Unproductive Foreigners

So . . . one thing that seems to consistently catch my attention is when they report the number of hours, and the commensurate amount of productivity, that is lost when people turn their attention away from work.  For example, the royal wedding last month apparently cost the U.K. 1, 5, 10 or 50 billion dollars in lost productivity, because people were not working.  Whichever estimate you believe, that's a lot of money.  Seems like a huge waste for a meaningless ceremony.

Likewise, we hear stories from other countries that don't jive with our North American ideal of maximum productivities, like the French having a dozen weeks of vacation a year and not working in the summer, or the Spanish and their siestas, or four-day workweeks in some countries.  Those unproductive layabouts, we may huff (if we either used the term "layabout" or huffed), so unlike our achievement-minded society.  But what we often fail to consider in such scenarios is that their opinion of us is as low as ours of them.

Our society has evolved to value production and efficiency above all else, and that is how we measure success.  In other societies, that is not the case.  So just as we think they are pampered or lazy, they think we're profoundly stupid for working 60-hour weeks while being paid for 40, and working 50 weeks out of the year.  Sure, their taxes are double ours and they take home much less of their paycheque, but they also don't pay monthly daycare costs that could rent a one-bedroom apartment in a major city.  Judging others by our own standards just doesn't make sense.

While travelling in China a couple of years ago this idea was brought front and center in two ways.  First, in every hotel that I had the pleasure of staying in there would be five to ten employees standing around the lobby with seemingly nothing to do.  Once in a while a guest would approach one of them with a question, but otherwise they had no other tasks.  Terribly inefficient, and such a waste of either employee time or wage expenses would not be tolerated here.  But in a society where a goal is to provide jobs for all, even less-meaningful jobs, this was important.

The second thing I noticed was the abject terror I experienced every time I was in a car (or bus, or van).  To call the driving reckless is an insult to recklessness.  This is not to say they were bad drivers - they weren't, as far as I could tell.  I saw very few accidents at the side of the road.  Because everyone drove extremely aggressively, all drivers were on full alert at all times, paying attention to every detail because they could not count on other drivers to be predictible (or follow what I had previously assumed to be rules of the road).

In North America, we do not pay as much attention while driving, partly because we assume the other drivers will do what we expect them to.  If we were to go there and drive, we wouldn't get out of the parking lot, because no one would let us in.  Likewise, when people from other countries come here, we often consider them "bad drivers" because they don't drive like we do (in fact, I wanted to title this post "Why Immigrants Can't Drive" before being wisely talked out of that by my wife).  That's like calling a bird a "bad walker" because he gets to where he's going differently than we do.  It implicitly assumes that our way is the right way and any other way is wrong.

Besides, if those lazy Europeans ever learned how to be as productive as us, I might be worried for our economy.