Germany to Pass Japan as Third-Largest Economy, Helped by Weak Yen
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
When looking at more common jobs, it's quite hard to find a German when you pass by any construction site. In fact, I can speak to a good amount of the workers in my native language.
That's news to me. Even in London is not that immigrant heavy unless you consider the Europeans immigrants.
If I were to count only people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia as immigrants, probably closer to 35%.
That's not really the case within the EU at least it's not black and white. You have the same rights as the "native" population. What makes you an immigrat? People in the U.S don't say they immigrate when they move from one state to another...they just move and I think that's the case with the EU as well.
* I didn't speak the language when I moved here. I do now, but I still have a heavy accent that immediately tells everyone I wasn't born here.
* People still casually discriminate against me. I apply with a (fake) German name to apartments. Obviously I use my real name when I meet them and sign the documents, but it has helped me get the foot in the door many times before.
* I did go to school in Germany, and those are the the only Germans I'm friends with. I've made friends with other immigrants, but German society is much harder to break into.
* I can't vote in elections (which is fair, to be clear).
* While I understand German culture now, I don't understand it like a German does. It's kind of hard to quantify the impact of this but while I can understand what's expected of me and why people act in certain ways, it still feels like doing a dance rather than a mutual shared understanding.
All that said.. I feel pretty at place here. Living somewhere for a long time tends to do that. But you still never get over the feeling that you're some guy living in a place, rather than being of that place. It's more of a 50/50.. sometimes you feel as if you've always been there, and sometimes as if you just came that day.
It's true that you can't vote in national elections but you can vote on local elections[0].
Usually you need just 5 years(on most EU countries)to get the citizenship to able to have this remaining right vote on national elections.
Now my question to you is: are you still an immigrant after you get the citizenship? What's different?
[0] "Every citizen of the Union has the right to vote and to stand as a candidate at municipal elections in the EU country in which he or she resides under the same conditions as nationals of that country."
> are you still an immigrant after you get the citizenship?
Yes. Because I immigrated here rather than being born.
Based on your rationale you can end-up with race discrimination and nazi stuff. (e.g even if you are born in the same country your parents were immigrants so you are still a kind of non-native and so on).
The cultural issue goes both ways. The wave of immigration may make the natives feel discriminated as well. That doesn't make them "immigrants".
Almost the same rights but not quite. You are also confining this issue to a purely legal standpoint -- my ability to travel the EU freely does not mean that I am Italian, for example.
edit: after rereading your comment, perhaps this passage refers to after I hypothetically take my citizenship. To answer that, I would consider myself then both German and an immigrant.
The point is, I do not identify as German, and Germans do not think I am German. I am influenced by German culture of course, having lived here long enough, but I am not strongly enough influenced to call myself German. I have younger siblings who are born here and have no memories of our family's homeland. I think of them as German, since they are in every way so -- they speak German, have German mannerisms and ideas, and do not understand a single bit of the culture of where I was born. They do not have German citizenship, but that doesn't matter at all since it's just who they are.
I hope this clears up my feelings on this topic.
That aside my point is that it's wrong to put an immigrant on a visa to Germany on equal footing with an EU citizen. The former "may be deported" at any time for various reasons while the later has *all the rights german people have.
Discrimination happens even between different regions, the most common being in the U.S(i.e souther accents). There is also race discrimination even for "native" people. That doesn't make all the black, yellow people immigrants from Africa, Asia etc.
For those unaware, this is commonplace for various industries in the US. The H1B Visa program is a grind-house for companies like FAANG, and I imagine the EU and other European nations have taken note to utilize the same policy.
If there is an EU citizen applicant suitable for the job, they get it. If there isn't, anyone can.
Update: there are of course also other arrivals, but the Syrians make the bulk of them.
Edit: Knowing HN, I'll be the one called racist as opposed to the comment right next to me that's saying terrible things about Muslims.
The problem with this approach is that, the compensation becomes high for no good reason and since less people are working the output declines. Everything becomes more expensive because the consumption stays the same or higher but the production don't follow. Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
Immigrants that work create prosperity. If you are having trouble competing with a newcomers who barely speak the language, don't know anything of your culture and they grew up in a much poorer conditions in a country with much less opportunities, then it's on you. You should have taken advantage of living in this rich country that has given you all kind of opportunities, if you can't I don't see moral obligation to pay you well just because you are local.
