Germany is no longer exceptional, and joining the European mainstream | Hacker News Reader

Germany is no longer exceptional, and joining the European mainstream

theatlantic.com

55 pointsseydor92 comments

Germany has a lot of things going for it, but it‘s weaknesses become really apparent at the moment:

- finance happens elsewhere, no world-leading banks anymore, meaning it‘s difficult to get capital, unless you‘re big corp

- no natural ressources to speak of, so the only indirectly tradable good is ingenuity, unfortunately too little happening in tech or services

- energy prices have balooned, which costs its industrial base dearly

- China has become a testy trading partner, as they now have transfered most of the know-how to DIY

- starting a company is almost surely easier elsewhere (except for maybe France, Italy, or Spain)

- mostly mediocre universities. the best academics are typically leaving and don‘t look back.

The biggest weakness of Germany is its unending love affair with the totalitarian Russia, a setup lasting since centuries and bringing misery to millions.

Germany has a few premier universities, but they still haven't recovered from the Nazi era.

German universities tend to have an idiosyncratic research group structure that tends to underpay promising young talent, and mires that talent in a few extra loops of bureaucracy. A few of them are introducing a more "standard" tenure-track, which will help young academics make a like-for-like comparison.

It's unlikely that they'll be pay-competitive with American R1s, though.

You are aware that much of the research is done outside of universities?

https://www.fraunhofer.de/en.html

https://www.mpg.de/en

https://www.helmholtz.de/en/

Sure, and their Federal labs are well-respected too:

https://ptb.de/

My post was about universities, not every research position available in the country.

and my post was that universities may have different tasks.

There is nothing left of the Nazi era in Germany. The leadership was executed in the Nuremberg show trials and the scientists were given an offer they couldn't resist or were outright kidnapped by the Soviet Union and United States. Nazi scientists made the US space program successful.

"Nothing left" isn't right. There are memorials, monuments, and several notable absences. Emmy Noether died in America, after all.

What memorials and monuments honoring the Nazis are left in Germany? There are none.

The last time I was in Berlin I found the Siegessäule where Speer moved it, largely as Speer modified it.

But less flippantly: the monuments and memorials are to people lost during the Nazi era.

Show trials?

Not nearly enough executions happened that should have.

Who was left out?

You mentioned them yourself. Operation Paperclip. These monsters got to live normal lives when they should have been thrown into a cave and the entrance demolished.

> Germany has a few premier universities, but they still haven't recovered from the Nazi era.

Dude, under which rock have you been hiding?! How does "not recovered from the Nazi era" manifest in your opinion?

Power, prestige, and productivity. Before the Nazis fucked up Germany its universities were better regarded than America's. Now, they're not as well regarded. They lost a lot of capability and prestige, and gained a little back. They haven't recovered to where they were.

What rock have I been working under? I've spent the last decade in American and German labs my dude.

Göttingen. We can know and we shall know.

1) Deutsch Bank ruined their rep.

2) talented/skilled workers?

3) They committed energy suicide by removing the nuclear option

4) What?

5) True

6) Seems to be happening all over though, degradation of education

> 2) talented/skilled workers?

In three places: Munich, Hamburg, Berlin. Everywhere else it's pretty difficult to find solid people.

> 4) What?

Haven't you noticed how much of the auto industry know-how moved to China? German auto industry bets on China to grow.

This is a gross misclassification, and both talent and motivation are not geographically constrained in any way. I dont see how you can justify an assertion like that.

Not constraint, yet Audi, a famous Germany automaker can’t build its own EV platform, can’t even use its parent’s platform (VW) and has to resort to buying it from China. That shows how slow and risk adverse the Germany’s car industry has become.

https://electrek.co/2023/07/20/chinas-saic-motor-confirms-pa...

The education system in Germany is totally broken. One selects a path at a very early stage in life. If that goes wrong, it is extremely difficult to switch to another job or education path. Almost every industry requires three to five year education. While in that education, one can work as an Azubi before Ausbildung. The pay as an Azubi is atrocious. Switching industries is really difficult. The country has chronic problems with Handwerker, bakers, doctors, teachers, skilled labor, and so on. This protective education system doesn’t make things easier. It’s almost impossible to earn your title through experience. All of that successfully prevents skilled workers moving between industries.

