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[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.30]&[01.31]
The moderator's opening remarks
Dec 22nd 2009 | John O'Sullivan
A few years ago, a group of academics gathered in Portovenere in Italyto discuss why Western Europe, though rich, was still far lessprosperous than America. In 2000, the average income per head of the 15rich countries in the European Union was around 70% of the level in America.That gap had scarcely changed in 30 years, even though productivity hadincreased much faster in Europe than in America. By the end of lastcentury, Europe's workers could almost match America's in how much theyproduced in their factories or at their desks. The reason Europeansremained poorer is that they spent a lot less time at work than had ageneration earlier. The economists gathered in Portovenere to ask why.The title of the conference was: "Are Europeans lazy? Or Americanscrazy?"
This question lies at the heart of our present debate. There are manyways to account for the variations in hours worked between countries,including differences in the proportion of adults in work or in thelength of the typical working week. The starkest（粗糙的） transatlantic（大洋彼岸的） 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（艰难取得） four weeks vacation together.
So are Europeans poverty-stricken slackers orare they simply wise enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour asleisure time? Robert Gordon argues the former. It is all very well tohave lots of holiday, he says, but leisure time is more enjoyable whenyou have money to throw around. His conjures up（使。。产生于脑际） a nightmarish visionof poor Europeans trudging wearily to cheap resorts that areovercrowded because everyone is forced to take the same five weeks offin August. Americans may be time-poor, he argues, but they can at leastsplash out（花大笔的钱） on a nice vacationthanks to the extra hours of work they put in. He playfully impliesthat 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 bysacrificing income for leisure time. "Time affluence", he says, is moresatisfying than "material affluence". He stressesthe benefits of regular holidays in improved health, greater happinessand family togetherness. (By contrast Mr Gordon thinks long holidaysonly 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. WhetherEuropean vacations are too long is a side show to the main issue ofdigging the world out of its 2007-09 economic crisis. Right now,everyone everywhere is taking too much vacation, there is too muchidleness, there are too many people whose most heartfelt wish is thatthey could replace their current idleness, their “long holiday”, with asteady full-time job.
We must debate as if we were in the summer of 2007, before the worldwide crisis started. Way back（很久以前）then, the unemployment rate was at the normal or "natural” level inboth the United States and Europe, and we did not see millions forcedinto long involuntary holidays.
And for clarity we must ignore all thedifferences among European nations and pretend that there is a singlecomposite European nation made up of the countries in the pre-2004EU-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, theydevote so few hours to work that their income per head (i.e. theirstandard of living), is only about 68% of that in the United States.That 22 percentage point difference is by definition the result oflower 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 whyannual hours of work per person in Europe are so short. Those in Europewho 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 isknown as the "lump of labour fallacy" and dates back to Herbert Hoover.In France there are the "hours police" who snoop on employees to makesure offices are empty at night.
The third reason is a high normal or natural rate of unemployment, asin the contrast between America's 4.5% and Europe's 7.5% in 2007.Fourth is a low level of labour force participation, especially amongfemales in the Mediterranean countries (Greece, Italy, Spain). Fifthis early retirement, caused by a set of financial incentives embeddedin state pension schemes that push Europeans into idleness and boredomat ages (57, 58) when most Americans are at their prime maximum earningages. In fact the US retirement eligibility age for full SocialSecurity benefits is gradually being raised from 65 to 67, reflectingincreased life expectancy.
Because Europeans work shorter hours, they have only 70% of the realmarket income per person as Americans (adjusted for differences inprices 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, theyhurt consumers and they reveal the tedium of European family life. Andbecause 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 vacationswhen they read their guidebooks and find that one restaurant afteranother in Paris or Rome is "ferme en Aout". The big advantage ofEurope from its own perspective is that, generally speaking, it takesits five-week vacations all at once. The big horror of Europe from anAmerican perspective is that it takes its five-week vacations all atonce.
The American mind recoils at the image of European five-week holidays,so many of them in August. These summer holidays typically takenorthern European families via train, car or Ryanair from their gloomynorthern rain-plagued homes to the promise of sunny Spain, Corfu or Crete.
Because Europeans are poor, they cannot pay for decent vacationaccommodation. They stay in trailer camps and jerry-built vacationhotels crammed together on the Spanish coast in foreign ghettos wheresunburned tourists huddle together to avoid contact with the locals.
Worse yet, they are there forfour or five weeks. This violates the basic economist instinct thatthere is a law of diminishing returns that applies to everything,especially being in the same small hotel room or rocky beach for amonth with the same set of screaming children or nagging grandmothers.
In some European countries, families are plagued with childrenwho just won’t grow up, especially in Italy where the typical30-year-old male lives at home with mama and expects free food andlaundry. Is this the kind of person with whom you would want to spend afive-week holiday? No wonder many European countries have much lowerfertility rates than the United States: "Living at home with yourfamily is the most effective method of contraception（避孕） ever invented."
Data showing that Americans take two-week vacations in contrast to five weeks in Europe are misleading. Americans are expert at juggling（有效的利用）three-day holiday weekends and holidays that occur in the middle of theweek into full-week vacations at the cost of only three or four daysoff.
