Has America gotten soft...

or are there two America, one that is working hard and the other is sponging like your lazy brother-in-law?


Fareed Zakaria at Time has written a defence of Obama's "America has gotten soft" comment.  Putting aside the passive-aggressive attack on conservatives, is it true that America has gotten soft?  Or is it the case that there are two Americas, and one is working its lilly-white pahookie off to support the other?


There is one America where Americans have not gotten soft. In that America, Americans work longer hours with fewer vacations than their foreign counterparts.

"Consider some examples. One country that makes frequent headlines for its relatively short working week is France, not least because of its own debate about the 35-hour week. But France is not the lowest: a look at the figures shows that the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Denmark work even fewer hours per year on average, while Germany works only marginally more (see graph). The UK may have higher employment, but it barely clocks up more working hours per year than France or Germany, and trails well behind the OECD average.

Though Koreans easily work the most hours per year in the OECD area, the US is also well above average: in 2005 annual hours worked in the US were 15% higher than the European Union (EU15) average.

This has not always been the case though. In the mid 1970s Europeans worked significantly longer hours. It was only in the mid-1980s that hours worked in the US began to exceed those in Europe. True, US hours worked have eased back, but not as much as in Europe: in the US they fell from about 1,850 hours worked annually in the 1960s to just over 1,700 in 2004, while western Europe’s decreased from over 2,100 to 1,600 in the same period. Since the 1970s US hours have in fact been broadly stable, whereas they have fallen sharply in Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg and France."

Likewise:

"Americans work much more than Europeans: according to the OECD a typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. Unemployment in the US is lower than in many European countries (though since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?"

These are statistics I've been aware of for a long time, mostly because I rarely get vacations, but then I'm self-employed in the private sector.

Of course, these statistics of hard-working Americans are private sector employees. They don't include teachers, professors or other government employees who get vacations, get comp time for working overtime, when they do, etc.

So, who has gotten soft?

Could it be that America's drop in productivity is due to the fact that we've been moving people from the private sector to the public sector, particularly under Obama?

Probably so.

Concerning America's falling ranking in education, is that may also have as much to do with governmental policies as anything else. We do set aside a certain percentage of seats in America's elite colleges for people who are simply not competitive at that level under our affirmative action policies. Are we surprised that the average results from such colleges is in decline? Likewise, we provide a curriculum that favors soft science and political correctness rather than intellectual rigor. Are we surprised that we test worse on hard sciences than countries that don't provide majors in Urban Studies, Feminist Studies, etc.

We also have a culture that is disdainful of appearing smart.

"The average American college student doesn’t learn much, because they aren’t that bright or intellectually oriented. They don’t do their reading until the last second, and have only marginal passion for the books which they purchase. Your mind can’t be broadened if you barely use it."

How much of that is due to the cultural trends from '60s, such as the cult of authenticity described by John McWhorter in his excellent book "Doing Our Own Thing."

And how much of that is due to the assimilation of what Theodore Dalyrimple refers to as "underclass values," such as tattoos, into the middle class, which unfortunately includes not looking "too white" by appearing smart.  See also this Wiki article that rounds up the sources on whether there is a minority cultural view that denigrates educational success, and includes this observation:

Stuart Buck, a lawyer, wrote Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation in 2010, published by Yale University Press. He argued that traditionally segregated black schools featured teachers, counselors, and others of the same race as the student population of the schools, who in many cases became mentors to the students. However, the integration of schools since the mid- to late-20th century may have caused schools to appear to some black students to be controlled or dominated by whites. Consequently, a black student trying to achieve high educational success may be seen primarily as trying to make him or herself appear superior to others.[10]

On a similar point, I posted Huntley-Brinkley's sign off from 1970 with the observation that it is like looking at the manners and mores of a lost world.

I suspect somehow that this is not the discussion that Zakariah hoped to have about whether America is getting soft.