You know what, on a second thought I agree it is a misclassification. I was commenting from the place where I sit. It depends on the industry. Different talents in different places settling close to the centers relevant to the industry in question. However, across all industries companies struggle to find enough talent.

Getting the feeling that the narrative "Germany is failing" is being pushed really hard this summer.

Yeah, Germany is bad, Europe is falling etc.

My pet peeve theory is that some Americans discovered life in Europe has several advantages and are thinking of moving. This is not ideal for the American economy so a narrative is created making people think there is something bad happening in Europe (bad and good things have been happening all the time, so basically you can write anything you want depending on which part and timeframe you pick and still claim you just describe facts).

I have the completely opposite impression. Europe can do no wrong, American is bad. That sentiment is much more popular than the other way around, even in a post about how much bigger American economy has become compared to Europe [1].

You yourself is getting defensive about an article in a publication that is far from promoting American exceptionalism (check it's homepage), written by a Swiss with an European education, living in Europe, with a career covering Europe's affairs [2]

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36763419 [2] - https://www.fpri.org/contributor/joseph-de-weck/

My theory as well, the most obvious one is the FUD around the real estate market in Spain

2024 will for sure be fun to watch (US presidential election)

As a German i gotta say the current government is really incompetent so naturally our economy is weakened

Perhaps it is the new Japan is failing (since at least 70 years). I would still take Japan before 90% of western countries though.

it's a sequel to popular predictions like the Euro will collapse tomorrow, the EU will collapse, Germany will be de-industrialized, with renewable energy the grid will collapse, ... and much more. It's largely part of a propaganda war.

Given that Russia used his energy exports to Europe as a weapon, things are getting more expensive and complicated, but Russia has failed so far to achieve its goals. One of these goals was to destabilize European countries with propaganda and energy shortages.

Germany hosts now a million refugees from the Ukraine and billions of Euros are being spend to provide help and to dampen the economic impact. A large part of the population sees that life gets more expensive. Countries like Poland are even more affected.

Positive effects: the need for the EU and NATO is clearer than ever. Also positive: the US provides a lot of support, thanks to the Biden administration.

The humanistic route might not be the cheapest one short term, but it's been shown again and again to be the correct one. Because no straight-thinking individual wants to be subjected to an overtly painful existence.

Here is for hoping the impact of the straight-thinking overpowers that of the rest.

Not saying there's no problems, but a beneficial system can self-correct for more benefit.

https://archive.is/Vz9VP

There's some potentially good points in here, but

> the once slightly rundown Berlin Ku’damm feels more and more like the manicured Avenue Montaigne in Paris

lol what, when was Ku'damm "slightly rundown", have you been literally anywhere else in the city?

I hate this kind of misleading two step:

“ per capita GDP in the former GDR is higher than in many regions in northern France. Unemployment, at 2.9 percent, is well below the U.S. or EU average, even though Germany took in a million Syrians in 2015 and another million Ukrainians in 2022. Berlin remains the biggest financial contributor to the EU”

But?

“ The country’s economy is fragile, and the rise of the AfD makes its politics as unpredictable as those of Austria or Italy. ”

That’s it. That’s basically the whole article. Germany still has an exceptional economy but it has a right wing party that is surging (like everyone else) and it’s economy is somehow “fragile” which apparently is justified by “German GDP has roughly stagnated since 2019. And German manufacturing is the main problem: Industrial output lags pre-pandemic levels by some 5 percent.”

I don’t know, seems fine. In any case, seems a very weak case for the sky to be falling in Germany. It’s just some mundane challenges in a still robust economy dressed up with a provocative headline.

(By the way, “roughly stagnated” can be translated as “not stagnated”. I knew that even before finding https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp because it’s a weasel term)

Leftie journalists cannot admit that all over Europe people vote for "far-right" parties because they are fed up with forced social engineering, activist green agenda, out of control imigration policy and growing taxes..They need external explanations...

Italy, Sweden, Finland, Holland, tomorrow Spain and Germany, Poland soon...

And it is all fruits of labour of current European Comission...

> I don’t know, seems fine.

Sure, on paper. However, energy prices and increasing curbing down on CO2 emissions drive heavy industry (the one Germany was built on) away from Germany. It's getting worse and this is the story line in the mainstream media.

