Chris, Nick and Fraser wonder if Switzerland is as boring as people say.

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by Tell Me Studios for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm Fraser McGruer and I'm here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Switzerland and whether being boring is a price worth paying for prosperity. Nick, you've got some views on this. I think you recently visited Switzerland.

I did. Yeah, I went to Ticino, which is the Italian bit of Switzerland. It's sort of due to a historical accident. This part of what is very clearly Italy has ended up in Switzerland and I was interested by this because being there, actually when you go from the German part of Switzerland to the Italian bit, you go through some mountains and whether you come by car or whether you come on the train, it feels like you've very, very quickly gone from what looks like a very German place to what's suddenly a very Italian place. I was kind of interested by this and I thought, well, what makes Swiss people Swiss? I asked a cab driver, how do you know you're Swiss and not Italian? He said, well, it's simple really. This part of Italian speaking Switzerland is in Switzerland. That's how we know we're Swiss. If you go to the German speaking part, you'll find that even though they speak German, that they're in Switzerland. Then we have the French speaking part, which is near France, but that's in Switzerland and that's how we know we're Swiss. I thought, well, this guy's not giving me many insights. I sort of said, well, yeah. Give me a hint of what unifies Swiss people? Who do Swiss people look down on? I think that's always a good ... It gives you a sense of the history of a country, isn't it? Who are the people you make jokes about? He said, well, that's an interesting question. In the Italian speaking part of Switzerland, they make jokes about the Italians. In the German speaking part of Switzerland, I thought this guy's really boring. This isn't going anywhere. I was kind of interested, okay, what's being Swiss about? I did a bit of research on what do Swiss people say they're proud of? They really do seem to be proud of the fact that they don't, as a country, do very much. I mean, don't get me wrong. They have a very active armed forces, which they do deploy in peacekeeping missions, but they're very proud of neutrality, proud of being prosperous. By all accounts, I think Switzerland appears regularly in lists of the most boring countries in the world. There's no doubt Switzerland is really amazingly efficient. It's got a very high GDP per capita. It's very beautiful to look at. They're very well behaved. In many ways, a perfect country. At the same time, one would have to say not very interesting, not very exciting. The question is, is there a connection between being boring and being rich? Which is better? Is being interesting actually something we should worry about? It seems from what you've described

there, we've got a state that has managed to erase nationality. Nationalism has all sorts of, it's got a bad press. It's got all sorts of negative connotations. But maybe one thing that was overlooked is that, yeah, if you can erase nationalism, you can have a wonderful,

perfectly functioning state. I don't think the Swiss aren't nationalistic. They're very proud

of being Swiss. Okay. I mean, all right. Apps, yes, but they've erased... But what being Swiss is, is something that I would consider rather dull. But it's almost, they've erased, they've made their nationality being not a nationality. I'm not sure this is a correct analysis, but I suppose

what I'm, I'm merely echoing, I think the thoughts of what, you know, as Orson Welles in the character of Harry Lime said in the film, The Third Man, you know, that the Italians had 30 years of warfare and bloodshed and terror and it produced the Renaissance and the Swiss had 500 years of brotherly love and it produced the cuckoo clock. In fact, that's incorrect. The cuckoo clock originates from Germany. So they haven't even got that. But, but yeah, I mean, so that's... Chocolate and cheese though. Chocolate and cheese. Yeah, fair enough. Dairy, dairy based foods. They're very good at it.

Yeah. Chris. Yeah. Well, I think this boils down to a question of whether or not it is better to have a generally high mean within your population, but low, low variance, right? So, so you've got, you've got people who are generally good and they all cluster around that being generally good, good at things versus whether it's worth having a lower mean. So, you know, the average level of competence in your society is perhaps not so high, but the variance is much greater. So you get, you know, occasional sort of outlying bits of genius within your, your population, but you also get, you know, low, very low competence and then just generally a big fat middle of sort of kind of substandard sort of levels of performance. You know, the kind of British model, dare I, dare I say it. And I, I think personally, I think the Swiss model is probably superior. I think most people would rather be rich, stable and, and, and well, but it's, I think, I think boring is a bit of a construct myself. I think it's a story we, we, we tell ourselves about them. But I, but I think it's, it's much more difficult to set up a high performing, low variance, boring society in a large and various countries. If you look at the countries that are a bit like Switzerland, you think of the Scandinavian countries, small and affluent, you know, places like Singapore, again, a sort of small, affluent country, but, but one which you can control a small population and get them up to a level of education and cultural homogeneity that you want to, that you want to do. Much more difficult to achieve it in, in Britain or the US or India or, or China. Yes, but, so I tried

