As good a place as any to remind people German workers have 30 vacation days on average (in addition to 10 public holidays).
Somehow the work gets done!
Somehow the work gets done!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_...
This my experience from living 5 years in the former East and afterwards moving to the West (already 7 years).
I agree. We should aim for nothing less than paradigm shift.
There’s nothing here that Marx didn’t articulate ~150 yrs ago.
They get to use an artificially cheap currency (cheap for them) to drive the largest trade imbalances on earth. They're plundering the Eurozone and EU, just look at the trade surplus they have in their own economic region ($180b trade surplus just with the EU alone). Were they using their own currency, their exports would suffer immensely. How long can that destabilizing arrangement continue? Not much longer, judging by several of their fellow Eurozone nations.
Even with all of that, their median household net worth is still lower than the US.
Seriously, I don't understand, what does a cheap currency (what does that even mean) have to do with trade surplus?
The way international trade works in theory is like this: when a country is running a trade surplus, demand for its currency increases, so that other countries can buy its goods. That extra demand drives up the exchange rate, which makes its goods more expensive, which drives down exports, which brings the balance of payments (exports minus imports) back into equilibrium.
What happens in the EU is that, because you have a shared currency, this balancing mechanism breaks down, and so trade imbalances between countries can only be corrected via deliberate subsidies (exactly as happens between rich and poor regions inside the US, for instance).
But, more than any other EU member, Germany has blocked this kind of policy, choosing to interpret trade imbalances in moral rather than economic terms (southern countries are too lazy, laid back, inefficient, etc).
Are poor regions in the US effectively assisted by subsidies? I feel in the EU the main problem is lack of integration, for example if I design a product here in The Netherlands, it would be a lot cheaper to set up a factory in say Poland or Spain, but I'd be hesitant to do that because of cultural and language barriers. I suppose that's less of a problem in the US, though in the US distances are greater.
What I'm saying is that, once you remove currency mechanisms which automatically bring into equilibrium the balance of payments between EU member states, you can have permanent trade imbalances between countries. German exports remain artificially cheap within Europe because they are Euro-denominated. So Germany keeps racking up balance-of-trade surpluses, which then allow it to go into the southern countries and buy up real estate and major companies, so that they become the effective owners of the country. Obviously they have a vested interest in maintaining the current system.
> Are poor regions in the US effectively assisted by subsidies? I feel in the EU the main problem is lack of integration, for example if I design a product here in The Netherlands, it would be a lot cheaper to set up a factory in say Poland or Spain, but I'd be hesitant to do that because of cultural and language barriers. I suppose that's less of a problem in the US, though in the US distances are greater.
There are quite a lot of factories in southern Europe, because salaries are much lower, but that does not really help the southern countries much, as the profits flow back north into their parent companies' countries. Obviously over time, salaries in the south will also tend to rise, hence the enthusiasm of Germany for an open-borders policy which floods the entire European market with cheap immigrant labour, thus holding wage levels low.