On Mon, 19 Sep 2005 15:38:23 EDT, Bill Fairchild <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>There are societal factors that could account for this difference in work >ethics or attitudes other than just having to work with expensive computing >resources. In the 1960s and 1970s most young adult professionals still had a >serious work ethic, and took their work seriously whether it involved >computers >or not. Today young adult American professionals have zero or negative work >ethic. I remember reading when there were many people of the white middle class fleeing South Africa. It was a little cheaper to move to Australia than to the U.S., but interviews showed that lots of people chose Australia because of the perception that the work ethics were comparable. They thought that workers in the U.S. work harder than in most wealthy countries. >From what I've read, there are a few exceptions (Hong Kong) - but most of the wealthy world have enough stuff that it isn't as important to work hard. Some places have people working long hours (Japan), but that was for societal reasons. Certainly poorer people are willing to work harder if they see a way to move from poverty. Leisure is undervalued in my culture though. To tell the truth - I find goofing off at work makes the time go very slowly. I don't like working enough to goof off. But others don't like work enough to work hard. People who look down on people who don't work that hard are using a value system which was useful when everybody needed to work together for survival (and everybody needed big families for the same reason). Maybe there are more appropriate ways to acquire personal value in societies where nobody need go hungry. This does mean that in a global economy, many jobs go to those who can do them who need them the most. They work hard for less. Is that a bad thing? It means I'm not as comfortable as I would like - but I'm still more comfortable than they are. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
