Not so lazy, after all

Is it possible that Europeans - famed for their endless vacations - work as much as we do?
By Geoff Colvin, senior editor at large
Last Updated: August 5, 2008: 9:23 AM EDT

(Fortune Magazine) -- Europeans rarely feel more superior to us Americans than at this time of year, and you can't blame them. They're taking their umpteen-week vacations, perhaps enjoying state-funded massages in Baden-Baden, while we're trying desperately to squeeze every drop of fun out of our measly two or three weeks off before returning to the salt mines.

The conventional view in Europe, held widely here also, is that they understand life better. So what if their per-capita incomes are lower than ours? They know what's really important, and it isn't slaving away like us job-crazed Yanks.

The trouble with this narrative is that it's based on a myth. Recent studies show that Europeans work much harder than most people think, and some, such as the Germans, work every bit as hard as we Americans do. An analysis of why makes it tough to say that one culture is somehow wiser than the other.

The key to the research is a simple question: What's work? The statistics we usually see focus on jobs that people get paid for, and by that measure Americans do indeed toil much more than Europeans. But that measure overlooks all the cooking, cleaning, lawn mowing, and other home-based labor that most people do. We don't get paid for it, but it's just as real as other work. When we count it as well as paid employment, the whole picture changes.

A thorough study by Richard Freeman of Harvard and Ronald Schettkat of Utrecht University found that Germans and Americans labor almost exactly the same amount. (The researchers note, "While our data deal with Germany and the U.S., our findings reflect the difference between EU and American models of capitalism more broadly.") The difference is that we do more market-based work, and Germans do more home-based work.

That simple fact holds large implications. For starters, it means we're more likely to buy various goods and services that Germans are more likely to produce at home. For example, they spend more time preparing meals, while we spend more money on restaurant meals; as a society we do more of our hamburger flipping at McDonald's, while Hamburgers do more of it at home.
Paying the price

An important result is that we create far more service jobs than Germany does, and that nation's much smaller service sector is the main reason Germans are less likely to be employed, with an unemployment rate consistently higher than ours for the past 20 years.

New research by Richard Rogerson of Arizona State University finds that "almost all of the difference [between Europe and the U.S.] in hours of [paid] work is accounted for by differences in the service sector." Some people denigrate burger flipping and the like as dead-end jobs, but for young people whose skills aren't yet highly developed, they're gateway jobs that are the best economic use of their time.

Now carry the analysis a step further. The difference between Germans and Americans in work profiles is much greater for women than men. American women are far more likely to hold paid jobs than German women, and those who do are far more likely to earn higher pay.

Each nation's economy supports those patterns. In America it's easy to buy prepared meals, child care, and such, so it's "easy for educated women to work in the market," as Freeman and Schettkat observe, whereas in Germany, "the lack of such alternatives makes full-time employment of women difficult." Thus, German women have far weaker incentives to go to college. In the U.S., 22% of working-age women hold bachelor's degrees, but in Germany only 11% do.

Bottom line, each economy runs according to powerful internal logic. Freeman and Schettkat sum up: "By working long hours and taking short vacations, Americans earn money to buy goods in the market. By working fewer hours and taking long vacations, Germans have more time to produce goods at home."

Fair enough. To each his own. But this August, as we Americans longingly imagine all those Europeans leaving their jobs behind for weeks on end, let's remember the rest of the picture - their hard work at home, unemployed youth, and less educated women - and perhaps think again about how envious we ought to be.

Friend to foe: Pak forces falter under jihadi fire

Islamabad may be the national capital of Pakistan, but the country’s real centre of power - the General Headquarters (GHQ) - is just half an hour’s drive away, in the garrison town of Rawalpindi. This is a completely khaki town, with neatly polished staff cars zipping up and down its wide roads, heavily armed guards standing like statues at the gates of British-era military buildings and smartly dressed officers and men going about their work in a hurried and nervous manner.

With its heavy razor-wire fences and tall and muscular armymen on patrol, it should be the safest town in the "most dangerous place in the world".

