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Comment by mustafa_pasi | Hacker News Reader

> At this points it looks like Germany is almost allergic to innovation.

It is ultimately the German culture that is to blame. Germans are way too conservative and risk-averse. And pessimistic to boot. You can say all you want about bureaucracy and all that ease-of-doing-business gibberish, but ultimately it is simply that Germans do not believe they can actually innovate and are too scared to take the risk. And this is true across the whole of society, from the plumbers to the board members of Siemens and Bosch.

I could write a whole book about the problems with German culture. This is really only one aspect of a much bigger issue.

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I suppose a large component of this is that it's an ageing society, with a median age of 47 - second only to Japan, excluding microstates.

Maybe it's just a very German thing to not have too many children - if it weren't for immigration, the country would have peaked in population in the 70s.

Germany also has a housing crisis at the moment, at least in the major metro areas where the jobs are.

Tough to increase native population when you don't build enough housing because you have CO2 caps, and you also turned the existing housing stock in a speculative casino table designed to enrich the few asset owners and the banks, and hoping unrestricted immigration that will suppress wages and prop up housing prices enough to get economic "growth".

Basically, Germany is just burning the candle on both ends, economically speaking.

I guess germany's ambition has been wholly crushed following ww2. Certainly an interesting effect. All the more surprising that they managed to aspire to so much when it comes to the EU.

West Germany had a very dynamic, bustling era in the decades after WW2. The foundation established there made them the world's top export economy pound-for-pound and one of the elite manufacturing economies. If they're lacking for ambition nationally-culturally, that would be a more recent event (post Euro).

I would speculate that there is cultural identity and dynamism value in having your own independent currency, just as there is in having your own language.

Germany's economy for example would be more potent if they weren't on the Euro. Artificially cheap exports is like a sugar high that is ultimately unhealthy for them, they have ridden that horse too far (relied on it to too great of an extent).

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