Germany's days as an industrial superpower are coming to an end

Too often I see people say to the disappearance of manual labor jobs: good, retrain people to use computers. I have slowly come to the belief that there are some people for whom working with their hands is the only kind of sane work they can do.

You can call them blue-collar, or working class (these are the people incidentally that raised me, the people in my neighborhood growing up).

Why would anyone not want to work in a clean office with only a compiler as your boss and a big paycheck waiting for you every two weeks? When I was younger I assumed that anyone not in the tech field were people not smart enough to pass Algebra in high school. It had not occurred to me then that it might go beyond aptitude and instead be due to something more fundamental about a person's nature or character.

I know I'm getting hand-wavy with nature, character but I'm not sure what other words to use. I came to believe that though many people who are like me find some satisfaction from having solved a difficult problem, or having created a functional framework that can now do work to solve problems there are many others where satisfaction primarily comes from having changed something with their hands.

I don't know if all of that makes sense or resonates with anyone. I'll add this though, the older I get, the more I recognize even in myself the satisfaction that comes from doing something physical (even mowing the lawn as an example). I seem to take some pleasure from taking something unordered or in a raw state, and ending up with a thing in an ordered or "finished" state. It's no doubt why I have pursued woodworking as a hobby, print making, creating PCBs. (And that fresh mown lawn looks so much nicer than the ragged lawn that was there before.)

In any event, following that line of reasoning has made me realize we should keep a large number of manufacturing, construction, repair and other manual labor jobs so that we can serve the whole of society. Just expecting everyone to learn to code is misguided and will fail so many people.

It is sad to me that Germany appears to have tried this model, tried to keep manufacturing in their country, and yet it is purportedly failing. I'm not too optimistic about our future when we apparently measure progress by "cost of living standards".

> The Anglophone strategy led to greater internal inequality but seems to be better from an aggregate standpoint.

Let's see. I feel like whatever is brewing economically and socially may hurt the "service industry backed societies" harder, when the time has come.

> Germany still has an enviable roster of small, agile manufacturers, and the Bundesbank and others reject the notion that full-blown deindustrialization is anywhere close.

It's not all cars. It's a lot of things you haven't heard about, because they are highly specialized, niche industrial parts. I think, the German economy rests on the shoulders of Maschinenbau and, presumably, there is a whole lot less naked growth enabled "bullshit" products in that space.

Don't lie, don't you feel something is freaky with the economy? I don't just mean numbers and stock value... something more fundamental. Don't you feel overwhelmed by commerce, at times? Like, there is a lot of non-products produced. Almost violently pushed onto people, sickening amounts of "stuff" saturating all channels. How many mouths does marketing feed? There is so, so much marketing. Can this really be sustainable???

I don't know. I feel something is getting horribly out of balance and the service industry is a symptom. Rabid inequality is a symptom. Like core rot, it looks fine, until a little gust lays the tree onto your house.

Those taxes made all that infrastructure that Europe uses possible. From fast trains to ports. Also, those taxes help you avoid paying $1000 per head for healthcare and then up to $18,000 out of pocket every year labeled as 'copay' until the medical insurance picks up... then tries everything it can to reject paying. Then up to $3000/month for a small room in a shared flat for housing, and then a few thousand on food and other costs.

And like they said - if you think that juniors in California take home $135k after taxes, you are living in a very different universe.

It's just means you're in a way more privilege Position as a dev in Poland than devs in Germany, but how does that look at scale, is the average Pole also much better off than the average German?

>The taxes will kill the old Europe.

Sure, but taxes also pay for infrastructure, healthcare and education which a country needs to flourish. Those high German taxes also contributed to the EU budget out of which Poland has been the highest net beneficiary over the years.

How would Poland look today in those areas without the EU money from German taxpayers, and, if every Polish worker was a tax-evading ..err..sorry I mean tax-optimzing IT worker like yourself?

What you're advocating is basically "fuck you I got mine, time to kick the ladder down now" as in you enjoyed the benefits of someone else's high taxes to grow but now that you've made it big, are against high taxes, and that my friend doesn't scale, nor build a successful society long term unless you're some small tax heaven country or bracing for rampant wealth and income inequality which I assume is starting to happen in Poland.

On top of that you have regulation and lack of subsidies making other places more attractive to produce in ie. the US, Eastern Europe or China.

Russia is responsible for something like 12% of all global crude oil. If sanctions actually worked and global demand for oil went unchanged prices would have increased, likely quite a bit as the demand is very sticky and not likely to decrease quickly in response to prices.

