Quote:
Originally Posted by redyaris
...but many of the countries such as Switzerland and Austria... have relativley equitable societies even if workers in the tourist industry are low payed.
|
Don't know much about Austria, but Switzerland - or at least the part of it I lived in, by Lac Leman - is far from being a model of income equality. There are a lot of rich to ultra-rich people living in mansions/palaces (literally, not McMansions) and driving Rolls, Bentleys, and Ferraris. There's an upper middle class who own what in the US would be typical suburban homes, which sell for (mid-2000s prices) roughly $1 million. And there are a lot of ordinary lower income folks getting by in small apartments, and people busking in the train stations for small change.
So you have Switzerland which is about as non-equal as you can get in a 1st-world country, vs Norway & Sweden. Both have snow, both have pretty decent mountains. Why does Switzerland get the world-class ski resorts, while the Nordic countries basically serve the domestic market?