> Germany will be the world’s only major economy to contract in 2023, with even sanctioned Russia experiencing growth, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Germany relies on so much natural gas for manufacturing (not just for energy, but as a raw material for chemical processing). At the very least though, they should build a few state of the art nuclear power plants. Their obsession with renewable energy is crippling them in this age of high natural gas prices.
Building nuclear plants takes forever and Germany has no reliable fuel source. Even Sweden is rowing back from their plan to build 10 new nuclear reactors.
I can't read the article due to the Pay Wall but I'd like to ask if it covered the fact that in Germany life expectancy is going up [0] and infant mortality is going down [1]?
I know I've just cherry picked two statistics there and please don't compare to other countries because it's very hard to do an apples to apples comparison. But my point is that any article or new sources that concentrates on money as the measure of success for a country might be coming from a (very common) point of view which maybe doesn't look at what's actually important in the world.
Can't see the full article text because I'm not going to pay for Bezos' opinion rag and the archive link isn't working for me right now but it's certainly a choice to single out Germany in the middle of the second year (fourth if you consider the pandemic as the beginning of it rather than the invasion of Ukraine, which removed Russia as one of the most important trading partners) of an ongoing global recession and open it by suggesting it's the government's fault.
While it's true that the coalition is weak, that is largely the result of the logical third partner, the party Die Linke having self-sabotaged itself during the election season and feeding into the US-style smear campaign of the German right against the Greens (case in point: the most widely read German newspaper, Bild, and its more white-collar sister newspaper Die Welt routinely single out Green politicians due to the obvious political leaning of its owner, Axel Springer). The only remaining potential partners would have been the Christian Union, which we'd been stuck with for 16 years at that point, or the neoliberal FDP, which on paper looked like a perfect match but chickened out of literally the same coalition four years prior after being told that being in a coalition means making compromises.
So the result existed on a knife's edge since the start and has basically been held hostage by the FDP, which chickened out of most of its progressive campaign promises that would have aligned them with the other two (even the self-ID law in its final draft is a far cry from what was promised and the cannabis legalization is going to be extremely conservative if it happens at all). Meanwhile the government has to deliver on the various commitments made by the previous government.
Angela Merkel, while apparently seen as a progressive internationally, was best known for being static: her biggest accomplishments during the Eurocrisis and the "migration crisis" were seen to be her reluctance to act quickly and instead be extremely reluctant and measured in any response. This worked fine for the most part (while of course resulting on a lot of missed opportunities: the conservative Union led government all but abolished subsidies on solar, killing off the nascent renewable energy industry that had sprung up after these subsidies were launched by a red-green coalition several years prior). However during the early months of the pandemic, her measured and science-based approach (she famously holds a degree in physical chemistry) was at odds with the federal and state-level demands for action while at the same time state-level leaders of her party were using the opportunity to position themselves as her successor when it became clear she didn't want to run for office again.
One such example of delivering on the previous government's promises is the action on climate change: the previous government committed to goals that can not be reached without significant changes to cut down on emmissions, but any change to do this is portrayed as Green zealotry. So we're now headed to meet only 98% of the goals (which were already much lower than what scientific consensus says is necessary) but the public impression is that the government is going overboard and giving the Greens free reign. Meanwhile the conservative Union is publicly flirting with the right-wing AfD and enjoying not being in the driver seat this time.
For the record, I don't even like the Green party but they're being used as the scapegoat for the coalition government trying to do the bare minimum (i.e. meeting the goals set by the conservative coalition preceding it) while constantly having to make concessions to the neoliberal FDP (which has no problem publicly airing its grievances).
So what I'm trying to say is that the economy in Germany isn't stagnating because of the government but because of the global ongoing recession and that the government isn't "weak" because of something it can fix but because of right-wing populism (which much like elsewhere was sent into overdrive during the first year of the pandemic) and having to rely on an unwilling coalition partner constantly threatening to ruin everything if it doesn't get its way. Just focussing on a "strong government" as the solution to this didn't end well last time we had an unstable government during an economic crisis (hint: that was nearly a hundred years ago, you may have read about it in a history book).
EDIT: Another FDP-ism worth mentioning is that the center-left SPD and the Greens would be fine with raising taxes to pay for subsidies and improving social welfare programmes while the FDP neither wants taxes to be raised nor additional debt to be accrued, effectively insisting on austerity (which as previously linked on HN is scientifically proven to be detrimental to a country's stability and economic well-being but usually involves wages decreasing and public services being privatized, i.e. sold off to big corporations and wealthy investors).
>but because of right-wing populism (which much like elsewhere was sent into overdrive during the first year of the pandemic) and having to rely on an unwilling coalition partner constantly threatening to ruin everything if it doesn't get its way.
Ah, yes, the good old classic boogieman, right wing populism: "It's the right wings' fault, if we could only silence those people and not let them have a voice we'd all be much better". /s
What if a healthy democracy means giving everyone an equal voice? Forcing a group to silence only make that group more angry, violent and prone to backlash.
Yes, that is a perfect example of how right-wing populism works, thank you for the demonstration: I say "right-wing populism went into overdrive and this hurt the election results of these parties" and you respond by saying I want to censor people with right-wing views and "silence" them.
Attack ads are a fairly recent phenomenon in German politics which is why we don't see the overt kind you're used to seeing in US politics ("Congressman so-and-so wants to ban children from eating food. Vote NO on proposition 123 to save America") but we do get a ton of the same "post-truth" astroturfing on social media. The reason the pandemic is relevant is that there is a significant overlap between these movements at this time and the various conspiracies surrounding COVID, just as in the US where "horse paste" and "Fauchi ouchy" have somehow become words you'd hear mentioned in political conversations now.
Note that I'm not talking about right-wing politics in general. There are still plenty of good old boring right-wing politicians in Germany. But in the proximity of the AfD (which can factually be described as including far-right extremist movements, just as Die Linke can factually be described that way for the left, though how those two things translate into actual threats of violence is a different conversation) we've seen a lot more emotion-focussed activism (e.g. Great Replacement references, "free speech", "traditional family values", etc) whereas on the left the closest example would be vegan activists (unless you think man-made climate change is a big lie).
