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These books also have in common that they cover topics that everyone has an opinion on, and that you can get really upset and angry over while not being in a position to really do anything about the "issues" they describe. As you say it's about how "something needs to change" but it's never the reader who has to change.

> Add some fears about the before-mentioned topics and there's your new book every few months, same content, different cover.

Talkshows and other media make these books even more profitable and popular. Publishing such a book almost guarantees that you'll be able to tour talkshows for a few weeks, give interviews to newspapers etc. as free marketing for your books.

> Publishing such a book almost guarantees that you'll be able to tour talkshows for a few weeks, give interviews to newspapers etc. as free marketing for your books.

I don't really see a clear divide between book publishers and media publisher on this issue. Most news media companies are going for the same content: everything is terrible, the world is constantly very close to ending, and you need to buy this paper to find out how to save yourself today. Bad news is good news after all.

> but it's never the reader who has to change.

Well to be fair the top book was about how to eat correctly. Isn't that about how the reader has to change?

I was refering to the kind of books that the parent comment also refered to:

> There has been at least one book about how "Germany/Germans are getting dumber", "The Big Crash is Coming" or something similar on the Spiegel Bestseller list at all times.

Not all books on the list are like that but there is indeed at least one of them at any given time. And those particular books never require the reader to change.

Yeah, just as long as the masses don't change so much that they start demanding adequate compensation for their work everything is OK ;)

> According to [2], 23% of Germans own stocks (although I remember that this number used to be around 15% a few years ago)

I too had a lower number in memory (~11%), and the first result I looked up [1] showed 16%, sourced from [2].

[1]: https://orange.handelsblatt.com/artikel/62761 [2]: https://www.dai.de/files/dai_usercontent/dokumente/studien/2...

Owning stocks is actually risky - in case of market crash (and it has happened often enough so that it's definitely possible as a once-in-a-lifetime event) you can lose big especially if you counted on it for pension/retirement purposes. Investment should always be done in context. Sometimes it's right to buy stocks, sometimes it isn't. Right now the market reaching sky-highs is not natural: there is no massive gain of productivity going on across industries so there should not be a massive uplift of all future earnings/values across the board.

Tangent - ordinarily I would consider it obnoxious to point this out, but I learned something and wanted to share it. As a native speaker, "the crash didn't come" sounds wrong to me - it should be "the crash hasn't come", but it took me a while to figure out why. I think the idea is that since you are saying "yet", you need to use the present perfect ("has not come"), which can imply an indefinite time (it might happen at some point, but we're not sure when). The simple past tense, "did not come", would be if we were referring to a past set time when something was expected to happen but didn't. (This seems like a very subtle distinction that I would consider exasperating if I was learning a new language, but I take it for granted in English!)

The flip-side is that a closed set of movement related words uses a different auxhiliary than the rest of the verbs, in German as well as e.g. French. However is gone, did go, has gone, was gone do not fit the pattern.

Deriving the reason for the different helper verbs from first principles is endearing, in principle, but you've merely given names to it that you somehow take for granted. It makes sense to have cut wood, and it makes no sense to do come or have come, except for a potatoe plant which if it cometh will have a Keim or Keimblatt to be precise; I'm guessing here.

German rather differentiates is and have in the perfective, "sie ist ge-kommen", "sie hat ge-sehen"; We don't say has come because we are intuited to think it is wrong. That is, you might as sell say the crisis is not ye(t)come.

Sorry, I don't completely follow this Also it's unclear to me if the bulk of your post is referring to German or English.

You summed it up pretty well. All of which is reinforcing itself. Could turn, under the wrong circumstances, into a self fulfilling prophecy. But than isn't that valid for almost every other industrial nation as well?

I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars. Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? There seem to be very little opportunities for investment in stock market. Real estate prices too seem insane.

Real estate prices are insane probably partly due to ECB negative interest rates which make buying on credit very attractive. I read an article on HN last week about zero interest 20y loans in Denmark. The DKK is pegged to the Euro.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20647651

Add to that all time lows (zero and below) for German bond yields which has bleak consequences for long time savers (future pensioners). Germany is a nation of savers.

Swiss 10y bonds are at -1%.

We are living in interesting times.

So what's a good strategy here ? Buy stuff on credit but sell to who ?

Dunno, but normally it's not a great idea to buy real estate when prices are insane and property taxes are high. Also if you buy on credit the asset is the creditor's until you pay it off, so you can't sell.