People who want to participate in the society, create value and be compensated for it should not be stopped from doing it just because it might hurt someone else's prospect. This is basically the same argument against technology where some people would argue that we should limit robots and automation so that the workers can keep their jobs.
People are scared of change and don't want competition but if we artificially limit competition, the whole society will end up uncompetitive and catastrophe can happen. Protectionism is very dangerous, look what's happening to VW.
I swear I encountered the same argument in Britain after EU enlargement in 2004, when they opened for all citizens of new countries. Cunningly DACH countries fiercely negotiated at that time the longest possible transition periods.
If you want to see a higher number in the bank account and pay higher numbers for everything, be my guest but that's not going to solve your problems. Inflation is not a saviour.
It's funny to blame others for being wage dumped on as being their own fault, as long as it's not your job that's threatened form wage dumping.
That's made up word. It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete. If you don't want wages go below some level simply set the minimum wage to that level.
What's next? Are we going to start issuing licenses for using JavaScript because the tech sector slowed and it's easy to learn a JS framework to compete for the available jobs?
Are you literate?
> It's actually competition and everyone has right to compete.
Ah yes, the "free market" argument again.
You see, when you can't afford a house anymore because the central bank and government fucked you over and your wages are stagnating thanks to unfair competition from migrant workers, then there's nothing we can do about it it's just the "free market supply and demand".
But when workers' wages start getting too high for employers' linking as he can only get a platinum trim yacht instead of the diamond one, then it's no longer the hand of the free market working in the workers' favor but it's now called a "labor shortage" so all unions must be defanged and immigration barriers must be removed to ease the so called "labor shortage".
Now that's propaganda.
I recommend everyone to watch the series called "Benefits Britain: Life on the Dole" (mostly available on YT). I don't even blame these people, they are just doing what the system lets them get away with.
Imagine you graduate form university and apply for jobs where your employer receives 1 resume for every position open. What happens with your bargaining power when your employer can now hire from anywhere in the world without any visa barriers and now receives 200 resumes for the same position?
"Negociate"?
> Workers being wage dumped on by cheaper more desperate workforce...
"Wage dump" - that word again. So this is how people pick up policital slogans and start repeating them, without even thinking about how much of it is true. I don't think it is true.
> people choosing to live on the dole because they're fuckups at life
Think about who is paying for their benefits.
> What happens with your bargaining power when your employer can now hire from anywhere in the world without any visa barriers
Right, because that's what's going on in the UK. I don't think anyone suggested anything even remotely like that. In fact, I don't know of any country that does that.
Yes, negociate, bargain, haggle, call it whatever you want. Everyone negociates their wage, or at least tries to. Do you not where you live?
>"Wage dump" - that word again. So this is how people pick up policital slogans and start repeating them, without even thinking about how much of it is true. I don't think it is true.
What's your point? That if your boss would have 10x the number of candidates your wages and negotiation power wouldn't tank?
Not for no good reason - supply and demand. Literally the most important corner stone of any capitalistic system. The rest of your paragraph is based on your forced assumption of "no reason".
> Maybe you make more money by not letting a Syrian immigrant to cook food and compete with you but you also pay more to have your apartment painted because they didn't let some other Syrian immigrant compete in the painting business.
I'd say you're undervaluing apartment painting. Which is obvious since you're advocating having to fly in people from a destroyed country to do it.
In other words: Low paying jobs wouldn't sit around for long going undone. The market would adjust. Either they're jobs that shouldn't exist in the first place and need to vanish, or they are underpaid and the market would adjust by paying them better.
Try envisioning a world where a person who does a hard shitty job gets paid the same as a highly trained person sitting in front of a PC all day. Cleaning toilets is essential for our society to function and should be a respectable profession. It might not take a lot of education, but it's a hard job none the less The only reason hard jobs like this are not paid what they're worth, is trickery like immigration.
What would increase the output of the society? Employed people or unemployed people? It's employed people, so as long as the newcomers are employed and produce more than they consume everyone will be better off.