>Yes, that is a perfect example of how right-wing populism works, thank you for the demonstration: I say "right-wing populism went into overdrive and this hurt the election results of these parties" and you respond by saying I want to censor people with right-wing views and "silence" them.
Yes, this is a perfect example how political silencing works: I say everyone should get an equal voice, and you twist my words, and say I'm supporting right-wing populism.
Bro, I never said YOU are trying to censor people, I'm saying the political situation in Germany is always trying to censor everything even remotely right leaning as if they're all Nazis. There's right wing, then there's the far right which are Nazis. Big difference, but in Germany you're not allowed any kind of right leaning opinions, and must be censored.
Censoring one group by default is basically the definition of a dictatorship.
> Big difference, but in Germany you're not allowed any kind of right leaning opinion
The fact that the centre-right economically and to a large extent socially, Angela Merkel, was chancellor for 16 years, and that the neo-nazi adjacent AfD exist proves you wrong.
There's right, and there' s "let's deport everyone of immigrant descent" far-right (using an example from the French far right because it's a fun one I recall, no idea if the AfD also campaign for this). Surely you can see how they're different and why one is actually actively dangerous, especially in a country that knows all too well when you let far rightists get away with it.
> Yes, this is a perfect example how political silencing works: I say everyone should get an equal voice, and you twist my words, and say I'm supporting right-wing populism.
You are the one twisting words here. Just like you twisted GP words in your previous post. GP did not say that you support right-wing populism but that your post was a perfect demonstration of it. This post of yours is also a demonstration of what GP was talking about.
> GP did not say that you support right-wing populism but that your post was a perfect demonstration of it.
Sorry, but what's the difference? That's being needlessly pedantic on a technicality.
> Just like you twisted GP words in your previous post.
I didn't twist his words because I was contradicting the political situation in Germany, not his opinion. And then he called my take as being "a perfect demonstration of right wing populism" which reinforces my point that you can't contradict the status quo in Germany and have a contrarian voice, without being called a right wing populist and people immediately bringing up the AFD even though you never did and don't even remotely support them.
But since you all brought it up, the Afd situation in Germany is something that's real that should be resolved through education and public conversations and debates, not silenced and swept under the rug pretending it doesn't exist as that just makes the problem worse.
I don't think you have a good understanding of what is going on in Germany. 20% of the German population currently want to vote for a fascist who likes to cite right wing terrorists, thinks Hitler wasn't all bad and wants to deport everyone whose grandparents aren't German, so how can you say "Right wing people are being censored"? This guy is on state television all the time.
I wasn't talking about right wing nutjobs getting screen time, I was talking about having sane right leaning discussion with people, which you can't because you're automatically pointed to the Afd nutjobs on TV as being representative for what you're trying to say, even though you have no connection to those people.
> I wasn't talking about right wing nutjobs getting screen time
You mean like Friedrich Merz, who coined the term "Sozialtourismus" ("social (welfare) tourism")? Horst Seehofer, the previous minister of the interior, who called migration the "mother of all problems in this country"? Last time I checked even the left treated them as "serious politicians" regardless of ther character.
The question really is what is it that you think you can't have a "sane right leaning discussion" about anymore? Usually when I hear people say that, it's about topics like race and IQ (and why we should treat people of different races differently because of that), sex differences (and why we should treat people of different sexes differently because of that), hetero- vs homosexuality (and why we should treat people with different sexual orientations differently because of that), poor people underachieving (and why we should treat them worse because of that) or trans people (and why we should treat them as sexual perverts).
If it's any comfort to you: I live in the North-West of Germany and most people I know think there's some meaningful difference between races (but we shouldn't treat people of other races worse for it), some meaningful difference between sexes (but we shouldn't treat people of other sexes worse for it), homosexuality is kinda icky and abnormal (but we shouldn't treat them worse for it), poor people are mostly at fault for where they are in life (but we should still generally support them) and trans people are weird freaks (but we should still treat them somewhat respectfully). I'm decidedly to the left of all of these stances and you can find plenty of people to have a "right leaning discussion" about these issues with, though I can't vouch for the sanity of it or how far right it will lean. I suspect the same is true in the South and especially the East of Germany, and even city centers like Berlin or Hamburg.
What I find the most absurd is how people belonging to a discriminated group actively participate in the discrimination sometimes. This is especially true for poor people. Just try to convince poor people that a tax on inheritance above X million euros would be fair, most of them have fought me hard. Everyone believes in the lie of permeable social levels, e.g. from dishwasher to millionaire.
> not silenced and swept under the rug pretending it doesn't exist as that just makes the problem worse.
Ironically there's a common misconception that Germany overcame its Nazi past through a process of "Denazification". Instead what happened was that while there were plenty of trials of former NSDAP members they usually resulted in hardly any consequences and frequently people were even able to go back into public offices because a lot of the evidence was deliberately swept under the rug. The biggest outcome instead was that "right-wing" became a dirty word by becoming synonymous with "nazi", so conservatives would go on referring to themselves as the "political center" while completely ignoring the role the Christliche Mitte (a Christian conservative party that strongly resembled the modern Union) played in Hitler's rise to power and the passing of the Enablement Act to reign in the lefties. Oh and of course for good measure we banned nazi symbols and slogans, which has led to "conservative" activists flying the flag of the German Empire (which shares the same colors and also pre-dates the Weimar Republic, which conservatives at the time saw as a leftist perversion).
And because most people on the far right are smart enough not to show up bald-headed in jack boots, camo jackets and flying the flag of the German Empire anymore, we're now at the point where the same people applauding for suggestions that immigrants should be shot at the border instead fly the German flag and talk about "protecting families" and "protecting our values". Basically our far right has arrived at the same point as the American far right (as laid out in the infamous leaked audio of a politician saying that you can't openly talk about Black people anymore so you instead have to talk about more abstract things like "urban crime" to still talk about Black people). And worryingly the "centrist" conservatives have over the past eight years or so adopted some of the same talking points and one of the conservative Union front-runners jokingly described his party as "an alternative for Germany" (AfD means "Alternative for Germany").
