I am not sure who is envious of France. Yes, they have fine history and artistry and all that. But we all know where France stands right now (economy wise).
They work less hours and their GDP is shrinking.
"France already discovered that a 35-hour workweek was impossible in a world where Indian engineers were trying to work a 35-hour day."
Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Oct. 10, 2010
No one has proven to me that critical discoveries in science and engineering (or any other field) came from people working themselves to the point of exhaustion as a matter of course.
Sure, the overworked and overtired can write more lines of code for e-commerce Web 2.0 apps and crank out lots of papers that relate to someone else's discoveries. But they won't be figuring out how gravity works anytime soon.
(My point being that too much faith in and reliance on this approach will cripple our ability to make breakthrough discoveries, and I think we've reached that point.)
