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The article lists a lot of things going bad for Germany. But was there some underlying reason? Like demographics, shrinking population? Or is it just the obvi

The article lists a lot of things going bad for Germany. But was there some underlying reason? Like demographics, shrinking population? Or is it just the obvious , Russian gas, rising Energy costs, now their prices are too high, so exports are down.

treprinum 3y ago
I'd say the main problem is "leadersh*t", incompetent captains of industry. It's so pervasive and prevalent that I really don't see any hope for them. People are also getting more and more unprofessional and expect high pay for subpar results. Devs on the other hand are hugely underpaid and the country operates in a two caste system of managers vs everybody else though not as badly as the UK. There is also a high aversion to risk; a friend of mine who built a successful company told me that in order to get 1M from a bank they essentially had to pay them 1M upfront.
- JPLeRouzic 3y ago
  > People are also getting more and more unprofessional > the country operates in a two-caste system I don't know for today but I remember in the 1980' some German engineers playing games on their computers during work at Deutsch Telecom.
  - treprinum 3y ago
    An accounting professor of Turkish origin in my MBA program in the US was making fun of Germany after the Wirecard scandal that he could have imagined such crime in Turkey but never in Germany and then shrugged his shoulders.
    - pgeorgi 3y ago
      Just look where Marsalek comes from: We import our criminals from Austria.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  Any traditional industry/company in Germany approaching "computers", "the web", "smart something" doesn't want to pay properly for devs. Mostly because the leadership in their late 50s (at best) has some nephew who is "good with computers" so it can't be that hard. You get senior electrical engineers laying down some bonkers architecture for how the software side is gonna work, and then two BSc CS graduates thrown at the job, representing the whole dev department. Anecdotal! This was about a decade ago, suddenly ran into a guy I knew from highschool who studied CS in another city. Told me he dropped out during his master's because he failed math, then got hired by a medium-sized company making sensors and actuators, who now wanted to enter the smart home business. Remote controllable relays for power outlets basically, energy meters, door-open sensors, not much more at that point. He was basically the only dev for the first six months, then got promoted to team lead and had two other devs working for him. He was inexperienced and had quite the ego when I talked to him back then. He was smug about using Arch Linux while I was on debian. He then went on and excitedly told me "did you know!? you can't just use ssh to get a shell on another computer, but tunnel arbitrary data over it!" I guess you don't learn much just copying commands from the Arch Linux wiki all day. Anyways, when I told him I don't think this project will go anywhere and will pretty much be done once Google or any other big player decides to enter that space, he just brushed it off because "they will have been there first". Needless to say, he's not with that company any more, but not after suffering some burnout... Two years after college!
  - sneed_chucker 3y ago
    Yeah it's not just computers. Germany is full of educated high IQ people working for, in my opinion, peanuts. But software and technology is especially poorly compensated there.
    - tuatoru 3y ago
      If grandparent's example is representative, German education is not teaching people what they actually need to know. The ssh stuff you can get in five minutes' reading of the man page.
- ulfw 3y ago
  100% this. In order to become a company leader in Germany you have to do things in a conservative way how 'it's always been done'. Be male, older and have a Ph.D. Just look at an average board of directors and you'll see 90% PhDs. No, they aren't any more intelligent or better educated nor trained. They just sucked up for more and more years to a professor at uni to get their PhD in something business. Doesn't help at all in actually RUNNING a business, but that's just how it's been done to get ahead.
lagrange77 3y ago
I think the dependence on china as a) a competitor in the supplier market, b) as a sales market and c) as an indispensable supplier of semi-finished products for its own industry also plays a major role.
qznc 3y ago
Yes, i think all ofthese are factors. A particularly annoying one is the debt break (Schuldenbremse) Germany introduced a few years ago. It prevents many investments currently. This one could be fixed relatively quickly though.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  > This one could be fixed relatively quickly though. In the sense that you could just repeal it, but not in the sense that there is a majority for that. The opposition parties are against repealing it, because it damages the current government, and roughly half or more of the government coalition are also against repealing it, because they consider austerity sound economic theory (meanwhile the other half considers rapidly ballooning welfare and transfer payments a feature, not a bug, and also believes rent control works, so arguably there just aren't very many adults in the room setting German economic policy right now). So it's something that cannot be fixed quickly because people are actively against fixing it.
