Göttingen was one of the most productive centers of mathematics (2019)
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
> University of Göttingen had more academic freedom than generations past. They were promised intellectual autonomy and freedom from close religious supervision. Instead, they were recruited solely to advance knowledge and carry out original research. The education of students was also more egalitarian than it had been previously in Europe, as both rich and poor were admitted and trained.
In Europe, academic freedom is limited because the structure we have resembles a very wide pyramid, with some minor differences across fields and countries. Junior professorships are more rare and more difficult to get into. The result is always the same, a full professor that controls his field locally and lots of expendable badly-paid postdocs working for him. Access to funding is also much more limited, which in turn restricts the capacity of said postdocs to pursue their own ideas, even while working under the umbrella of the professor.
In the US, tenure-track assistant professorships are much more common and requirements to apply are more flexible. Seed grants for junior faculty members are also common and not too hard to obtain. The result is a lot more freedom to explore. Basically, it is the same issue as with technology. EU suffers from over-regulation and control by some rent-seeking elites.
US research receives 20 percent more funding relative to Europe (2017 data). More funding means more science? On top of that I would guess a post doc in the US can find a nice job at a company way way easier than the same person in Europe for the same reason: there are more higher-tech US companies with more big money who need the smartest people in the world to work for them.
I would also guess more and more loss of buying power (inflation without increase in productivity) in general causes a carreer in academia to become less and less attractive relative to a carreer in the commercial sector. That goes for both Europe and the US I suppose.
Example: I'm in Europe with a bachelors degree working as a freelancer (engineer) and probably make 300 to 500 percent more than people who work their ass off for decades in academia. So yeah there's "curiosity" and "passion" to stay in academia, but there's also cold hard cash.
Junior faculty openings also exhibit the same trend and are much more common in the US. Among all people I have met in EU Academia throughout these years, only one person managed to progress to a faculty position. All others left Academia. Quite brutal, that figure should give policymakers some pause. In contrast, I know a few US academics that moved from PhD student to assistant and associate professor positions.
Exploiting postdocs without any promotion opportunities in sight is so common in EU that many countries are passing, or have already passed, laws to limit postdoc length. However, without more junior faculty openings and permanent staff scientist positions, I am not sure how this is going to work out.
I'm not sure about the status of academic freedom. Administrators, politicians, and donors seem to have more influence in the US, and the entire academia seems to be more politicized.
What really matters in the end is whether an institute is able to attract “rockstars” in their field. Even better if these rockstars care about their institute and are willing to hire and develop young talent.
A single rockstar can elevate the prestige of an entire institution: look at Richard Sutton at University of Alberta, or Thomas Cech at Colorado.
Making a few thousand euros more per month as a postdoc in Norway is nothing in comparison with a lifetime appointment at CNRS.
Competition for CNRS positions is as difficult as getting into a top tier faculty position in United States.
Norway is a more expensive country to live in than France.
Funding is probably higher in the US and of course if they drop out getting a job I'd usually easier than in Europe.
This reminds me of a post I recall, that the lone genius is actually a symbol of society's sweeping failures and not of singular merit.
Just hand money to individials/groups whos papers changed the world. If they want to buy services from a institution,thats their thing.
"Monumental Proof Settles Geometric Langlands Conjecture" https://www.quantamagazine.org/monumental-proof-settles-geom... is an interesting article that describes the multi-year effort to obtain this important result. The final proof has nine authors affiliated with seven institutions: Denis Gaitsgory, Max Planck Institute; Sam Raskin and Joakim Færgeman, Yale University; Dima Arinkin, University of Wisconsin; Nick Rozenblyum, University of Toronto; Dario Beraldo, University College London; Lin Chen, Tsinghua University; Justin Campbell and Kevin Lin, University of Chicago.
Lmao. Only someone who has never been a part of a high performance team with excellent mentors available in person throughout the day, can possibly believe this.
Alternatively, try this sentence: "Communications and travel may have largely obviated the advantages of a married couple living together in one place to raise a family."