Forget the numbers, those are just for bookkeeping. You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
You're using the word compensation ambiguously. Your sentence is thus nonsense as I cannot parse what you meant. Was that your point?
> You are not going to be better off if you you are compensated better due to staff shortages and then pay more due to staff shortages.
Are you saying that keeping payment low is good for people because it also keeps inflation low? I'm sure everyone will agree and take a pay cut any moment now :)
"Output" is vague and not an agreed upon ultimate goal. Slave colonies have lots of "output".
"Everything becomes more expensive" is vague and unsupported enough to be noise.
"Immigrants create prosperity" is dime store propaganda and noise. It isn't necessarily true nor false. Your presentation of it is negatively persuasive, howerever.
Your statement about "people who want to participate should have the right even if it hurts others" is simply a zero borders argument to permanently bottom out most wages. It isn't a pro technology argument. Couching its opposition as an anti-tech argument is bizarre mental gymnastics that isn't cogent.
"People are scared of change" is a generalized a bullying tactic meant to insult people in case none of your other arguments hit the mark.
Your argument that labor "competition" can't be limited by borders, lest society becomes uncompetitive and catastrophic, isn't born out by the evidence in any productive nation to include Germany. It's also a statement that is embarassed by your thesaurus abuse of alarmist adjectives. Which in turn belie any confidence that your arguments are persuasive.
That’s expected and instead you’ll probably get a lecture on how great capitalism is.
> because their energy usage grew way less than their GDP last year
Their main energy pipeline got blown up by an unknown assailant last year. They sanctioned Russia and thus stopped importing their energy and switched to US liquified gas for industrial use that's being shipped by ships and thus 2x more expensive. The US slapped another 2x on the price, just because they could.
Personnal service and agriculture in particular.
Less than 50% are employed 5 years after arrival, in a country with 5.7% unemployment.
I imagine adults who don't speak the language, require financial assistance, etc, will be a net drain from a tax perspective on a society, esp. when you factor in the high CoL. Its hard enough for the average naturalized citizen to be a net positive from a tax perspective, let alone someone from an entirely different world. An inconvenient/unpopular, but obvious truth.
What about all the other immigrants from EU or abroad whose higher education was not paid by Germany and they immigrate to Germany? Surely that is a positive. Germany is benefiting from paid-by-somebody-else qualified applicants.
The latter isn't really a requirement, at least when working in tech. I barely speak any German at all in my job, and I'm a German dude working at a German company. All companies I worked for since 2010 had English as "company language", and immigrants were in the majority (mostly from other European countries, but also US and Canada).
I know many engineers etc. working as taxi drivers or dish washers because their (excellent!) degree gets not accepted in DE.
At the same time industry is whining about "fachkräftemangel" - this could be a solved problem tomorrow if politics did not try to block immigrants wherever possible.
I would go so far as to say that the employment rate is effectively always 95%+ for every population and that the only question is whether people are working in the formal economy, in school, informally working, caring, or doing any number of other activities that make up our human society.
Maybe you can't get a mortgage, but you can get a house.
Is that actually worse than getting a mortgage?
I don't know but I think it becomes obvious that you are not employed the moment you want to move out. The house becomes a prison.
According to the chart in the article, the employment rate looks like 56-57% for men and just under 30% for women.
To be as generous to this hypothesis as possible, we'll say 57% for men and 29% for women.
In that case, the relevant population is 71% men.
This is not a political agenda. These are just facts.
[1]: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/wirtschaft/arbeitsmarkt-fuer-flu...
[2]: https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2023-10/ukraine-gefl...
[3]: https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article168661565/Tuerkischsta....
[4]: https://mediendienst-integration.de/integration/arbeitsmarkt...
What the US does with oil makes even less sense.
What the US does with the transportation of oil makes even lesser sense. If climate crisis is existential it seems like it would be worth having a few oil spills along a pipeline to save some carbon.
Not at the distances this short. If anything happens to any of the nuclear plants in France the pollution will reach Germany within 24 hours.
I've actually seen this used as an argument FOR building nuclear power plants in Poland: we already have like 10 such plants within 200 miles from our borders, so we already have all of the risks, but none of the benefits.