So yes, outright censorship doesn't work. The problem isn't the symbolism, the problem is the ideology. They will just move on to new symbols and new talking points if you don't stomp out the ideology. But don't worry: Germany will never stomp out the ideology of the far right. If we couldn't do it after the Holocaust, I don't think it will ever happen.
And while we're on a detour (because there obviously is no point in addressing anything you say given that you've now twice reframed what I said to presumably argue against someone not present in this conversation): the other day I was near the train station and passed a homeless person when something caught my eye: in the middle of the plaza was a large art installation celebrating tolerance and inclusion. It was covered by a lot of verbiage meant to spark conversation among passers-by and "enable dialogues" or whatever the cool kids do with political art these days. The entire thing was sponsored by a federal ministry and some German NGOs, for some reason there were also some leaflets about seasonal food although I'm not sure how that fits into the overall messaging about queer identities and immigrants. But I digress. After inspecting the art piece for a bit, I came across one headline on a poster board containing some wisdom about loving your neighbor: "Where does the idea that some people deserve more than others come from?"
Actually, let's digress even further since we're already just typing arbitrary words in a text box instead of having a meaningful conversation. A lot of people use the words "left" and "right" in politics without having a clear idea what they mean. Going back to early modern France isn't particularly helpful in the absence of a monarchy either, so I can understand a lot of the frustration behind this. Personally, I go by the definition that "right" means "more hierarchies" or "more static hierarchies" and "left" means "fewer hierarchies" or "more flexible hiearchies". These definitions are rightfully relative because there clearly isn't a meaningful "middle ground" between directly opposed political movements (after all, who would have agreed to let the Nazis have "only some genocide" if the question was Holocaust or no Holocaust?) but they fit neatly across the various layers politics are usually applied to: are straight people better (more morally correct?) than queer people? are people born here more deserving than people who only moved here? are children of wealthy people jusftifiably better off than children of poor people? do you lose if you snooze? do some deserve more than others?
Politics don't exist in a vacuum. Politics go right to the core of how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Elections in a representative democracy aren't a sport no matter how much the political system alienates us from itself through the centralization of power. Politics are informed by our ethical principles and electoral politics is how we do violence to support those principles, ideally without actually using direct violence against each other.
If you feel that everyone has a right to be heard, that is fine, and if that is integral to your ethical system, it is entirely acceptable to say that anyone opposing this principle is your enemy. But most people who say they value free speech to the extreme don't actually have that as the central basis of their ethical system. They usually just want to be able to say and hear certain opinions they agree with and that they think are unpopular. But the ability to say and hear unpopular opinions is merely a means to an end: once their social order is etablished, they want it to persist (because of course they would, otherwise what is even the point of establishing it) and at that point they would no longer want the opposition to speak freely. Libertarians may in some cases genuinely hold the absolute freedom of speech as a core value, but this does not mean they don't believe in hierarchies: favoring free trade for example means the ability to take advantage of the needs of others at their expense and to your benefit. Absolute freedom must always also include the ability to limit the freedoms of others because otherwise it can not be absolute. This leads to hierarchies, whether implicitly or explicitly. Thus the leftist anarchist who believes in the complete abolition of hierarchies must be at odds not just with the authoritarian who wants a predetermined rigid hierarchy but also the libertarian who wants an arbitrary dynamic hierarchy ruled by the market and the ability of its participants to take advantage of each other.
I don't think states are the answer to eliminating hierarchies because they are hierarchical by nature. It's like expecting corporations to help abolish capitalism: the incentives are completely misaligned. Where do people get the ideas that some people are worth more or more deserving than others? It's baked into the system. You can't debate the idea away within the system as doing so would challenge the system itself and the system is set up to reinforce itself. Any party openly running on a ticket of dissolving the state would be banned for being anti-constitutional the same way any part openly calling for another Holocaust would be. From a true libertarian standpoint (or the standpoint claimed by someone on the opposing end of the political spectrum trying to hide their true intentions) you can argue that all forms of censorship is wrong and all political options should be on the table and that the public opinion should decide. But through the mere circumstance of the debate happening in a system in which a state exists, the options on the table are already filtered by what the system can represent and the public opinion is already shaped by the system into which the members of the public were raised and exist in (as the saying goes: a fish has no concept of water). As someone more willing to side with the left anarchist side of this three-way split, I understand why my ideology is incompatible with the state and why the state can't allow it to blossom within itself, which is why I don't feign surprise when anarchist groups are attacked by it even when they have no interest in using physical violence. A person on the authoritarian end of the spectrum on the other hand is much more likely to be overlooked if they don't openly state their end goals and the precise nature of the hierarchies they want to use the state to manifest and enforce. A person on the libertarian end in contrast will only meet resistance when openly acting against the state itself (like the Unabomber did) but not when trying to erode its protective mechanisms under the banner of "opening it to the market". But that is largely due to the state existing in the overlap of its own structural system of hierarchy and other systems of hierarchy like capitalism.
Now with all that said, the Green party very much is not anarchist and while it's hardly as authoritarian as the right likes to claim, it is also certainly not libertarian. In the real world most people don't have coherent ideologies because they have more immediately important things in life than sussing out the logical contradictions of what they think is important or good. Political groups are made of people and then things get even more muddled.
