Before anyone thinks Switzerland is some bastion of democracy, I'd like to point out that they've been very conservative in some areas. Women didn't have federal voting rights until 1971, and received nation-wide local voting rights fairly recently in 1991. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_suffrage_in_Switzerlan...

If you run a democracy for nearly 850 years, it sort of looks a bit conservative.

Progressivism != democracy. Athens as of 500AD were technically utterly democratic, and had slavery, let alone no voting rights for women.

Progress can also be quite un-democratic. E.g. Soviet Union in 1920-30s progressed quickly to afford universal education, equal rights for women, let alone science and industry (especially military industry). It was quite anti-democratic, though, with fake elections (having just one "contender" in the bulletin), those who happened to be born into former "bourgeoisie" having severe restrictions in civil rights, let alone incarcerating and executing lots of people without any due process.

Let me also point out that conservative in this case does not mean US conservative. US conservatism is slowly creeping towards theological conservatism.

Isn't US "C"onservatism more or less just a prolonged arm for "Corporatism", not so much theological values there is it?

It is, but their audiance are often fundamental Christians who gobble up anything that matches their conservative ideas (which usually involves limiting other people's freedoms). Look at Trump right now, total scumbag if you look at the evidence, but somehow the represents their "values".

But thats kind of the point isn't it? Some Kanton decides by popular vote to be conservative, and they can do so. They are not forced to follow some politically progressive agenda, and so the people are not alienated as in other democracies.

The downside is that progress is slower, but the upside is that the system remains stable and there are no backlashes against a perceived "liberal hivemind" or whatnot.

Democracy does not mean that sensible things happen, it means the people govern themselves, for good or for worse.

Switzerland has found a feedback cycle that works exceptionally well. So you voted to spend lots of money on a football stadium? Well sorry, we can't afford free kindergarten anymore. People learn from this and retain identification with the political system.

There is also a fair amount of xenophobia inherent in the Swiss national identity. I know Germans who have lived there for 10+ years and are still considered outsiders.

In my experience, all you have to do is (passably) speak swiss german to be accepted by the locals. A lot of Germans live here 10+ years without speaking swiss german and I notice some distaste from the Swiss since a Swiss guy will feel like it's rude if he doesn't speak high german with a German, and many really don't like speaking high german.

There's definitely other forms of xenophobia here, though. There are a lot of negative stereotypes about some of the refugees that have come to Switzerland over the years, and many Swiss I talk to dislike the idea of refugees coming to Switzerland and choosing not to work (being unable to work is a different story).

> and many Swiss I talk to dislike the idea of refugees coming to Switzerland and choosing not to work

I'm sorry, but who actually likes that idea?

I think many jumps to the conclusion "will not work" from "does not work". Finding a job isn't always easy.

I mean, it's kind of weird to feel anything about what others do with their time.

In a capitalist dystopia, I'd agree with you. But everywhere else, you cannot live without impacting the lives of other people.

For example, let's say you choose to eat unhealthy food, become obese, and land in the hospital. You might say "who cares what other people eat" while you are using a limited, shared resource.

If you're able to not work indefinitely because you're consuming a limited, shared resource like the money of other people that live in a country, why should they think that's fair if it's supposed to be a safety net?

Depends if they do it on your dime and in your country -- the one you're supposed to take care of because you live in it.

It's all one damn earth. People already take advantage of each other. Why worry about the person next door? At least they aren't trying to kill you.

>At least they aren't trying to kill you.

Depends. Most are not, but in some cases, they are (e.g. islamic terrorism in France and Germany).

But the main reason is that some peoples/places have developed their own culture over centuries, and don't particularly appreciate some large rush of newcomers bringing their own stuff and messing the nice thing they have got going.

In Europe, you're more likely to die of lung cancer than terrorist attack. It's a load of crap that you'll meet anyone in your life who will genuinely try to end your life. Sure, you might be unlikely, but you also might win the lottery.

With respect to culture.... I don't know what to say to that. It strikes me as very xenophobic and more than a little naive. The way to get your culture to remain is by showing others what is to celebrate about it, not by forbidding them from living around you. It's not like any culture can exist long unchanged while children have access to the internet anyway.

I second that. A Czech child minder told me that she only really connected to the mothers when she switched to Swiss German.

Being considered an outsider is not bad. Being treated as subhuman or as an enemy because you are an outsider, that's when it becomes a problem.

Preserving a distinctly Swiss culture and society is what allows them to remain successful.

Can you name a place that doesn't have that? I've lived in three different (Western) countries and felt the same thing in all of them.

Actually, that is a human trait you will find everywhere. Sometimes it comes in a cultural disguise (unbelievers), sometimes hidden away, because the rich guy/woman might share the wealth, but wherever you go, people are suspicious/hateful of strangers. Only group exempt from that is teenagers, who seem to be less risk averse, but if socially lower ranking also go full foreigner hatred to boost self-esteem.

Milk the hatred and distrust for the benefits (Always double-check on foreign science! ) and name it to everyone falling for it as what it is: Ancient Ape bugs. So mild mockery would be the best reaction i guess.

