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Update: Added populations.
Update: Added 1980 vintage language data. Note that Italians are the largest foreign population traditionally.
Update II: I tried to plot the 1980 language proportions against 2005 per capita income. I know, not kosher, but doesn’t matter, almost none of the income variation can be accounted for by language variation (around 5%, with a slight positive relation between Germanity and wealth). Using the 1980 language data and 2005 per capita cantonal GDP the nominal per capita GDP would be 56,000 for German speakers and 51,000 for French speakers.
A commenter asked about Switzerland. I’d been meaning to look deeper into the issue for a long time, so I decided to give it a try. Below the fold are the Swiss Cantons organized by the variables you see in the title. I had to collect the information from various sources, explaining the obviously non-Anglicized names of some of the Cantons (I’ve just finished looking up the language and religious proportions in a somewhat time consuming manner, so I am not inclined to change the names since they’re rather intelligible). I ran into some papers relating factors such as government expenditure and economic productivity and Protestantism, but I’ll leave the data without comment and as a reference for readers. I also included a map below which can give you a sense of where the Cantons are and the distributed. One thing to note, several sources noted that in Switzerland Protestantism historically tended to be urban, which I thing goes a long way toward explaining what seems to be a difference in per capita GDP.
| Canton | Per capita* | Language | Religion | Population | German | French | Italian | Romansch |
| Basle-Town | 115178 | German | Protestant | 193100 | 81 | 3 | 8 | |
| Zoug | 93753 | German | Catholic | 95100 | 87 | 1 | 7 | |
| Nidwald | 73286 | German | Catholic | 37200 | 94 | 1 | 2 | |
| Glaris | 73236 | German | Protestant | 38700 | 83 | 10 | ||
| Zurich | 68804 | German | Protestant | 1181600 | 83 | 2 | 8 | |
| Geneve | 62839 | French | Protestant, Catholic | 396600 | 9 | 65 | 9 | |
| Schaffhouse | 55126 | German | Protestant | 73700 | 85 | 1 | 6 | |
| Basle-Land | 53502 | German | Protestant | 255300 | 85 | 2 | 7 | |
| Vaud | 52901 | French | Protestant | 608200 | 9 | 75 | 7 | |
| Schwyz | 50170 | German | Catholic | 125200 | 91 | 5 | ||
| Neuchatel | 49775 | French | 2/3 Protestant | 165400 | 8 | 77 | 9 | |
| Grisons | 49355 | 55% German, 30% Romansh, 15% Italian | 1/2 Catholic, 1/2 Protestant | 38700 | 60 | 1 | 13 | 22 |
| Argovie | 49209 | German | Mixed | 579400 | ||||
| Soleure | 46844 | German | 3/5 Catholic | 241600 | 87 | 1 | 7 | |
| Appenzel Rh-I | 45936 | German | Catholic | 14900 | ||||
| Uri | 45712 | German | Catholic | 35800 | 91 | 1 | 4 | |
| Berne | 45644 | German, French | Protestant | 938600 | 84 | 8 | 4 | |
| Thurgovie | 44918 | German | 2/3 Protestant | 225400 | 87 | 7 | ||
| St-Gall | 44866 | German | Mixed | 443900 | 89 | 5 | ||
| Appenzell Rh-E | 44215 | German | Protestant | 54000 | 90 | 5 | ||
| Lucerne | 43910 | German | Catholic | 342900 | 91 | 1 | 4 | |
| Tessin | 39646 | Italian | Catholic | 305600 | 11 | 2 | 84 | |
| Obwald | 39559 | German | Catholic | 31800 | 94 | 1 | 2 | |
| Valais | 38385 | 2/3 French, 1/3 German | Catholic | 273400 | 32 | 61 | 3 | |
| Fribourg | 38385 | 2/.3 French, 1/3 German | Catholic | 229900 | 32 | 61 | 3 | |
| Jura | 38070 | French | Catholic | 69222 | 9 | 86 | 4 |
* Nominal per capita GDP 20005, swiss franc
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In the early 70s a Swiss I’d just met asked me what was going on in Northern Ireland. I started an anodyne reply when he interrupted briskly with “No, no, it’s those awful Catholics, isn’t it? Lazy, stupid….”. The only thing I’d ever experienced that was anything like it was a conversation with several Milanese who launched off about southern Italians “Lazy, stupid, just Arabs, …..”.
It looks like being German is more correlated with prosperity than being Protestant.
I would expect that German-ness (of institutions) is, internationally, one of the most powerful predictors of prosperity – certainly within Europe the Germanic cities (dotted around the Baltic sea, or in Hungary, Czech, Poland, France or wherever) usually stand-out for their prosperity over the past many hundred years.
I would expect that German-ness (of institutions) is, internationally, one of the most powerful predictors of prosperity
only within the last 150 years. the prosperity of germans in eastern europe is somewhat like admiring the thrift of the lebanese in west africa. you need take into account the baseline (the rhineland was prosperous and modernized, prussia, land of serfs, was not).
also, germany (e.g., berlin) welcomed productive french hugenots (the hohenzollerns encouraged their settlement after their expulsion from france). so there were french cities for a while in germany (berlin dialect had a french influence), not the other way around (unless you count ethnic german regions on the border).
so you expectations don’t make any historical sense to me.