However just like right authoritarians like to hide behind libertarian talking points to advance their goals so do some libertarians capture right authoritarian movements to advance theirs by undoing the structural changes that further the goals of those on the left (e.g. codifying gender equality in law, thus attempting to use the hiearchical state to attack the gender hierarchy). And to make things worse, the right will often also adopt left talking points (e.g. talking negatively about "the elites" but referring to a specific demographic group rather than the existence of an elite in general). This is right-wing populism: using a talking point that has a good chance of wide popular support ("protect the children", "save our jobs") to further a tangentially related goal (ban transgender identities, restrict immigration) or create popular support by presenting a largely fictional threat or heavily misrepresenting reality (e.g. examples of "looting" after Hurricane Katrina that turned out to be survivors helping each other or "looting" their own homes, "rapists and gang members flooding the border", BLM protestors "burning down cities"). More often than not, this is also used to hijack left-wing talking points that happen to fit the current zeitgeist (e.g. infamously the NSDAP referred to Jews as "international bankers" at various points to hijack the success of socialist movements at the time). Contrast this with "left-wing populism" which is usually applied as a label to anyone promoting ideas like "raising taxes on the rich", "increasing minimum wage", "providing free health care for all", "providing free education for all", etc implying there is something more sinister they're not saying openly (which, based on reports from FBI investigations into leftist groups, is generally not the case: leftist groups are fairly straightforward about what they want).
Apologies if you've read through all this. Or not. Maybe it taught someone something. It was certainly more educational than whatever the point of crying censorship over the mention of the existence of right wing populism was.
> Personally, I go by the definition that "right" means "more hierarchies" or "more static hierarchies" and "left" means "fewer hierarchies" or "more flexible hiearchies"
Interesting take. Not sure I agree with it, but interesting.
Personally I'm a fan of pizza/radar charts for politics, because things are so much more nuanced than a left/right sliding scale could tell. Ecology, foreign, internal, economic, social policy, etc.
Because it's EU's beigest economy and saw the biggest economic drop in the block due to its poor political decisions on over-reliance on cheap Russian gas and cheap labor to maintain competitive exports.
It's not some conspiracy, but genuine concern that if EU's richest country is struggling, the rest of the EU members will bear some of the fallout too.
Whether we like it or not Germany has always been the benchmark in Europe. If the Danish or Austrian economy would drop by 0.5% probably nobody would care, but if the EU's richest members like Germany and France were to do that then it's more concerning for everyone. That's why Germany pops up a lot because it's a very important member of the block.
The sky-high energy prices are not because the end of coal and nuclear, but because the conservative government that ruled for the past 16 years streamlined the entire energy system so that it depended on cheap russian gas. However, prices are already down to normal again.
> not because the end of coal and nuclear, but [...] it depended on cheap russian gas.
Those events aren't independent, they are strongly connected. Coal and nuclear have provided baseload power, with gas and renewables filling in the peaks in the demand curve (e.g. solar for the day-peak). Ending coal and nuclear has ended baseload power, so not only do you have to fill the demand curve, you also have a far more variable supply curve. The only elements in that supply curve you can control are pumped-hydro storage and gas plants. Pumped-hydro is available but rare in Germany due to topography and the green movement. Which left gas plants, strongly increasing the reliance on gas imports.
Edit: And Germany is still dependent on the goodwill and market prices of gas suppliers. It is just that the cheaper and easy-to-transport Russian pipelined gas has been replaced by overseas ship-supplied gas.
Climate change is, in a sense, a massive store of value that you can take from without the consent of those who pay. Which makes it very hard for economics-minded thinking to overlook as a lazy way to thrive.
The end of coal has not happened on Germany, who went back to using massive amounts of coal as Russian gas stopped being available : 33.2% of all German electricity came from coal in 2022.
https://www.energy-charts.info/downloads/Stromerzeugung_2022...
(slide 17 braunkohle + steinkohle)
I'd say it's slowly happening. There was a large drop in 2019[0] by around 25% (~50TWh) from 2018, ignoring the 2020 drop (around 25% ~33TWh compared to 2019) due to the pandemic, 2021 was almost back to 2019 levels (-3.5%) and 2022 was an increase by ~6.5% compared to 2019. Looking at quaterly data[1] it looks like 2023 will be well below 2019 again. And no, it hasn't been replaced by gas[2], although there's no clear trend in gas for electricity, if anything gas consumption is down due to the war.
The end of coal is premature if your only other GW-scale energy source, nuclear, is being phased out at the same time, and you don't even have a replacement planned.
Bullshit. Energy prices are falling right now. I've just switched contracts for my parents at the weekend. They pay 30 cent/kWh for 100% renewable energy now. Down from 44 cent/kWh.
They are falling from the Ukraine-war special-circumstances peak down to the pre-war rising slope. 30ct/kWh is still 50-100% higher than what e.g. France, Poland, or the UK (comparable in size and economy) are paying.
Btw., those aren't even really low. Heavy industry, data centers and other energy-intensive industries are migrating heavily towards 1-digit-cent-per-kWh countries, so <10ct/kWh.
Corporations move operations to places where operating is cheap? How exactly would this not happen if the prices were lower? This kind of concessions is how you end up with domestic sweat shops.
FWIW the answer is not to prevent corporations from leaving the country either. That's silly. The answer is to apply carbon emission regulations to the entire supply chain of a company and to make the fines/fees more expensive than the money a business can save from moving somewhere else. Businesses act on what makes financial sense. If you want to change how businesses act, you need to change what makes financial sense for them.
You can try to ignore that and insist on applying emission regulations on import, which is what the EU currently is preparing.
However, the scenario this will lead to is: Industry will still leave high-energy-price areas. If low-energy-price regions can be found within the EU, industry might go there. Otherwise industry will be off to wherever in the world is cheap and happily charge the EU carbon import duties to EU customers. The rest of the world will enjoy low-priced not-carbon-neutral products that the EU will never be able to compete with because of economies of scale.
The only viable ways out of this isn't import duties but import restrictions, i.e. outright preventing goods that are not up to EU CO_2 standards from being imported. That will lead to local CO_2-neutral industries that have to be continuously walled off, because if they are exposed to the rest of the world they will be too small and expensive. The other way is a global agreement on CO_2 standards, such that those kinds of import regulations are unnecessary.
... which ends the same way as taxation treaties. Foreign countries will happily introduce CO2 emission regulations, then lie about them on a large scale.