to look for some research on this. Now, boringness is not easy to define, right? So all you have is a bunch of subjective lists. But it seems to me that boring countries sort of fell actually into two main categories. You either had, you had countries which were sort of prosperous, Western European style, you know, Switzerland, Nordic countries and sort of rich or small, Luxembourg and, you know, they're sort of, sort of boring because not much happens. But then you also have a lot of countries crop up on this list when they're very statist and they have a lot of cultural sort of top down enforced cultural conformity. So of course, one thinks of North Korea, but, you know, possibly countries like Saudi Arabia or the UAE or Kuwait, you know, which are, it's a different kind of boring. But, but I think they, so, so you, you know, those, those lists seem to seem to fall into, into two main categories. I think you have the kind of culturally, you know, there's no, there's no, there's no sort of big centrist state, state, you know, enforcing Swiss, the Swiss mentality in Switzerland. They're doing that to themselves. Whereas you, you do have a bit more of that sort of top down power structure in some of the, you know, I mean, if you think of the former Soviet countries or something, I mean, they're Belarus often crops up in lists of boring countries, you know, very much in some ways, the opposite of Switzerland. But I, but I was looking for any research into, you know, what, what sorts of cultural dimensions can we point to that appear to correlate with, with prosperity? And there is actually, there's, there's a chap called Hirt Hofstetter, who has tried to define and, and, and through survey data has tried to measure different sort of aspects of, of culture. And one that comes out very strongly as a determinant of economic growth is individualism versus collectivism. So individualism is a kind of preference for sort of a loosely knit social framework. And, you know, where people are generally expected to look to take care of themselves and their families, whereas collectivist societies tend to expect other people to help them out, essentially. That's, that's sort of the, the, the distinction there. That has been found to very strongly correlate with economic growth. Do you have a sense of which way round it goes? What do you think? Is individualism or collectivism better for economic growth?

One would have thought collectivism.

Incorrect. Yeah, one might have done. But this is, this is, in fact, say that the theory is that individualism leads to a high long run growth because it encourages innovation, because, you know, you as an innovator can capture the value of what you're doing. There's a theory that is mapped sort of onto the distinction between kind of hunting type activity and, and farming type activity where, you know, farming type activity gives you, there's much clearer relationship between the effort you put in and the reward you get. Whereas with hunting, it's a lot more random and there's expected to be more sharing because, you know, so, so there's, anyway, the, the, the point is that individualism very strongly correlates and countries that come high in individualism include the, the Anglophone world, so US, UK, Australia, Canada, and, and low, low individual, so high collectivism are, are sort of former Soviet countries, but also Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador, Pakistan, they're sort of at the bottom. And yeah, so that, that's, that was it. That's interesting to me. So basically individualism is, is now, is there a correlation between individualism and, you know, and boringness or

interestingness? Yeah. And I'm sure there, I mean, intuitively the answer needs to be yes. So if we think, I mean, just in terms of what you were just saying about economic prosperity, the most prosperous country in the world is the US, got the highest GDP, but enormous amounts of inequality and in income distribution compared to somewhere like Switzerland. Yeah. And it's

interesting that the, that people in the US who are poor in general, on average are happy with that. They're happy to live in a society with inequality if they feel that they could through their own effort, improve their lot, you know. Yeah. I just, go on Chris. Yeah. Well, I was,

