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Discussion: Foreign perception of Americans
Member Since: 3/27/2010
Posts: 6,259
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Quote:
Originally posted by Mayline
Well, as I was an exhange student in a little town down in the deep south in America about five years ago (for a year) I have met my fair share of dumb, uneducated and ignorant rednecks. But I have also met some of the most brilliant, awesome and inspiring people. Just like every country, there are bad AND good people in America.
Since I'm a dietetics student I'm genuinely concerned about the obesity epidemic that are facing America though. We have those problems in Europe and other countries as well of course, but not to the same extent.
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Can't agree more.
Moreover, obesity (and children obesity) is worldwide epidemic right now. WHO have warned it. Maybe the scale in U.S. is much larger. However, it's not a U.S. only problem, and many places (include my hometown) is suffering the same problem as well in different extent.
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Member Since: 3/4/2009
Posts: 5,549
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Ok here's a good article by Forbes based on the OECD report:
The World's Hardest-Working Countries
Quote:
LONDON -
If you thought you worked long hours, consider 39-year-old Lee from South Korea. A civil servant at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries, Lee gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day, gets dressed and makes a two-hour commute into Seoul to start work at 8:30 a.m. After sitting at a computer for most of the day, Lee typically gets out the door at 9 p.m., or even later.
By the time he gets home, it's just a matter of jumping in the shower and collapsing into bed, before starting the whole routine all over again, about four hours later. This happens six days a week, and throughout almost all of the year, as Lee gets just three days of vacation.
That's right. Three days.
And did we mention Lee has a wife and three teenage kids? "I get to see them for 10 or 15 minutes a week, and then just on the weekend," he says of his children before adding that, on weekends, he usually gets interrupted to go to the office.
Lee, who sometimes has to sleep at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries by lying on top of his desk, might seem like a workaholic that needs to get his priorities straight. But his schedule is completely normal in South Korea, where the average employee works 2,357 hours per year--that’s six-and-a-half hours for every single day of their life. According to a 2008 ranking by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, South Koreans work the longest hours per year, on average, out of every other OECD member.
"It’s the culture," says Lee. "We always watch what the senior boss thinks of our behavior. So it’s very difficult to finish at a fixed time." Leaving at the official time of 6 p.m. could mean not getting a promotion or raise. What would happen if Lee took a month's vacation? "My desk would surely be gone when I got back."
South Korea's hard-working citizenry is not alone. Greece comes second in the OECD's rankings with 2,052 hours worked on average each year, and just behind is a trio of Eastern European nations: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The U.S. is also above the OECD average of 32 nations, coming at No. 9, with 1,797 hours worked on average each year.
One nation that is famed for a short working week is France, whose 35-hour week is currently in a state of flux. But even the French aren't the OECD's most leisurely workers: Bottom of the list are the tall and amiable Dutch, who work an average 1,391 hours per year, preceded by Norway and Germany.
Culture, as Lee says, is a big factor in the different working hours of nations, but types of employment and legal vacation time are also important. In some countries like the United Kingdom, which comes in at No. 20 on the list, the length of the working week is relatively long, says Pascal Marianna, an OECD expert in employment analysis and policy. But vacations are legally longer in the U.K., at 20 days, than in, say, the U.S., where employees get 10 days of vacation each year. The French get five weeks of vacation a year.
Greece and Italy are also near the top, at No.s 2 and 8, respectively, because of their large number of self-employed citizens. Mexico comes in at No. 7 for the same reason, along with the number of people who work in what Marianna calls "informal employment." According to the International Labor Organization, less than half of the world's employed people enjoy the security that comes with a regular salary.
Another reason for the difference is government policies and, in particular, taxation. The OECD found that an increase in marginal tax rates, or the tax owed on every extra dollar or euro earned, can negatively affect the average of hours worked. That effect is felt most typically by women, who are often the second earners in households.
And what of the diversion between Europe and the U.S., which once provoked the head of the OECD's Economic Department, Jorgen Elmeskov to ask if Europeans were "lazy" or Americans "crazy." It seems to be a changing picture.
Europeans used to work longer than their American counterparts in the 1970s, and it was only in the mid-1980s that the U.S. started to exceed them. Though working hours in both regions have eased back since the 1960s, they've fallen much more dramatically in Europe, by 23%, to 1,625 hours, today, compared with the 3% slide in American hours over the same time period. Some of the sharpest falls in working hours have been in Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg and France, according to the OECD.
