Interesting. For those who know Germany, it's often said that even if the economic numbers are high, there's a lot of poor workers that need two jobs to live. Is it true ? true but only a small % ? normal according to you ?
According to IAB 2.7 million workers have a second job in Germany (which is about 1 in 12). Most of them probably because they don’t earn enough in their first.
And yes, this means that those jobs are tax subsidized.
According to this bar chart on wealth distribution in the EU [1] there is a huge difference between the average and median wages in Germany, so I would expect the group of poor workers to be much larger than we think it is.
Of course, being poor in Germany might mean something different than in the US, since we still have better access to healthcare (at least in my opinion, I don't know enough about the US system to be 100% sure).
[1]: http://media0.faz.net/ppmedia/aktuell/wirtschaft/831437975/1...
\EDIT: I should have cited the source accurately, the chart comes from the FAZ, a huge and respected German newspaper.
People in Germany seem to prefer rent over freehold property, this might explain Germany's low numbers compared to other states.
On the left there is wealth (/assets, "Vermögen"), then the next part is about the percentage of people who own houses ("Anteil Hausbesitzer"), and then comes the meat of the chart, the difference in gross annual income ("Bruttojahreseinkommen").
I am sorry to venture so far off topic, but I do most of my thinking either in German or in English which makes me vulnerable to stupid mistakes when the two overlap, so I would really appreciate it if you could tell me where I went wrong.
But IMHO the difference between median and average isn't that big in Germany, even smaller than in Austria which doesn't have Hartz IV and Euro-Jobs. What would you consider acceptable? Also consider that these numbers may contain salaries for part-time jobs too. And those numbers are from 2010.
It's probably just that I think that we should theoretically be in a good position to lower the divide between the rich and the poor, and instead it always seems to widen. I tend to forget that in a lot of other countries the situation is even worse, and maybe I should be thankful for what we have already achieved.
Thanks for the perspective, and a good Day of German Unity to you!
For the average German, buying a house means 30 years of debt: 300 000 EUR vs. 50 000 EUR salary (which is actually 30 000 EUR due to taxes and mandatory health insurance).
IMHO much of the difference between countries in this regard can be explained by tradition, history or population density.
Mostly everybody with medium- or high qualifications should have no problems finding a well-paid job. Across all ages. In the western parts of Germany...
That's not a great reference point. It only works well if you're only talking about New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.
California's GDP per capita is only about 8%-10% higher than Nebraska. Iowa is as high as Oregon. Illinois is 30% higher than Florida. Indiana is higher than Vermont. Wisconsin is higher than North Carolina. Minnesota is close to Maryland. South Dakota is higher than New Jersey or Virginia. Kansas is 20% higher than Maine. Missouri is higher than South Carolina. Ohio is on par with Rhode Island.
The US mid-west is an economic juggernaut compared to the rest of the world. It's larger than the economies of France or the UK, and nearly as big as Germany. Averaged out it's very comparable to the coastal states.
But how are populations developing? When people follow the money, GDP per capita evens out, maybe to the point of overcompensation given enough mobility and optimism to "make it there". Just look at how real estate prices are not matching the distribution of GDP per capita at all: real estate is less mobile than people.
(Edit: and yes, there surely are also some economic hotspots within the Midwest, some of those states are huge and have plenty of room to have their own internal concentration patterns)
Back to real estate, which brings us back to Germany, where rising real estate prices (both owned and rented) have increasingly been on people's minds recently: the solution cannot be just rent regulation or construction deregulation, it has to go to the root, find was to Conner concentration, to make the backwaters more economically viable, where housing prices ar not rising but in free fall.
Wages in Germany stagnated as well, domestic trade is dwarfed by export. Living has gotten much more expensive in the cities continuously moving the shrinking middle class further down.
Germany has a track record of being strong enough, so that revolutions seldom happen. But if they happen, the are almost guaranteed to be catastrophic.