See for example China: who have signed plenty of environmental treaties yet are dumping nuclear waste in the oceans on a large scale. Hell, China isn't even protecting their own people or nature just to avoid transporting the waste to the ocean. Rivers can do that for free, you see. To fully demonstrate how governments work, they lie about doing this (despite the fact it can be very easily measured), and secondly they criticize other countries for doing much less (such as China now criticizing Japan being forced into dumping some Fukushima cooling water)
The other alternative is what most tax havens are doing. They are raising taxes on companies ... and handing out subsidies that, somewhat suspiciously, exactly balance the tax raise. This is even done within Europe. This principle can easily be applied to emission regulations. After all, it's always paying to be allowed to pollute. Governments can simply pay that back some other way.
The article which this article links to [1] provides some interesting insights on the exact causes. In particular it's been driven by declining household consumption which, in turn, has been caused by a surge in food prices - with food cost inflation in Germany exceeding 20%. This was simultaneously paired by falling demand for German exports, particularly in China which had been driving German growth for years.
I simply hope that's the coolest typo and not a technical term I've never heard :D (At least if you think like I do and beige being the most boring color)
As can be seen, over-reliance on expensive non-Russian gas is not exactly a blessing and indicates that the “over”-reliance on cheap Russian gas was rational, but alas incompatible with US hegemony.
Many EU countries depended and still depend on Russian gas, including hardcore Russia hawks. It’s cheap and easily transportable. This beats morality every time, as can be seen from the past support of various dictatorships, autocracies and the various coups enacted to secure energy for the US and Western Europe.
With an important chunk of deliveries coming from Quatar, Azerbaijan, etc new suppliers are hardly better, but on the positive side at least aren’t invading anyone at the moment.
Well, the speed at which Finland and Sweden rushed into NATO (aka US) arms, when their illusion of "peace forever" was shattered, is a far stronger endorsement than anything else.
Unfortunately, we are humans and the only thing that organizes us beyond a certain scale (100-150 people) is force. Either you are strong enough yourself, or you need some strong backers.
Oh, you can be absolutely certain that Germany only decided to support the sanctions through gritted teeth. Prior to the war Russia was a highly-regarded trading partner for a lot of companies. Many companies had employees or contractors in Russia, especially in tech. The corruption and "conservative values" (e.g. its de facto ban on homosexuality) were well-known but mostly ignored.
Supporting the sections meant cutting off a limb with heavy blood loss. It's absurd to be confused why Germany hasn't managed to regain composure yet. We barely cauterized the wound.
> the “over”-reliance on cheap Russian gas was rational, but alas incompatible with US hegemony.
It was incompatible with the safety of Europe first of all. Both economic and military. Yes, we had a cheap ride, but it's over. In 2014 you could still pretend but in 2023 nobody wants to have blood on their hands.
No, I think Europe and especially the US are both fine with having blood on our hands. Depends whose blood, that’s all.
Also don’t mix morals and geopolitics, they’re often incompatible.
Our safety in Europe is at risk because of our stupid wars destabilizing the Middle East and because we’re stuck between great power rivalries, most recently as vassals in training of the US, which wants to drag us in its conflict with China.
I don't know how much Middle East blood is on our hands as Europeans were totally against the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. 36 million people protested. In Rome itself, 3 million people. No other event has managed to put that many people on the streets.
And Bush haven't managed to build a great coalition for his stupid war. His famous "you forgot Poland" will be laughed at for many years. These two wars were stupid before they ever begun, and Europeans knew about this from the very beginning and they did what they could to stop them.
An yet, Kremlin loves to say Russians are just doing the same things as European did. We are not the same.
Europeans failed at stopping them and no one was punished. That’s the only thing that matters, trying is not good enough.
I agree we’re not the same as the Kremlin and I like to use a metaphor of Western vs Eastern EU corruption to illustrate the difference: in EE, doctors and police may politely ask your for bribes. In WE there’s lobbying, “consultants” and cushy nepotism. It’s the sophistication which makes the difference, you see…
While Russia stupidly invades another country in blatant violation of international law, the US and EU invade to protect democracy and freedom, try at least to get the UN to rubber-stamp it and later make an effort at a botched up reconstruction, transforming the invaded countries in a living hell where children are sold for food (e.g. Afghanistan).
> the US and EU invade to protect democracy and freedom
No, the EU does not invade for any reason. People in the EU want to live in peace. The USA managed to convince Blair to ally with them to invade Iraq but that's it. Both Blair and Bush should be held responsible for their crimes.
Thanks for the Kremlin talking points on the Middle East. I'm sure instability in another continent is more risk to Europeans than the Russians having control over our energy AND food production -- had they taken all of Ukraine as Putin planned.
Luckily the Ukrainians are willing and able fight Russia for us, with reluctant support from their allies. An utterly embarrassing situation for most European countries.
Everyone should be familiar with the US and (Western-)Europe led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria which destabilized those countries with horrendous human costs. Two important consequences for the EU were:
* the refugee crisis in Europe peaking in 2015 and still continuing today, which led to a reaction from local EU populations and a political reorientation towards the far-right.
* radicalization (including the rise of ISIS/ISIL) which in turn led to terrorist attacks and an increased interest in mass surveillance within the EU.
If that happens to be a Kremlin talking point, then those Kremlin guys and girls are correct.
As for the Ukrainians fighting Russia “for us”, that’s definitely an EU/Washington/Kiev talking point and it’s objectively wrong: they’re fighting for their own country.
Our military support and tens of billions of EUR of financial support are keeping Ukraine in the fight much longer than they would have managed by themselves. The EU rep for foreign affairs and security policy pointed out that Ukraine would fall within days without our “embarrassing” support.
But if you feel we’re not doing enough, there’s always the foreign legion…
> Everyone should be familiar with the US and (Western-)Europe led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria
You are mixing things up. Western Europe didn't lead any of these wars. The UK joined the USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a stupid decision but it had nothing to do with the rest of Europe. Unless you claim UK=EU.
