[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][01.30]&[01.31]

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

链接出问题，今天发晚了。不好意思。

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html

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), 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.

http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/160

plukaUID: 2721764

NOTE
The starkest（十足的完全的） transatlantic（大西洋彼岸的） divide（用这个做名词！） is in holiday time.

most heartfelt（衷心的） wish

To put the case in a nutshell（坚果壳）（简短地说）, Europe makes itself poor by working many fewer hours per person than Americans.
【You can use in a nutshell to indicate that you are saying something in a very brief way, using few words.】

Excessively long vacations are only the tip of the iceberg（冰山一角）. 


snoop（探听调查） on

Americans' multiple（多样的） one-week vacations in contrast to the European five-week August exodus（大批离去） are much more efficient. diminishing returns of being bored with your relatives does not set in.


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（被链锁住的） to their bloody desks.（好表达！） I’d be having less fun if they had more vacation." 

Vacation time is a hedge（障碍物） against coronary disease.

All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by Americans. 


Vacations help bond families and often reintroduce romance into the lives of parents.

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. （有意思的观点）


Yet even if they produced a bit less, the tradeoff（交易折中平衡） would be worth it. 

COMMENT

Are European long vacations deleterious to people's life? My intuition replied this question even before my rationality started working. Picture two image in your mind: one is an American who is savvy in business with a fashion of restless competition that swift yet pressed; another is an European who is a little bit casual for his work yet with an easiness and satisfaction and basks himself in the sun show in a Spanish shore. The answer then seems self-evident for me: the contented leisureliness,not the smart pressure, catches me. 

Mr Gordon's affirmative on reducing European vacation was based on the premise that Europeans had no good way to consum their time plethora while the insuffient working hour hamstringed the economic health. Let's put the latter aside firstly, and examine the validity of the former claim. This statement, according to what he clarified next, seems to be grounded on that visits to resorts are the major pleasure and relief that a vacation provides. As Europeans are too poor to afford decent tours (so he claimed), they gain little pleasure on vacation. This assertion is too material. Many times people find themselves contented in tours not because of the breath-taking scenery but because of the comfortable companion of family and friends. The destination of visit contains not only the acquaintance of new places but the reintroduction of old affections: the family tie, the friendship, the love for life and nature. The economical scale can not weigh everything.

dingyi0311UID: 2627919

My comment
This is an article debate on the preference to material satisfaction and spiritual satisfaction. This is a very complex issue that cannot reduce to simple statement. Whether people desire for more material satisfaction or more spiritual satisfaction depend on whether their basic need are met. In china, there are many girls who marry people not the one they loved most but the man the most proper, which means that the man can provide them houses and wealth enough to afford their live expends. Some young girls even would rather to break up with their young but poor boyfriend and marry old and rich man. However，if the young man have a affluent money, even can not be termed rich, many girls would not chose a old rich man as their companion. They shift to pursuit spiritual satisfaction. The dfference tell us that people usually put the spiritual satisfaction at the second rank and pursuit it only after the material need are satisfied. As to the case debated in this article, I believe most European will not have their long holiday live changed even more working hours can bring them more stuff since their basic needs are satisfied. They now are pursuiting their spiritual satisfaction Similarly, as American care not about the money in their pocket, it is understandable they want even sacrifice their money for more leisure time.

ieyangj08UID: 2743219

Sentence
1) 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.
2) 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.  
3) 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.
4) 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.
5) 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.
6) 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."
7) 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.
8) Vacation time is a hedge against coronary disease.
9) All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by Americans.
10) In simple terms, rather than being an economic drain, vacations may significantly decrease unproductive expenditures associated with poor health.
11) Researchers have documented the degree to which many of children's strongest memories are of their vacations with their families.
12) 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.  
13) Those who oppose long European vacations often do so in the name of greater economic growth.
14) 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.
15) Yet even if they produced a bit less, the tradeoff would be worth it.

Comment

Why the average income per head in Western Europe was still less than that in America, though Europe is rich? There are various ways to account for; however, the starkest difference between the two countries is Europe’s five weeks vacation contrasting America’s two weeks holiday.

Robert Gordon argues Europeans are poverty-stricken slackers. Although they are time affluence, their holiday is inefficient and downscale, for they are suffering material constraints. On the other side, the flush Americans can splash out on a nice vacation due to their extra working hours.

John de Graaf, his opponent, holds that comprehensively Europeans are wiser than Americans and people in the United States would consider learning from European, for predictable and required breaks and the non-material joys are beneficial for the nation in a long-term perspective.

豆腐店的86UID: 2512956

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(几乎没变！), 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（辩论的重心）. 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（不要老用if... ） public holidays are included. Americans, by contrast, are lucky if they can scrape four weeks vacation together.

So are Europeans poverty-stricken slackers（这句话什么意思？？） 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 leastsplash out （表现出一种阔绰）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（以后不要用rich了！！！！）", 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（以后别说in short）, 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.(几个原因的组合) 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), 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.（句式，xxx是某问题5个原因中的一个！！这里句子有承上启下之意！！！可借鉴） 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.（如何写好长句！） 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（认为理所当然！！！）.

