Posted on 05/06/2009 5:28:01 AM PDT by bestintxas
Why bother to wake up when there are few jobs and when a wage earner is taxed so heavily to support a welfare state? Look at France, where people with no need to rouse themselves sleep longer than any other group of people in the industrialized world.
David Gauthier-Villars reports in the Wall Street Journal:
When he won the presidential election two years ago, Nicolas Sarkozy urged the French to get up early and work more to earn more.
A study released Monday suggests they missed the wake-up call.
France is the industrialized country where people spend the longest periods sleeping, according to a series of surveys on social habits conducted by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.
Once a statist culture prevails in a nation -- especially one where religion is downgraded as a source of eternal virtues -- it becomes very difficult to restore the old values.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Thinking, working, eating is all taken care of by the state. All a frenchman is responsible for is popping his own cork on a bottle of wine.
You know...some of this is just not true. I have friends in France...they live a good life and are quite happy...if the government does stuff they don’t like, there is an immediate rebellion against whatever.
So how many hours do they get?
Maybe they are just depressed.
“some of this is just not true.”
People would do well to read the report itself and desist from sweeping conclusions based on presuppositions.
http://www.sourceoecd.org/pdf/societyataglance2009/812009011e-02.pdf
Yes, France was #1 (at about 530 minutes per day), but the US was #2 in amount of sleep per day (at just under 520 minutes)—a finding (Fig. 2.5) that shocked me given that the report also demonstrates conclusively that Americans work more than most citizens in other nations (1896 hours annually vs. 1595 for all OECD countries on average: Table 2.1). But the reality is—at least according to this study—is that except for Japan and Korea, average sleeping time in all the other 16 countries studied exceeded 8 hours a day.
What the report also shows the amount of non-work time is positively related to life satisfaction (Fig. 2.13). Since the U.S. has the least amount of such time, one might expect us to have much lower life satisfaction. On the contrary, the U.S. is “off the charts” in terms of having a level of life satisfaction that is nearly 20% higher than would be predicted given our number of work hours. Only a handful of countries have higher life satisfaction. France in particular has an average level of life satisfaction that is about 15% lower than the US notwithstanding all that extra time they have for leisure/sleep etc.
On a related point, non-work time is positively correlated to per capita income, but again, relative to most other countries (which “hug” the prediction line much more closely), U.S. per capita income looks to be about 80% higher than it “should” be given our low level of non-work time.
In short, after skimming this report, I came away with greater pride in being an American, as opposed to envying the French.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.