I was just going to say, I think that in the case of Switzerland, I think culture is standing in for statism and I think they have a very, they have a very strong culture of perhaps not, not taking, not taking risks and not breaking from sort of conformity. And, you know, a couple of anecdotes that I'm aware of bear this out. So somebody I know works for a large Swiss multinational company and their small unit had recently been taken over by this company. So they used to be owned by a smaller US company. They then got taken over by this multinational Swiss company and they are head of this particular unit and they made this company a fairly large amount of money by some of the activity they, they underwent, but were chastised for kind of risk-taking behavior and, and being too, too entrepreneurial. Yeah. So to quote my, my second favorite US president, the problem with the Francophone Swiss is they have no, no word for entrepreneur. But yes, but essentially they, they don't they don't like risk taking behavior. And I think that is probably a lot of what boringness or excitingness is about. Yeah. There is actually

another dimension that Hofstetter looks at, which is called uncertainty avoidance, which does it, it does correlate with individualism, but not, but not totally. And uncertainty avoidance is about essentially, yeah, being, being comfortable with, with uncertainty and ambiguity and, and countries which has have low, have high uncertainty avoidance tend to have, you know, they tend to expect institutions to enforce rules. Whereas, whereas countries with who are happier with uncertainty tends to not see that as necessary and, and countries which have low uncertainty avoidance, interestingly include the US, the UK, India, and China, high uncertainty avoidance countries include Belgium and, and South Korea and Russia. So I wonder if that's, there's an, there might be an element there, but, but that, that is, that correlates less, that, that isn't as strong a determinant of economic growth as the individualism axis. I've got some really

strong views on Switzerland and the Swiss. Go on then. I mean, if you were to ask a Swiss person this question, is it better to be boring and prosperous or interesting, exciting and not prosperous? One presumes the Swiss person would say, well, of course, boring and prosperous. But for someone from the Anglophone world, no, we need to be exciting. And, you know, so I, just to say, I recognise that I'm coming to this with some baggage. Yeah. And I also think, as I

said, I think we, we tell ourselves a story to, to sort of salve our envy at societies like Switzerland and, and, you know, on a, on a sort of slightly larger scale, a country like Germany. We, we tell ourselves that, you know, yes, they're doing better than we are, but, but, you know, we're, we're, we're much more, it's much more interesting to, to, to be here. And if, you know, I think if you look at kind of, you know, our national, our national myths, you know, they're the Dunkirk spirit and, you know, the charge of the Light Brigade and the Battle of Hastings, they're, they're all about a sort of glorious failure, really. And Tim Henman. Tim Henman, exactly. We, we, we celebrate this sort of, you know, valour in, valour in defeat and, you know, how interesting that, that is. And you look at Shakespeare's tragedies, you know, great literature, but evidently, you know, it all goes wrong for people.

Yeah. And I think the, like the fact that we always lose to Germany on penalties in the, in the semifinals of the world cup. Now I don't know how true that is, but that's what that's the sort of, it feels like it's happened several times. I think we'd be disappointed if we were winning penalties against the German. I think we, we wouldn't know what to do with ourselves. Yeah, just once would be nice though. Yeah. Well, that's true. But, but I think if we were, I honestly, I'd feel a bit ashamed of having a football team, which won all the time. It's a bit like Andy Murray being really good at tennis. It's kind of, he doesn't feel right

somehow. It doesn't feel British. Well, look, taking all these arguments, we need to sort of close fairly soon, but taking all these sort of very nicely eruditely put points into consideration, I still, whenever I've just had, I think probably the worst holiday I've ever had was in Switzerland. There are so many reasons why. One was, for example, you can't go in a car anywhere without, they were always playing James Blunt on the radio. Is it James Blunt? That is a sad indictment of a

