VLVL2 "...like a porno star" ? (237)

[Dave Monroe]

THE NEW YORK TIMES
June 8, 2003
Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The God Factor)
By Niall Ferguson

OXFORD, England It was almost a century ago that the
German sociologist Max Weber published his influential
essay "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism." In it, Weber argued that modern
capitalism was "born from the spirit of Christian
asceticism" in its specifically Protestant form in
other words, there was a link between the self-denying
ethos of the Protestant sects and the behavior
patterns associated with capitalism, above all hard
work.

Many scholars have built careers out of criticizing
Weber's thesis. Yet the experience of Western Europe
in the past quarter-century offers an unexpected
confirmation of it. To put it bluntly, we are
witnessing the decline and fall of the Protestant work
ethic in Europe. This represents the stunning triumph
of secularization in Western Europe the simultaneous
decline of both Protestantism and its unique work
ethic.

Just as Weber's 1904 visit to the United States
convinced him that his thesis was right, anyone
visiting New York today would have a similar
experience. For in the pious, industrious United
States, the Protestant work ethic is alive and well.
Its death is a peculiarly European phenomenon and has
grim implications for the future of the European Union
on the eve of its eastward expansion, perhaps most
economically disastrous for the "new" Europe.

Many economists have missed this vindication of Weber
because they are focused on measures of productivity,
like output per hour worked. On that basis, the
Western European economies have spent most of the past
half-century spectacularly catching up with the United
States.

But what the productivity numbers don't reveal is the
dramatic divergence over two decades between the
amount of time Americans work and the amount of time
Western Europeans work. By American standards, Western
Europeans are astonishingly idle.

[...]

Yet even these figures understate the extent of
European idleness, because a larger proportion of
Americans work....

[...]

Then there are the strikes....

[...]

All this is the real reason that the American economy
has surged ahead of its European competitors in the
past two decades. It is not about efficiency. It is
simply that Americans work more. Europeans take longer
holidays and retire earlier; and many more European
workers are either unemployed or on strike.

How to explain this sharp divergence? Why have West
Europeans opted for shorter working days, weeks,
months, years and lives? This is where Weber's thesis
comes up trumps: the countries where the least work is
done in Europe turn out to be those that were once
predominantly Protestant. While the overwhelmingly
Catholic French and Italians work about 15 to 20
percent fewer hours a year than Americans, the more
Protestant Germans and Dutch and the wholly Protestant
Norwegians work 25 to 30 percent less.

What clinches the Weber thesis is that Northern
Europe's declines in working hours coincide almost
exactly with steep declines in religious
observance....

[...]

So the decline of work in Northern Europe has occurred
more or less simultaneously with the decline of
Protestantism. Quod erat demonstrandum indeed!

Weber's vindication has profound implications for the
next year's enlargement of the European Union, when
the Baltic States, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and the
Czech and Slovak Republics will become full European
Union members.

[...]

The impact of adopting the European Union's economic
and social rules is bound to be far greater for this
generation of new Europeans....

[...]

... one striking consequence of 40-plus years of
socialist rule in Eastern Europe has been a decline of
religious belief almost as marked as that in Northern
Europe.

[...]

... the difference between "old" and "new" Europe may
turn out to be less than many Americans now believe.
Enlargement of the European Union may simply confirm
the eastward spread of the leisure preference in an
increasingly work-shy and Godless European continent.

The loser will be the European economy, which will
continue to fall behind the United States in terms of
its absolute annual output. The winner will be the
spirit of secularized sloth, which has finally slain
the Protestant work ethic in Europe and Max Weber,
whose famous thesis celebrates its centenary by
attaining the status of verity.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20E12F83C5D0C7B8CDDAF0894DB404482

http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/8-12-03/discussion.cgi.59.html

http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/godfactor.html

http://www.econ.brown.edu/~asanz/global_03/
culture_incentives.pdf

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> I think it was Toynbee or was it Bettleheim who
> said, 
> 
> A culture which postpones rather than stimulates
> sexual experience in young adults is a culture most
> prone to progress.

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