The best example here is Viessmann take over by Carrier Global. In the midst of a heat pump boom, a Germany company manufacturing heat pumps sells itself to an American business: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/us-takeover-german-heat.... The reason? Many believe it's down to how expensive and difficult it is to manufacture these in the EU in the current eco climate.

This shows where the German industry is heading. The media often reports that about 30% of heavy manufacturing industry is thinking of leaving Germany and moving to the US or other places.

> The media often reports that about 30% of heavy manufacturing industry is thinking of leaving Germany and moving to the US or other places.

Especially because the US provides a lot of local subsidies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act

Europe itself has a lot of local subsidies. Airbus, the space industry, France’s agriculture, the list goes on. Europe also tries to attract chipmakers like TSMC or Intel to open plants there with generous incentive. Intel is said to get $10 billions from Germany:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/chipmakers-plans-factorie...

The US also has a lot subsidies & protectionism: Boeing, the space industry, agriculture, chip industry, ... the US tries to get TSMC and others to open plants there with generous incentives, etc

Plus they added even more subsidies and protectionism lately.

It’s one thing to say German economy is getting worse, I don’t take issue with that. It’s another thing entirely to say it’s “no longer exceptional”.

Especially while quoting exceptional stats like lower unemployment than US and rest of continent.

All economies have challenges but the article made a more novel claim than that and failed to prove it by quite a ways IMO.

>Berlin remains the biggest financial contributor to the EU

This is unsurprising for the EU's largest population, though.

>I knew that even before finding https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp because it’s a weasel term

Looks to me like ~1% annual average since 2018 which is not promising to put it mildly.

> This is unsurprising for the EU's largest population, though.

It's more difficult. The contribution to the EU depend on the economic situation. Germany is the largest net (!!) contributor, by far.

Countries pay to the EU and receive from the EU. A poor EU country with large population will receive much more than they pay.

For example France has half of Germany's net contribution, but does have more than half of Germany's population.

Poland OTOH net receives almost half of what Germany pays.

Most EU countries receive more from the EU than they pay.

Germany is the largest net contributor and the third largest per capita net contributor.

9 countries pay more than they receive and 18 countries receive more than they pay. Of the net contributors, Germany is paying by far the largest amount.

For example: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...

These contribution calculations are almost always misleading. The right wing parties (in particular the AFD) have been making these sort of calculations for a long time arguing that the EU is a money sink. The reality is that Germanys economy has likely been the biggest beneficiary of the integrated market offered by the EU. So the EU has been a huge net gain for Germany.

It's not misleading at all.

It here also means that Germany has a strong economy to be able to provide that amount of financial support for the development of the EU. And this strength is not just depending on the number of people (as claimed above), but also on the state of the countries economic development.

> So the EU has been a huge net gain for Germany.

sure, as it has been for other countries

I just read an article on how social media has had devastating consequences on par with the dropping of atomic weapons at the end of WW2. The main devastation the author pointed to? Right wing politics becoming vaguely more popular.

A lot of the “wow, that was bad” realization with nukes came decades later. The same may be true for social media.

We’ve yet to know what a generation raised on the stuff looks like 20-30 years later.

The price of electricity has been falling in Germany since the beginning of the year, the share of renewable energies in the electricity supply has risen > 65%. The level of gas storage is 20% higher than in recent years, even though there is no more gas flowing from Russia. Nevertheless, the price of gas and heating oil is falling in Germany. It seems to me that the catastrophic news regarding energy blackout etc. in Germany of the last year were slightly exaggerated.

But some people like the author of that article haven’t noticed that, yet.

https://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/energiemonitor-deutschland-ga...

> The party also wants the country to stop using the Euro and dissolve the European Parliament.

Let's be honest, this will never ever happen. Germany has a huge influence in the EU and on the euro, why would they stop using it?!

This is just the start of Germany's economic erosion. China will hollow out their higher-end industrial economy, their manufacturing export juggernaut. It already happened to the US, now it's Germany's turn. They'll have to learn new ways to compete, as the US has had to.

Not to mention Germany almost entirely missing the tech age has done extraordinary damage to its potential, wealth, future, etc. There was no good reason that had to happen, they have the talent and education to have a massive tech industry. Fixing this huge hole in their economy would be a big help.