And even in the worst case scenario the farther you are away the better.
I'm not sure if I understand that line of thinking. While the nuclear exit of Germany may have been short-sighted, it is what it is now. And when shit hits the fan in France because their power plants are down for maintenance or a lack of suitable coolant water, Germany exports electricity to France. That's what a supra-national electricity grid is for and that's not a topic that ever was open for debate.
Also, regarding the decision Germany made regarding nuclear power, I am not sure if it actually was the wrong one. Looking at the cost overruns and extended timelines of essentially any new nuclear reactor construction, the people complaining about nuclear power not being economically viable may have a point. Whether the much proposed alternative of small scale nuclear reactors can live up to it's promise on any kind of meaningful scale remains to be seen.
What I think is the biggest failure of German energy policy is the fact that Germany went from a leader in renewable technology to desperately lacking behind. While this demise was partially driven by the companies themselves, some extremely short sighted policy failures also are to blame.
As for the alleged cooling water shortages, they are not shortages but regulatory limits on downstream water temperature - which only concerns some riverine plants in summer. With three litres evaporated per kW/h produced, plants with evaporative cooling are very far from enduring a water supply constraint.
The other side argue France can do it using their own funds if they deem it necessary.
https://www.ft.com/content/b1dbd7b4-d8b9-45eb-bd18-4976f7c9a...
If taking into account the System LCOE (sum of generation, integration and storage costs to reach equivalent stable supply), then nuclear wins - and that doesn't even account for the VRE's huge land use.
Nuclear is a technological dead-end economically. Perfect for niche applications like submarines, but not for the grid.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
[2]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03014...
I'd rather not get flagged.
Not only that, denial of it appears to have been one of the instigating factors in launching far right parties to prominence.
And wow, it was in 2015? Forgot that it was almost a decade ago... People really, really should be able to move on... Well, they tried, but the endangered, lawless swimming pool narrative didn't really catch on, did it?
But even in regards to this topic the small percentage of sales Germany manufactures might have missed out on EVs could easily be overcome with advertising or other external factors.
So I see no reason why banning non EV by 2030 in some countries is impossible, Germany and many similar countries are ahead of the curve needed to get there.
But where the country is spectacular: in charging infrastructure. It has one of or even the densest high-performance-charger network in the world. 350kw chargers: world leading. Sure, the network is not finished yet. But having to actually have an electric car, Germany is one of the best places to be.
Few people noticed: Germany has also the leading hydrogen-fuelstation network outside Japan and South Korea.
I'm a _little_ confused by this narrative. VW Group is the largest seller of electric vehicles to the EU market. BMW is also pretty big. I mean, could German manufacturers be _more_ dominant? Perhaps, but it's certainly not a Toyota type case.
(I actually wonder how much of this is driven purely by the extreme... invisibleness of the eGolf and eUp; it was very difficult to tell that they weren't Golfs/Ups. Some people may think that the i3/4/5 are VW's first electric cars.)
Raw numbers don't matter. Culture will be deeply impacted. Also, the energy policy of Germany is catastrophic and will guarantee its doom
But yeah, Germany financed and caused Russias war with Ukraine by impoeting gas from Putin, I know.
- building up new nuclear reactors takes _many_ years and is still quite expensive, so its not a short-term solution. long term due to climate change the cooling might be a problem (like france already has issues in the summer when rivers run dry and they had to throttle nuclear reactors) - fossils must be phased out, not an option - hydrogen is at best a storage option for surplus energy (like solar), but highly inefficient to begin with - renewables are already cheaper than everything else and prices are dropping still [1]
so either people want to believe climate crisis doesn't exist and want to double down on fossils, or believe nuclear will solve it but it can't right now, or hope that some miracle happens somehow and energy/climate will be a solved problem somehow.
I'd prefer to focus on the here and now, which means renewables, plus some storage in any form, instead of beating dead horses over and over again.
---
[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/10/11/radical-energy...
It's the single worst decision ever made in the history of mankind? Replacing some power stations of one type with some renewables of another type, without any disruption to the functioning power grid?
World War 1. World War 2. China's Great Leap Forward. Stalin's Five Year Plan. The Vietnam war. All worse than changing the mix of the European energy grid by a few %?
