A Canadian and a Swiss: getting the work life balance right

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – Switzerland comes in sixth, behind three Nordic countries, The Netherlands and Belgium (not having a leader doesn’t count against you, it appears), for work life balance, according to the Paris-based OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development).

The report was published in October 2011 but unlike quality of life rankings for countries and cities, designed by for-profit groups, it received relatively little publicity.

The OECD report uses three key indicators to compare countries for work-life balance, but the ratings are based on this plus 10 other criteria, which together make up its better life initiative. Here, Switzerland ranks 7th. Canada, which suffers on the work life balance ratings, holds 4th place overall.

Two interesting tidbits of information form part of the Swiss report page: there are more visitors, 8.6 million a year, than the resident population of 7.6m, and renewable energy now accounts for 20.42 percent of energy used.

What we do right: income, jobs, education, health and life satisfaction

What we do wrong: governance (OECD’s lowest turnout for voters)

One statistic will surprise many readers, given the paucity of child-care facilities in Switzerland and the fact that women earn 20 percent less than men, according to the federal government: “In Switzerland, 79 percent of mothers are employed after their children begin school; this figure is higher than the OECD average of 66 percent and suggests that mothers are able to successfully balance family and career.”

Germany comes in for a tough review despite 8th place in the work life balance ratings, notes the Atlantic, which carries a nice set of slides on the top 23 countries. The odd cutoff number of 23 is due to the US coming in at 23.

I have a niggling complaint with the Atlantic article, for a sentence that could leave you thinking Europe’s oldest country is 30 years old: “The average first-time mother is as old as any country in the OECD (30), and the career costs of having a child are sky-high.”

Rain in St Prex 14 December: the flowers love it

LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND – Get your Christmas shopping in this week, before the weather turns a little chillier and weekend snow flurries arrive, for the Lake Geneva region’s weather this week doesn’t qualify as wintry yet.

Temperatures of 8-10C along the lake and thunderstorms have been followed by sunshine and more thunderstorms.

The safest bet for clothing today is a scarf around your neck.

Poor Santa, at a bit of a loss in his sunny warm window

St Prex, like other villages in the region has had unseasonable and unstable weather 14 December, with rainstorms and five minutes later sunshine; the neighbour’s flowers love it, Santa at another neighbour’s looks lost.

The good news, for skiers, is that it is snowing in the mountains (Crans-Montana’s webcams at 16:oo are grayed out from the snow).

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Am I the only one who wonders why someone would park their car next to a penitentiary and leave the keys in the ignition? It’s Saturday, so I can’t easily check on details for press releases that come in the door. And will Valais police even have the answer? People in Valais do sometimes leave their keys in their cars, rural-fashion, but next to a prison?

The car in question was used in a high speed chase after an escaped prisoner stole the car (he must have thought it was put there just for him), and it can’t be in good shape after flipping over, although the prisoner is all right.

Wonder what the insurance company will have to say about this one.

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – A friend, Mary, in New York shared this with me and all I can say is that no matter what you think of animal testing, if you love dogs you’ll love watching these beagles take their first steps outside their lives in a lab. They’re in Santa Monica or I’d consider adopting one in a flash!

20 years later, have we learned anything from that other famous crook, Maxwell?

Robert Maxwell, media mogul, British MP, self-made man and notable crook, died in 1991

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - Plus ça change . . . Why is my first reaction skepticism, I wonder, when I see the headline that Irving Picard has done a deal with the IRS and is expected to get back $326 million for Bernard Madoff’s former clients? Picard is the lawyer assigned to get back some of the money stolen by Bernard Madoff. He has asked a court in the US to approve the deal whereby the IRS will pay back 98 percent of the money it collected from Madoff as 30 percent withholding tax on fictional transactions, part of the airy-fairy deals and probably, says Picard, designed to make him look legitimate.

I hope the day some of these people get some of their money back they stand up and let the rest of us know because I, for one, have trouble believing they will ever see a penny, based on personal experience with another crook, this one in his grave. Robert Maxwell published The European, a newspaper I wrote for regularly as a freelance journalist in 1990. Europe’s first national newspaper, Maxwell liked to boast of his baby.

Maxwell died 20 years ago, in November 1991, presumably by falling overboard his luxury yacht in the Atlantic, but rumours have swirled since then about suicide and murder. The rumours are unlikely to die down because of the number of people who never saw a penny he owed them, as his various scams caught up with him and he took his secrets to a soggy grave.