As for the opposite extreme, South Korea, things are slowly moving toward the OECD norm after the Korean government introduced a five-day working week in 2004 for schools and companies with over 1,000 employees. But with the culture of hard work so deeply ingrained, change is slow. "A Korean's identity comes from his title at work," says Michael Breen, author of The Koreans, explaining that employees often refer to each other by titles such as "office manager Kim" or "accountant Park," even outside the workplace.
"This is an authoritarian corporate culture," he adds. "It's very bad form to leave the office before the boss does, so people will hang around doing nothing, and then when the boss leaves, they feel free to leave. ... Because of all of that, people don't have much of a life."
Yet amid the current economic downturn, personal spending in developing nations, and rapidly industrializing Asia in particular, is seeing industrious citizens loosen up a bit. The OECD confirmed that South Korea is gradually converging toward its standard practices. "I am personally trying to reduce my working time and I try to reduce my stress," says Lee. "Korea has this kind of bad culture where we always think about the boss’ opinion. But we are changing."
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Some Asian countries, followed by some countries in Eastern Europe. US at the 9th place, which is quite high.
Western European countries are at the end of the list. France with only 35 hours a week.
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Member Since: 3/10/2011
Posts: 5,354
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Quote:
Originally posted by DiamondDust
WOW. Thank you for making a completely offensive blanket statement about a nationality that is so diverse it's simply impossible to categorically describe us as this or that. I hear horrible things about other countries all the time. For instance, I have many friends who have studied abroad in Europe and went to visit France. So many have come back and reported that French people are absolutely excruciating to be around - mainly because of their unbearable pretentiousness and their unfounded disrespect towards Americans, quite likely based upon bigoted, ignorant notions that have somehow been espoused in major media outlets, undeniably the result of a few (loud) Americans who in no way represent the entirety of the United States population. Does that mean all French people are rude or inhospitable? No way! And for every Republican trying to build a wall around the southern United States, there are about three or four Democrats, Independents, etc. advocating for immigration reform in the interest of the immigrants who are making strides to become naturalized - and even those who aren't. And the idea that we treat immigrants poorly is just ludicrous. Democrats have worked hard to keep initiatives like Affirmative Action in place to give underrepresented minorities (who are, in many locations, no longer the minority) an opportunity to better themselves and their situation. Hell, Sonia Sotomayor is of Puerto Rican descent, and she's a Supreme Court justice! She's one of the most powerful women in the nation when it comes to jurisprudence and federal law, and she's an immigrant. She's also a shining example of how the American system has worked to benefit the immigrants you say we mistreat.
I think that most of the **** America gets is the result of a fiscal system that is largely based upon laissez faire, free market economics with limited government regulation. Sure, capitalism isn't perfect, and it has directly precipitated the mass-consumerism and consumption that people criticize Americans for possessing. But those exact tenets of economy are the reason countless immigrants have been able to move to the states and build lives for themselves when they would have lived in squalor or some other pre-determined state of existence otherwise. And that same influx of heterogeneity is the reason America is a massive nation composed of all sorts of different people - so this idea that all Americans are fat, uneducated, and stupid really doesn't make much sense, especially when you consider the fact that millions of American citizens domiciled within our borders hail from the same country or ethnicity as some of the loudest critics of Americans abroad.
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Funny you mentioned that, because my friends just came back from a class trip to France and while they enjoyed the cities they could not stand the people, basically for the same reasons you posted. One of them even spat on my friend. But, do I go around with the notion that all French people are rude and nasty, no.
As for the rest of your post, I agree 100%.
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Member Since: 5/1/2007
Posts: 15,659
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Quote:
Originally posted by fanoftalent
Without hard work? Americans are the most overworked nation in the world. If anything, they know too well how to dedicate themselves to their work. That brings up the issue of being overly materialistic, but that's another topic.
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Giiiiiiirl you really haven't left your country have you
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Member Since: 3/4/2009
Posts: 5,549
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Quote:
Originally posted by Raguabros
Giiiiiiirl you really haven't left your country have you
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gorl, read the article I posted. Don't judge the whole nation by couple of American teenagers you had sex with.
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