Social suppression seems to have failed on a large scale recently.

Switzerland is very much worse than a lot of other country in that regard. It might happen in other countries as well, but its very much the majority in Switzerland.

Switzerland has one of the largest percentages of foreign-born and non-citizen residents, so probably it's not so bad.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign...

you've lived in three western countries for 10+ years each, and your mother tongue is one of the official languages of the 'foreign' nation?

If I understand your question correctly, then yes.

Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco

Talk to some immigrants in those places that are not white/asian and/or successful.

> The Swiss model does seem to scale. The population has scaled from 6.2 million in 1970 to about 8.2 million today. GDP per capita also went up significantly during this time, and outpaced GDP per capita growth in the USA.

While that is certainly adorable (and, seriously, good for them!), "scale" in GP is referring to: "Will it work for 450M people at the same time?" -- or in China's case: "Will it work for 1.3B people at the same time"?

GP posits that in a large liquid world, big enough to support the Ch or SG populations, they will both do well, but that it requires this large external world to pull it off. If the model WAS the external world, it wouldn't.

> adorable

Do you mean admirable?

I have a hard time thinking of an economy as being adorable, except maybe if the whole thing is very physically small (like, a city of miniscule people, or something like that)

Switzerland's economy is adorably small. It is approximately 3x the size of LA County, and in there are cheese makers, watch makers, ski chalets, etc.

"inspiring great affection; delightful; charming"

This seems adorable to me.

Adorable is used to belittle things -- it's even a meme:

“That’s Cute” (otherwise known as “That’s Adorable”) is a sarcastic expression used to patronize or dismiss someone’s self-complacency or boastful statement, similar to the phrase “bitch, please.” It is typically used to juxtapose the capabilities or accomplishments of two comparable subjects

I think it's meant as a diminutive. Also, economies have natural sizes that are not bound to geography; it's rather easy to compare them on any number of characteristics.

That's obviously unknowable, but I present evidence that the model has scaled. I see no reason why China couldn't become as wealthy as Switzerland if it followed the same models (but I doubt it will any time soon).

But I think the claim being made is "scale in size only works with a larger scaling somewhere else". Pointing to growth in Switzerland doesn't do much to argue with the idea that this model only works when you have massive regions with less wealth to absorb exports and services.

To simplify absurdly, average global global wealth per person is ~$24,000. If everyone in China had median Swiss wealth, that would be half the world's wealth. If everyone in China had mean Swiss wealth, that would be more wealth than exists in the entire world.

So at least in the short term, no. China can't become as wealthy as Switzerland. Global wealth has doubled over the last ~40 years - even if China captured every penny of the next doubling, it would still take >50 years to match Switzerland under any realistic model. Swiss wealth is inescapably a product of inequality, in the sense that there doesn't exist enough wealth to raise everyone to their level.

But we aren't talking about the short term, or are we? 50 years in the grand scheme of things seems quite short term when discussing such extreme cases as a communist country that was starving only decades ago and Switzerland: they are two polar opposites.

But fundamentally wealth is not a zero sum game. Countries have internal markets too. The idea that China can only grow if the rest of the world gets richer too isn't right: they can achieve enormous growth by selling things to themselves as well. That wasn't their primary economic model so far but that has more to do with the political priorities of the CCP than anything else.

I agree with all of this, but that 50 year case was ludicrously generous - I gave China every penny of economic growth in the entire world. What I'm saying is that "China could be like Switzerland by implementing Swiss policies" is implausible, because there simply isn't enough money to be like Switzerland. Even if you think it would work, which I don't, the timeframes involved are up there with "dawn of industrialization to now".

I'm not mistaking the global economy for a zero sum game, but I'm saying that growth is bounded for any merely-strategic change. And, I'm saying that Switzerland's strategy is largely a zero-sum one of providing luxury goods and services to transfer foreign wealth in. China could reach Swiss wealth with a breakthrough in graphene superconduction (not zero sum, increases rate of global wealth growth), but it's not realistic by becoming a banking and luxury goods hub (near-zero sum, doesn't alter existing ~2% global growth rates).

Why would growth be bounded depending on the cause of that growth? Genuine question, not trying to be snarky.

50 years might be an unrealistic timeframe for China, but then again who knows? Putting aside my personal view that they're going to either stagnate or go backwards within the next decade, it doesn't seem impossible. Although they're obviously much much smaller, Singapore is an example of a country that went from abject poverty to one of the richest in the world in less than a generation.

Again, very different country compared to China, but they were also pretty much at rock-bottom even a decade after WWII ended. They were bombed, invaded and occupied by the Japanese in WWII, which meant they were heavily air-raided/bombed by the Allies in the later stages of the war. They had no natural resources, scarce water supplies and were kicked out of the Malaysian Federation in the early 60s. Even Lee Kwan Yew, at the time, appeared to think the latter was a death sentence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41ND3U_9HgQ .

I dunno. I guess all I'm saying is miracles can happen (although I personally think it unlikely in China's case).

