All Intensive Purposes

Mr. Alexander Ineichen of Oberaegeri, Switzerland, writes to the Financial Times:

Sir, The debate in your letters columns as to whether the Swiss are dull or Switzerland a paradise is missing the point. The two are not mutually exclusive but correlated. . . .

The Swiss never had victories on battlefields to speak of, never had colonies, never had social upheavals or revolutions, never had disasters. The Swiss, unlike their neighbors, do not even strike. The Swiss have no poets, no composers, few philosophers, and hardly any painters and writers of international acclaim. No wonder the Swiss are dull.

However, when we measure wealth and quality of life not just as gross domestic product per capita but add some less tangible factors such as functionality of infrastructure, medical care and pension system, as well as level of education and safety of our children on their way to school, Switzerland actually is paradise. . . .

Oscar Wilde must have been thinking of the Swiss when he said: "It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating."