[REBORN FROM THE ASHES][comment][02.13]&[02.14]

海王泪UID: 2673613

关于REBORN FROM THE ASHES组COMMENTS活动的说明&汇总
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1042733-1-2.html
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同主题：European holidays [Opening]
https://bbs.gter.net/thread-1055897-1-1.html
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European holidays [Rebuttal]
This house believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes

The moderator's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | John O'Sullivan

Those with a wry disposition will find some amusement in two American-based commentators spending Christmas locked in a debate over whether Europeans take too much holiday. It reminds the moderator of the title of a paper co-authored by one of the featured guests in our debate: "The Economics of Workaholism: We Should Not Have Worked on This Paper". Thankfully, neither of our two debaters sees the holiday season as an excuse for slacking, even if one is arguing for more time off.

Mr Gordon spares no effort in trying to demolish objections to the proposal that Europe takes too much time off. Are Europeans healthier and happier because of their long holidays, as his opponent argues? The evidence suggests no such link, says Mr Gordon. The variation in life expectancy within the EU itself is unrelated to holiday time. Europe's health and vitality in comparison with America are explained by good diet, not vacation time. Look at Japan. Its workers also take few holidays, yet they are far healthier than Americans. That is because "the Japanese are thin and eat a lot of fish [while] Americans are fat and eat a lot of burgers and pizza".

Similarly Mr Gordon sees no connection between holidays and life satisfaction in the EU. Danes have long holidays but score badly in cross-country studies of happiness, he notes. The Portuguese, by contrast, have short holidays but are fairly chipper. And Americans are cheerier than Europeans, despite their briefer vacations. Mr Gordon is keen (and perhaps wise) not to make this debate about whether Europeans have a better quality of life than Americans do. "We have many policies and institutions that should be copied from Europe," he says. "But long vacations are not among them."

For his part, Mr de Graaf strives hard to bulldoze Mr Gordon's case. The idea that Europeans suffer by sacrificing income for holiday time is "simplistic". Money isn't everything and it is not much use if you have no time off to enjoy it, whether it comes as private income or is used to finance the public works and generous welfare benefits enjoyed in many European countries. America may be rich, he notes, but its wider dispersion of wealth and income means many Americans do not share in its benefits. The poorest citizens often have the least time off, another inequality.

Europe closing down for August may be a cause for regret, says Mr de Graaf, but that is hardly an argument against a generous holiday entitlement. Perhaps Europeans should take more piecemeal breaks, as Americans are forced to. To close out his case, Mr de Graaf returns to his strongest debating point (even if it is based on anecdote rather than evidence): "I have never found a European who would trade his vacation time with the typical American, but it's hard to find an American who does not envy his European counterpart in this regard."

Have our contestants' efforts convinced you one way or the other? Please cast your vote now.

The proposer's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | Robert J. Gordon

John de Graaf's defence of Europe's long vacations centres on health and happiness. He credits long vacations as the source both of better health outcomes and a higher level of happiness in Europe than in America. But he is wrong on both counts. Europeans do live longer than Americans, but not because of their long vacations. And Europeans are demonstrably less happy than Americans.

Further, a wide variety of new evidence in the economics literature on happiness shows a broad range in western Europe, with the United States comparable with the top European countries and way above the western European average. Some Europeans, especially in southern Europe, are downright miserable.

Fortunately we do not have to limit this debate to our opinions, because there are facts available on the length of vacations, on life expectancy and on happiness.

Mercer Human Resources Consulting maintains a league table of minimum paid vacation days for a worker with a ten-year tenure, and this table includes paid holidays as well. Surprisingly, these vary more across the EU-15 countries than between the EU-15 and the United States. The common notion is that Europeans have five weeks of vacation, more than double the stingy two weeks granted to Americans. But the Mercer table shows much smaller differences: 23.3 days of holiday for the population-weighted EU-15 compared with 15 for Americans, a margin of +55%. Including paid vacation days narrows the margin to 33.7 days for Europe compared with 25 for Americans, a margin of +35%.

Are these data on holidays related to health outcomes, as Mr de Graaf contends? Fifty years ago life expectancy in western Europe and Japan was shorter than in the United States but now is longer. The Wikipedia league table based on UN data shows that every country in western Europe except Portugal has a longer life expectancy at birth than the United States, with differences ranging from an extra 2.7 years in Spain and Sweden to an extra 1.2 years in Belgium, Germany and the UK.