- konschubert 3y ago
  It does not prevent investments by industry at all.
  - qznc 3y ago
    I agree, but I have no clue how to fix that. Many industries should take on more debt but somehow they don’t. Maybe they lack ideas what to do with the money?
konschubert 3y ago
Gas prices are lower than before the war. So that cannot be it.
messiah_complex 3y ago
Demographics. The Baby Boomers have started to retire. Population is aging, birth rates are low, labor pool is shrinking.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  But why would people retiring cause plants to close. The article talks about layoffs. But if they are having layoffs, and people can't find work, that would indicate they do have workers, not a shortage of workers.
  - messiah_complex 3y ago
    Not just about the raw number of people. When your hear "the population is aging," it means the median age is increasing over time. It puts a lot of strain on an economy when the ratio of retirees to working age people gets too high. Retirees are expensive.
    - rhelz 3y ago
      Perhaps it puts a lot of strain on an economy where 1% of the people get 50% of the wealth. Perhaps it is hard for current workers to send the lion's share of what they produce to the 1%, and still pay for the retirement of past workers. The current trends are unsustainable, sure, but just unsustainable for our current economic regime.
zelphirkalt 3y ago
Bad governments that actively hinder progress on many fronts (just look for example at Wissing as a transport minister being completely anti train service, destroying infrastructure for the people, while dancing to the tune of car manufacturers), lining their own pockets, corruption, unfettered lobbyism and bad policies for education system added their weight to this. A country can only take so much incapability and corruption, before things go downhill. As a German I warn, we better watch Germany very closely, if the likes of AfD get to power. Way too many people are either desperate enough or uninformed enough or disappointed enough to vote for the far right bordering illegal. This has all been in the making for a long time, due to previous and current governments. A party like FDP is very far removed from its originally held values, and would love to jump in bed with the far right AfD, if that brought them into the government again after the Ampel coalition. They are traitors of democracy basically, just like CDU.
- Xunjin 3y ago
  Isn't the German policy tracking down NeoNazis on AfD? IIRC there is even a movement on closing down a specific party. I remember hearing a news about it. Btw I love DW news, such a great channel.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    There were some calls to shut down AfD, but that's probably too difficult (and the process is difficult for good reasons!), and having them "certified by the courts that they're not extremist enough to be closed down" might be just the advertisement they seek. The current target seems to be the "Junge Alternative", the AfD's youth organization. Since that's just an association and not a party, it's an easier target. Also, the party youth organizations tend to be more radical than their "grown-up" counterparts, so it's probably relatively simple to make a case there.
throwaway4good 3y ago
There is plenty of migration from south and Eastern Europe into Germany so demographics is not an issue.
tormeh 3y ago
Demographics is the big one. Obviously fewer workers and more retirees, but also a gerontocracy where many parties primarily want to go back to some idealised version of the past. The CDU is basically the party of 1960s car adverts. The Greens are hippies, recent management notwithstanding. The SPD has an identity crisis, but before that was classic cold-war social democrats. The Left is fortunately going extinct, but was classic Warsaw Pact. There’s a bit of a trend here. The general population is generally looking backwards, and decision-makers and bureaucrats skew even older than the general population.
- skippyboxedhero 3y ago
