@Lucco: As a perspective on life, yours is admirable and on some level, you're right that any other perspective on life from people of our status is any number of bad adjectives.
As a policy discussion, everything you said is irrelevant.
Unfortunately, political discussion is weighed down so heavily in rhetoric, so that very vague, relative terms like "fair" and "necessary" and "good/bad" get twisted into all sorts of bends so that a ton of contradictory yet somehow-true-on-some-level statements come out of it.
If it's possible for citizens of a country (complete hypothetical based on no statistics whatsoever because my point is about rhetoric and not policy) to work half as many hours (let's say 20) and for the society to otherwise operate the same, except for maybe even allowing citizens who decide to work twice as hard (40 hours/week) the social mobility to move up in the world and be rewarded for their hard work, then it seems like that should be preferred regardless of how many hours people work in India.
I'm not as wont to go into conspiracy theories as wuf, so I won't say that "those people" have succeeded some sort of campaign to make middle-class first-worlders feel bad about trying to improve their conditions through policy, but it does seem like that guilt does exist and distracts from the factual nature of some of these discussions.
But, again, if it were proven that people working less would in fact hurt society, all of this is irrelevant; that's beside my point.
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