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Coronavirus revealed the unexpected strengths of Germany’s model of government
- Daishiman 6y agoOrganized societies with high levels of trust backed by effective bureaucracies from a tradition of discipline and rigor are actually good at solving things, who would have known. Whenever Libertarians claim that governments don't work, I point them to the success stories of the German state. The issues generally never lie with private vs public initiatives (although the incentive structures count), but rather with effective vs ineffective institutions.
- sieabahlpark 6y agoWhat if you don't ignore WWI and WWII?
- 373923636 6y agoLibertarians are usually talking about markets when they refer to that and the people who disagree with them usually aren't economists. Germany is no more impressive than Singapore or Korea, you can accomplish a lot of impressive looking feats when you're operating at a miniscule scale and your culture is mostly homogenous. I'll be more impressed when they start surpassing modernized SEA region nations or when they manage the same feats under an atmosphere of diversity.
- mpweiher 6y ago> miniscule scale Population Germany: 83,166,711 Singapore: 5,703,600 > culture is mostly homogenous. [..] atmosphere of diversity. "Germany is the second most popular immigration destination in the world. [..] Of the country's residents, 18.6 million people (22.5%) were of immigrant or partially immigrant descent in 2016"
- Daishiman 6y agoAll of Western Europe has a huge influx of immigrants and they are highly functional countries.
- mnky9800n 6y agoThinking Germany is homogenous just makes it obvious you've never been there. Germans in Germany are barely homogenous between east and west Germany not to mention the influx of immigrants from different time periods.
- amadeuspagel 6y agoThinking Germany isn't homogenous (relative to the US) just makes it obvious you've never been to the US.
- mnky9800n 6y agoI'm American. Lol.
- amai 6y agoGermany has more than three times more hospital beds per inhabitant than the UK: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hospital-beds-vs-gdp?country=DEU~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/hospital-beds-vs-gdp?coun... It also has 70% more medical doctors per inhabitant: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/medical-doctors-per-1000-people-vs-gdp-per-capita?country=DEU~GBR https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/medical-doctors-per-1000-... All this comes in handy in case of a pandemic.
- rurban 6y agoWith an average utilization of 10% of ICU's during this flu season this argument is moot. More likely is that they did better nursing homes protections, or just had less dangerous Virus variants than in the west. I don't see any other advantages of the German system affecting this year's flu pandemic. It's better of course. But mostly irrelevant.