In my field, there is a lot of discussion over whether conferences should go virtual to ensure "equity", "inclusion", and all that; and to save pollution and CO2 from plane travel. According to the defenders of that take, current technology makes meeting in person totally unnecessary and online conferences can replace physical ones just fine. But curiously enough, everyone who I've seen defend that position are at elite universities in places like California where they have a high concentration of top figures in the field within a short drive. Almost no one from more remote areas (like myself) defends that... largely because many of us have stories where those polluting plane tickets helped us connect with relevant people in the field, learn and boost our career.
But back to the marriage analogy... when those people from top universities make that comment, I usually tell them that if they are so interested in equity, diversity, not polluting and all that jazz, and since according to them online interaction is enough and getting together physically is just a luxury, they should then take remote PhD students (which would even let them select from a larger pool!). It's an obvious conclusion of their position, right?
The answer is always crickets.
Remote conferences and lower publishing fees definitely help people at these underfunded places. But it is true that being there in person is still much more valuable. Informal face to face interaction at posters, joint dinners between different research groups, mingling during coffee breaks etc. are not replaceable by a Zoom Q&A.
Most likely their discussion were over zoom while scribbling over a blackboard.
Sex and LaTex! I dig it!
(from a comment above) Idk much about math or anything would love to make it to AGI that can tell me which opinion is correct when reading HN
For example, there was also Felix Klein (who brought Hilbert to Göttingen) who was more on the teaching side. He even designed the house from the ground up in a way that he thought would be optimal for teaching and working together.
There is a really good article by Norbert Schappacher called
"Das Mathematische Institut der Universität Göttingen im Nationalsozialismus"
or
"The Mathematical Institute of the University of Göttingen under National Socialism"
https://irma.math.unistra.fr/~schappa/NSch/Publications_file...
You can DeepL it. Here is just the first paragraph:
Göttingen has been a name in the mathematical world since Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). However, from the end of the 19th century until the National Socialists seized power, it was for many the center of the mathematical world, and in this respect it outstripped the traditional centers of interest: Paris and Berlin was above all the joint work of David Hilbert (1862–1943) and Felix Klein (1849–1925), around whom an increasingly important mathematical institute was formed. Hilbert's role was on the side of creative mathematical research, which he pursued with complete openness to all possible new ideas and with a versatility not seen since Gauss. Felix Klein, on the other hand, was above all an exceptionally successful organizer and academic teacher in Göttingen – four years before his appointment to Göttingen, a health breakdown had ended the period of his most original mathematical research.
In addition, mathematics and physics were very much intertwined in those days - one inspired the other. And Göttingen was essentially a village - everyone knew everyone. They would meet up in a bar in the evening and speak about whats on their mind. That way, there was also a regular get-together with the local industry.
For example Robert Wichard Pohl, head of the 1st physics institute (called "a patriarch of physics" or "The good Lord"), Gustav Tammann, head of the institute for physical chemistry, and the heads of Ruhstrat (a local company specialized in developing and manufacturing high-temperature industrial furnaces, transformers, etc.) regularly met. Pohl wanted to have a furnace for what was later called the Czochralski method (creating pure crystals) and Ruhstrat built the stuff.
Or in 1894, in collaboration with Nobel Prize winner Prof. Walter Nernst, Ruhstrat created the adjustable sliding resistor, the basis for adjusting and changing resistances as well as current and voltage. They supplied the first private homes and businesses in Göttingen with electricity using electrical block stations and developed the electricity meter.
Lots of aspects came together to thrive, not just Hilbert.
P.S. Fun fact: Ernst (or Adolf?) Ruhstrat had the first car in town and later sold it to Tammann.
Germany has many great mathematicians at present. Just by expanding population and budgets, it probably has more great mathematicians than in the Göttingen days. These mathematicians are not as famous as the Göttingeners of the 1920s, however, fundamentally because earlier mathematicians laid the foundation of the field and later researchers basically have built on those foundations and can't claim the same glory.
As to post-war Germany being boring - I'd assume but it seem neither here nor there.
We did. Göttingen was an important place, but not the epicenter of math. Mathematicians were working all over the globe from China to India, Russia to Britain, America and Germany. Just to mention one of the maybe most gifted people of that period in the world, Srinivasa Ramanujan, people are literally still going through his work and finding novel things.
It's just that we're much better story tellers when it comes to some regions of the world. If you went by movies and biographies you'd think Alan Turing did half of all computer science, who remembers Konrad Zuse? That's one area where Germany routinely gets snubbed in the public imagination.