Maxwell also owned the Daily Mirror and he had illegally borrowed the staff’s pension fund. I was only owed £1,000, so perhaps I shouldn’t complain; others fared far worse. I was broke at the time, had a baby, a new mortgage and interest rates had skyrocketed. I really, really was counting on that money.

In fact, most of my anger over the 10 years of correspondence that followed his death was aimed at Arthur Anderson’s accountants, who sent me letters once a month, detailing over several pages, the work they were doing to extract some cash from the Maxwell mess to let little guys like me be paid at least a portion of what we were owed. At one point it looked like I might receive £200. Then that dropped to £120, a fact explained somewhere in the hundreds of pages I received; it was clear that Arthur Anderson was working hard on the case. And getting paid to do so.

The letters suddenly came less often, like the boyfriend who’s gone to see and found someone more interesting in another port.

It seems that was indeed the case, for in 2002 Arthur Anderson, the accounting and not consulting part of the business, was busy with Enron’s problems. Enron, an energy company, went famously bust in 2001 and in 2002 AA was found guilty by a US court of not auditing Enron correctly. That verdict was later overturned, but AA had meanwhile handed in its license to operate, and it shut down.

If it ever came close to finding some money to pay me a fraction of what Maxwell owed me I’m pretty sure it disappeared in the AA budget for writing, copying and mailing thousands upon thousands of useless pages to small creditors.

Good luck, Madoff clients.

Sri Lanka also claims to have a Buddha Sacred Tooth, specifically his left canine tooth (photo, Sri Lanka tooth sanctuary, Wikipedia)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Is it just me, or is it a little odd to keep finding teeth in the news this week?

Tooth number one: John Lennon

First, John Lennon’s rotting molar up for auction (sweet: it sold for $31,000). I’m not sure which worries me more, that someone kept that tooth all these years, or that someone wanted to buy it. A dentist,  not surprisingly.

Tooth number 2, Lord Buddha

Then there’s the “enshrinement visit” of the Sacred Tooth of Lord Buddha, heading from Beijing to Myanmar for its fourth-ever visit.

The good thing about teeth is that most of us have more than one, for those who want to treasure them after we depart this world. In the case of Buddha, at least five sites in Asia have a sacred tooth of his, according to Wikipedia.

Tooth number 3, Italian baby, age 41,000 years old

Ancient Europeans were formally identified as the very oldest people here this week, and I give you one guess how we know: their teeth! Baby teeth from Italy and others from Britain are the subject of a paper in the revue Nature.

Tooth number 4, Vancouver kid at Halloween

Halloween, ok we expect it, but Canada’s The Globe and Mail puts a new twist on scary teeth, quoting one Vancouver orthodontist who says there’s a 70 percent spike in visits, mainly from kids, in the three weeks following Halloween. Parents, be warned: candy is not cheap!

Tooth number 5, homo sapiens tourist, Bangkok

Last but not least comes a forlorn call on Facebook from GenevaLunch’s tech man, Claude, asking if anyone knows of a dentist in Bangkok. He broke a tooth eating popcorn last week and needs a crown. Names are quickly provided, phone number found but ah, this tale has a bite to it. The dentist is working, but his assistants are unable to get to the office due to flooding.

Take that and chew on it. At least you’re in illustrious company, Claude.

China's changing household wealth: a main boulevard in Shanghai, 1985 (photo, ©2011 Ellen Wallace)

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND – I haven’t stopped looking at international comparisons for cost of living and wealthy individuals, but I have stopped paying attention to them if they’re dollar-based. They’re mostly nonsense.

Looking at media reports about Credit Suisse’s new “Global Wealth Report” I almost dismissed it, thinking it would be just another list, until I took the time to look at the report itself.

We learn that the number of extremely wealthy Chinese is growing rapidly. And we learn, as TSR points out in its story about this, that household wealth in Switzerland has grown far faster than anywhere else – in dollar terms. The only real purpose that information will serve is to add to the jealousy of Switzerland that is already a small feature of life in Europe.

What matters in this report, is the groundshift it lays out clearly.

