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.
One of the Indian parents at ds's school would agree. As a doctor, she sees a big difference between the Indian and American ways of preparing students for medicine: the Indian system, according to her, relies on lots of rote memorization, while the American way is to teach students principles of research and expect them to start using them earlier. And she 'voted with her feet', so to speak - she and her husband chose the U.S. to work and raise their family in.
I think a combination of the two cultures' approaches stands to produce potent results - maybe that's why Indian-Americans and Asian-Americans are disproportionately represented among the finalists in both competitions that require memorization (the Scripps spelling bee, for example) and competitions requiring creative, independent thinking (like Intel).