But it’s not. As the war with the Taliban and al-Qaida on the country’s north-west fringes moves to the heart of the nation, it’s the immaculate streets of Pindi that have been awash with blood and enveloped by fear, and the GHQ - obsessed with the ‘real enemy’ on the eastern front for the past 60 years - looks shaken and confused by the ferocity of attacks from the enemy who lurks within.

Last week, as Lt Gen Mushtaq Baig, chief of army medical services, was blown to bits by a teenaged suicide bomber in the heart of the Rawalpindi cantonment, Pakistan’s worst fears were confirmed once again: the militants were determined to attack the core of the Pakistani army.

And the Army is not ready for this deadly game with the people it has patronised, nurtured and guided in the past. Though it has been involved in a high-voltage battle of nerves with militants in the NWFP, it has gained little ground against them.

The militants are elusive and deeply motivated, and there have even been incidents of some army units willingly surrendering to the heavily armed militia rather than fight them.

The reason for this debacle is quite simple. Trained to fight conventional war with the Indian army in the mountains of Kashmir, the plains of Punjab and the desert of Rajasthan, the Pakistani army struggles and fumbles as it takes on battle-hardened guerrillas in the treacherous terrain of the Pashtun belt.

There’s another reason: Since 1947, generations of Pakistani army have been trained, motivated and indoctrinated to fight India. Just like in jingoistic Bollywood flicks, the word enemy always had only one meaning in the barracks of the Pakistani army. Explaining the Pakistani establishment’s perception of India in a recent interview, Ayesha Siddiqa, author of Military Inc: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy , said: "India is an enemy, it is about to eat us up. We have to challenge it."

It’s probably this mindset that explains the ‘misuse’ of more than $5 billion given by the US to the Pakistani military to fight the Al-Qaida and Taliban in its restive border areas with Afghanistan. In a report published last year, US military officials said they believed that much of the American money had been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India.

The American accusation led to a war of words between Islamabad and Washington, with the Pakistanis accusing the Americans of ingratitude and the Americans in turn charging them with not doing enough to counter the Al-Qaida "which was expanding its influence from the remote border regions into the more populated parts of Pakistan".

"The Pakistanis are damn good fighters," says a retired Indian Army officer who saw action on the western front in 1971. "But unlike us, counter-insurgency is not their strength. It’s a different ballgame altogether. They have to shift their focus from India if they want to defeat the militants in the mountains."

This is precisely what the Americans have been telling Islamabad. In recent weeks as the country voted in the general elections and President Pervez Musharraf stood defeated and isolated, some top US officials - CIA director Michael Hayden, deputy secretary of state John Negroponte and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Mike Mullen - flew down to Islamabad, offering to train Pakistan’s Frontier Corps in anti-guerrilla operations and trying to persuade army chief Gen

Ashfaq Kayani to switch from training in conventional warfare to counter-insurgency operations. The general reportedly agreed with the Americans’ viewpoint.

But even if Gen Kayani manages to shift the focus of his army’s training, it’s not going to be easy to win this battle, for an entirely different reason. Because of the heavy dose of religion during training and the army’s symbiotic relationship with religious extremists in the past, the soldier on the front is not convinced he is fighting the right battle. Trained to fight the ‘big enemy’, the soldiers are getting a bit confused as they take on the people who once fought alongside them.

"Even before the Taliban, we engaged with non-state actors and militants," says Siddiqa. "Who fought the war in 1947-48? We got those tribal warriors from Waziristan primarily to fight. In 1965 again, we used jihadis." In addition, the army also used religious extremists to defeat its political opponents. Now they are in a Catch-22 situation. Though Pakistan joined the US war on terror after the threat of being "bombed back to the Stone Age", its army is not ready - militarily and mentally - to fight the enemy’s enemy which has turned its guns on its former patron.

shobhan.saxena@timesgroup.com

Nuclear Proliferation: Has Iran won?

Did the American intelligence report let out Iran way too easily. No. After the miscalculations in Iraq was very important for America and UN to work on concrete evidences (though elusive in world affairs) than on political considerations. In last one year, America's push for tougher measures against Iran was taking the shape of another politically motivated unwanted war. Now with this new revelation there is nothing to fear. In fact US will receive more support now for diplomatic measures against Iran's nuclear policies.