Wrote a little 300 word essay on this, and I was prepared to add the comment until i realized it does not really matter. The situaton(or at least my opinion/response) can be explained in a simple phrase: Good, 10-20 years of failed policies get you this. Especially everything post 2015. Not 'happy' per se at this analysis/realization, but the fact is that Germany and Europe (or at least the western big european powers, wink) reaped what they sow: detrimental policies NOT willed by the european citizens.

“…Chancellor Angela Merkel once said, “I think of airtight windows. No other country can build as airtight and as beautiful windows.”“

That is still true. Quality of houses and apartments in Germany is incredibly high compared to the rest of the world.

Very flowery and verbose article... till I ran into the paywall

This is called Hacker News for a reason, boy...

> A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.

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

They're a damn pain. It'd be nice if HN flagged them with a red asterisk or such.

Sites with paywalls that can't be bypassed are already banned.

Yeah, we don't want ads, but also don't want to pay.

We don’t want to pay to unblock a single random article on a random website. Also I personally don’t want to pay to read paywalled articles, that’s correct too. I just immediately close the tab.

Germany was uber green for like 50 years, yet it failed to deliver technological breakthrough. All green bets like diesel, biomass, natural gas, wind and solar, failed to deliver. And current leader in solar and batteries is China.

Germany is now burning huge amount of coal, and importing it across globe from South America. And yet it struggles to heat it's houses.

Current German economy is not sustainable without cheap energy.

None of this is true. Germany has had a conservative government from 1982 to 1999, and from 2005 to 2021. The Green party has been in the government as a junior partner only once from 1999 to 2005. The conservative governments mainly bet on nuclear (until Fukushima) and on cheap russian gas, while neglecting renewables. Coal consumption has dropped significantly in the last decades with a small resurgence last year due to the russian gas embargo. Nonetheless, the gas supply for heating never ran low since the russian invasion.

Is Germany on a fault line?

Yes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Erdbebenzonen.png

All of Germany is less shaky than zone 4, according to the map you link to. In comparison, half the population of California lives in zone 4 if I recall correctly.

Green party is irrelevant in this.

Germany had huge scare from Chernobyl. On 2006 there was no single student graduating from nuclear energy, in entire country! How did they bet on nuclear energy?

Parts of HN continue to live in an alternative reality. I fail to grasp how this obviously factually wrong comment can even exist, let alone be a top comment.

* Germany's coal use is now at a historic minimum, comparable to the 2020 COVID year outlier

* Germany does not use coal for heating

* Germany does not struggle to heat its homes. Even if it did, it was around 16 degrees Celsius around new year's, so people did not need to heat much in the warm winter

* Solar, wind and renewables in general are one of the most exciting and fastest developing industries in the world

Could people check basic easy to find facts before posting?

But Germany hardly has any renewable options.

Why’d they screw up Nuclear so badly?

Their “green” approach had a lot of problems

Last year they passed law to reduce heating temperatures. Using radiators too much could be fined.

> Germany's coal use is now at a historic minimum,

With coal powerplants in hot standby for wind? And imports from other countries that use coal heavily?

> Solar, wind ... exciting and fastest developing

That is the point! It should not be exiting and developing. By now it should be booring and reliable.

The law was not changed to reduce heating temperatures since you can regulate temperature yourself. The law defines a minimal temperature that needs to be reached, otherwise you are entitled to have the heating fixed or get your rent reduced. This minimum was reduced. Ironically this helped my neighbor finally get her heating fixed since she realized she can complain about this to her landlord and they fixed it fast once she did that.

Again, coal use is at a historic minimum and this is easy to find. Here is the chart for electricity production until 2022 [1] and here is the data for the first half of this year [2]:

> The electricity production from lignite was down 21 percent, hard coal was down 23 percent, natural gas was down 4 percent, and nuclear declined by 57 percent, compared to 2022 values.

As far as I know heating with coal is negligible.

I don't get your point about renewables - their expansion has been on a basically exponential curve, but the starting point was practically zero. The world is installing massive amounts and will continue to do so - Germany played a large role in that.

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

[2] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/press-media/press-releases/...

> Using radiators too much could be fined.

Source?

> All green bets like diesel, biomass, natural gas

That's a huge clue right there. Germany bet on the most conservative solutions (keeping their diesel cars and house heating systems) and guess what, they don't work. Burning food for energy was never going to be good idea, and biodiesel was never going be clean enough for cars, but they went for it anyway because they didn't dare touch the auto companies.