Wow, thanks Razib!
I read the Wikipedia entry on the history of Switzerland. Like many non-Swiss, I realize I had the Canton system the wrong way round. We often hear Cantons proposed as a political solution for some fractious part of the world. In the 1990s it was thought by some to be the solution to the Yugoslav conflict, for instance. So I assumed it had originated in Switzerland for a similar reason.
Actually the Cantons go way, way back in Swiss history. If anything, centralization was more of a political innovation in Switzerland. Napoleon forcefully united Switzerland into something like a conventional sovereign state. The Swiss hated it and reversed it, but came to realize they needed a little bit more centralization, if only to help ward off the next Napoleon.
Napoleon did something similar in both Germany and Italy, but there the results were very different. The 200 odd German principalities and city states were to merge into a centralized German nation under Prussian leadership, and it’s almost the same story in Italy.
I think it was Nietzsche who pointed out that the Germany of small independent city states had given the world J.S. Bach and Goethe, while, since unification, Germany’s greatest poet was now Bismarck!
I think it was Nietzsche who pointed out that the Germany of small independent city states had given the world J.S. Bach and Goethe, while, since unification, Germany’s greatest poet was now Bismarck!
to be fair, the n-man lived before the rise of german science….
Using the 1980 language data and 2005 per capita cantonal GDP the nominal per capita GDP would be 56,000 for German speakers and 51,000 for French speakers.
PISA records Swiss scores by language region. I can only find reading scores from 2000 (which puts the French regions ahead). But Volkmar Weiss has IQ transformations for 2006:
German Swiss: 106
French Swiss: 104
Italian Swiss:102
Hey Razib
senschaft.de/english/index_english.html
You should check out this guy, Michael Blume.
http://www.blume-religionswis
He did a lot of study on religion, fertility et al in Germanic countries. Just figured, you’d might like to know.
tx.
Aren’t those maps striking-looking? My impression is that the Swiss are the world champion cartographers. Edward Tufte somewhere talks about Swiss topographic maps as the best.
Yeah, but Swiss science gave us LSD!
Nietzsche also mentioned that Switzerland’s great cotribution to civilization was the cuckoo-clock. Something like “In northern Italy, 500 years of war gave us the Renaissance; In Switzerland, a thousand years of peace gave us the cuckoo-clock.
What Nietzsche honored was aristocratic excellence and striving at the expense of peace and harmony, rather than decentralization. Florence, Venice, Genoa, Pisa, etc. in Northern Italy seem to have been his ideals, along with classical Greece.
Link
He misunderstood Swiss history, though. Switzerland exists because of a combination of very realistic diplomacy and (for a time) the best military in the world. No one invaded Switzerland because Swiss mercenaries were the best troops anyone had. They were not usually free-lancers, IIRC, but were rented out by the Swiss nation.
Downing’s “The Military Revolution and Political Change” says something similar about Sweden. Sween preserved its relative freedom and egalitarianism because it fought its wars outside the country and gained enough plunder and payoffs (from France etc.) that they didn’t have to squeeze the Swedish populace terribly hard, whereas France, Prussia, and Spain needed to destroy popular traditional institutions in order to maximize their extractions.
Historical significance of Swiss infantry
Nietzsche also mentioned that Switzerland’s great cotribution to civilization was the cuckoo-clock. Something like “In northern Italy, 500 years of war gave us the Renaissance; In Switzerland, a thousand years of peace gave us the cuckoo-clock.
Nietzsche said that? I’m pretty sure it was in fact Harry Lime (Orson Welles) in the movie “Third Man”.
The data on Argovy are missing, and it looks as though Valais corrupted Fribourg or vice-versa. (When #s add up to less than 100%, is that immigrants?)
When #s add up to less than 100%, is that immigrants
yeah, i omitted ‘other.’ i’ll fix the data soon….
The cuckoo clock line is indeed found in “The Third Man.” Whether it came from Nietzsche I cannot say.
I’d guess the most important factor in this is geography. If Switzerland was in the same geographical position as Poland – ie stuck on the great North European plain mid-way between Germany and Russia – it would have been in big trouble. (Mel Brooks once described Poland, sadly, as “the doormat of Europe”). As it is, the Alps make foreign occupation of Switzerland not impossible, but not worthwhile either.
Geography doesn’t determine the outcome of every battle – only maybe 95%.
Btw, Orson Welles was dead wrong. The Cuckoo clock was German and Switzerland has been innovative throughout history, while Italy lagged since the Renaissance. (Not that they did a bad job either..)
Via Johan Norberg
This is what they did accomplish:
“the tax revolt, direct democracy and more wealth than any other country ever had? For example the pencil, the newspaper, the first branded article, the electric telegraph, the clock-factory, the internal combustion engine, the Swiss army knife, playing cards, the cartoon, contact lenses, vivisection, organ transplantation, the Red Cross – and Absinthe.”
Not bad at all.
Elsewhere, though, mountainous areas are split up into feuding groups: the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Atlas mountains. And usually it’s possible for an outside power to recruit one of the groups against the others, but that didn’t happen in Switzerland.
One thing I don’t know about is economic interdependencies of the various areas of Switzerland.
Switzerland has been innovative throughout history…
And they continue so to this day.