Due to the great success of her first appearance and the unexpectedly warm atmosphere in the city, she extended her engagement by a week. On the afternoon before her last concert, she summarized the impressions she had gathered over the past few days, which had been unexpectedly positive, in the rough version of the chanson Göttingen, which she wrote in the garden of the Junges Theater, and performed it (not yet fully formulated and with a different melody) that same evening. The success of the chanson was sudden and overwhelming. She then returned to Paris, where she completed the lyrics and composition.
The Junges Theater at that time was housed in the house of the current Lumiere cinema.
Draw a line that passes thru Ulm & Goettingen, wide enough to contain also ___
1) Humboldt's university reforms creating graduate education and research universities. This doesn't explain the seed of German intellectual activity as it was a relatively late development, but it does explain the institutionalization of German intellectual activity. As to the seed...
2) German was the language with the most literate speakers in Europe during the Enlightenment. For a few centuries after the Reformation, Protestant regions did have higher rates of literacy than Catholic or Orthodox regions, and Germans were the most numerous of the Protestant cultural-linguistic groups.
One of many instances in history where a city’s rise to prominence was kicked off by political turmoil or religious persecution in the leading city of the previous era. For example: immigration of merchants and weavers from Belgium to the Netherlands following Spanish occupation and the Fall of Antwerp, Huguenot emigration from France during the French Wars of Religion, etc.
When trying to answer the question of why a certain city/country/company started becoming successful, it’s often a good starting point to ask who moved there and what skills and experience did they bring, rather than mistaking it as a static group of individuals.
Another corollary: it really pays to be a tolerant, stable and welcoming country. When other countries do stupid things you can benefit from an inflow of talent and experience.
Yup. The US has a pretty incredible history of brain draining European countries when they become intolerant or living there became otherwise intolerable. So many inventors in the states were brilliant immigrants.
The "progressive" left of today is quickly running out those same asian (and other) scientists out of US and CAN universities, via social media mob lynching and DEI inquisitions.
Im not seeing any right wing movement playing out with the same dynamics.
Where are these institutions affected by right wing persecution?
For example Paul Dirac, Max Born, Einstein, Enrico Fermi, Heisenberg, John von Neumann, Oppenheimer, Max Planck, and Wolfgang Pauli either studied, did research or had a profession in Göttingen
Take Oppenheimer, for instance. He transfers to Göttingen from Cambridge in 1926 (after a relatively miserable time at the Cavendish labs studying under J.J. Thompson). He earns his PhD at Göttingen quickly. By September 1927, he's back in the USA on a teaching fellowship with Caltech.
So, Oppenheimer isn't at Göttingen for very long - not even 2 years! But in that brief time, he meet Max Born, James Franck, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, John Von Neumann, Eugene Wigner who are also all there.
Wolfgang Pauli and Enrico Fermi had moved to other institutions by 1926, and Edward Teller doesn't get there until 1930 - but it's plausible that the Göttingen connection (and their relationship to Max Born) are how Oppenheimer meets them.
In 1934, David Hilbert, by then a grand old man of German mathematics, was dining with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, “How is mathematics at Göttingen, now that it is free from the Jewish influence?” Hilbert replied, “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.”
Interestingly, that name doesn't look particularly Russian.
German Jews often possess incredibly Slavic names like "Moskowitz", suggesting an unclear boundary between being "German" vs "Russian".
Moskowitz in particular is the German spelling of a Russian patronymic identifying the man's father as having a Yiddish name. That's several cycles of transferring between Russia and Germany.
Hermann Weyl wrote an article on Hilbert's mathematical work (from the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society [pdf]):
https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1944-50-09/S0002-9904-1944...
Hilbert's mathematical range was enormous. Among many things, he was known for his 23 "Hilbert problems" which influenced a lot of subsequent mathematics:
Benjamin Yandell, "The Honors Class - Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers". Natick, MA: A. K. Peters, 2002. [ISBN:1-56881-141-1]
There's been significant progress on some of the problems since Yandell's book, but it's still a good introduction.
regards...
So, for one effort, they saw that for the electronic signal amplifiers they needed, vacuum tubes, amazing and powerful, were too big, hot, expensive, and delicate so invented transistors, patented them, and, realizing the power, gave the patent to the world. Today if we had to pay a penny a transistor, then the 8 core AMD 4.0 GHz processor I bought for $115 (with HOW many transistors?) would cost -- hmm, could buy a house, a big one!