“The global wealth currently held by 4.4 billion adults has increased 72% since 2000 to reach USD 195 trillion. Driven by robust economic expansion in the emerging markets, the Credit Suisse Research Institute estimates that global wealth will grow 61% to USD 315 trillion by 2015. The middle segment of the wealth pyramid is composed of one billion individuals who are located in the fastest-growing economies of the world and who hold one-sixth or USD 32 trillion of global wealth.”

Move over USA, make way for Asia

This middle segment is composed of people whose average wealth per adult is $10,000 to $100,000, and 60 percent of them are in Asia.

The report underscores a shift that anyone who has recently spent time in the US will have felt, that this powerhouse of consumers is losing its strength to move the world’s economies. The introduction to the report states it baldly. “The Credit Suisse Research Institute believes that wealth provides people in the middle segment with the financial security they need to become the world’s emerging consumers and that the middle segment will replace indebted US households as the global economic growth locomotive.”

Switzerland and Norway, the report shows, are currently, in dollar terms, “the richest nations in the world in terms of average wealth per adult, which stands at USD 372,692 and USD, 326,530 respectively. They are followed by Australia, which is in third place with average wealth per adult of USD 320,909 and Singapore with average wealth per adult of USD 255,488. Figures for Australia and Singapore have both doubled in the last decade.”

Where there is wealth, there is often poverty

Growing wealth has not meant the disappearance of poverty, no real surprise, but the numbers are sobering. “At the base of the wealth pyramid there are three billion people with average wealth per adult of below USD 10,000, of which 1.1 billion own less than USD 1,000 and 307 million are in India.”

The report is, after all, published by a group backed by a bank, and one curious detail is tucked in here. “Some 2.5 billion people are as yet unbanked. As the wealth of this significant group grows, it will both require and fuel the creation of new financial services.”

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The hottest media story in Geneva in recent weeks has been about safety in the city, the rising rate of crime, the poor police response, the danger to foreigners visiting the city, the danger of foreigners bringing crime into the city: in short, Geneva, that haven of peace, isn’t what it used to be.

Here’s my suggestion: let’s lighten up and let the Swiss politicians fight it out.

Crime-fighting and politics, old bedfellows

Rising crime is a favourite topic of politicians everywhere in an election year, and citizens in Switzerland will elect their parliament later this year.

Geneva has had a tug of war over the police department for several years, so the themes of not enough support for the police, and its opposite, police are not being managed well, resurface like clockwork.

Swiss media have sunk their teeth into this story

World Radio Switzerland, WRS, kicked off the latest round by reporting on the mugging of the son of a US diplomat in mid-July. It was a story that deserved to be told. Illustré carried an interview with photos of the young man and the other Edipresse publications, notably the Tribune de Geneve picked up the thread and ran with it.

The initial story has been extended, in headlines, to not just one, but several international workers who are victims of assaults in the city. The message sent by the UN to its workers this summer, which prompted the news stories, was the result of not just one attack on a diplomatic family member, but two. There are plenty of other stories around, of course, as there are in any city.

WRS today published a story that begins: “From muggings in the middle of the night to burglar alarm scams—the public’s perception is that crime in Geneva is out of control. Many people have related their stories to WRS and other Swiss media as well social networking sites . . .” (Italics are mine)

Who is measuring public perception and how

The problem with media stories about public perceptions is that they are whatever the editors decide they will be, for unless you hire a creditable polling agency to survey a large sample audience, you simply don’t know: it’s too easy to find large numbers of people who will back any point of view for stories like this.

Do foreigners really believe Geneva is not safe? Is it less safe than it used to be? That it’s not a city where you can go out at night? That is doesn’t compare well to other cities around the world? And what kind of cities do you compare it to – ones of the same size or of the same degree of openness to the world?

We have two sources of information on public perception it seems: news media, part of whose job is to create stories that pull in audiences, and social media, who for all the large numbers of members they claim, tend to have the same relatively small and vocal groups speaking up on hot topics.

Crime in Switzerland low, compared internationally

So what’s the reality?

Geneva police statistics show crime up in the first half of 2011 compared to the previous year, but the figures were actually lower during the summer months. The city’s crime rate fell by 5 percent in 2010. It has the highest crime rate of Swiss cities, but to keep this in perspective, four of the city’s five murders in 2010 were cases of domestic violence and crime statistics have been harmonized nationwide only since 2010, so federal officials warn they should be read with caution.

