The pace of life in 31 countries: Western Europeans combine a fast pace with ample leisure, while Latin Americans take their time both on and off the job

American Demographics, Nov, 1997 by Robert Levine

Even a person with a first-rate watch in Brazil finds it difficult to be on time. Few people have their own cars, and public transportation is unreliable, to say the least. On more than one occasion, my bus driver abandoned his vehicle in the middle of our route. Once he returned after more than ten minutes, taking the last bite on a sandwich, and thanked us all for our patience. Another driver once excused himself for "un momento" and returned some 15 minutes later with his groceries. In both cases, I seemed to be the only person who was losing confidence. "Calma, Bobby," my companions would say to me, as they did in many situations during my Brazilian experience.

In last-place Mexico,

people who attend too closely to the clock

can be a real nuisance.

In last-place Mexico, people who attend too closely to the clock can be a real nuisance. My colleague Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, with both an M.D. degree and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, grew up in Mexico but had divided his professional life between Mexico and the United States. "If you're invited to a party for a certain hour," Aguilar-Gaxiola observes, "it's understood that you should arrive late. If you show up at the scheduled hour-en punto-you may find yourself in the way of your hosts setting up or getting dressed. These rules about punctuality play a very important role in Mexican culture."

"Ah, where have they gone, the ambers of yesterday?" asks Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness. Many of them, it seems safe to say, are on the streets of Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City.

Whither La Dolce Vita?

A few years ago, New York Times journalist Alan Riding contrasted the compulsive workaholism of the United States and Japan to the ease with which much of Europe relaxes in the pleasures of the good life. Under the headline, "Why La Dolce Vita Is Easy for Europeans... As Japanese Work Even Harder to Relax," Riding asked: "How is it that Europeans sit around all day drinking coffee, spend long evenings over dinner, dress elegantly, get up late, take long vacations... Why, in short, do Europeans live so much better than Americans?"

How do we reconcile the results of our experiments with this popular stereotype? Should we conclude from our data that La Dolce Vita of Western Europe is a dream of the past-that the Japanese and Western Europeans are the new stressed-out, time-urgent Type-A's of the world while the United States has finally learned to relax?

To answer this question, it may be helpful to look beyond our three measures of speed, which were designed to focus on facets of the temp of workday life. What about the duration of this tempo? How long are people's off-hours? Do they enjoy vacations? What is the balance between hard work and leisure? It is here that Western Europe continues to diverge sharply from the United States, and even more from Japan.

To begin with, the average work week is shorter in most European countries than it is in the United States; both have shorter hours than Japan. One recent estimate indicates that the average annual paid working hours are 2,159 in Japan, compared to 1,957 in the United States, 1,646 in France, and 1,638 in the former West Germany. Workers in Japan, in other words, put in an annual average of 202 hours more than their counterparts in the United States and 511 hours more than workers in West Germany.