So, net, Bell Labs was a big success for Bell, its stockholders, the US voice telephone network, the future of technology, the economy, and the standard of living of the world.
How to do that again? Hmm ....
...paving the way for Cliff Stoll!
And, with all due respect, many people outside the US don't realise how lucky the best minds were that there was a stable, prosperous, (actively) welcoming society to bring these best minds out of the self-inflicted chaos of Europe.
In WW2, consider the names of the top US general in Europe and the top admiral in the Pacific.
The Nimitz family stems from Bremen, and quite deeply so (13th century), which would fit, because Bremen/Lueneburger Heide is not that far from territories settled by Polabian Slavs.
Edit:
Found it in seconds, second para in your link.
In Europe you have the Enlightenment with all that entails.
Then in America you have Ben Franklin and then the revolution. Later Charles E Elliot gets frustrated and tours the great schools in Europe only to come back to boston and reform Harvard. Which leads to it being emulated at Stanford.
Later on the US military decides on Stanford to focus on its microwave research for radar setting the groundwork for what becomes Silicon Valley.
This is probably due a more indepth essay.
But to limit ourselves to the outcome of WWII, there isn't much more to say. The US actively sought these brilliant refugees. The latter were glad to escape to a country that wasn't a murderous dictatorship.
Franklin is a celebrity in his day, and is such a party animal and keen wit he wins over the french aristocracy. Leading to said fleet, which is undoubtedly the key factor in deciding the outcome of the revolutionary with their presence at the battle of Yorktown. But before all that he is going up down the colonies organizing philosophical groups, his Juntas, meeting and connecting the thinkers and subsequent founding fathers. While in addition running a printing press sowing popular dissent and none more influential than publishing Thomas Paine’s pamphlets. The dude was the original punk!
That was probably also because he was a good diplomat. I have read his autobiography, which is very interesting, and shows how versatile he was.
Woodrow Wilson's proposed peace deal didn't involve imposing harsh reparations on Germany. That was the doing of Georges Clemenceau, the prime minister of France, who was under pressure to make Germany's reparations bill as large as possible as retribution for the war.
In any case, some sort of Intermarium probably was the only thing that could have prevented WWII in one shape or another.
In such a situation, the reparations are the straw that broke the camel's back, and lead to an economic catastrophe.
It's ALL self-inflicted. But there was no sense of self at the time, what's new today is that Europe is starting, slowly and shakily, to see itself as a whole. At least I cannot imagine today ever wanting to murder a German more than a French. Ever.
We appreciate the sweet deal on the Louisiana Purchase, but "cause of the US" is a bit much, don't you think?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War
(look at the combattants section)
But ofc at the time it was very different, Europeans didn't exist per se, each country saw itself as completely different from the others.
What I meant is accusing the US to cause a problem in Europe is a tautology: we made the US in a way, so if the US come back to cause issues, well, it's ALSO our own fault. Every problem in Europe is "self" (that "self" changed with time) inflicted, it's not the Asians or the Africans causing conflicts, there is no external factor to blame, we MUST fix them our"selves".
Ironically, lots of problems in Africa or Asia were also inflicted by Europeans, they can claim an external factor, them. We really messed up a lot of the world, for reasons that are now beyond comprehension since we're raised by the people who stopped it, and it's a sin I have trouble to carry sometimes. Gladly, most alive today seem to have forgotten, forgiven or benefitted from it, doesn't make me forget those not alive today :(
Also, I think the US will have something similar in reverse: Some of the brightest people educated in the US are going back to their home countries because they have visa troubles, social problems or simply better opportunities due to simple things like housing or structural things like the industry moved there.
Also, judging by the enormous hate stream on the social media, many can be nudged to move out of the US to have some piece of mind. After Brexit, many EU citizens choose not to stay in UK even if they had that option because they have become a political subject and since they are not desperate why stay and risk it?
China appear to be the next frontrunner in this. Many times, if you venture outside of the angloshpere you find out that somewhere(often in China) somebody is already doing it at the same level or better.
