Instead, less than a year later, we have another vote on executive salaries, the 1:12 initiative. It would permit companies to award their best-paid worker no more than 12 times what the worst paid took home. The referendum takes place on Sunday. This time, the initiative looks destined to fail: The latest opinion poll put the yes vote at 36 percent, with 54 percent opposed, and 10 percent undecided.

One reason for that may be that in most Swiss companies, the pay disparity is lower already. Salaries are close to the European Union average, and few companies pay starvation wages. But a handful of large corporations buck the trend: Among the big banks, the ratio between the best and worst paid has been around 1:500 for years; for Novartis in 2009, it was 1:752; at Credit Suisse the same year, the differential was as high as 1:1,812. Even companies that were heavily in the red continued to pay extravagant boardroom bonuses and salaries.

It was not always this way. Until the mid-19th century, Switzerland was poor. My great-grandmother, who grew up in an Alpine valley, often went hungry; occasionally, she was even forced to eat grass to fill her belly. Switzerland’s elevation to the ranks of the most prosperous nations was largely because of its manufacturing industry: watches, textiles and mechanical engineering.

It was only after World War II that Switzerland became an important player in the financial sector. Despite our reputation abroad, that is probably why banks don’t really figure in our sense of who we are; we just let them get on with it. Their revenues contributed substantially to our welfare, but we were never in love with them.

What is inescapable in Swiss daily life and culture is agriculture — even though only 4 percent of Swiss still work in it and farming represents just 0.7 percent of our gross domestic product. Our national heroes are not scientists or artists or captains of industry, but fictional characters: an ornery farmer by the name of Wilhelm Tell, a goat-girl called Heidi. Our national sport is “schwingen” wrestling, a farmers’ sport; the first prize at big events is a steer.