But these intra-Europe differences in life expectancy are not correlated with vacation time. The correlation across the 15 countries between days of vacation and life expectancy is only 0.13, far below the correlation required for statistical significance. Adding Japan pushes the correlation coefficient down to -0.08. In fact, since Japan has shorter vacations and much longer life expectancy than the EU-15 average, the correlation for the EU-15 average and Japan is a stark -1.0.

This suggests the strong possibility that vacation time has nothing to do with health outcomes in general and life expectancy in particular. The Japanese are thin and eat a lot of fish. Americans are fat and eat a lot of burgers and pizza, and their restaurants serve portions that are grotesquely oversized to the eyes of European and Japanese visitors. An epidemic of obesity starting in childhood is widely recognised as an important source of America's poor performance in the league table of life expectancy, as is poor access to health care. I would be the first to support the European view that America's health-care system is unfair, inefficient, needlessly complex, and deprives millions of Americans of the health care that in other developed nations is regarded as a fundamental right of citizenship. But this debate is about vacations, not the American health-care system.

Let us turn now to happiness, for which extensive cross-country data are available thanks to extensive research admirably summarised recently by David Blanchflower1, an impartial observer who holds both American and British citizenship. Indexes of happiness for particular countries are developed from surveys that ask large numbers of people about the degree to which they are satisfied with their lives. The basic metric is a "four-step" question which asks respondents if they are very satisfied, fairly satisfied, not very satisfied and not at all satisfied with their lives. If everyone responded "very satisfied", that country would have a happiness index of 4.0, and if everyone responded "fairly satisfied" the index would be 3.0.

Results from the 2004 survey (the latest available for all countries) show the United States with a happiness index of 3.42 and the population-weighted average for the EU-15 at 3.04 and Japan at a dismal 2.74. Within the EU-15 the indexes range from a high of 3.59 in Denmark to a low of 2.49 for the Portuguese, who seem to regard their lives as even more dismal than do the Japanese.

Are Danes happy because they take unusually long vacations, and are Portuguese unhappy because their vacations are short? Once again, there is no correlation within the EU-15. The correlation coefficient between happiness and days of vacation is a highly insignificant 0.05 and drops to -0.10 when paid holidays are included.

What about the relationship between happiness and vacation days between the EU-15 average, Japan and the United States? Here the correlation is strongly negative, a highly significant -0.65 for vacation days and an amazing -0.94 when paid holidays are included.

But I would not try to trump Mr de Graaf by claiming that Americans are happier because they take short holidays. It is much more likely that the length of holidays has nothing to do with happiness. There are more plausible candidates. Start from the fact that American dwelling units have twice the interior space as in Europe with four times the total land per housing unit. Americans happily do their errands in SUVs while Europeans are carrying their groceries home via bus or subway to their cramped apartments. Mr De Graaf envies European holidays for "improving family life and the welfare of children". Another interpretation is that European children need those extra vacation days to escape from the confinement of their space-constrained residences, while American children can play outside with their friends while Daddy fires up the backyard barbecue.

All is not well in America, and there are problems beyond obesity and a dysfunctional health-care system. American fiscal deficits are too high, petrol taxes are too low and the United States uses about twice as much energy as Europe. We have many policies and institutions that should be copied from Europe, but long vacations are not among them.

The opposition's rebuttal remarks
Dec 24th 2009 | John de Graaf

I am honoured to share this debate with Robert Gordon, many of whose analyses I have admired for their nuance and depth. I agree with him that we should define Europe as the pre-2004 EU-15. But his opening remarks strike me as simplistic.

It seems from what content in Professor Gordon's opening statement actually refers to holiday time (I share his feeling that Europeans probably retire too early), that his position rests on the opinion that Europeans are nearly as productive per hour as Americans, yet "so poor" by comparison. What can he mean by this, except that in aggregate GDP terms, Europeans have less money? If money were the measure of the good life, he might have a case, but that would be to ignore things which Europeans take for granted but many Americans have no access to: efficient public transportation, including high-speed rail, generous family and sick-leave benefits, free health care and public education through college, a generous social safety net, and, of course, the time to enjoy these things.

To accept his view that Europeans are poor would mean to discount their better health, longer lives and lower levels of mental illness. It would mean that wealth is defined as more massive homes or cars or entertainment systems, in which to appreciate a purely private comfort. The Europeans need less of these things because they have ample and beautiful public spaces, cities of charm and grace, paths to walk and ride their bikes, highly accessible art and culture—and the time to enjoy these things.