There probably is going to be a correction at valuations. Cool stuff is happening in China and elsewhere and the USA is in a disarray with idelogies so extreme that are not too far of from the stuff that ruined Europe in the first half of the 1900s. Coup attempts, assassination attempts, election denial, mainstream targeting of group of people, rich looking into capitalising on all that when social disparity is so large that some live like kings others teetering - this is not a healthy society.
The language barrier alone will stop Chinese cultural hegemony.
Anyway, with the banning of TikTok it's pretty clear to me: No more global companies without hard tech. The US used to be the bastion of free global trade but they resigned. Anything that relies on things like network effect or branding will become local because countries can enforce it. If some country has the engineering capacity to build a website where people post texts and media and others like and share that media then the American version wouldn't be allowed.
Therefore, the US economy will become as powerful as having about 300M citizens, not as global power. China has huge number of citizens, they win by default as long as they can do the hard tech good enough and they apparently can do that.
US embargoes only pushed them to make their local alternatives and they made them pretty good, whatever they make they make it for over a billion people.
EU has a version of this problem, that is they don't have one large chunk of people who speak the same language and trade on the same rules. The trading on the same rules is something that EU fixed a lot but the EU is still fragmented and this makes EU companies anaemic because they can't get huge without going global. When the global trade is gone, the US will have the same issue(probably still better situation than EU but much worse than China).
Also, Chinese don't operate on western principles therefore you can't expect same outcomes. Aging population issues are much different when you have enough production base that can sustain old people with small number of young people(they no longer rely on manual labour as much as they used to). In the west aging population means reduction in consumption(therefore reduced investments, economy slowdown etc.), but in countries like China that doesn't have to be a problem, they can simply keep producing as needed. When the west was preoccupied with investing all the money into optimising advertisement, they invested in wast infrastructure.
I'm personally more concerned about the west than China. Well, of course I would be since I'm part of the west but yeah I think you get the point.
There are very few technologies where the US or EU has an edge over China. Embargoes helped a lot with that.
In fact it becomes absurd, for example the EU/US/UK wants to make the world a better place by replacing ICE cars with electric ones. China builds great cars for cheap in huge amounts and the EU/US/UK act like Gavin Belson saying "I don’t want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do". There you lose the environment claims, even if EU/US/UK have a point.
The west lost the technological edge, the Americans like to claim that EU regulated too much but in the American case it appears that not regulated billionaires didn't invest in tech but resorted into rent seeking and now they expect the politicians to protect them from the Chinese companies who allegedly received unfair support from their governments but nonetheless they made better products.
I don't know I'm not a clairvoyant or expert analyst in this stuff, I'm just pessimistic on the near future of humanity and the west will be the bigger losers because they lost the plot.
You have to think about this like a country that has the ability to globally project power or take part in regional war.
The US (and Europe) doesn’t want to lose its domestic auto manufacturing industry because it can be easily retooled to pump out war machines when required. [0]
You don’t let a foreign nation (especially an adversarial nation like China) destroy an industry that is critical during total war if you’re the global hegemon, or more realistically, a country that may go to war in the future (see Volvo in Sweden, Renault in France, etc)
Here’s GM Defense, Ford and Chrysler have similar histories during the World Wars, as do auto manufacturers in various European countries.
> World War 1: Over 90 percent of GM’s truck production was redirected to war manufacturing during the First World War.
> World War 2: GM began delivering war materiel as early as 1940 with all U.S. manufacturing plants – over 100 in total – eventually being converted to produce defense goods. Between February 10, 1942 and September 9, 1945, not a single passenger car for civilian use left the assembly line at any GM plant.
[0] https://www.gmdefensellc.com/site/us/en/gm-defense/home/abou...
I'm not a China fan at all, in fact I'm very concerned that the west will imitate China and in fact banning TikTok was a sign of it. Banning is the Chinese way.
Remember when the US was pro-free speech and criticised dictatorships for blocking social media? Kiss good bye to that, now it's US that blocks it. Chinese citizen experience, imported into the west.
If Trump wins, there's Project 2025 where they plan to replace every government position with party loyalists - Just like China.
Outside congresspeople pushing for re-election I feel like I haven't heard this at all. Not since the Snowden leaks has the US been so happy-go-lucky with their denouncement of surveillance.
Not just cool stuff... I just finished listening to several podcasts with a Czech journalist who covered China for decades.
