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Considering that I use at least four languages[1] every day, and am thankful[2] to be living someplace that has not yet been completely overrun by chains and big box stores, I'd argue the assertion of a "heterogenous" US might need defending. On the original question: I think switzerland is nice for two reasons. (a) we didn't blow ourselves up twice last century, which meant that even with little absolute growth we went from being a relatively poor european country to a relatively rich one, and (b) putting more emphasis on quality of life than on hustle results in, well, more quality of life. [1] It doesn't work for francophones, who have a general swiss (or at best cantonal) idiom, but in swiss-german there are several isoglosses just within my valley that allow me to place a speaker. Granted, my valley has been historically universally catholic, but these days that just means that our protestants and muslims get lumped together in the "not christian" bucket :-) [2] a french friend put it this way, earlier this century: "Modern europeans are too busy feeling sorry for those poor benighted savages who had the misfortune to be born a few villages over, to bother travelling halfway around the world to bring their superior way of life to people at gunpoint." À mon avis, c pas faux. |