  Demographics aren't the issue. Japan has had relatively bad aging, per capita growth for working-age population since 1990 is equal to the US. Indeed, the issue of demographics has been a massive problem because politicians repeat the mantra: population cannot age, we must mass import. Okay...but most high productivity people aren't going to Germany (and to be clear, this has been the case in France, the UK, many other places). So they just get more minimum-wage workers who drag down productivity/incomes. I agree with your point about the parties but Japan is a very backwards-looking society, they have had none of these issues. Their economic policy hasn't been perfect but if you compare to Western Europe: they haven't made a lot of those errors either so naturally ended up in a better place. With Germany, there is an issue with pension sustainability without population growth...but the problem is: pension sustainability not a lack of population growth (even if it wasn't, as I explain above, it is quite literally impossible today to solve this issue with immigration...the productive people aren't leaving the US, it isn't happening). You have seen Western Europe go even harder on population growth and (if anything) economic growth has just accelerated lower. Economic growth is quite simple: make things that people want, train people to make those things, do it all very cheaply (look at Eastern Europe, higher standard of living, lower incomes so lower wages and more business investment, sensible investment in government services...these economies weren't even on the map when Germany was going through the 2000s slump).
  - tormeh 3y ago
    Is Japan actually in a better place? GDP per capita is worse, work hours are longer, debt is much higher, birth rates are lower. Citation needed.
pgeorgi 3y ago
Several decades of politics and industry kicking the can down the road and hoping that the challenges go away by itself. For example: German car makers are still somewhat reluctant to embrace electric motors (no matter the power source or storage) and would like to stay with combustion engines (no matter the combustible) because that's a niche they and the entire downstream industry feel comfortable with. Yes, a large share of the industrial base in Germany hinges on it. But a long-term view on things would have started divesting from this exclusivity decades ago. Instead, they hoped the challenge just goes away by building better combustion engines. There's _finally_ some movement in that direction (Volkswagen embracing EVs is huge), but there are also still reactionary pockets that try to water everything down because hydrogen or synthetic fuels are right around the corner, just you wait! (possible, but very unlikely) Another example from the industry: The chemical industry never hedged their reliance on fossils, either. While they will remain a consumer of fossils for chemical processes, the industry was comfortable just heating whatever they need to be really hot with them as well. Now they're scrambling to retool their factories to still use fossils where impossible to replace (e.g. fertilizer production uses the chemical properties) but to use hydrogen when stuff just needs to get hot. That the amount of fossil fuel might go down was _kinda_ obvious with all those CO2-reduction targets, but they preferred to wait it out. I see more hope with them, though: they need to retool, but after the furnaces use hydrogen (wherever that comes from), they can do business as usual (and gradually optimize hydrogen sourcing). The car industry (some say that 20% of the German industrial base rely on that directly or indirectly) is much worse off. Another example, this time politics: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a private company fully owned by the government. There's some money going back and forth between the company and its owner, but one of the arrangements was that DB pays for maintenance of its infrastructure itself, but catastrophic loss of infrastructure (and related repairs/rebuilds) are covered through government money. What is the private company (that was expected to pay some 8-9 digit sums of earnings back to the federal budget for years as part of that back-and-forth) doing then? Cut down on maintenance. When stuff breaks entirely, repairs aren't on them, so that's the "rational" choice for the company. Politicians were asleep at the wheel as far as these incentives are concerned (or worse: they calculated with them, kicking the can down the road.) There are advocates for moving more logistics from the road to rail, but that's kinda stuck because there's a huge repair-and-investment plan right now (to deal with that oversight of decades) that will block various key routes for the next few years. And it's not as if the Autobahn-network is any better off (map with construction sites at https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn): lots of bridges from the 60s reaching their end-of-life all at once because maintenance is an expense that was better ignored (since politicians decided that above all else, the country mustn't increase its debt: So we had a kinda-balanced budget but accrued the steel-and-concrete equivalent of tech debt)
imtringued 3y ago
Killing the domestic economy while favouring the export surplus economy. People don't seem to understand that Germany's export strategy is fueled by debt. It looks fine from the perspective of Germany alone, but this strategy has resulted in an overall increase in debt in the entire euro area and Germans are hypocritical enough to think that they are the heroes saving the EU when the situation is the exact opposite. Euro area debt is bailing out the German export economy.