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. （长句！！）

In some European countries, families are plagued with children who just won’t grow up,（暗指啃老···） 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（今天刚刚看到的GRE词汇！） 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(原来这里可以不用and!) 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(A差不多只有B的一半多点点~~~) 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（清晰地记得，是第一次的debate作业教会了我这个词组！！！） 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（XX是不能被XX衡量的！）, 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.

----------------------------------------------

nightmarish  

噩梦

trudge

A long, tedious walk.

冗长乏味的行走

idle

Not employed or busy:

空闲的，有空的：不工作的或不忙的

take for granted   

认为理所当然

lavish

Characterized by or produced with extravagance and profusion:

奢侈的：以奢侈和大量丰富生产为特征的

recoils

To fall back; return:

报应；回报
violates

To fall back; return:

报应；回报

perennial

Lasting an indefinitely long time; enduring:

持久的：持续很长时间的；持久的：

coronary

Of or relating to the heart.

心脏：心脏的，或与心脏有关的
-----------------------------------------

It seems like this debate goes fiercely, however, I would rather think both the debaters are somewhat off-target. The resolution is that “THBT Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes” while both sides spent too much effort on discussion about the situation in America. In this case, I haven’t been persuaded by either side, since they all fail to provide analysis and evidence that what will happen if Europeans cut the holidays and work more. I have to admit that, based on the criteria of judging a debate; both sides have picked a wrong way to go.
Personally, I believe that it is better for the Europeans to stay in their own way of life. Although, a healthier lifestyle which has more time to enjoy and less pressure of intensive work may not help them become economically competitive against America, it doesn’t stop them from being culturally prosperous among the world, since we all know that it is the art, design, literature and all kinds of cultural industry that the Europeans are famous of.

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

lies at the heart of ；
starkest ；

if they can scrape four weeks vacation together.

His conjures up (to make something appear when it is not expected, as if by magic) a nightmarish vision of

furloughs(a leave of absence from duty granted especially to a soldier also : a document authorizing such a leave of absence))

Comment:
When we are talking about European countries, we all show our jealous for their easy life with high payment, idle style of living and most important one that is the frequent holidays. For the people who have long work hour but short leisure it is really a great voice to ask for more holidays especially, in my opinion, in the countries like America, which almost taking work as their life. After watching the debate between those two, I honestly believe that it will be a disaster for turning European countries as second United States.
According to Professor Gordon, the reason why European countries are poor is because they are lazy, taking too many vocations and fewer hours for work. As he says, lacking money for a better trip also is a good excuse for working less. Frankly speaking, Prof. Gordon’s economic view definitely conforms to American way. From my personal perspective, I prefer to Mr. Graaf’s idea, which refer to people’s health and the so called index of happiness. Yeah, for an individual, what he or she cares about is not how high of the GDP will get, but how his or her life is going to be. That’s means how much money they will get, which is the basic point. However, we all know that money can not buy everything including, such as health, happy life. Sacrificing time for working sometimes means paying more for others, which we can learn from Mr. Graaf’s statements.
In this debate, I actually find two different views for an argument.

海王泪UID: 2673613

My Comment

"Are Europeans lazy? Or Americans crazy?"
When asked by a question with only two choices, we should keep in mind that there might be a false dilemma. We cannot chose any of these two choices when Europeans are indeed too lazy (though better than Australian) and Americans are truly too crazy. We should find a pattern between E and A. That is, a good balance between life and work. And I hope one day we find this pattern called C. (Developed China. I am just kidding.)

As far as I am concerned, only focus on and argue about total days of vacation can hardly draw an agreement. In fact, it may be more effective when we talk about how holidays being distributed in a year. That is, we should discuss about the policy tendency between scattered, short holidays and lengthy vacation

It is the long holidays which indeed hurt productivity but not the short holidays. If Europe can scatter its six or seven weeks instead of an unreasonable long time away from work, Europeans may not be as lazy as right now. We can imagine that, after the same long five weeks in August, people returning to work sites are much stranger to their works than before. For example, a worker skilled in fixing components probably works much slower and commits errors more frequently. What’s more, it is common sense that people could be more reluctant to focus on jobs if they still enjoy the leisure habits and feelings formed by long holidays. In contrast, it is not hard to understand that short and scattered holidays may be much more effective in recharging tired people without byproduct of lengthy vacation.

Furthermore, short and scattered holidays would enjoy a good position due to the law of diminishing returns ( a basic economist instinct). Think about this. Supposed one week of holidays equals to one piece of pizza, you feel extraordinarily happy and cheer for it after toiling for life when you are hungry. Then the second piece of pizza could keep satisfied you but you are full enough. On and on, you eat the third and uncomfortable one, and the forth one. Lastly, you will meat the most nauseous one! More pizza and longer holidays could not make you happy as the fist couples of ones. Therefore, short and scattered day can keep cheering up people all year round in an effective way.

zhengchangdianUID: 2563082

Comment:
The world has witnessed too many examples of American-style life, especially in the developing countries. Of course, no one has the right to estimate or criticize others way of life. However, no one can stop the inevitable trend of American-style to dominate the whole world. Computer enterprise in India, whose outstanding merits are high speed and convenience, is an absolute representative of American-style business and becomes a pillar industry. It is no exaggeration to say that the reason why India has burst on the international scene is its prominence in computer enterprise. On the other hand, Japan, as the second strongest country in the world stage, also grows in strength on the basis of American work tradition. Factually, American-style life's success is owing to its accordance with the marketrule of rapid development. So the European have to readjust their leisurely pace of living if they want to achieve as much wealth as the American.

