A very nice show. This is my first time watching the show on this forum and I am impressed by the host's objective analysis. After living in the US for more than 40 years I still find it hard to believe how the French society (or Europe as a whole) can afford to allow its workers a minimum of 6 weeks vacation per year (in addition to the number of days of sick leaves, family leaves, etc.). To be honest, I don't think it is sustainable on the long term (money does not grow on the tree and someone has to pay for it, right?). Another thing I sort of disagree with the host of the show is that I believe the French people are also working hard (definitely work harder than as we see them superficially on the outside. It is just the French society ,like other developed nations, has become more and more of a service based-society rather than a manufacturing emphasis society. (Note: China is also gradually transforming into a service-based society, in one sense. But because of the huge population (with diverse and multi facades of talents) of China, it still has a huge manufacturing focus base. Again things don't happen automatically in life, French people have to work hard to learn, invent, create and build and work hard just like any other race even though we Americans were shaking our heads often time when we saw those Europeans (French, Italians, Greeks, etc. etc.) on strike or fighting to maintain their retirement age to below 60 (US retirement age is officially 65 or older. Of course one can retire anytime if one is financially capable, in any society), ha, ha. (Chinese society retirement age is 55 due to its population, but that is different.) One thing I totally agree with the host of the show is "one should not assume the same productivity output between blue collar work productivity and white collar work productivity. For example, if one blue collar worker productivity is X and by adding one additional blue worker the productivity would become 2X or close to it, if the work or the manufacturing system is efficient. But in mental work environment that may not be the case. I worked as a software engineer and in the software management for nearly 40 years before retirement and I almost never seen any management (including myself ) expect an engineer that he or she must produce so many lines of code (or engineering work) to prove his or her productivity. The nature of the type of work just does not work that way. I remember one of my colleagues was joking he did not produce anything after working days or even weeks before eventually found out one line of error code in the software he was told to check and NASA paid him the equivalent of $100,000 (in 1985 money) for that line of code. Aside from this, I totally agree with the gentleman's analysis of the strength of the multi-facades French society and confident the we Chinese also have the similar strength as well, if not better, given the long history of the Chinese culture of working hard and working intelligently (as long as we can continue to be down to earth and can avoid the overzealous nationalistic behavior like the 亩 产 万 斤 type of mistakes). Thank you for the show.
Well done Episode, fair and reasonable comments. French's key philosophy ( as well for Italian ) is to ENJOY LIFE. '' living knowhow' & 'living quality' are their value. Creativity ( in many domains ) is a outlook of their ''living quality' - French are not lazy, by the way, France is not the country who has the more vacation holiday... those are stereotype.