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.
“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.