But unfortunatly, not everyone can have it all. That attitude may lead to more risk taking, but it will also be a constant source of unhappiness.
60 minutes had a story about Denmark, which is the happiest country in the world. Their secret is to try to get it all, but also know that you might have to settle for less.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/02/14/60minutes/main3833...
Video is here: http://60minutes.yahoo.com/segment/140/happiness
Not necessarily. It may be a source of unhappiness, but it may just be a calibration effect. Consider the question, "on a scale of 1-10, how happy are you?" I know 1 == sad (not me) and I know 10=="a marijuana forest full of strippers?!?". But what does 5 or 8 mean?
Say I'm the sort of person who might rate myself a 9. But If there is a person, real or hypothetical, who is "happier" than me (1), but not quite a 10. So that leads me to conclude HE must be 9 and I must be 8. But I'm not less happy, I just don't know how to answer a "how happy are you" question.
Similarly, I might want to rate myself a 5, but then I think about how I wasn't eaten by velociraptors, and jack myself up to 7 (my understanding is that something of this nature occurs in Denmark).
(1) His beer comes from further away than my beer and his wife's ass is higher up than my wife's ass.
I find the saying "you can have it all" to be idealistic bullshit that dooms an economy and its people to failure and exploitation. It merely justifies the reason not to have a welfare system because it is your own damn fault if you take a leap against common sense that is never able to pay off.
Example: 50 years ago AT&T invented the picturephone AKA video phones. The reason it took almost 40 years for it to even become marketable was because it wasn't worth the risk for people. There wasn't enough reward to justify the risk of changing, so no one did.
Simply put it gave 10 frames per second of picture, gave no benefit over voice and cost a fortune. $20 vs $1200 for a handset, it was a retarded product and took 50 years to even get uptake and by that time it was on broadband phones and the housephone market is already beat by VoIP and Webcams.
Would a start-up have survived 50 years with no selling product?
I'm not arguing that this is reality, I'm just saying our attitude is such that anything is achievable. Maybe that makes us naive, but it also makes us much more likely to take a big risk for a big payoff.
I confess I don't know France well enough to add to your views on it's economic attitudes, but I do know the US well enough to say what I just said. I think the point of the article is that since we are not taught to fear capitalism, we are more likely to do stupid things that sometimes actually pay off, and the pay off is generally worth it for society, if not for the individuals that failed en route.
And I think France was the #1 power in the world briefly... the Napoleonic Era. Either way, it has been one of the top powers for quite a while. I, as an American, am still envious of your prowess in Nuclear Energy.