Hacker News Reader

Comment by killerpopiller | Hacker News Reader

for example?

East Germans are a lot poorer, the East German economy is a lot lower productivity and investment, and politically the old DDR states lean a bit more right (ripe area for AfD recruitment).

Some West germans still look down on Ossies, even though Merkel was one herself. It's a lot like how northern states look down on southern states in the U.S.

Interestingly enough, the east is the most prolific voting area for both far right and the left. Both AfD and Die Linke had their best results in the eastern states. Might be connected to the horseshoe theory, I'm thinking. Where voters don't have a specific connection to any one political mindset so they choose the party that is the most extreme in their mind and won't hesitate to switch to another more extreme party, even if they switch from far left to far right because they aren't affiliated with a specific political mindset.

On the way between Hamburg and Berlin, there's an area that looks like a deserted warzone. It's where all the young people came from that moved to big cities for the better job opportunities. The people that remain are elderly / unemployed, so naturally those villages will decay. The east had quite some areas that relied on local industry and/or farming for people's income. During the unification, most industry was auctioned off to westerners, so the east took a pretty big hit, both in terms of losing company tax revenue and in terms of losing high-skilled labor.

There are a lot of areas in the east that are abandoned and falling into decay.

This is the precise problem that rural America has with youth abandoning the rural areas.

The cure for this is immigration, but the people that remain in the rural areas are very right wing and very xenophobic.

That cure is worse than the disease. We don't need people living all over for no good reason.

Here's a good image detailing the wage differences between East-West. Similar charts can be found for GDP, quality of life, and other assorted economic measures. As well as many cultural differentiators like religion. The wall fell decades ago, but the impacts remain, therefore sometimes it makes sense to distinguish between the two.

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fvoxeu.org...

You probably want to include the context for the graphic.

"Average Wage in Germany by County

Notes: Average daily wages obtained from a 50% random sample of establishments via the Establishment History Panel (BHP) of the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). Real wages are expressed in 2007 euros valued in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, using county-specific prices. East–West border is drawn for clarification; there is no border today."

Ignoring Merkel and the former President Gauck, the percentage of Ossis in prestigious, affluent or influential positions is very subpar. Enterpreneurs, CEOs, well-known artists, professors, generals, judges ... are disproportionally Wessis, and immigrated Wessis dominate in those positions even in former GDR.

IIRC the discrepancy between population share and elite share for Ossis is even worse than for American blacks.

Look at a night time aerial photo of Berlin, you can still see where the wall was (via the color temp of the lights). Reintegration takes a while.

That special photo is really old by now. Today, you have to know where the wall was to know. Berlin has switched to LED-lighting for all new street lights.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/06/east-german...

Found this analysis of the wealth gap between east and west germans: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/121292/1/837461987.p...

TL;DR: at the 50th percentile, net worth of west germans was ~40k in 2012 vs ~14k for east germans (in euros).

https://vividmaps.com/germany-is-still-divided-by-east-and-w...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com