Best I can tell, the temporary bump in prices in Europe were largely a factor of political plays making oil temporarily more scare while Russia and the oil industry adjusted. Prices are back down now because Russia and the oil industry found a new flow pattern to move Russian oil into the global supply.

If that's the path to success, AfD will be at 50% within 2 years.

Where does this cliché come from? Germans work less than any other country on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a...

I think you misspelled "an energy crisis that was caused by short-sightedly failing to invest in and build out nuclear power."

Germany was warned for decades about the dangers of relying on Russia, and ignored the warnings.

In terms of population, infrastructure, capital plant and equipment, and institutions, Germany has been eating its seed corn for decades.

Edit: the same applies to national security, as Germany's ineffectual support for Ukraine shows.

1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...

Didn't EU sanctions cause the energy crisis ? How did the Russians cause it ? From someone who is not in the NATO sphere, I can only marvel at how Germany can suicide themselves so effectively. Now, they are buying Gas from the U.S at 2-4x prices. The U.S. gas billionaires laugh their way to the bank while Germans fall into poverty.

Can you share your unique insights about the characteristics of other demographic groups, and their impact on German society? Immigrants, perhaps? People of color? Muslims?

As a “old person” (not a boomer, before you “OK, Boomer” me) I deal with folks like you in the workplace every day. I have to listen to “oh you are too old to understand”, and “you are just too old to change” regularly told to all colleagues over 50.

Those prejudices are shameful.

The leftist in me is sad to acknowledge that (not really, I'm more on the autogestion side), but EU institutions dropped the ball on this subjects, the main drivers were auto companies and universities/engineering schools.

Look at how many lawyers, civil servants, other government workers, management consultants the UK can afford to support. Housing hundreds of thousands of economic migrants for free. That is a rich economy. The problem is that the productive section of the economy isn't growing (and a lot of the unproductive activities, for example paying lawyers hundreds of thousands per year to block industrial development, are blocking growth).

The same is true of Germany. Of almost every economy in Western Europe bar NL.

There is no "labour shortage"...I don't even understand how that is supposed to work. There is a price for labour, if you can't pay it then you will go out of business. Companies: refuse to train staff, complain that no-one is trained, rely on mass importation of migrant labour, and then also complain that they can't afford to pay more (when they refuse to hire any higher-skill staff who can actually improve productivity)...these aren't real problems. Economic inactivity rates are sky-high across Western Europe WHILST companies say there is a labour shortage. Who believes this?

Deindutrailisation was an absolutely huge political topic in the 80/90/00s. It was probably the biggest economic topic throughout the 80s. The "enshittificaton" caught no-one by surprise apart from politicians who believed that the 2000s (specifically) were a time of massive prosperity (you still see this, Starmer goes on continuously about how wonderful the 2000s were, great time for laywers/bankers/landlords, people like him). Throughout the 90/00s, they pumped government jobs into these areas...and are now surprised that everyone else has run out of money to support these people doing nothing? (Same thing has happened in Germany with the East btw, same thing in France, Italy, Spain).

I agree that identifying the problem is the issue but it is far deeper than deindustrialization (the discussion of which got us here because the "solution" was: mass government intervention into certain areas to try and boost the vote for whatever party thought they could win...it should be no coincide that elections in the UK are now won and lost in the areas of "deindustrialization" AND nothing happens to fix these areas beyond politicians promising a mystery box full of cash).

That this is happening simultaneously in many Western European countries and other developed countries should be the clue that it is cultural.

Economic growth has never been easier, costs have never been lower, potential has never been higher. People should ask why we are circling the drain even more rapidly whilst other countries are smashing it.

Given the massive failure of AVR Jülich, whose design was supposed to be "fail safe" while it's now the most 90Sr-contaminated nuclear facility world-wide, and the corruption around it, there's little trust that even if the technology is safe, operations would be.

That accident in Jülich was 1979, rumors that something happened were struck down with political support, and so the acknowledgement by the operator was 21 years later in 2000 and the government confirmed it only in 2010. The plan for decommissioning is to get it done by the end of this century, after we "develop some procedure during the next 60 years." (that is, we have no f'ing clue what to do with that thing right now). By that time, the incident has been 120 years ago...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor (and even more so its German equivalent page) has the gory details of that mess. Germany likes to do things at industrial scale, and so it also messes up at industrial scale.

As a result (and while Chornobyl didn't help the nuclear-power cause, the German anti-nuclear-power movement predates that incident by ~10 years), Germany moving away from nuclear power has been a long time coming.

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.

So that cannot be it.

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.

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): 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)

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.