错字： prominence owing

番茄斗斗UID: 2720914

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（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 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（使。。产生于脑际） 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（花大笔的钱） 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（很久以前） 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), 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（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 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（防止。。而采取的措施） 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（由。。携带） 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.

COMMENT:
The debate is to argue the resonableness of the lengthy holiday in Europe, while the two debaters make senses to each other from their perspective view. The proposer, viewing it in an American way, questions the lengthy holiday by revealing the disminishing income and tedious choice of vacation. However it makes sense, it suffers from some drawbacks as well. With the ignorance of the differences between American and European, Mr Robert is highly exposed to the possibility of misunderstanding, that happiness is judged by one's own perspectic view. In an American's point of view, material affluence meets the needs of a perfect vacation, while in Europe, time affluence might be a prority. What's more, tedious as Mr Robert despicts, European are enjoying the highest happiness, which is undoubtly cracks Mr Robers's plausible argument.

错字：
disminishing--diminishing
Prority-priority

kulewy531UID: 2603031

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.

tequilawineUID: 2702008

1 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.
2 This question lies at the heart of our present debate.
3 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.
4 So are Europeans poverty-stricken slackers or are they simply wise enough to enjoy the fruits of their labour as leisure time? 疑问句的选择
5 To engage in this debate in December 2009 requires that we play a fantasy game.
6 Excessively long vacations are only the tip of the iceberg. 冰山一角
7 Long European holidays constitute just one of the five reasons why annual hours of work per person in Europe are so short.
8 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.
9 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.
10 Worse yet, they are there for four or five weeks.
11 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.
12 Let us start with health.
13 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."
14 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.
15 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%.
16 All together, these infirmities account for a lion’s share of the enormous health-care costs borne by Americans.
17 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.
18 Researchers have documented the degree to which many of children's strongest memories are of their vacations with their families.
19 Those who oppose long European vacations often do so in the name of 以。。。的名义greater economic growth.
20 They are right in not wanting to sacrifice these non-material joys for the stuff extra hours of work can buy.


Suspicion arises between the long holidayand prosperous economic, when we compare the system that operates in European withwhat is operated in USA, generally speaking, we can assure that the differencebetween them make a difference indeed, however, only on the basis of thispoint, it is not sufficient to conclude any arbitrary assumption. That meanswhat we ought to do is not only focus on this mere aspect of two things thatalso have many other contradictions each other, even in the same manner stillexists some nuances.

Let us start with the proposer’s attitudefirst. To document his proposal, he assume that we ignore all the differencebetween them and treat the EU as a single country, obviously it is , the fatalfallacy also emerge with the ideal condition. To pursue the truth of short workhours, author elicits five reasons why annual hours of work per person in Europeare so short. Of course, as we mentioned before, the long vocation consists oneof the total five, whereas, the other four include lumpof work fallacy aiming to create more jobs in the market, high or normal rateof unemployment, low labor force participation, and last coming from earlyretirement which seems ridiculous for the sense of author.

However, allow me to rebut on my littleside opinion. At the beginning, even we agree with the assumption and in thelight of it, we still linger in the circle circumstance delving into one aspectexcept considering others at the same time in a narrow view.



Arbitrary arbitrary
Persue pursue
Conclude include
circustunce circumstance

prettywraithUID: 197049

Comments (2010-01-30, 31):
As let one poor people judge which rich people is more wealthier, it is awkward for a Chinese to judge whose holidays are more reasonable. Some of them do not have jobs but have plentiful time, and they do not have enough money to travel. Some of them with nice pay have little time to have good rest, and even they need to spend their additional none-work time in working. Thus, most of Chinese people always have little chance to enjoy their holidays. But holidays are necessary part for our life. If we have opportunities to pick up this part, which types of holiday is better?

The professionals complaint the European holidays are too long with lower quality, while some Americans admire their neighbors have more time to enjoy the life. From my perspective, in different age, people should have different holidays. For instance, when I am young and I just begin my career, I need less holiday time, because I look forward to earning more money and improving working skills. In this way, the young people could set up a solid foundation for future life whether in personal finance or career. When I am becoming older, I hope I can have more time to enjoy the life with family like the current European holidays. In old age, perhaps, I have enough money for the rest of life or I am rich. Following the growing of age, I need more rest and more time with family. After all, old people have less energy than the young people to work. Thus, I think we should make different holidays plan for the different age people.

Wrong Spelling:
whose  whoes
complaint compaint
neighbor  neigbor