I just don't get it. Please, please, someone explain this to me, why people say things like this. Is there some right wing website going endlessly on about how Germany is a doomed failed state, as some kind of way to relive glory days of the Allied victory?
If this was replicated then every German citizen would spend several hours every day discussing it. In reality I can't recall ever having a face to face conversation about it.
Very true.
> They shut down their nuclear production and replaced it with lignite.
Not really true and often a bad faith argument. While it is true that some of the output has been replaced with coal, it's a) not everything; having the coal power on unscheduled has been deemed unnecessary (with the benefit of hindsight). b) ignoring the fact that the scheduled shutdown of coal has been rescheduled to be earlier, resulting in net-savings over the original plan (which was admittedly still a massive policy failure).
Plenty of research shows that if you put people in safe places with opportunity, they of course respond very well. They also embrace very attractive concepts like freedom, human rights, fairness, etc.
Germany is prosperous, maybe there are not as many Unicorns as in USA or even UK, the country works like a clockwork and everyone is very active in very wide range of stuff.
All those charts showing how Europe is behind because top 100 largest companies are mostly American tech giants, some petrol companies and some construction and bank stuff from China? Those are so so misleading into making people believe that Germany or mainland Europe is a wasteland that missed out on technology.
Especially Germany, they have very well educated and healthy population and even if they don't make the most trendy consumer products right now, they still have wast infrastructure and people who can produce things.
Of course not everything is rosy, but Germany's and mainland Europe's core problems all come down to cheap energy availability and that's solvable. It's much easier to solve than stuff like widespread social problems like decline due to drug use or political instability.
They tend to rely on paperwork a bit too much maybe, they don't use credit cards that much etc. all these stereotypes are true but technology is not limited to computers, other stuff is also important and they are still pretty good in these things.
Sure, but looking at valuation of the likes of Apple versus German "hidden champions", the big money is in products targeting the general consumer and not niche machinery widgets. This is also reflected in things like work culture, treatment of workers and pay.
This missing out on the wave of consumer tech and software, and sticking to pushing dying tech like diesel engines all the way till the 2010's, is probably one of the reason the purchasing power of the average German has stagnated since the 90's when it peaked.
Source: have worked at a couple of Germany's hidden champions making some high end machinery widgets and wouldn't do it again unless I was facing homelessness. US companies for me all the way baby (operating on EU soil).
That housing became unaffordable is a different topic, one purely caused by greedy investors.
You can be a tax heaven and if FAANG and big-tech corps simply use your country as a base station to funnel the sales and profits of an entire continent/economic area becasue they pay no taxes there, then your GDP will be insane but that might not mean much to your average worker who isn't getting a piece of that pie.
Germany is Europe's richest country, but that doesn't make the Germans as individuals automatically the wealthiest citizens in Europe. Think about hat for a second. In fact, when it comes to wealth, the avenge Germans net worth is significantly lower than most wealthy EU states, sometimes even on par with those form former Eastern block EU states.
This isn't a particularly good comparison. Comparing the largest B2C company in the world to some SMB isn't particularly fitting. When comparing "valuations" it is also important to consider the fact that some of Germany's biggest companies are entirely privately owned and not exchange listed - and also popular in the US to an extent at least (Lidl, Bosch).
> is probably one of the reason the purchasing power of the average German has stagnated since the 90's when it peaked.
This is a pretty widespread trend and just as prevalent in the US. Salary increases desperately lacking behind the countries' productivity. Some interesting reads [1] [2]
> Source: have worked at a couple of Germany's hidden champions making some high end machinery widgets and wouldn't do it again unless I was facing homelessness. US companies for me all the way baby (operating on EU soil).
That's a pretty personal and individul experience which comes down to personal preference. Certainly, both vastly different ways of working have their benefits and drawbacks. Having a few colleagues who switched from US based companies to a somewhat large German hidden champion, they seem to be pretty happy here for the most part. I'm under the impression that the focus on US companies is especially prevalent in software related jobs, which is not surprising given the $$$ and the interesting technical challenges (at least for FAANGish companies). I don't think such strong preference exists for other industries to be honest.
[1] https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...