> Why would growth be bounded depending on the cause of that growth?

Totally fair question. I didn't mean specific causes are bounded (it doesn't matter if your conductors are yttrium or graphene), but I wasn't terribly clear. What I mean is that relative-growth gains are bounded in a way that absolute-growth gains aren't.

Relative growth (i.e. cutting better trade deals, capturing more share and profit on what exists) is constrained by existing wealth + wealth growth. So the pie you can steal from other countries, plus the fairly stable ~2% annual increase in the size of the pie. You can do a bit better than that by increasing internal efficiencies, and in fairness Singapore has done well with this - their health efficiency per healthcare dollar is sky-high, and it's not because they're pioneering radical new medicine. But even so, these effects are generally limited by international conditions and the size of your existing inefficiencies. (Again, to be fair, sky-high in China.)

Absolute growth I'm considering unbounded, or bounded at ludicrous heights. It's about increasing the growth rate of the pie (and capturing some/all of that growth). So industrialization, nitrate fertilizers, and similarly ground-breaking tech all let the pie grow faster and produced incredible pie-growth wealth. (Not computerization, an oddity for which I have theories but no one seems to have answers.)

All of which is to say that the larger your nation, in both absolute terms and percentage of globe terms, the harder it is to get rich on relative gains. Discreet banking was worth some relatively fixed percentage of money movement. That created huge wealth in Switzerland (and the Seychelles), but can't be scaled by employing 10x as many bankers. Bridging East and West with free markets, low-corruption governance, and a stable core city was worth some large amount of money for Singapore, but that can't be scaled by developing 10 such cities. These are tricks where you interpose yourself in the middle of an extreme profit flow, and if your group is small enough then collecting your cut at the margin makes everyone rich.

I confess that I'm overstating, though. My personal suspicion is that gross inefficiencies are a defining trait of most economic activity, and China is surely worse than many. So in that sense, it might be possible to pour money into efficiencies like health, education, and (sustainable) infrastructure and reap massive gains. It might be that 2% global annual growth can be locally beaten by just being less stupid, but Singapore and Switzerland were simply too small alter the global stats with their local improvements. So I could be vastly wrong - maybe handing iron rule of China to another Yew could produce 4% or 8% growth every year, even without any special breakthrough.

As for will happen, I think we agree there. Too much fragility, not enough political will.

Thanks for the well thought out reply. I think what you say is sensible in the context of relative growth. I suppose the two factors that might allow relative growth of one country's economy to be net positive growth globally would be (a) gains specialisation and trade and (b) advancement in technology (in a sense, one of the aspects of 'efficiency' you discussed above). It seems easy enough to argue one way or the other about how much scope these factors create for 'net positive relative growth', but I would definitely agree it's bounded at some level.

It's a good point about Yew having the advantage of a near-autocracy. Although it might sometimes appear that way to us westerners, this is not entirely the case in China. I have noticed though that there is a (not entirely unjustified) stain of thought that authoritarian government is better able to implement unpopular, but growth positive, government economic policy. It's just my vague concern with nothing to really back it up, but I can't help but feel were slowly sliding towards illiberal 'democracy' in much of the first-world anglosphere. Hopefully I'm mistaken, as I quite like genuine liberal democracy.

The computerisation point is a very interesting one. Putting aside the possibility it's a measurement issue, one other theory I've seen posits that computerisation more often leads to cannibalisation of industries, rather than creation. Albeit these argument generally acknowledge that minor (but still positive) gain are made from higher industrial efficiency. My own pet theory is that computerisation has turned many markets into 'winner-takes-all' markets, meaning gains from efficiency have been translated into (highly concentrated) private wealth much more than they have led to broader increases in economic growth. I think there are two factors at play here: (1) the positive network externalities often associated with computerised markets and (2) the 'always increasing' economies of scale that purely (or mostly) computerised services enjoy, due to the non-rivalrous nature of their consumption.

I'd be very interested to hear your theories if you're willing to share :)

From a fiscal point of view, it's impossible for every country to be a net exporter of goods.

>But the Swiss economy is diversified.

It's easy to be diversified if you funding it with "stolen money" -- or the world's rich banking accounts in any case.

Well, I mean it is stolen money.

The Swiss I've known have been some of the most thoughtful and intelligent people I've had the pleasure of working with. Just saying that it's probably not the best country to use as an example even if they have done a lot recently to reform their economy away from the banking system.

You just proved my point.

There is no actual evidence that Switzerland is a good place to live because of "stolen" money - in reality, in the American case, not even slightly stolen money but legitimate money owned by legitimate expats that the US Government somehow believes it owns by birthright. In that case it's America stealing from the Swiss, in fact.

There is plenty of evidence that it doesn't matter though, like the fact that the country is still the same even after eliminating all financial privacy rights for non-Swiss. Note that Swiss people still have very strong privacy from the Swiss government by law, a position that puts the Swiss government in a weaker position than most governments are, as tax investigators have much less power. It's only foreigners where the Swiss financial privacy has been dropped. Yet they still manage to make the system work well.