treprinum 3y ago

I'd say the main problem is "leadersh*t", incompetent captains of industry. It's so pervasive and prevalent that I really don't see any hope for them. People are also getting more and more unprofessional and expect high pay for subpar results. Devs on the other hand are hugely underpaid and the country operates in a two caste system of managers vs everybody else though not as badly as the UK. There is also a high aversion to risk; a friend of mine who built a successful company told me that in order to get 1M from a bank they essentially had to pay them 1M upfront.

JPLeRouzic 3y ago
> People are also getting more and more unprofessional > the country operates in a two-caste system I don't know for today but I remember in the 1980' some German engineers playing games on their computers during work at Deutsch Telecom.
- treprinum 3y ago
  An accounting professor of Turkish origin in my MBA program in the US was making fun of Germany after the Wirecard scandal that he could have imagined such crime in Turkey but never in Germany and then shrugged his shoulders.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    Just look where Marsalek comes from: We import our criminals from Austria.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
Any traditional industry/company in Germany approaching "computers", "the web", "smart something" doesn't want to pay properly for devs. Mostly because the leadership in their late 50s (at best) has some nephew who is "good with computers" so it can't be that hard. You get senior electrical engineers laying down some bonkers architecture for how the software side is gonna work, and then two BSc CS graduates thrown at the job, representing the whole dev department. Anecdotal! This was about a decade ago, suddenly ran into a guy I knew from highschool who studied CS in another city. Told me he dropped out during his master's because he failed math, then got hired by a medium-sized company making sensors and actuators, who now wanted to enter the smart home business. Remote controllable relays for power outlets basically, energy meters, door-open sensors, not much more at that point. He was basically the only dev for the first six months, then got promoted to team lead and had two other devs working for him. He was inexperienced and had quite the ego when I talked to him back then. He was smug about using Arch Linux while I was on debian. He then went on and excitedly told me "did you know!? you can't just use ssh to get a shell on another computer, but tunnel arbitrary data over it!" I guess you don't learn much just copying commands from the Arch Linux wiki all day. Anyways, when I told him I don't think this project will go anywhere and will pretty much be done once Google or any other big player decides to enter that space, he just brushed it off because "they will have been there first". Needless to say, he's not with that company any more, but not after suffering some burnout... Two years after college!
- sneed_chucker 3y ago
  Yeah it's not just computers. Germany is full of educated high IQ people working for, in my opinion, peanuts. But software and technology is especially poorly compensated there.
  - tuatoru 3y ago
    If grandparent's example is representative, German education is not teaching people what they actually need to know. The ssh stuff you can get in five minutes' reading of the man page.
ulfw 3y ago
100% this. In order to become a company leader in Germany you have to do things in a conservative way how 'it's always been done'. Be male, older and have a Ph.D. Just look at an average board of directors and you'll see 90% PhDs. No, they aren't any more intelligent or better educated nor trained. They just sucked up for more and more years to a professor at uni to get their PhD in something business. Doesn't help at all in actually RUNNING a business, but that's just how it's been done to get ahead.

lagrange77 3y ago

I think the dependence on china as a) a competitor in the supplier market, b) as a sales market and c) as an indispensable supplier of semi-finished products for its own industry also plays a major role.

qznc 3y ago

Yes, i think all ofthese are factors. A particularly annoying one is the debt break (Schuldenbremse) Germany introduced a few years ago. It prevents many investments currently. This one could be fixed relatively quickly though.