It was (sadly) never uber green. It was always mostly coal based. These green bets you are talking about, just like e-fuels today, were mostly greenwashing gimmicks pushed by the industry.

Both German export to China and German automotive industry faced disruptions. China's economy slowed down and China anyway can do without German technology at this point. And German automotive industry cannot compete with EV's yet. BYD is replacing Volkswagen.

End of cheap gas is just a cherry on top (de-industralizing German Chemical sector which moves outside Europe).

But Germany is capable country in crisis. They will overcame...

> During the last 26 years the exports of Germany to China have increased at an annualized rate of 11.8%, from $6.58B in 1995 to $121B in 2021.

https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/chn/partner/d...

EVs are not disruption, those are pushed by regulations and subsidies. Germans basically decided to dismantle their car manufacturing industry.

> pushed by regulations and subsidies

a sort of disruption it is... ;-)

Because of stupid decisions like shutting down nuclear plants. The greens are going to lose big time in the next election. But nonetheless AFAIK Germany is still one of the largest countries pushing for renewable energy.

It was not stupid decision. Those plants were at end of their life, extending their life would be very expensive. There were no major investment in this industry for past 20 years. French nuclear plants have the same problem, and will be retiring soon.

They almost cost nothing to start again

https://twitter.com/energybants/status/1681951312492253185

> Krümmel, big enough to power a million people, still has an operating license despite closing 2011: saved by antinuclear politics, ironically

I don't think this reactor has a license. Currently it is planned to dismantle it , soon. The reactor was especially ill fated, since it was plagued with a series of serious problems.

To get it running again, would be expensive.

Shows that the guy posting on Twitter has no idea about the actual reactor.

Turns out the real force behind German engineering was cheap gas after all

It Is Difficult to Get a Country to Change Something When Their Profits Depend on not Charging It.

It's not just solar and batteries China has a lead in. ICE cars requires many precise manufacturing that Germany has lots of experience with.

Electric cars are way more simpler and China has a leg up here.

They are simpler but that doesn’t mean they are more reliable yet.

At least in the US electric cars score poor reliability pretty consistently, because there’s a lack of maturity and quality.

I'm not taking about reliability. I'm talking about complexity.

ICE have a method of converting gasoline explosions to rotational energy which powers the drive and the battery.

Electric car have a method of converting electrical potential to rotational energy.

Germany is very specialized in making precise part for ICE that just don't exist in Electrical cars. Could they be reoriented for something more? Maybe but not in near term.

How can we deliver when there are laws where anyone can block wind energy only because they don't like how it disturbs the beauty of the landscape?!?

Back home in Portugal there is no discussion, wind parks are built and that is it.

Yup -- people don't realize that if you want to get large-scale projects done, you have to step on a few people's toes.

And kill scores of birds of prey and wildfowl?

Wind turbines kill such a small number of birds compared to cats, cars, windows, powerlines etc.

All the countries that have won wind parks over Germany still have their nature just fine.

Even better, their nature appreciates the amount of green energy being generated, that Germany still is catching up to.

Same thing happens even if you build a house. Every square foot of land human take, removes a square foot of land for animals, bugs, plants, fungi. It may be less impactful to the human psyche when it's indirect damage, but it's still damage.

Bald eagles, buzzards, griffon, sea eagles, red kites, ospreys, harriers, merlins, eagle owls, kestrels, Egyptian vultures and so on do not fly in to houses on a daily basis.

What a ludicrous comparison.

It's not about flying into them. It's about removing livable and forageable space. It indirectly leads to the death and reduction of living things.

The focus on the visceral thought of a bird flying into something is what I meant about being impactful on the human psyche.

Are you against windows as well? Those kill billions of birs.

Start by banning cars, then we can have the wildlife discussion.

Now that it is beyond doubt, do not forget how German media and journalists have been misrepresenting and lying about their green energy successes for decades.

Am I allowed to make an assumption?

Chinas biggest advantage over anyone are their industrial spies. China has been unseen in the early 2000s, but they sucked up everything they could! I think the rebuilding Neuschwanstein in China should have been a huge warning sign then. After that they just used their brightest people (and they have a lot!) to spy on every piece of technology they can. How could they have become so big so fast?

German IT infrastructure made it easy to go everywhere and just grab what they wanted...

And now we are whining about their technologic advantage.

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