[2] https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
[3] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/conferences/shared/pdf/2018061...
If they're large, then they're not really hidden anymore. Hidden champions are usually those sub-200 employee companies usually located in the county side. SAP, Porsche or Zeiss are not hidden champions.
Whenever I tell someone where I work, there is a 80% chance they've never heard of the company, despite there being a high chance they use one or multiple of our products.
Except trains and government bureaucracy and a bunch of other things.
Maybe not like clockwork but as a visitor from a country without a strong train network I was (easily?) impressed
Germany's Liebling has always been the Autobahn, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Sorry for the pointless post but got to reminiscing.
Are those friends enjoying the irony of becoming immigrants to escape immigrants?
Every country welcomes you with open arms if you're a skilled and educated laborer in areas of shortage and not migrating to be a burden on the welfare system.
It's natural - and necessary for self regulation - for people to take the initiative and move out of these places.
Unfortunately we are having hard times. IMHO, a huge part of it is the contemporary landed gentry.
That's interesting. In Germany the decentralization is considered a main reason for the many problems on modernization in bureaucracy and other public areas.
> Those are so so misleading into making people believe that Germany or mainland Europe is a wasteland that missed out on technology.
I think the reason is more that Germany was an early adopter of many technologies, but was then trapped on old infrastructure and workflows, while some others simply failed for various reasons. So it's more an upgrade-problem, then "installation"-problem.
> Europe's core problems all come down to cheap energy availability and that's solvable. It's much easier to solve than stuff like widespread social problems like decline due to drug use or political instability.
In theory yes, in reality it goes hand in hand. Germany for example is cursed by people who poison the progress since a long time. And the harm is showing since a while now. Ironically, it usually only gets better when something catastrophically happened, like Fukushima, or the War with Russia.
They probably have a point. Both structures have pros and cons, I believe.
Of course the setup also slows down progressive policies or any changes in general due to conservatives/rightwingers blocking things, but that’s the price of it.
The Mittelstand is certainly not rushing to hire them.
Why you think they would change their opinions just because they migrate to western countries is beyond me.
Isn't all of this stuff verging on thought policing?
You're exaggerating, but in essence, yes. If you don't align with western values, please keep away.
> Isn't all of this stuff verging on thought policing?
Plenty of countries choose immigrants based on a multitude of factors. You can't even fly to the US as a visitor if you're deemed unfit.
Sure, Germany doesn't particularly need criminal immigrants, but the criminality of immigrants is wildly blown out of proportion by racists, to put it bluntly.
This is corroborated by every statistic on crime. The country has been getting safer ever year for decades. It is also corroborated by looking a little bit into which violent crime specifically becomes highly publicized. There is a lot of attention on (violent) crimes of immigrants, while even gruesome murders of e.g. foreign exchange students by locals don't ever make it further than local news.
I'm German living in Germany, and the "problems" of immigration are a total pseudo-issue. It's 95% bullshit. I've never seen any such problem with my own eyes, yet it's one of the most publicized and discussed topics in this country. It's just strange, and I can't explain it any other way than by racism.
Thanks. Had a good laugh at that line. :)
I remember that there was an analysis on the criminality of the Syrian refugees during the first wave. The police found that, no surprise, having more people increases the number of total criminal offences, but looking at the data in relative terms it was found that proportionally, Syrians are equally criminal as Germans.
I always found that line to be rather interesting. German is a very difficult language and hard to master. To go about everyday life as an immigrant, you'll either need to live in a big city or somehow magically master German. Also, large parts of Germany are increasingly known for not being exacyl welcoming for people of non-german descent.
The notion that all people want to come here and highly specialized immigrants will come rushing through the door is kind of arrogant and typically ignorant. Germany is reliant of net-immigration over the coming decades if the economy wants any hope of workforce availability.
> That mantra began dying after the 2015-2016 Cologne mass attacks on women, and every new incident since then has reduced its viability. The current pro-Hamas demonstrations throughout Europe are just the latest in a long line of such.
negativity bias and media coverage are fascinating things. Not to take a way from the severity of the silvester attack, none of the issue you just mentioned is in any way representative of the average immigrant or refugee population. Even the "hamas demos" that received extreme media covereage were fairly small and peaceful on most occasions (also worth mentioning that demonstrating for piece in Gaza is not equal to demonstrating for Hamas, although there were instances).