The Kremlin propaganda is repeating these statements very often so I can understand some people started believing these lies.
Also maybe because Europe has deep economic issues and growth has been slow or non-existent pretty everywhere outside of Eastern Europe over the last 10 years or so.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s productivity wise Western Europe and the US were almost on the same level. Look at the gap now..
> universal health care and strong worker's rights
And generally low wages and high living costs. e.g. real estate is about 2x cheaper in the bay area or SF compared to Paris for instance adjusted by median income, while London, Munich, Rome and some other major cities are only 40-60% more expensive.
Wages aren't really something you can compare directly, not having to account for hugely expensive random healthcare events, or being able to send your children to good schools without dishing out tens of thousands of dollars (or even simply not living in American cities/suburbs) count for a lot. Mobility exists, and as such I'm inclined to believe the law of one price applies to the labor markets due to the fact that neither USA or Europe is completely deserted. It's just about which tradeoffs you are willing to make.
Of course, I find USA's situation a bit more unstable because remote work is getting more common. How much is the premium for having people in the same physical location anyway?
> Wages aren't really something you can compare directly
You can still account for all of those thing.
As far as schools are concerned it’s highly variable in the US. There are certainly some very good public schools just living expenses are also likely to be much higher in those areas.
> It's just about which tradeoffs you are willing to make.
So a country with highly accessible social services must also have a stagnant economy and unaffordable housing? I don’t really see the link..
Succinctly, remote work enables arbitrage from US wages to EU cost of living.
Some of the misgivings of living in US is balanced by the high wages (example: living in San Fransisco vs San Fransisco wages); effectively firms are subsidizing US education costs and healthcare costs via wages (instead of taxes). With remote work being more common, people can start living in lower cost, more tax-subsidized areas while also being qualified for the high wage jobs. After a while, San Fransisco firms might notice that they do not have to subsidize San Fransisco landlords in order to get good developers. They can instead give a little less wages to equally good developers who live in less costly areas. If the wages are depressed enough, living in US might not make sense at all; after all you need to pay for your children's school, have someone drive them everywhere until they are 16, and account for unexpected healthcare costs which are already accounted for in Europe.
>Succinctly, remote work enables arbitrage from US wages to EU cost of living.
In theory yes, in practice it doesn't look like it's happening. I haven't seen a massive boom of US companies opening up shop in my EU neighborhood.
Those who wanted to hire EU workers have been doing it already. Plus, why would San-Fran companies move to Europe when haven't even exhausted all lower cost areas in the US yet?
Operating in Europe and hiring here opens up a lot of headaches and liabilities, other than culture and time zone differences, that many US businesses don't like (sick leave, parental leave, taxes, labor laws, more taxes, etc). It's not as easy to hire here remotely as you think.
You need to have an legal entity in each EU country if you want to hire in every country, or, the usual M.O., you open a shop in Dublin, Berlin or Amsterdam and hope people from other countries can stomach the housing market and accept to move there, but unlike the US, you can't remotely employee people in an EU country while they live in other EU countries as labor laws, tax and social systems don't easily allow cross-border remote work as every country expects you live and work locally or use the cross border commuter policies but for that you need to live near the border anyway.
Yeah, it’s interesting that many US companies are still only willing to hire people in the US for remote positions when they could probably get more for less if they extended it for Europe.
> account for unexpected healthcare costs which are already accounted for in Europe.
If you’re a software engineering you’re likely to already have good enough insurance and can save at least 20-50k for any unexpected costs anyway.
No. The Energiewende put so much stress on the German energy market - which boasted the highest consumer prices per kWh in the world before the Russo-Ukranian War - it completely went bonkers after the war started.
Germany’s capability to fund a massive welfare state stems from its large industrial base, which is very sensitive to energy costs.
It’s those blue collar jobs the are getting completely f-cked by the policies elected largely by white-collar workers.
The scary thing is: worker's rights in Europe, notably including Germany, have been crushed in the last two to three decades. The remainders are just still relatively strong, compared to the rest of the world; including the largest economies, USA and China.
>The scary thing is: worker's rights in Europe, notably including Germany, have been crushed in the last two to three decades.
Schröder's infamous Agenda 2010[1] that sought to crush unions power, workers rights and welfare programs, in order to force more Germans off welfare and taking poverty wages to pump up the economy. It pumped up the economy indeed but it didn't have the promised effect of increasing wages of living standards, quite the opposite, the rich got richer and the poor were poorer.
When they ran out of poor Germans to exploit, they turned to Eastern EU workers form Poland and Romania. As those markets are drying up of cheap exploitable labor as well, they invited workers from Africa and the Middle east to make dangerous journeys to come to Germany, hence Merkel's Germany's famous open borders "Willkommenskultur", despite backlash from other Schengen and EU members who's borders and asylum centers got overwhelmed.
The unpopular opinion that nobody is allowed to discuss is the country is unsustainably addicted to cheap immigrant labor for its exports to be competitive and to prop its over-inflated housing market. It's burning the economic candle at both ends to pump up the GDP.
> it didn't have the promised effect of increasing wages of living standards... they ran out of poor Germans
So which one is it? According to you Agenda 2010 helped Germany to run out of poor Germans. And you are right -- from the introduction of Hartz IV, German unemployment permanently fell by over 6% -- despite the mass immigration that you are complaining about.
The rich getting richer in the zero-interest-rate decade is a global phenomenon - unemployment declining by these truly immense amounts very much isn't.
I'm not assuming the victim stance, but every time this is brought up it is always actively ignored and scoffed off as nonsense. There's a lot of arrogance in German politics pushing everyone to bury their head in the sand and tell themselves everything is fine, nothing can possibly go wrong, we're the best at everything, right before the country is caught with their pants down, unprepared for the obvious issues brewing under their noses.
Remember the Wickard scandal when the Financial Times uncovered their dirt and instead of the authorities looking at Wirecard they turned at the Financial Times as if they were trying to Financially destabilize Wirecard?