He said that under Xi, the country has become superparanoid. Before Xi's term, people would talk to journalists mostly freely, and even foreign journalists would get a pass in their daily activities unless they touched something really sensitive (Falun Gong, Tibet, Uyghur unrest).
After Xi came to power, the situation started to worsen, police started to follow journalists around and harass them for banal reasons, regular Chinese started being afraid of talking even about trivial topics. The former Overton window narrowed to a "compulsory vs. banned" dichotomy. One of his last experiences was that he went to a tomato processing factory to report on tomato harvest and was immediately arrested by the police because how dare you record something about a tomato factory.
I don't think this environment is going to be particularly conductive to economic growth, and the latest trends seem to concur. China is strangling its future growth in the name of National Security.
The American colonies led Great Britain in purchasing power per capita from 1700, and possibly from 1650, until 1774, even counting slaves in the population
The common view that American per capita income did not overtake that of Britain until the start of the 20th century appears to be off the mark by two centuries or longer.
This remark should leave a bad taste in one’s mouth. Obviously being immoral and exploiting human beings is an economic advantage. And excluding them in the census but benefitting from their work would be dehumanizing them even more.
James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Nina Simone. Others who didn't necessarily emigrate to Europe did spend much time there: Paul Robeson, John Coltrane, Lillian Smith, Alain Locke, and Ethel Waters amongst them.
You can also see patterns in movement of creative and technical talent within the US. There is of course the Great Migration from the South to northern, mostly industrial cities. California collected creative and technical talent from across the country, to a much greater extent than already established and notable Eastern states with large cities (New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, ...). In some specific cases (the establishment of Hollywood), we know that lax patent enforcement and ready escape to Mexico was a strong draw for the early film industry against Edison's lawyers. I suspect that in addition to the much-ballyhooed physical climate, reduced social strictures, ease of land development, and rapidly-growing metro regions particularly near Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, contributed. There's also of course the WWII and post-war / Cold War military economy which played a tremendous role.
You also saw organisations such as RAND moving wholesale to the West in the 1950s, for a combination of factors: more space, closer to major aerospace operations. Entire families were shipped west by railroad.
My hypothesis is that intellectual and creative talent seek freedom, in both positive (opportunity) and avoidance of negative (oppression, suppression, abuse) senses. As much as we talk of capital being more mobile than labour, creative labour being concentrated in a few individuals is especially mobile, and quite sensitive to conditions of oppression. One obvious risk shares some parallels with a paradox of transportation infrastructure: as transportation improves, formerly greenfield / undeveloped regions become developed and land values explode such that further improvements in transportation become exceedingly expensive, both financially and politically. In the intellectual and creative realms, moats and ramparts, institutional rigidities, commercial and political allegiances, etc., emerge, which actively retard further progress.
The challenge is in identifying where new regions (in the physical and geographic sense) of opportunity might be emerging.
But we are talking about US getting brains from all over Europe. The combined GDP of the top 3 European countries (Germany, UK, France) pre WW1/2 is larger than the US, just as the GDP per capita of any individual European country pre WW1/2 is higher as well.
Is that true? https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
They go the other way.
The US surpassed the UK in per capita income in the 1880s. However, American yeomen farmers, factory workers etc. were far better off than (non-UK) Europeans even in 1800, hence millions of Europeans immigrating. By 1913, the American was still earning almost twice as much as the German or French: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_(P...
Once the war started, the borders were closed.
It's easy to "innovate" when you're starting from a "clean slate".
We didn't trump up anything about American individualism, ingenuity and innovation. Rather, a visiting European, de Toqueville, wrote about it extensively as early as 1835.
De la démocratie en Amérique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_in_America
He also said
"...I have nowhere seen women occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, ... to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply,—to the superiority of their women."
"Tocqueville noted that religion played a leading role in American life in the 1830s, due to its being constitutionally separated from government. Far from objecting to this situation, he observed that Americans found this disestablishment quite satisfactory, in contrast to France, with its outright antagonism between avowedly religious people and supporters of democracy."
Happy to have my privacy, no company snooping on me
's all good, man :)
This is an interesting remark. It seems that countries like Estonia or Poland, which significantly overhauled their systems in the 1990s, are more innovative than Italy, Germany or France, whose systems are much older and somewhat ossified / clogged with bureaucracy.
