Your derogatory remark about North Americans was made publicly on this list.  When I read it, I hoped you were joking (email is a poor medium for ironic jokes).  If you seriously meant it as an ethnographical analysis of North Americans, but on second thoughts wish retract it, please do so here too.  If you wish to pursue a defence of the assertion, then I think it must be said to fall outside the scope of INDOLOGY.

I think we can all agree that we deplore the use of financial metaphors for non-financial matters, what anthropologists like Marylin Strathern have called the "spread of the audit culture."  But my experience of European institutions shows me that this practice is just as pervasive in Europe as anywhere else. In Britain, the decisive turn to viewing every human act as a form of business transaction was achieved by the Thatcher government, and has been in force ever since.