society, I think. It is. You cannot get away from James Blunt there. They love him. And in fact- You know what, that really, I mean, this is an anecdote, I'm aware, but that feels very ripe. James Blunt seems like the sort of thing a really successful, boring country would, would be into. He's sort of, he's sort of, it's kind of middle of the road, inoffensive, but well-produced, high quality. That argument has just changed my position on Switzerland, I now hate that. Look, I think, sorry to widen it when we're supposed to be wrapping up, but I think one thing we haven't touched on is this sort of, whether or not we actually do enjoy prosperity, or whether we enjoy striving for something, whether we enjoy a fight on the way to prosperity. And I, and I think actually, you know, there's this, there's this psychological phenomenon, the, the hedonic treadmill, which was first identified by St. Augustine, actually, when he said, you know, true saying it is, desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack or horse mill. You know, that actually strikes, what we do not actually feel any, anything like as happy when we acquire new wealth, as we think we're going to be. And, you know, there've been studies looking at, for example, one study looked at lottery winners and their levels of happiness before and after, and also people who've been paralysed and their levels of happiness before and after. And we expect these things to have a much more significant impact on our wellbeing than they do. In fact, you know, winning the lottery has almost negligible impact on people's reported level of happiness. And, and, and I, I wonder if actually, you know, there is, we, we like having problems to solve. We like it being the case that we are trying to get to a better world, that that actually getting there is, is no fun, you know, and I, and I, and I, and I think Nirvana's boring. I think, I think that's true. And I think because, and I think there's a perfectly sensible evolutionary rationale for that. I mean, if you imagine one, one, you know, group of humans who were happy with their lot and another group who said, well, I want to expand and get to the next field. That's where, you know, that's, that's where the real happiness is. Being continually dissatisfied and striving is, is going to win because, you know, people who are content and just sit there are going to get wiped out by them. And so, so I just, I think more fundamentally, actually, you know, feeling, feeling like you have something you need to achieve is probably important for humans. Actually feeling like you've done it all and you've, you're perfectly happy. It doesn't actually make us happy. And this, this may be why the Swiss position

of official neutrality feels a bit, a bit weird that they, to, to us, they don't, they don't want to get involved in, in strife. Whereas it seems like human nature to, to seek out, seek out

conflict in some way. Yeah. And I think if you, it's interesting, I was interested by this Swiss position on nationality, on neutrality, because I expected there might at least be some soul searching in, in Switzerland about, you know, standing by while, you know, profiting while the, you know, Nazis ravaged Europe. And, you know, if you look at Ireland, for example, who of course remained neutral during the second world war there, you know, there's some debate about that in Ireland, you know, not everyone's content that that was the right thing to do. The Swiss have got no problem with it whatsoever. They think being neutral is something they're hugely proud of. And it reminds me of those, it reminds me of the, you know, the neutral planet in Futurama, where Zack Brannigan says, you know, what makes a man turn neutral? Is it, is it greed, lust for power? You know, it's, it's, it is, you know. But I think it's their history of,

of having been, you know, a small middle European power that's just been waltzed over by France and the Habsburgs for, for, yeah, they, they probably got a bit bored of, of being involved in conflict. We need to stop there. Yeah, I suppose the Belgians would like

to have the same neutrality that the Swiss have, but they don't have the advantage of the Alps

going all the way around. Yeah. Look, let's stop there. What's the official name of Switzerland in Switzerland? Schweiz? No. Is it the Helvetic Federation or something? In Latin. Yeah. That's why it's CH on there. Right. Because it's in, I don't, I'm not, excuse my poor Latin, but it's something like Confederate Helvetica or something like that. And for me, that says almost you need, everything you need to know about Switzerland. You can't even call your own country in your own language. Sorry. Of which there are many. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's like the Germans. They

don't even call it Germany. They call it Deutschland. I mean, you know, that means the land of the Dutch. They're totally confused. Okay. All right. Let's wrap up. There's many,

there's many more things I wanted to say to many more gripes I had about Switzerland, not least the worst and most boring New Year's Eve I've ever had in my life. I think, I think we should say

that actually none of this is any complaint against any Swiss individuals. I'm sure they're all, they're all lovely. Even my taxi driver who, because no, through fault of his own happened to be incredibly dull, but I mean, he was a very nice man. Okay. Let's wrap up there and apologies to

any of our Swiss friends out there. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. We've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. Thank you for listening and until next time, goodbye.