formerly_proven 3y ago
> This one could be fixed relatively quickly though. In the sense that you could just repeal it, but not in the sense that there is a majority for that. The opposition parties are against repealing it, because it damages the current government, and roughly half or more of the government coalition are also against repealing it, because they consider austerity sound economic theory (meanwhile the other half considers rapidly ballooning welfare and transfer payments a feature, not a bug, and also believes rent control works, so arguably there just aren't very many adults in the room setting German economic policy right now). So it's something that cannot be fixed quickly because people are actively against fixing it.
konschubert 3y ago
It does not prevent investments by industry at all.
- qznc 3y ago
  I agree, but I have no clue how to fix that. Many industries should take on more debt but somehow they don’t. Maybe they lack ideas what to do with the money?

konschubert 3y ago

Gas prices are lower than before the war. So that cannot be it.

messiah_complex 3y ago

Demographics. The Baby Boomers have started to retire. Population is aging, birth rates are low, labor pool is shrinking.

FrustratedMonky 3y ago
But why would people retiring cause plants to close. The article talks about layoffs. But if they are having layoffs, and people can't find work, that would indicate they do have workers, not a shortage of workers.
- messiah_complex 3y ago
  Not just about the raw number of people. When your hear "the population is aging," it means the median age is increasing over time. It puts a lot of strain on an economy when the ratio of retirees to working age people gets too high. Retirees are expensive.
  - rhelz 3y ago
    Perhaps it puts a lot of strain on an economy where 1% of the people get 50% of the wealth. Perhaps it is hard for current workers to send the lion's share of what they produce to the 1%, and still pay for the retirement of past workers. The current trends are unsustainable, sure, but just unsustainable for our current economic regime.

zelphirkalt 3y ago

Bad governments that actively hinder progress on many fronts (just look for example at Wissing as a transport minister being completely anti train service, destroying infrastructure for the people, while dancing to the tune of car manufacturers), lining their own pockets, corruption, unfettered lobbyism and bad policies for education system added their weight to this. A country can only take so much incapability and corruption, before things go downhill. As a German I warn, we better watch Germany very closely, if the likes of AfD get to power. Way too many people are either desperate enough or uninformed enough or disappointed enough to vote for the far right bordering illegal. This has all been in the making for a long time, due to previous and current governments. A party like FDP is very far removed from its originally held values, and would love to jump in bed with the far right AfD, if that brought them into the government again after the Ampel coalition. They are traitors of democracy basically, just like CDU.

Xunjin 3y ago
Isn't the German policy tracking down NeoNazis on AfD? IIRC there is even a movement on closing down a specific party. I remember hearing a news about it. Btw I love DW news, such a great channel.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  There were some calls to shut down AfD, but that's probably too difficult (and the process is difficult for good reasons!), and having them "certified by the courts that they're not extremist enough to be closed down" might be just the advertisement they seek. The current target seems to be the "Junge Alternative", the AfD's youth organization. Since that's just an association and not a party, it's an easier target. Also, the party youth organizations tend to be more radical than their "grown-up" counterparts, so it's probably relatively simple to make a case there.

throwaway4good 3y ago

There is plenty of migration from south and Eastern Europe into Germany so demographics is not an issue.

tormeh 3y ago

Demographics is the big one. Obviously fewer workers and more retirees, but also a gerontocracy where many parties primarily want to go back to some idealised version of the past. The CDU is basically the party of 1960s car adverts. The Greens are hippies, recent management notwithstanding. The SPD has an identity crisis, but before that was classic cold-war social democrats. The Left is fortunately going extinct, but was classic Warsaw Pact. There’s a bit of a trend here. The general population is generally looking backwards, and decision-makers and bureaucrats skew even older than the general population.