Does Iran require nuclear power for civilian purposes? Wonder why? With hydrocarbon reserves this is not the first thing that should be there on the Government's mind. Rather they should look towards the Sheikhs of UAE who are stimulating economic activity in their region by attracting talent and businesses with their extra petro dollars. Iran, which in the past has a better record in developing local human capital should try not to get distracted in showmanship and power politics.

The ayatollahs have wriggled off the nuclear hook, but there is a way to put them on again

WHO would have thought that a friendless theocracy with a Holocaust-denying president, which hangs teenagers in public and stones women to death, could run diplomatic circles around America and its European allies? But Iran is doing just that. And it is doing so largely because of an extraordinary own goal by America's spies, the team behind the duff intelligence that brought you the Iraq war.

It doesn't take a fevered brain to assume that if Iran's ayatollahs get their hands on the bomb, the world could be in for some nasty surprises. Iran's claim that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful is widely disbelieved. That is why Russia and China joined America, Britain, France and Germany at the UN Security Council to try to stop Iran enriching uranium. Until two months ago they seemed ready to support a third and tougher sanctions resolution against Iran. But then America's spies spoke out, and since then five painstaking years of diplomacy have abruptly unravelled (see article).

The intelligence debacle over Iraq has made spies anxious about how their findings are used. That may be why they and the White House felt it right to admit, in a National Intelligence Estimate in December, that they now think Iran halted clandestine work on nuclear warheads five years ago. As it happens, this belief is not yet shared by Israel or some of America's European allies, who see the same data. But no matter: the headline was enough to pull the rug from under the diplomacy. In Berlin last month, the Russians and Chinese made it clear that if there is a third resolution, it will be a mild slap on the wrist, not another turn of the economic screw.

At the same time, Iran is finding an ally in the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Its director-general, Mohamed ElBaradei, is a Nobel peace-prize winner who is crusading to confound those he calls “the crazies” in Washington by helping Iran to set its nuclear house in order, receive a clean bill of health and so avert the possibility of another disastrous war.

Honest spies, a peace-loving nuclear watchdog. What can be wrong with that? Nothing: unless the honesty of the spies is deliberately misconstrued and the watchdog fails to do its actual job of sniffing out the details of Iran's nuclear activities.

Thanks for letting us off

Beaming like cats at the cream, a posse of Iranians went to January's World Economic Forum in Davos claiming a double vindication. Had not America itself now said that Iran had no weapons programme? Was not Iran about to give the IAEA the answers it needed to “close” its file? In circumstances like these, purred Iran's foreign minister, there was no case for new sanctions, not even the light slap Russia and China prefer.

Yet Iran's argument is a travesty. Although the National Intelligence Estimate does say that Iran probably stopped work on a nuclear warhead in 2003, it also says that Iran was indeed doing such work until then, and nobody knows how far it got. The UN sanctions are anyway aimed not at any warhead Iran may or may not be building in secret, but at what it is doing in full daylight, in defiance of UN resolutions, to enrich uranium and produce plutonium. We need this for electricity, says Iran. But it could fuel a bomb. And once a country can produce such fuel, putting it in a warhead is relatively easy.

Some countries, it is true, are allowed to enrich uranium without any fuss. The reason for depriving Iran of what it calls this “right” is a history of deception that led the IAEA to declare it out of compliance with its nuclear safeguards. So it is essential that Mr ElBaradei's desire to end this confrontation does not now tempt him to gloss over the many unanswered questions. With a lame duck in the White House and sanctions unravelling, Iran really would be home free then.

Would it be so tragic if a tricky Iran were to slip the net of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? North Korea quit the treaty and carried out a bomb test in 2006. Israel never joined, saying coyly only that it won't be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons into the region—but won't be the second either. India and Pakistan, two other outsiders, have already strutted their stuff. Why should one more gate-crasher spoil the party?

One obvious danger is that a nuclear-armed Iran, or one suspected of being able to weaponise at will, could set off a chain reaction that turns Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, even Turkey rapidly nuclear too. America and the Soviet Union, with mostly only their own cold war to worry about, had plenty of brushes with catastrophe. Multiplying Middle Eastern nuclear rivalries would drive up exponentially the risk that someone could miscalculate—with dreadful consequences.