Americans' multiple one-week vacations in contrast to the Europeanfive-week August exodus are much more efficient. The city doesn’t closedown, diminishing returns of being bored with your relatives does notset in, and because American incomes per head are about 45% higher thanEuropean, there is plenty of money for Americans to travel, and theydo. Americans take a week in the summer at a nearby lake or seashorebeach, a few days at Thanksgiving and/or Christmas to be with therelatives, and a week in winter to ski in the many resorts that arewithin driving distance of much of the population, not to mention theUtah 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 severaltimes per year to different places with different people provides ahigher payoff of leisure per day. The perennial law of diminishingreturns 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 wassome mistake, that the real resolution must be: "This house believesthat Americans get too little holiday time." Of course, in that case Iwould have argued in the affirmative, and my sense is that ProfessorGordon might have agreed with me.
In all honesty, my visits toEurope have made me very jealous of European holiday time. I have yetto talk to a European who wishes to see his or her vacation timereduced. This does not mean they want to see American vacationsextended: I recall meeting a man from London in California's YosemiteNational Park two summers ago. When I asked if he thought Americans gottoo little vacation, he quickly responded, "Oh, no! After all, I getfive weeks off and I can come to this beautiful place and it's not eventhat 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 thatEuropeans take are justified, not simply because they enjoy thoseholidays, but because their access to holiday time brings benefits fortheir health, their family connections, their environment, theiroverall life satisfaction and even their hourly productivity.
Let us start with health. Vacation time is a hedge（防止。。而采取的措施） against coronarydisease. Indeed, men who do not take regular vacations are some 32%more likely to suffer heart attacks than those who do, while for womenthe figure is even higher, at 50%. Women who do not take regularvacations are also two or three times more likely to suffer fromdepression 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 expectanciesthan the United States (while spending half as much on health care), orthat a Los Angeles Times story reported that Europeans are only alittle over half as likely as Americans to suffer from such chronicillnesses as heart disease and high blood pressure in old age.Meanwhile, Americans are also about twice as likely to suffer fromdepression and anxiety. All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by（由。。携带） Americans.
Further evidence for the positive impact of shorter working time,including vacation time, on health comes from new findings thatAmerican health has actually improved during the recession (while manyworkers have received extended furloughs), and that the shorter workinghours associated with recessions regularly lead to health improvements,while periods of rapid economic growth are associated with poorerhealth outcomes. Moreover, a recent Greek study found that around theworld, mortality rates are at their lowest in the periods of the yearimmediately after most people in a given country take their vacations.In simple terms, rather than being an economic drain, vacations maysignificantly decrease unproductive expenditures associated with poorhealth.
Vacations also improve family life and the welfare of children. Researchers have documentedthe degree to which many of children's strongest memories are of theirvacations with their families. Vacations help bond families and oftenreintroduce romance into the lives of parents. They have even beenshown to improve children's academic performance. Extended holiday timeallows for more tourism—a benefit to many national economies—which, asa travel specialist, Rick Steves, points out, helps increaseinternational understanding and connection, vital in these times ofworldwide distrust.
Moreover, lengthy periods of time off improve life satisfaction.As even Forbes magazine pointed out, annual Gallup Polls have found thehighest rates of happiness in such countries as Denmark, Finland, theNetherlands (with the world's shortest working hours) and Sweden,nations where attention is paid to work-life balance and of coursewhere holiday time is lengthy. And psychologists such as Tim Kasser andLeaf Van Boven have found that for most citizens of the industrialNorth, time affluence, including ample vacation time, brings morelong-term satisfaction than material affluence does.
Those who oppose long European vacations often do so in the name ofgreater economic growth. But ever higher growth rates are notsustainable in the long run. According to the Global Footprint Network,Americans, with their emphasis on material consumption rather than timeoff, have roughly twice the environmental impact of Europeans. A studyby CEPR, a Washington DC think-tank, found that by reducing theirworking 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 athreat to productivity. In fact, an Air New Zealand study found thatafter two weeks off, workers experienced an extra hour of quality sleepeach night and showed 30-40% faster reaction times on the job. A recentHarvard Business School study found that in one large company, workerswho experimented with predictable and required time off actuallyproduced more than their colleagues who worked longer hours. Their workwas more focused and the quality of their communication with fellowworkers improved dramatically.
Yet even if they produced a bit less, the tradeoffwould be worth it. Many of the great joys in life cannot be measured bythe 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, forgood food and wine, for travel at bicycle speed, time for family andtime for long and memorable holidays. They are right in not wanting tosacrifice these non-material joys for the stuff extra hours of work canbuy. People in the United States have much to learn from them. And theymight even want to consider taking longer holidays.
COMMENT:
The debate is to argue the resonableness of the lengthy holiday inEurope, while the two debaters make senses to each other from theirperspective view. The proposer, viewing it in an American way,questions the lengthy holiday by revealing the disminishing income andtedious choice of vacation. However it makes sense, it suffers fromsome drawbacks as well. With the ignorance of the differences betweenAmerican and European, Mr Robert is highly exposed to the possibilityof misunderstanding, that happiness is judged by one's own perspecticview. In an American's point of view, material affluence meets theneeds of a perfect vacation, while in Europe, time affluence might be aprority. What's more, tedious as Mr Robert despicts, European areenjoying the highest happiness, which is undoubtly cracks Mr Robers'splausible argument.
错字：
disminishing--diminishing
Prority-priority |
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楼主: 番茄斗斗
发表于 2010-1-23 00:45:34
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