The "American Dream" vs. the "Russian Dream" One American farmer has a neighbor that just got a prize cow. A Russian farmer similarly has a neighbor with a prize cow. The American farmer's dream: to have a better cow than the neighbor. The Russian farmer's dream: that the neighbor's cow dies.
A Russian in America told me this, over 10 years, and being in Slovakia has anectdotedly confirmed that here there is much more "destructive" envy than "competitive" envy-admiration; where there is much less in the US. I don't think Americans are really so much more absolute gain oriented rather than relative gain, merely that their efforts and dreams are more focussed on the positive construction/creation aspects of competition. The American response is to do more, do better, do smarter -- the Slavic, probably Euro feeling is more: he must have cheated, he should be brought down. And, in fact, cheating ahs prolly been the case for the last few hundreds of years -- the ones doing better are, by and large, cheating in some way or another, special unfair pull. There's a LOT that could be said about this, and hard data is very hard to come by. Tom Grey Slovakia -----Original Message----- From: Gustavo Lacerda (mediaone) [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 4:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Economics of rank vs. Economics of the most money "Jacob W Braestrup" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How well this 'philosophy of envy' is rooted in people seems to me to > be very dependent on culture. In the US people seem to care more about > absolute gains than Europeans (especially Scandinavians, who seem to > focus solely on relative gains). That sounds interesting. Can you back it up? Gustavo