Not in the case of real estate. There you might have to repay the outstanding debt immediately including any losses of the bank. Unless you manage to sell the financing along the real estate. For private persons, investors and developers are different I think in terms of credit conditions.

> Why do people earn only 5k after tax?

Because Germany is a high-tax-country. People also generally don't have a lot of private pension funds, that's tied up in a publicly organized system that's based on income, and "shared" between employer and employee (that is, the employer will pay half of it directly, which generally means that your pay is lower by that much). You get pension claims instead of building personal wealth.

While there's still a lot of personal wealth to be inherited over the next decades, families appear to have more difficulties building wealth. It's why, whenever somebody says "Germany is a rich country", my instinct is to ask them "what is this Germany you speak of", because there are large differences when you look at the average/median citizen, a very well-off knowledge worker or rich person, or a person living at/below the poverty line.

You and we say "after tax", but actually it's after tax, health insurance, unemployment insurance, pension fund and few more peanuts.

I'm not an expert on that since I'm self-employed, but imho that's not completely accurate. Most contributions aren't completely tax deductible (pensions: 86/88%), and many of them share a max deduction limit of 1900 Euros, so you'll quickly get above that if you're earning an average salary.

Public pensions and all the other stuff is usually directly deducted from your monthly pay, private insurance is where the deductibles come in. Not an issue for you standard stuff as an employee.

Yeah, not an "I need to pay this" issue, but I was talking about tax implications. Whether the money makes a stop in your account is one thing, whether it gets taxed as if it did is another, which I understand it is.

> Why do people earn only 5k after tax ?

It's not clear what your point of reference is. If you're wondering why it's much lower than in the US (where the 90-percentile household is probably around 170k USD pre-tax or 9k-10k post-tax), there are many many factors that contribute to the difference. The most important ones (unordered) are IMO:

- USD is probably overvalued by 15%-20% [1]. In the past 10 years, the EUR/USD rate fluctuated between 1.05 and 1.55, currently it's 1.12. It's unlikely that the relative living standards between the US and Germany fluctuated as much as 50% in this period, so a lot of the nominal incomes differences are not real.

- Americans work 30% more hours than Germans [2]

These two factors can explain most of the pre-tax income differences.

The net difference is a bit higher still, due to higher taxes/mandatory payments. I don't have references at hand, but at the €100k level, take-home pay is around 60%-62% of gross, while for an American at $112k it's closer to 70% (federal, state and payroll). No comment about justness, proper accounting for transfers, subsidies, other taxes, mandatory insurances, etc. This is a huge sprawling debate topic, but it's indisputable that disposable income at the same gross is higher in the US than in Europe. IMO, the first 2 factors accounting for differences in gross incomes are more important anyway.

A fairly mainstream economic theory is that the higher European (marginal) taxes are actually a major cause of the lower working hours (and hence lower personal income) [3]. The highest marginal rates actually don't differ that much (typically around 50% in Europe, 45% federal+state in the US), but in Europe the higher rates typically kick in at much lower levels: US marginal rate at $100k is probably around 30%, whereas in many European countries it's already in the 40%+ bracket.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-11/trump-has... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_average_annual_labor_h... [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109830788286551061

Also don't forget that, at least in Germany, after tax in casual conversation usually means net salaries after stuff like social security, health care, etc... Which might also explain some of the difference.

It's fairly similar for americans too, but most people talk about pre-tax incomes vs. post tax, health insurance & 401k deductions, money in my bank account amounts.

>Why do people earn only 5k after tax ? >I read somewhere that the German billionaire class controls 1T dollars

You answered the question yourself no ?

>Why do people earn only 5k after tax ?

As a side note, the 5k are not actually "purchasing power" or really-really "after tax" as it is usually intended in the US, in the EU there is VAT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax

which is similar to the "sales tax" in the US but that is usually much higher.

In Germany (Mehrwertsteuer) it is (relativaly) low at 19% standard.

In the US we have sales tax (and even city tax) that varies from state, county, city. Most states also have an income tax.

Do German states have income taxes?

No, states and county-equivalents get a share from the federal income tax, and add other taxes (mostly on county-level), "Gewerbesteuer", which is an additional tax on businesses, and property tax being the largest ones.

Not that I am aware of. Tax rate seems fairly constant from State to state

Bank interest rates are 0 and negative, so people can't leave their money in the bank. They either have to spend it, driving up house prices or invest in the market to get better return. With bank rates being so low, folks are paranoid and with all their nest eggs in the market, they pay more attention to it.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-08-06/how-th...