basic economist instinct that there is a law of diminishing returns that applies to everything, especially being in the same small hotel room or rocky beach for a month with the same set of screaming children or nagging grandmothers. In some European countries, families are plagued with children who just won’t grow up, especially in Italy where the typical 30-year-old male lives at home with mama and expects free food and laundry. Is this the kind of person with whom you would want to spend a five-week holiday? No wonder many European countries have much lower fertility rates than the United States: "Living at home with your family is the most effective method of contraception ever invented." Data showing that Americans take two-week vacations in contrast to five weeks in Europe are misleading. Americans are expert at juggling three-day holiday weekends and holidays that occur in the middle of the week into full-week vacations at the cost of only three or four days off. Americans' multiple one-week vacations in contrast to the European five-week August exodus are much more efficient. The city doesn’t close down, diminishing returns of being bored with your relatives does not set in, and because American incomes per head are about 45% higher than European, there is plenty of money for Americans to travel, and they do. Americans take a week in the summer at a nearby lake or seashore beach, a few days at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas to be with the relatives, and a week in winter to ski in the many resorts that are within driving distance of much of the population, not to mention the Utah and Colorado Rockies that are easily reachable by air. The typical European five-week August vacation is inefficient, congested and boring. The typical short American vacation taken several times per year to different places with different people provides a higher payoff of leisure per day. The perennial law of diminishing returns never seemed more appropriate. The opposition's opening remarks Dec 22nd 2009 | John de Graaf (Executive director, Take Back Your Time) I must say that when I first read this resolution I thought there was some mistake, that the real resolution must be: "This house believes that Americans get too little holiday time." Of course, in that case I would have argued in the affirmative, and my sense is that Professor Gordon might have agreed with me. In all honesty, my visits to Europe have made me very jealous of European holiday time. I have yet to talk to a European who wishes to see his or her vacation time reduced. This does not mean they want to see American vacations extended: I recall meeting a man from London in California's Yosemite National Park two summers ago. When I asked if he thought Americans got too little vacation, he quickly responded, "Oh, no! After all, I get five weeks off and I can come to this beautiful place and it's not even that crowded because the Americans are all chained to their bloody desks. I’d be having less fun if they had more vacation." But this is not an argument about preference. The long holidays that Europeans take are justified, not simply because they enjoy those holidays, but because their access to holiday time brings benefits for their health, their family connections, their environment, their overall life satisfaction and even their hourly productivity. Let us start with health. Vacation time is a hedge against coronary disease. Indeed, men who do not take regular vacations are some 32% more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who do, while for women the figure is even higher, at 50%. Women who do not take regular vacations are also two or three times more likely to suffer from depression than those who do. Dr Sarah Speck, a Seattle cardiologist, calls workplace stress “the new tobacco”. She suggests that taking regular blocks of time away from work may be nearly as good for your health as stopping smoking. It is thus perhaps no accident that nearly all western European countries can boast longer life expectancies than the United States (while spending half as much on health care), or that a Los Angeles Times story reported that Europeans are only a little over half as likely as Americans to suffer from such chronic illnesses as heart disease and high blood pressure in old age. Meanwhile, Americans are also about twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety. All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by Americans. Further evidence for the positive impact of shorter working time, including vacation time, on health comes from new findings that American health has actually improved during the recession (while many workers have received extended furloughs), and that the shorter working hours associated with recessions regularly lead to health improvements, while periods of rapid economic growth are associated with poorer health outcomes. Moreover, a recent Greek study found that around the world, mortality rates are at their lowest in the periods of the year immediately after most people in a given country take their vacations. In simple terms, rather than being an economic drain, vacations may significantly decrease unproductive expenditures associated with poor health. Vacations also improve family life and the welfare of children. Researchers have documented the degree to which many of children's strongest memories are of their vacations with their families. Vacations help bond families and often reintroduce romance into the lives of parents. They have even been shown to improve children's academic performance. Extended holiday time allows for more tourism—a benefit to many national economies—which, as a travel specialist, Rick Steves, points out, helps increase international understanding and connection, vital in these times of worldwide distrust. Moreover, lengthy periods of time off improve life satisfaction. As even Forbes magazine pointed out, annual Gallup Polls have found the highest rates of happiness in such countries as Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands (with the world's shortest working hours) and Sweden, nations where attention is paid to work-life balance and of course where holiday time is lengthy. And psychologists such as Tim Kasser and Leaf Van Boven have found that for most citizens of the industrial North, time affluence, including ample vacation time, brings more long-term satisfaction than material affluence does. Those who oppose long European vacations often do so in the name of greater economic growth. But ever higher growth rates are not sustainable in the long run. According to the Global Footprint Network, Americans, with their emphasis on material consumption rather than time off, have roughly twice the environmental impact of Europeans. A study by CEPR, a Washington DC think-tank, found that by reducing their working hours to European levels, including European-length holidays, Americans would cut their energy use and carbon outputs by 20-30%. Even so, extended periods of time off such as Europeans enjoy are not a threat to productivity. In fact, an Air New Zealand study found that after two weeks off, workers experienced an extra hour of quality sleep each night and showed 30-40% faster reaction times on the job. A recent Harvard Business School study found that in one large company, workers who experimented with predictable and required time off actually produced more than their colleagues who worked longer hours. Their work was more focused and the quality of their communication with fellow workers improved dramatically. Yet even if they produced a bit less, the tradeoff would be worth it. Many of the great joys in life cannot be measured by the crude index of GDP, as even Nicolas Sarkozy has recently noted. Europeans have a high quality of life (as so many Americans observe) precisely because they take time to live, time for conversation, for good food and wine, for travel at bicycle speed, time for family and time for long and memorable holidays. They are right in not wanting to sacrifice these non-material joys for the stuff extra hours of work can buy. People in the United States have much to learn from them. And they might even want to consider taking longer holidays. Comments:
In the proposer’s argument, he hold’s the assumption that the income a person gets equals the work he does. In a capitalism country, this assertion is not precise, since a person’s income is composed of both his salary and the money he gets from investment such as stock market profits. Therefore, even Europeans work fewer hours than Americans and, hence, they get less amount of salary, Europeans could still get more income by investment. In short, it is not necessarily for Europeans to work harder.
As for the opposition’s view, he cites the opinion of a professor to support that vacations are not too long. However the professor cannot represent those who are ill-paid. Possibly for those who have limited incomes, they are more willing to earn money instead of relaxing. | 
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发表于 2010-1-23 02:12:13
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