Swiss crime statistics are low compared to other countries, for crimes recorded by police. Assault, for example: the Swiss rate is 2.9 per 100,000, compared to 281.6 for the US, 150.4 for New Zealand, 32.2 for England and Wales and 3.1 for Australia. France, to my great surprise, is at the bottom of the assault rates in major countries, with only 0.3 per 100,000. France’s rates for intentional homicide and rape are twice as high as Switzerland’s.

Car theft? Switzerland is the number one country for this. Draw your own conclusions.

Of course, these are based on figures recorded by police, and I’ve been hearing arguments that not all crimes are reported to the police. There is little evidence this happens more often in Switzerland than elsewhere, however. And comparative statistics are also a couple years old. In Geneva, crime went up in 2009, went down in 2010, appears to be going up again, but the percentages look high because the base is small.

The other public perception

Here’s my personal perception, my two bits based on a handful of conversations with others who have lived in the area for several years. I could say public perception corresponds to this:

• I don’t think Geneva is as safe as it was 25 years ago when I arrived, but I also don’t think Paris is as safe as it was 25 years ago when I left it, and I think this is probably true for many cities. There are more drugs, populations are larger, transient populations move around more easily.
• I think Geneva is nevertheless a much safer city than most but like any urban area, there are and will be muggings, thefts and worse. The police force probably does need beefing up, another remark that could be applied to most cities I know.
• Urban living requires paying close attention to your surroundings, avoiding situations and places where trouble is more likely to occur, stirred with a good dose of common sense. A city you don’t know is generally more dangerous, as is any city when you’ve been out drinking. And any city will feel more dangerous if you don’t tune out people who turn unfortunate personal experiences into generalizations. Your surroundings are as scary as your sense of drama lets them be, so if you don’t want to live in fear, trying reining it in.

I feel as sorry as anyone else for people who’ve run into trouble, through no fault of their own, and the young son and daughter of diplomats certainly didn’t deserve the treatment they got at the hands of thugs. I think the public should know about it.

But I don’t believe we should make them victims again, to suit personal or professional needs to dramatize what happened to them.

My own son was mugged at age 19 in Vancouver, his first month at university there (he managed to get away with minor injuries by running very fast, not always an option). I was held up at gunpoint in a dark courtyard in Paris, with insinuations about sex, when I had been there only a month, several years ago. When I had been in Geneva a short while a close friend was traumatized by a ghastly acid-throwing incident in the laundry room of a building, which disfigured a work colleague. The student apartment two girlfriends and I had vacated a week earlier one summer in Milwaukee was broken into by a drug hustler who had the wrong building; one of the girls who had just moved in was cruelly raped and beaten up.

Most people I know who live in cities have tales like this to tell. But urban life continues, and people find their own ways of dealing with safety issues and crime.

That doesn’t make for exciting journalism or social network chatting, though.

It’s time to be responsible news consumers and move on.

Chateau de Coppet, home to the IMMA

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Coppet will formally introduce the new home of the International Menuhin Music Academy (IMMA) next week at the Château de Coppet, and the arrival of violin star and maestro, Maxim Vengerov, who will serve as music consultant.

The school left the Villa Nestle in September 2009 and its main premises are now in Coppet, with students living there during the academic year. Summer classes, a feature of the school since it was founded in 1977, continue in Gstaad.

Students at the academy are generally housed by host families and the school is looking for families in the Coppet area with the kind of space and love of strings music that will make it possible for a young musician, finishing his or her musical education, to practice several hours a day (although not every day). Students generally leave for the Christmas and Easter holidays. Telephone,  IMMA secretariat: +$122 364 4494.

ST PREX, SWITZERLAND – First come, first serve, for 8 tickets to the St Prex Classics festival, 16-28 August (two weekends): 4 tickets for 19 August (Soirées Ravel) and 4 tickets for 28 August (Trois pour 4 : Gershwin Piano Quartet). Simply contact tv@stprexfestival.com and include the web address of this page in your request for the tickets. Note that the 28 August event is sold out, so this is a golden opportunity to get a ticket.

The festival, now in its fifth year, features several evenings of world-class entertainment, both dance and music, including a first encounter between star violinist Nigel Kennedy and the Paris Opera’s “etoile”, Aurélie Dupont, the evenings of 25 and 26 August.