Time for Plan B

For some this threat alone justifies hitting Iran's nuclear sites before it can build the bomb they fear it is after. But if Iran is bent on having a bomb, deterrence is better. Mr Bush has already said that America will keep Israel from harm. By extending its security umbrella to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, America might stifle further rivalry before the region goes critical.

Much better, however, to avoid a nuclear Iran altogether. Mr Bush says diplomacy can still do this. It is hard to see how. But he does have one card up his sleeve: the offer of a grand bargain to address the gamut of differences between America and Iran, from the future of Iraq to the Middle East peace process. So far Iran's leaders have brushed aside America's offer of talks “anytime, anywhere” and about “anything” by pointing to the condition attached: that Iran first suspend its uranium enrichment. Strangely enough, the best way to put pressure on Iran's rulers now is for America to drop that rider.

There would need to be a time limit or Iran could simply enrich on regardless, with what looked like the world's blessing. Similarly Russia and China would need to agree to much tougher sanctions to help concentrate minds. Iran's leaders may still say no. But the ayatollahs would have to explain to ordinary Iranians why they should pay such a high price in prosperity forgone for making a fetish out of not talking, and out of technologies that aren't even needed to keep the lights on. If Iran's leaders cannot be persuaded any other way, perhaps they can be embarrassed out of their bomb plans.

Compensation and Performance measures: Pak used anti-terror aid against India

What happens when you do not compensation is not backed by performance measures


WASHINGTON: More than five billion dollars in US aid to Pakistan has often never reached the military units it was intended for to fight Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and was instead diverted to other programmes, the New York Times reported on Monday.

Much of the money meant to reimburse frontline Pakistani units was channelled to weapons systems aimed at India and to pay inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs, unnamed US government and military officials told the daily.

Pakistanis critical of President Pervez Musharraf said he used the reimbursements to prop up his government, and one European diplomat said the United States should have been more careful with its money.

"I wonder if the Americans have been taken for a ride," said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Money intended to repay Pakistan for maintaining 100,000 troops in the restive tribal areas apparently does not reach the troops who need it, officials said.

"It is not making its way, for certain, we know, to the broader part of the armed forces which is carrying out the brunt of the operations on the border" with Afghanistan, a senior US military official told the Times.

Despite the vast funds flowing to Pakistan, a US official visiting the border recounted finding members of the country's frontier corps "standing there in the snow in sandals."

Several soldiers were wearing World War I-era pith helmets and had battered Kalashnikov rifles with only 10 rounds of ammunition each, the official said.

The two countries have never forged clear strategic goals as to how the US military aid should be spent or how Pakistan could show it was meeting Washington's expectations, according to US and Pakistani officials.

US aid to Pakistan has come under scrutiny recently in the United States given the strength of Al-Qaida and Taliban cells in Pakistan's north-western tribal areas as well as the failure to secure the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Musharraf has also been forced by US pressure to ease back on repressive measures, lift emergency rule, shed his military uniform and move the country toward greater democracy.

The United States provides the five billion in aid to reimburse Pakistan for carrying out military operations against terrorist threats. A separate US program delivers 300 million every year to pay for equipment and training for the Pakistan military.

The US Congress on Thursday slapped restrictions on the 300 million in traditional military aid, 50 million of which will be withheld until Pakistan shows it is restoring democratic rights.

US funds are vital for Pakistan's military, with American aid accounting for about a quarter of the military's entire budget, the paper said.

Pakistani officials interviewed by the New York Times denied their government had overcharged the United States for the "war-on-terror" military aid it gets.

But US officials cited helicopter maintenance as an example of the funding programme's failure.

While Pakistan received 55 million dollars for helicopter maintenance for an eight-month period in 2007, the officials said they found out that only 25 million had been received by the Pakistani army for helicopter maintenance for the whole of 2007.

Allegations that generous military aid to Pakistan has been squandered represent another setback for President George Bush's administration, which has viewed Pakistan as an important ally in the "war on terror."