skippyboxedhero 3y ago
Demographics aren't the issue. Japan has had relatively bad aging, per capita growth for working-age population since 1990 is equal to the US. Indeed, the issue of demographics has been a massive problem because politicians repeat the mantra: population cannot age, we must mass import. Okay...but most high productivity people aren't going to Germany (and to be clear, this has been the case in France, the UK, many other places). So they just get more minimum-wage workers who drag down productivity/incomes. I agree with your point about the parties but Japan is a very backwards-looking society, they have had none of these issues. Their economic policy hasn't been perfect but if you compare to Western Europe: they haven't made a lot of those errors either so naturally ended up in a better place. With Germany, there is an issue with pension sustainability without population growth...but the problem is: pension sustainability not a lack of population growth (even if it wasn't, as I explain above, it is quite literally impossible today to solve this issue with immigration...the productive people aren't leaving the US, it isn't happening). You have seen Western Europe go even harder on population growth and (if anything) economic growth has just accelerated lower. Economic growth is quite simple: make things that people want, train people to make those things, do it all very cheaply (look at Eastern Europe, higher standard of living, lower incomes so lower wages and more business investment, sensible investment in government services...these economies weren't even on the map when Germany was going through the 2000s slump).
- tormeh 3y ago
  Is Japan actually in a better place? GDP per capita is worse, work hours are longer, debt is much higher, birth rates are lower. Citation needed.

pgeorgi 3y ago

Several decades of politics and industry kicking the can down the road and hoping that the challenges go away by itself. For example: German car makers are still somewhat reluctant to embrace electric motors (no matter the power source or storage) and would like to stay with combustion engines (no matter the combustible) because that's a niche they and the entire downstream industry feel comfortable with. Yes, a large share of the industrial base in Germany hinges on it. But a long-term view on things would have started divesting from this exclusivity decades ago. Instead, they hoped the challenge just goes away by building better combustion engines. There's _finally_ some movement in that direction (Volkswagen embracing EVs is huge), but there are also still reactionary pockets that try to water everything down because hydrogen or synthetic fuels are right around the corner, just you wait! (possible, but very unlikely) Another example from the industry: The chemical industry never hedged their reliance on fossils, either. While they will remain a consumer of fossils for chemical processes, the industry was comfortable just heating whatever they need to be really hot with them as well. Now they're scrambling to retool their factories to still use fossils where impossible to replace (e.g. fertilizer production uses the chemical properties) but to use hydrogen when stuff just needs to get hot. That the amount of fossil fuel might go down was _kinda_ obvious with all those CO2-reduction targets, but they preferred to wait it out. I see more hope with them, though: they need to retool, but after the furnaces use hydrogen (wherever that comes from), they can do business as usual (and gradually optimize hydrogen sourcing). The car industry (some say that 20% of the German industrial base rely on that directly or indirectly) is much worse off. Another example, this time politics: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a private company fully owned by the government. There's some money going back and forth between the company and its owner, but one of the arrangements was that DB pays for maintenance of its infrastructure itself, but catastrophic loss of infrastructure (and related repairs/rebuilds) are covered through government money. What is the private company (that was expected to pay some 8-9 digit sums of earnings back to the federal budget for years as part of that back-and-forth) doing then? Cut down on maintenance. When stuff breaks entirely, repairs aren't on them, so that's the "rational" choice for the company. Politicians were asleep at the wheel as far as these incentives are concerned (or worse: they calculated with them, kicking the can down the road.) There are advocates for moving more logistics from the road to rail, but that's kinda stuck because there's a huge repair-and-investment plan right now (to deal with that oversight of decades) that will block various key routes for the next few years. And it's not as if the Autobahn-network is any better off (map with construction sites at https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn): lots of bridges from the 60s reaching their end-of-life all at once because maintenance is an expense that was better ignored (since politicians decided that above all else, the country mustn't increase its debt: So we had a kinda-balanced budget but accrued the steel-and-concrete equivalent of tech debt)

imtringued 3y ago

Killing the domestic economy while favouring the export surplus economy. People don't seem to understand that Germany's export strategy is fueled by debt. It looks fine from the perspective of Germany alone, but this strategy has resulted in an overall increase in debt in the entire euro area and Germans are hypocritical enough to think that they are the heroes saving the EU when the situation is the exact opposite. Euro area debt is bailing out the German export economy.