> The Mittelstand is certainly not rushing to hire them.
That generalized and somewhat racist rant is missing one key factor: they have to and they want to. Birthrates have been in continuous decline since the 70s and now boomers are also about to completely enter their pensions. The dependency ratio for the coming decade(s) is looking bleak. Also, as a result of declining births, you people entering the workforce is very much down. if you want to survive as company, you'll need workers. If you want workers, there is a high chance you'll also have to hire immigrants and refugees. Most companies want this, the remaining hurdle isn't racism or the unwillingness to hire them, it's as always the German bureaucracy
To be fair, Germans are not very welcoming to other Germans either.
I know of cases where equally qualified (University degree, etc.) Syrians received 20% to 30% less than Germans.
Moreover, the usual source countries have a below-replacement fertility rate, so the number of prospective immigrants is dwindling.
I don't see how this could be sustainable in the long run.
Yes. And it will not be a German culture anymore as Germany is colonized.
The important part is preventing one culture to overwhelm everything else of course, this is where many fail. Diversity must not bow to anything that wants to enforce beliefs into everyone, no matter if religions (domestic or imported) or politics or whatever.
Diversity itself is a core value in itself, however.
What does it mean to be British? or French? or German? What is the European dream? Is it attainable? Defendable? Teachable? It's gotta be more than the language.
Looking at the US, it does just fine integrating different cultures from all over the world. All the problem ethnicities in Europe are gainfully employed model citizens in the US. One should maybe ask what is going wrong in Europe before resorting to extreme measures.
- Those that are rich and / or well-educated. - Those that desperately want to be in the US to come illegally. - Refugees
The wealthy / well-educated are too busy trying to climb whatever ladder they've chosen.
The illegal migrants are too busy working to make ends meet. They don't get much for free - their kids get to go to school, which they're very thankful for.
The above two categories of people came here by choice and want to become American. They aren't a drain on the system, and will add to its wealth.
The US is able to control the inflow of refugees much more than Europe can. The US also has a lot of space to let different cultures and even ethnicities realize their own American dream.
Gemany might not be the worst place. But it definitely has lost a lot of appeal due to all those issues.
>> Destinations In July 2023, Germany exported mostly to United States (€13.6B), France (€9.23B), Netherlands (€8.64B), China (€8.27B), and Poland (€6.97B), and imported mostly from China (€12.8B), Netherlands (€8.55B), United States (€7.7B), Poland (€6.43B), and Italy (€6.26B)
(also - stating the obvious - but "Europe" and "EU" are entirely different things)
Do you possess any actual familiarity with this country?
This is...common sense. I really don't get what your hostile obstinance is about, but I'm not interested in arguing over these nonsensical minor points any further.
P.S., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phanariots#Russian_influence
Yeah, this argument is really becoming a nonsensical waste of time.
This lasted only for two decades immediately following the war, during the years of Soviet control, but Romania famously began to depart from that Soviet control in the 1960s. French then fully returned to its position as the major foreign language taught in schools, and while Russian was still taught at a few schools here and there, it was no longer a language prescribed at the national level. Again, this is a pretty well known fact. You are out of your depth here.
Even if Romania and Russia shared Orthodox religion, they had different conventions in terms of liturgy, monastery organization, etc., and whenever there are Russian–Greek differences, Romania always goes with the Greek convention.
If you claim Russian cultural influence on Romania, let’s have some examples.
Unless you're suggesting that Romanian culture under communism arose independently and had no connection whatsoever to the USSR at any level? It just appeared from the ether, and Romania's presence in an Eastern Europe dominated by the Russian Empire and then USSR made no difference whatsoever, that it's at the same level as Russian influence on Zimbabwe or on Indonesia?
Here's the actual reality: all states are influenced by larger powers in their neighborhood, even the unpopular ones. Especially in Eastern Europe with regards to Russia. It may be unpopular, especially these days and especially in places like Romania, Poland, and Lithuania, but to pretend that somehow these cultures evolved on separate planets is not an intellectually honest position.
P.S., I live in the region in an ex-Soviet country.