The same thing repeats itself on every issue in Germany, like this topic. Just look at the top comment: "Something negative about Germany in the WSJ? It can't be true, it must be WSJ trying to destabilize Germany". Everyone keeps doubting that Germany is ever doing something wrong and assumes by default that all negative news must be incorect or have an agenda.
I’m not sure how useful it is to speculate about some massive media conspiracy to drum up bad news about countries with worker’s protections and universal healthcare to try and discredit those things in the US, rather than accept the Occam’s Razor explanation that those countries do in fact just have bad news sometimes.
Sorry, but that's again a straw man: No one claimed that those countries never have bad news. Those countries having bad news and the Economist exploiting it also doesn't really seem like a crazy conspiracy theory.
The recurring accusation is that paper and fax is king. And as a Polish immigrant, I find this true. I can do most of the bureaucracy online for the Polish state and it's not the case in Germany. In turn, the lengthy path has its end; in my home country, you can be chased by the authorities in circles, because there's never a way to be 100% compliant with the law.
I started a company in Germany recently, which is like a 29 step 3 month process that costs around 1000€. I’m trying to get some seed funding support from the government, because seed investing from angels in Germany is weird (odd angel rounds with multiple angels, who require the company to have revenue already but also true innovation but also want a high percentage of the company).
Anyway, there’s lots of funding programs, which on paper is a great offset for the lack of risk and venture spirit. But the programs are all Byzantine in their requirements, long applications, small print in their rules which exclude you etc. For one application of a R/D program for small companies, which is done in a smart acrobat pdf (wow), on the cover page, it asks for the company stamp.
What is a company stamp? I’m not quite sure, it doesn’t seem to be a legally required thing. It’s just a ink stamp with the company name and some basic info, that you can stamp paper documents with to make them appear more official.
So I spent another 25€ to get a company stamp and ink pillow for my startup. Another startup expense, and strangely representative of the entrepreneurial experience in Germany overall.
In Portugal we have this stamp thing as well. I remember being dumbfounded that we were stamping as a form of "signature" for the company. The whole process of company bureaucracy is really like being transported to the 60s.
Don't get me started on making certain legal statements in a kind of commerce registry. It almost feels royal with handwritten stuff and a person helpfully dictating the correct legal incantation that properly changes the social capital. At least the workers were indeed helpful.
To top it off we got Portuguese legalese letters from the tax authority that were unreadable to the founders. They were so convoluted, we thought we owed something but in fact we were being asked to withhold payment to another company which owed tax money. It was so convoluted I asked a lawyer.
Regarding applying for money. We did apply for money and got granted but the money turned out to exclude wages or the founders so we rushed to have profitability otherwise we could just not support ourselves. We still did money but it was a miserable life and we earned far better being employed. This is the same in Poland, with some fellow aeronautics colleagues. That is the "VC" system in Europe. No trust, no understanding: everything stays the same except for the ones who know the system.
A fellow startup-er made a demo to a bigger company proving the concept, the bigger company took the demo, and showed to another bigger company because the money they could ask for would be bigger. Of course the bigger partner had no experience and the project came up empty.
Lastly, I tried to do business as a consultant to Portugal, while being a resident in Poland. Due to me being a citizen I needed to pay VAT even though I would not need to because I am not a tax resident there and would be double taxed. I canceled the contract as again I earn more employed and cannot be bothered.
Finally, as it is not only a problem of VC, me and my business partner were engineers and we definitely were out of depth on running a company to the full potential. Looking back I would have liked to have paid for a professional manager that would understand doing business better.
So called "Kleingewerbe"/"Einzelunternehmen" are not limited to the 22k turnaround. You can make millions that way, if you want to.
When you outgrow the 22k though (that limit is called "Kleingewerbe"), you'll have to do advance VAT returns and stuff like that. That's what I meant with much easier regulations when you start/stay small.
I suppose it's the same as in other EU countries, and when you outgrow the "easy and small" status, you can upgrade to a different type of company with more serious requirements.
I find that attitude strange, like risk-averse. It sounds like a hobby, not like a startup company. Such a venture (Kleingewerbe) is effectively a sole proprietorship, meaning no separation of liability, probably no employees, no capital thus no shares and no private investing, and also very limited possibility to get public funding.
It matches my perception that people in Berlin will come together to start some brick and mortar business without big growth potential and call it a "startup". Yes they did "start up" a company, but if you choose the English rather than German word that people associate with silicon-valley style tech startup to describe your venture, I think you should have a business model that aims for growth, not just a be a collection of young people to start a company. I guess it shows that in risk-averse Germany, traditionally young people become employed rather than start their own companies. So even if it's not a startup in the VC sense, the young entrepreneurs still call it that because it is risky and modern from their point of view.
Why do you need public funding and risk, though? Business culture in Germany is very different than e.g. in the US.
So called "Mittelstand" is what the German economy is build on. These are stable companies, often lead by families in the nth generation, concentrating on making good products. Most of these companies are the result of somebody (or some friends) being good at something, starting in his shed and scaling that operation up over time.
Aiming for that unicorn/public funding/VC money is just plain stupid. At least it's rich people money that's usually getting burned there.
>These are stable companies, often lead by families in the nth generation, concentrating on making good products. Most of these companies are the result of somebody (or some friends) being good at something, starting in his shed and scaling that operation up over time.
...on inherited wealth from WW2 salve labor and war profiteering[1].
>> Most of these companies are the result of somebody (or some friends) being good at something, starting in his shed and scaling that operation up over time.
You’re using the wrong tense here. Germany used to be a bit more innovative, the „Mittelstand“ is a leftover of that.
How does that encourage small businesses creation?
That seems backwards to me, compared to other EU member states. This "German way" seems more like it's more discouraging to start a small business, rather than encouraging it, and more convincing to just stay employed instead rather than bothering to start a small business.
In general if you see criticism in US media of economic conditions of other nations, you’ll have to do extra research to see if it’s more wish fulfillment than facts.