European life is hardly grim, bleak or desperate. I think of the rural Dutch village where my cousins live, with its international restaurants, lively, colourful market and prosperous-looking shops, or the dozens of tiny, lovely and well-kept Austrian, Swiss and German hamlets one passes on the train, each house with its bright flowerbox, each town surrounded not by Wal-Mart sprawl—the mark of buying power—but by the lovely greenery of field and forest. And I compare them with the dereliction that characterises so much of rural America—the heartland streets with their broken windows and empty storefronts and homes—or with the urban slums one sees from Amtrak.

If Americans are richer than Europeans in income, we also have to consider who shares in that wealth. For the half of all Americans our 30-year march to extreme inequality has left in the lurch, even the material lives of Europeans look very good indeed.

Europeans, professor Gordon suggests, suffer from a "tedium of family life". That seems a harsh assessment of a life where families enjoy their flowers and gardens, long meals together, shopping together, bike rides and amusements together, while their American counterparts rush through their meals, flop, exhausted by work, in front of the television in their separate rooms and starve for the conversation of a French café or British pub. I am reminded of what a state legislator, a Republican actually, told me of a trip to Scandinavia. "It was as you say, John. The work ended at five, people had plenty of time off, and we had such great long meals and walks in the woods and wonderful talks." "And you know," she said, her eyes gleaming, "the best part about it was that everyone wasn't trying to get filthy rich!"

Professor Gordon's descriptions of dull European and exciting American vacations are the work of a lively imagination. My French cousins take two to three weeks off in August, another two at the Christmas holidays and shorter breaks in fall and spring. My Dutch cousins do the same. They often camp, not in "pitiful" trailer camps, but in well-tended European campgrounds that are inexpensive, yet commonly include excellent on-site restaurants.

If too many Europeans take their vacations at the same time, as Professor Gordon suggests, that is an argument for spreading those holidays out, not for eliminating them. And if their resorts are crowded, well, so is much of Europe; its population densities have always been higher than in the United States, where open space is plentiful. But how that can be seen as an argument against holidays is beyond me.

It is up to you, dear reader, to decide if the fact that some Europeans have adult children at home is relevant to holiday time. If we lopped a couple of weeks off, would they all be out of the house?

What strikes me as a real fantasy game is Professor Gordon's idea that Americans regularly have weeks of time here and there to visit the beach, stay with relatives and ski the Rockies. A 2008 poll by the Opinion Research Corporation found that the median American paid vacation was one week, with more than a quarter of American workers getting none at all. I met a woman in Florida who was supposed to get two weeks of paid vacation a year but had not been allowed to take it in seven years.

Instead of stretching their long weekends into weeklong vacations, many Americans chop their vacation days so they have the occasional long weekend, or use them to make up for their lack of paid sick days. And as for those easily accessible American playgrounds, Aspen brims with European skiers and when I was last in Yosemite, the Americans were lamenting that most of the visitors there were from Europe.

In a nutshell, as Professor Gordon puts it, I have never found a European who would trade his vacation time with the typical American, but it is hard to find an American who does not envy his European counterpart in this regard.

So, for Professor Gordon, it seems that the case against long holidays is built on the fact that Americans (at least the rich ones) have more money than Europeans do. But to be rich in time and relationships, health, public life, security, access to art, beauty and conversation, is hardly to be poor.

And if an American economist like Professor Gordon has not yet figured this out, the Europeans, led, ironically, by President Sarkozy, are starting to.

原文链接：http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/440

123runfordreamUID: 2697608

Comment:

I am not sure that I am convinced by the attractive vacation and the wonderful life in Europe or by one of those two brilliant debaters. It becomes a little bit harder to think it over because both of them are seem to be sensible on this issue. However, considering about the different identities of them, I would choose to stand by Mr. Graaf.
As what I have thought about that the purpose for a country should be the good life of its people. And the good economic of a country could not stand for the good life of them, since it is just a sign of proper created by its people. For this point, I was totally absorbed in the fantasy picture described by Mr. Graaf. Are these all relative to the length of vacation? If it does, then there is no point to discuss about the necessary to abandon it. If not, is there still having anything to do with the action? No either. If the longer vacation does create something to make some difference of European people’s lives, the argument that it cause the loss or the behind of economic, which is compared to America’s is not convincable (convincible).