In Britain we are now glumly entering the age of austerity and everyone expects unemployment to go on rising. This has been the case in the past: even when the economy starts to grow, there is a painfully long lag before unemployment starts to fall. But not in Switzerland is different. There, unemployment is already falling. Since January, it has fallen from an already low 4.5 per cent to 3.8 per cent, half the UK rate.
If you go to Zurich and ask why there are so comparatively few people out of work, you have a good chance of being told: ‘employment is picking up fast because it is cheap to sack people’. It is a classic paradox and not the only one to be found in this part of the world.
In recent years, British policy wonks have looked at how things are done in America. Meanwhile the left has long had a warm feeling about Sweden — usually unsullied by much research into the country. No one cares much about Switzerland. The country may not, apparently, have invented the cuckoo clock, but it has made a better fist of a welfare state than most. That is to say, it gets better results and, just as crucially, avoids causing nearly as much collateral damage.
The boom in lone and unmarried parenting is one of the ways in which our own welfare state has harmed our society — not only the children involved but also the women and men. Of course I am not blaming all lone parents, only saying that the research shows it is a less than ideal way of bringing up child-ren. In Britain, 46 per cent of our children are born out of wedlock. In Switzerland the figure is where ours was 25 years ago, vastly lower at 16 per cent.
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