WSJ is US media, but ad a certain us business slat and more recently is now owned by a world wide media magnate Murdoch whose bias in owned outlets is also renowned. So while wsj is “legitimate”, one need to look past the labels of legit/non-legit as there is context for everything.
Germany is the biggest economy inside the EU and they've been fairly competitive globally so far. Also they've made some pretty unique political decisions, such as the nuclear phase-out.
> Also they've made some pretty unique political decisions, such as the nuclear phase-out.
They shot themselves in the foot in knee-jerk reaction to what happened in Fukushima. Nuclear is clean energy. All the scare mongering is done by hippies who think that somehow wind turbines and solar panels are made out of thin air and don't pollute.
It was the Social Democrats and the Greens back in 1998 who decided to stop all nuclear development and close all the existing plants over the next 10-20 years.
Nuclear was already long doomed by the time Fukushima happened
And it is now being enforced by the green party at the worst time since Fukushima – a period of very expensive and scarce energy – for idealogical reasons.
Yes, would have, but let's not pretend it's now entirely the green's fault that we now don't have nuclear power, which the comment I replied to did. They could have prolonged the life of only three power plants for a limited amount of time. Going back to nuclear now is a decision that should have been made decades ago, when CDU was ruling.
Nope. The Greens are the first to give up their ideology to come to an agreement with other parties. It's called "Realpolitik". They were also the ones who warned against increasing dependency to Russia, but were ignored when CDU was in power. You know, the conservative party, that sat on their asses for 16 years doing almost nothing in terms of renewable...
Doing Realpolitik? Fine. Decreasing dependencies to Russia? Fine. Expanding renewable energies? Fine. Shutting down nuclear power while in an energy crisis? Not-so-fine.
And when they blow up, half of Germany can not be inhabited anymore. Germany is small and extremely densely populated. You can not compare it to the US where nuclear plants are in the middle of nowhere.
One of the problems is that solar and wind are being billed as a drop in replacement for gigawatt-scale electricity production, when in reality it’s likely going to find it place at the micro level to help alleviate the load and cost in smaller settings.
The problem with energy is rarely the source (we can derive energy out of most anything that moves, heats, or shines), but the storage. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear are gigawatt-scale producers of energy because we can ramp up production at any time by simply shoveling more of our stockpile of fuel into the proverbial furnace. We can predict when solar or wind will give us power, but this is cold comfort if we need it now and it’s not windy or dark.
This is why I’m bullish with hydrogen because it offers a way to store energy chemically that does not wear out like a battery and operates at 40-60% efficiency vs sub-25% for combination-driven power generation.
I don't know how much this is present in US culture, but in the UK the prospect "beating" Germany in any form makes politicians and media outlets of a more nationalistic bent very excited indeed. That they are also very fond of references to Britain's "finest hour" in World War II probably gives away the reason why. It probably also helps that Germany has the kind of onshore manufacturing economy coveted by those same people(even if this is now turning into a problem) whereas the UK is actually more service orientated.
There is no football match that an English football fan will more willingly talk about than Germany's 5-1 home defeat against England during the 2002 World Cup qualifiers!
Because germany is on a very slippery slope. Our politicians are occupied with idiotic things like tearing down nuclear power plants before the coal ones and the economy is going downhill.
If nothing changes and the job market stays as bad as it is, I'll seriously consider moving to a different country.
The economy is not going downhill, its stagnating. And this is due to the dependency on cheap russian gas that the conservative party somehow thought was a great idea.
The decision to phase out of nuclear was good, as import of nuclear fuel has similar problems as the import of fossil gas. Additionally, there is the nuclear waste problem and the risk of a major reactor catastrophe which would make Germany uninhabitable. It is debatable whether this should have been done after coal phase out, but this decision has been made by CDU in 2013 and is currently not reversible anymore. There is no fuel, no functioning reactors and no companies willing to operate any reactor and no insurance willing to insure them.
So under the cold war Germany was the main battle ground. Both Russia and the US setup massive spying and influence operations there. In particular journalism and foreign correspodence were perfect for this.
After the Berlin wall fell, Russia dismantled its spook apparatus. The Americans kept theirs intact.
Now that the real business of journalism is smaller than ever. The spooks have an even higher weight than they used to.
So what is WSJ pushing?
In short the Washington line: Don't invest in Germany. They are too reliant on China and Russia. Ultimately they will have to do what we have done - implement protectionist subsidies like the IRA, expand military spending, and run massive fiscal deficits.
> Two decades ago, Germany revived its moribund economy and became a manufacturing powerhouse of an era of globalization.
If they're referring to Gerhard Schröder's "Hartz reforms" in which the social state was slashed while (oh, the irony) the Social Democrats were governing, I'm sure the WSJ applauded those, and maybe they increased Germany's international competitiveness a bit, but to say that Germany's economy was "moribund" (i.e. on its deathbed) is a bit of an exaggeration.
My take on the current situation: companies don't like it if anyone other than the conservatives is in power, so they are careful with investments. Plus the global situation is still unstable, interest rates have risen, and German companies are notoriously cautious - one more reason to hold back investments. Add to that the lack of qualified personnel - despite its "recession", Germany currently has record low unemployment.
>Add to that the lack of qualified personnel - despite its "recession", Germany currently has record low unemployment
"Lack of qualified personnel" is just double-speak corporate propaganda for over-abundance of poor paying jobs that nobody wants.
And record low unemployment means nothing. You can always drop unemployment by raising the cost of living (current situation) and cutting welfare programs, meaning people will be forced to take any shit job they can find just to stay afloat and boom, you have record low unemployment.
IMHO, a healthy economy should always have some unemployment because there's always a glut of shit jobs that ideally should stay vacant because they have poor conditions and pay, but the west's dirty secret is grey area migration which helps keep those shit jobs going.
Er, no, I live in Germany and can confirm that there are actual problems finding personnel for, let's not call them "shit jobs", but jobs with a combination of low pay/high stress/bad working times like nursing home/hospital staff, waiters, bus/train drivers etc.