But the US system is even older, and it still produces good results. Heck, the UK system is ancient, and the UK has a lot of innovation going on, both in tech and biotech.
The US started from 100m ahead - the level Europe was at the time - so they already had a foundation - and (imo) made it easier to look ahead from atop a (100m) mound.
An advantage that hasn't been put ti much use because once could make a strong point that things have been stagnant for 60 years.
That was often heard in Germany after the war. Hitler's politics were not seen as bad, if only the jews were not killed. Often, it was mentioned that Hitler's achievement was to reduce the mass unemployment after getting to power in 1933.
"Nazism" is defined by more than "antisemitism" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
* the main goal of the Nazis was to conquer and enslave East Europe.
* for that the Nazis transformed Germany into a war machine
* the war to enlarge Germany was the defining goal and everything was forced to support that goal
* generally Nazi ideology was racist and brutal. There were lots of groups which were to be killed and/or enslaved.
* it was a Dictatorship with Hitler as a "Führer"
Even if Nazi Germany were not "antisemitic" it would still have started the war in the East to conquer East Europe as a colony (-> "Lebensraum" -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum ).
It's really one of the most destructive and self-defeating ideologies ever, much more so than e.g. fascism in Italy and Spain.
I can't recommend reading Mein Kampf, because it sucks, but it's essential to have an informed opinion on this subject.
The "socialism" in the name was just branding. The Hitler-wing of the Nazi party was extremely right wing, especially in economic matters, and financed by the German industry. Anyone in the party holding sympathy with strasserism and the like was quickly purged or murdered.
Asking how fascism without antisemitism would have have fared makes no sense, as having internal and external enemies is a crucial part of fascism. Pinochet in Chile might be an example where fascism wasn't particular antisemitic but I assure you it was still not great for intellectual development, on the contrary.
That was not defining for the economic policies under Hitler. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany
The Nazi economic policy had one goal in the early years: forcing the German economy to concentrate on wartime preparations. Building up the military power and the military economy. All the companies were forced to work towards that goal. Many Germans were put into forced labor ("Reichsarbeitsdienst", ...) to support the build-up of the military and the military economy.
Large amounts of weapons had to be developed and produced: for Heer, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine.
The goal was to be ready for a large-scale war in the East in just 4 years.
With the war started, the economy was mostly a state-directed war economy, private or not. Even though there were large private companies they were all directed to work for the war economy.
The Nazis themselves were also involved in large scale industrial production. The Concentration Camps were also producing for the military. "Vernichtung durch Arbeit" (-> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extermination_through_labour )
That the Nazis were supported by leaders of the German industry did not mean that the Nazis were interested in privatizing, market economies or such. There was one goal: reorganizing the German economy to build-up and run the large scale war in the East. The goal was to colonize and enslave East Europe. Finances were concentrated on the war economy and other economic activities were no longer important or even possible. Companies involved would profit from it financially and expand. Companies involved in private sector activities would have a hard time. For example finances and raw materials was with priority allocated to the military economy.
A large scale area in Eastern Europe was dreamed about (-> upto 1933) and in 1939 the war started with the attack on Poland to realize this war for Lebensraum, where the Germans then would be the elite race and the others were slaves (or dead). This east european region would provide food, energy, raw materials, ... There were ideas about what this large "Reich" would be like. But that was not close to be realized, given that Germany was deeper in war with every day, on two sides, 1941 onwards: in the east in the Soviet Union and against a US lead war in the west. Germany was busy fighting the war.
43/44 some German economist were beginning design an economy in more detail for a time after a war. But it then became clear that it was after a lost war (with the Nazis no longer in power) and that this time probably was not far away, with then the war being lost in 1945.
That said, one can certainly imagine a NS movement that left the Jews alone and concentrated its wrath the other usual suspects. It might not have achieved quite the fiery intensity, or had quite the degree of hypnotic effect that it had on so many people that it did without the singular choice of a primary "hate object" that it made
Resonating as it did with centuries of psychic undercurrents in regard to the position of the Jewish minority in European society.
And without refugees and woke feminists who would the modern rightwings blame for all the misery in society?
If they had arised a few decades later they probably would scapegoat immigrants.