Then, the “Communist cultural elements in Romania from 1945 to the 1990s” changed significantly in the 1960s as Romania went its own course. Thereafter, Romanian communism was increasingly blended with Romanian nationalism.[0]
> P.S., I live in the region in an ex-Soviet country.
That doesn’t make you qualified to speak on Romanian culture and history. The Eastern Bloc was not a monoculture, and many countries in the region are poorly understood by their neighbours. Romania is unusual in the region in its culture being marked by two traits besides Greek-aligned Orthodox Christianity: francophilia and dacomania. Those circumstances left very little room for Russian culture to make inroads.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_communism_in_Romania
Again: you're telling me that communism in Romania didn't happen because of the Soviet Union, and that the Soviets implemented a communist political structure but this had zero effect on the culture? There was no communist culture in Romania? Zero? That's what you just claimed.
You do understand that just because Romania shifted away from the USSR a couple decades later doesn't change the fact that the communist party was still in power and only became in power in the first place because of the USSR?
This is a bit like arguing that Japan has no cultural influence from America, even though America conquered the country and replaced its government with a westernized one.
I'm talking about stuff like Mercedes-Benz engine factory in Jawor, seats from Groclin, Michelin and Bridgestone tyre factories, or the fact that Poland is world's second biggest battery manufacturer (ahead of US) - all of that is used in German car manufacturing supply chain.
In fact, of course, exchange rates are endogenous. The value of the yen reflects (among other things) the relative value of what Japan makes to what other countries make. If a currency's value falls (and there was no change in the money supply) what it means is people value that country's output this year less than they did last year.
Foreign investors poring money into a country will prop up exchange rates even without any changes in total economic output. Similarly outflows from foreign investment dividends depress exchange rates.
* Demand for products sold internationally and denominated in Yen (not US dollars, for example).
* Demand due to perceived risk of the Yen's future value
* Supply of Yen printed by the government
* Supply due to Yen sold to purchase imports
Maybe some other things I'm not thinking of.
- energy policies of the past decades was a desaster, mostly ruined by the conservatives. Germany was at some point a pioneer of solar tech, but it got crushed by economic policies favoring fossils, now china owns the majority of this rapidly growing market, and Russian pipelines are gone.
- extremely strong car manufacturer lobby that gets heavy subsidies and economic policies favoring car infrastructure. Public transport got defunded/privatized, transitioning to non-fossil transport options is fought tooth and nail, with heavy propaganda, so that many citizens even are aligned with that.
- heavy industry/manufacturing is a big chunk of BIP. Directly hit by the energy price hikes.
… all of which in general can be solved with cheap/abundant energy. Turning the expensive fossil dependency into green energy would be a literal multiplier for everything else in the country. We don’t have nuclear energy anymore (wrong decision imo) but lots of EU neighbors that do and help us in times of need.
It’s not even a technical problem anymore, and we have a shit ton of SME across the country that can engineer stuff. It’s purely a lobbyism/corruption problem with political will and media campaigns. Right now we have a Green Party in our government and they get an absurd amount of flak for trying to turn the ship around after decades of conservative corruption and mismanagement. Everything they do gets spinned into doomsday speech from the right to the point of blatant lying, and ordinary people just want to believe it.
I have no idea how to fix these hatestorms and misinformation amounts going around. But the point is: if we somehow manage to get into large scale renewable energy, BIP will skyrocket.
Source? I haven't seen any of that. With the Deutschlandticket, stuff even got cheaper.
https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/panorama/germany-app...
As long as they don't get voted out and replaced by far right goons with conspiracy theories about heat pumps then Germany should do okay.
There is India, Russia, Brazil... Is Germany really bigger than them?
Isn't it?
I don't see how anyone could argue than Germany's economy isn't much bigger than that of Russia or Brazil.
There was a map shared during the CSCE that pictured the different regions of Russia, I can't find the article anymore.. sad
How does protecting the very small minority in the Amazon cause a 'split' of Brazil, in any significant sense? They could create a national park too.
Economically, yes, and for decades if not for your lifetime depending on your age and how we account for East Germany. India and Brazil being in the conversation is a 21st century phenomenon (a very good one!).